Preface

This Anthroposophy Lexicon is translated from the work of Urs Schwanderner (1939–2010).

Note: This material assumes at least a minimum conceptualization of Anthroposophical Spiritual Science research – some material more than others. The author highly recommends reading the Foreword by Urs Schwanderner (below) before delving into the depths of his work here. In addition, if you are new to Spiritual Science, it is important to understand, in the author's personal view, a few fundamentals, which are shared here. These are the author's comments based on his own experience in working through Rudolf Steiner's Anthroposophy and may or may not reflect what RS taught directly.

• First is the relationship between the physical (plane) and the spiritual (world or worlds). They are not separate "spaces" or "locations" as one might conceptualize them either from church teachings and dogma or one's own imagination. The spiritual permeates the physical at every level that we are able to perceive. There is nothing that exists in the physical world that does not have a direct spiritual counterpart. This is not an abstract concept. The physical world is a condensed expression of the spiritual behind it: "The physical body, the etheric body, the feeling soul body and the mind soul are to be regarded as archetypes of the spirit world condensed in the world of the senses."

  If this rule/reality is not fully accepted, i.e. before it is fully understood or realized within, there are many various things shared that will cause either confusion or consternation without this truth as a foundation. With that in place, when you run across seemingly implausible if not impossible concepts, you are more easily able to attribute the object in question this rule. For example the relation of material blood to its spiritual counterpart.

• Next it is important to understand the limitations of (human) language when striving to describe spiritual truths. For example, the Earth (as we know it today) has been — and is — on an evolutionary path every bit as much as the human being. (Side note RE 'evolution': Darwin was backwards in his theorizing; human beings did not evolve from lower forms, lower forms were 'left behind' as human beings evolved 'upward') Past incarnations of the Earth are known as 'Saturn', 'Sun' and 'Moon'. Yes, there is a correlation between those stages and the physical planets of our Solar System. It is important not to get bogged down in the technicalities of what you do not (yet) grasp about what is shared in this book.
• Lastly, it must be accepted (if you are serious and sincere in your desire to know) that one cannot 'prove' spiritual truth via anything pointed to in the physical world. Seeking, or requiring, 'physical proof' of this material will only lead you farther away from that which you (honestly) seek. However, just as one needs light to see in the physical world, once you begin to allow this material to 'soak into your soul' (and not allowing it to remain stuck in a vortex of confusion), its (spiritual) light will help to develop spiritual eyes (indeed, many spiritual 'organs') and 'dots' will begin to connect between the spiritual and the physical i.e. correlations will begin to come into focus. Once this begins, the true seeker will be forever 'different'.

The above has been the author's experience over many years of study and metamorphosis. In Steiner's own words:

Although Anthroposophy does depend both on knowledge and perception, it does not consist of mere 'phrases,' but of very definite knowledge. But it is not enough merely to acquire this knowledge as a general conviction according to present-day methods, and then rest satisfied. For the point in question is not merely that one should acquire the conviction and know that man lives many lives and that there are causal conditions which pass over from one life into another, that there is such a thing as reincarnation, as karma.

The beneficial effects of Anthroposophy do not lie in the spreading of this knowledge, but are felt in the constant and repeated study of all the details connected with it, and in allowing the teaching to work upon one's soul.

It does one no good simply to believe that man lives more than once and that there is such a law as that of reincarnation, karma, and so on. The mere belief in this will not carry one far. As regards the real depths of life there is not much difference between the soul of a man who knows of reincarnation and karma and one who knows nothing of it.

In an anthroposophical sense our soul is only changed if we constantly study, not only the generalities, but the deeper things that Spiritual Science can teach us. That is why it is a good thing that we should over and over again consider how the various details of life appear in the light of the Anthroposophical conception. It is by no means sufficient merely to know that there is a great law of destiny establishing a connection between the past deeds, feelings and thoughts of a man and his present and future experiences.

Anthroposophy will only become a life-factor when we can apply this general doctrine to the different experiences of life, when we become able to put our whole soul into such a position, that we obtain an entirely new outlook on life.

The Christ Impulse and the Development of the Ego-Consciousness,
GA 116
https://rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA116/English/APC1926/19091222p01.html

The [full] lexicon is massive – over 14,000 entries; 14 volumes, together around 7000 pages with over 100 illustrations (Schwanderner's TOC). Included here is a subset of just over 600 specific key topics selected by the author.

The source German was translated to English using DeepL (free version) though small portions of the material were translated using Google Translate.

The source data (e.g. the GA reference) is provided for each lexicon entry. To track down the corresponding lecture of the GA, use the corresponding 'Source' reference for the GA. The author suggests using the RS Archive for English versions of the lectures. However, not all referenced material may have been translated to English at the time of reading.

The parent/main topics shared here are in (English) alphabetical order; the sub-topics are in the order they appear in the German edition.

In addition to Schwanderner's work, supplemental material has been added where it was felt it was of value to do so. Sources of this added material range from passages of Rudolf Steiner's lectures (sourced from the RS Archive), and from the Free Man Creator website.

If the (general) subject of Anthroposophical Spiritual Science is new to the reader, the author suggests reading the first entry in the Appendix, Repeated Earth Lives As The Key to the Human Riddle. Also, the entry titled The Supersensible World, written by Schwanderner, is a more comprehensive overview of Spiritual Science teachings. Additional subjects have also been included in the Appendix that were not in the original set of subjects selected for this work.

Anthony K. M. Douglass, 2025

Schwanderner's life's work is the encyclopedic lexicon titled "Anthroposophy – Rudolf Steiner's Humanities" (in several volumes). In the print edition (year 2009) he describes this work in the subtitle as an "alphabetical reference work using the original wording by Rudolf Steiner" as far as possible. The creation of a comprehensive list of terms, the gathering of all relevant statements on the respective keyword / term / topic from Rudolf Steiner's oeuvre and the creation of an understandable description from the selected sentences is a task to which he has dedicated many years of his life. In addition, there are all graphic stitches that can be found in the encyclopedia, for which he developed his own line technique, which specifically shows it optimized as black and white illustrations.

Foreword

In a foreword by Marie Steiner we can read: "Thus Rudolf Steiner now continues to bring us, even after his death, the sacrifice he had to make throughout his life: to give the fragments of his spirit (fragmented in lectures) to people in the writing of another. Those who lived from his spirit forced this sacrifice from him." [1] This present work is an attempt to reunite this immense work of over 6000 lectures - insofar as this is possible at all - into a certain whole. Only then does one really realize what a huge work one is actually dealing with. This was also the case for the author, for whom the work eventually grew to seven times the size he had originally expected and planned for.

The author was aware that it is very problematic to process spiritual science lexically. However, the possibility of easy access, even to more remote areas, outweighed the concerns. The individual larger articles have been written in such a way that they can be understood by themselves. Likewise, as a counterbalance to the necessary alphabetical fragmentation, a general overview that can be understood without prerequisites was placed in front. If one reads the following passages from Rudolf Steiner and also knows the support he lent to Adolf Arenson's reference work at the time, one can come to the conclusion that a work such as the present one would also find support from Rudolf Steiner. We read: "In the Anthroposophical Society a great deal has really been given. You can get a slight dizziness when you see all the cycles (the transcripts of lecture series) that have been printed, one after the other. But still, again and again, individual people come and ask about one thing. In most cases this is not even necessary, because if you actually process what is written in the cycles, most questions will answer themselves in a much more certain way. You really just have to be patient. For much of what people want to know, it must be pointed out that there are old cycles, old courses that have been left behind, which, after they have been held, some people only care about to the extent that they now want a "new" one. But they simply leave the old one behind." [2] And: "The printed writings and cycles have not actually been read as they could be read, so that one could arrive at everything that is meant and said, more or less even tangibly said." [3] Or even: "If one could also say (about the works of H. P. Blavatsky) that it would be good to take the "Unveiled Isis" and arrange it systematically and logically, or to take out five-sixths of the "Secret Doctrine" and edit the other sixth in an orderly way..." [4]

"I admit that due to the speed with which the teachings of the anthroposophically oriented world view have reached the members of the anthroposophical movement, it has sometimes been the case that the later has obliterated the earlier. [5] By processing the material offered in the cycles, one progresses from an outward absorption to an inward processing. This inner processing is of great value for real progress. From what is now (1915) available as cycle material, many thousands, perhaps even more, of compilations can be made if they are made fruitful. [6] The method of spiritual science must be such that one gathers from the most diverse sides what can bring enlightenment about the spiritual world. Thus what has been presented here in earlier years is still valid years later, even if it can now be illuminated anew from new points of view by what we can now bring to it. [7] It is particularly important, however, that for this knowledge sought in the supersensible worlds, people are found who understand the matter by virtue of their intellect. The rational, understanding comprehension of spiritual science is particularly necessary today, for this is the very thing that overcomes the most reluctant cultural powers. People's intellect is so great today that the whole of spiritual science can be understood if one only wants to. (But) there is another view: that is the one in which one tries as much as possible to be lulled by the spiritual mind, to become dreamy, to be infused with warmth, to merge with the universal forces, to unite the soul with the divine universe. [8] (On the other hand) the point is that just as for the simple soul-mind the remarks scattered everywhere in the lectures, in the cycles, which can carry the human being, can be taken up everywhere, so also the individual hints which must lead to the necessary progress in the individual sciences." [9]

In every book that reproduces Rudolf Steiner's lectures there is the passage:

The contents of these prints were meant as oral communications not intended for printing ... Anyone who reads these private prints can take them in the fullest sense precisely as what anthroposophy has to say. That is why it was possible to abandon without hesitation ... the institution of distributing these prints only within the circle of the membership. It will just have to be accepted that there are errors in the copies I have not checked...

We must therefore be critical of the wording in a certain sense. For example, the author came across various errors, mostly hearing errors on the part of the stenographer or reading errors in the transcription of the shorthand ^*. There were also other inaccuracies or mix-ups, which often only became apparent as errors from the wider context. Obvious errors were simply corrected. In all other cases, the correct wording has been inserted into the text in brackets like any other insertion. We must also bear in mind that we are dealing with the spoken word for almost the entire work, in some cases in front of an audience with considerable prior knowledge. This prior knowledge had to be inserted into this work by insertions, if possible in the original wording. An attempt was made to retain the original wording as much as possible, but sometimes - for the sake of readability - it was necessary to deviate from it. Explanatory notes and inserts are placed in (round) brackets and are formulated in such a way that they can be read continuously together with the text [inserts in square brackets are from the book editors of the Rudolf Steiner Estate Administration].

This work of lectures was held for more than 20 years throughout Europe, between Palermo and Helsinki, in front of a wide variety of audiences, from specialist lectures to academics to lectures for the craftsmen working on the Goetheanum building. The terminology is therefore often quite varied. It has been standardized in the sense that the term chosen as the subject title is always the one that most closely resembles a name rather than a paraphrase - for example: Archai instead of spirits of personality. If the descriptive form is essential for the text, it has been left as it is and the lexical subject term has been added, for example: ...the spirits of personality, Archai...; the underline means: this name is a subject title. The texts on this subject can be found under this keyword. Explanations that were only of contemporary interest, mostly political or economic problems, were not included, nor were such explanations that refer to general, not specifically spiritual knowledge.

The author would have liked to include comparisons from the occult literature of that time and today, as well as more recent scientific findings. He has to deny himself all this, as the work would otherwise get out of hand. Let specialists of future times tackle this. In general, this work should be seen as a first beginning - not all the lectures have been published yet - future generations will find quite different connections that have not exactly been stated in concrete terms. The author would therefore like to apologize to the reader for any imperfections that are necessarily inherent in such a work in a "still undeveloped area".

It should also be noted that many earlier references have been printed out, as we do not have to be as economical with space as we would with a printed version. There may therefore be some duplication.

Finally, the editor would like to pay tribute to all those people whose preparatory work made this work possible in the first place. Elisabeth Vreede should be mentioned first. She systematically collected and sifted through lecture notes from the first lectures and laid the foundations of the Rudolf Steiner Archive. Without the work of Marie Steiner-von Sievers the lectures would for the most part have simply faded away in the circles of the membership of the Society at that time, the fact that exact transcripts and printed lecture cycles exist is her work. Thus every work on Rudolf Steiner's spiritual science is deeply indebted to her. Her work was continued by the publication of a complete edition by the Rudolf Steiner Estate Administration, whose members have mastered and are still mastering this extraordinarily difficult task in the most excellent way.

The author is deeply indebted to all of them. At this point he must also express his gratitude to another person - his wife Inge Schwendener-Kaatz, for without her efforts the author would not have been able to find the time to take on this task. This work is therefore dedicated to her. We would also like to take this opportunity to thank her for reading the corrections and for the many references to ambiguities and potential misunderstandings.

We have a friend of the author, Edy Hunziker, to thank for this new computer version, as a preliminary stage for a printed new edition in double size. He installed all the computer equipment, both hardware and software, for the author, was able to make the computer more or less palatable to him and also actively supported him when the whole project threatened to capsize.

Kurt Schäfer-Vincent came up with the idea of converting this encyclopedia into a database so that it could be viewed on the Internet, as is possible with today's natural sciences. It was he who put his idea into practice and to whom we now owe access via the Internet.

Dornach, September 2009

Urs Schwendener

Sources:

[1] GA 279: Eurythmy as Visible Language (Sound-Eurythmy Course) (1924)

[2] GA 236: Esoteric Observations on Karmic Connections - Second Volume (1924)

[3] GA 147: The Secrets of the Threshold (1913)

[4] GA 133: The Earthly and the Cosmic Man (1911/1912)

[5] GA 185a: Documents on the History of Development for the Formation of a Social Judgment (1918)

[6] GA 161: Paths of Spiritual Knowledge and the Renewal of the Artistic World View (1915)

[7] GA 141: Life between Death and the New Birth in Relation to Cosmic Facts (1912/1913)

[8] GA 183: The Science of the Becoming of Man (1918)

[9] GA 326: The Moment of Origin of Natural Science in World History and its Development since then (1922/1923)

^* Incidentally, when translating this work, the author ran across many instances of the word "plan" where it was seemingly meant to read "plane". Why it did not translate with the 'e' was not investigated. However, in almost every instance the word was used in conjunction with another word, such as "physical" e.g. "physical plan". This is the justification for sensing that what was meant is "physical plane". It is left to the reader to judge for him/her self. ~A.K.M.D.

1
Ahriman

The light is that which radiates from the past, the darkness that which points to the future. The light is of a mental nature, the darkness is of a volitional nature. [1] The ancient Persians, out of their instinctive clairvoyance, called what they felt as the dying past in the light Ahura Mazdao, what they felt as the future in the dark will, Ahriman. [2] (For further information see: Ahriman zarathustrian)

As we know, religious representations have often emerged from old, now outdated views of the humanities. And Peter is not wrong to call Ahriman the prowling lion who seeks to devour whoever he can catch. It is for this reason that Peter calls Ahriman by this name, because Ahriman does indeed prowl about in secret, that is, in the subconscious of human nature, and thereby strives to achieve his world goal by drawing the subconscious power of man to himself in order to use it to achieve other spiritual goals in the development of the world than those which lie in the straightforward human current itself. [3]

But because man has been pushed down into the mineral kingdom, because the Elohim have given him an independence, but this independence is again not a full independence, for he lives through it dormant in his will and in his metabolic system of limbs, other spirits have access. These sneak into evolution, so to speak. They are the Elohim who stayed behind, who were in the cosmos with the Elohim and just didn't want to let man down to earth completely (see: Lucifer). But he has now come down to earth through the Elohim. Other spirits are now coming from outside. We find them when we direct our occult gaze to the hosts of cherubim, seraphim and thrones. Of these spirits, who actually belong to this species (i.e. the 1st hierarchy), some have remained behind. They have not entered these hosts, they have "only" become spirits of wisdom, kyriotetes. These spiritual beings show themselves in such a way that one can say of

They actually want to begin a completely new creation in the earth, they want to conserve the earth-man. As he is embodied in the mineral kingdom through the Elohim, so they would like to take him as a beginning and from this beginning they would like to continue the development. They want to erase all the past. Let us tear man away from the Elohim, they do not need him, and let us begin a new evolution. Let him be the initial link so that he can then live on and on. These ahrimanic entities want to wipe out all the past and only want to leave man as a result of what he has directly achieved on earth. A new evolution is to begin with the earth, which is to be a new Saturn, then the sun is to come and so on. These ahrimanic entities storm into the unconscious of man, into the life of will, into the metabolic life of the limbs. They are those spiritual entities that want to instill in man an interest in everything that is external, mechanical, for example. They would like to destroy everything that the earth has brought with it from the old moon, they would like the animal world to disappear, the physical human world to disappear, the plant world to disappear, only the physical laws of the mineral kingdom to remain, but above all they would like to remove human beings from the earth; and they would like to form a new Saturn out of machines, a new world out of nothing but machines. [4]

Those entities that are actually spirits of form, exusiai, but masquerade as archai, as elemental forces, would therefore actually be destined for the spaceless according to their essence. But they enter space, they work in space. This is the actual ahrimanic character, that spiritual entities, which are destined by their nature to be spaceless, have preferred to work in space. This creates the possibility of shaping in space in such a way that the shaping does not radiate directly from the spaceless, but that the spatial is reflected in the spatial, the one through the other in space. In a certain sense, we are all shapes emerging from the spaceless, insofar as we do not resemble each other. But we do resemble each other, especially if we are related by blood. We resemble each other because there are also spiritual entities that form the spatial after the spatial. We resemble each other because ahrimanic forces pervade us. The entry of certain spirits of form, exusiai, into space gives rise to the ahrimanic. [5] The spirits of form rule in the physical world, and they share this rule with Ahriman. [6] Ahriman is said, for though there are multitudes in the retinue of Ahriman, Ahriman represents himself as a unity because he strives for unity. [7] If it were not for the Ahrimanic illusion, which arises from forces that enter the three-dimensional from the spaceless, man would see how the forces that are anchored in the material can never gain influence on his being. The assertion that forces are anchored in matter which can continue to work in man is a purely Ahrimanian assertion, and he who makes it declares Ahriman to be his god, even if he does not say so. [8]

The good gods once created these antagonisms (Ahriman and Lucifer) for themselves, but in a previous time, so that in this way they could use their full power for that direction of development, so that freedom could come into it, so that man could not come to an unfree love through the external arrangement of forms, they took up the Luciferic and Ahrimanic element, so that man could come from within to a unity of the human name over the whole earth, from within. They first, I would like to say, fragmented human beings through the opposition, so that they could then, after the physicality had been fragmented, give them unity again in the spirituality, in the Christ. [9]

In the distant past, Ahriman placed himself as an independent cosmic power alongside the divine-spiritual powers. - Now, in the present, he stands spatially within the world to which man belongs, but he does not develop any connection of forces with the beings who rightfully belong to this world. Only since intellectuality, detached from the divine-spiritual beings, approaches this world, does Ahriman find himself so related to this intellectuality that he can connect himself in his own way with humanity through it. For he has already united with himself in ancient times what man receives in the present like a gift from the cosmos. If Ahriman succeeded, which is his intention, he would make the intellect given to mankind similar to his own. - Now Ahriman appropriated intellectuality at a time when he could not internalize it within himself. It remained a force in his being that had nothing to do with heart and soul. Intellectuality emanates from Ahriman as a cold, soulless cosmic impulse. And the people who are seized by this impulse develop a logic that seems to speak for itself in a pitiless and loveless way - in truth, it is Ahriman who speaks in it - in which there is nothing that shows a real, inner, heartfelt, soulful connection between man and what he thinks, speaks and does. [10]

Ahriman wishes to conquer space in his course out of time; he has darkness around him, into which he sends rays of his own light; he has all the stronger frost around him, the more he achieves his intentions; he moves as a world, which is completely drawn together into one being, his own, in which he affirms himself only by negating the world; he moves as if he carried with him the uncanny forces of the dark caves of the earth. If man wants to work in freedom while developing his egoism, if the proud feeling of revealing himself in action becomes his freedom, then he is in danger of entering Ahriman's territory. [11]

The moment you think of space - even if only in the abstractness of how the present thinks of space - the moment your mind is filled with the thought of space, you are stuck with your soul in a spiritual region where Ahriman is fighting a mighty battle against hierarchies of a different kind. [12]

According to the materialists, space is empty, and in there the atoms are wobbling around. The whole thing is based on deception. For the atoms are bubbles before imaginative cognition, and where there is empty space, there is reality; and the atoms consist precisely in the fact that they are inflated into bubbles. There is precisely nothing there in relation to their surroundings, like the air pearls in a bottle of mineral water: there is nothing in the water where the pearls are, but you can still see the pearls. So the atoms are bubbles. The space is hollow, there is nothing inside. Inside these bubbles is the substance of Ahriman, he is inside, he is actually inside in his individual parts. The whole atomic system is Ahrimanic substantiality. We must place Ahriman in those places in space where the materialists place their substance. [13]

If, on the one hand, we see that on the moon beings remained behind in their development (see: Lucifer) in order to intervene in human life on earth, then it can appear to us explainable that beings also remained behind on the old sun, who then played a similar role on the moon as the Luciferic beings now do on earth. Within the Angeloi, a similar struggle took place on the old moon as the Luciferic struggle in our own being. It was Ahriman who was, so to speak, the tempter in the breasts of the Angeloi, and he worked within them. Through him the Angeloi became what they then became, and they brought over what they had become through Ahriman (into the earth evolution) just as they brought over what they had achieved in the good. [14]

Now there are beings who, when the moon split off from the earth (see: earth evolution), spurned, if I may so express myself, to make the journey to the moon with the Yahweh beings, and who remained in the realm of the earthly. When we look at the moon, we can say: this is the outer physical reflection of everything that rightfully participates in the world order as a Yahweh entity. - But when we become acquainted with what takes place within the surface of the earth, both in the solid earth and in the watery, we have beings who have refused to take up their abode on the moon, who have taken up their abode on the earth unlawfully. These beings, who, one might say, belong to another age, who did not go with us when the earthly became cosmic through the moon and Venus and so on, now have an influence on the sleeping human being just as much as the cosmic beings themselves, but they have an ominous influence. That is indeed the shocking, the terribly painful thing that initiation gives, that through it one becomes acquainted with things beyond the threshold of ordinary consciousness which are by no means harmless to man. [15] Man is really exposed to these beings who, in his state of sleep, persuade him that good is evil and evil is good. For the earthly moral order is bound to the human etheric body, and man actually leaves his moral achievements behind in bed when he sleeps. At first he does not pass over into the sleeping state equipped with his moral qualities. These unlawful Moon, Venus and Mercury entities dwelling on earth - the ahrimanic entities now try to give man an etheric body from the earth ether in every state of sleep. They almost never succeed. In rare cases (with people who had a double next to them in later incarnations, for example Pope Alexander VI Borgia), they have succeeded, but they almost never succeed. If such an ahrimanic being really succeeded in gradually bringing a whole etheric body into a person when he sleeps again and again, the person would be able to maintain himself in his etheric body after death when he is in his etheric body. Otherwise the etheric body would dissolve within a few days. Gradually, an etheric human race would emerge and the earth would be preserved. [16] (See further below in this article: Diseases and Ahriman).

Sources:

[1], [2] GA 202: The Bridge between the World-Spirituality and the Physical of Man. The Search for the New Isis, the Divine Sophia (1920)

[3], [5], [7], [8], [12] GA 184: The Polarity of Duration and Development in Human Life. The Cosmic Prehistory of Humanity (1918)

[4] GA 203: Man's Responsibility for World Development through his Spiritual Connection with the Earth Planet and the Star World (1921)

[6] GA 147: The Secrets of the Threshold (1913)

[9] GA 165: The Spiritual Unification of Humanity through the Christ Impulse (1915/1916)

[10], [11] GA 26: Anthroposophical Guiding Principles. The Path of Knowledge of Anthroposophy - The Michael Mystery (1924/1925)

[13] GA 176: Human and Humanistic Truths of Development. The Karma of Materialism (1917)

[14] GA 120: The Revelations of Karma (1910)

[15], [16] GA 219: The Relationship of the Star World to Man and of Man to the Star World. The Spiritual Communion of Humanity (1922)

Ahriman as Evil

The thinking that should actually be applied to the spiritual world - radically, consistently, violently applied to external sensory reality - does not bring about the construction of this sensory reality, but its destruction. If we now go one plan higher, from our sensory plan into the next spiritual plan, then through the contemplation of this plan we notice what is actually at work in evil. For if the forces that live in thieves, robbers and murderers were not lived out unlawfully here in the sense world, but if man were to live it out metamorphosed, transformed, on the higher plane, it would be fully justified there. That is where it belongs. Evil is a displaced good. Only through the fact that the ahrimanic forces force into our world that which belongs in a completely different world does the nature of evil arise. And so a destructive thinking arises - not a thinking that can wait for fulfillment from the spiritual world. [1] The world has taken on an ahrimanic character. For this had to happen, that the ego, by grasping itself in the physical, then, if it does not rise up at the right time to grasp itself spiritually as a spiritual being, that it then, if it remains in the physical, is seized by the ahrimanic powers. And we see this seizure in the fact that, as little as the sleepy souls want to admit it to themselves, a tendency towards evil is asserting itself everywhere today. [2] Thus we are dealing with much, much lower powers in the influence of Ahriman than in the influence of Lucifer. The influences of Lucifer can never become as bad as the influences of Ahriman and those entities that are connected with the fire powers (retarded entities of Saturn's evolution, see: Asuras). Ahriman's influence can lead a person, in order to gain occult knowledge, to perform tasks with his physical body, for example. In certain black magic schools, such practices are indeed taught to the greatest extent. It is one of the most terrible seductions of man when the starting point for occult training is taken from the physical powers of the body. [3]

Sources:

[1] GA 189: The Social Question as a Question of Consciousness (1919)

[2] GA 204: Perspectives on the Development of Humanity. The Materialistic Impulse of Knowledge and the Task of Anthroposophy (1921)

[3] GA 107: Spiritual science of human nature (1908/1909)

Ahriman as a consequence of Lucifer

The fact that man was prematurely transferred down into the earthly sphere (this is the result of Lucifer's influence), that his earthly interests and desires pushed him down, caused the Ahrimanic spirits to interfere with what man was able to see and comprehend. As a result, man fell into error, fell into what could actually be called conscious sin. They have seduced him into thinking that what is in his surroundings is material, that he does not see through this material to the true foundations of the material, to the spiritual. [1] Lucifer first made the influence of Ahriman possible and therefore, when we look at Ahriman, we are led back to a primal influence of Lucifer, who could only come before our soul (in spiritual research) after we had made long preparations to recognize this inner connection. [2] It depends on the human inner being how he allows the outer world to approach him. And just as you cannot see the outside world properly with an eye in which something is destroyed because of the inner defect, so man does not get to see the outside world at all as it is because of the Luciferic influence. And because there was a reason for man not to see the outer world as it is, the Ahrimanic influence could force its way into the incorrect image of the outer world. [3] The justification for the appearance of such a force in the course of the world, whose effect also has its evil consequences, should to a certain extent be sought in the necessity it has for the development of the human being. If the Luciferic element were fully effective without opposition, it would overcome the attraction of the human being for this life when the soul enters the sensuous life; and the human being would not come to this entry at all. At the time when the possibility of the human soul turning away from the sensual life arises, the Luciferic is overcome by another, which attracts this soul to the sensual existence to a greater extent than it does through its own being.

(But) this Ahrimanic also has its dark side, (for) in it lies the origin of the aberrations of thought. [4] Certain forces which play a part in the becoming of the world and also have man in their currents, we summarize as Luciferic on the one side and as Ahrimanic forces on the other. With such words it is just so that one must acquire for years that which is inherent in such words, otherwise they remain phrases. But if one has the content, then one has something in these words that one must have, just as the electrician has two impulses in his positive and negative electricity that he must have in order to be able to speak of things. Exactly the same way of thinking that correctly speaks of positive and negative in the inorganic field, speaks of Luciferic and Ahrimanic in the soul-spiritual field. We can say that man as we actually have him before us, as we ourselves are, is a state of equilibrium; he is actually only ever something that is a balance between two poles, between the Luciferic pole and the Ahrimanic pole. On the one hand, everything in us tends towards the fantastic, the rapturous, the one-sided; the other pole is the ossified, the rational, the sober. [5] If you have a magnet, you know that we have two kinds of magnetism in the magnet. We have positive and negative magnetism. Not true, in the physical world one is not at all embarrassed to give things names. In magnetism there is something invisible in iron. In the same way, there is something invisible and supersensible in hardening. And this invisible, supersensible, essential quality, which one can observe if one has the gift, is called ahrimanic. Ahrimanic, then, are the forces that constantly want to turn a person into a kind of corpse. If there were only ahrimanic forces, we would continually become corpses, and we would become pedants, completely petrified people. We would constantly wake up, we would not be able to sleep. The forces that now soften us, rejuvenate us, that bring us to imagination, these are the Luciferic forces, these are the forces that we need so that we do not become a living corpse. But if only the Luciferic forces were there, we would remain children all our lives. [6]

Sources:

[1], [2] GA 107: Spiritual science of human nature (1908/1909)

[3] GA 120: The Revelations of Karma (1910)

[4] GA 35: Philosophy and Anthroposophy (1904-1923)

[5] GA 192: Spiritual Scientific Treatment of Social and Pedagogical Questions (1919)

[6] GA 349: On the Life of Man and the Earth. On the Essence of Christianity (1923)

Ahriman as the spirit of lies

Ahriman is a spirit of lies who conjures up illusions for people. He is not an illusion, oh no. But that which, under his influence, is conjured up before man's spiritual eye is a delusion. When man's desires, when man's passions take evil paths and at the same time he somehow surrenders to occult forces, then the occult forces that emerge as a result force their way into the etheric body, and among the illusions, which can sometimes be quite venerable figures, the most pernicious, the worst powers appear. Such is the terrible influence of Ahriman on man. And there will be less and less protection in the world against the influence of Ahriman outside the forces emanating from the Christ Mystery. In a certain way our time - and many phenomena herald this - is moving towards these influences of Ahriman. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 107: Spiritual science of human nature (1908/1909)

Ahriman - Karma as a consequence of Ahriman

What, on the other hand, have those spiritual beings who want to keep man in his progression done against this seduction, against error and illusion from the sensual? They have given man the opportunity to eliminate all error again through his karma, to wipe out all the evil he has caused in the world. Thus karma appeared as the result of the deeds of Ahriman. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 107: Spiritual science of human nature (1908/1909)

Ahriman-Satan

Ahrimanic spirits are those who were actually called the spirits of Satan in the medieval view, if one takes the names exactly. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 107: Spiritual science of human nature (1908/1909)

Ahriman for the seer

One cannot see Lucifer at night if one does not see his comrade, Ahriman, during the day. And so for the human being who has come so far in the development of his self and his astral body, the daily things that cause the perception of things in waking life become different than for the naive human being. Thus he learns to recognize desire - not that which comes from within, that is Luciferic, but that which comes from without, that which awakens desire in man from without, that which thus attracts us in the things and beings around us, so that we follow this attraction out of personal interest, thus everything that entices us to enjoyment from without - as an ahrimanic impression. Then one learns to recognize (further) as an ahrimanic impression everything that instills fear in us from the outside, everything that arouses fear in us from the outside. Thus, when one has undergone a certain development in one's astral body and self, Ahriman accompanies one at every turn; one sees that he emerges from the temptations of pleasure and from the impressions of fear. Again (as with Lucifer) this Ahriman had to be concealed because of the immaturity of men, that is, a veil was spread over his being. It was done in such a way that the outer world was immersed in maya by making people believe that instead of Ahriman, who peeps out everywhere, there is matter outside in the world. Wherever man dreams of matter, there is in truth Ahriman. And the greatest seduction is the materialistic theory of physics, the material atoms; for these atoms are in reality nothing other than the forces of Ahriman. [1] The Ahrimanic mystery is not yet revealed in the Bible in the same way as the Luciferic mystery. While we place the Luciferian mystery in Lemurian times, we must place the Ahrimanian mystery in Atlantean times. Here the Bible has only a hint, not such a clear, widely shining picture as that of the Paradise temptation. It only says in the Bible that it was brought about by the impulses that came into earthly existence: that the sons of the gods took a liking to the daughters of men. This is only an indication of that which enters as an Ahrimanic impulse. [2]

Sources:

[1] GA 145: What significance does the occult development of man have for his sheaths (physical body, etheric body, astral body) and his self? (1913)

[2] GA 272: Spiritual Scientific Explanations of Goethe's "Faust" Volume I: Faust, the Striving Man (1910-1915)

Ahriman's work in Atlantis

Since the middle of the Atlantean period of development, beings had asserted themselves in the area of human development which worked in such a way that man lived into the sensual-physical world in an unspiritual way. This could go so far that instead of the true form of this world, illusions and phantoms of all kinds appeared to him. Through this influence of Ahriman man after death came under powers which even then made him appear only as a being turned towards the earthly-sensual conditions. The free view into the processes of the spiritual world was increasingly taken away from him. He had to feel himself in the power of Ahriman and to a certain extent excluded from communion with the spiritual world. [1] Ahriman has approached man since the middle of the Atlantean period and has caused a large number of initiates to fall into black magic, because they were led by the seduction of this tempter to misuse what had become accessible to them from the spiritual world for the service of the physical-sensual world. This powerful influence of black magic forces led to the eventual downfall of Atlantis. [2] Almost all civilizations, the Indian, the Persian, the Egyptian, the Greek-Latin culture have gone through their period of decadence, in which they decayed, in which the Mysteries also decayed, in which the pure traditions of the Mysteries were no longer preserved. In these times, many of those who were either disciples of the initiates and yet could not keep up with them, or people to whom the mysteries had been unlawfully betrayed, have now taken wrong and evil paths. Places of black magic powers emanated from these influences and have survived into our time. [3]

Sources:

[1] GA 13: The Secret Science in Outline (1910)

[2], [3] GA 107: Spiritual science of human nature (1908/1909)

Ahriman in the body of man

The devil can easily be denied from the modern point of view, but nevertheless Ahriman and Lucifer live out in the human nature, Ahriman in the etheric body and Lucifer in the astral body. [1] And so it is easy to ignore the fact that since the year 1879 Ahrimanic powers have had to descend from the spiritual world into the realm of man, that they have had to penetrate human intellectuality, human thinking and feeling and perception (see: Fall of the Spirits of Darkness). [2] The basic experience of the 5th post-Atlantean cultural period, our period, is that the etheric body is contracted, that it is not too large (as in Greek times), but rather too small, and this will become stronger and stronger the further evolution proceeds. The further man progresses in his materialistic contempt for the spiritual, the more this etheric body will contract and dry up. However, since the organization of the physical body depends on the etheric body penetrating it properly, there will always be a tendency for the physical body to dry out when the etheric body is too compressed. And if it were to dry out particularly strongly, it would develop horn-like feet instead of the natural human feet. Ahriman in particular can now live into this dried up etheric body, just as Lucifer can live into the expanded etheric body. Ahriman will develop the aforementioned horn-like feet - goat's feet. [3]

Ahriman is unable to immerse himself in the blood; he can live continuously in the nerves, live until he dries up, until he is sober, because he cannot reach the warmth of the blood. Just as the Greek man faced the Sphinx, who lives in the respiratory system, so the man of the 5th post-Atlantean cultural period faces Mephistopheles (Ahriman), who lives in the nervous process, who is cold and sober because he suffers from bloodlessness, because he lacks the warmth of the blood. And thus he becomes the mocker, the sober companion of man. Whereas the Greek man was tormented by an overabundance of questions, the modern man will face the torment of being banished into his prejudices, of having a second body next to him that contains his prejudices. Everything that develops in materialistic prejudices, in materialistic narrow-mindedness, will strengthen the Mephistophelean nature, and we can already say now: We are looking into a future where everyone will be born with a second human being who will accompany him in such a way that he will feel the compulsion to think materialistically. In future times humanity will have to give the child so much education - be it through eurythmy, be it through a spiritual-scientific attitude - through which the etheric body must be enlivened that the human being will be able to take up his right position, that he will recognize what his companion means. Otherwise he will not understand this companion, otherwise he will feel towards him as if he were bewitched, spellbound. Just as the Greek had to come to terms with the Sphinx, so modern man will have to come to terms with Mephistopheles (Ahriman), with the satyr-like, faun-like figure who has goat or horse feet. The confrontation between Faust and Mephistopheles - that, one might say, becomes the foundation for the pedagogy of the future. [4]

Sources:

[1] Bei 45: Contributions to the Rudolf Steiner Complete Edition. Booklet 45 (1974)

[2] GA 177: The spiritual background of the outer world. The Fall of the Spirits of Darkness (1917)

[3], [4] GA 158: The connection of the human being with the elemental world. Kalewala - Olaf Åsteson - The Russian Folklore - The World as the Result of Equilibrium Effects (1912-1914)

Intelligence and Ahriman

In Ahriman there stands before us above all a world entity of conceivably highest intelligence, which has already taken intelligence completely into the individual. Ahriman is highly over-intelligent in every direction; he commands a dazzling intelligence that comes from the whole human being - only not from that part of the human being that forms itself humanly in the human forehead. [1] The Ahrimanic beings are completely predisposed to absorb everything that detaches itself from the gods as intelligence. They are predisposed to unite the sum of all intellectuality with their own being. They thus become the greatest, the most comprehensive and penetrating intelligences of the cosmos. [2]

Sources:

[1] GA 237: Esoteric Observations on Karmic Connections - Third Volume. The Karmic Connections of the Anthroposophical Movement (1924)

[2] GA 26: Anthroposophical Guiding Principles. The Path of Knowledge of Anthroposophy - The Michael Mystery (1924/1925)

Ahriman as a being of pain

One would like to call the Ahrimanic beings beings of pain. For they actually strive towards the human form, but cannot achieve it for themselves. It is a terrible pain that these ahrimanic beings basically go through. It can only be alleviated for them if they approach the human being and grasp the intellect. The mind cools this pain. That is why they bite into the human mind, they claw into it with their whole being, so to speak, they bite into it.

The ahrimanic is something that comes up from the material world, that has passed through the animal kingdom, that painfully strives towards man, that wants to seize the intellect, but that is repelled in man by the superhuman being. It is something that wants to enter man again and again and wants to keep man with the mere intellect, does not want to let him ascend to imagination, inspiration, because it wants to keep the human being with it to alleviate its torment. [1] As man cherishes material science within himself, Ahriman unites himself with his science. And just as Lucifer in particular has his hand in the artistic, so Ahriman has his hand in the formation of the mechanical, the technical, that which would draw the mind away from man, that which would draw him into the machine, be it into the mechanical tool, be it into the machinery of the state. One might say that during the Renaissance the Luciferian activity came to a kind of dead end; the Ahrimanic activity then took hold beyond the wall of this dead end. And we see the whole hustle and bustle that has been going on since the Renaissance; we see the drift towards mechanism, towards mindless science, taking place with the Ahrimanic character. What has arisen in recent times as materialistic science, as industrial technology, is of a thoroughly Ahrimanic nature and, if it could spread without the Christ conception, would bind man to the earth, preventing him from ascending to the Jupiter existence. But if we bring the Christ-conception, if we bring a new spiritual life, if we bring imagination, inspiration, intuition into that which is only knowledge of the outer world, then we redeem the ahrimanic being. How this redemption can be pictorially imagined, I have described in my mystery dramas from the most varied aspects. But it would be an overcoming of man by Ahriman if the conception of Christ could not continue to take shape as a truly spiritualized conception, (i.e.) de-theologized. Materialistic science, the external industrial mechanism would hand man over to death on earth, that is, it would create a completely different world in which man would live on more or less like a petrified creature for the edification of the Ahrimanic entities, if the Christ conception would not again permeate the modern materialistic, the modern mechanical being in a spiritual way. [2] We have not (for example) to avoid Ahriman, but to conquer the powers of Ahriman for the advancing culture of mankind. We have to bring them in. The struggle is that Ahriman wants to take the souls out. Humanity has the task of bringing Ahriman in with his powerful forces. [3]

Sources:

[1], [2] GA 208: Anthroposophy as Cosmosophy - Part Two:. The Formation of Man as the Result of Cosmic Effects (1921)

[3] GA 171: Inner Impulses for the Development of Humanity. Goethe and the Crisis of the Nineteenth Century (1916)

Diseases and Ahriman

Those illnesses which do not come from external influences, but which emerge from within the human being, are connected with the fact that when the Ahrimanic beings have almost reached the point in any human being where he assumes an etheric body outside his ordinary etheric body, these people, who thus already carry etheric body law into their physical body and into their ordinary etheric body on waking up, carry causes of illness into themselves. Through these causes of illness, the legitimate Venus, Mercury and Moon beings protect themselves against the harmful influence of the illegitimate ones. The human body breaks down in some illness so that it can sweat out - if I may use the expression - what it has absorbed in unlawful etheric processes through the ahrimanic influence. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 219: The Relationship of the Star World to Man and of Man to the Star World. The Spiritual Communion of Humanity (1922)

Ahriman and the subconscious

Ahriman is at work in the subconscious, conjuring up judgments from this subconscious. People then believe that they are judging from their conscious mind, whereas they often conjure up judgment from their subconscious drives and from their subconscious, refined impulses, or allow themselves to be conjured up by the Ahrimanic forces. Everything that is connected with man's desire to dominate other men, everything that is contrary to a healthy social will, is of an ahrimanic nature. The person who is possessed by Ahriman wants to dominate as many people as possible and then, if he is clever, will use human weakness to dominate people through this very weakness. [1] Ahriman only has a strong influence on people in the present age if there is a distraction of consciousness in some way. The most radical manifestation is, let us say, a fainting spell or a clouding of consciousness that lasts longer. [2] The most effective fight against the coming Michael age consists in the fact that the Ahrimanic spirits, in times when people's consciousnesses are dampened down, make people "possessed" by themselves, so to speak, that they intervene in human consciousnesses (see, for example, the outbreak of the First World War: Next, below). [3] The ahrimanic entities gave the quality of fear to feelings that would have had a completely different effect without them. [4]

Sources:

[1] GA 184: The Polarity of Duration and Development in Human Life. The Cosmic Prehistory of Humanity (1918)

[2] GA 237: Esoteric Observations on Karmic Connections - Third Volume. The Karmic Connections of the Anthroposophical Movement (1924)

[3] GA 240: Esoteric Observations on Karmic Connections - Sixth Volume (1924)

[4] GA 13: The Secret Science in Outline (1910)

World War [1] (noted above)

Christ himself came into the world. He did not take man to heaven for an earthly life, but man must permeate his earthly life with a spirituality that can be communicated and which in turn gives man the opportunity to defeat the dragon (see: spirits of darkness). One must understand something like this so thoroughly that one can answer the question of why people tore each other apart in the second decade of the 20th century. They tore each other apart because they took the fight to an area where it did not belong, because they did not see the real enemy, the dragon. The forces that are part of defeating him include those that will only bring peace to earth when they are developed in the right way. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 217: Spiritual forces in the coexistence of the old and young generations. Pedagogical Youth Course (1922)

Ahriman the god of obstacles and lord of resistance

Everything that was right in a past time becomes an obstacle in later development. To a certain extent, development is based on the fact that what is right for one time becomes an obstacle when it is carried into a later time. Those powers which direct the obstacles were then (at the time of Christ) technically called Mammon. [1] Mammon is the god of obstacles, who puts destructive, obstructive things in the way of progressive movement. On the other hand, this god Mammon is seen as the producer of very specific entities (see: bacteria), which have a destructive effect on human life in the form of infectious diseases. The infectious diseases unknown in earlier times originate from the god Mammon. [2]

One of Ahriman's tasks is to channel the forces from the spiritual world into the physical world which cause resistance in physical life. Comfort is a general, widespread characteristic of human beings. If one follows the souls who were connected with it after death, one sees how this comfort continues after death, and how man then has to live through a province, as it were, in which he even has to spend a certain time between death and the new birth in becoming a servant because of the comfort, as an effect of this comfort - as the soul of the god or gods of resistances. These are the spirits that are under the dominion of Ahriman. [3]

Sources:

[1] GA 114: The Gospel of St. Luke (1909)

[2] GA 93a: Basic Elements of Esotericism (1905)

[3] GA 144: The Mysteries of the Orient and Christianity (1913)

Temptation by Ahriman

The occultist knows that there is not only a temptation of Lucifer through desires, but also one through Ahriman - namely when one carries one's own passions out into the macrocosm by seeing all kinds of figures. [1] The moment Ahriman encounters what we have acquired as a healthy power of judgment in our earthly existence, he is terribly frightened, because it is something completely unknown to him, and he is very afraid of it. Therefore, the more we strive to develop the healthy power of judgment that can be given in life between birth and death, the more we work against Ahriman. This is particularly evident in the case of all kinds of personalities who are brought to us and who then tell us about all the spiritual worlds they have seen. And if one makes the slightest attempt to make something clear to these personalities, to teach them understanding and discernment, then Ahriman usually has them so much in his power that they can hardly respond; and this becomes all the stronger the more the lure of Ahriman expresses itself towards the acoustic side. There are even more remedies against what shows itself in visionary images than against what shows itself acoustically, such as voices heard and so on. Such people have a great aversion to learning anything that has to be acquired for the ego-consciousness between birth and death. They don't like it. If, however, such a person is brought to the point of developing sound judgment and is willing to accept teachings, then the voices and hallucinations soon cease, because they were previously only Ahrimanic misty images and because Ahriman becomes terribly frightened as soon as he senses that sound judgment is coming from the human being. [2] In the case of clairvoyants who talk a lot about previous incarnations of people - and usually with nonsense - which happens very often, because some people have the statements about previous incarnations just like that on the platter, one must be suspicious of them for the reason that it is all too easy in this area to draw on the forces that are most susceptible to temptation. Why are the statements of such clairvoyants, who are exposed to temptation, so often wrong? Because the lower instincts and impulses rise up like a mist from among the powers thus saved (as the basis of clairvoyance) from this age, together with the use of these powers. Then Ahriman and the Ahrimanic spirits come and form ghosts out of what arises, so that one can see these ghosts and take them for earlier incarnations. Looking into the earlier lives on earth is achieved through the development of those powers which are especially spared in youth, when the speech-forming powers are no longer used to form speech and reign in the realm of the sensual instincts and their organs. [3] Ahriman is the spiritual figure who takes pleasure in and benefits from it when souls appear to be quite deep, quite mystical, quite occult, but are not actually truthful. [4] There are people who believe that they can enter the spiritual world through certain diets and other material processes. But everything they then see, especially if it is the most sublime figures of light, no matter how grandiose it may appear, is only a reflection of their own self, an ahrimanic deception. [5]

The story of temptation (in the Gospels) points to deep mysteries. Just as these (seducing) powers had to come to make man independent, so he must break free again through the Christ in his soul. Gradually Lucifer and Ahriman will transform themselves into their opposite. Man will take the Christ impulse into himself and have Ahriman (and Lucifer) outside; in the past and now it is the other way round. [6] The gates, the windows, where the Ahrimanic and Luciferic entities enter the world and carry out their plans, are that they attack people in the state of dimmed consciousness and make them obsessed with themselves. For Ahriman and Lucifer do not work in an inexplicable, horrible way, but by the fact that people come to meet them in their state of consciousness. [7] The Ahrimanic power counts on people who are inclined towards the sphere of fantasy, so that their perception of sensual reality is transformed into fantasy images as if of its own accord. It believes that with the help of such people it can completely cut off the development of humanity from the past in order to bring it in the direction it wants. [8] (See also: Eighth Sphere)

Sources:

[1], [5], [6] GA 124: Excursions into the Field of the Gospel of Mark (1910/1911)

[2] GA 120: The Revelations of Karma (1910)

[3] GA 140: Occult Investigations into Life between Death and New Birth. The Living Interaction between the Living and the Dead (1912/1913)

[4] GA 277: Eurythmy - The Revelation of the Speaking Soul. A further development of Goethe's view of metamorphosis in the field of human movement (1918-1924)

[7] GA 176: Human and human developmental truths. The Karma of Materialism (1917)

[8] GA 26: Anthroposophical Guiding Principles. The Path of Knowledge of Anthroposophy - The Michael Mystery (1924/1925)

Ahriman and hierarchies

The Ahrimanic entities are deeper in the region of evil (than the Luciferic entities) and are recruited from the most diverse hierarchies, from the Archangeloi to the Dynamis (and Kyriotetes 203.259). [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 110: Spiritual Hierarchies and their Reflection in the Physical World. Zodiac, Planets, Cosmos (1909)

Ahriman - Redemption from Ahriman

The redemption of Lucifer happens through love, through the higher love, which is free of egoism. The redemption of Ahriman happens through thinking. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 266/3: From the Contents of the Esoteric Lessons. Volume III (1913-1923)

Ahriman - Tasks

If people had remained as they were in ancient times, that they did not actually know death at all, then they would never have been able to develop an intellect (in order to be able to become creative in the future), because the intellect is only possible in a world in which death reigns. In a physical way one could say: Death can only occur because man deposits salts not only in the rest of his body, but also within his brain, that is, deposits mineral-solid components, dead components. The brain constantly contains the tendency towards salt deposits, towards bone formations that have not materialized. So that the brain continually contains the tendency towards death. This inoculation of death had to come over mankind. This can be seen from the human side. But it can also be seen from the side of the higher hierarchies. There it presents itself somewhat differently. (You should say:) We higher hierarchies are able to let an earth emerge from the moon in which people know nothing of death, but in which they also cannot develop their intellect. It is impossible for us higher hierarchies to shape the earth in such a way that it provides the forces for people to develop their intellect. We have to get involved with a completely different being, a being that comes from other paths than we have come from, the Ahrimanic being. Ahriman is a being that does not belong to our hierarchy. Ahriman comes into the evolutionary stream in a different way. We have to get involved with this Ahriman. If we tolerate Ahriman within the earth evolution, if we grant him a share, then he brings us death and with it intellect, and we can absorb death and intellect into the human being.Ahriman knows death because he is intertwined with the earth, because he has gone paths through which he is connected with the earth evolution. He is a knower, a sage of death. He is therefore also the master of the intellect. The gods had to get involved - if one may say so - with Ahriman. They had to say to themselves: evolution cannot progress without Ahriman. The point is that Ahriman can be included in evolution. But if Ahriman is absorbed into evolution and he now becomes the master of death and thus of the intellect, then the earth is no longer ours, then Ahriman, who only has an interest in intellectualizing the whole earth, takes the earth for himself. The gods were faced with the great question of losing control of the earth to Ahriman in a certain sense. There was only one possibility: that the gods themselves would get to know something that they had not been able to get to know in their god worlds, which were not permeated by Ahriman, that the gods themselves would get to know death on earth through one of their emissaries, the Christ. If no god had passed through death, the earth would have become entirely intellectualistic without ever entering into the evolution which the gods intended for it from the beginning. [1] And an opposition to Ahriman is actually only present today in such teachings as flow through anthroposophy. When anthroposophy makes it clear to people that the spiritual-soul being is independent of the physical being, then Ahriman must first give up his hope. [2]

The ahrimanic beings bring about the materialization of the sensory world. For the higher kingdoms of nature they have the task of bringing about death. Insofar as death is part of the necessary order of existence, the task of the ahrimanic beings is founded in this order. From the elementary world they develop, among other things, that effectiveness which finds its expression in the destruction and death of existence. But when one observes the activity of the ahrimanic beings from the spiritual realm, one learns that something else is connected with their activity in the lower world. Because they have their scene in this world, they do not feel bound to the order that would apply to their powers if they worked in the upper world, where they have their origin. They strive for an independence in the lower world that they could never have in the upper world. This expresses itself particularly in their effect on man, inasmuch as man forms the highest natural kingdom of the sense world. They strive to make the life of the human soul, insofar as it is bound to the human being's senses, independent, to tear it away from the upper world and incorporate it completely into their own world. The human being as a thinking soul has its origin in the upper world. The thinking soul that has become spiritually seeing also enters this upper world. The thinking that unfolds in the sense world and is bound to it has within it that which is to be described as the influence of the ahrimanic entities. These entities want to give sense thinking a kind of permanent existence within the sense world. By bringing death through their powers, they want to snatch the thinking soul from death and allow only the other beingness in man to flow into destruction. According to their intentions, however, the human thinking power should remain in the realm of the senses and assume an existence that should become more and more similar to the nature of the Ahrimanic. [3] Ahriman has his elemental messengers (elemental beings) everywhere, who carry to him that which is a withering physical and etheric entity. [4] Ahriman is, in the widest circle, the lord of death, the ruler of all the powers which are to bring about within the physical-sensual world that which must necessarily be there in this physical-sensual world as annihilation, as death of the entities, since these entities would (otherwise) overgrow the sensual world. The task of lawfully regulating this death in the appropriate way from the spiritual world fell to Ahriman; he is the lord of the regulation of death.

Its realm in the most eminent sense is the mineral world. This is always dead. But just as our earthly world is, the mineral kingdom, the mineral lawfulness, is also poured into all the other kingdoms of nature. The plants, the animals, the human beings, insofar as they belong to the kingdoms of nature, are all permeated by the mineral, absorb the mineral substances, thus also the mineral forces and laws, and are subject to the laws of the mineral kingdom. Thus that which belongs to legitimate death also extends into these higher realms of the rightful dominion of Ahriman. In that which surrounds us as external nature, Ahriman is the rightful lord of death, and in so far as he is this, he is not to be recognized as an evil power, but as a power thoroughly grounded in the general order of the world. But Ahriman can transcend his domain. He approaches human thinking. In so far as this human thinking lives in the sense world, it is bound to the brain, which must succumb to destruction according to the general world order. Ahriman has to regulate this course of the human brain towards annihilation. When he now oversteps his domain, then he gets the tendency, the intention, to detach thinking from its mortal instrument, the brain, to make it independent; to tear physical thinking, which is directed towards the sense world, away from the physical brain, into whose stream of annihilation this thinking should pour itself when man passes through the gate of death. Because Ahriman is so active in human thinking, and people who are bound to the world of the senses naturally only feel the effects of the spiritual entities, people whom Ahriman has by the collar in this way feel the urge to tear thinking away from its integration into the great world order. And that creates the materialistic mood. By succeeding in tearing this thinking away from its basis, which is bound to the brain as physical thinking, Ahriman creates shadows and schemes in the physical world, which then permeate the physical world. With these, Ahriman wants to continually establish a special Ahrimanic realm for himself. [5] These schemes are visible to elementary clairvoyance as scurrying shadows. [6]

Ahriman is the principle that interferes with our perceptions and draws us in from outside. He has the strongest effect in cases where we have the feeling: Here you can no longer keep up with your thinking; you are at a critical point with your thinking, your thinking is caught up in a tangle of thoughts. This is where the ahrimanic principle seizes the opportunity to penetrate us as if through a crack in the outside world. Where our thinking ceases to grasp that which can bring reason and understanding into the matter from the phenomena, there also sits that which is called chance. It sits where Ahriman is most dangerous to us. Man calls those phenomena accidental where he can most easily be deceived by the Ahrimanic influence. Thus man will learn to understand that it is not in the nature of the facts when he is led to speak of coincidence somewhere, but that it will be due to him, to his development. And he will gradually have to educate himself to penetrate maya and illusion. [7]

Here, as a physical human being, we are, with certain exceptions, banished to a single place. However, the spiritual is always brought into the physical to some extent, and this allows us to walk around on the physical plane. This is essentially an Ahrimanic effect, since the spiritual is carried into the physical by Ahriman. [8] When we walk over the rigid earth, it has its rigidity, its hardness for the reason that the Ahrimanic entities are, so to speak, concentrated in it, which should actually only have the stage they are now artificially acquiring at a later point in their development. [9] Ahriman is the spirit that spreads matter like a veil over the spiritual and makes it impossible to recognize the spiritual world. [10]

Ahriman is the lord of the material laws, those laws which can indeed only be spiritualized after the entire earth evolution has come to an end. If he did not abuse this dominion, if he did not extend it to something else, he would be the only necessary entity of his kind within the earth evolution. [11] In his earthly life man is bound to the material laws, and he cannot achieve the direct spiritualization of that which comes from the material laws through a merely inner spiritual process, but for this external things are necessary. Everything that weaves us into a social order, so that we are under the yoke of laws that we can only spiritualize in the overall course of the earth's development, belongs there. The impossibility of turning "stones into bread" (see the story of the temptation of Christ), the impossibility of having the spiritual directly in matter, the existence of this impossibility and its mirror image, the dominion of money, gives Ahriman dominion, for Ahriman also lives socially in money. [12] He who really penetrates to reality through true natural science will find Ahriman. But men are afraid of this, for they believe they will fall into the abyss if they find the spirit - Ahriman - where they are merely looking for the substance, which in truth is not there. [13] There are many people in the scientific establishment today who seem to think very well. There is Ahriman in them, and it is more convenient to let Ahriman think in them than to think for themselves. It is also easier to pass your exams if you let Ahriman think in you. It is easier to become a private lecturer and university professor if you let Ahriman think in you than if you think for yourself. [14] Ahriman is at work at every laboratory table, in every machine, in short, in the most important cultural milieus of modern times. [15] Infinite spiritual power has flowed into this material life. Insofar as they satisfy the material needs of modern humanity, they serve Ahriman. What the ChristJesus once went through - the temptation by Ahriman - truly, the ordinary human souls cannot go through these shocks all at once. This temptation must be spread out for people. [16] Just as Lucifer in particular has his hand in the artistic, so Ahriman has his hand in the formation of the mechanical, the technical, that which would draw the intellect away from man, that which would draw him into the machine, be it into the mechanical tool, be it into the machinery of the state. [17] Ahriman is the great enthusiast for everything programmatic. He is the inspirer of eternal statute-making. We do indeed see how modern man sometimes rebels against Ahrimanism, how he rails against bureaucracy, which is pure Ahrimanism, how he rebels against the schematization of teaching and so on - but as a rule only in order to fall a little deeper into that from which he wishes to escape. [18]

If you want to get to know the nature of the Ahrimanic deeds, you can actually do so today wherever you attend meetings that are effective out of the ordinary consciousness. Today one has much opportunity to become acquainted with Ahrimanism in the world, for it is extraordinarily powerful. [External events clearly show that the age whose history can only be written from the physical plan has ceased. We must realize that the Ahrimanic powers are everywhere making more inroads into historical development. Two leading personalities, (the American President Wilson and the Russian revolutionary leader Lenin, died under the same symptoms of illness, both of [progressive] paralysis [the brain of the dead Lenin was only half the size}), that is, both offered a gateway for the ahrimanic powers. These things show that world history ceases to be earth history and begins to become cosmic history. [20]

As long as the work of supersensible entities (which are normally advanced) entering into human activity exists, that is, until about the 15th century, the Ahrimanic powers have only a - one might say - faintly insinuating power within the development of mankind. Ahriman's influence on man in this world history (since the 15th century) is possible and can have a devastating effect because the work of the gods related to man has died out in this stratum. But man could not come to the development of free will in any other way than by entering a sphere in which the divine-spiritual beings connected with him from the beginning were not alive. [21]

Sources:

[1], [2] GA 211: The solar mystery and the mystery of death and resurrection. Exoteric and esoteric Christianity (1922)

[3] GA 17: The Threshold of the Spiritual World (1913)

[4] GA 150: The world of the spirit and its intrusion into physical existence. The influence of the dead on the world of the living (1913)

[5], [6] GA 147: The secrets of the threshold (1913)

[7] GA 120: The revelations of karma (1910)

[8] GA 168: The connection between the living and the dead (1916)

[9], [14] GA 203: The responsibility of man for world development through his spiritual connection with the planet Earth and the starry world (1921)

[10] GA 109: The Principle of Spiritual Economy in Connection with Reincarnation Questions. An aspect of the spiritual guidance of humanity (1909)

[11], [12] GA 148: From Akasha research. The Fifth Gospel (1913/1914)

[13] GA 184: The polarity of duration and development in human life. The cosmic prehistory of humanity (1918)

[15] GA 176: Human and human developmental truths. The karma of materialism (1917)

[16] GA 154: How does one gain an understanding of the spiritual world? The inflow of spiritual impulses from the world of the deceased (1914)

[17], [18] GA 208: Anthroposophy as cosmosophy - Second part: The formation of man as a result of cosmic effects (1921)

[19] GA 237: Esoteric reflections on karmic connections - Third volume. The karmic connections of the anthroposophical movement (1924)

[20] GA 300c: Conferences with the teachers of the Free Waldorf School. Volume III: Conferences 1923–1924 (1923-1924)

[21] GA 26: Anthroposophical Principles. The Path of Knowledge of Anthroposophy – The Michael Mystery (1924/1925)

Ahriman - natural phenomena make him visible

In the rising of the watery vapors of the earth, the one who has brought himself to spiritual vision discovers that something can live in this natural phenomenon which carries earthly things upwards in a centrifugal direction. It is not for nothing that people easily become melancholy when they live in fog, for there is something in the experience of the foggy that burdens our will. Now, among other exercises, you can create your imaginations in such a way that you burden your will of your own accord. You can do this by inwardly concentrating on certain bodily organs, muscles in particular, to evoke a kind of inner muscular feeling, a sense of muscle. In this way one strains the will through one's own activity. And then one becomes aware of that which is present in the ascending mist, one becomes spiritually and mentally aware of how certain Ahrimanic spirits live in the ascending mist, which in this way expand their existence in relation to the earthly. [1] Ahriman is the power which the general creation of the world uses to bring forth nature. That we do not feel nature to be spiritualized is due to the fact that the spirit is not contained in the present life of nature, but that it works from the past. And this is the secret of the world-creating powers, that they make use of this spirit, which they have left at an earlier stage, for effect at a later stage, but allow it to work in from the past. [2] .

Sources:

[1] GA 232: Mystery Formations (1923)

[2] GA 183: The Science of the Becoming of Man (1918)

Ahriman & Satan

In that man draws intellectuality to himself from the universe - and after all it is in the wisdom of the world that he draws it - that man gives the possibility, in unguarded moments, which are always there, of allowing this intellectuality to be seized by that ahrimanic power which in the Christian tradition is called Satan and which must not be confused with the ordinary devil, who does not have the qualities of Satan, but is a lower power. Satan has the rank of primordial powers, of Archai, and he is the one who, in the course of world evolution, has seized this intellectuality long before it approaches man in the way it has been described. He is at present, so to speak, the most comprehensive possessor of intellectuality, and he strives to bind human intellectuality so strongly to his own that in this way man can fall out of his evolution. So to make the Mystery of Golgotha ineffective is what this Ahrimanic power strives for. Now, this ahrimanic power, which in the Christian tradition is called Satan, has no power to work further upwards in the various levels of the world than as far as man. It is therefore impossible to imagine, for example, that the intelligence of an Angelos^[1] could be directly seized by this satanic power. Only in certain exceptional cases can this happen. And the knowledge of this possibility, that in the future moments could occur when it might also be possible for the satanic power not only to bind human beings to itself by way of intellectuality, but when the satanic power could also bind beings from the realm of the Angeloi, namely the Archangeloi, to itself, is at present still one of the higher mysteries of occultism, which cannot be spoken about for the time being, and which can only be revealed under certain conditions. If, as it were, the intellectuality contained in man is seized by the ahrimanic power, then man can be torn out of his evolution into a completely different path, simply by his being being torn away by his intellect, which Satan is able to tie in with. This would not be possible with any other spiritual or mental power, with any other bodily power in man than only with the intellect, for the intellect is so situated in man that it represents the most independent thing in man; everything else depends on certain divine powers. Therefore, if Satan were to approach, for example, people's feelings, sensations, desires and wishes, he would still have to deal with the superhuman powers inherent in these soul faculties. Intellectuality is the first thing with which man can completely detach himself from the entities that bring about his personal evolution; it is the first thing where man, through his very own free power, must link up with those powers that have stood by his development from the beginning. Thus man must learn to understand that he has to identify himself voluntarily with the last aims of the Apocalypse, where it is clearly indicated by the apocalypticist that there will appear that power which represents the Alpha and Omega of the continuous creative forces, the continuous creative being of evolution, and that man has to connect himself out of his own resolution to that being which has guided him as long as he was not yet cosmic.

We can already see how the satanic power is endeavoring to bring man into its evolution in this way. The way to do this is to gather people together in such associations as we see emerging everywhere today, where the old group souls cease and a new group soulfulness can begin. That is why what is happening at present (1924) in the East of Europe, for example, is so terribly satanic, because everything is leading towards bringing people together there with all their strength in such a way that group souls would become necessary. If the most intelligent are thus taken over into the lower realm of the Ahrimanic, then groups that are formed there can only be assigned as groups to Ahrimanic powers; and then that would be the way for the satanic powers to tear humanity out of earth evolution and bring it into another planetary evolution. Group soulfulness can only succeed if the intellectual element is completely emancipated in a certain way. The most sophisticated approaches to this are being made in the East today. However, it also occurs everywhere in Central and Western Europe. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 346: Lectures and Courses on Christian Religious Work, V. Apocalypse and Priestly Work (1924)

Ahriman - protection from him

How can you protect yourself from Ahriman? By being content with what you have been given:

Rejoice in what is granted to you;

Withhold gladly what is not granted to you!

Then Ahriman cannot get to us. One should not be desireless, not an ascetic who flees the world, but also not just full of joy, but should keep the balance between the two; this gives the right mood for the esoteric. [1]

Sources:

GA 266/3: From the Contents of the Esoteric Lessons. Volume III (1913-1923)

Ahriman at work

Ahriman is at work in everything that is volitional. He approaches us in everything that reveals itself as a gesture in word or writing: In everything that manifests itself in mediumistic writing, it is now a question of a trained medium or a natural mediumistic writing, or also of the fact that one otherwise feels urged to write something; while appearances of figures, heads of light and so on, which are produced by a medium, are caused by Lucifer. Where, for example, one feels urged to write, one can counteract this by stopping and not giving in to these inspirations which one thinks one feels or perceives, but by stopping and opposing these whisperings with the firm will not to follow them. Through this effort of will, one gains undreamt-of powers in the occult. Ahriman is in what we say, in the words we form and let others hear. As soon as the ear hears the sound, the larynx emits the sound and the words are formed in writing, Ahriman comes and hardens the sound, the word, the writing. It is therefore important to strengthen the soul and to examine one's thoughts and words in the most subtle way. Swedenborg's world view (for example), his distant visions and experiences (dreams of truth) are permeated with Ahriman, including what Kant took from Swedenborg's writings, in which he was interested. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 266/3: From the Contents of the Esoteric Lessons. Volume III (1913-1923)

Ahriman hinders spiritual development in cooperation with Lucifer

Why is it that the esoteric, even if he has practiced concentration and meditation for years, has still not attained a vision of the higher worlds? To answer this question clearly, let us imagine what meditation actually is. When we want to meditate, we have the will to turn away from external things, we wish that they should no longer exert any influence on our thoughts, they should not disturb us in our devotion to the spiritual. But external events and thoughts about them constantly push themselves in front of our meditating soul, they want to turn us away from our meditation, they defend themselves against our devotion, so that we have to fight against them with our utmost willpower. In all the thoughts that creep in between our meditation, something also comes before us that we think we do not know, and yet it is our own self that reveals itself in all these thoughts and that shows us how flighty we actually are and how little we can detach ourselves from our daily preoccupations and desires. For what always penetrates us during our meditation, when we have the desire to separate ourselves from external things and connect with the spiritual, is our streaming life of desires. In the images of our daily life it flows incessantly into our thinking and resists when we want to connect with the spiritual realm. That this is the case can be to our benefit, since in all these images and thoughts we get to know ourselves in our constantly inflowing life of desire; it must bring us to self-knowledge, which we have practiced very fleetingly up to now. But mostly we will still look for all kinds of excuses, for we do not want to accuse ourselves, and that is the reason why the view into the spiritual world still remains closed to us; our ego of desire draws a veil over it. If we were to turn our attention away from the events and experiences of our life of desire, if we were to turn our ego towards the spiritual and focus all our devotion on it, we would have succeeded long ago. If, to use a trivial example, we would only pay as much attention to our meditation as we do to conversations of all kinds that we have in company, or to news about our dear fellow men, we would make rapid progress in our knowledge of the higher worlds, we would then push back our resisting ego. What are our thoughts but memories of past events, and these events are nothing but the desires we have felt. If they had not become a pleasure to us, we would not have kept them in our memory. Just examine your memory, and you will find that everything that you have most enjoyed is engraved in it. Everything that has remained indifferent to us, that has not particularly interested us, of which we have enjoyed nothing, so to speak, has disappeared from our memory. We love Ahriman and Lucifer too much, they accompany us throughout our lives precisely because we love them so much. And why do we love them so much? Well, we need to know how Ahriman and Lucifer reveal themselves to man and endear themselves to him, namely because they bring us into contact with the things of the world around us, the world in which we seek our pleasure and the satisfaction of which is so pleasant to us. Through the rays of light which they let fall on the objects and which then in turn shine back from the objects to us, through this contact with the rays we feel a pleasant stimulus, just as the crying child felt at the caressing touch of its mother. Lucifer and Ahriman caress us by casting their light rays over the things of the world and our eyes become aware of them through the touch of the rays. We must recognize Lucifer and Ahriman with open eyes in all that we do, and especially where these two powers want to stand in front of our meditation to deny us the view into the spiritual world, for the moment has dawned that we must strive to develop ourselves to spiritual knowledge by forming spiritual organs of clairvoyance within us, so that these organs do not dry up and consume themselves. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 266/3: From the Contents of the Esoteric Lessons. Volume III (1913-1923)

Ahriman in man

It is the realm of Ahriman in which we weave and live from the moment we wake up until we fall asleep. This is very easy to understand because Ahriman is in our physical body. He constantly helps us when we want to acquire knowledge through the physical body. We first acquire ordinary knowledge through the physical body, through the senses, the ordinary tools of the physical body. Ahriman sits in there. Lucifer also gives him what he has experienced in us during the night when we wake up. During the day, in connection with Ahriman, we acquire what we call our knowledge of the world. When we fall asleep, Ahriman generously repays the gift that Lucifer gave him when he woke up. So we can say: instead of us, Ahriman enjoys our nightly experiences during the day; instead of us, Lucifer enjoys our daily experiences during our sleep, in our ego. In our physical body Ahriman enjoys, in our ego Lucifer enjoys; Ahriman during the day, Lucifer during the night. [1]

Man is made from the dust of the earth. That which is mineral is the actual realm of Ahriman. And he also feels comfortable when he can penetrate us in relation to everything that is mineral in us. You secrete salts (for example), and through this you can actually think; in general through everything that asserts itself in you as a mineral process, through this you are a thinking being. Ahriman wants to enter this realm. And that is why he fights for a share in the blood, in respiration, in metabolism. He can only do this if he breeds certain qualities in human souls, for example, if he breeds in human souls the very special inclination towards the dry intellect that wants to be absorbed in materialism, towards the intellect that scoffs at truths imbued with feeling, where he can therefore breed the arrogance of the intellect in the human soul. Then he makes the human blood, the human respiration, the human metabolism also inclined for himself, and he can then, as it were, scurry out of the salty, mineral into the blood into the respiration. If man were to take into account only that which he experiences between birth and death out of his earthly nature, and were only to appreciate a continued life after death, not to look at a previous life before birth, the ahrimanic would indeed gradually take possession of the human from the mineral process. Everything that is Yahvish (see: Yahweh) would be thrown away from the earthly development, that is, what has come over from Saturn, Sun and Moon, and a new creation would begin with the earth, but it would deny everything that has gone before (a new Saturn would thus arise). [2]

When man looks into his inner being, perceives physical nature as his instincts, as his passions - all this is of course astral, but it flows up from physical nature. What man perceives in himself in this way through his instincts, drives, passions, has underneath it, so to speak, a realm of entities that have an intimate relationship with man, but which are of a sub-human nature. [3] But these entities live directly on earth, but in such a way that man cannot see them, because they never get a body formed in such a way that man can see them. For they have only one body, which lives in the earthly and watery elements. And their actions on earth are the ebb and flow, the volcanic phenomena, the earthquake-like phenomena. And these sub-human entities are under the control of the Ahrimanic powers. The effects of these entities go up into the human metabolism. And what you see rising as ebb and flow, or what you see only more rarely in volcanic or earthquake-like effects, is always present in an ebb and flow in the metabolism of man. These are the ahrimanic effects. These entities fight to harden the human being, to make him similar to themselves. This would make him infinitely clever in material terms, incredibly intelligent. These entities cannot achieve this directly, they want to achieve it indirectly. That is why their truly millennia-old efforts in earthly life have already succeeded in training a whole race of such sub-human beings. They do this by seizing the instinctive nature of human beings when this instinctive nature is particularly wild and strong; to a certain extent they seize this instinctive nature. The human being is then enslaved to these ahrimanic powers during his life, so that he is completely given over to his passions, instincts and drives, so that he is a wild person, and then they can tear this out after death.

And in this way there is already a whole sub-human population of the earth, which is present in the water and in the earthly. These earthly watery beings actually populate the layer that lies immediately below the earth's surface. Those people who can look into mines know these beings very well. The ahrimanic powers are waiting for people to come down in such an incarnation through a karma that is brought about by instincts, drives and passions, so that such a being is particularly pleasing to them, so that people say in a certain life on earth: I don't want to go back into the spiritual world, I want to embody myself in such a sub-sensible being after I have left my physical body, from which one goes out again to a supersensible life. But then I remain united with the earth, I no longer die. The ahrimanic beings are always of the opinion that they will be able to lure so many people into their race in this way that the earth will one day be populated with only such ahrimanic sub-human beings. And in this way they want to make the earth itself immortal so that it does not scatter in the universe. [4] It is precisely because man is transferred alive into time that it has been possible for the ahrimanic powers to penetrate our world through the gate of humanity and to work within man as such. And the consequence of this is that man detaches his present existence from the spiritual. [5] It is from the influence of the Ahrimanic powers, which the creative forces use to form us, that this animal (but softer) head, which we would otherwise wear, does not really sit on us, as the Egyptians drew it on some of their figures. [6]

An ahrimanic person is devoted in his value to the external: the rich miser. [7] In every antipathy there is in a certain way the ahrimanic. [8] Passion, the feeling of envy, is in the astral body. And now there is a very definite law which says that qualities which appear in our astral body and through their hideousness arouse in us the longing to get rid of them, creep into our etheric body and then appear there in deceptive forms. They manifest themselves in very specific judgments that we make about others. These judgments are then such that we do not envy the other, but reproach him, find everything about the other bad. The judgment appears to be just, but in truth it is based on envy. Envy is now a characteristic in which the Luciferian power in man expresses itself. Envy is a very evil quality, which is why people have an antipathy towards it. Once man has recognized envy in himself, he seeks to fight against Lucifer as the originator of envy. Now Lucifer simply hands the matter over to Ahriman, and he clouds the human judgment of the other person. (But there is also the opposite process:) Lying is an Ahrimanic characteristic. Man also has an antipathy towards lies and tries to fight them. When it is fought, Ahriman hands over the reigns to Lucifer - and a quality creeps into the human astral body that appears as very, very strong egoism. This is then restrained mendacity. [9]

Sources:

[1] GA 162: Questions of art and life in the light of spiritual science (1915)

[2] GA 203: Man's responsibility for world development through his spiritual connection with the planet Earth and the starry world (1921)

[3], [4] GA 218: Spiritual connections in the formation of the human organism (1922)

[5], [6] GA 183: The science of human development (1918)

[7], [8] GA 166: Necessity and freedom in world events and in human action (1916)

[9] At 45: Contributions to the Rudolf Steiner Complete Edition. Issue 45 (1974)

Ahriman in man - the Doppelgänger / double

Man enters this world with his organism, with which he is clothed, without descending with his soul into this organism. But there is also the opportunity that a short time before we are born, another spiritual being besides our soul takes possession of our body, of the subconscious part of our body. An ahrimanic spiritual being is just as much in us as our own soul. These beings, which spend their lives precisely by using people themselves in order to be able to be there in the sphere (of people), have an extraordinarily high intelligence and a very significantly developed will, but no mind at all. And we already go through our lives in such a way that we have our soul and such a double, which is much more clever than we are, but has a Mephistophelean intelligence, an Ahrimanic intelligence, and in addition an Ahrimanic will, a very strong will, which is much closer to the forces of nature than our human will, which is regulated by the mind. In the 19th century, natural science discovered that the nervous system is permeated by electrical forces. But if the natural scientists believe that the nervous power that belongs to us, which is the basis for our imaginative life, is somehow connected with electric currents that pass through our nerves, they are wrong. For the electric currents, the forces that are placed into our being by the double, do not belong to our being at all. These beings once decided of their own free will that they did not want to live in the world in which they were destined to live by the wise gods of the upper hierarchies. They wanted to conquer the earth, they need bodies; they do not have bodies of their own: they use as much of the human bodies as they can use, because the human soul cannot completely fill the human body; they accompany us below the threshold of our consciousness. There is only one thing they absolutely cannot tolerate in human life: death. That is why they must always leave the human body in which they settle before it is afflicted by death. This is always a very bitter disappointment, because that is precisely what they want to conquer: to remain in human bodies beyond death. If the Mystery of Golgotha had not happened, if the Christ had not passed through the Mystery of Golgotha, it would have long since been the case on earth that these entities would have conquered the possibility of remaining within the human being even when death is karmically predestined for the human being. Then they would have triumphed over human development in general, and they would have become masters of human development on earth. Today they still have to be careful not to prolong the life of this body beyond the (predetermined) hour of death. [1]

Certain occult brotherhoods have long been informed about this matter, know things very well and have withheld them from mankind. Today the situation is such that it is impossible not to gradually equip people with the concepts they need when they have passed through the gate of death. For everything that man experiences here, even what he experiences below the threshold of consciousness, he needs after death, because he must look back on this life and this life must be completely comprehensible to him in retrospect, and because it is the worst thing if he cannot do this. But one does not have a sufficient concept to understand this life in retrospect if one cannot illuminate a being that takes such a part in our life as this ahrimanic being. It can no longer be beneficial in the future if occult brotherhoods can use such things to spread their power. In the coming centuries man will have to know more and more that he carries such a double within him. This is nothing more and nothing less than the originator of all physical diseases that emerge spontaneously from within; it is the originator of all organic diseases. [2] The doppelgänger has a preferential relationship to the forces emanating from the earth. These beings, which as such ahrimanic-mephistophelean beings take possession of the human being a short time before he is born, have their very special taste nature. That which we humans have in a faint image as geography is for these beings the living principle of their own experience; they arrange their abode accordingly. From this arises one of the most important tasks of the future: to cultivate again that which has been torn away - geographical medicine, medical geography. Paracelsus tore it away from atavistic wisdom. [3] The area where that which flows up from below has the greatest influence on the double, and where it enters into the greatest relationship with that which flows out from the double, and thus also communicates itself to the earth, is that area of the earth where most of the mountains do not run from west to east, in the transverse direction, but where the mountains go mainly from north to south - for this is also connected with these forces - where the magnetic north pole is close by. This is the area where, above all, kinship is developed with the Mephistophelian-Ahrimanic nature through the external conditions. People like Woodrow Wilson develop who are only a wrapping of the doppelgänger, through whom the doppelgänger itself has a very special effect, who are essentially actually embodiments of that which is American geographical nature. [4] Diseases come from the fact that this being works in the human being. And when remedies are used, the purpose is to give this being from the outer world that which it otherwise seeks through the human being. If I add a remedy to the human body when this ahrimanic-mephistophelean being is at work, then I give it something else; I caress this being, so to speak, I am sonsing it, so that it lets go of the human being and is satisfied with what I throw down its throat as a remedy. All these things are only just beginning. Medicine will become a spiritual science. And just as medicine was known in ancient times as a spiritual science, it will be recognized as a spiritual science. [5]

Sources:

[1] - [5] GA 178: Individual spiritual beings and their work in the human soul (1917)

Ahriman in the life between death and a new birth

At the moment when the soul has passed through the gate of death, these Ahrimanic-spiritual entities come buzzing in. They are there in abundance, and it is not surprising that they are there, for they are the spirits of destruction. Their regular activity is to work on the destruction of the physical organization. That is part of their trade. They just must not stay there too long. People who have absorbed spiritual understanding keep these beings at bay. But these spirits have a lot of power over the materialistically thinking souls who do not acquire an understanding of the spiritual world. And those souls suffer much from Ahriman who have spurned acquiring spiritual understanding in life. After death, during the Kamaloka period, when they go through their lives, they have the feeling everywhere that they see what they have lived in: Why did I do this or that? They see that one of the destroying spirits is about to come and snatch it away from them, so they think: I didn't really do it for anything. The spirits of the higher hierarchies cannot see them when they return to life and so everything must seem pointless to them. [1] The more man turned his interests towards the physical-sensual world, the greater was the possibility that Ahriman would take up residence in the soul during life on earth and then retain his power beyond death. In earthly life this leads to viewing the sensual-physical existence as the only existence and thereby blocking any view of a spiritual world. In the spiritual world (for example, after death) this violence leads the person to complete isolation, to directing all interests only towards himself. People who are under Ahriman's control at death are reborn as egoists. [2]

It was a great moment for the development of the world when the event of Golgotha occurred. There the Christ appeared in the world which man enters after death (Christ's descent into hell). In this world, the influence of Ahriman was even stronger. The influences of Ahriman acted on man with terrible force and power. An infinite isolation and regression to human egoity would have occurred in the life between death and a new birth. And in the reincarnation man would be born into his life in such a way that he would have become a crass, a terrible egoist. [3]

When going back towards the new birth, Ahriman in particular is at our side. For he leads us back to earth, he is an important personality in the return journey in the second half of life between death and the new birth. And he can also do bad things to those people who do not want to believe in him in their life between birth and death. He then gives them too much of his powers. He gives them what he always has left, those powers that are connected with earthly gravity, that bring all kinds of misfortunes that look like coincidences into earthly existence and so on. [4]

Ahriman achieves his great successes by shortening the second half of human life from death to a new birth. Not true, a certain amount of time elapses from death to a new birth. This time, which is represented in my mystery plays, what I have called the cosmic midnight (the greatest distance from earth), is the second half. This second half, from the middle to a new birth, Ahriman seeks to shorten [for man]. In this way he seizes the human brain with his power of thought with great haste, with great energy. He hooks himself into the brain, so to speak. Ahriman seeks to bind people more and more to the earth. This is the way in which Ahrimanic forces work more and more on people, how they want to bring the power of thought more and more into earthly life in relation to the spiritual world: people come one to two centuries too early (to incarnation). [5]

Sources:

[1] GA 254: The occult movement in the nineteenth century and its relationship to world culture. Significant aspects of external spiritual life around the middle of the nineteenth century (1915)

[2] GA 13: Occult Science in Outline (1910)

[3] GA 107: Spiritual Scientific Study of Man (1908/1909)

[4] GA 150: The World of the Spirit and its Intrusion into Physical Existence. The influence of the dead on the world of the living (1913)

[5] GA 211: The solar mystery and the mystery of death and resurrection. Exoteric and esoteric Christianity (1922)

Ahriman and Akasha

In ordinary waking earth consciousness, a sentence (an imagined content) first burrows into one's own etheric body and remains connected to the person until the person can correct it. So the bad thought improves in the course of karma. A sentence that really touches the spirit enters the general etheric substance. People produce of their own accord, even from our 5th post-Atlantean period onwards, but only such things that can be corrected again. But under the influence of Lucifer and Ahriman, if they do not learn to be on their guard against them, they nevertheless engrave what they think, what they carry out under the influence of Lucifer and Ahriman, into the general ether substance of the world. This is now entered in the same way as otherwise only the results of spiritual science are engraved. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 170: The Riddle of Man. The spiritual background of human history (1916)

Ahriman and astral light

It is not only St. John's bugs that become luminous to the physical eye of man at St. John's Day. Seen from the other planets, the interior of the human being becomes luminous for the etheric eye of other planetary beings at St. John's Day, a luminous being. This is the sulphurization process. It is a marvelous astral light in which human beings shine out into the cosmos during midsummer time, that which is there of majestic beauty, which at the same time gives rise to the ahrimanic power approaching the human being. For the ahrimanic power is tremendously related to these substances which sulphurize in man. And on the one hand one sees how, as it were, people shine out into the cosmos in the light of St. John, but how the dragon-like serpentine formations of Ahriman worm their way through these people who shine out into the cosmos in the astral light and try to ensnare them in the dreamlike, sleeplike, subconscious realm. And when the meteor stones fall in midsummer, then this cosmic meteor iron, which contains such a tremendously strong healing power, contains the weapon of the gods against Ahriman. The processes that take place in every blood corpuscle when the iron compound shoots into it are humanly, on a very small scale, minutely the same as what takes place when the meteoric stone shines and radiates down through the air. [1] (See also: blood iron)

Sources:

[1] GA 229: The co-experience of the course of the year in four cosmic imaginations (1923)

Ahriman and Christ

If one wants to apply human expressions to divine will, one could say: Ahriman waited with longing for the moment when he could penetrate human consciousness with his power. Now he was surprised by this, (as) he had not previously known that there was a divine decision to send a being to earth, the Christ, who passed through death. This made it possible for Ahriman to intervene, but the tip of his actual dominion was broken. [1]

For the salvation of mankind, Christ combined his being with the immortality of the divine-spiritual being in Ahriman's realm. [2]

Sources:

[1] GA 211: The Solar Mystery and the Mystery of Death and Resurrection. Exoteric and Esoteric Christianity (1922)

[2] GA 26: Anthroposophical Guiding Principles. The Path of Knowledge of Anthroposophy - The Michael Mystery (1924/1925)

Ahriman and growing old

From a certain age onwards, we infuse our own being into the spiritual within the earth in a certain way. We make the physical earth more spiritual than it would otherwise be. So from a certain age onwards, we spiritualize the physical earth in a certain way that cannot be perceived with external senses. We carry spiritual things into the physical earth, just as we carry physical things up into the spiritual world when we die young; we squeeze out spiritual things, so to speak, when we grow old, I can't say it any other way. From a certain point of view, growing old in the spiritual sense consists of squeezing out spiritual things here on earth. This means that Ahriman cannot have such an intensive effect on people today that the opinion that ideals have a certain significance could be completely extinguished. But at the present time we are already very, very close to people falling into the most terrible errors, especially with regard to what has been said. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 183: The Science of the Becoming of Man (1918)

Ahriman and evil

The same forces that underlie our evil thoughts were emitted on the old moon by the beings of the hierarchies, from the angels (Angeloi) up to the spirits of form (Exusiai). They thereby brought forth the lunar existence. Lucifer and Ahriman, however, remained behind and are only now radiating these forces. Now, however, they are working into the meanwhile further condensed physical, into the physical blood of the human being, and thus evil arises. They are not evil in themselves. The esotericist must let them work on him, but not allow them to reach physical condensation. Then they remain valuable for the good thoughts of the future. [1]

This struggle of Christ against Ahriman is already possible again, so that an idea of it can arise in the Gospel in the story of the temptation. But the matter can only be fully understood if we realize, as I have often explained here, that Lucifer plays a greater role in the earlier development of mankind and that Ahriman has only had an influence on human consciousness since the time of the Mystery of Golgotha. Before that he also had an influence on humanity, but not actually on consciousness. [2] (Through the unanswered question at Christ's temptation by Ahriman - of the stones that should have been turned into bread) it could happen that Ahriman also remained active alongside Christ on earth during the three years that Christ worked in the body of Jesus of Nazareth, and that he then entered the soul of Judas and was active in this soul to betray Christ. What happened through Judas is related to what is the not fully resolved question of temptation after the event at the Jordan (see: John's baptism) [3]

Sources:

[1] GA 266/3: From the Contents of the Esoteric Lessons. Volume III (1913-1923)

[2] GA 211: The Solar Mystery and the Mystery of Death and Resurrection. Exoteric and Esoteric Christianity (1922)

[3] GA 148: From Akashic Research. The Fifth Gospel (1913/1914)

Ahriman and the element of air

The first element in which man was created was heat. And it was actually intended during the development of the earth that man should send streams of warmth from outside into his body. Summer warmth and winter cold, which he now experiences in his body as an individual human being, he should feel as his ego flowing into him from outside, so to speak. He should feel this ego as connected to all other egos. That the warmth is now drawn into us, into our blood, is Lucifer's deed. The second element with which we are closely connected is air. We should actually have the feeling that the air out there is us, that we flow into the body with it with every breath and revitalize it. Instead, we feel the air as something coming to us from outside and return it as something poisonous, as something that kills. And killing air is where Ahriman meets us. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 266/2: From the Contents of the Esoteric Lessons. Volume II (1910-1912)

Ahriman and the Babylonian corruption

Everything that is capable of bringing man below his own spiritual level is included in what the apocalypticist calls the Babylonian temptation. Man is only truly human when there is complete harmony in him between the principle of the material and the spiritual, that is, when the material does not play up into emotions uncontrolled by the spiritual. That is precisely what it is all about and we must understand this very well. For even the apocalypticist could not speak as he does if he assumed that emotions, passions and everything that comes from the sphere of the will and the sphere of the mind were completely unjustified from the outset. To declare the emotions and passions to be unjustified, this ascetic striving in the wrong sense, again springs from the emotional, the passionate. For he who does not feel strong enough to permeate his passions with spirituality in such a way that he puts them at the service of the good evolution of the world, is just paying homage to his emotion of weakness. Even if he wants the good evolution - if he becomes impoverished in his emotional sphere, he will pay homage to his weakness. So the apocalypticist is not concerned with tearing out the emotions, not with tearing out the affects and passions, but with ensuring that the emotions do not remain uncontrolled by the spiritual. And all that which represents the emotions in human life, be they great or small, which remain uncontrolled by the spiritual, all this is summarized in the Apocalypse in the name of that city Babylon, in which ruled - I would like to express it stereotypically - the apostasy from spirituality through the passions. We only have to translate the strong, crude expressions of that time - they were not crude for that time - into our language. The old way of thinking was not to form abstract concepts, but always to refer to something concrete (the whore of Babylon), to something characteristic. This is also how the apocalypticist speaks of Babylon. Why Babylon in particular?

In Babylon, or rather at the site of Babylon, there were really high mysteries in ancient times, in which one could be initiated into the secrets of the supernatural cosmos, in which one could learn secrets about the starry worlds and their spiritual content. It was precisely in Babylon that the oldest Babylonian priests used the human powers of dream clairvoyance in a way that we would call mediumistic clairvoyance today. And it was in such a way, in a certain sense mediumistic, that the wonderful ancient Babylonian teachings were formed. We can see today that mediums, even if they initially appear suitable for conveying the spiritual - this happens in many cases, but it would have to be controlled by insightful initiates - are exposed to influences that are morally very questionable. Mediums, because there is a certain disproportion between what they reveal and what they are, are often no longer able to distinguish truth from lies; and this can extend to an area where morality can no longer be separated from immorality. A human being becomes a medium - and this was also the case with the Babylonian priests - when the ego and the astral body are drawn out of the physical and etheric body by external force. But the moment the medium's ego and astral body are pulled out of the physical and etheric body, another power is already inside this ego and astral body. Depending on whether the initiator who brings about something like this has good or evil intentions, whether he belongs to the left or the right, it can be a good or an evil power. In ancient Babylonian times, excellent insights and revelations came to light in this way. But in later times and today the disadvantage becomes apparent: when the medium returns to the physical body, what happens? You see, the logic used in the physical world to distinguish between lies and truth in the physical world cannot be used in the spiritual world. It is a complete mistake to believe that the concepts of lie and truth, as they are rightly used in the physical world, can also be applied in the spiritual world. There is nothing in the spiritual world that should be distinguished in this way. There are entities there that are good and those that are evil. You have to recognize them from within, because they do not tell you what kind they are. But the evil ones are also true in their nature. Of course, this is difficult to grasp, just as everything that confronts us when we enter the spiritual world is difficult to grasp. [1]

Therefore the true initiate must have a certain constitution of soul for seeing in the spiritual world. He must feel fully responsible for the fact that the moment he returns to the physical world he has to work with physical concepts. The medium cannot do this because he does not go over into the spiritual world with consciousness. When it returns, the ego and astral body fill the physical and etheric body with a way of thinking that is correct for the spiritual world, but which corrupts all moral feelings and sensations valid in the physical world. Therefore the medium becomes corrupted towards truth and lies, and this then affects everything else. One can indeed say that Babylon has undergone this development from the highest, most significant revelation of the spiritual worlds to a terrible corruption. What at first relates to the principle of spiritual revelation, also in relation to the general human life into which it extends, can lead to a strong corruption, so that man, after he has entered into the spiritual, becomes more immoral than he was before with his ordinary humanity. Hence Babylon was taken as the representative of moral corruption. And the expressions that appear in the Apocalypse mean nothing other than those that were commonplace for corruption at that time. But since then, the whole of humanity, which has continued that which lived in Babylon, has become a city of Babylon over the whole world. This is what the apocalypticist means. The city of Babylon is to be found among humanity on earth today. It is where there are people who have fallen victim to the Babylonian temptation. And this attitude of men is what must fall before that final state of which the apocalyptic speaks can come. If we examine what is active in the "Babylonian corruption", we find that the Ahrimanic principle is active everywhere in this Babylonian corruption. Ahriman is in man, and he is a power that is initially close to man within the world as a whole. He is in the emotions, which are corrupted in this way.

The Ahrimanic is opposed to the Luciferic as its opposite pole. The Ahrimanic lives in that which falls in Babylon, and the Luciferic is opposed to it. What kind of picture must present itself to the apocalyptic when he looks at this? The image of the exultant attitude of the Luciferian angels. We must not conceal this from ourselves. It has always been the great error of some world views that the bad is to be found just opposite the best, that, for example, the evil principle below is always met by the good from above. But that is not the case! Here in this chapter of the Apocalypse (Acts 19), below is the Ahrimanic - Babylon - and above, where the angels rejoice over the fall of Babylon, is the Luciferic. That which is intoned above as a rejoicing of the angels is the voice of Lucifer. The Christ principle is always the balance between these two. Only when the trinity of the world constitution is understood in the right way can one also understand what the apocalypticist is saying here. It is utterly incomprehensible to the ordinary human mind to think that pure, good spirits would raise their voices in jubilation when the torments described here come upon people below. Of course, this becomes immediately understandable if one sees this as a cry of joy from those beings who, basically, before the world came into being in which man experiences his spiritual formation, were against the world coming into being in this way. The Luciferic beings want to keep the whole evolution on a completely different spiritual level; they do not want that connection, that marriage of spirit with matter, which has taken hold in earthly existence, so that they actually feel in their souls: Now that that which has been seized by Ahriman has been eliminated from earthly existence, we have the satisfaction that at least a part of earthly existence will not continue and will fall out of earthly evolution. In this respect a grandiose honesty of world view speaks from this picture described by the apocalypticist. [2]

Sources:

[1] & [2] GA 346: Lectures and Courses on Christian Religious Work, V. Apocalypse and Priestly Work (1924)

Ahriman and the spirits of darkness

In the autumn of 1879 certain spiritual entities, which had been active like rebels in the spiritual world for decades (since 1841), were defeated and pushed into the realm of human development as dark spirits. So they now live among us, and they live among us in such a way that they send their impulses into our conception of the world, but not only into our mental conception of the world, but into our feelings, into our impulses of will, and also into our temperaments. These spirits of darkness - ahrimanic-luciferic beings - are of the same nature as those spirits of darkness which in ancient times were also cast from the spiritual world, i.e. from heaven to earth. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 177: The Spiritual Backgrounds of the Outer World. The Fall of the Spirits of Darkness (1917)

Ahriman and spiritual science

In spiritual science the other sphere is created, in which an Ahrimanic element is not present at all. And it is precisely by recognizing that spirituality to which the Ahrimanic powers have no access that man is strengthened to face Ahriman in the world. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 26: Anthroposophical Guiding Principles. The Path of Knowledge of Anthroposophy - The Michael Mystery (1924/1925)

Ahriman and elemental beings

We can do wonderful chemistry today, and through all kinds of intellectual arts, I would like to say, make what is done in chemistry anthroposophical. But all that we do is based on spiritual effects, on spiritual beings and their actions. And we have to move on from what we consider outwardly - in my opinion also outwardly anthroposophical - to what is underlying there as spiritual. We must penetrate to the spiritual elemental beings, we must not reject this; we must therefore be aware that if we only continue the culture of the last centuries in an intellectual way, even into the scientific branches, we will not get any further if we take into account the wave of spiritual life that wants to enter our physical world everywhere and which we must meet if we do not want to fall into decay as humanity with our culture. [1] (23.5.1922) One can see how - if man does not now grasp the spiritual that wants to flow into the physical culture, into the physical civilization - how these beings will reach their certain goals, if man does not decide to become attentive to the incoming army of the beings of intellect, feeling and will, i.e. the earth, water and air beings - to the influx of all the beings that are connected with the etheric forces. Then these beings will go their own way, uninfluenced by human knowledge. And we can already see today, if we have a gift of observation for such things, how the elemental spirits of the lower realms, the earth realm, the water realm, the air realm, have to a certain extent decided to make something else out of the earth than what is suitable for man.

These elemental spirits have decided to gradually turn human beings more or less into automatons, to turn the earth into something essentially different from what is suitable for human beings as an earthly existence. The form of the earth which I had to describe when I had to describe the development of the world in my "Secret Science" (GA 13) in the sense in which it lay, I would like to say, in the intentions of those beings who lived at the starting point of the development of the world - this form these elemental beings do not want to have; for all these elemental beings of the lower kingdoms, they want to form themselves as the army of Ahriman. And as the human intellect falls into decay, and man does not illuminate through spirituality that which he has developed as his intellect, so the human intellect, during its decay, is led in a roundabout way through the elemental spirits, who to a certain extent - well, if I may now express myself in this way, know something much more clever at their congresses than we do at our congresses - that which is human intellectual power is transferred in this roundabout way into the ahrimanic intellectual power of the earth. - And those elemental spirits who exist in the ether join the Luciferic beings and also want to work on this transformation of the earthly. I would like to say: the lower elemental spirits would like to harden and wave and weave through the earthly in a different way than is supposed to happen for the benefit of man; the higher elemental spirits would like to give what is now being waved and forged through by the lower ones such a character that it can work out into the cosmos. Man, however, would only continue to develop in what is being worked on as, I would like to say, a kind of vermin of this planet, which can come about in this way. This can only be avoided if humanity decides to pay attention to the fact that a spiritual wave wants to enter our earthly development, that this spiritual wave wants to guide us to feel and see the Christ impulse. [2] (23.5.1922)

Sources:

[1] & [2] GA 250: ???(The Structure of the Anthroposophical Society. From the beginnings to the outbreak of the First World War)

Ahriman and Elohim and the heart

After Lucifer had taken possession of the human heart, the Elohim had to place a counterweight on the other shell of the cosmic world order in order to restore the balance. This happened in the Atlantean period, when the Elohim entrenched Ahriman with all his ammunition in the human brain in order to bring his cooling effect against the Luciferic fire. And that which cools Ahriman from the fire that burns the imaginations, inspirations, intuitions of perceptions, that becomes thoughts, ideas in man. This realization that Lucifer is enthroned with his fire in our heart, and that Ahriman cools this fire in the head, has always been held by the ancient initiates, and a last remnant can be found in Aristotle (who was not clairvoyant himself), who said that heat emanates from the heart to the head and is cooled there. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 266/3: From the Contents of the Esoteric Lessons. Volume III (1913-1923)

Ahriman and the power of cognition

Human cognition of the earth is the destructive instincts made dull: Shiva in his most terrible form has been blunted to such an extent that he does not live himself out, but that he has become, as it were, threadbare, squeezed out to the point of human imagination, that is the Maya of the inner being, that is the cognition of man. Thus knowledge had to be weakened, or rather thus the impulses and inner forces had to be weakened, so that the originally fearful, in which Ahriman reigns within - for originally it is Ahriman who arouses this desire (see: Cain and Abel) here - so that Ahriman's power would be weakened to such an extent that man would not live out Ahriman and thereby constantly make himself the servant of Shiva. That (the destructive instincts) which is the sum of these forces had to be weakened to such an extent that they would only rule in man in such a way that he would be able to empathize with other beings with his concepts and ideas. If one tries to penetrate another being with a concept, if one tries to sink the idea into the being of another, then this idea sunk into the being of another is the blunted weapon of Cain, which was thrust into Abel. And so man comes in slow evolution through ever-increasing strengthening of cognition to the point that he gradually develops what he was not allowed to live out in the physical world because it had become an instinct of destruction - first in objective cognition, then in imaginative cognition, which already goes more into the being of the other, in inspirative cognition, which penetrates still closer into the being of the other, in intuitive cognition, which goes all the way in, but lives on spiritually with the other itself in the other being. In this way we gradually struggle to understand what this self actually is.

The astral body, seen from its innermost nature, is the great egoist; the self is more than the great egoist, it not only wants itself, it still wants itself in the other, it still wants to go over into the other. And knowledge, as it is attained on earth, is this blunted desire to cross over into the other, to expand all that one is, not only within oneself, but further beyond oneself into the other. It is an increase of egoism beyond oneself. If you first consider this origin of knowledge, then you will realize how everywhere there is the possibility of misusing this knowledge; for the moment this knowledge goes astray, it immediately becomes an abuse, if this knowledge is a real knowledge in the self. Only by progressing, by making this penetration into the other ever more spiritual and spiritual, and by coming from the astral body expanded into world interests to renounce all penetration into the other, by leaving this other completely untouched in one's own existence, by placing the other's interest higher than one's own interests, only by this does one make oneself ripe to ascend in knowledge. And here, if you follow this train of thought, you actually arrive at a real conception of what black magic is; for black magic begins where occult activity is carried into the world without one being able first to expand one's interests into world interests, without one being able to value other interests more than one's own interests. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 145: What significance does the occult development of man have for his sheaths (physical body, etheric body, astral body) and his self? (1913)

Ahriman and esoterics

The human soul comes into contact with Ahriman and Lucifer to a much more intense degree when it embarks on the path of clairvoyant consciousness. (An example): Man always has some things in his soul which he has not fully mastered, so to speak, for which he has special affects. Ahriman develops a special activity towards such things. There are parts of the human soul that can be detached from the whole of the human soul. Because man does not exercise complete dominion over such inclusions, Ahriman makes use of them. They allow themselves to be shaped by Ahriman so that he gives them the human form. If one lives into the elemental world, then one stands opposite this independent part of one's own being as one's double. [1]

If we live ourselves up into the world of the Archangeloi as egoists and unloving people, so that we have reached the stage of mystical development through which we can stand inside the world of the Archangeloi, but without developing the feeling of wanting to receive the influences of the spiritual world through grace, instead of the Archangeloi then carrying us through, we rise out of ourselves and are surrounded by the entities of the Ahrimanic world. [2] For Ahriman helps every soul to carry up into the higher worlds as much as possible from the sense-world that takes place there and can only take place in the sense-world. And the power to carry what is valuable from the sense world up into the eternities is the power of Ahriman. To return the moment of eternity is the power of Ahriman. [3] And if you encounter Ahriman in the higher worlds, he is dangerous there because he helps you - which he loves to do - to carry up into the supersensible world what you have gained and experienced in the senses. Many people, as soon as they have crossed the gateway to the supersensible world, begin to find Ahriman a very convenient comrade, for he is always anxious to turn what takes place on earth into parts of the higher world and to claim it there for himself and his associates.

By entering the supersensible world, one already has (by stripping off egoity) the quality of recognizing him a little divinely, in that he penetrates earth evolution with a tremendous tragedy - precisely in the sense being and always strives to transform the sense being in such a way that it becomes a spirit being. And this is one of the duties of the Guardian of the Threshold, that Ahriman remains as invisible as possible in the sensual world, so that man can only develop what lies within his own powers to preserve the moment in eternity and cannot unconsciously allow himself to be helped by Ahriman. If we allow Ahriman to help us with the precious treasures of temporality, that is good. [4]

And Ahriman, what does Ahriman want? He wants to give power to man. Ahriman is the spirit that fell away earlier on the old sun. The archangels, the Archangeloi, were human beings back then, but very different from us today. The thinking back then was immediately translated into action. The people of that time were powerful beings. Thought was an immediate reality. Wisdom was not yet like on the old moon, but power was; only power without wisdom leads to black magic, to darkness. We defeat Ahriman through our attitude: by surrendering to the world spirit, by being only its instrument, by allowing it to work only in us. If we do our meditation with this attitude, then we can defeat Ahriman. [5]

As we take away more and more of the darkness that we weave into outer matter as it fades away, and as we come to completely overcome the ahrimanic influence in this way, then we will be able to recognize the world as it really is as an earthly world. We will penetrate to what matter really is, to the nature of light. Today, even science still indulges in the most diverse deceptions about the nature of light. One does not see light with physical eyes, but one sees through light. By penetrating to the light, man himself will develop the spiritual counter-image of light; that is wisdom. By developing wisdom and love, we develop those elements that will flow out again from our souls themselves as gifts for those who sacrificed themselves as Luciferic and Ahrimanic powers in the first half of the earth's evolution in order to give us what we need to achieve our freedom. We will have to give these powers what we develop in wisdom and love. [6]

Sources:

[1] GA 147: The Secrets of the Threshold (1913)

[2] GA 154: How to Acquire Understanding of the Spiritual World. The Influx of Spiritual Impulses from the World of the Departed (1914)

[3], [4] GA 138: Of Initiation. Of Eternity and the Moment. Of Spiritual Light and the Darkness of Life (1912)

[5] GA 266/2: From the Contents of the Esoteric Lessons. Volume II (1910-1912)

[6] GA 120: The Revelations of Karma (1910)

Ahriman and money

Ahrimanic power lives in what money appears to produce as money. You cannot inherit without so much Ahrimanic power passing with the money. There is no other way to have money in a wholesome way within the social structure than to have it in a Christian way. Every time money produces money, this is something that only takes place here on the physical plane, whereas what man is is always connected with the spiritual world. So what do you do when you yourself do not work, but have money and give this money away and the other person has to work for it? Then the person has to carry to market what is his heavenly share, and you only give him earthly things, you pay with purely Ahrimanic things. And where Ahriman is involved, only destruction can result. [1] The moment you put only money in your purse, you are in the objectified Ahrimanic in its extreme consequence. For everything that permeates the social order from the money side is Ahrimanic, and the rule of money is an Ahrimanic rule. [2]

Sources:

[1] GA 186: The basic social demand of our time - In a changed time situation (1918)

[2] GA 192: Geisteswissenschaftliche Behandlung sozialer und pädagogischer Fragen (1919)

Ahriman and gods

If people had remained as they were in ancient times, that they did not actually know death at all, then they could never have developed an intellect, for intellect is only possible in a world in which death reigns. In a physical way one could say: Death can only occur because man deposits salts not only in the rest of his body, but also within his brain, that is, deposits mineral-solid components, dead components. The brain constantly contains the tendency towards salt deposits, towards bone formations that have not materialized. So that the brain continually contains the tendency towards death. This inoculation of death had to come over mankind. And only that which emerged from this necessity, that death really played a role in human life, was the external acquaintance with death. This is how it can be seen from the human side. But you can also look at it from the side of the higher hierarchies. The situation is somewhat different there. We higher hierarchies are able to let an earth emerge from the moon in which people know nothing of death, but in which they also cannot develop the intellect (and thus a later creative power). It is impossible for us higher hierarchies to shape the earth in such a way that it provides the forces for people to develop intellect. We have to get involved with a completely different being, a being that comes from other paths than we have come from, the Ahrimanic being. Ahriman is a being that does not belong to our hierarchy. Ahriman comes into the evolutionary stream in a different way. We have to get involved with this Ahriman. If we tolerate Ahriman within earth evolution, if we grant him a share, then he brings us death and with it intellect, and we can absorb death and intellect into the human being. Ahriman knows death. Ahriman knows it because it is intertwined with the earth, because it has taken paths through which it is connected with earth development.

He is a knower, a sage of death. He is therefore also the lord of the intellect. The gods had to - if one may say so - get involved with Ahriman. They had to say to themselves: evolution cannot progress without Ahriman. The point is that Ahriman can be included in evolution. But if Ahriman is absorbed into evolution and he now becomes the lord over death and thus over the intellect, then the earth is no longer ours, then Ahriman, who only has an interest in intellectualizing the whole earth, takes the earth for himself. The gods were faced with the great question of losing control of the earth to Ahriman in a certain sense. There was only one possibility for the gods themselves to get to know something that they had not been able to get to know in their god worlds, which were not permeated by Ahriman, that the gods themselves got to know death on earth through one of their emissaries, the Christ. A god had to die on earth, and he had to die in such a way that this was not due to the wisdom of the gods, but to the human error that would take hold if Ahriman alone had dominion. A god had to go through death, and he had to overcome death. So that the mystery of Golgotha meant for the gods: the enrichment of their knowledge through the wisdom of death. If no God had passed through death, the earth would have become completely intellectualistic without ever entering into the evolution which the gods had intended for it from the outset. Now the Christ taught his initiates that he had come from a world in which death was unknown; he had come to know death on earth, he had conquered death. - If one understands this connection between the earthly world and the divine world, then one knows how to lead the intellect back to spirituality. This is roughly how one could express the content of those esoteric teachings that the Christ gave to his initiated disciples. That which he gave them, precisely the teaching of death as it appears from the scene of the world of the gods. Ahriman waited with longing for the moment when he could penetrate human consciousness with his power. [1]

Now he was surprised by the fact that he had not previously known that there had been a divine decision to send a being to earth, the Christ, who passed through death. This made it possible for Ahriman to intervene, but his actual rule was cut short. Since that time Ahriman has used every opportunity to bring people to the mere use of their intellect; even today Ahriman has not given up hope that he will succeed in bringing people to the mere use of their intellect. If Ahriman could succeed in completely instilling in people the conviction, so that every other conviction would vanish from the earth, that man can only live in his body, that he cannot be separated from his body as a spiritual-soul being, then the human soul would be so seized by the idea of death that Ahriman could easily realize his plans. Ahriman always hopes for this. And an opposition to Ahriman is actually only present today in such teachings as flow through anthroposophy. When anthroposophy again makes it clear to people that the spiritual-soul being is independent of the physical being, then Ahriman must first give up his hope. This struggle of Christ against Ahriman is already possible again, so that an inkling of it can arise in the Gospel in the story of the temptation. But the matter can only be fully understood if one realizes, as I have often explained here, that Lucifer plays a greater role in the earlier development of mankind and that Ahriman has only gained an influence on human consciousness since the time of the Mystery of Golgotha. Before that he also had an influence on humanity, but not actually on consciousness. [2]

Sources:

[1] & [2] GA 211: The Solar Mystery and the Mystery of Death and Resurrection. Exoteric and Esoteric Christianity (1922)

Ahriman and Yahweh

By going to earth and making man out of the earth, Yahweh, in order to bring man further than he could have brought him in his own realm, made him out of an element foreign to him and only injected his own element into him. But in doing so, Yahweh has taken to his aid something to which the ahrimanic entities have access. In this way Yahweh has become involved in this battle against the ahrimanic element for the development of the earth, which wants to fight with the help of human beings in order to gain the world for itself in a roundabout way through the mineral process. Basically, the ahrimanic entities have succeeded in this area. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 203: The Responsibility of Man for World Development through his Spiritual Connection with the Earth Planet and the Star World (1921)

Ahriman and cultural tasks

To a certain extent, elemental beings are detached from the world directly adjacent to ours. In a sense, they are supposed to watch what people are doing there. So they are specially commissioned from other worlds with the mission of looking after human nature and preserving what they learn there for future times. For you see, we humans can carry our karma from one life to the next, we can also carry everything that happens to our karma through external culture from one life to the next. What we experience in the car as human beings, we can carry from one life to another; not the construction of the car. We humans ourselves cannot carry over from one life on earth to another that which has arisen merely from earthly forces. Thus, in the course of civilization, mankind has established something that it would lose itself if other beings did not come to its aid. That is the significant thing, that we have beings in the midst of us in the world adjoining us who are destined to carry over what man cannot carry over from his civilization into the future, so that man can have it again in the future. You see, a great deal has been lost to mankind because in past times it has become quite difficult for some of these beings to fulfil their task, so much of what was already invented in civilization in ancient times has been lost again. We humans cannot transfer the abstract content of our libraries from one life on earth to another. This requires special beings. And those spiritual beings with whom we humans are in direct contact cannot do this. These entities had to make use of other (ahrimanic) beings who were alien to them for a long time, who have undergone a completely different development than our spiritual beings who are connected to us. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 243: The Initiate-Consciousness. The true and the false paths of spiritual research (1924)

Ahriman and future Jupiter people

If we go back to the lunar stage (see: Moon of old), we have to say that the Angeloi were human beings then; not people who looked like us, because the old lunar stage had completely different conditions. But apart from these lunar humans, the Angeloi, we also developed there in a preliminary stage. Especially when the lunar development was already in descent, we sometimes came into consideration for the Angeloi in a quite troublesome way. But it is the same with the descending earth evolution. Since it has been in descent, other beings have followed. This is a significant, an important result of spiritual scientific research, which is to be taken very, very seriously, that we have already entered this stage of earth evolution, where beings are asserting themselves who on Jupiter - that is the next stage of earth evolution - will have moved up to other human forms, but nevertheless to forms that can be compared with human beings. We (earth humans) will indeed be other beings on Jupiter. But these, so to speak, Jupiter people are already there now, just as we were on the moon. Supersensibly these beings are very much there. They have been making themselves felt more and more since the middle of the 15th century. At first, these beings preferably developed the impulse of a power that is very similar to human willpower. These invisible entities are related to that which remains unconscious to the ordinary consciousness of today. [1] If one examines (the outbreak of the First World War) spiritually, then one finds that (the 30 to 40 people who were involved were of clouded consciousness) and that these darkened consciousnesses were the gates through which precisely these will beings took possession of the consciousness of these people and worked with their consciousness. And these beings, which, I would like to say, are pushed from behind - for behind them actually stands the Ahrimanic, which gives them their strong will-power, which infuses them with their powers of direction and so on - these beings, which are in themselves sub-human entities, are, however, in their mass dominated by higher Ahrimanic spirits and thus have something in them which goes far beyond their own nature and essence. Thus they show something in their appearance which, when it captivates the human being, even has a stronger effect, considerably stronger than that over which the weak human being, if he does not strengthen himself through the spirit, can be master today. Just as the Luciferic hosts, which Michael has cast down, have gone out for human enlightenment, for human reasoning, so these hosts go out for a certain penetration of the human will. They burrow, as it were, in the deepest layer of consciousness, where man still sleeps awake today. Man does not realize how they enter his soul being, as well as his body being. But there they pull with their powers of attraction on everything that has remained Luciferic, that has not become Christed. They can also reach this, they can seize it. [2]

Sources:

[1] & [2] GA 194: The Mission of Michael. The Revelation of the Real Mysteries of the Human Being (1919)

Ahriman and Lucifer - intelligent and willing human beings

Thus today, too, the assertion of the unified soul is made and it is believed that the soul as such originates in the same way with intellectual thinking as with loving volition, whereas if one really wants to understand man, one must make a distinction. That which we think through mere intellect as a world-view can therefore never approach reality, remains hallucination because it comes from an interpenetration of our intellect with a spiritual entity which does not belong to this world: with ahrimanic spiritual entity which does not belong to the world order into which we look out with our eyes. It is the same on the other side with regard to the will, which is interspersed with Luciferic entities. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 184: The Polarity of Duration and Development in Human Life. The Cosmic Prehistory of Humanity (1918)

Ahriman and Lucifer - culturally

We can say: Lucifer has his hand in everything that is traditionally theological, in everything that is artistic and degenerates into the mannered and stiff, in everything that is Renaissance-like; while Ahriman has his hand in everything that is only external, spiritless natural science, which cannot discover the spirit in nature, and in everything that is external mechanism in human activity. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 208: Anthroposophy as Cosmosophy - Part Two:. The Formation of Man as the Result of Cosmic Effects (1921)

Ahriman and Lucifer: a duality

The good gods themselves once created these oppositions, albeit in a previous time, so that freedom could enter in this way, so that man could not come to an unfree love through the external arrangement of forms, so that man could come from within to a unity of the human name over the whole earth, from within. They first, I would like to say, fragmented human beings through the opposition, so that they could then, after the physicality was fragmented, give them unity again in the spirituality, in the Christ. [1]

Wisdom, which is the inner counter-image of light, wisdom that can unite with love, and love that permeates itself with wisdom, will find the right way to work back on that which is immersed in the wisdom of the outer world. If we are to gradually participate in the other half of the development, to overcome Lucifer and Ahriman again, then we must permeate ourselves with wisdom and love. By developing wisdom and love, we develop those elements that will flow out again from our souls themselves as gifts for those who sacrificed themselves as Luciferic and Ahrimanic powers in the first half of the earth's evolution in order to give us what we needed to attain our freedom. We will have to give these powers what we develop in wisdom and love. [2]

Thus we have two hosts in our earthly human environment, the host in the air, which would like to make man moral, but would lift him away from the earth, and the ahrimanic entities immediately below the earth's surface, which would like to pull man down, to keep him always on the earth. These two kinds of entities are in the mineral kingdom, in the vegetable kingdom, in the animal kingdom, and also in the ordinary physical kingdom of man, in so far as he does not live excessively in impulses, in passions, in desires; they are there in such a way that they must get along with each other. [3]

The breathing process develops according to two one-sidednesses, according to the Luciferic one-sidedness, in that we think, and according to the other one-sidedness, according to the will process, according to the Ahriman side, the metabolic processes. We oscillate back and forth between Lucifer and Ahriman, and the equilibrium position, the middle ground, is the breathing process through which we stand within the great harmony. [4] One can say that man is actually constantly exposed to the danger of either becoming too soft or too hard. If you have a magnet, you know that the magnet attracts the iron. We have two kinds of magnetism in the magnet. We have positive magnetism and negative magnetism. One attracts the magnetic needle, the other repels it. There is something invisible inside the (magnetized) iron. There is also something invisible, supersensible in the hardening, and this - if you have the gift, you can observe it - is called ahrimanic. If there were only ahrimanic forces, we would constantly become corpses, and we would become pedants, completely petrified people; we would constantly wake up, we would not be able to sleep. The forces that now soften us, rejuvenate us, that bring us to imagination, these are the Luciferic forces, these are the forces that we need so that we do not become a living corpse. But if only the Luciferic forces were there, we would remain children all our lives. These two opposing forces must be present in man. [5]

Only when one will learn to speak of the Luciferic and Ahrimanic in human nature without superstition, with scientific exactness, as one speaks today without superstition, without mysticism, of positive and negative magnetism, of positive and negative electricity, of light and darkness, only then will one be able to gain such a knowledge of man which is equal to the abstract knowledge of inorganic nature which we have gained in the course of the last centuries. Only then can there be (a true) science of man, when we ascend from the poor concepts of the positive and negative, from the poor concepts of polarity, as we find them in inorganic nature, to the fulfilled concept of the Luciferic and Ahrimanic in man. [6] (Likewise) one will only have a psychology when one is able to see this polarity in the soul. [7] (Also the concept of) force and matter coincide completely with Lucifer and Ahriman. [8]

If the development of mankind had gone on until the middle of the Atlantean period without the influence of Lucifer, man would by then have developed a highly clairvoyant consciousness of images. There would have been something in his soul which, through his power, would have revealed the outer world to him in inner pictures; he would not have perceived the outer objects through his eye. Through the Luciferic influence man saw the physical world earlier, but not correctly; he saw the outer world as through a veil. The divine-spiritual beings had intended for him to develop in such a way that he would have perceived the outer world instead of the inner world perceived in the image of the dull clairvoyant consciousness, but in such a way that behind every sensuality there is a spirituality. He would have seen the real spirit behind the physical world. Now, because the Luciferic entities have pulled man down to earth too early, the outer world has become such to man that the world of the spirit behind it is covered to him, and he sees the physical opaquely, otherwise he would see through it to the spiritual source of the world.

Because man descended into matter too early, this matter became too dense for him. He could no longer penetrate it. But from the middle of the Atlantean period onwards, other spiritual entities that had remained behind were able to mingle with this matter, so that it became clouded, as if permeated by smoke, and man could no longer see the spiritual. These are the Ahrimanic entities. Ahriman is the spirit that spreads matter like a veil over the spiritual and makes it impossible to recognize the spiritual world. And these two spirits hold man back in his development towards spirituality. And it was the ahrimanic influence in particular that asserted itself in man and caused the destruction of a part of the earth: Atlantis. [9] Everything that enters the world also forms a Luciferic and an Ahrimanic counter-image. [10]

Sources:

[1] GA 165: The spiritual unification of humanity through the Christ impulse (1915/1916)

[2] GA 120: The revelations of karma (1910)

[3] GA 218: Spiritual connections in the formation of the human organism (1922)

[4], [8] GA 176: Human and human development truths. The karma of materialism (1917)

[5] GA 349: On the life of man and the earth. On the essence of Christianity (1923)

[6], [7] GA 210: Old and new initiation methods. Drama and poetry in the shift in consciousness in modern times (1922)

[9] GA 109: The principle of spiritual economy in connection with reincarnation issues. An aspect of the spiritual guidance of humanity (1909)

[10] GA 173: Contemporary historical considerations. The karma of untruthfulness – first part (1916)

Ahriman and Lucifer and the human being

While outside the human soul life the Ahrimanic and Luciferic are opposing forces of world development, in the soul itself too strong an influence of the Ahrimanic on the conscious life also prepares the ground for the interventions of the Luciferic. And if the human being is permeated by the Luciferic, he develops a special tendency to allow his conscious soul life to be permeated by an Ahrimanic character. [1] When waking up, the Ahrimanic is most effective; conversely, when falling asleep, the Luciferic is most effective. Deviations only arise when too little of the Luciferic impulse is carried into the waking state, so that the Ahrimanic impulse works too strongly during the waking state. It will unite the human being's ego too thoroughly with the physical. If the Luciferian is working in people in an unjustified way, they will carry too much of their waking life into their sleeping life. Dreams will appear in the sleeping life that are too reminiscent of daytime life. These in turn will have an effect on waking life and drive it into an unhealthy mysticism. It can be seen everywhere in life that man's state of equilibrium must be brought about by the two polarities, by the Luciferic and the Ahrimanic, but that aberrations can take place. [2] There is a center in man where Lucifer and Ahriman meet in his own being. There the human being has the opportunity either to swing with Lucifer and let the astral body penetrate deeper into the etheric body than is good, or he has the opportunity to absorb the thrusting power of Ahriman and let the etheric body penetrate deeper into the astral body than is right and regular. We are dealing with such force effects. [3]

Sources:

[1] GA 35: Philosophy and Anthroposophy (1904-1923)

[2] GA 210: Old and New Methods of Initiation. Drama and Poetry in the Change of Consciousness in Modern Times (1922)

[3] GA 134: The World of the Senses and the World of the Spirit (1911/1912)

Ahriman and natural disasters

Ahriman has a mysterious connection with the fiery forces of the earth, which have withdrawn from the direct influence of the individual human being. These fiery forces of the earth (see: Earth's interior) are a life element of the Ahrimanic spirits and through Ahriman's influence the overall karma of the human race is connected in a certain way with the karma of Ahriman. When certain spiritual attitudes and events occur in the development of mankind, then again the connection between man and Ahriman makes itself felt, and that which man himself used to be able to do in the past, to exert influence on natural events, happens today through Ahriman and his spiritual comrades. Ahriman awakens storms, volcanic eruptions and earthquakes. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 108: Answering questions about the world and life through anthroposophy (1908/1909)

Ahriman and philosophy

The laws which then (during the old solar evolution) took place between the spirits of wisdom, the Kyriotetes and the Archangeloi, come to light again in the philosophical striving for wisdom on earth. Now the Kyriotetes repeat this intervention during the earth evolution, not in the new, but in the remains of the old solar evolution. And by not noticing that in the philosophical development the spirits of wisdom pulsate through his mind, man develops his philosophy. But because this is the old solar development, something backward lives in it. This gives rise to the fact that beings who have remained behind can use the forces of philosophical development to continue their old solar existence, beings who remained behind during the old solar time, who at that time neglected to undergo the development that one can undergo in one's etheric body, sentient body and in the sentient soul, in the interaction of spirits of wisdom and Archangeloi. These spirits, who have missed their development during the time of the sun, can use the human philosophical development to be parasites in the human development. These are the ahrimanic spirits. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 161: Paths to spiritual knowledge and the renewal of artistic worldviews (1915)

Ahriman and language

The ability to speak for ourselves came about because the Ahrimanic power made a change to our originally endowed organism of movement during the Atlantean period. It is to the ahrimanic power that we owe it that we can speak, that we have the gift of speech. We have been predisposed to perceive more or less the whole other person in gestures and gestures, in mute means of expression, and to imitate these ourselves with our own locomotor system and thus to communicate without the physically audible language. We were much more spiritually inclined to communicate. Ahriman intervened in this more spiritual way of communicating, specialized our organism, made the laryngeal system capable of producing sounding words. And that which then remained of the laryngeal system, to have made it capable of understanding sounding words, is therefore an Ahrimanic gift. [1] If only the luciferic angels had come, the delusion of unity would indeed have come over the earth; but the individual languages would have developed in such a way that, if one only overcame the delusion of unity in one's mind, one could still feel in the different languages what lies in them. But once the world of imagination had been torn away from the Luciferic angels, it was then easy for the Ahrimanic Archangeloi to drive the language down another step, so that there was then no longer any possibility of developing the language in such a way that the feeling for the immediate imagination would have remained in it. [2] When the "civilized" had discovered the savage Americans, the more judicious philologists thought it strange what logically transparent languages these savage people had! A whole large number of such languages were found there, in which, as the philologists can assure us and as is also true, the finesse of Spanish and Italian is found in the formation and organization of language. Such things were found among the wild natives of Greenland. Now there is no doubt about it: these savages did not have the intellect that modern man is so proud of. Nor would this modern intellect get very far if it were to engage in language formation and language creation; for what the modern intellect achieves when it wants to create language can be seen for itself in many places. In the human soul, which was still a wild soul, which did not yet have the intellect of the present day, there was indeed objective reason, that objective reason which I showed you the other day in the creative language of mankind. Reason prevailed there. This reason that prevailed there did not yet affect man as strongly individualized as today's world reason affects man; it affected man even less individualized, less separate, and worked in him even more as cosmic reason. And so it has also come to be in the development of humanity. How did that which is cosmic reason come into language? Today humanity is no longer linguistically creative, it was linguistically creative; what appears in the languages today are only residues. How did this cosmic reason penetrate into the human soul, how did it become individual? If we try to answer this question, we come to what we call the Ahrimanic. [3]

Sources:

[1] GA 170: The riddle of man. The spiritual background of human history (1916)

[2] GA 162: Questions of art and life in the light of spiritual science (1915)

[3] GA 184: The polarity of duration and development in human life. The cosmic prehistory of humanity (1918)

Ahriman and primal teachers

A peculiar relationship arises between those ahrimanic beings who preferably belong to the lunar sphere and the wise primal teachers of mankind, I would like to say it is a terrible flattery on the part of these ahrimanic beings towards these primal teachers of mankind, they would like to win them over for themselves. The wisdom of these primal teachers could only speak to the instincts of mankind, not to full self-conscious prudence. Therefore, for the salvation of mankind, these primal teachers withdrew from the earth at a certain point in time and went to the moon colony. And after the ahrimanic beings, when these primal teachers were still on earth, made every effort to keep these primal teachers on earth and to leave it at instinctive wisdom, they still believe today that they can, when man has passed through the gate of death and has arrived at the lunar sphere (see: Life between death and a new birth), at least they can still do something there, and so, through their flattery, they constantly try to persuade these primal teachers (who preserve the karma of human beings) to approach those who have just died. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 231: The supersensible human being, anthroposophically understood (1923)

Ahriman and hereditary forces

The hereditary traits that pass from the ancestors to the descendants contain the very things that give the Ahrimanic entities their points of attack on human nature. In the forces of heredity lie the ahrimanic forces. And because the human being carries within him much of these hereditary impulses, he has a physicality that the ego cannot easily access. Today this is called being "hereditarily burdened". The consequence of this is that the ego cannot fully penetrate the physicality, that the ego cannot fully fill all the individual organs of the physicality, and the body to a certain extent develops an effect of its own alongside the impulsiveness of the ego, which actually belongs in this physicality. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 232: Mystery Formations (1923)

Ahriman and seduction by him and human freedom

By the fact that the Ahrimanic powers have entered us through the victory of Michael (see: Fall of the Spirits of Darkness), we again conquer a piece of human freedom. These hosts of Ahriman have entered all of us, (but) we do not have to allow the Ahrimanic powers to have the upper hand over us, so to speak, we do not have to fall in love with these Ahrimanic powers. That is very important. For there is a real danger that people will hold on to this persistence in materialism, in the materialistic-Ahrimanic way of thinking, and carry it out into times when it is actually destined to be overcome. Then the people who want to remain with it would enter into an alliance on earth with all that has similarly arisen through the victory of Michael over the dragon, that is, they would not unite themselves with the spiritual progress of the earth's development, but with material progress. In a certain period of the 6th post-Atlantean era, they would only find pleasure in living in what will then come through bacilli (see: bacteria), through the small microscopic enemies of human beings. [1] The earth will have long since become a corpse when the time arrives in which we must have transformed our materialistic ideas to such an extent that we can ascend to a more spiritual existence. On an earth that no longer supports us, no such carnal incarnations will be sought as we are currently seeking. But those people who have so attached themselves to the materialistic mind that they do not want to let go of it, will still crawl down to this earth in the future form and find their occupation in what then develops on this earth in particular in the deeds of the bacilli, the tubercles and so on, for these entities will then rummage through the corpse of the earth properly. They are now only, one might say, the prophets of what will happen to the whole earth in the future. And then a time will come when those who are so attached to the materialistic mind will unite with the powers of the moon and surround the earth, when it has become slag, when it has become a corpse, together with the moon. For these people want nothing more than to hold on to the life of the earth. [2]

Ahriman wants to make man a dreamer in the first half of his life, and in the second half of his life a being who remembers these dreams and thus only comes to self-consciousness in the second half of his life. In practical terms, this would mean that we would not actually be born spiritually until the beginning of our thirties, or at most at the age of 28. Before that, we would walk around on earth as if drowsy. If that were the way these beings want it, we would be torn away from our entire cosmic past. [3] Ahriman wants to erase our past and bring us back to the starting point with the earth, wants to erase our past, preserve us on earth and bring us back to where we were as Saturnian beings. It is a retrograde movement, a retarding movement. Life is ultimately composed of a premature (Luciferian) and a retarding movement, and the state of equilibrium between the two must be found. [4]

It is precisely such moments that Ahriman uses for his craft, when man, fully awake, enters a kind of dizzy state, a kind of conscious twilight state, when he does not feel quite at home in the physical world, when he begins to abandon himself to the circular dance of the universe. The best way to protect ourselves is to strive more and more to develop clear and precise thinking. The moment we use common words and expressions that are not the result of thought but of habitual speech, we become thoughtless, even if only for a brief moment. And these are particularly dangerous moments. [5] When forming an idea, Ahriman is highly indifferent as to whether it corresponds to reality. For him, everything that he forms as truth - we would not call it truth in a human context - but what he forms for himself as truth, is always about effects. This or that is said so that it produces this or that effect. [6] In the greedy desire of the Ahrimanic powers lives the cold hatred of everything that unfolds in freedom. Ahriman strives to make a cosmic machine out of what he lets flow from the earth into the universe. He was called into the cosmos, which serves human development, because "measure, number and weight", his domain, had to be developed. [7]

Sources:

[1], [2] GA 177: The spiritual background of the external world. The fall of the spirits of darkness (1917)

[3], [4] GA 184: The polarity of duration and development in human life. The cosmic prehistory of humanity (1918)

[5] GA 254: The occult movement in the nineteenth century and its relationship to world culture. Significant aspects of external spiritual life around the middle of the nineteenth century (1915)

[6] GA 170: The riddle of man. The spiritual background of human history (1916)

[7] GA 26: Anthroposophical Guidelines. The path of knowledge of anthroposophy – The Michael Mystery (1924/1925)

Ahriman and Zarathustra

Ahriman or Angramainyush means as much as the resisting one or the spirit of opposition. [1] Everything that radiates from the sun into the world space, that the seraphim and the cherubim carry the light of the sun out into the world space, Zarathustra attributed to that spirit which he called Ahura Mazdao or Ormuzd. Every spirit that carries the forces of its essence from the center of the sun out into the circumference is opposed everywhere by the abnormal spirits of the individual hierarchies, which in their totality form the realm of Ahriman. That which is thrown against it by all the abnormal spirits of the higher hierarchies, that which they invade, we imagine as that which is occupied by darkness, that is to say, by self-light captured from within, which reveals itself outwardly as darkness. [2]

In the ancient Persian cultural period, the great initiates contrasted two beings, one of which they saw personified in the sun, the other in the moon. Ahura Mazdao, the aura of light, Ormuzd, is the being that the Persians worshipped as the highest god; Ahriman is the evil spirit, the representative of all the beings that possessed the earth plus the moon. The religion of the Persians is a reminder of the second earth epoch (see: Earth evolution). [3]

Sources:

[1] GA 101: Myths and legends. Occult signs and symbols (1907)

[2] GA 136: The Spiritual Beings in the Celestial Bodies and Kingdoms of Nature (1912)

[3] GA 106: Egyptian Myths and Mysteries in Relation to the Working Spiritual Forces of the Present (1908)

Ahriman form

One gets a good impression of the Ahrimanic form, even without trying to meet Ahriman himself, when one sees the etheric body of immoral people passing into the cosmos (after death). [1] While Lucifer's forehead wing is powerfully developed, Ahriman's is the lower jaw. The whole materialism of the world is expressed in the formation of the masticatory and dental system. [2] Metaphorically speaking, the cold, ossified, bald-headed Ahriman creeps around our modern educational institutions. [3] He is long, lean and skeletal, a bony creature. [4] In man, Ahriman shoots, sprouts into the legs and from there up into the rest of the organism. In birds, Ahriman sprouts into the feathers. If man were to fly around in the air, he would also have feathers, because then the Ahrimanic forces would act on him from completely different directions. So he only has these few rudiments of the ahrimanic, which are present in the hair. They are strongest in the head, which in itself is proof that the human head has a great deal of Ahrimanic power. The hair is actually built into the organism from the outside. [5] The ahrimanic works tangentially in its directional forces, for example in the feathers. [6] In all occult writings, Lucifer is described as a snake, Ahriman as a dog. [7]

If we were to reproduce Ahriman in human imagination, we would have to give him a receding forehead and a frivolous, cynical expression, because everything in him comes from the lower forces, but it is from these that the highest intelligence comes. [8]

Sources:

[1] GA 221: Knowledge of the earth and knowledge of heaven (1923)

[2] GA 157: The fate of people and peoples (1914/1915)

[3], [4] GA 203: The responsibility of man for world development through his spiritual connection with the earth planet and the starry world (1921)

[5], [6] GA 205: Becoming human, world soul and world spirit - First part: Man as a physical and mental being in his relationship to the world (1921)

[7] GA 124: Excursions into the area of the Gospel of Mark (1910/1911)

[8] GA 237: Esoteric reflections on karmic connections - Third volume. The karmic connections of the anthroposophical movement (1924)

Ahriman figure of the sculptural group in the Goetheanum

This figure has bat-like wings, a kind of dragon- or worm-like body and a head reminiscent of the human head. Everything that is powerful in Lucifer's forehead recedes completely in this figure, is atrophied. The lower parts towards the mouth are powerfully developed. The gold of the earth becomes shackles that bind Ahriman. [1]

If the Ahrimanic entities were to have their hopes fulfilled, then the whole of humanity would have to gradually dissolve. The transition to this union with this earthly entity would consist in man's organism first becoming more and more similar to living lime. He would combine living lime with his organism and become more and more calcified. [2]

I have tried to reproduce that which is formed down there in the figure of Ahriman, who was created pictorially over there (in the Goetheanum) in the dome and is created sculpturally in the wooden group. [3] And so, between the Ahrimanic and the Luciferic, Christ in his resurrection form appears before the eye as the Easter apparition: the resurrected Christ, hovering over Luciferic powers above, founded on Ahrimanic powers below. [4] And so it is precisely in this center of the Goetheanum that the Easter Mystery should stand in a certain sense. [5]

Sources:

[1] GA 159: The Secret of Death. The Essence and Significance of Central Europe and the European Folk Spirits (1915)

[2] - [5] GA 229: Experiencing the Course of the Year in Four Cosmic Imaginations (1923)

Ahriman incarnation in the future

Just as there has been a carnal incarnation of Lucifer (in ancient China), just as there has been a carnal incarnation of Christ, so there will be a real incarnation of Ahriman in the West before even part of the 3rd millennium of the post-Christian era has expired. Earth humanity cannot escape this incarnation of Ahriman in the flesh. It will come. [1] The Ahrimanic powers are preparing the development of mankind in such a way that when one day Ahriman appears in human form within Western civilization, which will then hardly be called civilization in our sense, just as Lucifer once appeared in human form in China 3000 years before Christ (see also: Primordial Wisdom). [2] It is only a matter of earthly humanity finding its correct position in relation to this Ahrimanic earthly incarnation. Such an entity as Ahriman, who wants to be incarnated on earth, directs certain forces in human development in such a way that they serve this entity to its particular advantage. It would undoubtedly be most favorable for Ahriman if he were to bring it about that by far the greatest number of people had no idea of what could actually lead to the favoring of his existence; if by far the greatest number of people lived in such a way that these preparations took place, but people considered them to be something progressive, good, appropriate to the development of mankind. If Ahriman could, so to speak, sneak into a sleeping humanity, then that would be most pleasant for him. [3] Now an essential means for a favorable effect of what Ahriman should bring to mankind - he will bring just as favorable things as (6000 years earlier) Lucifer brought - is that mankind should place itself in the right way. The important thing is not to sleep through the appearance of Ahriman. [4]

If one remains with the simple faith (of all confessional religions), then one condemns oneself to the dullness of the soul and soul dullness, and then the wisdom does not penetrate, which is to be taken from Ahriman, so to speak. So it is not a question of humanity simply receiving the wisdom of the future, but of humanity working out this wisdom of the future for itself, and of those who work it out assuming the obligation to save the earth culture; to save the earth culture for Christ, just as the old Rishis and initiates had assumed the obligation not to give in to Lucifer's desire to lead humanity away from the earth. [5] One of man's tasks for the next development of civilization will be to live so fully consciously towards the incarnation of Ahriman that this incarnation of Ahriman will serve mankind precisely with regard to the promotion of a higher mental, a spiritual development by becoming aware of what man can or, let us say, cannot attain through mere physical life. But people must consciously approach this Ahriman incarnation and arrange things in such a way that they become more and more conscious and aware in all areas, that they see more and more which currents in life are moving towards this Ahriman incarnation. They must know that Ahriman will live among men on earth, but that men will confront him and determine for themselves what they may learn from him, what they may absorb from him. [6]

To a certain extent, Ahriman wants to keep people so dull that they (for example) only understand the mathematical aspects of astronomy. Therefore he seduces many people to assert their well-known aversion to the knowledge of the spirit and soul of the universe. Another of these seductive powers of Ahriman - he works, I would say, in a corresponding manner with the Luciferic powers - is connected with the endeavor to maintain among men, as far as possible, the already very widespread sentiment that it is sufficient for public life if it is ensured that people are economically satisfied. [7] That which is justifiable - to establish a culture which must naturally lead in its consequences to a certain human happiness - is perverted in such a way that happiness itself is presented as the desirable thing. [8] How many people today no longer value the spirit for the sake of the spirit, but the soul for the sake of the soul. Such people only take in what is praised to them as useful by the public life of knowledge. Everything that is really useful in terms of knowledge - even if people do not always admit it to themselves, but it is so in public life - is supposed to be a preparation for bringing about the possibilities of eating. It is a strange error that people of today indulge in precisely in this area. They believe that the spirit cannot be eaten. But you see, the people who say this are the very ones who eat the spirit. For to the same extent that one refuses to take into oneself anything spiritual that would be taken in as spiritual, to the same extent one consumes the spiritual with every bite that one takes materially through the mouth into the stomach and transports it on a different path than it should go, for the salvation of mankind. [9] The unspiritual food and drink passes through the stomach to Lucifer. [10]

Everything that can divide people into groups, that distances them from mutual understanding about the earth, that brings them apart, promotes Ahriman's impulses at the same time. And one should actually take Ahriman's voice from what is so often spoken today as a new ideal over the earth: Liberation of the peoples, even the smallest. [11] What you experience with the sects that swear by the Gospel of John or Luke as a literal content is a kind of twilight of consciousness. In the case of a re-dawning of consciousness, which would emerge precisely through the Gospels, which one does not deepen spiritually, people would emerge who would best serve to prepare Ahriman for his incarnation, so that people would one day stand by him entirely in his sense. [12] What is often spread today in the positive Christianity of the outer world is a preparation for the incarnation of Ahriman. [13] Another means is to stir up everything that divides people today into small groups that are at war with each other. You need only look at the present (1919) at the feuding party system, and you will find - if you are only impartial - that these parties cannot be explained by mere human nature. [14]

Humanity must consciously live towards the Ahriman incarnation under the upheavals that will occur on the physical plan. Under the continual war and other hardships of the next human future, the human spirit will just become very inventive in the field of physical life. This cannot be prevented in any way by this or that behavior - it will occur as a necessity - through this such a human bodily individuality will become possible that Ahriman will be able to incarnate in it. This incarnation will be able to seduce and tempt people on earth to the strongest degree. [15] Ahriman will be that individuality which will show men to what immense sagacity man can attain if he calls to his aid all that can promote sagacity from the forces of earth. In the hardships that will befall people in the near future, people will become very inventive. Many things will be discovered from the forces and substances of the world that will provide food for people. People will learn what they need to eat and drink in order to become really clever. You cannot become spiritual by eating and drinking, but you can become clever by doing so. These things come about all by themselves through the hardships that will arise in the near future. And, I would like to say, through certain use of these things, certain secret societies, which are already making their preparations for this today, will prepare that through which the Ahrimanic incarnation will then be able to exist on earth in the right way. [16] Ahriman is working most intensively before a large number of representatives of today's so-called confessions, in that they disregard the truth: "I am with you always until the end of time", in that they declare as heretical everything that emerges from the direct view of the present Christ, and in that they conveniently adhere to the Gospels literally, but only literally in their way. [17]

Ahriman would bring to people, through the most magnificent arts, all that clairvoyant knowledge, as it is meant here, which until then could only be acquired with great difficulty and effort. Think how infinitely convenient that would be. People would not need to do anything. They would be able to live materialistically and would not have to worry about any spiritual striving. If Ahriman were to incarnate in the Western world at the right time, he would found a large secret school where the most magnificent magic arts would be practiced. He would be able to turn large numbers of people into clairvoyants through magic. But he would turn people into clairvoyants in such a way that what one person would see, another would not see, not a third. People would all get mixed up, and although they would receive a foundation of clairvoyant wisdom, they would only be able to come into conflict and quarrel. Humanity would fall prey to Ahriman, simply because it had not appropriated for itself what Ahriman would then give it. In a sense, everything that has been developed by human culture up to now would perish. All that would be fulfilled which, in an unconscious tendency, the present humanity actually wants hopelessly. What is at stake is this: Precisely that future wisdom which is clairvoyant in nature, this future wisdom, must in turn be taken from Ahriman (like the primal wisdom from Lucifer). One can say: It is only one book, not two wisdoms. - It is only a question of whether Ahriman has the book or Christ. Christ cannot have it without humanity fighting for it. And mankind can only fight for it by telling itself that it must have acquired this content of spiritual science through its own efforts by the time Ahriman appears on earth. The cosmic work of spiritual science consists in ensuring that the knowledge of the future does not become or remain Ahrimanic. [18] The essence of this matter is that a similar struggle is necessary for the wisdom of the future as had to be waged by the ancient initiates who imparted language and the ability to think to mankind, as had to be waged against Lucifer. Just as these initiates of primordial wisdom had to wrest from Lucifer that which has become human understanding, so that which is to be insight into the inner nature of things in the future must be wrested from the Ahrimanic powers. [19] In the struggle for the wisdom of the future, one of the most frequent experiences is that the world around one feels as if the air were suddenly frozen into granite. One need only consider that it is the endeavor of the Ahrimanic powers to bring the earth to complete solidification. [20]

Sources:

[1], [3], [5], [7], [9] - [13], [18] - [20] GA 191: Social understanding from spiritual scientific knowledge (1919)

[2], [6], [14] - [16] GA 193: The inner aspect of the social riddle. Luciferic past and Ahrimanic future (1919)

[4], [17] GA 195: World New Year's Eve and New Year's thoughts (1919/1920)

[8] GA 171: Inner development impulses of humanity. Goethe and the crisis of the nineteenth century (1916)

Ahrimanic characteristic of man

Standing still (in life) is ahrimanic. Not a day should pass in man's life, at least to a certain extent, without his taking in at least one thought which changes his nature a little; which puts him a little into the possibility of being a becoming being, not merely a being in being. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 187: How can humanity find the Christ again? The threefold shadow existence of our time and the new Christ-light (1918/1919)

Ahrimanic elementals of modern times

Just as in ancient times these mechanical, chemical, physical activities mingled with Luciferic power, so today, when they can no longer be kept in check, they mingle with Ahrimanic forces. It is a law that everything that originates from mechanical, mechanical, chemical, physical thinking can be fertilized in a peculiar way by what originates from partial human nature, in the following way: These sums of thought, which relate to the chemical, physical, mechanical, technical, financial, are thought today by people who, for example - there are also other things to be considered - are still inside a national way of thinking; but they are not compatible with it, then Ahriman has a fertilizing effect, and through this connection of national mindset with international physical science, Ahrimanic elemental beings arise today in our environment. Humanity has no alternative but to either leave everything that is physics, chemistry and the like, or to become international in its way of thinking. [1] These elemental beings of an ahrimanic nature must drive people more and more into things that must necessarily counteract the beneficial development of the human race in the last three cultural periods that the earth still has to go through (before the next great upheaval). [2]

Sources:

[1] & [2] GA 180: Mystery truths and Christmas impulses. Old myths and their meaning (1917/1918)

Ahrimanic forces in the present

When asked where the ahrimanic forces were most strongly asserting themselves today, Rudolf Steiner replied: "As far as I have been able to observe, this is the case in the cinema and with the typewriter. Not that there are not other machines that are more ahrimanic in their construction, but as far as the effect on man is concerned, it is as I have told you." [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 266/3: From the contents of the esoteric hours. Volume III (1913-1923)

Ahrimanic forces and man's inner source of destruction

If we imagine that which underlies our intellect in us, that is, if we imagine that here is the sphere of sense perception - we would then form the concepts which would radiate back into our consciousness as remembered concepts, so that there would be a mirror, so to speak - you will understand the image, we do not look down behind our memory - then down there, under the memory, lies the sphere of destruction. Here all the laws of nature dissolve, all the earthly laws of the world dissolve in man. Here indeed lies a hearth of destruction, and this hearth of destruction must be in us just as there must be a (reflecting) coating behind the (ordinary) mirror. We need this, otherwise the memory would not be there. So there must be a hearth of destruction within us. For anything to be in the world, there must be spiritual forces to bring it about. In my anthroposophical view, I call the spiritual forces that underlie this focus of destruction ahrimanic forces. Man is protected by the threshold that is given in his memory mirror, he does not normally enter this hearth of destruction fully without further ado; the concepts of memory are mirrored beforehand. But this hearth of destruction must be there. The ahrimanic forces, which are connected with these destructive forces, that is, with the forces of dissolution for what happens in the physical world, these ahrimanic forces are not actually evil when one looks at the world from their aspect. For what they do, the destruction, is not evil at all in the divine world plan. But if man now abstracts in such a way that he allows the destructive forces to pass through his memory mirror, then what happens is that something occurs here in the physical world which has its good meaning in the next higher world, which is only displaced in the physical world. So that what we call evil in physical life is a necessary thing in a higher world. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 343: Lectures and courses on Christian religious work, II. Spiritual knowledge – religious feeling – cultic action (1921)

Ahrimanic cultural achievements and spiritual science

By bringing spirituality into our culture, we can raise even that which is so alarmingly Ahrimanic in influence, such as shorthand or typewriting, into the sphere of spirituality, so that we redeem Ahriman. This is only possible through full reflection on the spiritual life. He who lives today in a materialistic attitude and writes in shorthand or even on a typewriter gets deep into the Ahrimanic element. You see, we are not talking about a reaction, we are not frowning upon the demonology that has arisen; but the demons themselves are to be redeemed. But for that which comes up in spiritual science, one will need the exact fixation, because it is necessary to express oneself in an exact, precise way. And then the ahrimanic will be able to render essential services to the spiritual. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 208: Anthroposophy as Cosmosophy – Second Part: The Formation of Man as a Result of Cosmic Effects (1921)

Ahrimanic powers within the earth

In all older times, in which there was something similar to our present Christmas festival, it was believed that what takes place with the earth at Christmas time could only be understood through initiation into the knowledge of the Mysteries, through initiation, as it was still called in Greece, into the chthonic Mysteries. Through this initiation into the knowledge of the Mysteries, man became, as it were, alienated from the environment of the earth, in which he lives with his ordinary consciousness, to such an extent that he immersed himself in something into which he could not physically immerse himself: that he immersed himself in the spiritual-soul and learned to know what the earth becomes during the full winter time by sucking in its spiritual-soul. And through this initiation into the Mysteries, man then learned that the earth becomes particularly receptive to the penetration of the lunar forces at the time of the winter solstice. This was regarded as the secret, if I may express myself in the modern sense, as the Christmas secret of the ancient Mysteries: that at Christmas time one gets to know the way in which the earth, by being imbued and permeated with its spiritual-soul, becomes particularly receptive to the effectiveness of the lunar forces within the earth.

In certain older times, for example, no one was trusted with knowledge of healing science who was not initiated into the secrets of winter, who did not understand how the earth is particularly receptive to the effectiveness of the lunar forces within it through its breath-holding, how it penetrates the plants in particular with healing powers at this time, how it makes something quite different out of the plant world, but also out of the world of the lower animals in particular. The Christmas initiation was experienced as a descent into the depths of the earthly. This Christmas initiation was associated with something that was perceived in a certain sense as a danger to the human being. One said to oneself: If one really looked lovingly, filling one's consciousness with that which lives in the earth as lunar forces at Christmas time, then one comes into a kind of state of consciousness in which one must be very strong inwardly, must have strengthened oneself very much in order to withstand the onslaught of the ahrimanic forces coming from all sides, which live in the earth precisely through the absorption of the lunar activity. And only in the strength that one developed in oneself in one's soul-spiritual being in order to break the resistance of these forces, only in this strength did one see that which could allow man to endure his earthly existence in the long run. But then, some time after the celebration of these Christmas Mysteries, the Mystery Teachers gathered their pupils together and, like a kind of revelation, they told them the following: Yes, certainly, one can see through with full consciousness what is at work within the earth at the winter solstice through initiation.

But, especially when spring comes, with the growing plant world, that which the ahrimanic powers bring about rises from the depths of the earth and permeates everything that grows and sprouts, and also permeates man himself. In the time when man was still endowed with divine powers, this original divine inheritance enabled mankind to withstand the onslaught of the ahrimanic powers that poured over mankind in this way during the winter moon period. But - so the initiates told their disciples - a time will come over mankind when people will be, so to speak, stunned by the spiritual through what the earth absorbs of lunar forces at winter time. With the growth and sprouting in spring it will come over mankind like an intoxication towards the spiritual and take away mankind's consciousness that there is a spiritual at all. Then mankind, if it does not find the possibility of resisting these intoxicating forces, will become a slave to the earth and will not be able to develop further with the earth to other future stages of earthly development. - The initiates painted in gloomy colors the age that had to dawn for mankind with the 15th century, where mankind will be great in abstract dead thoughts, but where mankind can only become spiritually capable again by gaining new strength to defeat the intoxicating forces that rise from the earth through the self-spiritual power that mankind can develop. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 223: The annual cycle as the breathing process of the earth and the four great festival seasons. Anthroposophy and the Human Mind (1923)

Ahrimanic immortality

People who join the circles of certain ceremonial-magical societies secure for themselves a power beyond death, an ahrimanic immortality, so to speak. For them, the society they have joined is, so to speak, a certain guarantee that powers of theirs will live beyond death that should actually only live until their physical death. And this thought lives in more people today than they think, the thought of securing an ahrimanic immortality, which consists in the fact that one works not only as a single, individual human being, but that one works through the instrument of such a society. There are many such societies. (But) just as much as one gains in immortal mortality, or rather in ahrimanic immortality, just as much one loses from the consciousness of the other, the real, the genuine immortality. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 174: Contemplations on Contemporary History. The Karma of Untruthfulness - Part Two (1917)

Ahrimanic contamination of the present

And an Ahrimanic infestation is currently (1920) on the rise, with an enormously strong force. It is quite terrible how the civilized man of the present is asleep to what is actually developing. Just consider how mechanical forces, machine forces, have developed in recent times. It was not so long ago that people had to use their muscular strength to do what, in a certain sense, they can now leave to the machines, to which they merely tap. What takes place in the machines is based on the forces that man brings out of the earth by extracting the coal. The coal provides the power that then works in our machines. Now, when man gets to the point where a machine is working alongside him, it is as if he hands over to the machine what he used to have to do himself. The machine does it. The machine stands next to him and does the work that he previously had to do himself. You measure what the machine produces by horsepower, and if you want to measure on a large scale, you measure what you produce within a certain territory by the power that a horse produces in a year when it performs its daily work. Now take the following: in 1870 - you can calculate this from coal production - six whole and seven tenths million horsepower years were worked within Germany - I am deliberately choosing the war year. In other words, in addition to the work done by people, the machines worked six whole and seven-tenths million horsepower years. So that is a power that has been worked out of the machines themselves. In 1912, 79 million horsepower-years were worked in the same Germany by machine power! Since Germany has almost 79 million inhabitants, this means that a horse works alongside every person throughout the year. And consider the increase from 6.7 million horsepower-years to 79 million horsepower-years within just a few decades!

And now consider these ratios in relation to the outbreak of the terrible catastrophe of war. In the same year, 1912, France, Russia and Belgium together were able to muster 35 million horsepower years; Great Britain 98 million horsepower years. In 1870, the war was essentially fought by men, because it was not possible to mobilize much of the mechanical forces. There were only 6.7 million horsepower years in Germany. In a few decades, things had changed. As you know, in this war the machines essentially worked against each other. What confronted each other on the fronts came from the machines, so that the horsepower years of the mechanisms were actually led to the front. However, it took a long time for Great Britain to mobilize its 98 million horsepower years. But then the total of what came from the mechanical power of these empires amounted to 133 million horsepower-years against 79 million horsepower-years from Germany; about 92 million horsepower-years were obtained when Austria was added. This initially compensated somewhat for the fact that, as I said, Great Britain was not able to convert its horsepower so quickly from land cultivation to the front. In this terrible catastrophe of war, it was really not the wisdom of the generals that confronted each other - although they did indicate certain directions - but the essential thing that confronted each other were the mechanical forces that clashed on the fronts, and which did not depend on the generals, but on the inventions that man had previously made out of his natural science. And what had to happen, as it were, with iron necessity? Let us assume that the horsepower years of the United States of America with 139 million horsepower years were sent to the front. You see, quite apart from the genius of the generals, the fate of the world was predetermined by what man had produced in a few decades of machine power. Nothing could be done against this fate of the world, against this necessity, where the results of mechanical forces simply clashed on the fronts.

Yes, what is actually going on here? Man has constructed the mechanisms out of his thinking. By constructing them, he had placed his mind, the mind he had gained from natural science, into the mechanisms. In a sense, the mind had run away from his head and had become the horsepower in his environment. They were now working themselves, having run away. It is not easy for the sleeping civilized man of the present to imagine the furious speed with which this creation of an inhuman-extra-human world has taken place in recent decades. The man I referred to at the end of the second millennium of the pre-Christian era had the Luciferian contamination around him; the spiritual beings for whom he developed his needs and who appeared to him outside of nature. If this is a natural object, the spiritual being appeared in it. Now man lets his spirit flow into matter, into mechanisms. In Germany, for example, every human being has created a horse next to himself out of the human mind, which now works next to him, which was not a horse, but was machine power. It is separated from man, just as these elemental beings were once separated from man, only in a different sense. They were so separate that man had to turn his Luciferic power to them. Now he turns his ahrimanic power to it. Now he is ahrimanizing it, mechanizing it. We live in the age of ahrimanic contamination. People do not even realize that they are actually stepping back from the world, and that they are incorporating their minds into the world and creating a world next to themselves that is becoming independent. And the great, I would say, diabolical experiment has been carried out since the year 1914; that one ahrimanic entity has basically tipped the scales against the other ahrimanic entity. We have had to deal with an ahrimanic battle almost over the whole earth. It has taken on an ahrimanic character through the fact that man has created a new ahrimanic world in the mechanism that surrounds him. And it is a new ahrimanic world. If you look at the figures: From 6.7 million to 79 million horsepower-years in a few decades, the extra-human mechanical force has increased - the ratio is the same in the other countries - how rapidly the Ahriman has grown in the last few decades! May not the question arise as to whether man should completely lose what is placed in his will, what is placed in his power of initiative? The question can be asked whether man is to be led more and more towards the illusion that he makes things, while in reality the Ahrimanic forces, which can be calculated by horsepower years, work against each other? [1]

Thus, the world becoming Ahrimanic is a simple example of arithmetic in order to know what must happen. And how does man stand beside it? He can stand next to it as the stupid one, whose machines finally run against him when he finds even more complicated combinations of forces. This Ahrimanization is the modern counterpart to the Luciferization of the world of which I spoke earlier. That is what we must look at. For isn't this perhaps the most obvious thing to prove the necessity that man must now create from within? We will not stop this Ahrimanization, nor should we. Culture demands ahrimanization. But it must be accompanied by what now works out of the human inner being, what in turn draws wisdom, beauty, power, i.e. strength from the human inner being in imagination, in intuition, in inspiration. For the worlds that will arise there will be human worlds, they will be worlds that stand before us in the spirit, in the soul, while outside the ahrimanic machine forces are at work. And these powers, which rise from imagination, from inspiration, from intuition, will have the power to direct what would otherwise have to overwhelm man around him out of the frenzied pace of Ahrimanization. What comes from the spiritual world, from imagination, inspiration, intuition, is stronger than all the horsepower that can still sprout from the mechanization of the world. But the mechanizing forces would overwhelm man if he did not find the counterweight for them in what he can find from the revelations of the spiritual world, which he must strive for. [2]

Sources:

[1] GA 202: The Bridge between the World-Spirituality and the Physical of Man. The search for the new Isis, the divine Sophia (1920)

Ahrimanic world and striving for freedom

With that which the human soul experiences in the direction of freedom, it touches the Ahrimanic in the world. With that which it experiences in the direction of religion, even if it goes towards the Mystery of Golgotha, it comes very close to the Luciferic. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 212: Human Soul Life and Spiritual Striving in Connection with World and Earth Development (1922)

Ahrimanic world created by man

You must get an idea of what it means that in the nature surrounding mankind not only that which appears to the sober consciousness of today as nature and confronts us as natural laws was revealed, but that grandiose beauty, that is, beautiful appearance, was revealed in powerful, pictorial revelations of spiritual beings that looked out of every spring, out of every cloud, out of everything. Especially at this time, towards the end of the 2nd millennium of the pre-Christian era, it was not like in even older times, where of course all this was also there; but it was, I would like to say, more naturally there. At that time man had to partake of this grace by doing something himself. He did not have to do it in the way that we now seek a higher spiritual development out of full consciousness, but he could - and it was even a quite doubtful ability - develop desires for this spiritual that revealed itself in nature, he could fire up his powers of need, his driving forces; then the spiritual revealed itself to him, as it were, out of nature. And in this firing up of the driving forces, the forces of need, lay a strong Luciferic gift. That was the Luciferic danger that arose. Man could, so to speak, shake himself up, fire himself up, in order to unite the spiritual with himself. But this kind of shaking up was something Luciferic in him. That is why the world of culture and civilization at that time was heavily infested with Luciferianism towards the end of the 2nd millennium of the pre-Christian era. [1]

And a (corresponding) ahrimanic infestation, it is currently (1920) on the rise, with a hugely strong force on the rise. See the article above: Ahrimanic Infestation of the Present.

Sources:

[1] GA 202: The Bridge between the World-Spirituality and the Physical of Man. The search for the new Isis, the divine Sophia (1920)

Ahrimanic beings

The ahrimanic being does not want spiritualization or style at all, would prefer (in architecture, for example) to produce only very prosaic buildings, utilitarian buildings, for example, would like to mechanize everything, put everything at the service of industry, would not like to give man any value nor any manual work as an art, but would only like to supply models, which are then reproduced by machine in infinite copies, just as Ahriman himself can reveal himself in an immeasurably large number of copies through the 'secret of number in many people. [1]

For those who, like me, do not experience the spirit world, this kind of immersion in a school of thought (see: world view) is a mere mental activity. For those who experience the spirit world, it means something essentially different. He is brought close to beings in the spirit world who want to make such a school of thought the only dominant one. There one-sidedness in knowledge is not merely the cause of abstract aberration; there is spirit-living intercourse with beings, which is error in the human world. I spoke later of ahrimanic beings when I wanted to point in this direction. For them it is an absolute truth that the world must be a machine. They live in a world that directly adjoins the sensory world. With my own ideas I have never for a moment fallen into this world. Not even in the unconscious. For I was careful to ensure that all my cognition was carried out in a level-headed consciousness. All the more conscious was my inner struggle against the demonic powers that did not want to turn the knowledge of nature into a spiritual view, but into a mechanistic, materialistic way of thinking. The seeker of spiritual knowledge must experience these worlds; mere theoretical thinking about them is not enough for him. At that time I had to save my spiritual view in inner storms. These storms were behind my outer experience. [2]

Sources:

[1] GA 208: Anthroposophy as Cosmosophy - Part Two:. The Formation of Man as the Result of Cosmic Effects (1921)

[2] GA 28: My Course of Life (1923-1925)

Ahrimanic beings - aims with man

Human freedom is such that even man is free to realize materialism for the human kingdom, that is, to shape this earthly man in such a way that he is absorbed in matter. It is therefore basically a matter of choice to be a materialist. If one is strong enough to realize what one tells man as a materialistic attitude, then this attitude only becomes true through man. What works on man in this form comes through the ahrimanic beings. They want to maintain everything that is earth development at the level that has only come to man through earth development: in the mineral organization. They want to make man perfect, but only as a mineral organization. The ahrimanic beings intend to seize this earthly, mineral nature of man, to tear it out of the ongoing development and to isolate it for themselves. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 197: Opposites in the Development of Humanity. West and East - Materialism and Mysticism - Knowledge and Belief (1920)

Ahrimanic West

In the West we find souls immersed in the Ahrimanic element everywhere after the wise guidance of the world. We find this most strongly in America. There is a tendency there to develop a culture that is completely submerged in the materialistic, the Ahrimanic element, that is completely permeated - even where spiritualism is striven for - by purely material views. Even where people strive for the spiritual, they want to have the spirits before them in a tangible, spiritualistic way. This longing will also gradually take hold of Western Europe. There the mission will be fulfilled to introduce the ahrimanic element into the culture. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 159: The Mystery of Death. The Nature and Meaning of Central Europe and the European Folk Spirits (1915)

Ahrimanic and technical

The technical and the ahrimanic cannot be separated. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 275: Art in the Light of Mystery Wisdom (1914/1915)

Ahrimanic world goal

The Ahrimanic powers do not want the originally divine-spiritual powers to illuminate the universe in its further progress; they want the cosmic intellectuality they have absorbed to radiate through the entire new cosmos and for man to continue to live in this intellectualized and Ahrimanized cosmos. In such a life man would lose the Christ. For he has entered the world with an intellectuality which is quite the same as it once lived in the Divine-Spiritual, when this still formed the cosmos in its essence. If we speak today in such a way that our thoughts can also be those of the Christ, we oppose the Ahrimanic powers with something that prevents us from falling prey to them. [1] All of Ahriman's interest is directed towards distracting people from the spiritual and directing them towards the material, which is indeed also a spiritual, but one that is hidden in the earth. [2] While we live on earth, there is a constant interaction between will and thought within us. The will takes possession of the thought, and we have to carry this composite of will and thought through death. Ahriman wants to prevent us from doing so. He wants the will to remain separate, that the thought should only be specially developed in us. Then we would lose our individuality if what Ahriman actually wants were to happen. We would arrive at the moment of death with an almost exaggerated, instinctively formed thought. But we humans cannot hold this thought, and Ahriman could seize it and insert it into the rest of the world, so that it would continue to work in the rest of the world. This is indeed the fate that threatens mankind if it continues with the present materialism, that Ahriman can steal thoughts away from people and incorporate them into the earth in their effectiveness, so that the earth, which should actually perish, is consolidated. Ahriman works against the word: "Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass away."

He wants words to be thrown away and heaven and earth to remain. This can only be achieved if people's thoughts are stolen, if people are de-individualized. If Ahriman could continue to work, as he has been able to do since 1845, then human brains would first of all become stiffer and stiffer, and people would live under obsessive thoughts, under materialistic thoughts. Just think how fixated the thoughts of many people are today. One such effective product of these obsessive thoughts in the scientific field is atomism. [3] Even today, without people being aware of it, there are tendencies in certain underground circles, where all kinds of societies are working towards such things, to bring about something similar to what was declared at the Council of Constantinople in 869: Man does not consist of body and soul, but man consists of the body, and the soul is merely something that develops out of the body. It is therefore impossible to educate the human being spiritually; one must therefore find a material means of inoculating the human being at a certain age, and then he will develop his talents through inoculation. You can do that, but you turn the human being into an automaton. Such a vaccine would simply achieve the loosening of the etheric body in the physical body. As soon as the etheric body is loosened, the play between the universe and the etheric body is an extraordinarily lively one and the human being would become an automaton. For the physical body of man must be educated here on earth through spiritual will. [4] In the end the earth would become - and this is also Ahriman's intention - a great entity in which all human beings would be dissolved to a certain extent. They would be connected with this great unified earth entity. He would combine living lime with his organism and become more and more calcified. [5]

The ahrimanic beings have the prospect of achieving, at least partially, what they want, that is, to connect man with the earth by wanting to fuse his attitude, his conception, with the earthly. This influence of the Ahrimanic entities is particularly evident in our age and will become stronger and stronger. [6] The ahrimanic powers want to shape the earth in such a way that man, too, will remain a mere earthly man, that he will, so to speak, harden in earthly materiality and live on into the future of the world like a kind of pillar of his past. As long as our intellect, as in the last 3 to 4 centuries, was still rooted in the spiritual through an ancient inheritance, these ahrimanic powers could not get at man. But that has changed since the beginning of the 20th century. We do not pay attention to the fact that there is spirit in all our surroundings; as a result, the Ahrimanic can creep into us without our knowledge and take possession of precisely that spirituality of which we want to know nothing in our surroundings. Even within the ahrimanic, the spiritual will still be discovered. [7] The ahrimanic beings strive to separate from man all that which carries him towards the soul-spiritual, as it must develop in the human realm. They want to transform the sub-human, that which lies in the drives, instincts and so on, that which expresses itself in the physical, into the spiritual. [8]

For the near future, for many millennia, it is important that we as human beings acquire a sense of responsibility for a thought that we conceive. And one can roughly understand the conception of thought in such a way that the thought is so far advanced that we translate it into language and possibly make it suitable for communication. When we have driven the thought so far that we consider it ripe for communication, then Ahriman takes care to have the thought and to place it in the general world-substantiality. Thinking is not given to us to form the thought prematurely, but to seek to regard thinking as an operation, as something that may remain in this form for a long time. And we should, as it were, suspend the formulated thought until we can justify to ourselves that we have turned and twisted a fact in all directions. [9]

Sources:

[1] GA 26: Anthroposophical principles. The path of knowledge of anthroposophy – The Michael Mystery (1924/1925)

[2] GA 176: Human and human developmental truths. The karma of materialism (1917)

[3], [4] GA 205: Becoming human, world soul and world spirit – First part: Man as a physical and mental being in his relationship to the world (1921)

[5], [6] GA 229: Experiencing the course of the year in four cosmic imaginations (1923)

[7] GA 211: The solar mystery and the mystery of death and resurrection. Exoteric and esoteric Christianity (1922)

[8] GA 232: Mystery formations (1923)

[9] GA 170: The riddle of man. The spiritual background of human history (1916)

Ahriman-Mephistopheles

Just as the Greeks had to deal with the Sphinx, so modern man will have to deal with Mephistopheles, the satyr-like, faun-like figure who has goat or horse feet. [1] When one has undergone a certain development in one's astral body and self, Ahriman accompanies one at every turn. When one begins to see him, then one can protect oneself from him, then one sees that he peeps out from the temptations of pleasure and from the impressions of fear. Now mankind as a whole is developing in such a way that towards our future man is really developing more and more the powers of intellectualism. As a result, his head will outwardly take on a different shape. In a certain respect, the beginning of this development towards intellectuality was given in the dawn of the newer natural sciences, from about the 16th century onwards. It was precisely in the 16th century that it was known that a future would come in which people would be able to really see Ahriman more and more because of the higher development of their self and their astral body. Then, because intellectual development resisted the perception of the spiritual with all its might in the first period, a darkening occurred. But the 16th century, in the figure of Mephisto at the side of Faust, who is nothing other than Ahriman, was still able to point out that Mephisto would become more and more a kind of seducer of the human race. In the future, man will be forced to realize that he will be accompanied by Ahriman-Mephisto throughout his waking life. But this, of course, also corresponds to the opposite image, and that is that man is approaching a future which, every time he wakes up, will give him the impression, like a dream just flitting along - and then more and more clearly and distinctly - that your nightly comrade was Lucifer. [2] (See also: Mephistopheles)

Sources:

[1] GA 158: The connection of man with the elemental world. Kalewala – Olaf Åsteson – The Russian people – The world as a result of equilibrium effects (1912-1914)

[2] GA 145: What significance does the occult development of man have for his sheaths (physical body, etheric body, astral body) and his self? (1913)

(the next entry is connecting to the above)

Mephistopheles

He who knows the way into the spiritual worlds knows that this Mephistopheles really exists as one of the two tempters whom man encounters when he goes the way into the spiritual land, when he seeks the way into the spiritual world. There are two powers or forces that man encounters. One force is what we call the Luciferic force, which takes hold of man more inwardly, in the center of his soul, and drives his passions, instincts, desires and so on down a degree into the personal, into the ignoble. What affects man himself, what seizes him in his innermost being, is the Luciferic. But because man was once seized by this Luciferic principle in his development through the world, he was delivered over to another principle. If man had never been seized by this Luciferic principle, then the outer world would never confront him in a merely material form; then the outer world would confront man in such a way that man could say to himself from the outset that everything external is an expression, a physiognomy of the spirit. Man would see the spirit behind everything materially sensual. But because everything material has been condensed by the influence of Luciferic power, that which only presents man with the illusion of an outward materiality is also mixed into the outward view; it is that which shows man the outward in the form of Maya or illusion, as if it were not the outward physiognomic expression of the spirit. This power which shows man the outer world in an untrue form was first recognized in all its depth by Zarathustra.

Under the name "Ahriman" Zarathustra first depicted the figure that opposes the god of light. Zarathustra called this opponent of the god of light Ahriman, and for all those who took up the culture of Zarathustra, Ahriman then became that deceptive figure which, in contrast to everything that man would otherwise see in transparent spiritual clarity, is that which penetrates with smoke and mist to illusion. If one wanted to put it particularly harshly, then this figure, the one who corrupted man because he forced him into the bondage of matter and lied to him about the true form of the material, was called Mephistopheles. This is what this figure was called in Hebrew, where "mephiz" means the corrupter and "tophel" means the liar. And this figure then crossed over into the West, into the medieval figure of Mephistopheles. In the Faust books, we see Faust confronted with this power; it is also called the "old serpent". Goethe got to know this Mephistopheles. The later Faust tradition was then no longer able to distinguish properly between the figures of Lucifer and Mephistopheles. Goethe, however, encountered as Mephistopheles everything that is conveyed through the external senses, through the human intellect, which is accustomed to using a physical brain as an instrument, as a view of the external world. The human being who appeals only to this faculty of the ordinary intellect was to him, as it were, like another ego of the human being striving upwards into the spiritual world. Thus, for Goethe, everything that appeals to the merely intellectual - as in Merck or Herder - was represented in a wonderful way in the figure of Mephistopheles, who does not believe in a world of goodness or does not consider it meaningful and important. In Goethe himself was this second self, which could come to doubt the spiritual world, and Goethe sometimes felt himself caught in the conflict that we can call the Mephistophelean power.

He felt himself caught between this evil force that was stirring in his soul and the truly honest striving of his soul for the spiritual heights. Goethe felt these two forces in his soul. In the second part of "Faust", in the scene of the "Walk to the Mothers", Mephistopheles, the representative of all that can be found through the intellect bound to material external science, confronts the inner man striving for the spiritual heights, who is spellbound by an illusion in what Mephistopheles makes people believe. He stands there with the keys. [1] Goethe conceives of Mephistopheles as a being to whom the devachanic realm is unknown. He is only at home in the astral. He can therefore be of service in the creation of the homunculus; but he cannot accompany Faust into the realm of the "mothers". Yes, for him this realm is even a "nothing. [2]

Goethe research has made the most diverse efforts to unravel the figure of Mephistopheles. Basically, the resolution of the name "Mephistopheles" is simply to be found in the Hebrew, where "mephiz" means the hinderer, the corrupter, and "tophel" the liar, so that we have to understand the name as applying to a being composed of a bringer of destruction, of obstacles for man, and on the other hand of a spirit of untruth, of deception, of illusion. The fact that Mephistopheles may be associated with the devil or with the idea of the devil is already indicated by his name; for the word "tophel" is the same as "the devil". [3] Ahriman, Mephistopheles, Mammon - these terms coincide - are to be found in money, in all that is connected with external natural egoism. [4]

In modern man, the etheric body constricts, contracts, becomes too small. - The further man progresses in his materialistic contempt for the spiritual, the more this etheric body will contract and dry up. However, since the organization of the physical body depends on the etheric body penetrating it properly, there will always be a tendency for the physical body to dry out when the etheric body is too compressed. And if it were to dry out particularly strongly, it would develop horn-like feet instead of the natural human feet. The human being will not get them, but the tendency to do so lies within him. Ahriman in particular can now live in this drying etheric body. Ahriman will take on this form, which indicates the poverty of the etheric body. He will develop too little etheric power to have properly organized feet and will develop the horn-like feet mentioned above - goat's feet. [5]

Like Oedipus with the Sphinx, the human being of the 5th post-Atlantean cultural epoch has to cope with Mephistopheles. He faces this Mephistopheles like a second being. The Greek faced the Sphinx through the blood and respiration process that had become energetic. Modern man, with all that presses out of his intellect, his sobriety, faces that which is bound to the nervous process. Prophetically, this confrontation of man with the Mephistophelean, I would say poetically, could be foreseen. But it will emerge more and more as a fundamental experience the further we get in the evolution of the 5th post-Atlantean period. Whereas Greek man was tormented by an overabundance of questions, modern man will face not so much the torment of questions as the torment of being enchanted into his prejudices, of having a second body next to him that contains his prejudices. [6]

Now humanity as a whole is in a state of development, of evolution. And this is proceeding in such a way that man is actually developing the powers of intellectualism more and more towards our future. As a result, his head will outwardly take on a different shape. In a certain respect, the beginning of this development towards intellectuality was given in the dawn of the newer natural sciences, from about the 16th century onwards. It was precisely in the 16th century that it was known that a future would come in which people would be able to really see Ahriman more and more because of the higher development of their self and their astral body. Then, because intellectual development resisted the perception of the spiritual with all its might in the first period, a darkening occurred. But the 16th century, in the figure of Mephisto at the side of Faust, who is nothing other than Ahriman, was still able to point out that basically Ahriman will become more and more dangerous and perilous in a conscious way for the future of human development, that Mephisto will become more and more a kind of seducer of the human race, so to speak. [7]

The moment we ascend into the spiritual world, we acquire a new relationship to our physical body, a relationship similar to the one we have with our eyes or ears within the physical body. The physical body acts more as a whole, like a kind of organ of perception, but we soon realize that it is not really the physical body, but the etheric body. The physical body gives us, as it were, only a framework that holds the etheric body, as the sensory organ that perceives a world of weaving, floating images and sounds. This feeling of being separated, as it were, in our human essence from our physical body can be described as something that, like a misunderstood experience, will come over people more and more of its own accord as we, as humanity, move towards the future. There will come a time when many, many people will increasingly experience the sensation: Yes, what is this, I feel as if I have split, as if there is another person next to me. - And this sensation, this feeling, which will appear as something natural, just like hunger or thirst or other experiences, must not remain misunderstood by the people of the present and the future. Certainly, in the later, more robust life, under the impression of the physical world, these feelings and sensations that I have characterized will not be so particularly strong in the very near future, but in a more distant future they will become stronger and stronger. At first they will appear in the growing child. Children will hint: There or there I saw a being that said this or that to me, what I should do. When a child says: I saw someone there, he has disappeared again, but he keeps coming back; he keeps saying this and that to me, and I cannot rise up against him - then he who understands spiritual science will recognize that something is announcing itself in the child which will emerge more and more clearly in the evolution of humanity. [8]

Take an impartial look at evolution. How much has ceased to approach man in a warm, direct way in the course of the 5th post-Atlantean cultural period. Take the countless questions that really come to us when we immerse ourselves in spiritual science. They are not there for the modern materialistically minded person. He does not feel the riddle of the Sphinx; the Greek still felt it vividly.

Modern man, however, must feel something else. He actually knows everything so well in his own opinion, observes the sensory world, combines it with reason, and then all the riddles are solved for him. He has no idea how much he is groping around in the outer phantasmagoria. But this condenses his etheric body more and more, dries out his etheric body more and more, and finally leads to the Mephistophelean element attaching itself like a second nature to the being of the man of the present into the future. The materialistic attitude will dry up the etheric body, and Mephistopheles will live in the dried up etheric body.

We will have to understand this, and mankind will have to give the child so much education in future times - be it through eurythmy, be it through a spiritual-scientific attitude - through which the etheric body must be enlivened, so that man will be able to take up his right position, so that he will recognize what his companion means. Otherwise he will not understand this companion, otherwise he will feel towards him as if he were bewitched, spellbound. As the Greek had to cope with the Sphinx, so modern man will have to cope with Mephistopheles, with the satyr-like, faun-like figure who has goat's or horse's feet. [9]

Sources:

[1] GA 57: Where and how do you find the spirit? (1908/1909)

[2] GA 35: Philosophy and Anthroposophy (1904-1923)

[3] GA 107: Spiritual science of man (1908/1909)

[4] GA 148: From Akasha research. The Fifth Gospel (1913/1914)

[5], [6] GA 158, page 103f (1993 edition, 234 pages)

[7] GA 145: What significance does the occult development of man have for his sheaths (physical body, etheric body, astral body) and his self? (1913)

[8], [9] GA 158: The connection between man and the elemental world. Kalewala – Olaf Åsteson – The Russian people – The world as a result of equilibrium effects (1912-1914)

Ahriman's counter-school to the Michael school

While Michael was training his flocks above, a kind of subterranean Ahrimanic school was founded just below the surface of the earth. The spiritual is also active and effective in the subterranean. And if no impulses flowed down from Michael just at this time to inspire the intelligence heavenly, if the intelligence on earth was initially left to itself, then the Ahrimanic hosts endeavored all the more to send impulses from below into the intelligent development of mankind. [1] The supersensible Michael school was something that deeply disturbed the Ahrimanic demons on earth, especially in the 15th-18th century, and caused them to become terribly agitated. [2]

Sources:

[1] & [2] GA 240: Esoteric Observations on Karmic Connections - Sixth Volume (1924)

Ahriman's realm

The 6th layer (of the earth's interior) is the earth of fire, which contains forces as substances that can become terribly devastating and destructive; it is actually these forces into which the primordial fires (see: fire) have been banished. Basically, the realm of Ahriman is materially active in this layer and it is from this layer that he works. What appears in the outer phenomena of nature in air and water, in cloud formations, what appears as lightning and thunder, is, so to speak, a last remnant - but a good remnant - on the earth's surface of the forces that were already connected with the old Saturn and that have separated from the sun. Of what is at work in these forces, the inner fire forces of the earth are placed in the service of Ahriman. There he has the center of his activity. And while his spiritual effects attract human souls and lead them into error, we see how he - in a certain way bound - has certain points of attack for his work within the earth. If one were to know the mysterious connections between what has happened on earth under the influence of Ahriman and what has become Ahriman's own karma as a result, one would recognize in the earthquake the connection between what happens as natural phenomena in such a terribly sad, tragic way and what prevails on earth. This has remained behind since ancient times as something that reacts on earth against the light, the good beings. Ancient Lemuria perished through the fire passions of men. The same fire that is now below was above. At that time the fire receded from the surface of the earth; the same fire that emerged like an extract from the primeval fire is the inorganic fire, the mineral fire of today. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 107: Spiritual science of human nature (1908/1909)

Ahriman's realm as a danger for humans

The danger of falling into the realm of Ahriman was at its greatest around the year 333 BC. This is the time when people switched over to mere intellect, to mere logic. Then the Mystery of Golgotha occurred, and immediately became part of humanity. And from the year 333 AD, the time began since which man must consciously strive into the realm of the higher hierarchies. However, he has not yet risen again from the ahrimanic realm, because intellectualism has only really come into being since the 15th century. But because he lives in the intellect, i.e. not in a 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 he lives in the Maya of Ahriman. This allows him to get out again and to turn back. Since 333 it has been placed in the freedom of man to strive upwards. The Catholic Church made every effort to prevent this; it must finally be overcome in this direction. [1] If you add the (above two year) numbers together, you get 666. This is the "number of the beast", where man was most exposed to really sinking down into the realm of the animals. But of course he remains exposed to this, even after the year 333, if he does not strive upwards after the Maya of Ahriman has entered. But remember, it is a different matter whether man acquires a spiritual attitude and thus his astral body remains connected with the Angelos when he is asleep, or whether, if man does not acquire a spiritual attitude, the Angelos does not go with the sleeping man, for then man brings with him out of sleep that which is the inspiration of Ahriman. The whole materialistic way of thinking, this whole filling of man with materialistic thoughts, it emerges in the present epoch with ever greater and greater rapidity from the sleeping state of man. Ahriman is also making other efforts to remove man from his Angelos. [2]

Sources:

[1] & [2] GA 205: Becoming Human, World Soul and World Spirit - Part One:. Man as a bodily-soul entity in his relationship to the world (1921)

Ahriman's works

That which we recognize as the physical body is all the product of Ahriman; on the other hand, we must recognize the work of Lucifer in what we experience as soul life merely in the physical body. [1] Why do we not see the spiritual world around us when we are awake during the day? - Because Ahriman pushes the painting of the sense world in front of it. Oh, he is a great artist, for this world is beautiful and great and glorious, but it is not the true world. We do not see Ahriman himself in the physical world, we only see him in the spiritual world; here we only see his work, his deed. [2]

Sources:

[1] & [2] GA 266/3: From the Contents of the Esoteric Lessons. Volume III (1913-1923)

Ahriman's work and influence

The Ahrimanic influence first asserts itself out of the Eighth Sphere, from which the rest of our organism - apart from the head - is created; it is full of vitality, it is created for vitality through its own organization. The ahrimanic powers now work into it. Conversely, they endeavor to send into the vital forces of the rest of the organism the forces of death which, according to the divine development, actually belong in the head. So that we receive the forces of death from the eighth sphere in this way through the detour of Ahriman. That is physically speaking; spiritually speaking I would have to express myself thus: Everything that works in from this Eighth Sphere works on the human will, not on the intelligence. But the human will is based on desire; there is always something of desire in the will. That which underlies the will as the nature of desire, into which Ahriman continually tries to bring the personal element of man. And because the personal element of man lies hidden in the nature of desire, our human soul-will activity is precisely an imprint of our approach to death. Instead of allowing ourselves to be permeated by the divine ideals, allowing them to penetrate our desires and thus our will, something personal is brought into our desires, into our will. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 194: The Mission of Michael. The Revelation of the Real Mysteries of the Human Being (1919)

2
Alcohol

Alcohol was not on earth earlier - in the Atlantean era; it came later to help people individualize themselves. It closes man off from his higher faculties and makes him self-enclosed. Hence the use of alcohol in the Dionysian mysteries. Today, however, every person in civilized countries has already reached this stage, and alcohol is now only an evil. Through its use one loses the ability to adapt to others and to understand them. Alcohol is particularly harmful to the esoteric, as it transforms all developed higher forces into forces of the personal ego and repeatedly closes this into itself, tearing the astral body apart, as it were, through the two opposing currents - the higher and lower ego forces. Through the coming of the Christ to earth that principle has been brought by which everyone can consciously achieve his individualization. That is why Christ Jesus says: I am the true vine. By using alcohol, one prepares a breeding ground for numerous hosts of spiritual beings, just as a poorly cleaned room automatically becomes full of flies. (See as an example under: Asuras) [1]

Therefore, abstinence from alcohol is necessary, because it works from the outside on the ego that is active in the blood. Meditation draws the spirit upwards, loosens the connection with the physical body; alcohol draws it downwards and solidifies it in the same. What the other plants save up solely for the young germ, all the motive power that is otherwise saved up only for the young germ and does not pour out into the rest of the plant, this also pours out in a certain way into the pulp of the grape; so that through the so-called fermentation, through the transformation of that which is poured into the grape, which has been brought to the highest tension in the grape itself, something is produced which in fact has a power within the plant which can only be compared occultly with the power which the ego of man has over the blood. In the production of alcohol that is produced in another kingdom of nature which man must produce when he acts on the blood from his ego. The consequence of this is that through alcohol we introduce something into our organism which acts from the other side in the same way as the ego acts on the blood.

We have absorbed a counter-ego in alcohol, an ego that is directly a fighter against the actions of our spiritual ego. So that we unleash an inner war and basically condemn everything that emanates from the ego to powerlessness when we oppose it with a counter-fighter in alcohol. Real spiritual development can only proceed easily if we do not create this opposition. [2] Alcohol prevents that which is the living body from rotting. But this is the effect of alcohol, which is produced in man himself; it prevents the rotting of certain substances which man needs. So that man has actually prescribed through his inner organization how much alcohol he should have. If, however, he drinks too much alcohol, then too much is conserved, and that which is actually supposed to decay is conserved and preserved in the body. 348.222Since mankind began to drink wine, the idea of reincarnation quickly became obscured and finally disappeared from the general consciousness. Alcohol obscures the memory, darkens it in its inner depths; an eclipse of the power of memory in the etheric body. [3] This is the deeper reason for the worship of Bacchus, the god of wine and drunkenness. This was the popular form of the Dionysus of the ancient mysteries, which in itself had a completely different meaning. This is also the symbolic meaning of the wedding at Cana. [4]

Alcohol only appeared at a certain time in world and human history. And it will disappear from it again. Alcohol was the bridge that led from the generic ego from the group ego to the independent, individual ego. Man would never have found the transition from the group ego to the individual ego without the material effect of alcohol. [5]

Sources:

[1] GA 266/1: From the Contents of the Esoteric Lessons. Volume I (1904-1909)

[2] GA 145: What significance does the occult development of man have for his sheaths (physical body, etheric body, astral body) and his self? (1913)

[3], [4] GA 94: Cosmogony. Popular Occultism. The Gospel of John. Theosophy on the basis of the Gospel of John (1906)

[5] GA 100: Human Development and the Knowledge of Christ. Theosophy and Rosicrucianism - The Gospel of John (1907)

Alcohol and earth influence

We absorb what the starry world sends us when it snows in winter and develop it in the right way. To do this, however, we need our soul to work on our organs in the right way, otherwise our organs will atrophy on earth. If we load our bodies with absinthe (or other alcoholic beverages), then we exclude ourselves from the starry world. Then we no longer absorb any influences from the starry world. And the consequence of this is that we ruin our bodies because we expose them entirely to the influence of the earth. [1]

Sources:

Quotes: [1] GA 348: On Health and Illness. Foundations of a spiritual-scientific theory of the senses (1922/1923)

Alcohol and the human group soul

Alcohol has not been in mankind for nothing. In a future humanity it will be possible to say in the fullest sense of the word that alcohol had the task of dragging man so far down into matter that man became egoistic, and that alcohol made him claim the ego for himself and no longer put it at the service of the whole people. So the opposite service that the group soul rendered to humanity was rendered by alcohol. It has deprived people of the ability to feel at one with the whole in the higher worlds. Hence the cult of Dionysus, which cultivates living together in a kind of external intoxication. An absorption in a whole, without seeing this whole. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 103: The Gospel of John (1908)

Alcohol, the Etheric body, and Reincarnation

There were ages in the history of man when wine was not known. In the days of the Vedas it was practically unknown. In the ages when there was no drinking of alcohol, the idea of previous existences and of many lives was universally held; nobody doubted its truth. As soon as man began to drink wine, however, the knowledge of re-incarnation rapidly faded away, ultimately to disappear entirely from the consciousness of man. It existed only among the Initiates who took no alcohol.

Alcohol has a peculiarly potent effect on the human organism, especially on the etheric body which is the seat of memory. Alcohol obscures the intimate depths of memory. 'Wine induces forgetfulness' — so the saying goes. The forgetfulness is not only superficial or momentary, but deep and permanent and there is a deadening of the power of memory in the etheric body. That is why, little by little, men lost their instinctive knowledge of reincarnation when they began to drink wine.

Belief in reincarnation and the law of Karma had a great influence not only upon the individual but upon his social sentiment. It helped him to bear with the inequalities of human life. When the unhappy Egyptian labourer was working at the Pyramids, or the lowest caste of Hindu building the gigantic Indian temples in the heart of the mountains, he said to himself that another existence would compensate him for labours patiently accomplished, that his master if he were good had already undergone similar tests or that he would have to undergo them in the future if he were unjust and cruel.

As the era of Christianity drew near, man was destined to enter upon an epoch of concentration upon earthly efforts; he was to work towards the amelioration of earthly existence, the development of intellect, of logical and scientific understanding of Nature. The knowledge of reincarnation, therefore, was to be lost for two thousand years and wine was the means to this end.

Source: GA 94 – An Esoteric Cosmology – VII – The Gospel of St. John – Paris, 31st May 1906

https://rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA094/English/SGP1978/19060531p01.html

2
Asuras

Just as man today consists of a physical body, etheric body, astral body and I, Manas, Buddhi and Atman, so these beings who inhabited Saturn, whom we can compare with today's earthly man in his relationship to the earth (these beings went through their human stage at that time), consist of I, Manas, Buddhi, Atman, the Holy Spirit, the Word or Son and the Father (see: three Logoi). Theosophical language calls them Asuras (Archai). They are the ones who have implanted the independence, the I-consciousness and the I-feeling into this physical structure of the (later) human body from the beginning. You would not be able to use your eye in the service of the ego if your faculty had not already been prepared in such a way that you could place it in the service of the ego. Thus these limbs have been prepared by the spirits of the ego - also called the spirits of egoism (Archai). They have given us what is wisest when it is properly trained. But everything that is highest is turned into its opposite and has the most harmful and corrupting effect if it is not properly trained. Man could never reach that high level which we call independent human dignity if these spirits had not implanted the sense of self in him.

There have always been beings who have taken the evil path. These beings, who today are far above human beings, whom we look up to as the most sublime that can exist, have placed their ego in the service of self-denial, of sacrifice; the others have selfishly pursued their ego. We carry within us the effects of those spirits of the ego who have taken the good path (Archai) in their striving for freedom and human dignity, and we carry within us the germ of evil, because the beings (Asuras) who fell away at that time (Saturn) have continued to work. This contrast has always been felt. Christianity itself distinguishes between the Father God, whom Christianity regards as the highest ascended spirit of Saturn, and his adversary, the spirit of all evil entities and everything radically immoral, which fell away on Saturn at that time. [1]

The Asuras are spirits of the strongest egoism left behind in Saturn's evolution. These are the entities that strive towards the eighth sphere. They want to condense matter more and more, to compress it so that it cannot be spiritualized again, that is, returned to its original state. They are the dregs of the whole planetary evolution, which begins with Saturn and passes through the Sun, Moon, Earth, Jupiter, Venus and Vulcan. The Asuras already populate the moon and work from the moon on man, whom they want to pull down into the eighth sphere and thus snatch him away from the progressive development and its goal - the Christ. All those who aspire to the eighth sphere will eventually find their existence on a moon [of the future Jupiter]. [2]

While all the beings that were on the (old) sun were luminous, like everything that is a fixed star today, the old Saturn realm of those beings that had remained behind seemed like a dark enclosure, like dark places opposite the light, like dull caves within the body of the sun that disturbed its harmony. Particularly with regard to the aroma of the world, sensations interfered from the beings who had remained behind, spreading all kinds of bad smells. Our myth has retained this by saying that the devil stinks and leaves behind an evil odor. In the progress of the sun (to the present) a dark inclusion has really also been left behind, and the present sunspots are really the stragglers of the old Saturnian realm on the sun. [3] These ego beings of Saturn are also called the spirits of egoism. Egoism is something that has two sides, one excellent and one reprehensible. If egoism had not been implanted in the beings again and again on Saturn and on the following planets, then man would never have become an independent being who can say "I" to himself. The sum of power is already implanted in your body from Saturn, which stamps you as an independent being, which separates you from all other beings. For this the spirits of egoism, the Asuras (Archai), had to work. There are two kinds of them, apart from smaller shades. The one kind is that which has developed egoism in the noble, independent way, which has risen higher and higher in the development of the sense of freedom: this is the excellent independence of egoism. These spirits have guided humanity through all subsequent planets. They have become the educators of mankind to independence. Now there are spirits on every planet who have lagged behind in their development. They have remained stationary, they did not want to go any further. These are the difficult spirits of temptation; they tempt us to reprehensible egoism. Even today they are still around us, these evil spirits of Saturn. Everything that is bad has its power from these spirits. [4] The influences of Lucifer can never become as bad as the influences of Ahriman and those entities that are connected with the fire powers. [5]

The asuras - the evil ones - are entities that are one degree higher in their will to evil than the ahrimanic entities and two degrees higher than the luciferic ones. [6] Lucifer has anchored himself in the sentient soul; there he has crept in, there he sits. In the second member of the human soul, the intellectual soul, i.e. the reworked part of the etheric body, Ahriman has established himself. He is in there and leads man to false judgments about the material, leads him to error and sin and lies. In all this, for example, that man gives himself up to the illusion that matter is the right thing, we see the whisperings of Ahriman, of Mephistopheles. Thirdly, it is the turn of the consciousness soul, which consists in an unconscious reworking of the physical body. Today man is still basically working on this unconscious reworking of the physical body, on the consciousness soul. And in the time that will come now (1909), those spiritual entities that are called the asuras will creep into this consciousness soul and thus into what is called the human ego - for the ego merges into the consciousness soul. These will develop evil with a much more intense force than even the satanic powers of the Atlantean or even the Luciferian spirits of the Lemurian era. The evil that the Luciferic spirits brought to mankind at the same time as the blessing of freedom, they will all shed completely in the course of time on earth. The evil brought by the ahrimanic spirits can be cast off in the course of karmic law. But the evil brought by the asuric powers cannot be atoned for in this way. If the good spirits have given man pain and suffering, illness and death, so that he can develop upwards despite the possibility of evil, the good spirits have given the possibility of karma towards the ahrimanic powers in order to make up for the error - this will not be so easy towards the asuric spirits in the course of earthly existence. For these asuric spirits will cause that which is seized by them - and it is, after all, man's deepest innermost being, the soul of consciousness with the ego - that the ego unites with the sensuality of the earth. Piece by piece it will be torn out of the ego, and to the same extent as the asuric spirits settle in the consciousness soul, to the same extent must man leave pieces of his existence behind on earth. That which has fallen prey to the asuric powers will be irretrievably lost. Not that the whole man needs to fall prey to them, but pieces are cut out of the spirit of man by the asuric powers. [7] The one who enters the initiation and becomes clairvoyant is not confronted with external matter. As such, it is Maya. While in everyday life man is confronted by matter, prakriti, the soul that develops through yoga into initiation is confronted by the world of the asuras, the world of the demonic, against which he has to fight. Matter is what offers resistance; the asuras, the powers of darkness, become enemies. Only then does this soul become spiritually aware of itself, where it enters into battle against the demons, against the asuras (as a general term). [8]

The asuras only intervene in the fifth race. They are by far the most pernicious and mainly affect the sexual life, i.e. the physical body. The many sexual aberrations of the present (1906) are due to this strong influence. [9]

These asuric powers announce themselves in our age through the spirit that rules there and which we can call the spirit of mere life in sensuality and of oblivion of all real spiritual entities and spiritual worlds. Today they seduce people into a kind of theoretical materialism. But in the further course of time - and this is becoming more and more apparent through the wild passions of sensuality, which are descending more and more upon the earth - they will obscure man's view of the spiritual beings and spiritual powers. Man will know nothing and want to know nothing of a spiritual world. He will teach more and more not only that the highest moral ideas of man are only higher forms of animal instincts, that man is also descended from the animal in his whole being, but man will take this view seriously and live like it. This world-view will come without fail, and it will have in its wake that men with this world-view will also live like animals, will sink down into mere animal instincts and animal passions. And in some of the things that are now (1909) asserting themselves as wild orgies of purposeless sensuality, especially in the places of the great cities, we already see the grotesque hellish glow of those spirits which we call the asuric. [10]

The bad astral world is the domain of Lucifer, the bad lower devachan is the domain of Ahriman and the bad upper devachan is the domain of the asuras. If you push the light into the sub-material, i.e. one level lower than the material world (astral plane), electricity is created. If one pushes the chemistry still further down, into the bad lower devachanic world, magnetism arises. If we push that which lives in the harmony of the spheres even further down to the asuras on the bad upper devachan, then there is an even more terrible force that cannot be kept secret for much longer. We must imagine this force to be much, much stronger than the strongest electrical discharges. [11]

The middle of this century (1950) is a very significant time. One should feel the full gravity of responsibility when one is, as it were, chosen by external natural destiny to assume the reign of materialism - for it will be the reign of materialism - in the outer world on earth. For this reign of materialism at the same time carries within it the seed of destruction. The destruction that has begun will not stop. And to assume external dominion today means: to take over the forces of destruction, the forces of human sickness, to live in them. That which humanity will carry into the future will emerge from the new germ of the spirit. It will have to be nurtured. And the responsibility for this lies precisely with the side to which world domination falls. [12] Without the threefold structure, this rule over the world will result in the death of culture and cultural disease.

The first abyss is the lie, the degeneration of humanity through Ahriman. The second is selfishness, the degeneration of humanity through Lucifer. The third abyss is illness and death in the physical realm, and in the cultural realm: Cultural disease, cultural death. These are a gift of the asuras, just as lies are a gift of Ahriman, just as selfishness is a gift of Lucifer. Thus the third, which is worthily placed alongside the others, is a gift of the asuric powers. [13]

Sources:

[1], [3] GA 100: Human Development and Christ-Recognition. Theosophy and Rosicrucianism – The Gospel of John (1907)

[2], [9] GA 266/1: From the Contents of the Esoteric Hours. Volume I (1904-1909)

[4] GA 99: The Theosophy of the Rosicrucian (1907)

[5], [7], [10] GA 107: Spiritual Science of Man (1908/1909)

[6] GA 110: Spiritual Hierarchies and their Reflection in the Physical World. Zodiac, Planets, Cosmos (1909)

[8] GA 142: The Bhagavad Gita and the Epistles of Paul (1912/1913)

[11] GA 130: Esoteric Christianity and the Spiritual Leadership of Humanity (1911/1912)

[12], [13] GA 194: The Mission of Michael. The Revelation of the Real Secrets of Human Nature (1919)

Eighth sphere and asuras

Asuras are spirits of the strongest egoism that have remained behind in Saturn's evolution. These are the entities that strive towards the eighth sphere. They want to condense matter more and more, to compress it so that it cannot be spiritualized again, that is, returned to its original state. They are the dregs of the whole planetary development, which begins with Saturn and passes through the Sun, Moon, Earth, Jupiter, Venus and Vulcan.

The Asuras already populate the moon and work from the moon on man, whom they want to pull down into the eighth sphere and thus snatch him away from the progressive development and its goal - the Christ. All those who aspire to the eighth sphere will eventually find their existence on a moon (of the future Jupiter). [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 266/1: From the Contents of the Esoteric Hours. Volume I (1904-1909)

4
Adam Kadmon

Every sensual human being also contains a soul and a spiritual human being. However, man only has consciousness within the sensual, but the astral and the spiritual man also work in him; the soul and the spirit are also active in every human being. The human being originates from the Devachan. It was originally virgin matter from which man, when he still lived in the pure spiritual land, formed a body for himself. This earthly state of ours was preceded long ago by another life on our earth. Then people were still pure spirits, there was only spiritual reality. Then man first descended into the astral existence, not yet to physical reality. At that time he was still the Adam-Kadmon, that "pure" entity in which the physical world of impulses was not yet present. [1]

When we are between death and a new birth, our soul is busy putting our body together. The fact that the human being comes into being through heredity is only apparent. Through heredity only the outermost physical shell is clothed, but man must develop the form of his organs. When man approaches earthly life, he still has the sun and moon within him. But gradually the sun and moon shrink together. And then something detaches itself from the sun, and something from the moon. Now one then has - instead of having had sun and moon in oneself before - something before oneself that is a kind of image of sun and moon. Shining, glittering, you have before you two initially huge spheres, one of which is the spiritualized sun, the other sphere the spiritualized moon: one sphere in bright shining light, the other sphere glowing, more warm in itself, warming fiery and more holding the light to itself as if egotistically. These two spheres, which detach themselves from the cosmically transformed human being - from this Adam Kadmon that still exists today - these two spheres approach each other more and more. It is then said, when one comes down to earth: Sun and moon become one. [2]

In the past, the zodiac was not drawn in such a way that it was divided into its corresponding animal forms, but in such a way that the individual human limbs were drawn in relation to the respective regions. This is the great cosmic man who runs through all world legends and world myths. Think of the giant Ymir; of Adam Kadmon of the Kabbalah. [3]

Let us now imagine that man could also produce sounds, colors and other sensory perceptions as well as his own being. Then we have the human being who existed before the Lemurian race (see: Earth evolution) and who is called the "pure" human being. Man becomes impure because he does not produce his whole being himself, but incorporates others into his being. This pure man was called Adam Kadmon. When the Bible speaks of man at the beginning, it speaks of this pure man. Until Lemurian times, he led a supersensible existence. [4] Man always first carries within himself what he subsequently sees around him. Everything that exists around us at present emanated from us in a previous evolution, at a time when our being was still connected with the earth, the moon and the sun. In the Kabbalah, this cosmic being, from which the present human being and all the kingdoms of nature emerged, is called Adam Kadmon. This type of human being contained all the various forms of human beings that currently represent the nations and races. [5] The Adam Kadmon is this giant head that the earth once was. In reality, we must imagine that man was once the whole earth. And it was much more alive. Today the earth is a dead being, just as the human head is dying, and if we go back to this human head, which is there in the maternal body, it is alive through and through. It is as the earth once was. [6] We are all descended from a human being, he was the earth itself. Now, when the sun went out (of the earth), the earth died on one side, and the animals crawled out, just as the animals still crawl out when something has died. And on the other side the forces remained. Only now they were not stimulated from within by the sun, but from without, and man became small and could become many people. [7]

The Germanic (Norse) tribes had a legend in which it was said: The earth was once a giant man, the giant Ymir. In the first to third centuries, when Christianity already existed, you could find strange statues everywhere when you went to the fields in Asia or Africa; they were everywhere. And in these statues, people who could not yet read and write expressed how things used to be on earth. It was expressed in form, in sculpture, that the earth was once a living being. [8]

Sources:

[1] GA 88: On the astral world and the Devachan (1903-1904)

[2] GA GA 214: The secret of the Trinity. Man and his relationship to the spiritual world in the course of time (1922)

[3] GA 110: Spiritual hierarchies and their reflection in the physical world. Zodiac, planets, cosmos (1909)

[4] GA 93a: Basic elements of esotericism (1905)

[5] GA 94: Cosmogony. Popular occultism. The Gospel of John. Theosophy based on the Gospel of John (1906)

[6] - [8] GA 347: The knowledge of the human being according to body, soul and spirit. On early earth conditions (1922)

Adam Kadmon and Giant Ymir

In the very earliest stages of the evolution of Earth, when the Earth was in an etheric condition and not condensed to physical mineral matter, it would have appeared clairvoyantly as a cloud or fine mist consisting of ether points. These individual ether points are referenced as the primal occult 'atom' of the Earth, and each consisted of the archetype of the present human form, like the plant seed contains the archetype of the physical plant. In other words: each etheric seed point contained the spirit world archetype of what was to develop on Earth as Man. Ancient cultures and religions, from ancient clairvoyant wisdom, point to this earlier stage of evolution of the Earth when the human being was the entire Earth, or when the Earth was like a huge human being. In Asia this being was spoken of as Adam Kadmon, Germanic mythology and legends called it the giant Ymir. Ymir is a figure from Norse mythology that appears in the Edda, compiled in the 13th century from old traditional materials. Other names are Aurgelmir or Urgelmer. In the northern tradition, the giant Ymir is slayed/killed and from his parts, the Earths evolves. From his hairs the forests are made, from his bones the rocks, from his blood the streams and rivers, etc. (1905-GA090B on Germanic mythology) In later stages of human consciousness, people could no longer understand this and the Old Testament was misunderstood and incorrectly translated, which led to the individual Adam, instead of Adam Kadmon as the entire Earth.

Source: https://anthroposophy.eu/Adam_Kadmon_and_Giant_Ymir

Fine etheric mist cloud consisting of single ether points

.. If we look far back into the evolution of the Earth, we can say that our Earth has not always appeared as it does today. It did not have the firm mineral base of today; the mineral kingdom was not as it is today; the Earth did not bear the same plants and animals, and men were not in such a fleshly body as they have today; men had no bony system. All that was formed later. The farther we look back, the nearer we come to a condition which, if we could have observed it from cosmic distances, we would have seen as a mist, as a fine etheric cloud. This mist was much larger than our present Earth, for it extended as far as the outermost planets of our solar system and even farther. It included a far-reaching nebular mass, wherein was contained all that went into the formation of the earth, and also of the planets and even of the sun.

If we could have examined this mass of mist closely, if an observer could have approached it, it would have seemed to be composed entirely of fine etheric points. When we see a swarm of gnats from a distance, it looks to us like a single cloud; close-up, however, we see the single insects.

Thus, in the most remote past, the mass of our Earth would have appeared, although then it was not material in our sense but was condensed only to an etheric condition. This earth-formation consisted of single ether-points, but something special was connected with these ether-points.

Had the human eye been able to see these points, it would not have seen what the clairvoyant would have seen or what he actually sees now when he looks back.

[Comparison: clairvoyant view of the spiritual light-form in a seed of a wild rose]

...

If now, as in the previous example, the clairvoyant contemplated such an etheric point in the primeval substance, there would arise for him from the point (as from the seed in the previous example) a light-form, a beautiful form, which in reality is not there but rests slumbering in the point.

What is this form that the seer perceives, looking back at the primal earth atom? What is it that arises?

It is a form that is different from physical man, as different as is the archetype from the physical plant. It is the archetype of the present human form. At that time the human form slumbered spiritually in the etheric point, and the whole earth-evolution was necessary in order that what rested there might develop into present-day man.

Source: 1908-09-03-GA106

Synopsis

The Earth once was like a huge human head. The Earth received nourishment from the cosmos in the past and from the sun now. The head of the human embryo as picture of the Earth. The human being was at one time the whole earth. Why people are so small. We are all descended from one ancestor. Misinterpretations of the Old Testament ..

[The Tradition of Adam Kadmon and Giant Ymir]

It is interesting to note that, even though the Old Testament had been misunderstood and misinterpreted for a long time, not only Asian scholars spoke of Adam Kadmon as the human being who was the entire earth, but even the ancestors of modern Central European peoples, such as the Swiss, the Germans, and so forth had legends according to which the earth once was a huge human being, the Giant Ymir. They also believed that the earth was fertilized.

They spoke of the Earth as we would of a human being. This manner of speaking was no longer understood in later times because these correct mythical images were later replaced by the incorrect Latin interpretation of the Old Testament. The old Germanic tribes in Europe thought in pictures that came to them like dreams but were far closer to the truth. Those people drew from an ancient science that revealed knowledge through dreamlike images. Later on people misunderstood the Old Testament and spoke of the small individual Adam instead of Adam Kadmon, the entire Earth.

Thus we can gain great respect for the ancient, imaginative, albeit dreamlike knowledge. At one time, such knowledge existed, but it was then wiped out. This should not surprise us, for this extinction occurred at a certain time. In Asia Minor, in the Near East, in North Africa, southern Europe, Greece and Italy in the first, second, and third centuries, you could come upon strange statues in the fields everywhere. They were the means by which the illiterate people of those times expressed their beliefs about the past of the Earth. In these statues they expressed that the Earth was once a living being.

Later other people became very angry and, in just a short time, they simply destroyed these statues, which could have taught us a great deal. The monuments that survived are the least important ones, for in the first few centuries of our era people knew very well which statues were important and had them destroyed. Nonetheless, humanity at one time had a wonderful knowledge of these things, dreamlike though it was.

It is also extremely interesting that instead of thinking as we do today people then were actually dreaming, though they did more of it at night than during the day. Everything we learn of this ancient human wisdom is permeated with the realization that these people observed a lot during the night; for instance, shepherds in the fields observed much during the night.

The ancient Germanic tribes, and others as well, possessed this wisdom of the Earth as a giant human being, who existed for quite some time. The human being did not become small all at once but only gradually, until he became what he is now.

Source: 1922-09-30-GA347

5
Man as a Centaur

Our physical body was only reshaped, transformed, metamorphosed during the earth evolution. Much of it was already present not only in its structure, but also in its development, in its formation during the old lunar evolution. What was added during the earth evolution is not really visible, if you take "visible" in the true sense of the word. Actually, only the position has changed during the earth's evolution: We have become upright beings walking vertically on the surface of the earth.

Thus we can say in terms of spiritual science: the image of the centaur, man and horse, or man and some animal form in general, is actually intended to represent imaginatively the human physical body as it would turn out if one were to add to its present upright position what man was during the lunar evolution, when he did not have this upright position. In such images, in such imaginations, which mythology has preserved, lie hidden infinitely deep wisdoms. [1]

The further one goes back in the development of mankind, the more one also sees that our form, our form of the past, has to a certain extent been preserved for the clairvoyant view in the contemplation of our self during sleep, during the night. And so it also happens that man, when he looks at himself, gets to know his physical corporeality in an infinitely finer - one might say - ethereal corporeality. His form is more like a vivid dream image than the form of flesh and blood as which man appears to himself today. Thus we must acquaint ourselves with the idea that the self and the astral body, when they are outside the human entity, hardly see the head. This becomes quite shadowy; it is not completely obliterated, but it becomes quite shadowy. In contrast, the rest of the human organization becomes clearer. It also becomes shadowy, but it becomes so that the human being does not appear to be made of flesh and blood, but has the distinct impression that he has a more powerful organization, so that one is completely reminded of the form of the centaur. Only that which appears upwards as a human continuation of the centaur, showing the human countenance, is quite shadowy; that, on the other hand, which does not correspond to any animal form of today, but which reminds one in a certain respect of animal forms, that gains power, and one says to oneself: For the spiritual sight this is stronger, denser even than the present form of flesh and blood.

At another point in our development we would come to the figure of the sphinx. So at night we become a very peculiar figure. If we now grasp this continuation downwards into the clairvoyant eye, which reminds us of an animal being, then we get to know something of which we gain a very definite impression. The impressions, these inner experiences are actually the essentials. The pictures are important, but the inner experiences are even more important. One gains a certain impression, so that afterwards one knows: that which actually drives you to your purely personal interests during the day, which inoculates purely personal interests into your soul, comes from what you see at night as your quasi-animal continuation. By day you do not see them; but they are in you as power. These are the forces that draw you down, so to speak, and seduce you into personal interests. - And if you develop this impression more and more, then you come to recognize who Lucifer really is in our evolution. [2] The further we turn our clairvoyant gaze back towards the time to which the Paradise imagination corresponds, the more beautiful the structure becomes, which is actually only reminiscent of the animalistic for later times. And if we even go back to the paradisiacal, where the situation is such that the animal continuation of man is as if torn away from man himself and multiplied into bull, lion, eagle, then we may say that these figures, which we pronounce with these names for those ancient times, can also be for us in a certain respect the symbols of beauty. These figures become more and more beautiful. And if we then go still further back in time, we come back to the time in which Lucifer's true form appears to us, so to speak, in noble beauty, just as he wanted to preserve himself in the evolution from the old moon to the earth. [3]

The people before the 8th century BC were such that they still had a living connection with their previous incarnation. If they did not exactly belong to the Hebrew language tribes - there it was somewhat different - but if they belonged to the wide circle of the so-called heathen peoples, it was so that what they experienced in their souls was definitely for them the result of previous incarnations, and that they were clearly aware that what they experienced in their souls was the spiritual experience of spiritual worlds. For such people there was no doubt that the greater part of what they were was not inherited from their father and mother, but had descended from spiritual worlds and had united with what came from their father and mother. Actually, all human beings presented themselves as centaurs; that which had descended from the spiritual world had been superimposed on that which had arisen from carnal heredity. [4]

The impressions of the senses can be imagined as if they were spread out before us like a carpet. Of course, we have to imagine this carpet as being filled with the impressions of hearing, with all the impressions of the twelve senses. To a certain extent, this sensory carpet covers a reality that lies behind it. We must not imagine this as the natural scientist imagines the atomic world, for example, or as a certain philosophical school of thought speaks of the thing in itself, but of a spiritual reality lying behind sensory perception, in which we ourselves are embedded, but to which man's ordinary consciousness, which he carries between birth and death, does not reach.

At the moment when we would, so to speak, unravel the sensory tapestry at a first stage, so that we would see more outwardly than the multiplicity of sensory impulses - what would we see at this first stage of the spiritual unraveling of the sensory tapestry? What we would see at first is a sum of forces that all work to impulse our entire life from conception to death. We would not see our life in the individual events if we were to unravel the sensory tapestry, but in its entirety. We would not find something completely alien at first, we would find ourselves at the first stage of unraveling the sensory perceptions - but not ourselves as we are at this moment, but ourselves as we are in this whole life between birth and death. This life, which does not enter our physical body and therefore cannot be perceived with physical senses, this life enters our etheric body, which is essentially an expression of this life that we would see if we were to switch off the senses, the sense perceptions.

If, as it were, the sensory carpet were to be torn up - and it is torn up when man ascends to see - then man finds himself as he is designed for this earthly incarnation. But as I said, the senses are not suited to perceiving this. What is suitable for perceiving this? Man already has it, but he has it at such a stage of development that there can be no question of real perception at present. What would be perceived there does not penetrate any eye, any ear, does not penetrate any sense organs, but is inhaled, sucked in with the breath. And that which etherically underlies our lungs - there can be no question of the physical lungs, for the lungs, as they are, are not a direct organ of perception - that which etherically underlies our lungs is actually an organ of perception, but for the human being between birth and death it is not a useful organ of perception of that which is inhaled. [5]

Our deeper reality lies in the air we inhale, in relation to each breath as it fits into the overall rhythm of life from birth to death. It is only so arranged that what underlies the whole pulmonary system is undeveloped in man on the physical plane, has not progressed to the ability to perceive. If that which actually builds up our pulmonary system, that which etherically underlies it, were examined and correctly recognized, then it would basically turn out to be quite the same as what physically, for the physical world, is our brain with the sense organs. In that which underlies our pulmonary system, we have a brain at an earlier stage of development. And you are not mistaken if you imagine that, in addition to the physical head that the human being carries, there is also an etheric head that is not yet useful as an organ of perception in ordinary life, but which has the capacity to perceive that which lies behind the etheric body, as creating this etheric body, that which we enter when we pass through the gate of death. We then discard the etheric body, but what creates it (the formative forces), what produces it, that is what we enter. [6]

Thus we are placed in the entire visible cosmos, which is now based on the invisible cosmos. We enter this invisible cosmos when we pass through the gate of death. Rhythmic life is the life that underlies our emotional life. We enter the rhythmic life of the cosmos in the time we live through between death and a new birth. This rhythmic life lies as our etheric life spread out behind the sensory carpet. At the moment when one comes to the seeing consciousness, one would see this world rhythm, which is, so to speak, a rhythmically undulating sea of worlds, now astral in nature. And in this rhythmically undulating astral sea the so-called dead are also present, the beings of the higher hierarchies are present, that which belongs to us is present, but which lies below the threshold, from which only the feelings that are dreamed away, the impulses of will, which are asleep in their own reality, are wafted up. [7] (See also: Self Higher).

However, it is a head that we carry within us as the head of a second human being, it is a head - but what belongs to this head is also a body, which is initially an animal body. A real centaur. The centaur is already a truth. It is an ethereal truth. The significant thing is that a relatively great wisdom plays in this being, a wisdom that relates to the whole cosmic rhythm. This head is much wiser than our physical head. All human beings carry within them a very wise other human being, the centaur. But at the same time, this centaur, despite his wisdom, is equipped with all the wild instincts of animalism.

Now you will understand the wise guidance of the world. It could not give man a consciousness that on the one hand is powerful and understands the rhythm of the world, but on the other hand is untamed, living in wild impulses. But what is animalistic about this centaur in one incarnation is tamed (for the) next incarnation by passing through the world of world rhythm between death and new birth. What underlies our lung system in the present incarnation, what is hidden there, appears as your physical head, which is then, however, muffled down to its limited sensual knowledge, and it appears in the next incarnation as the whole human being now also tamed according to the wild instincts. What the centaur is in this incarnation is the sensually perceptive human being in the next incarnation. Now you will also understand why I have said that between death and a new birth man has as his lowest realm the animal realm, in whose powers he must become a master. He must participate in transforming the centaur, the animal in him, into the human for the next incarnation. [8]

Sources:

[1] GA 169: World Being and Ego (1916)

[2], [3] GA 145: What significance does the occult development of man have for his sheaths (physical body, etheric body, astral body) and his self? (1913)

[4] GA 191: Social Understanding from Spiritual Scientific Knowledge (1919)

[5] - [8] GA 179: Historical Necessity and Freedom. Influences of Fate from the World of the Dead (1917)

Centaur of Greek mythology

If it were not for the animals around us, which are represented by the equine nature, man would never have been able to acquire intelligence. Man felt this in earlier times. Therefore, when the new culture arose in ancient India, it was the horse that played a mysterious role in the cult, in the service of the gods, and everything that is connected to the horse in terms of customs can be traced back to this fact. Man grew out of a form that still had within it, so to speak, that which is embodied in the horse, and in the form of the centaur, art still depicted a man as he was connected with this animal. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 104: The Apocalypse of John (1908)

6
Christ

The harmony of the spheres, that which lives in the ether of sound (see: types of ether), can only be experienced by man when he works his way up through initiation, or when a solar being descends in order to communicate it to some human being who is chosen as an instrument of development for other human beings. For such a person the sun begins to sound, the harmonies of the spheres begin to become audible. - And above the ether of sound lies the ether of life. And just as the word, the sound or sense, underlies the mere sound as a higher content, as something inner, more soulful, so also connected with the ether of life is sense, word, the same thing that was called "Honover" in later Persian, and what St. John the Evangelist calls the "Logos", as a meaningful sound that is inherent in the solar being. It is not a mere myth, but a literal truth, that Zarathustra also received his instruction through the word of the sun. [1]

Moses (a reincarnated disciple of Zarathustra) is supposed to prophetically proclaim a higher God who is within the God of Abraham's father, but like a higher principle. What is his name? "God said to Moses: I am the 'I-am'!" There the Logos calls out his name, there he calls out that which can first be understood of him through the mind, through the intellect. Now let us look at the external sign through which the Logos trickles down to the Israelites, as far as they can grasp him purely conceptually, in thought. This external sign is the "manna" of the desert. Manna is the same word as manas, the spirit self. Thus the first hint of the spirit-self flows into that humanity which has gradually attained ego-consciousness. But that which lives and comes in manas itself may be called something else. It is not merely that which one can know, but a power that one can receive oneself. When the Logos merely calls his name, one must understand him, grasp him with reason. When the Logos becomes flesh and appears within humanity, it is an impulse of power that is brought among men, that lives not only as teaching and concept, but that is contained in the world as an impulse of power in which man can participate. He is not called manna, but the "bread of life", which is the technical term for "buddhi" or "spirit of life" [2]

Christ is nothing other than the embodiment of the Logos, the six other Elohim, who were preceded by the one, the Yahweh-God. And this one figure of Jesus of Nazareth, in whom the Christ or the Logos was incarnated, therefore brings into human history itself that which previously only ever streamed down to earth from the sun, that which is only contained in sunlight: "The Logos became flesh. [3]

It is only because it is the task of earthly existence to lead men down in their spiritual activity into the earthly world that the Christ must appear in man, in sensuous embodiment. Therefore, according to Plato, the great Greek philosopher, the world soul is laid out in the form of a cross through the universe and stretched out over the earthly world body. That is what Plato said. It is a symbol that the initiate knows in its deepest meaning. [4]

Christ did not leave behind any records like other great teachers of humanity. His task was to live these teachings that already existed, to live them in an exemplary way for humanity and thus to free the mystery teachings in order to bring the greatest possible mass of humanity to faster spiritual evolution. Thus he made the greatest sacrifice for humanity: his light spirit descended into the darkest matter. [5]

There is a ruling, weaving Word of Creation, there is a rendition of the ruling, weaving Word of Creation in the Vedic documents. - The Word is the creative in the world; it is revealed in the Vedas. This is part of the Krishna doctrine. [6] In a different form it confronts us again, in a more concrete, in a living way, in a being itself that is conceived walking over the earth, embodying the divine word of creation. The Vedas: an abstract approach to humanity - the divine Logos of which the Gospel of John speaks to us: alive and the creative word itself! [7]

Sources:

[1] GA 123: The Gospel of Matthew (1910)

[2], [3] GA 103: The Gospel of John (1908)

[4], [5] GA 88: On the Astral World and the Devachan (1903-1904)

[6], [7] GA 142: The Bhagavad Gita and the Epistles of St. Paul (1912/1913)

Christ - Aspect of the Cosmos

In reality, in this figure of Jesus of Nazareth, who was walking around in Palestine, lived the entire spiritual central force, the central force of the sun, and the outer physical appearance of Jesus was a Maya. Therefore, everything he did was connected with the great events of the macrocosm. Let us note the following: We find mentioned throughout the Gospel of Mark the fact that the Christ healed when the sun had set, or before the sun had risen. [1] With the appearance of the Christ the first impulse is given that what otherwise shines down physically and bodily on the earth with the sun also radiates spiritually inwardly. And the light that will shine through man from within as spiritual light, as Christ-light, will become ever greater, just as the outer sunlight radiates around him from without. This will be man's future, that he will not only look at the sun with his outer eyes and feel its glory, but that he will also revive the spiritual sense of the sun in his inner being. When he is able to do this, he will fully understand what actually happened on earth in the figure we call the Christ Jesus. Only slowly and gradually will man be able to understand this. [2]

The Greeks, for example, still retained in their whole world view the possibility of seeing behind the sun the two other suns, the spiritual and the mental sun. And it was only because the Mystery of Golgotha was not immersed purely in Greek wisdom and Greek feeling, but in Roman wisdom and Roman feeling, that the knowledge of the connection between Christ and the spiritual sun was broken. The Christian Fathers of the Church and the Christian Doctors of the Church in particular had to deal with this, to veil this mystery of the sun, to make it forgotten. A veil, as it were, was to be spread over the deep, significant, comprehensive wisdom of the connection between Christ and the mystery of the sun through the continuing development of Christianity, as it is called. The institution that the Church experienced through Romanism was particularly suited to letting people know as little as possible about the mystery of Christ. The Church was thus an institution for keeping the mystery of Christ secret. [3]

If the connection between the sun and solar power and Christ and Christ power is not recognized again, then the world will not always be able to be easily connected to the spiritual. But therein lies one of the main tasks of spiritual science. [4] The sun would never have been condensed into an aerial substance if, during the ancient solar evolution, that entity which descended again with the dove at John's baptism in the Jordan had not separated from the sun in an aerial body and not merely in an etheric body. So when we look at the sun, we have to say that what in the sun are impulses of heat, light and chemistry, what are impulses of life, are also connected with the other entities (of the sun), which are only the representations of the lower forms of the gods. What is gaseous in the sun is in fact the body of the Christ. The sun as a ball of air or gas outside in the world space is the original body of the Christ, who in union with the other upper gods, however, was a god figure related to the earth being. [5] (See also: Ahura Mazdao).

Christ is nothing other than the embodiment of the Logos, the six other Elohim, who were preceded by the one, the Yahweh-God. And this one figure of Jesus of Nazareth, in whom the Christ or the Logos was incarnated, therefore brings into human life, into human history itself, that which formerly only flowed down from the sun to the earth, that which is only contained in sunlight: "The Logos became flesh". [6] The highest peak of supersensible observation consists in recognizing Christ as the directing power in the spiritual world. The more the soul develops supersensible powers of cognition, the closer it comes to the Christ entity. [7]

The Christ is such a powerful entity that it remains incomprehensible even to the highest clairvoyant consciousness. However high the initiate may rise, he comprehends only a small part of him. We, who live 2000 years after him, are only at the beginning of understanding Christ. A higher realization of his nature is reserved for humanity in the future, when more intimate impulses of will will be awakened in it. There is a difference between Buddha's teaching and Christ's power as there is between an art connoisseur in front of a painting by Raphael and Raphael himself. Buddha prepared souls for what Christ was to bring. In the grand scheme of things, his preparatory work is the most significant that has ever been accomplished. [8]

And so we finally look up (after all the levels of the hierarchies) to a high entity that goes beyond all that we have discussed (from the Angeloi to the Seraphim), to the Christ entity itself, which brings to earth something that has nothing to do with the individual human being, but with the guidance of all mankind. And man must find his own way to the Christ; for he is only forced to find himself by the elemental forces, Archai; he must come to the Christ voluntarily. [9] This Christ-being is the leader of those spiritual beings who, when the sun separated from the earth, went out of the earth with the sun and founded a higher scene for themselves in order to work on the earth from this sun, i.e. from outside. [10]

That which in the language of the holy Rishis is called Vishvakarman, in that of Zarathustra Ahura Mazdao, in that of Egyptian culture, if one really understands what lies behind the name, Osiris, and that which in the language of the fourth cultural period is called Christ, has shone in through the gate of the Sun-Spirit of Wisdom, Kyriotetes. The entrance for the spirits of the higher hierarchies (probably of the super-hierarchical being) was the spirit of wisdom, the sun spirit of wisdom. [11] When the Christ of the Gospel of John is described, he is described as acting like an entity that makes use of the realm of the wisdom-filled cherubim. If you describe him in the sense of the Gospel of Luke, then you are describing what springs from the heart of Christ as the warm fire of love. The love fire of the seraphim flows through the world, and it was communicated to our earth through Christ Jesus. When we describe that Christ "was" and "is" in our earthly existence, when we consider him in all his power, which can be described as "working through the kingdom of thrones" - this is the third characteristic of Christ Jesus described to us by the writer of the Gospel of Mark. [12]

The Christ differs quite radically from other beings that take part in the earth's development. He is a being of a completely different order. He is a being who, anticipating the lunar evolution, remained behind during the old solar evolution out of a certain sure, far superhuman wisdom. The Christ was not directly connected with the earth evolution, but with the sun evolution. He was a macrocosmic being from the beginning of the earth evolution, a being which is therefore exposed to completely different evolutionary conditions than the microcosmic beings. This macrocosmic Christ-being had developed the macrocosmic fourth principle, the macrocosmic ego, outside of the earthly. Thus the Christ-being is a being that in a certain respect resembles man, except that man is microcosmic and has expressed his four principles microcosmically, thus also has his ego microcosmically as earth ego, but the Christ as world ego. But his development had proceeded in such a way that he was just great and important through the full development of this ego, which he brought down to earth. And he did not have the fifth macrocosmic principle and not the sixth macrocosmic principle, for he will develop these so that he can give them to man, on Jupiter and Venus. The Christ is therefore an entity of four-membered nature - up to his macrocosmic ego - just as man himself is such a being microcosmically. Now each principle of the macrocosm and the microcosm has an intimate relationship to the corresponding other. Thus we have three classes of beings at the beginning of the earth's development: Human beings who are to receive their fourth principle fully formed on earth, a class of Luciferic entities who are to form their sixth, and a class of Luciferic entities who are to form their seventh principle, who thus stand higher than human beings in that they are to form the sixth and seventh principles. But in this respect they also rise above the Christ. It will not be the Christ who, let us say, will stimulate people in the future to express something other than the actual ego, the innermost human being to ever higher and higher levels. It will be the Luciferian spirits who will then lead man beyond himself in a certain respect. In practical terms, this will be realized in the future in such a way that through the absorption of the Christ principle into the human nature, this nature will be deepened more and more, this human nature will absorb more and more light and love within its own being, that the human nature will have to feel light and love as something that is intrinsic to it. The internalization of the human soul into infinite depths will be the gift of the Christ impulse. The other spirits, who have higher principles than the Christ, even if only of a microcosmic nature, will in a certain way lead man beyond himself. The Christ will internalize people, but also make them humble; the Luciferic spirits will lead people beyond themselves, make them clever, clever, ingenious, but in a certain way also make them arrogant, teach them that they can become something superhuman already during their development on earth. [13]

What is the lowest part of this Christ entity? From below it is the etheric body. This means that once the human being has transformed his entire astral body through the spirit self, Manas, and will work into the etheric body, then he will work in this etheric body in an element in which the Christ has already worked in the same way. The Christ gives an impulse of a mighty kind, which works into the future, and which man only comes to when he approaches the working of his etheric body in a conscious way. [14] Christ says: "I am the way, the truth and the life." - Christ is the personification of the power that changes the etheric body. [15]

In that we as human beings carry within us the possibility of development into the spirit man, Atma, into the life spirit, Buddhi, into the spirit self, Manas, we thus carry within us something which we must develop beyond the earthly, which we must develop in such a way that the earthly gives us no guidance. [16] When we look longingly for something extraterrestrial, because we have to say to ourselves: To become fully human, to unfold all that in us which we must develop as manas, buddhi, atma in the future, then we must look away from the earthly to that which has come into the earthly from the extraterrestrial. We must look to the Christ and say to ourselves: The Christ has brought into the earth those non-earthly forces which can stimulate us to develop what the earth itself can never stimulate us to do. And we must grasp with our whole human being that which initially confronts us more in concepts, in ideas. We must learn to recognize Christ as the Saviour of our humanity. We must learn to recognize him as the being who makes it possible that we need not, one could say, remain united with the earthly, that we need not be buried on earth for all eternity, so to speak, and that what could develop in us beyond the earth would have to remain undeveloped. When we feel the Christ as the guide to our full humanity, then we feel the Christ-power within us. And we should actually realize that we can never seriously speak of our development into Manas, Buddhi, Atma, without becoming conscious of it: Talking about these things only makes sense if we appeal to the Christ, because the Christ is that which can develop more in us than the earth can give us. [17]

That which is knowledge must become a personal matter. The libraries may have to shrink and people must carry what is in the libraries more in their own souls. Spirit-self, manas can only emerge from this personalization of knowledge. We must in turn take back into our personality that which is knowledge. We must carry it within us. [18]

The spiritual man who experiences the spirit within himself is that which was also the deeper content of the Christ. The person then experiences the Christ, lives with the Christ, shares in him. Christ is the same as Buddhi. [19] The Christ-entity already animated the great prophets. It was a well-known entity in the older mysteries, and everywhere reference was always made to him who was to come. It was still possible that he could embody himself like a kind of subconsciousness in the Buddha. But walking on earth he could only embody himself when a physical body and an etheric body and an astral body were specially prepared. The Christ had the greatest power of effect, but he could only embody himself when a physical body, an etheric body and an astral body had been completely purified and cleansed by another entity. And so the embodiment of the Christ could only happen in such a way that a being appeared who had developed to such a high level. That was Jesus of Nazareth. It is necessary to have tremendous powers in order to purify one's bodies so that one can leave them viable. Jesus of Nazareth had to be an extraordinarily high individuality to be able to do this. [20]

Thus, by becoming human, the Christ-being was prepared to make the great sacrifice - for the Christ-being this was a great sacrifice - of using only specifically human powers within a human body and expressing its entire connection with the divine through specifically human powers. [21]

The Christ-entity had descended from the spiritual heights and was now bound to the abilities of the three bodies. It would therefore be wrong for anyone to imagine that the Christ, because he now belonged to a higher world from which he had descended, could have seen the higher world immediately, could have had insight into it. The Christ-entity had all kinds of abilities, but in the three shells of Jesus of Nazareth it only had the abilities that corresponded to the three shells, the three bodies of Jesus of Nazareth. That is why they had to be prepared in such a complicated way, because the abilities of these three shells were, however, high abilities that meant more than the corresponding abilities of all other people on earth. But the Christ was bound to them. [22]

The development that Jesus of Nazareth showed, this stage of development, came from the fact that the Zarathustra individuality dwelt in him. But this human nature is abandoned by the Zarathustra individuality (at John's baptism). That is why, as soon as the Christ-individuality took possession of it, this human nature sent towards it everything that otherwise comes out of human nature: the tempter (see below). That is why the Christ was able to go through all the despair and sorrow described to us as the events on the Mount of Olives. What the Christ-bearer was, is true man, is not an adept! [23]

The greatest misunderstanding of the Christ-life is to apply the processes of initiation to the Christ-life as if the Christ-life had undergone an initiation during the earth evolution. It is therefore necessary, when speaking of the Christ-life, always to make it very clear that the terms used must never be used in the same sense as in the old or any other initiation, but in an absolutely physical-earthly sense, as referring to a history outside the initiation. [24] Christ himself could initiate; but in the same sense as one must speak of Lazarus being initiated by the Christ, one cannot say that the Christ was initiated on earth. It cannot be said in the same sense. Instead of initiation, there is John's baptism in the Jordan. But if John's baptism were the corresponding act of initiation, then it would be described differently; then it would be described in such a way that the Christ would stand before us as the one to be initiated and a far more exalted initiator would carry out the initiation. However, the instrument is not a higher initiator, but John the Baptist, who, according to the facts, must not be placed higher than Christ Jesus. One should therefore also avoid speaking of it as if the Christ had passed through a stage of birth, infancy or baptism or transfiguration or revival in the same sense as another initiate has passed through such stages. For at the same moment that one applies the terms birth, baptism, transfiguration, ascension to Christ in the same way, one has completely misunderstood Christianity. The life of Christ is different from the life of another initiate in that the Christ appeared as such from the very beginning, in that we are told of his earthly deeds, but we are not told that he was influenced by a daimonion like Socrates, or that he sat under the Bodhi tree like Buddha, or that he had visions like Mohammed. [25]

When it is said today that the Christ-entity can no longer embody itself in a fleshly body, it must be said that this has never actually been claimed at all. For even then the carnal body was the shell of Jesus of Nazareth, into which the spiritual Christ-entity enters. It is not like other individualities who build their own bodies; rather, the Christ-entity only later descended into the body that Jesus of Nazareth had prepared. However, it then merged with him. [26] For men the Christ appeared; for a certain spiritual world he disappeared. And as he passed through the resurrection, he appeared, I would say, shining from the earth to certain spiritual beings of the extraterrestrial like a star, which now shines to them into the spiritual world from the earth. [27]

The Christ, however, in his peculiar nature, is not resolved in the fact that he was in the shell of Jesus of Nazareth for three years, but he is also the leader and guide of all the beings of the higher hierarchies. Just as he entered into the development of mankind through the Mystery of Golgotha, so there were also events for the entities of the higher hierarchies, that is, the Christ became something in the course of time for all these entities of the higher hierarchies. The Christ was the teacher of the Angeloi during the Egyptian-Chaldean period. At that time his impulse flowed into them, and now they appear on a higher level of development. They are now working down from the higher worlds as christened beings. In the same way the Archangeloi, who were not yet Christed at the time when they inspired Zarathustra and his disciples, have in the meantime absorbed the Christ-impulse and will be the spiritual leaders of mankind in the sixth cultural period which will follow ours. And those Archai, who were the inspirers of the holy Rishis, have meanwhile also absorbed the Christ-impulse and will be the spiritual leaders of the seventh post-Atlantean cultural period. Thus we see that for the beings of these four Hierarchies, for the human beings, Angeloi, Achangeloi, Archai, the Mystery of Golgotha, the Christ-event, means the highest that we can speak of in our cosmic development as human beings. How did the beings of whom we have said that they have fallen behind actually fall behind? They have fallen behind for the reason that they have rejected the Christ impulse. While the Angeloi of the Egyptian-Chaldean period, who were filled with the Christ-impulse, are now instilling such forces into the development of mankind as will lead mankind upwards to spiritual life, to spirituality, the others, who have rejected the Christ-impulse, seek to give to mankind as inspiration all that we can call materialistic culture and science. Our time can only be understood if we know that these two currents of spiritual guidance prevail in it. As soon as one is unable to distinguish between them and pays fanatical homage to one or the other, one is not in a position to see clearly how our culture is actually progressing. [28]

Approximately in the middle of the old solar evolution the great and mighty thing happens, that during this solar evolution an entity develops forces which are in contradiction with the finer, thinner etheric elements. In contrast to what we call the Mystery of Golgotha, the great earth sacrifice, we can speak of a sun sacrifice which consisted in the fact that a being chose its abode among the gods who only wanted to live in the finer elements, but developed such denser powers which were equal to the earth elements. And so we have, since the solar evolution, in the series of beings who are actually only armed with their powers for the etheric, a being who has an intimate relationship within the world ether for the earthly. Since the ancient development of the sun, this entity has been waiting for the right moment to channel the powers it had developed into the earth itself. And it was Zarathustra's great merit that he recognized this: In that which is out there as the sun, something remains of the old sun. For the time being it contains this being. But the moment is approaching when this being will also bring down to earth its form appropriate to the elements. Then came the moment when humanity was admittedly not yet mature enough to recognize this being inserted into the etheric world itself, but when it first recognized its mirror image. We can say that this image relates to reality in the same way that moonlight, which is reflected sunlight, relates to direct sunlight itself. This mirror image was called Yahweh by the ancient Hebrew people. Yahweh is basically the same as the Christ, only as a mirror image, prophetically foreshadowed as it were. Just as the upper gods relate to the lower ones, so Yahweh is the image of the real Christ and resembles him completely for those who see through things. Christ himself spoke of this: If you want to know me, then you must also know how Moses and the prophets spoke of me. The Christ knew well that when Yahweh or Jehovah was spoken of in ancient times, he was spoken of, and that everything spoken of Yahweh relates to him as the mirror image relates to his archetype. [29]

The fact that the Christ has become an earth being from a sun being has given him access to the individual human individualities. The other solar beings who remained in the sun only have access to the generality of humanity. The Christ has even retained something of this, but something that is infinitely beneficial for our earthly humanity: what has remained for him is that his work does not know any human differentiation. He is the Christ for all men without distinction of class, race, nation and so on. In his effectiveness he provides inward help in the same way to the genius and the fool. The Christ impulse has access to the individuality of man, and it is precisely this impulse that must work in the deepest inner being if it is to be effective in man at all. It is not the powers of the intellect, but the deepest powers of the soul and heart that must receive the Christ-impulse; but when it is then received, it does not work in the sense of the individual-human, but entirely in the sense of the universal-human. [30]

Christ departed from the sun, just as we humans depart from the earth when we die. And just as the etheric body is visible to the occult observer in a person who dies by leaving the earth, which he discards after three days and leaves behind the physical body, so Christ left behind in the sun what we find described in man as the spiritual man, Atma, the seventh member of the human being. Christ died from the sun. From the moment of Golgotha that which was his life-spirit, Buddhi, was to be seen on earth. So that from the Mystery of Golgotha the earth was enveloped by the life-spirit of Christ as by a spiritual being. [31]

The stars are bodies left behind by the gods after these gods themselves have progressed to other stages of development. But this is the difference between all planetary gods and the Christ God, that the Christ God leaves no such physical star behind at death on earth, leaves no remnant behind that would have remained unspiritualized, but passes over completely into the spiritual and passes over as spirit with the human souls to the Jupiter existence. If that which belongs to Christ, for which one has the right to use the name Christ, were to embody itself again in a physical body after the Mystery of Golgotha, then the first germ would be given through this physical substance, to which other things would join to form such a star, which would remain behind in the future. Thus a star would be created for which mankind would have to long back in all the future. This longing back must not be achieved through the Christ-being. The forces that are generated in a certain part of the human soul, so that nothing remains of a longing for the earth, must grow stronger in resistance like all forces. Therefore, through the wise guidance of the world, those beings must also be left behind who, like the leading Angeloi of the Egyptian-Chaldean period, the Archangeloi of the Urperian period or the leading Archai of the ancient Indian period, do not interpenetrate with the Christ-impulse and therefore continue without the Christ-impulse. They will - and the name of Christ will not be applied to them - represent that element in the future development of mankind whereby, however, a certain longing and also a certain connection will remain to that which will be outside in the universe as planetary remains, as stars, and will be seen from Jupiter, as our Venus, our Mars, our Jupiter are seen from the earth. [32]

As long as the Christ power was not connected with the earth, but acted on the earth from outside as solar power, all impulses for growth and life went into the human inner being. Man was formed and sustained by it from the cosmos. Since the Christ impulse lives with the earth, man in his self-conscious being is given back to the cosmos. [33]

Christ works in complete freedom in the calculable, the earth element; thus he renders harmless what only the calculable desires, the Ahrimanic. The event of Golgotha is the free cosmic act of love within the history of the earth; it can also only be grasped by the love that man brings to this grasp. [34]

The purpose of development through successive lives on earth is thus to gradually make the whole man, and thus also the conscious part, the expression of the forces which, under the influence of the spiritual world, rule over him unconsciously in the first years of life. [35] Only at the end of all earth lives will man be able to have that within himself which will allow him to live with that spirit being for longer than three years. But then man will also say to himself: "It is not I, but this higher one in me, which has always been there, that is now working in me". Until then he cannot yet say this, but at most this: he feels this higher being, but he has not yet come to bring it to full life in himself with his real human ego. [36] To recognize the forces at work in man in childhood is to recognize the Christ in man. [37] Then one can feel that it is unjustified to ask: Why, if man has already gone through many embodiments, does he again and again come into existence as a child? Because it turns out that this apparent imperfection is a perpetual reminder of the highest that lives in man. And one cannot be reminded often enough - at least each time at the beginning of a life - of the great fact of what man actually is according to that essence which underlies all earthly existence, but which is not affected by the imperfections of this existence. [38]

Those who felt connected to Christ Jesus received the power to absorb the buddhi within themselves. John called this the divine word of creation. The power to awaken the buddhi in people in the first place came from the life of the Christ on earth. Thus we must understand the Christ as the common spirit of the earth. [39]

Through the appearance of Christ Jesus something completely new arises with regard to the mode of initiation. It was only through the appearance of Christ Jesus that it became possible to express directly into the life body, the etheric body, that which was life spirit, buddhi. The experiences made in the higher worlds could now be incorporated into the physical brain without the etheric body having to be separated first. The first to possess an etheric body that was completely permeated by the spirit self, Manas, and a physical body that was completely permeated by the spirit of life, Buddhi, was Christ Jesus. This made it possible for those who are connected with him to undergo the same initiation without separating the etheric body from the physical body. [40]

For there to be an inner Christ, for the higher man to be born, a historical Christ was necessary. [41] In older times man felt himself to be light in the light. He felt that he belonged to the light. He did not say "I am", he perceived the rays of the sun that fell on the earth, and he did not distinguish himself from the rays of the sun. Where he perceived the light, he also perceived himself, because he felt himself in there. With the Christ, this became effective in his own inner being. It is the sun that moves into one's own inner being and becomes effective in one's own inner being. [42]

The earth and that which is above it, that which first united with the earth through the mystery of Golgotha, developed like two opposite poles. Christ and the earth belong together. In order to unite, they first had to develop separately as polarities. Thus we see that it is necessary for things to live out in reality that they differentiate themselves into polarities, and the polarities then unite again for the progress of life. That is the meaning of life. Now we also see the meaning of experiencing Christ: Earth is to co-experience the divine mysteries. In this way, polarity was placed in man, just as it is in the earth. When man thinks, the world thinks in him. He is the scene, he only brings the thoughts together. When man feels and wills, it is the same. [43] Just as we ourselves have an etheric body and an astral body, so our earth also has such higher bodies. And just as a small amount of substance expands in a liquid, so that which radiated spiritually from the deed on Golgotha expands into the spiritual atmosphere of the earth, permeates it and has been in it since that time. Since that time, therefore, something has been communicated to our earth that it did not have before. And since souls do not merely live everywhere surrounded by the material, but since souls are like drops that live in the sea of the earthly spiritual, people have been embedded in the spiritual atmosphere of our earth, which is permeated with the Christ impulse, since that time. This is the great difference between pre-Christian and post-Christian life. [44]

On the one hand the Christ is there for the most simple-minded, and on the other hand he is also there for those who need wisdom and wisdom and ever more wisdom. Of course, you can only get to know the Christ's relationship to the higher worlds through initiation. But you only need this when you enter initiation. Christ gives occult aspirants the means to remember their ego when they are in the higher worlds. Without the Christ-impulse one cannot do this in a certain way. [45]

If the Christ had scratched somewhere on a rock, for all later generations: I have been there -, then all later generations would have known the fact from the sensory world, then they would not have needed to believe it. That precisely this was not the case, that one cannot recognize it by sensual means, but that one must recognize it with the power of the spirit, that is the redeeming thing, that is the deep meaning that lies in it. One must understand it in this way, then one finds it in direct connection with that which already here on earth lifts man out of the sensual-physical world and raises him into the spiritual world. [46] (See also: Etherization of the Blood of Christ; Atlantis - Sun Oracle; Monstrance).

Sources:

[1] GA 124: Excursions into the Field of the Gospel of Mark (1910/1911)

[2] GA 105: World, Earth and Man, their Nature and Development and their Reflection in the Connection between Egyptian Myth and Contemporary Culture (1908)

[3] GA 183: The Science of the Becoming of Man (1918)

[4] GA 181: Earth Death and World Life. Anthroposophical gifts of life. Necessities of Consciousness for the Present and the Future (1918)

[5], [28], [29], [32] GA 129: World Miracles, Soul Tests and Spiritual Revelations (1911)

[6] GA 103: The Gospel of John (1908)

[7] GA 35: Philosophy and Anthroposophy (1904-1923)

[8] GA 118: The Event of the Appearance of Christ in the Ethereal World (1910)

[9] GA 102: The Influence of Spiritual Beings on Man (1908)

[10] GA 114: The Gospel of Luke (1909)

[11] GA 136: The Spiritual Beings in the Heavenly Bodies and Kingdoms of Nature (1912)

[12] GA 117: The Deeper Mysteries of Becoming Human in the Light of the Gospels (1909)

[13] GA 130: Esoteric Christianity and the Spiritual Guidance of Humanity (1911/1912)

[14] GA 116: The Christ Impulse and the Development of the I-Consciousness (1909/1910)

[15] GA 94: Cosmogony. Popular Occultism. The Gospel of John. Theosophy on the basis of the Gospel of John (1906)

[16] - [18] GA 197: Opposites in the Development of Humanity. West and East - Materialism and Mysticism - Knowledge and Belief (1920)

[19] GA 53: The Origin and Purpose of Man. Basic Concepts of Spiritual Science (1904/1905)

[20] GA 106: Egyptian Myths and Mysteries in Relation to the Spiritual Forces at Work in the Present (1908)

[21], [24], [25], [45] GA 137: Man in the Light of Occultism, Theosophy and Philosophy (1912)

[22] GA 148: From Akashic Research. The Fifth Gospel (1913/1914)

[23], [41], [44] GA 131: From Jesus to Christ (1911)

[26] GA 143: Experiences of the Supersensible. The Three Paths of the Soul to Christ. (1912)

[27] GA 223: The Cycle of the Year as the Earth's Breathing Process and the Four Great Festival Seasons. Anthroposophy and the Human Mind (1923)

[30], [31] GA 240: Esoteric Observations on Karmic Connections - Sixth Volume (1924)

[33], [34] GA 26: Anthroposophical Guiding Principles. The Path of Knowledge of Anthroposophy - The Michael Mystery (1924/1925)

[35] - [38] GA 15: The Spiritual Guidance of Man and Humanity. Spiritual Scientific Results on the Development of Humanity (1911)

[39] GA 97: The Christian Mystery (1906/1907)

[40] GA 100: Human Development and the Knowledge of Christ. Theosophy and Rosicrucianism - The Gospel of John (1907)

[42] GA GA 211: The Mystery of the Sun and the Mystery of Death and Resurrection. Exoteric and Esoteric Christianity (1922)

[43] GA 155: Christ and the Human Soul. On the meaning of life. Theosophical morality. Anthroposophy and Christianity (1912/1914)

[46] GA 154: How to Acquire an Understanding of the Spiritual World. The Influx of Spiritual Impulses from the World of the Departed (1914)

Christ - etheric apparition

If we put into clear words what is happening chaotically in the depths of souls, it is like this: inside the souls there is a striving to understand the mystery of Golgotha again. A new experience of Christ is being sought. We are necessarily faced with a new experience of the Christ-event. In its first form it was still experienced with the remnants of the old soul inheritances, and since these have been used up since the fifteenth century, it was propagated by tradition. It was not until the last third of the nineteenth century that the eclipse was complete. There were no old heritages left. A light must be sought again out of the darkening of the human soul. The spiritual world must be experienced. [1] If man seeks Christ Jesus in an outwardly historical way, he cannot find him. He must find him in the way of spiritual research. But there he will surely find him. There he will find the historical event of Golgotha. Why? Because the historical event of Golgotha was one that occurred through freedom in the development of mankind, through a freedom in an even higher sense than other historical events, and because this free event should approach man precisely in our time period in such a way that nothing forces him to accept its validity, but he must accept this validity out of inner freedom. If there is already historical proof, we are not free to accept it. If there is no external historical proof, one accepts it for spiritual reasons, and on the spiritual ground one is free. One becomes a Christian through freedom. And that is precisely what is necessary for the present age to understand, that in reality one can only be a Christian out of complete freedom, not even forced by historical documents. In our age, Christianity should gain that truth - that is predestined for this time - whereby it becomes the great impulse of human understanding for freedom. It is one of the fundamental truths of our time that this is recognized, that it is recognized that the evidence for Christianity must be sought in the spiritual world. [2]

But in the etheric body it is always present in the etheric atmosphere of the earth. And because people will develop into ether sight, they will see him. Thus the return of the Christ results from the fact that people ascend to the ability to see the Christ in the etheric. This is what we have to expect in our time of transition. [3] In fact, this is the most important event that is granted to the clairvoyant today (1910): that he sees the Christ in the spiritual atmosphere of the earth. Because this ability will now appear in a larger number of people in that period, this number of people will then have the direct vision of the Christ, the Christ in his etheric body, mediated by natural vision, with whom people will then deal as with a physical personality. The Christ will not descend to a physical body a second time, but people will ascend through their abilities into the etheric, in which he now reveals himself. The Christ will have returned to them in the realm of their expanded experience. [4] This Christ-event, however, will not merely be an event which satisfies the transcendental curiosity of men, but it will above all be an event which will make demands on the minds of men for a new understanding, for a new comprehension of the whole Christ-impulse. [5]

People will develop such abilities that they will perceive the Christ on the astral plane as an etheric figure, as was the case with Paul before Damascus. This event of perceiving the Christ through gradually developing higher abilities in people over the next three millennia begins in our 20th century. From then on, these abilities will gradually emerge and will develop in a sufficiently large number of people over the next three millennia. That is to say, a sufficiently large number of people will know, by looking into the higher worlds, that the Christ is a reality, that he lives, they will get to know him as he lives now. And they will not only come to know the way he lives now, but they will become convinced, just like Paul, that he died and rose again. But the foundation for this cannot be laid in the higher worlds, it must be laid on the physical plane. [6] This is also what is meant when it is said: Christ will appear in the clouds - for by this is meant that he will appear as an ethereal form on the astral plan. But it must be emphasized that he can only be seen in the etheric body in this epoch. [7]

This unification of the organs [basically, every sense organ is an organ of respiration] can only be achieved through an understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha. Only this can enable us to feel the whole of nature morally. If we then look up at the clouds and see the lightning shooting out of them, we will be able to see the Christ in his etheric form. With the "clouds", that is, with the elements, he comes in his spiritual form. This face will one day appear to every human being, sooner or later. Only the Father knows the day and hour - as the Gospel says. [8] The return of Christ means: to see the Christ supersensibly in the etheric body. Therefore, everyone who wants to follow the right course of development must acquire the ability to see with the spiritual eye. It would be no progress for humanity if Christ had to appear once more in the physical body. The next time he will reveal himself in the etheric body. [9]

Sources:

[1] GA 217: Spiritual Forces in the Coexistence of the Old and Young Generations. Pädagogischer Jugendkurs (1922)

[2] GA 179: Historical Necessity and Freedom. Influences of Fate from the World of the Dead (1917)

[3], [4] GA 118: The event of Christ's appearance in the ethereal world (1910)

[5] GA 175: Building blocks for an understanding of the mystery of Golgotha. Cosmic and Human Metamorphosis (1917)

[6] GA 132: Evolution from the viewpoint of truthfulness (1911)

[7], [9] GA 130: Esoteric Christianity and the spiritual guidance of humanity (1911/1912)

[8] GA 265: On the history and content of the epistemological department of the Esoteric School from 1904 to 1914 (1906-1924)

Christ - etheric manifestation - human perception - and the obstacles to it

In the important times that will follow the year 1930, individuals will be able to develop higher powers, as if by nature, whereby what we call the etheric body will become visible. Etheric clairvoyant powers will develop in a number of people. Two things will then be possible. Either the materialism of our age will continue: then, when such powers appear, it will not be understood that they lead up into the spiritual worlds; they will be misunderstood, and thus they will be suppressed. If that were to happen, it would not justify people in the materialistic sense saying at the end of the year 1940: "Now look what fantastic prophets they were at the beginning of the 20th century! Nothing has come true! - For if the new abilities will not be there, this will not be a refutation of what can and must be said now, but it will only be proof that incomprehensible humanity will have nipped these abilities in the bud and thus taken something away from itself that humanity will have to have if it does not want to wither and become desolate in its development. If these forces are suppressed, humanity will go further into the swamp of materialism. [1]

No one, no initiate, no matter how powerful, has any influence on the appearance of the Christ himself. That is coming. But one can make arrangements for this Christ-event to be received in one way or another, for this Christ-event to work in one way or another. Those brotherhoods which want to banish the souls of men into the materialistic sphere, these have the ambition to let the Christ pass by unnoticed in the 20th century. They strive to conquer the sphere of influence, which is to come through the Christ in the 20th century and beyond, for another entity. There are Western brotherhoods that strive to take the impulse away from the Christ and to replace it with another individuality that has not even appeared in the flesh, but is only an etheric individuality of a strictly Ahrimanic nature. This other being, that is what they will call the Christ. [2]

The next three millennia will be devoted to making the appearance of Christ perceptible in the etheric world. It will only be inaccessible to those who feel completely materialistically. One can think materialistically if one only accepts matter and denies everything spiritual, or also by dragging the spiritual down into the material. One is also materialistic if one only wants to accept the spiritual in a material guise. There are also Theosophists (and Anthroposophists!) who are materialists. One is not a non-materialist by being a theosophist (or anthroposophist), but by realizing that the higher worlds are there even if one cannot perceive them with a sensual manifestation, but that one must develop upwards to them in order to perceive them. [3]

Christ's return presupposes that there is a humanity in this century that understands how he will show himself, in what manifestations he will show himself. Otherwise the most terrible, rumorous movements will possibly arise, starting from people who, in the deep subconscious regions of their being, suspect something of the return of the spirit of Christ, and who will represent this fact to mankind in an outward, trivial and frightening way. [4]

The Christ is always there, but he is in the spiritual world. And we can reach him if we rise into it. And all anthroposophical teaching should be transformed in us into the strong desire not to let this event pass humanity by without leaving a trace, but to gradually form a humanity in the time available to us that may be ripe to form these new abilities in itself and thus reconnect with the Christ. Otherwise humanity would have to wait a long, long time before it could be given such an opportunity again. It would have to wait a long time: until a reincarnation of the earth. If mankind were to pass this event by, it would be limited to those who, through esoteric training, prove themselves willing to rise to such an experience. [5]

Sources:

[1] GA 116: The Christ Impulse and the Development of the I-Consciousness (1909/1910)

[2] GA 178: Individual Spirit Beings and Their Work in the Soul of Man (1917)

[3] GA 130: Esoteric Christianity and the Spiritual Guidance of Humanity (1911/1912)

[4] GA 227: Initiation-Knowledge. The Spiritual and Physical Development of the World and Humanity in the Past, Present and Future, from the Point of View of Anthroposophy (1923)

[5] GA 118: The Event of the Christ Appearance in the Ethereal World (1910)

Christ - ether appearance - human perception of it

Man is not an earthly being in reality, he is a cosmic being, a being that belongs to the whole universe. On the one hand man will be earthbound, on the other hand he will feel like a cosmic being. And this feeling will be deposited in him. Once this is no longer theory, but is felt by individual people who, through their corresponding karma, grow out of what is today a trivial feeling, when humanity feels disgusted and thus comes to a reversal of the feeling of merely inherited characteristics, of the feeling of chauvinism, only then will a kind of reversion occur. And out of the expectation, out of the desire that there must be something that solves this human riddle, out of this will arise the mood that the cosmos will meet. The fulfilment of this urge will prepare him to recognize how this Christ-being will reveal itself to him out of the grey depths of the spirit, which will now speak to him spiritually. The Christ will not come in the spiritual sense if people are not prepared for it. [1]

At the turn of the 20th century a new kingdom of natural beings will be born, as it were, which will emerge from nature as a spiritual source and become visible and tangible for man. [2] The fact that the soul will recognize and feel something new out of nature means nothing other than that the Christ entity will begin a new activity in the etheric world. [3] People will feel the consoling words of Christ as if through their own hearts. But it can also feel like a physical hearing. [4] This apparition of Christ will be a spiritual experience, albeit a spiritual-psychic experience, a spiritual experience. [5] A certain higher development of the general human powers of cognition will begin, thereby bringing about the possibility that in the course of the next three millennia, even without any special clairvoyant preparation, more and more people will be able to attain a direct vision of the Christ. [6] The Christ is there, is united with the etheric body of the earth. The important thing is that the human soul develops upwards in order to behold him. [7]

Christians are perhaps in a more difficult position than the members of some other religions when they actually experience the etheric Christ; but they must try to accept this Christ-event just as neutrally. This will be precisely the task of developing an understanding, especially from within Christianity, of the possibility of entering the spiritual world without being dependent on any positive religious creed, but solely through the power of good will. [8] In the way that Christ appeared to Paul, his appearance is possible today. It is then an initiation that can sometimes occur without prior training. From the middle of our 20th century onwards, this experience will occur for many people. [9] For people, especially those in their youth, this will be the case. [10]

In older times, language was closely interwoven with the human organism; now it is beginning to emancipate itself from it. This will free the language-forming power and it will be used for the perception of the world word, the spiritual Christ. [11] There will be a number of persons who will experience the working down of the Christ into our world from the astral plan in an etheric form. [12]

But this reappearing Christ will not travel on ships over seas or in railroads, but he will be recognized in the individual human being - in that which passes from human soul to human soul, and according to the constitution of the human souls themselves - by the means which are given in the etheric. What we may say about the appearance of the reappearing Christ proves to be weak in comparison with what will come to the human soul purely from the supersensible world. For people love to see with their sensual eyes the Great One who is to come; they love to imagine that he is flying in an airplane, that he is sailing over the seas, they love to be able to grasp and hold with their senses the One who is to come. Why is that? Because it puts them in fear of really coming into contact with the supernatural worlds. [13]

Certain powers will be developed in human nature towards the future, which will work in such a way that as soon as a person has reached a certain age and becomes quite conscious of himself, he will have the feeling within himself: There is something in me that I must understand - it will express itself in something like this: I feel something in me that is connected with my actual self. Strange, but it will not fit in with everything I have been able to know since my present birth! - You will be able to understand it when you have made spiritual science your purpose in life; then you will know: What I feel now, I feel strangely because it is the ego that has come over from previous lives. - This feeling will be oppressive, fearful and anxiety-producing for those people who cannot explain it to themselves from their repeated lives on earth. It will be the Christ-impulse that will enliven the whole view backwards. This change in the organization of the human soul will come. And it will proceed from the event which begins in the 20th century and which we can call a kind of second Christ-event, so that those people to whom the higher faculties have awakened will see the "Lord of Karma". The people who will experience this will not only experience it in the physical world - whether a soul will live in a physical body or in the time between death and a new birth: if it has prepared itself, it will experience the Christ-event. It is not the seeing that depends on whether we are embodied in a physical body, but the preparation for it. The preparation for seeing the event with understanding and light must be made here in the physical world (since only here is one capable of developing in freedom; the afterlife is determined). The person who sees it unprepared, when his powers have awakened, will not be able to understand it. The Lord of Karma will appear to him as a terrible punishment. In order to understand this event full of light, man must be prepared. The next three millennia will give people the opportunity to undergo this preparation. [14]

Sources:

[1] GA 200: The New Spirituality and the Christ-Experience of the Twentieth Century (1920)

[2] - [4], [10] GA 130: Esoteric Christianity and the Spiritual Guidance of Humanity (1911/1912)

[5] GA 182: Death as a Transformation of Life (1917/1918)

[6], [14] GA 131: From Jesus to Christ (1911)

[7] GA 129: World Miracles, Soul Tests and Spiritual Revelations (1911)

[8] GA 118: The Event of the Appearance of Christ in the Ethereal World (1910)

[9] GA 124: Excursions into the Field of the Gospel of Mark (1910/1911)

[11] GA 150: The World of the Spirit and its Entry into Physical Existence. The Influence of the Dead on the World of the Living (1913)

[12] GA 143: Experiences of the Supersensible. The Three Paths of the Soul to Christ. (1912)

[13] GA 138: Of Initiation. Of Eternity and the Moment. Of Spiritual Light and the Darkness of Life (1912)

Christ - ether apparition - subsequent effects

This will be followed by other events, just as the Palestinian Christ event was preceded by other events. Thus those who prophetically foretold it will also become his successors after the characterized age, after he himself will again have become visible to mankind in the etheric body: those who foretold him earlier. Those who lived on earth as Moses, Abraham and the prophets will again become recognizable to mankind. Thus man, if he does not miss the most important event of the near future, will gradually grow into a community with all those who preceded the Christ event as patriarchs. [1] When these great times come, people will also be able to work together more consciously in the physical and spiritual worlds. Today this is not possible because there is no common language. Humanity is thus growing into a time when the influences from the spiritual world will become ever greater. The great events of the coming time will make themselves felt in all worlds. People between death and the new birth will also have new experiences in the other world as a result of the new Christ event in the etheric world. However, they would not be able to understand them if they had not prepared themselves for them on earth. [2]

Sources:

[1] & [2] GA 118: The Event of the Appearance of Christ in the Ethereal World (1910)

Christ - ether appearance as return

The Christ, who approached from far away on earth and connected with the earth, he will be the real thing on earth at its destination, he will be the spirit of the earth. He already is, but then the souls of men will be permeated by him, men will form a whole with him. The physical bodies will merge into that which bursts forth, which becomes world dust. The etheric bodies only have a purpose as long as they have physical bodies to renew; they too will no longer exist. The Christ-spirit will be the only real thing that can remain from the earth. [1]

In what (still in antiquity) emerged chaotically as ideas of the imminent return of time, there lived the truth that the Christ had appeared in the region that lies beyond the world of the senses, where the battle between Christ and the Sibyls took place, a spiritual battle. Thus the Christ did indeed have a judging office to perform. Those who understood it materialistically, that the Christ would soon return after his resurrection, misunderstood it. Human concepts of that time were not sufficient to understand these things. [2]

The Christ has already been crucified twice: once physically in the physical world (Mystery of Golgotha) and a second time in the 19th century. The seeds of earthly materialism, which since the 16th century have been carried up into the spiritual world to an ever-increasing extent by the souls passing through the gate of death and have brought about more and more darkness, formed the "black sphere of materialism". This was absorbed by Christ into his being in the sense of the Manichaean principle in order to transform it. It brought about the "spiritual death of suffocation" in the Angeloi being in which the Christ being had revealed itself since the Mystery of Golgotha. This sacrifice of the Christ can be described as a second crucifixion of the Christ on the etheric plane. This spiritual death of suffocation, which brought about the abolition of the consciousness of that Angeloi being, is a repetition of the Mystery of Golgotha in the worlds that lie immediately behind ours, so that a revival of the previously hidden Christ consciousness can take place in the souls of men on earth. This revival becomes the clairvoyant vision of humanity in the 20th century. One could say that humanity experienced the resurrection of his body at that time; it will experience the resurrection of his consciousness from the 20th century onwards. [3]

In many respects, materialism has become the basic impulse of the last epoch. Numerous souls have died who have passed through the gate of death with a materialistic attitude. Then these souls lived in the time between death and new birth in the spiritual world in such a way that they knew nothing of the world in which they lived. Then a being appeared to them. They saw it in this world. They had to see it because this being had united itself with the earthly existence, even if it ruled invisibly for the time being in the sensual earthly existence. And the efforts of these souls who had passed through the gate of death succeeded in expelling the Christ from the spiritual world. And the Christ had to experience a renewal of the Mystery of Golgotha, even if not on the same scale as the previous one. At that time he went through death, now it was an expulsion from his being in the spiritual world. And thus the eternal law of the spiritual world was fulfilled in him. What disappears in the higher, spiritual world, arises anew in the lower world. If in the 20th century it is possible for souls to develop an understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha, it stems from this event. Hence the Christ is united in an even more intimate way with everything that is the destiny of men on earth. [4]

In the thirtieth year of his life, Jesus of Nazareth saw the Christ enter into himself. A time is now (1913) approaching in which people will become more and more numerous in whom, from the thirtieth year of their lives, not the Christ in his fullness, but the knowledge of Christ will enter as if through an enlightenment. In the thirtieth year of life a new, comprehensive soul life will begin with these people through the fact that they will see the Christ in his etheric being. People must not let the impressions they will receive, which usually only occur quietly, pass them by carelessly, for only rarely do vehement impressions take place. Through the spread of true antroposophy, human souls will become such that they will not carelessly let enlightenment pass them by when it comes, for otherwise they would not be able to receive it during several incarnations. [5]

The future shows itself from two sides, from the side of desolation, of being absorbed in materialism, but also from the birth of a new spiritual world, not only in thought, or, let us say, in perception, but for existence. For the Christ will come to man's side and become his counselor. This is not meant as an image alone, but in reality people will receive the advice they need from the living Christ, who will be their counselor and friend, who will speak to human souls like a person who physically walks beside us. [6] (This can be promoted through) devotion to the powerful etheric body of Christian Rosenkreuz. He will be able to bring the new clairvoyance to people and will bring high spiritual powers to light. The 20th century, however, has the mission of making this etheric body so powerful that it will also have an exoteric effect. Those who are seized by it may experience the event that Paul experienced before Damascus. We must trace this reappearance back to the great event of the work of the Twelve and the Thirteenth in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries (initiation of the Christian Rosicrucian). [7]

Sources:

[1] GA 143: Experiences of the Supersensible. The Three Paths of the Soul to Christ. (1912)

[2] GA 149: Christ and the Spiritual World. On the Search for the Holy Grail (1913/1914)

[3] - [6] GA 152: Preliminary Stages to the Mystery of Golgotha (1913/1914)

[7] GA 130: Esoteric Christianity and the Spiritual Guidance of Humanity (1911/1912)

Christ - etheric apparition and Shamballa

Again and again, those who connect with the spiritual world in this way enter this mysterious land called "Shamballa". It is the primordial source into which the clairvoyant gaze has penetrated, which withdrew in the Kali Yuga, which is spoken of as an ancient fairyland, but which will return to the realm of humanity. Shamballa will exist again after the Kali Yuga has ended. Humanity will grow back into the land of Shamballa through normal human abilities, from which the initiates must draw strength and wisdom for their mission. Shamballa exists, Shamballa existed, Shamballa will be there again for humanity. And the first thing that people will see when Shamballa shows itself again will be the Christ in his etheric form. There is no other guide for humanity into the land that the Oriental scriptures have declared to have disappeared than the Christ. The Christ will lead men to Shamballa. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 118: The Event of the Appearance of the Christ in the Subtle World (1910)

Christ - Encounter of the sleeping human being in the Christmas to New Year period

Around Christmas time, right up to today's New Year, the human being undergoes an encounter of his astral body with the spirit of life, Buddhi. And this encounter with the buddhi is the basis of our closeness to the Christ, for it is through the buddhi that the Christ reveals himself. He reveals himself through a being from the realm of the Archangeloi. Of course, he is an infinitely higher being, but he reveals himself through an Archangeloi. If man now - be it through the development of spiritual consciousness in the realm of religious deepening and religious practice, or be it, supplementing this religious practice and perception, also through the reception of ideas of spiritual science - if man now deepens, spiritualizes his life of perception, then he will experience the after-effect of the encounter with the genius (higher ego), just as he can experience the after-effect of the encounter with the Buddhi, or with the Christ, in waking life. In the time that now follows the Christmas season, up to Easter time, the conditions are particularly favorable to bring to consciousness the encounter of man with the Christ. [1] (See also: Encounter with the Father-Principle).

Sources:

[1] GA 175: Building Blocks to a Realization of the Mystery of Golgotha. Cosmic and Human Metamorphosis (1917)

Christ - Consciousness

The Christ-consciousness can only be awakened if one has faith not only in the development of man, but in the transformation of man, if one has faith that something will come out of man which is not inherited in him by inheriting a body from his ancestors, but which is in him by having gone through earlier earth lives. Now the inherited qualities have become weak, and those qualities in man become stronger and stronger which come over from the earlier incarnations not with the blood but with the soul. This can be taken over into consciousness, and then such a person encounters the other person with quite different feelings than people generally have today. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 196: Spiritual and Social Changes in the Development of Humanity (1920)

Christ - pictorial representation

If you go back to the very oldest times, you will find that the most common, the most widespread image of Christ Jesus is the one that depicts the Christ as a younger man with a lamb around his shoulder and as a shepherd. And this was called the Good Shepherd. And it was actually only in the 6th century that the images depicting Christ hanging on the cross and dead appeared. There is also something important behind this. The first Christians still had the view that the Christ had come into Jesus from the sun, that the Christ was an extraterrestrial being. The whole thing was later misunderstood, because it was later turned into the dogma of the so-called immaculate conception. It was only when it was no longer understood that Jesus was a man at first, albeit a very important man, and that it was only in the thirtieth year of his life that the spirit, which is called the Christ, came into him as the spirit of the sun - at the time when this was no longer understood, the view was taken on the one hand to represent the dead Christ on the cross, the dying Christ, and on the other hand the coming of the Christ in a spiritual way was already transferred to the birth. [1]

The outward pictorial representation of Christ, how he is to be presented outwardly pictorially, is a question that has yet to be resolved. What should emerge is that which represents the emerging outwardness of the organization of the impulses of astonishment, compassion and conscience. What expresses itself in this must express itself in such a way that the face of Christ becomes so alive that that which makes man an earthly man, the sensual, desirous, is overcome by that which spiritualizes, spiritualizes the face. A mouth in which one can feel that it is not there to eat, but to express what has ever been cultivated as morality and conscience in humanity. Such a power will be connected with this sub-form of the face that it will radiate, fragment and tear apart the whole of the rest of the body, so that it will become a completely different form, whereby on the other hand certain powers will be overcome, so that it will be impossible to give the Christ, who will show such a mouth, any kind of body form such as the present physical man has. Dagegen wird man ihm Augen geben, aus denen alle Gewalt des Mitgefühls sprechen wird, mit der nur Augen Wesen ansehen können – nicht um Eindrücke zu empfangen, sondern um mit der ganzen Seele in ihre Freuden und Leiden überzugehen. Und eine Stirn wird er haben, wo man nicht vermuten kann, daß die Sinneseindrücke der Erde gedacht werden, sondern eine Stirn, die etwas vorn über den Augen vorstehen wird, sich wölben wird über jenem Gehirnteil: aber nicht eine «Denkerstirn», die wieder verarbeitet, was da ist, sondern es wird sich Verwunderung aussprechen aus der Stirn, die über die Augen hervortritt und sanft sich wölbt nach rückwärts über dem Kopf, dadurch ausdrückend, was man Verwunderung über die Mysterien der Welt nennen kann.

This will have to be a head that man cannot find in physical humanity. Every imitation of Christ would actually have to be something like the ideal of the Christ figure. The artist must not look at something that is there if he wants to form the Christ, but he must allow himself to be strengthened and worked upon and penetrate himself inwardly with everything that a spiritual immersion in the spiritual development of the world can give through the three most important impulses: astonishment, compassion and conscience. [2]

When, after long immersion in the spiritual-scientific idea of Christ, an attempt is made to portray Christ, then a figure will be obtained in which it will be recognized that something is contained in his countenance which all art can, but must and will struggle with: his countenance will then contain something of the victory of the powers which are only in the countenance over all other powers of the human form. When men will be able to form an eye that lives and only radiates compassion, a mouth that is not suitable for eating, but only for speaking those words of truth that are the conscience lying on man's tongue, and when a forehead can be formed that is not beautiful and high, but that is beautiful in the clear shaping of what stretches forward to what we call the lotus flower between the eyes (see: Astral Body - Organs and their Organization) - once all this can be formed, then it will be found why the prophet (Isaiah) says: "He is without all form and beauty. " This does not mean beauty, but it is that which will triumph over decay: the form of Christ, where all compassion, all love, all duty of conscience is. [3]

Nevertheless, Rudolf Steiner assured us that both the sculpture and the colourful depictions of the representative of humanity were designed in such a way that, when we met him, we would recognize him immediately. So here, too, one can certainly speak of a kind of portrait-like quality. [4]

Sources:

[1] GA 353: The History of Humanity and the Worldviews of the Civilized Peoples (1924)

[2] GA 133: The Earthly and the Cosmic Man (1911/1912)

[3] GA 143: Experiences of the Supersensible. The three paths of the soul to Christ. (1912)

[4] Mü: Heinz Müller: Traces on the Path (1976)

Christ - event and life between death and a new birth

First of all, when we go backwards through the nights, we arrive at birth. When we have arrived there, when we have passed through the soul world and have arrived at our birth again going backwards - we go back in time after death - then we have to go through the path to our previous life on earth. So that the human being can then take over his previous earth life, shaping it for a further, a third earth life. The human being must therefore not only go back to his birth, living after death, but to his previous life on earth. And today man would be in such a position that, after death, when he has gone through this running back to his birth or conception, he would then continue to seek the way backwards to the previous earth lives, and he would not be able to find the connection to the previous earth lives. You see, this connection could be found in the first millennia of the earth's development before the Mystery of Golgotha, when one came across the age of the last Bodhisattva while wandering backwards. Today it is only of use to people if they undergo this return journey under the guidance of the Being who united with the earth through the Mystery of Golgotha, that is, in other words, if such a relationship of man to the Mystery of Golgotha arises that the Christ can become the guide for people, because the Christ summarizes that which has always been present in guiding powers for life between death and a new birth through the Bodhisattvas appearing on earth. Thus the occurrence of the Mystery of Golgotha is one of the most important facts in the whole evolution of the earth, especially for the experiences between death and a new birth. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 227: Initiation-Knowledge. The Spiritual and Physical Development of the World and Humanity in the Past, Present and Future, from the Point of View of Anthroposophy (1923)

Christ - Events

Three times, before the Mystery of Golgotha occurred, the Christ had united himself with humanity from the spiritual worlds through the threefold penetration of that spirit being who was later the Nathanish boy Jesus: firstly, to regulate the sensory experience in a moderate way in the Lemurian period; secondly, to regulate the life forces at the beginning of the Atlantean period; thirdly, to regulate the soul forces at the end of the Atlantean period. Only then, fourthly, did the Mystery of Golgotha take place in order to regulate the ego in its relationship to the world. [1] The first and second preliminary stages were in the devachanic world, the third in the astral world and the event of Golgotha in the physical world. [2] This later Nathanian Jesus entity was also present at the three earlier events, only it was not incarnated as a physical human being. It lived as a spiritual, archangel-like entity in the spiritual worlds. And it was traversed three times by the Christ entity. [3] Three times this entity has ensouled itself in archangeless form and then incarnated in human form. And if you ask me: How is it that the Christ did not descend from Hierarchy to Hierarchy and only then descended to man - I must answer you: I do not know that, because I do not combine at all. Rather, factual research shows that the Christ made use of an archangeless form three times - the angelic form was omitted - and then a human form. [4]

1^st Christ Event

The earth itself has spiritual forces within it which can flow through the spine if it remains horizontal in its natural growth, as in the animal body. But the earth has no powers of its own to directly serve the human being, who can be directed vertically through his ego, whose consciousness awakens later. In order for man to develop harmoniously with an upright, vertical gait, forces must flow in from the cosmos, from the extraterrestrial. Lucifer and Ahriman could have brought all human development into disorder by tearing man away from the spiritual forces of the earthly through his upright position, if the first Christ-event had not occurred in the old Lemurian time. [5]

(At that time) the interpenetration of that being, but as a kind of angelic being, which later became the Nathanian Jesus with the Christ being, took place in that realm which, as a spiritual realm, is the closest to our earthly realm. By interpenetrating with the Christ, he took on ethereal human form. Thus something new has penetrated into the cosmos, which now radiates onto the earth and (the) people, the physical earth-human form, into which the power of the etheric supernatural Christ-being has flowed, (which) makes it possible to protect oneself from that destruction which should have penetrated. Through spiritual science we notice, as it were, the protectors, the guardians of childlike growth and childlike becoming. We realize how the Christ-power radiates around this childlike being and childlike becoming. [6]

Because of what was present through the Luciferic and Ahrimanic influences, bodies were not possible whose senses could have provided proper abodes for the souls who had now come down from the planets. Men would have been tormented by the antipathy and sympathy of their senses; one would have had to go through the world in such a way that one would have been continually blessed by sympathy or tormented by antipathy, depending on whether one saw this or that color; one would have been blessed or terribly painfully repulsed. This was the disposition of the whole of evolution, the way the cosmic forces acted upon the earth, especially from the sun, so that the senses would have been trained in such a way. Any contemplation of the world in wisdom, in a certain serene wisdom, would have been impossible. There had to be a change in the cosmic forces that flowed in from the cosmic environment of the earth and built up and shaped the senses of the human body. Something had to happen in the spiritual world so that the forces would not come in in such a way that these senses would have become mere organs of antipathy and sympathy, for that is what they would have become under Lucifer's and Ahriman's influence. The Christ-being transformed the cosmic forces that flowed in to build up the senses in such a way that these senses were transformed from mere organs of sympathy and antipathy into the organs that mankind could then use. Thus man came to be able to look with wisdom at all the nuances of sense perception. The being that then appeared as the Nathanian boy Jesus was then still dwelling on the sun, it was permeated by the sun spirit itself, so permeated that the sun's activity was, as it were, softened in such a way that the human sense organs, which are essentially the result of this sun activity, did not become mere organs of sympathy and antipathy. [7] These senses would, one could say, have become hypersensitive, oversensitive. For example, a red color would have made the impression on the human eye that the eye had felt a certain kind of pain. The senses would have been painfully affected by other impressions in a different way. For example, the eye would have felt as if it had been sucked dry by the blue color. And so with all the other senses. One would have had to go through the world in such a way that the senses would have been continually affected in a painful way, or probably also in an excessive and therefore also unwholesome pleasure. [8]

2^nd Christ Event

That which had developed in a useful way for a while (the beginning of Atlantis), the human vital organs and their basic forces, the etheric body, had become disordered. For the cosmic forces, which work in from the environment of the earth and to which it is incumbent to bring order precisely into these organs of human life, into the organs of respiration, the organs of circulation and so on, these forces developed under the Luciferic and Ahrimanic influence in such a way that the organs of life would not have become useful for the human beings on earth. The forces which have to supply these organs of life do not emanate directly from the sun, but from what in earlier times were called the seven planets. And it was necessary that these cosmic forces which condition the human organs of life should now also be softened. If development had gone on as these cosmic forces could have arranged it under the influence of Ahriman and Lucifer, it would have come about in such a way that man would have had in these organs of life either only organs of greed or organs of disgust. [9] These seven organs of life are vascular organs in the physical body, but what underlies them is actually an organization of the etheric body. The human being would have felt alternatingly raging greed and terrible disgust. [10] The same entity that later appeared in the Nathanian boy Jesus, which in earlier times dwelt on the sun and had been spiritualized there by the Christ entity, now moved from planet to planet, touched in its innermost being by the impossibility of allowing human evolution to continue in this way. And what she experienced there had such a strong effect on her, in that she embodied herself successively on the different planets, that at a certain time during the Atlantean development the Christ-spirit again asserted itself. Through the interpenetration of this same entity with the Christ Spirit, the possibility arose that temperance was implanted in the vital organs of human beings. [11] (Without this event) man would have developed his whole culture of life in such a way, all his bodily organs, larynx, tongue, throat and so on, even the deeper organs such as the heart and so on, in so far as they are connected with it, that man would only have been able to utter in poor babbling - in the manner of a sibyl or medium - that which egotistically causes him pain, joy, pleasure, lust. Man would indeed be able to produce much more artificial sounds than the animal, but in his sounds he would only have found expressions for that which lives within him. The whole of language would have become a sum of interjections (exclamations, words of feeling). [12]

3^rd Christ Event

If thinking, feeling and willing do not interact to the right degree, then the human being either becomes excessively hypochondriacal or goes into a state of madness. [13] If nothing else had happened (towards the end of Atlantis), man's soul organs would have become disordered. To a certain extent, people would have been condemned to a perpetual chaotic use of their soul organs, of thinking, feeling and willing. They would either have become frenzied through an excess of will, or dazed through a restrained feeling, or people with fleeting ideas through hypertrophied thinking and so on. This was the third great danger to which mankind was exposed in a certain way on earth. Now that which orders these three soul forces is also ordered from the cosmos, from the earthly environment; for the earth itself is essentially the scene for the ordering of the ego. The corresponding interaction of the three soul forces of thinking, feeling and willing must be ordered by the interaction of sun, moon and earth. And now the soul of that being, which later became the Nathanish Jesus, took on such a cosmic soul-form that its life was, as it were, neither on earth nor on the moon nor on the sun, but in such a way that it felt itself, as it were orbiting the earth, dependent on the influences of sun, moon and earth at the same time. The earth influences came to it from below, the moon and sun influences from above. The clairvoyant consciousness actually sees this being, if I may say so, in the prime of its development in the same sphere in which the moon revolves around the earth. So I cannot say exactly: the moon influence came from above; but it actually came from the place where he himself was, this pre-earthly Nathanian Jesus. This in turn cried out to him what should have become of the thinking, feeling and volition of the human soul, and he sought to feel fully within himself the tragedy of human development. In this way, however, he again called down upon himself the high Sun-Spirit, who now, for the third time, lowered himself upon him. [14] This had the effect of bringing moderate harmony into the powers of the human soul, into thinking, feeling and willing. A good memory of this third event has remained in the mythical imagination. This is the pictorial representation of the third Christ-event: the archangel Michael or St. George, the later Nathanian Jesus-boy, pervaded by the Christ-entity. [15]

The Greeks represented the Christ, the later Nathanian boy Jesus, as their Apollo. [16] The Greeks, who in their mythology felt something like afterimages of the events during the Atlantean period, also expressed in their mythology this supersensible fact just mentioned. And the image, the afterimage, under which the Greeks imagined the third ensoulment of Christ in an archangel-like being, is Apollo, the sun god. As the protector of Pythia's sayings, Apollo appears as the being who harmonizes the dragon that rises from the earth in the form of vapours. If, without the harmonization of Apollo, this vapour were to flow into the passion of Pythia, thinking, feeling and willing would be expressed as madness. Through the impregnation with the powers of Apollo, what the Pythia has to say sometimes becomes the wisest advice given to the Greeks. If one could have asked an initiate of the ancient mysteries for his true opinion as to who Apollo is, he would certainly have given the answer: He is the forerunner of Christ Jesus, who has not yet descended to the physical plan. Mankind has preserved a wonderful imagination of this third Christ-event in the image: St. George defeats the dragon, or the archangel Michael defeats the dragon. [17]

The power of this Christ-being now penetrated a second time in the human body (the) organs that are expressed in the power of speech. Thus the power of speech was given the opportunity to use words to create real signs for the external environment and thereby to create language as a means of communication across the individual areas of humanity. The child could never learn to speak if these two Christ events had not occurred in the Atlantean period. [18] What would have become of man if this third Christ-event had not occurred? He would have been seized furiously by his wild desires, by his life of will. He could have become furious, even though, on the other hand, his intellect would have been selfishly scornful of that which the will accomplishes in a frenzy. [19]

4^th Christ Event

The ego would have developed disorderly if the fourth Christ-event in the Greco-Latin period, the Mystery of Golgotha, had not occurred. [20] Before that, it was the case that no one could really penetrate the physical body and etheric body with his ego. This happened for the first time at the Christ event. [21] If the Christ is to exemplify the full initiation, he must exemplify the two sides: the descent into the physical body and etheric body and the ascent into the macrocosm. Both events are exemplified by the Christ. [22] (See: Christ-Jesus; Christ Life).

Sources:

[1] - [6], [12], [17] - [19] GA 152: Preliminary Stages to the Mystery of Golgotha (1913/1914)

[7], [9], [11], [14] GA 149: Christ and the Spiritual World. On the Search for the Holy Grail (1913/1914)

[8], [10], [13, [15], [16], [20] GA 148: From Akashic Research. The Fifth Gospel (1913/1914)

[21], [22] GA 123: The Gospel of Matthew (1910)

Christ - Knowledge

What have we actually gained through the soul, which has gradually become stronger over the centuries, from the 4th and 5th centuries onwards? Outwardly mechanical knowledge. But now the time has come when the soul must strengthen to such an extent that, just as it used to see the spiritual sun with the help of the etheric body when looking out into the heavens with the physical sun, it now looks inwardly into the ego, perceives the ego and, as it were, behind the ego the Christ. The human being must come to find behind the ego what he previously found in front of the sun. However, in this respect we are at the very beginning. [1] We first need spiritual science so that we can come to the knowledge of Christ again. For the Christ is on earth, but that which surrounds him is in the world of the higher hierarchies. And it has been the great temptation of humanity in recent times that it has undergone modern natural science with its great triumphs. Behind all these forces of nature live the spiritual beings, directing and guiding, serving the Christ. The Christ is in all that is earth evolution. Supernatural beings serve him, but supernatural beings are only recognized through spiritual science. Therefore, spiritual science also has an infinitely significant task in relation to the renewal of Christianity. [2] That which has brought about our misfortune in modern times for civilized mankind is not that we have lost the Christ - who stands before us in a higher glory than Osiris did for the Egyptians - that we have to go in search of him with the power of the isis (like the Egyptians). No, what we have lost is knowledge, is the vision of Christ. We must find it again with the power of Christ that is in us. [3] The Christ will not reappear in his spiritual form in the course of the 20th century simply by something coming in from outside, but by people finding that power which is represented by St. Sophia. The tendency in the course of modern times has been to lose precisely this Isis power, precisely this Marian power. It has been killed by everything that has arisen in the modern consciousness of mankind. And the newer confessions have in part eradicated precisely the view of Mary. [4]

Sources:

[1] GA 220: Living Recognition of Nature. Intellectual Fall of Man and Spiritual Elevation of Sin (1923)

[2] GA 203: Man's Responsibility for World Development through his Spiritual Connection with the Earth Planet and the Star World (1921)

[3], [4] GA 202: The bridge between the spirituality of the world and the physicality of the human being. The Search for the New Isis, the Divine Sophia (1920)

Christ - Evolution and involution

The further back we go (in the history of the Mysteries), the more knowledge of the Christ we find, even if it is the Christ who must be thought of in supersensible regions. But it is a knowledge that can only be conveyed through angels. This is evolution. This knowledge, this idea of the Christ, is distributed among many people. The Christ lived as the inspirer of many people: Evolution.

This knowledge is slowly receding, disappearing, dimming, and in the one being, in Jesus of Nazareth, everything that was previously distributed is concentrated. Imagine within evolution a drop of the Christ inwardness in one of the mystery priests, a second, third, fourth and so on, in each of the mystery initiates one would find: he has something of the Christ in him when he goes out of his body with his spirit. The Christ is multiplied in them. It all disappears. And in a single place, in the body of Jesus of Nazareth, everything that was distributed there is drawn together: involution. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 165: The Spiritual Unification of Humanity through the Christ Impulse (1915/1916)

Christ - fish symbol

And the purity of the solar state of those high beings expresses itself materially in the form of the fish, for this is the highest material form that can be attained by the beings of the old sun. Christ, the sun hero, who transplanted the entire power of the sun to the earth, is symbolized by the sign of the fish. Now you will understand with what deep intuition esoteric Christianity has grasped the significance of the fish form; it is for it the outer symbol of the solar power, the power of the Christ. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 101: Myths and Legends. Occult Signs and Symbols (1907)

Christ - demand on man

In a certain sense, man is a member of certain groups of people because the Archangeloi and Archai stand behind him. In other words, he stands in the line of inheritance, in the hereditary relationships. We stand unconsciously opposite one another in this differentiation, which must necessarily be brought into humanity through the hierarchies. The Christ demands more: when you confront a human being, then you should look at him in such a way that what he appears to you as in the outer world is not the whole, complete human being; you should look at him in such a way that his reality does not come merely from Archai, Archangeloi, Angeloi, but from higher spirits who no longer belong to the earth development, nor to the planetary development - for that begins with the Archai, but with the higher heavenly spirits; that with the human being something enters into Maya which is supernatural. That one may recognize in every earthly man the Christ who is behind him, that one may recognize the truth of the word: "Inasmuch as thou hast done it unto the least of my brethren, thou hast done it unto me." [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 172: The Karma of Man's Vocation in Connection with Goethe's Life (1916)

Christ - Passage through the planetary sphere and Greek gods

And still later in Greek times this reflection of the planetary spirits was perceived, which had come into being, as it were, through the fact that the being which, permeated by the Christ, wandered through the planets, became one or the other on each planet: on Jupiter he became the one whom the Greeks later called Zeus; on Mars he became the one whom they later called Ares; on Mercury he became the one whom the Greeks called Hermes. The Greek planetary gods subsequently reflected what Christ Jesus had made in the supernatural worlds out of the planetary entities that were permeated by the Luciferic and Ahrimanic principles. [1] (See also: Apollo).

Sources:

[1] GA 149: Christ and the Spiritual World. On the Search for the Holy Grail (1913/1914)

Christ - envelopes of the future

The Christ impulse was there on earth, was present as a kind of spiritual substance. It remains. It is absorbed by human beings during the evolution of the earth. But how does it live on? When he walked on earth during the three years, he did not have a physical body, etheric body and astral body for himself, he had taken on the three shells of Jesus of Nazareth. But when the earth will have reached its goal, it will, like the human being, be a fully formed being that corresponds to the Christ impulse. But where does the Christ impulse get these three shells from?

The astonishment or wonderment about things that has been expressed on earth since the fourth post-Atlantean cultural period in the development of humanity, which began with the Mystery of Golgotha, finally reaches the Christ and forms the astral body of the Christ impulse. And everything that takes hold in human souls as love and compassion forms the etheric body of the Christ impulse, and what lives in people as conscience and animates them, from the Mystery of Golgotha to the earthly goal, forms the physical body or what corresponds to it for the Christ impulse. This is how a saying of the Gospel takes on its true meaning: "Inasmuch as you did it to one of the least of these my brethren, you did it to me!" Thus, at the goal of earthly development, the Christ will be enveloped in three ways by that which has lived in human beings and which, when they have transcended their ego, will have become the envelope of the Christ. The Christ does not build his own astral body, but in what people find in themselves as astonishment or wonder, they will contribute to the astral body of the Christ. His etheric body will be built through compassion and love, which will prevail from person to person, and his physical body through that which will develop in people as conscience. What man sins in these three areas also deprives the Christ on earth of the opportunity to develop fully, that is, it leaves earthly development deficient.

Men who walk the earth indifferently, who do not want to acquaint themselves with what can reveal itself to them on earth, deprive the astral body of the Christ of the possibility of its complete development through their indifference; men who live along without compassion, without unfolding love, prevent the etheric body of the Christ from being able to develop fully, and those who are unscrupulous prevent the same for his physical body; but this means that the earth cannot reach the goal of its development at all. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 133: The Earthly and the Cosmic Man (1911/1912)

Christ - macrocosmic power

Man has developed in his physical body, etheric body and astral body since the Saturnian period through the solar and lunar periods. The ego could only enter the sufficiently prepared bodies on earth and continue to unfold there under the supporting influences of the Christ impulse, because Christ is macrocosmically what our ego is microcosmically and means for us humans. In our epoch the higher human principles are already shining into our development. Manas, Buddhi and Atma are developed in us from the higher spiritual worlds through the macrocosmic principles. But not through the fourth macrocosmic principle, but through the fact that beings who themselves have no macrocosmic, but only a microcosmic significance, formally act as teachers in humanity, since they have already progressed one or more principles further than human beings themselves. Christ, on the other hand, is a macrocosmic being who stands on the fourth stage of his macrocosmic development, just as man stands microcosmically on the fourth stage. Thus we must distinguish between macrocosmic and microcosmic principles, but be aware that the first four macrocosmic principles naturally contain all the higher microcosmic principles. The microcosmic entities thus act as teachers and seek to drive man forward through their teaching. Christ, on the other hand, who acts as a macrocosmic reality, is not a teacher like the other teachers, but has united himself with the earth as a reality, as power, as life. The highest teachers of successive periods are the Bodhisattvas. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 130: Esoteric Christianity and the Spiritual Guidance of Humanity (1911/1912)

Christ - Michael - Experience

They will be able to stand side by side: Michael-experience and Christ-experience. Through Michael, man will find the right way into the supersensible in relation to external nature. The view of nature will, without being distorted in itself, be able to stand alongside a spiritual view of the world and of man, insofar as he is a world being. Through the right attitude towards Christ, man will experience that which he could otherwise only receive as a traditional revelation of faith in the living communication of the soul with Christ. The inner world of the soul's experience can be experienced as spiritually illuminated, just as the outer world of nature can be experienced as spirit-bearing.

If the human being did not want to gain insight into his own supersensible being by living together with the Christ-being, this would lead him out of his own reality and into the ahrimanic one. Christ carries within himself the future impulses of humanity in a cosmically justified way. For the human soul to unite with him means to absorb its own future germs in a cosmically justified way. Other beings, who already show forms in the present that are cosmically justified for human beings only in the future, belong to the ahrimanic sphere. Connecting with Christ in the right way also means protecting oneself from the ahrimanic in the right way.

Thus in the future the Michael-experience and the Christ-experience can stand side by side; in this way man will find his right path of freedom between the Luciferic aberration in illusions of thought and life and the Ahrimanic allurement in future forms which satisfy his pride but which cannot yet be his present ones. To fall into Luciferic illusions is not to become fully human, not to want to progress to the stage of freedom, but to want to remain at too early a stage of development - as God-man. To fall into ahrimanic temptations is not to want to wait until the right cosmic moment has come at a certain degree of humanity, but to want to anticipate this degree. Man walks his way through the cosmos in such a way that his retrospective view of the previous world can be falsified by Luciferic impulses and his forward thinking into the future can be deceived by Ahrimanic temptations. [1]

Michael will give the right orientation when it comes to the world that surrounds man for his cognition or for his actions. One will have to find the way to Christ within. [2]

Sources:

Quotes:

[1] & [2] GA 26: Anthroposophical Guiding Principles. The Path of Knowledge of Anthroposophy - The Michael Mystery (1924/1925)

Christ - Mysterium

The second side of initiation, living out into the macrocosm, into the great world, rising into the sun and stars, really took place through the Christ with the human nature. There he was first anointed, anointed like another human being, so that he would become pure, so that he would be immune to what might initially approach him from the physical world. There we see how the anointing, which plays a role in the ancient mysteries, confronts us again on a higher level, on historical ground, whereas otherwise it was a temple anointing. And we can see how the Christ now expresses his absorption in the whole world at the Passover meal, where he declares to those standing around him that he feels himself in all that is expressed as solid within the earth - which is indicated in the word "I am the bread" - and likewise in all that is liquid. This conscious stepping out into the great world is indicated in the Passover meal, just as man steps out unconsciously in sleep. And the feeling of all that man must feel as an approaching blinding is expressed in the monumental words: "My soul is afflicted unto death!" The Christ Jesus actually experiences what people otherwise experience as being killed, as being blinded. In the scene of Gethsemane, he experiences what can be called The physical body abandoned by the soul shows its own states of fear. And everything that follows is in fact intended to depict the penetration into the macrocosm: the "crucifixion" and what is represented by the "burial". After the Christ had actually accomplished what had been accomplished earlier, but with the help of others, in the three and a half days in the Mysteries, after he had accomplished what he had just been reproached for, because he had said that this temple should be torn down, and in three days he would build it up again - which is a clear reference to the initiation into the macrocosm that otherwise took place in the three and a half days - but it also indicates that after this scene he is no longer to be sought there, where the entity of Christ Jesus was enclosed within the physical, but outside in the spirit that pervades the world spaces. This is usually translated thus - and even in these weak translations of recent times it confronts us with all majesty - "Soon you will have to look for the Being who will be born out of the evolution of mankind, at the right hand of the Power, and he will appear to you out of the clouds." There you have to look for the Christ, poured out into the world, as a model of the great initiation which man experiences when he leaves the body and expands into the macrocosm. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 123: The Gospel of Matthew (1910)

Christ - Mystery of Golgotha

What happened on Golgotha can still be perceived today by the initiates; people who go through the initiation principle can still see it today in the Akashic Chronicle. The writers of the Gospels also only wrote it from the Akashic Records. A correct relationship to these events cannot be gained from the sensual world. [1] The Mystery of Golgotha could never have taken place in the higher worlds, just as it has no archetype in the higher worlds (see: Devachan), but is an event which, because it includes death in itself, is completed within the physical plan, so the understanding of it must also be acquired on the physical plan. Indeed, it is actually one of the tasks of man on earth to acquire this understanding in one of his incarnations. [2]

This fact, which occurs on the outer physical plane, has this in common with all supersensible facts; they cannot be proved externally either. Those who were involved in the later formulation of the Gospels convinced themselves of these events - with the exception of the writer of the Gospel of John, who was the immediate contemporary of these events - from the constellation of the stars, as they were still great connoisseurs of the connection between the macrocosm and the microcosm. They obtained the content by clairvoyant means, but they gained their conviction through the constellations of the macrocosm. [3] The Mystery of Golgotha took place at three o'clock in the afternoon on a Friday, April 3, the year 33. The birth of the I took place. [4]

The Mystery of Golgotha calls forth into the world-historical plan, as a mystery for the whole of humanity, that which in detail symbolically and allegorically, if we wanted to speak so, but condensed into ritual in the ancient mysteries only took place in the image, now became reality for the whole of humanity. [5]

What the soul of every initiate went through, the Christ Jesus went through up to the body, simply on a different level. Because the Christ was not an earthly man, but a solar being in the body of Jesus of Nazareth, the same thing that the old initiate went through in the mysteries according to his soul, the Christ Jesus could go through on Golgotha according to the whole human nature. Despite the death of the body, despite the rising of the body of Jesus of Nazareth in the mortal earth, a resurrection of the Christ could be accomplished, because this Christ ascends higher than the soul of the one to be initiated could ascend. The initiate could not bring the body into such deep regions of the subconscious as Christ Jesus brought it. Therefore the one to be initiated could not ascend as high with the resurrection as the Christ; but up to this difference in world magnitude the old act of initiation appeared as a historical fact on the place of consecration at Golgotha. [6] If we think of the initiation experience as extended over the whole earth: If we think of the whole earth as a kind of conscious living being, as it is in reality, then we must say: Until the Mystery of Golgotha in the course of the historical development of mankind, this earth did not have its higher self. This higher self of the earth now dwelt in the man Jesus of Nazareth, entered through the baptism of John in the Jordan and has been an effective impulse in earthly life since the completion of the Mystery of Golgotha. Earth life has thereby received its higher self. [7]

Lucifer did not have the tendency and the longing to lead people down a slippery slope through his deeds, but to rebel against the upper gods. He wanted to defeat his enemies, not put people on a slippery slope. Man has been caught up in this conflict between the gods from the very beginning of the earth's development. This was something that the gods in the higher worlds had to settle among themselves, but through the conflict between the gods man was drawn deeper into the world of matter than he should have been. The gods had to compensate for this. People had to be brought up again, Lucifer's deed had to be undone. This could only be accomplished by an act of the gods.

Death and dying exist only on earth; in the higher worlds there is only transformation, metamorphosis. But death can be traced back to that which came into man through Lucifer, and if something had not happened on the part of the gods, the whole of mankind would have become more and more entangled in a tendency leading to death. A sacrifice had to be made on the part of the gods: One of their own had to descend and experience death, which can only be experienced in the midst of the children of earth, as a balancing act for the Luciferic deed. And from this death of the gods emanates the power that can also radiate into the human souls and bring them up again from the darkness into which they have fallen through Lucifer's deed. This does not concern people directly, they were watching an affair of the gods. No wonder that what is a matter of the higher worlds cannot be represented by physical means, for it falls out of the physical world. [8]

The interaction of the ahrimanic and luciferic powers (the ahrimanic as a consequence of the luciferic) had in fact brought it to the point that at the time of the Mystery of Golgotha mankind was actually supposed to die out on earth. And through that which happened with the Mystery of Golgotha, one might say, humanity was healed from extinction. The physical body of man was again given a corresponding freshness. Through the Mystery of Golgotha, the powers of growth and prosperity of the physical human being were rekindled. This makes it possible for the human being to receive an impulse in the sleep states that he would not otherwise receive; during the independence (of astral body and ego) in sleep, the influence of the Christ-power takes place in particular in those human beings who prepare themselves for the sleep state in an appropriate way through the necessary soul content. [9]

When this time (the turning point of time) approached, the gods of the higher hierarchies had to say to themselves: "We are losing the possibility of our servants intervening in human souls. Because we were unable to stop Lucifer and Ahriman, we are only able to work through our servants up to this point. Then forces arise in the human souls which can no longer be directed by the Angeloi, Archangeloi and Archai. The forces of Lucifer and Ahriman cause people to fall away from us. Then the decision was made to send down the sun spirit, to sacrifice him, saying to himself: From now on he shall choose another lot than to sit in the council of the gods; he shall enter the scene where human souls live. Now he enters the earth aura through the gate of Jesus. So we are dealing with a matter of the gods governing the earth, not merely with a human matter. [10] With regard to everything else, mankind is free to search for historical evidence; with regard to the Mystery of Golgotha, historical evidence in the most intensive sense will never be of any use to man, but mankind should be compelled to understand this important event of the earth not in a physical-historical way, but to enter into it with a spiritual understanding. Whoever does not want to comprehend the Mystery of Golgotha without historical documents through a spiritual understanding of our earthly development should not comprehend it. This is the will, one could even say the will of the gods. Humanity should be forced to spirituality with regard to the most important matter on earth. It can only comprehend the Mystery of Golgotha - otherwise it is always historically refutable - if it rises to a spiritual comprehension of the world. [11]

There was a time before the Mystery of Golgotha when the earth had an atmosphere. In this atmosphere was the soul, which belonged to the soul of man. Now the earth has an atmosphere that is emptied of the soul that belongs to the soul of man. Instead, the same soul that was previously in the air has entered the light that embraces us from morning to evening. The fact that the Christ united with the earth made this possible. So that air and light have also become something else spiritually and mentally in the course of the earth's development. [12]

Sources:

[1], [4] GA 143: Experiences of the Supersensible. The Three Paths of the Soul to Christ. (1912)

[2], [3] GA 132: Evolution from the Point of View of the Truthful (1911)

[5], [7] GA 198: Healing Factors for the Social Organism (1920)

[6] GA 233a: Mystery Places of the Middle Ages. Rosicrucianism and the Modern Principle of Initiation - Easter as a Piece of the Mystery History of Humanity (1924)

[8] GA 130: Esoteric Christianity and the Spiritual Guidance of Humanity (1911/1912)

[9] GA 224: The Human Soul in its Connection with Divine-Spiritual Individualities. The Internalization of the Annual Festivals (1923)

[10] GA 148: From Akashic Research. The Fifth Gospel (1913/1914)

[11] GA 182: Death as a Transformation of Life (1917/1918)

[12] GA 194: The Mission of Michael. The Revelation of the Real Secrets of the Human Being (1919)

Christ - Mystery of Golgotha - physiological meaning

That which, because we are earth-men, is lacking in our nervous system, that which is only filled with Ahrimanic elements, confronts us in the Mystery of Golgotha, and it is our human task to absorb it into the blood, in order to christianize the Luciferic in the blood, to shape our enthusiasm in such a way that it lives in us. For all that which we can think in abstract thoughts is bound to the nerve substance, all that which lives in us as feeling, as mind, as enthusiasm, as mood, is bound to the blood. And now you see, I would say, spiritually and physiologically into that which took place with the Mystery of Golgotha. That which he left behind has been drawn after man, and again it is supposed to permeate him, because it was not supposed to permeate him at the beginning of his work on earth. If it had permeated him at the beginning of his work on earth, it would have permeated him and he would have become an automaton of the spirit. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 169: World Being and I-ness (1916)

Christ - Mystery of Golgotha - the center of gravity of earth evolution

A system has only one center of gravity, (a) balance(beam) only one suspension point. That is why the occultists of all times, ancient and modern, when speaking of the center of gravity of earth evolution in the true sense, recognize this turning of evolution to the one point, to the Mystery of Golgotha, and the ascent of human evolution again from this point. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 127: The Mission of the New Spiritual Revelation. The Christ-event as the central event of earth evolution (1911)

Christ - Mystery of Golgotha and earth aura

There comes a time when the astral body (of the earth) changes completely, when it shows completely new colors, completely new processes. There is such a turning point in the earth's development when we look at the earth as an organism. Before, its astral body shows us certain colors, and afterwards it shows us other colors. And if the person in question were to investigate what time it was that the earth's astral body underwent this radical change, he would find that it was when the blood flowed from the wounds of Christ Jesus that the whole astral body of the earth changed. Since that time the earth as a planetary body has been the body of the Christ. [1]

The consequence of this was that the etheric and astral sphere of the earth was now completely substantially permeated by the Christ-entity. This Christ-substance descends to the etheric sphere of the earth and can be found in the etheric sphere of the earth in all future, but could never descend to physical condensation in a fleshly body. Like the shell of a snail, what is physically on the earth today is a shell-like thing, which will one day, when the earth has reached the goal of its development, fall away from the totality of human souls, just as the physical body falls away from the individual human soul in death today. The totality of human souls will pass over into a spiritual sphere at death on earth and will cast off like a cinder, like a shell covering, everything that is today the physical of the earth. The Christ-being, together with the entirety of the human souls, will continue to ascend into the spiritual spheres in order to later reach the next embodiment of the earth being. Because Christ has permeated the physical substances of the earth since the Mystery of Golgotha, but does not unite with them, nothing will remain in the essence of the Christ that could long for the discarded earth-shell; it will continue to shine as a star. [2]

Since the event of Golgotha, Christ has been the planetary spirit of the earth, the earth spirit, who will increasingly transform the earthly body. [3]

Sources:

[1] GA 98: Natural and Spiritual Beings - Their Work in our Visible World (1907/1908)

[2] GA 129: World Miracles, Soul Examinations and Spiritual Revelations (1911)

[3] GA 108: The Answering of World and Life Questions through Anthroposophy (1908/1909)

Christ - Socrates - Buddha - a comparison

Socrates extracted individual, earthly reason from the souls of his disciples; the Christ extracted heavenly reason from the souls of his disciples. The Buddha gave heavenly enlightenment to his disciples; the Christ gave earthly enlightenment to the crowd in his parables. I ask you to take these three images: over in the land of the Ganges, the Buddha with his disciples - the antitype of Socrates; over in Greece, Socrates with his disciples - the antitype of the Buddha. And then this strange synthesis, this strange connection four to five centuries later. There you see the lawful development of human evolution in one of the greatest examples standing before your soul. [1]

The great conservator of the culture of the sentient soul into the culture of the intellectual or emotional soul is the Buddha - What is the mission of Socrates, who appears somewhat later? Socrates also stands in the age of the mind or soul. He appeals to the individuality of man, to that which can only really emerge in our fifth cultural age. He has to take in a still abstract form the time of the consciousness soul into the time of the intellect or mind soul. Buddha preserves what has gone before. Therefore what he proclaims appears like a warming, shining light. Socrates takes in what for him is the future, which is the characteristic of the time of the consciousness soul. Therefore it appears in his time like something sober, like something merely intellectual, like something dry. Thus the third, fourth and fifth periods of civilization push together in the fourth; the third is preserved by Buddha, the fifth is anticipated by Socrates. The Occident and the Orient are there to absorb these two differences; the Orient to preserve the greatness of the past time; the Occident is concerned with anticipating in an earlier time what is to come forth in a later time. [2]

Sources:

[1] GA 139: The Gospel of Mark (1912)

Christ - Sun Spirit and the Catholic Church

And these people (here Jesuits) also know very well why it is carefully avoided to tell the Catholic lay community that it should also belong to the inner teachings of the Catholic Church to regard Christ as a solar spirit. [1] When the Mass is read - the so-called sanctissimum, in which the host is (seen to be) on a crescent-shaped saucer - then one feels: This is indeed the living symbol of the fact that in Christ the solar being was once sought; for on every sanctissimum, on every monstrance, the rays of the sun are on it. But the connection between Christ and the sun has been lost; it is only still there in the symbol. It has remained there to this day in the symbolum, but the symbolum itself is not understood! [2]

Sources:

[1] GA 255b: Anthroposophy and its Opponents (1919-1921)

[2] GA 237: Esoteric Observations on Karmic Connections - Third Volume. The karmic connections of the anthroposophical movement (1924)

Understanding Christ

But the understanding (of Christ) was completely over in the fourth (Greek-Latin) period. Therefore, the teaching could only penetrate people's minds as a fact of faith. It was the worst time for the understanding from which people were most distant. But the effects of Christ do not depend on what people can understand. For Christ was not a world teacher, but the one who performed something as a spiritual being, who flowed into the earth aura in order to live among people. This can be symbolized when the women came to the tomb and were told by the spiritual being: The one you are looking for is not here! [1]

Christ appears on earth in an age that is least suited to understanding him. Actually, for those who look at the theological-spiritual development that is linked to the appearance of Christ from a spiritual-scientific point of view, it appears as if this theological development has set itself the task of contributing as much as possible in order to create obstacle after obstacle to the understanding of the Christ-being. For this theological scholarship seems to be moving further and further away from this understanding. [2]

All spiritual beings who never come to our earth, who remain only in the spiritual worlds, do not pass through death. Christ has become a fellow-citizen of men in the physical world, and that which took place on Golgotha makes it so that, if one understands the only death of the Gods, one does not come away empty-handed in the solar time (in the life between death and a new birth). In order to know the Christ, one must understand his death, and because death is the essence, the mystery of Golgotha can only be understood here on earth, where death is present. If one does not achieve a relationship with Christ here on earth, then one does not experience him in the higher worlds, then we find his place empty in the time of the sun. But if we take the Christ impulse with us, then the solar throne does not appear empty; then we consciously find the Christ. It is important for our present human development that we find the Christ in the spiritual world by recognizing him. Why? Yes, when we go through this solar time (in the post-mortal passage through the spheres), then we have gradually entered a world where we are dependent on spiritual light (only that which can be illuminated can be perceived spiritually). Before, before the time of the sun, we still have the after-effects of the earth. Now we need more. [3]

All philosophy has the peculiarity that it proceeds along the thread of thought, developing one link from the other, thus, as it were, seeking what follows in what precedes. Thus they are right as philosophies. But one never arrives at the relation which results when one considers that the cause need not cause at all. The cause, in its essence, can be the same whether it causes something or not. This changes nothing in the essence of the cause. And this significance is presented to us in the symbolism of God the Father and God the Son: that the Christ is added as a free creation to God the Father, as a creation that does not follow directly from Him, but which places itself as a free act alongside the preceding creation; which would also have the possibility of not being; which is therefore not given to the world because the Father had to give the Son to the world, but the Son is given to the world as a free act, through grace, through freedom, through love, which gives itself freely in its creation. Therefore, one can never come to the Son God, to Christ, through the same kind of truth by which one comes to the Father God as the philosophers. In order to arrive at the Christ, it is necessary to add the truth of faith to the philosophical truth, or - because the time of faith is diminishing more and more - to add the other truth, which comes through clairvoyant research, which must also first develop as a free act in the human soul.

Therefore one must say: Just as one proves from the arrangement of natural processes that there is a God at all, so one can never prove externally from the chain of causes and effects that there is a Christ. The Christ has existed and can pass by human souls if they do not feel the strength to say: Yes, this is the Christ. It takes an active effort to awaken to the truth impulse in order to recognize the Christ in the one who was there as the Christ. We can be forced to recognize the other truths, which lie in the realm of God the Father, if only we engage in thinking and apply it consistently, for to be a materialist is at the same time to be illogical. [4]

(A witty man once illustrated the impossibility of the mechanical-materialistic creation of the world with a grotesque image: such a creation of the world can be compared exactly to the creation of a complete dictionary by an explosion in a printing press).

Sources:

[1] GA 148: From Akashic Research. The Fifth Gospel (1913/1914)

[2] GA 149: Christ and the Spiritual World. On the Search for the Holy Grail (1913/1914)

[3] GA 140: Occult Investigations into Life between Death and New Birth. The living interaction between the living and the dead (1912/1913)

[4] GA 153: The Inner Being of Man and Life between Death and New Birth (1914)

Christ - Refuser

Suppose man were to refuse to accept the Christ in his soul, then he would arrive at the end of the earth, and he would have all these phantom-like beings, which have emerged from him in earlier incarnations, in the spirit mist that will have formed from the earth in the course of human evolution (see: elemental beings of the solid). That which would be there would be a dead earth and would pass over to Jupiter dead. At the end of time, the remains of our incarnations on earth will stand there like a mighty tableau if we have not received the living Christ within us. If we have inwardly grasped this "Not I, but the Christ in me, the Christ in us", he takes over that which draws out of us, and our remnants stand there animated by the Christ. When these remnants are criss-crossed, they press, they squeeze together. But as a result of the thinness pressing together, it becomes dense - the spiritual also becomes dense - and all our earthly incarnations are united into one spiritual body. It belongs to us, we need it as we develop towards Jupiter, for it is the starting point of our embodiment on Jupiter. We will stand there with our soul at the end of our time on earth - no matter how it stands with its karma - we will stand there before our earthly remains collected by Christ and will have to unite with them in order to go over to Jupiter together with them. We will be resurrected in the body! If we had rejected the Christ, then at the end of our time on earth our individual remains of incarnation would be scattered; we would be bound to that which remains dead in our remains on earth. Our soul would indeed be egoistically liberated in spirit, but we would not be able to approach our bodily remains. Such souls are the prey of Lucifer, for he strives to prevent the souls from reaching their earthly goal, to keep them in the spiritual world. And Lucifer will send over into the Jupiter time what scattered earth remnants have remained, as dead inclusion of Jupiter, who will then be inside Jupiter as moon and will always drive up these earth remnants. And these will have to be enlivened by the souls above as generic souls on Jupiter. The human kingdom on Jupiter will split into one in which the souls will have reached their earthly goal, and into those souls which will form a middle kingdom between the human kingdom of Jupiter and the animal kingdom of Jupiter. These will be the souls that are luciferic, that is, merely spiritual; they will have their body below, this will be a clear expression of their whole inner soul, but they will only be able to direct it from the outside. The Jupiter existence will still be followed by a Venus existence, and a balance will be created again through the further evolution of the Christ, but it is precisely on Jupiter that man should become aware of what it means to want to become perfect only in his ego and not to make the whole earth his concern! Man is to experience this once through the whole Jupiter cycle, in that everything that he has not gone through in his earthly existence can then come before his spiritual eye. [1]

In the "Dark Ages", people spoke of Christ appearing in the world because he had to wrest the earth from the devil. - True enlightenment leads us back to this simple, plain popular belief! For Lucifer owns everything on earth that is not liberated by the Christ. And everything human that is more in us than that which is merely decided in our ego, it is ennobled, it is made fruitful for the whole of humanity when it is christened. [2]

Sources:

[1] GA 155: Christ and the human soul. On the meaning of life. Theosophical morality. Anthroposophy and Christianity (1912/1914)

Christ - Perception

The further the development of mankind progresses, the more abstract the word becomes; it becomes merely a sign of what it is supposed to express. Language becomes more and more inorganic, more and more arabesque-like, more and more alien to man. Where does this come from? In this alienation of language from the inner meaning of words, the forces that were previously used to form language are laid bare. The language-forming power is released and will be used for the perception of the world word, the spiritual Christ. We reach the Christ impulse by being members of the whole human race. The Christ will approach man in such a way that he will pour out his essence as the epitome of moral ideas over the whole evolution of mankind. [1]

The Christ, when mankind will recognize him in spirit, will have this in common with the ethical motives, that he can also be denied, that he forces no one to acknowledge him. The old gods still had an effect on other powers of the human soul. They still grasped man where he had not yet brought himself to consciousness. But the Christ will appear to man consciously in his spirituality to the extent that man has freed himself in consciousness and has raised himself to him. He will be there for all who want to recognize him without anyone being forced to acknowledge him. In the future, the recognition of the Christ-being will also be a free act of the soul for each individual human being. [2]

In Greek and Roman times, man was trained to perceive in particular that which approaches externally. This is why the impulse of the Christ event enters the world as external perception. Now we live in the culture of ideas. Therefore our cultural epoch will reach its goal in that Christ will be known as something that is perceived from the astral world as an inner conception. As an etheric form he will manifest himself out of the astral world. In the next epoch, in the time of emotional movements, man will manifest his emotional movements in particular in order to see the Christ astrally. And then, in the epoch of morality, the Christ will manifest himself as the highest that man can experience: as an I that shines in from the upper devachanic world. So the perception of the Christ will also continue to develop. In his ideas, in his imaginations, man will now perceive the Christ in a natural way. [3]

Sources:

[1] & [2] GA 150: The World of the Spirit and its Entry into Physical Existence. The influence of the dead in the world of the living (1913)

[3] GA 143: Experiences of the Supersensible. The three paths of the soul to Christ. (1912)

Christ - Perception pre-Christian

In ancient Indian culture, we see seven great holy teachers who are referred to as the holy rishis. The seven rishis see much. But beyond their sphere is this high being, which they called "Vishva Karman", a being that filled the spiritual world but was beyond what the clairvoyant human eye could see in those times.

When Zarathustra directed his clairvoyant gaze up to the sun, then - he said - one not only sees the sun, but, just as one sees an aura surrounding a human being, so one sees the great aura of the sun, Ahura Mazdao. And it is the great aura of the sun that once brought forth the human being. Man is the image of the sun spirit, Ahura Mazdao. But Ahura Mazdao did not yet dwell on earth.

And then comes the time when the clairvoyant man begins to see Ahura Mazdao in what surrounds him on earth. When Zarathustra had found a successor in Moses, Moses' clairvoyant eye opened and he was then able to see in the burning bush and in the fire on Sinai the spirit that announced itself to him as "ehjeh asher ehjeh", as the "I am who was there, who is there, who will be there", the Yahweh. The spirit that was once only on the sun had migrated down to earth. That was the development: descended from the universe first to the physical elements, then into a human body; only then was the divine I, from which man originated and to which the writer of the Gospel of Luke traces the family tree of Jesus of Nazareth, reborn. Then the great event of the rebirth of God in man had occurred. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 112: The Gospel of John in relation to the three other Gospels, especially the Gospel of Luke (1909)

Christ - Why did the Christ die in a human body?

The God died because the development of the world made it necessary for the God to enter the earthly human being, for a God of the upper worlds to become the leader of the earthly development. For this, the Christ had to be related to death. Death-related, my dear friends! One would like this word to be deeply, deeply understood by human souls. [1] But in order for the Christ to dwell in us, he had to become death-related, related to death, related to everything that is spread out in the world, beginning with the light and going down into the depths of matter. The Christ had to be able to enter into that which we carry within us as the corpse of light, the corpse of warmth, the corpse of air and so on. He could only become related to man by becoming related to death. And we must feel in our souls that God had to die so that he could fulfill us, who have conquered death through the Luciferic temptation, and we can say: The Christ in us. [2]

Sources:

[1] & [2] GA 155: Christ and the human soul. On the meaning of life. Theosophical Morality. Anthroposophy and Christianity (1912/1914)

Christ - ways to him

There are three ways to Christ: firstly the way through the Gospels, secondly the way through inner experience and thirdly the way through initiation. [1]

We must to a certain extent have a dualism in naming. In the Christ we must see the cosmic-spiritual; in Jesus we must see that through which this cosmic-spiritual has entered into historical development. To conceal, to distort this mystery of Christ connected with the ancient mysteries, that was to a certain extent the task of the Church in the centuries that have passed. Try to realize how it was for those individuals who really wanted to seek Christ Jesus: it was always a martyr's path. He always had to be sought, the Christ Jesus, against the conventions, just as today, of course, it has to be sought against what has remained of the conventions (or has been newly formed again). [2]

Sources:

[1] GA 143: Experiences of the Supersensible. The three paths of the soul to Christ. (1912)

[2] GA 183: The Science of the Becoming of Man (1918)

Christ - Entity

The Christ entity is not a human being. It is an entity of the higher hierarchies. On earth it had to live three years as a human being among humans. For this purpose a human being had to be born to meet it, the Nathanian boy Jesus. And because this human child could not have absorbed - since it did not have the previous education of earlier incarnations - because it could not have absorbed what outer culture had worked out on earth, a soul entered into this child which had worked out in the highest sense that which outer culture can bring: the Zarathustra soul. That which can be achieved on earth as the highest, Zarathustra contributed to this human child. And that which the heavens could give to the earth, so that the earth could receive spiritually, that which it receives every summer through the increased power of the sun, the earth received through the Christ-being. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 150: The World of the Spirit and its Entry into Physical Existence. The influence of the dead into the world of the living (1913)

Christ - How do I find him?

You find the Christ when you have the following experiences. Firstly, I want to strive for as much self-knowledge as is possible for me according to my very individual human personality. - No one who honestly strives for this self-knowledge will be able to say anything else to himself today as a human being than: I cannot grasp what I am actually striving for. I fall short of what I am striving for with my power of comprehension; I feel powerless in the face of my striving. This feeling of powerlessness is healthy, it is nothing other than the feeling of illness (the residue of the impulse of Gondishapur) that is implanted in us. And by feeling this sickness, one feels that the soul would actually be condemned by our body, as the body is today, to die with us. Then, when we feel this powerlessness strongly enough, the change comes. Then comes the other experience that tells us: But we can overcome this death of the soul if we do not surrender to what we are able to achieve through our physical powers alone, if we surrender to what the spirit gives us. We can have the opportunity to rediscover our soul and reconnect with the spirit. By sensing the Savior, we feel that we carry something in our soul that can rise from death at any time in our own experience. - When we seek these two experiences, we find the Christ in our own soul. This is an experience that humanity is approaching. No supersensibly developed abilities are needed for this, but only the will for this self-reflection, the will also to combat that arrogance which is so common today, which does not allow man to realize that when he relies on his own powers, he becomes arrogant towards his own powers.

But then, when we can feel powerlessness and restoration from powerlessness, then the stroke of luck occurs for us that we have a truly real relationship with Christ Jesus. For this experience is a repetition of what we experienced centuries before in the spiritual world. Thus we must seek it in its mirror image here in the soul on the physical plane. [1] We have found the Christ when we have found ourselves again, but out of powerlessness. The whole feeling of nothingness that comes over us when we think about our own powers without pride must precede the Christ-impulse. [2]

Sources:

[1] & [2] GA 182: Death as a transformation of life (1917/1918)

Christ - How do you gain a relationship with him?

Many people ask again and again: Yes, how do I come into a closer relationship with the being that we address as the Christ? - There is no simple formula: Do it this way or that way! - but certain more important things in the whole of spiritual science today are such that they lead one into the region of the Christ as he is present. So to experience him in such a way that one experiences him as a physical man in physical events was only possible at that time (in Palestine). If you want to get close to him today, then you have to look for him as he lives in the earthly sphere. But he does not live in the gross contexts. So it is precisely the search for finer, more remote contexts that can bring people into that region of consciousness where they really experience the Christ. We must go to this being, it does not come to us. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 176: Human and Humanistic Truths of Development. The Karma of Materialism (1917)

Christ - How do I get in touch with the Christ

My dear friends, I am often asked by our members: How do I get in touch with the Christ? - It is a naive question! Because all we can strive for, every line we read from our anthroposophical science, is to relate to the Christ. In a sense, we do nothing else. And the person who seeks a special kind of relationship on the side is only naively expressing that he actually wants to avoid the somewhat uncomfortable path of studying or reading something. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 169: World Being and I-ness (1916)

Christ - Return

This is the difference between all planetary gods and the Christ God, that the Christ God leaves no physical star behind at death on earth, leaves no remnant behind that would have remained unspiritualized, but passes over completely into the spiritual and passes over as spirit with the human souls to the Jupiter existence. If that which belongs to Christ, for which one has the right to use the name Christ, were to embody itself again in a physical body after the Mystery of Golgotha, then the first germ would be given through this physical substance, to which other things would join to form such a star, which would remain behind in the future. Thus a star would be created for which mankind would have to long back in all the future. This longing back must not be achieved through the Christ-being. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 129: World Miracles, Soul Tests and Spiritual Revelations (1911)

Christ - where does he live?

Only when one immerses oneself completely in the element of heaviness does one penetrate to the experience of lightness. In the flight dream, this element penetrates the human experience. Today's psychology interprets this dream quite wrongly by seeing it as a dream of fear. For fear is connected with becoming narrow. In a dream of flight, however, one dreams precisely of widening, of lightness. The power of lightness is linked to the sun. It is the power that causes water to rise from the earth and evaporate. This evaporated water then condenses again into clouds and returns to the earth as rain. But it is not correct to think that the power of lightness only lifts the water up to this sphere. In truth, the substance of the water is carried much further. For it is completely dematerialized by lightness. When the clouds rise and disappear, the water ceases to be material. But the power of the sun, which brings this about, can have such a strong effect that too much earth-water is etherized upwards. Then too much foreign ether accumulates in the earth's environment. The accumulated ether then suddenly breaks back into the material earth sphere. We experience this as the phenomenon of lightning. In it, the ether substance lights up to condense into a watery form in rain or even into a solid form in hail. In lightning, the sky tears apart and the accumulated ether breaks down. But what happens abruptly and thus audibly in a thunderstorm also happens rhythmically and silently elsewhere: in the evaporating water and the gathering clouds. Every time you fall asleep, you enter the world in which lightness reigns. When you consciously learn to fall asleep, you also become aware of this. It is the same world that one enters through the gate of death. It is the kingdom in which Christ lives today. One reaches it by dying out of the physical. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 266/3: From the Contents of the Esoteric Lessons. Volume III (1913-1923)

Christ - Future

People who allow themselves to be penetrated by the power of Christ, first inwardly and then more and more outwardly. In this way, the future will not only understand the essence of Christ, but will be imbued with it. [1] Times will come when the Christ will be called something quite different, when there will be quite different documents, when no reference will be made to the external history that such a being once existed, but when this fact will be recognized out of the consciousness of humanity. [2]

Sources:

[1] GA 123: The Gospel of Matthew (1910)

[2] GA 127: The Mission of the New Spiritual Revelation. The Christ-Event as the Central Event of the Earth Evolution (1911)

Christ as Avatar

Already on the old Saturn level, exalted beings, the thrones, sacrificed their will substance so that the first structure of the physical human body could be formed from it. This is only one example on a large scale. But all the time - one may well make use of this expression - entities which have preceded man in their development descend to man, connect themselves with human evolution by temporarily dwelling within a human soul, within a human entity, as one might also say, assuming human form, or if one wants to express it more trivially, appearing like a force in the human soul, which permeates this human soul, inspiring it; so that such a human being, who is permeated by a God, can work more within human evolution than any other human being. [1] In the designation "Christ, the Son of the living God" a descending being is meant. If one wanted to name him with a word of oriental philosophy, one would call him an "avataric" being, a descending God. [2]

The fact that the avataric being of the Christ dwelt in the body of Jesus of Nazareth made it possible for the etheric body of Jesus of Nazareth to be multiplied countless times, as well as the astral body and even the ego. These multiplications were now suspended until they could be used in the course of human development. But they were not bound to this or that nationality (like earlier avatars), but where a person was subsequently found who was mature and suitable to receive an astral image of the astral body of Jesus of Nazareth interwoven into his own astral body, or an etheric image of the etheric body, these could be interwoven into him. [3]

If we follow the development of Christianity, it was first the memory of what was on the physical plane, so to speak, then it was the etheric that wove itself directly into the etheric bodies of the bearers of Christianity in Central Europe. In the later centuries, from the 12th to the 15th century, it was especially the astral body of Jesus of Nazareth that was interwoven in numerous images into the astral bodies of the most important bearers of Christianity. One such personality was Francis of Assisi. In Elizabeth of Thuringia we have such a personality who had an image of the astral body of Jesus of Nazareth interwoven into her sentient soul. [4] (With the scholastics it was in the intellectual soul). With those who were more imprinted with the consciousness soul, or the image that lives itself out as the consciousness soul of Jesus of Nazareth, the special realization arose - because the ego is located in the consciousness soul - that the Christ can be found in the ego. These were the people you know as Meister Eckhart, Johannes Tauler and all of the bearers of medieval mysticism. [5] (See also under: Images).

Sources:

[1], [2] GA 123: Das Matthäus-Evangelium (1910)

[3], [4], [5] GA 107: Spiritual science of human nature (1908/1909)

Christ as the inverted macrocosmic man

The "being" Christ is to be imagined as the inverted macrocosmic man, who is, however, equal to the second aspect of the Godhead, or the Logos. - (Imagine) the moment before the so-called "monad" [the totality of monads] descends in order to incarnate into the hitherto prepared animal-man bodies. The animal kingdom up to that point, as far as it had come into being, i.e. with the exception of the mammals, had physically spread out everything that had to be drawn together into one being for the lower human being. In these Lemurian animal-men the monadic world descends by first separating Manas from Buddhi. In the Lemurian man (see: Lemurians), Manas is thus incarnated, which unites with Kama (desire-matter) to form Kama-Manas (mind-soul), and Buddhi-Atma only remains connected with Manas as an attachment.

Christ is now that entity which first awakens the "Buddhi" as the first spark. For this it is necessary that the Christ being takes possession of a chela (spiritual disciple) in the third degree [Jesus] Thus we have to regard the Christ event on earth as the reversal of the process within the monad world, of that which took place with "Adam". Paul expresses this quite clearly when he calls the "Christ" the "inverted Adam". The external historical process is only the actual symbol for the inner spiritual process. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 89: Consciousness - Life - Form. Basic Principles of Spiritual Scientific Cosmology (1903-1906)

Christ as the spirit of the earth is substantially poured out in the earthly aura

While exoteric knowledge does not enrich us and leaves nothing behind after death, it is different with all esoteric knowledge. It flows into us, into our astral body, forms certain new links there; new threads weave themselves into the astral body and remain connected with our being. - We know that the astral body surrounds the human being in egg form. Since an ego works in it, it radiates out: New threads are woven into it, new insights, so that we can call it the "body of knowledge". This cognitive body will become denser and denser, stronger and stronger, and finally become spirit-self. By developing it, a planetary development of the earth alone is possible. On Jupiter this cognitive body will already be as dense as our astral body, on Venus like our etheric body; on Vulcan it will finally have become as physical as our blood. Just as the earth is surrounded by an envelope of air which man breathes in, so there is also a spiritual substance in this air which wants to flow into man.

It depends on us whether we let this spiritual substance out again as air of death, or whether we bring it into connection with our theosophical knowledge and weave the fruit into our astral body. But this is not important for us alone, but for the whole cosmos. If we inhale this spiritual substance without making it fruitful within us, we take something from the cosmos but give it nothing in return, thus hindering evolution. It depends on us whether the Earth state can be followed by the Jupiter state, namely by increasing these spiritual forces around the Earth. If we look back to (ancient) Saturn, we know that our physical body came into being there in its first form. It arose from the thoughts of the gods, and these thoughts condensed into what we are today. But already on Saturn it was expected that man would continue the work of the gods, and this is what we do when we allow the spiritual substance of our environment to flow into us in order to build up our body of knowledge from it.

That was the purpose of the Mystery of Golgotha, to offer man this opportunity. What is it that we take into ourselves with this spiritual substance? It is the Christ himself. It was not like this before the Mystery of Golgotha. People could say: Ex Deo nascimur. Those to be initiated at that time were prepared in such a way that they went back to what had been handed down from the old gods. But we know that with the Mystery of Golgotha the aura of our earth has changed, because the Christ has become the spirit of the earth. He poured himself substantially into this earth aura and has been contained in it ever since. And again, now is the time when this outpoured Christ-substance has condensed so that it can be absorbed by human beings. In Christo morimur therefore means nothing other than to immerse oneself in this spiritual substance and to absorb the Christ completely with it, so that one can say: "Not I, but the Christ in me." [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 266/2: From the Contents of the Esoteric Lessons. Volume II (1910-1912)

Christ etheric

If we only get to know the Latin word Dominus in its real inner meaning of essence, we come to understand what the use of language means in this case, quite apart from spiritual research: the one who is somehow chosen on earth or in the world at all to give direction to another being is the Lord. But how long will there be a need for external masters on earth? How long do we need the commandments of external masters, even the commandments of external spiritual masters over the earth? - Only until the time when the Christ indwells people with the name that he only understands himself. Then every human being will also be able to follow the Christ in his own being, in his own soul. Then everyone will strive to realize in himself that which wants to realize the will of man out of inner love; the Lord of lords, the King of kings will dwell in each individual. Spiritually speaking, this is the time in which we ourselves now live. And the fact that we live in it is only concealed by the fact that people continue to live in the old ways and really first deny this indwelling of Christ as much as possible, deny it as much as possible in all areas. It must be said that there is much in many people today that prepares them in the right way for the etheric appearance of the Christ, who is a being descending from the divine world. But people must prepare themselves for this by finding the source of their actions and deeds within themselves. [1]

(In) 1933, there would be the possibility that the earth and everything that lives on it would perish (through the collision with the Biela comet - the comet having been subsequently observed to split in two and destroyed and has not been seen since 1852.) if it were not for another wise arrangement weren't there that can't be calculated. It is so that the calculations can no longer be correct when the comets have taken on other forms. One would have to say in the sense of the apocalyptic: Before the etheric Christ can be grasped by men in the right way, mankind must first come to terms with the encounter of the beast that rises in 1933. - That is apocalyptically speaking. Here spiritual contemplation is combined with the contemplation of nature. That is where the spiritual character of what is in the universe becomes clear. [2]

Rudolf Steiner once said that one can approach the etheric Christ by meditating on the saying "My kingdom is not of this world". [3]

Sources:

[1], [2] GA 346: Lectures and Courses on Christian Religious Work, V. Apocalypse and Priestly Work (1924)

[3] Pfe: Ehrenfried E. Pfeiffer: A Life for the Spirit. Ehrenfried Pfeiffer (1899 - 1961) (1999)

Christ etheric - organ for his perception

With every heartbeat, a certain amount of substance is absorbed, taken away as physical pressure and added to the etheric substance. This then begins to radiate outwards. Dr. Steiner said that a clairvoyant could see the extent of the radiation rising from the heart to the brain, and that a person would be ashamed to fall asleep in the presence of a clairvoyant during a lecture. The radiation from this etheric heart organ is currently developing into a spiritual organ of perception. A new sense organ is developing in this etheric heart, and this is the only organ through which man can experience and recognize the etheric Christ.

Today we can have a similar experience with the heart as we had with the sun in the ancient mysteries. We experience a sun in every heart. The sun shines on all people, it shines on the fields of the earth, it shines on other planets. And it is constantly using up its own energy. The sun dissolves matter and transforms it into radiant energy. Its light can be seen everywhere in our universe. The same power that dwells in the sun wants to dwell in every human heart. When one realizes that the heart is a spiritual sense organ, then one begins to develop the power to see the etheric Christ. This happens by recognizing that the power in the heart is the same as the power in the sun, both physically and spiritually. If you take this very seriously, there will still be conflicts, but you will also realize that the whole world view changes. The power of the heart is a power that wants the good. [1]

Sources:

[1] Pfe: Ehrenfried E. Pfeiffer: A Life for the Spirit. Ehrenfried Pfeiffer (1899 - 1961) (1999)

Christ risen from the dead

Almost everything that was known at the time about the risen Christ, about the Christ who passed through the Mystery of Golgotha and then taught some of the chosen disciples after his resurrection in a spiritual body, like the older teachers of primitive mankind, has been lost to external tradition. At most, the Gospels indicate how important the teachings that the Risen Christ gave to his disciples were, but even there in a makeshift manner, in the encounter of Christ Jesus with the disciples who went to Emmaus and so on. And finally, Paul's experience at Damascus is also meant by Paul himself as an instruction given to him by the Risen Christ, which then turned Saul into Paul. In those older times there was an awareness that the risen Christ Jesus had very special mysteries to share with people. It was only because of the people that they could not have these messages at first. Men had to develop those powers of the soul which then became the use of human freedom and the human intellect. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 211: The Solar Mystery and the Mystery of Death and Resurrection. Exoteric and Esoteric Christianity (1922)

Christ's encounter with himself

A great and wonderful thing is taking place behind the scenes of world history. From the West, pagan Christianity, Arthurian Christianity, also appearing under a different name and in a different form; from the East, Christ in the hearts of men. The encounter: Christ, the real Christ who came to earth, meets his image, which is carried towards him, flowing from West to East. 869 is the encounter. Up to this year we have clearly distinguished between a current that goes north and across Central Europe, which, whether it was called Baldur or something else, carried the Christ as the sun hero within it. And the Arthurian knights spread their culture under the banner of Christ as sun hero. The other current, which is rooted in the heart, which later became the Grail current, is to be seen more in the south from the east, it carries the actual, the true, the real Christ. The one coming from the West carries a cosmic image towards him, so to speak. The encounter of Christ with himself, of Christ as the brother of man and of Christ as the hero of the sun, who is only present in the image, this encounter, this confluence of Christ with his own image takes place in the ninth century. [1] (See also: Arthur; Grail).

Sources:

[1] GA 240: Esoteric Observations on Karmic Connections - Sixth Volume (1924)

Christ of the Gnostics

The Christ of the Gnostics, who is actually the Nous (see: Nus), could only come so far as to embody himself in man, but he could not come as far as death and resurrection. For Basilides, for example, this obscures his vision. His vision is obscured at the moment when he approaches the final acts of the Mystery of Golgotha with his inner vision; his vision is obscured when it comes to death and resurrection. His gaze was directed to the walk on the cross, to the Golgotha walk of Christ Jesus, but he could not complete from a vivid imagination that the Christ carried the cross to Golgotha, that he was nailed to the cross and rose again. He realizes that Simon of Cyrene took the cross from [the Christ], that he carried it up to Golgotha, and that Simon of Cyrene was crucified instead of the Christ. This is the Gnostics' conception of Christ, insofar as Gnosticism appears in the figure of Basilides, and basically this is the historical figure of Gnosticism. By regarding the 365th divine as the Jewish God, the Gnostics perceived the paternal in the divine just at the end of this series. Where the Jews worshipped their God, there they felt the paternal, while they felt that which later came to light as the Holy Spirit in the other pole, in the Nous. And therefore the Gnostics gave an answer to a certain Christian question of the first Christian centuries, which is no longer appreciated today, they gave the answer: The Christ is a much higher creature than the Father, the Christ is not of the same nature as the Father. The Father, who found his utmost, most extreme expression in the Jewish God, is the Creator of the world, but the Creator of the world was compelled to allow a world to emerge from its subsoil that brings forth the good and the bad, the good and the bad at the same time, that brings forth health and sickness at the same time, that brings forth the holy and the devilish at the same time. To this world, which was not made of love because it contains evil, the Gnostics opposed the Christ as the higher divine, who came down from above, who carries the Nous in himself, who can redeem this world, which the Creator had to leave unredeemed. The Gnostics actually saw the matter in such a way that the Father of the worlds was still imperfect, that he could only bring forth the more perfect in his Son, that he did the procreation to the Son, the begetting of the Son, in order to complete the development of the world. [1] (See also under: Montanists).

Sources:

[1] GA 343: Lectures and Courses on Christian Religious Activity, II Spiritual Recognition - Religious Feeling - Cultic Action (1921)

Finding Christ - is like access to the supersensible world

When we find the Christ, that is, when we open up the spiritual world, then we also find access to the supersensible world, but now not through the physical body, as was the case in ancient times, but through the elevated power of the soul. And this we get now, when the parallelism between the bodily and soul development only goes up into the twenties - later it will go up even less far - by penetrating ourselves with the knowledge of a supersensible event, namely the Mystery of Golgotha in the midst of sensuous events of earthly development. Everything on earth was sensual. Only in the Mystery of Golgotha did the supersensible mingle with the earthly events. This can only be understood through supersensible knowledge. We must achieve in the soul what was achieved in the older times in a way that was more mediated through the body. No matter how much we admire that which, by the way, has not come down to us from the primeval Indian times, but which has remained later from these primeval Indian times in the glory of the Vedas, the magnificence of the Vedanta philosophy, in the splendor of the Bhagavad Gita, we must know that in those ancient times this could only have been achieved by the fact that man in this way, as he grew into old age, had something spiritual radiated back into him from his body. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 226: Human nature, human destiny and world development (1923)

Christ in me and modern initiation

Thus one works in the sense of this power of Christ: if one recognizes that one receives the Christ in oneself into the ego that has become too strong, then one permeates oneself with the Christ-power that has come into the earth through the Mystery of Golgotha. Then the ego is switched back into the person in the right way. It is a universally significant word, this Pauline word: Not I, the Christ in me - it gives direction and orientation to those who experience the power of the Christ through modern initiation. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 211: The Solar Mystery and the Mystery of Death and Resurrection. Exoteric and Esoteric Christianity (1922)

Christ in himself

Little by little, humanity is coming to the point where harmony is established in the world through its voluntary actions. In order to achieve this goal, the power that is Christ in the sense of the Gospel must intervene. In the secret schools it is said of those who are able, by their own inner strength, to raise themselves into such a relationship with all their fellow human beings that they freely, without any compulsion, fit into the harmony, that "they carry the Christ within them". [1]

All the ancient leaders of humanity have become rulers through the Angeloi working through them. Just as he previously absorbed the Angeloi, man today must absorb the Christ through devotion to the Christ-being. [2]

Sources:

[1] GA 100: Human Development and the Knowledge of Christ. Theosophy and Rosicrucianism - The Gospel of John (1907)

[2] GA 127: The Mission of the New Spiritual Revelation. The Christ Event as the Central Event of Earth Evolution (1911)

Christ inward

The ego of Jesus of Nazareth left the three shells at John's baptism, but an image of this ego remained in the three shells like a seal impression. The Christ-entity takes possession of these three bodies, but also of something else that remains behind like an imprint of the Jesus-self. From the 12th, 13th and 14th centuries onwards, something like an ego copy of Jesus was woven into people who now began to speak of an "inner Christ". Meister Eckhart, Tauler, they then spoke out of their own experience like (out of) an ego copy of Jesus of Nazareth. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 104a: From the Illustrated Scripture of the Apocalypse of John (1907/1909)

Christ Jesus - double name

Before the Mystery of Golgotha, people looked out into the vast universe; they saw stars upon stars, they saw the sun and the moon, they saw air and water, the various kingdoms. But they did not look at them as people do today, but behind all this they saw the Christ, who had not yet descended to earth with them. In those ancient times, the Christ was associated with the cosmos, he was seen as extraterrestrial. In everything in which the Christ was seen, there is nothing that lasts beyond the existence of Venus. Everything through which the spiritual was revealed to man in the times before the Mystery of Golgotha, and also the Christ in the cosmos, only lasts until the Venusian existence. People lived with heaven, but it is so sensual that it also disappears with the existence of Venus. What remains beyond the existence of Venus has its germs only in man. The Christ had to come to man from the universe if he wanted to enter eternity with man. That is why the Christ descended from the cosmos, in order to be henceforth with that which lasts as a germ in man into eternity. [1]

It is literally true: That which is there in the wide sphere of the senses as stars, as heavenly bodies, will pass away. But the Word, the Logos, which has appeared in the Christ, and which unites with the eternal essence of man, will remain, that is a literal truth. This is also the reason why we must have a dualism in naming, so to speak. In the Christ we must see the cosmic-spiritual; in Jesus we must see that through which this cosmic-spiritual has entered into historical development and has so united itself with humanity that it can now live on with the human germ into the eternities. To conceal, to distort this mystery of Christ, which is connected with the ancient mysteries, was to a certain extent the task of the Church in the centuries that have passed. Finding the way to Christ Jesus was always a martyr's path. It always had to be sought, the Christ Jesus, against the conventions, just as it naturally has to be sought today against what has remained of the conventions (or has been newly formed). [2]

From the first moment of its earthly life, the Christ-entity initially had only a loose connection with the body of Jesus of Nazareth. The connection was not like the connection between the body and the soul in an ordinary human being, so that the latter dwells completely in the body, but in such a way that at any time, for example when it was necessary, the Christ-entity could leave the body of Jesus of Nazareth again. And while the body of Jesus was somewhere as if asleep, the Christ-entity spiritually made its way there or there where it was just necessary. The body of Jesus was not always present when the Christ-entity appeared to the apostles. But then he had appeared in such a way that they could confuse the spiritual appearance with the body of Jesus of Nazareth. The apostles could not always distinguish clearly. The ordinary human being is a microcosm, a small image of the whole macrocosm. The reverse is the case with the Christ-being. The macrocosmic solar entity forms itself according to the shape of the human microcosm, crowding and compressing itself more and more, so that it becomes more and more similar to the human microcosm.

At the beginning of Christ's life on earth, immediately after the baptism in the Jordan, the connection with the body of Jesus of Nazareth was still the most loose. It was still something quite supernatural. She performed healings that could not be accomplished by any human power. She spoke to people with a forcefulness that was a divine forcefulness. The Christ-being, as if only binding itself to the body of Jesus of Nazareth, worked as a supernatural Christ-being. But more and more it made itself similar to the body of Jesus of Nazareth, pressed itself, drew itself more and more into earthly relationships and contributed to the fact that the divine power dwindled more and more. Little by little the God became a man. Like someone who, in infinite agony, sees his body fade away more and more, so the Christ entity saw its divine content fade away, becoming more and more like the earthly body of Jesus of Nazareth as an ethereal being, until it had become so similar to him that it could feel fear like a human being. [3] From the divine fullness of power to powerlessness, that was the path of God's passion. A path of infinite suffering for God incarnate, to which was added the suffering of mankind. But this suffering of pain gave birth to the Spirit that was poured out on the apostles at Pentecost. Out of this pain was born the omnipotent cosmic love, which descended at the baptism in the Jordan from the extraterrestrial, heavenly spheres into the earthly sphere, which became like man, like a human body, and which underwent the infinite suffering that no human thought can conceive, which underwent the moment of supreme divine impotence in order to give birth to that impulse which we then know as the Christ-impulse in the further evolution of mankind. [4]

It is a prerequisite that one knows how the spirit self, Manas, enters the consciousness soul in general humanity in order to understand how the Christ nature as a special cosmic spirit self, Manas, entered the consciousness soul nature of Jesus of Nazareth. Tertullian (the oldest Latin church father), for example, found only a surrogate for this. What he developed as a concept can be summarized as if one were to say today: There is no mixture - according to Tertullian - between the Christ, corresponding to the Manas, and the Jesus, corresponding to the consciousness soul and all the lower members of the being that belong to it, no mixture, but only a connection. The consciousness soul is of course always inwardly mixed with the mind soul, but the spirit self is not mixed with the consciousness soul. And Tertullian really develops this concept. He says: "Christ is not mixed with Jesus, but united. [5]

Even Jesus of Nazareth, who had lived through many incarnations and had reached a high level of initiation, was not able to become the bearer of the Christ individuality at birth. But after a life of thirty years of preparation, he was able to purify and cleanse the outer human shells, the physical body, the etheric and astral bodies, to such an extent that the individuality of Jesus of Nazareth could leave these purified bodies at the baptism of John. [6]

At this baptism, where the meaningful symbol of the dove appears above the head of Jesus, who is not merely inspired but directly intuited by the Christ, something shoots through the whole body of Jesus of Nazareth right into those limbs which in the present development of mankind are most removed from the influence of man: something happens right into the bones. Today man is able to move his hand, but he has no power to work into the chemical forces of his bones, he is solidified in his bones. The body of Jesus of Nazareth is the only body that has ever existed on earth that was given control over the power that holds cartilage and bone ash together through the intuition of Christ. This is indicated to us by the fact that through this mastery of the bones that power came into the world which is capable of really conquering death in physical matter. For the bones are to blame for the death of man; because man was so formed that he incorporated the solid bone mass, he became entangled with the mineral matter of the earth. Thus death was born to him, and it is not for nothing that death is represented by the skeleton. This is the living power that is able to transform the bones back again one day, that is, to gradually lead them into spirituality, which will happen in the future mission of earth evolution. Therefore, no foreign physical power was allowed to intervene in this bone tissue: You shall not break his leg! The legs of the others who were hung on the cross were broken. [7]

By uniting the Christ with the outer shell of Jesus, this event in its outer appearance also shows itself to those who have opened their spiritual eyes in an opposite appearance (like every supersensible perception). While in a physical embodiment a spiritual comes down from higher worlds and unites with the physical, that which in this case was sacrificed to receive the Christ spirit appears above the head of Jesus in the form of the white dove. A spiritual being appears as it detaches itself from the physical! This is definitely a clairvoyant observation. [8]

When Zarathustra looked up to the sun in ancient Persia and spoke of Ahura Mazdao, this was imprinted on the astral body. The Christ descended into this astral body. Was it not therefore quite natural that the Christ, when he needed images of thought, when he needed expressions of feeling, could only clothe them in that which his astral body presented to him? In the Gospel of John some of the expressions already used in the ancient Persian initiation are heard again. [9]

Sources:

[1], [2] GA 183: The Science of the Becoming of Man (1918)

[3], [4] GA 148: From Akashic Research. The Fifth Gospel (1913/1914)

[5] GA 165: The Spiritual Unification of Humanity through the Christ Impulse (1915/1916)

[6], [7] GA 105: World, Earth and Man, their Nature and Development and their Reflection in the Connection between Egyptian Myth and Contemporary Culture (1908)

[8], [9] GA 112: The Gospel of John in Relation to the Three Other Gospels, Especially to the Gospel of Luke (1909)

Christ cosmic

The cosmic Christ has come down from the ancient cosmic home of the soul in order to give back to the human soul what it had to lose on earth through the Luciferic temptation. The Christ leads the soul back up to its ancient home, which was assigned to it by the gods. [1]

But those who have accepted the Mystery of Golgotha, in what position are they actually? They are in the position in which they can express the innermost confession of the spiritual content of the universe in such a way that they can say: That which in ancient times still had to be seen through a dialog from the earth to the cosmos has descended and appeared in a man, in the man Jesus of Nazareth in the course of the Mystery of Golgotha. Recognition in the Christ, who lived in Jesus Nazareth, of that being which in earlier times also became visible to people through atavistic clairvoyance in the course of the year (today this takes place in the unconscious). See: Encounter with the spiritual world around Christmas time), this is something that should now be emphasized more and more for the spiritual development of mankind. For this would combine the two elements of Christianity that must actually be combined if, on the one hand, Christianity is to develop in the right way and, on the other hand, humanity is to develop in the right way. [2]

Sources:

[1] GA 155: Christ and the human soul. On the meaning of life. Theosophical Morality. Anthroposophy and Christianity (1912/1914)

[2] GA 175: Building Blocks to a Knowledge of the Mystery of Golgotha. Cosmic and Human Metamorphosis (1917)

Christ cosmic - Problems of understanding the Christian denominations

It is precisely this tendency of anthroposophical spiritual science towards an extraterrestrial view that has been countered: this anthroposophy is not Christianity, cannot be Christianity, because it replaces the purely human in Christ Jesus with a supernatural being, a cosmic being. It is even perceived as an insult that the Christ should have entered Jesus from the cosmic realms of heaven. Why is that so? It is so because up to the point of religion, up to the point of religious feeling, man, by looking at the celestial expanses, sees only the mathematical-mechanical cosmos, sees only the great machinery, so to speak. And so even the religious, even those who want to teach the religious today, believe that if one seeks the Christ before the Mystery of Golgotha in the realms of the world, one would mechanize religion. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 79: The Reality of the Higher Worlds. Introduction to Anthroposophy (1921)

Christ's second crucifixion

Just as the first Mystery of Golgotha was performed in Palestine, the second was performed by Constantinism (Emperor Constantine the Great). For by eradicating the mysteries, Christ was crucified and killed for the second time as a historical phenomenon. For the terrible destruction that took place over the centuries was not only - and this should not be underestimated - a destruction of the greatest artistic and mystical achievements, but also a destruction of the most important human experiences. But people did not understand what had actually been destroyed with what had disappeared on the outside, because the depth of the concepts had already been completely lost. When the temple of Serapis and the temple of Zeus with their magnificent images were destroyed, people said: "Yes, if this is destroyed, then the destroyers are right, because ancient legends have handed down to us: If the temple of Serapis is destroyed, the heavens will fall and the earth will become chaos! But the heavens have not fallen and the earth has not become chaos, even though the Roman Christians razed the temple of Serapis to the ground, people say. Certainly, the stars have not fallen, the outer, the physical ones; the earth has not become chaos, but in human experience that which was formerly known through the initiation of the sun has disappeared. The whole immense wisdom, which arched mightier than the physical sky in the view of the ancients, collapsed together with the temple of Serapis. And this ancient wisdom, of which Julianus the Apostate still felt an echo in the Eleusines (see: Mystery of Eleusis), where the spiritual sun, the spiritual moon stretched above him, sending down their impulses, it fell. And that which the ancients experienced in the Mysteries of Mithras and in the Egyptian Mysteries became chaos. Spiritually it was so that the heavens collapsed and the earth became chaos: for what has disappeared in these centuries is quite comparable to what would disappear if we were suddenly to lose our senses, where, at least for us, the heavens above would no longer be, and the earth below would no longer be. The old world has not merely vanished in the trivial way in which it is presented, but it has vanished in a much deeper sense. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 175: Building Blocks to a Realization of the Mystery of Golgotha. Cosmic and Human Metamorphosis (1917)

Christ Life and Pedagogy

In the course of his developmental history on earth, man has, so to speak, descended from the youthful, childlike experience of ageing into those times when he only experiences his unified human being until he is in his thirties. There he was shown from the depths of the world the figure that exemplified to him, right into his thirties, what he should live by so that he could absorb the forces in his youth in order to carry into old age what he had absorbed in his youth. In the time after the Mystery of Golgotha, man can no longer, through the development of nature, carry into old age the forces that he needs at this age. For this reason, the life of Christ Jesus, which only lasts until the middle of earthly life, has been presented to him on earth, which has given man a divine-human model until the 33rd year. If he grasps the strong forces of this model, so that he can grasp inwardly: "Not I, but the Christ in me", if we arrange all education, all teaching in such a way that it is thoroughly Christianized, so that in youth we allow the child to absorb the forces which then, as I have indicated, can extend into the highest age as if elastic in time, then we Christianize the whole human being - then we work on the progress of humanity in this field out of the knowledge of the history of human development. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 335: The Crisis of the Present and the Path to Healthy Thinking (1920)

Christ's teachings

Sermon on the Mount and Beatitudes

Man used to be able to rise up to spiritual beings. Now, however, these had to come down very close to him, descend completely into his sphere, so that he could recognize them with his I-entity. This time was prophesied in ancient times. It was said that man would then be able to find his relationship to his God with and in his own ego. But when this moment arrived, people had to be vigorously reminded that the promised time had really come. The one who did this in the most powerful way was John the Baptist. Christ Jesus himself gave the most emphatic teaching on the fulfillment of the times in what we call the Sermon on the Mount. It was by no means a popular sermon, for it says: "When Christ saw the people, he went away and revealed himself to his disciples". Christ revealed the following to them. [1]

Outwardly, of course, Christ Jesus had to express himself as it was in the language of those who listened to him; but what he had before his soul as an inward word was such that it did not correspond to the way the words of speech are outwardly characterized, but that it had in itself the lost power of the word, the undifferentiated power of speech. And without forming an idea of this power independent of the individual differentiated languages, which is in man when the word completely spiritualizes him, one cannot ascend to the power that lived in Christ, nor to the meaning of what is actually meant when Christ is spoken of as the "word" with which he identified himself completely, through which he worked, through which he also accomplished his healings and the casting out of demons. Christ Jesus never wrote anything down. There is nothing that he wrote down! Scholars have even argued about whether he was able to write at all, and those who want to affirm that he was able to write can only cite the passage about the adulteress, where he made signs in the ground. But otherwise there is no evidence that he was able to write. But apart from that, he did not write down his teachings like other religious founders. This is no coincidence, but is intimately connected with the power of the word, the full power of the word. [2]

The expression "on the mountain" is used several times in the New Testament. "On the mountain" means: in the mystery, in the inner, in the intimate. - The Sermon on the Mount is also not to be understood as a popular sermon, but as an intimate teaching of the disciples. The transfiguration on the mountain should also be understood in this sense. Jesus went up the mountain with the three disciples Peter, James and John. It says that the disciples were caught up; Moses and Elijah appeared next to Jesus. For a moment, space and time were erased; they were on the mental map with their consciousness. [3]

In ancient times, when a person with suppressed ego, what we would today call a medium, rose dreamlike to the spiritual worlds, he was in communion with good spiritual beings. But this had changed at the time when man was supposed to find the bond to the realms of heaven through the ego; and when he now sought or developed ecstatic states, they were described as states of "possession", which brought man into contact with evil spiritual powers that were hostile to him. Thus, at the time when Christ Jesus appeared, it had to be proclaimed as a salutary teaching: It is not right for you to try to enter into states where you perceive the spiritual worlds to the exclusion of your ego, but now it is right for you to seek the bond to the divine-spiritual realms in your deepest core of being. This teaching is essentially laid down in the Sermon on the Mount in the Gospel of Matthew. [4]

The whole spirit of the Sermon on the Mount is imbued with the new impulse of man's selfhood. And likewise the following, where the transition is then made to the so-called healings (see: Christ's Life - Healings). [5]

In ancient times, one could paraphrase, there was a dreamlike clairvoyance. Through ecstasy, man was transported up into spiritual worlds. At that time he was rich in spiritual life. In ancient times, when he was imbued with spirit, with what is called "pneuma" in Greek, he was transported up into divine-spiritual worlds. Now the Christ could not say: God-filled are those who become rich in spirit through ecstatic states! - for they had to be healed just as the possessed. That is why the healing of the possessed is spoken of earlier (in the Gospel). Now he had to proclaim: The time has come when those who have become beggars for the Spirit will be filled with God! - that is, those who cannot rise to ecstatic, dreamlike, clairvoyant states, but who are instructed to seek the kingdom of heaven within themselves, from their ego. God-filled are those who do not scare away suffering through ecstatic elevation to God, but who bear it and develop the power of the self, whereby they find within themselves the Paraclete, who was later called the "Holy Spirit", who reveals himself through the self. [6]

Blessed from now on are those who are beggars for the Spirit, for that which we can call the kingdoms of heaven flows into their ego when the way has been opened to them through Christ. [7]

It is not for nothing that in these Beatitudes of the Sermon on the Mount there is a Greek word in every single sentence, which is very important. So if we take the first sentence: "Blessed are the beggars in spirit", it would then go on to say: "In themselves" - or "through themselves" - "they will have the kingdoms of heaven". This "in themselves" is always alluded to; in the second sentence, in the third sentence and so on, it is always referred to. - Forgive me if I now point out something great in relation to our time in a very trivial way. Our time will have to decide not only to apply the word αύτων "auton" - which lies in our "auto-mobile" - to machines, not always to understand it only in the most external way; but it will have to decide to understand the peculiarity of ότι αύτων, of putting into operation, also in the spiritual field. This is something that our time may well take as a warning: With regard to machines, it loves the "putting into operation through originality"; but with regard to what used to be outside the I-consciousness, and what was experienced outside the I-consciousness in all the ancient mysteries up to the Christ-event, humanity should also learn the "putting into operation through originality", so that man can gradually become the self-creative originator of it all. And this is precisely what today's humanity will learn to understand when it becomes imbued with the Christ impulse. [8]

In very ancient times, the 16-petaled lotus flower (see: astral body - organs) rotated in the opposite direction to the clock hand. In people today, this wheel stands still. But in the clairvoyant it actually begins to move again, and in the opposite direction. Now 8 of the 16 leaves were once visible. The 8 in between were hidden. And it is precisely these 8 new leaves that bring the beatitudes of Christ to development. [9]

In the sentence: "Blessed are the beggars in spirit, for they shall find in themselves the kingdoms of heaven!" the new truth is expressed for the physical body. It could be expressed in this way for the etheric body: In the etheric body is the principle of suffering. A living being alone can suffer through the damage to its etheric body, if it still has an astral body; but the seat of suffering must be sought in the etheric body.

If one wanted to express the healing that used to flow out of the spiritual world, which is relevant to the etheric body, in relation to the new truth, one would have to say: those who suffer there can now be comforted not only by stepping out of themselves and entering into contact with the spiritual world; but: if they now enter into a new connection with the world, they can be comforted in themselves, because a new power has been brought into the etheric body through the Christ. If they now, living towards the Christ, fill themselves with the new truth, they experience in themselves the consolation for all suffering.

What must now be said with regard to the astral body? In former times, when man wanted to hold down the emotions, passions and egoisms of his astral body, he looked up into the upper regions and demanded power from the realms of heaven; procedures were carried out with him (see: initiation of the old) which killed the harmful instincts of his astral body. [10] But now the time had come - the Christ had to proclaim this again - when men, if they tame and purify, make the passions, impulses, desires of their astral body equanimous, will achieve through themselves what is the goal of present humanity and what is expressed by pointing to the great progress of development. [11]

But now the time had come when man, through the action of the Christ in his ego, was to receive the power to restrain and tame the passions and emotions of his astral body. Therefore, the new truth in relation to the astral body must now be: Blessed are those who are meek through themselves, through the power of the ego; for they will be the ones who inherit the earth! [12] Those can be filled with God through the impulse of Christ who tame their instincts and desires in the astral body and make them meek. In this way they will find the earth through themselves. Thus in the third sentence of the Sermon on the Mount this, which is actually always translated with a nonsensical word, is said: Those who make equanimous - not: meek - their instincts, desires and passions, will be allotted as a lot, or one can also say, inherit the earth.

Here we have the first three sentences of the Sermon on the Mount before us in all their world-historical significance: What was possible in the physical body through a very special formation of the physical body in ancient times of mankind, that people saw the spiritual in clairvoyant, dreamlike states, is expressed in the first sentence of the Sermon on the Mount for the physical body, which is now impoverished in inner spirituality. For the etheric body, through which suffering becomes conscious, even if it first becomes conscious in the astral body, it is indicated that people must develop a power within themselves in order to find support against the suffering they bear as a trial. Then we have indicated for the astral body that man, by taming and purifying his instincts and passions and so on, finds that strong power within himself whereby he becomes an actual ego and receives the mission of the earth as his lot.When we now come up to the ego, we know that this ego works in the sentient soul, in the intellectual soul and in the consciousness soul. The I works in the sentient soul, that is, it spiritualizes the sentient soul. In this way that which is to be spread by Christianity becomes an important matter for man in the outer world: brotherly love pouring out all-righteousness. What the emotional soul otherwise feels only in the physical, thirst and hunger, it must learn to feel through Christianity in relation to the spiritual: thirst and hunger for the all-governing justice. [13]

Now we come to the mind soul. While the ego still broods dully in the sentient soul, it first shines forth as the actual human ego in the intellectual soul, only to become fully conscious in the consciousness soul (in order) to become a pure ego there. The human ego, that by which we are equal to all human beings, that which everyone carries within himself, shines forth in the intellectual soul. Wherever we find a human being in the world, he is a human being and equal to us in that an I shines forth in his intellectual soul. In this way we will come into a right relationship with our fellow human beings, that something arises for us precisely in the intellectual soul, which we should carry out into the outer world as we are able to receive it. In the intellectual soul we are to develop something which we let flow out into the environment in such a way that it can flow back to us. Therefore, in the Sermon on the Mount it is the only time that the subject of the sentence is the same as the predicate: God-filled, or blessed, are those who develop love, for by radiating love they become love again. - In this you see the infinite depth of such a spiritual document that it can be understood even in its sentence structure down to such details. [14]

In the lower members the human being relates to certain divine entities which work into the subordinate members, into the physical body, etheric body, astral body and also into the intuitive soul; and what the human being develops there as virtues and so on is also taken up again to these divine entities. But what develops in the intellectual soul, when it develops the Christ power, will above all have to be a human quality. When the human being himself begins to discover the intellectual soul, he becomes less and less dependent on the divine-spiritual forces of the environment. So here we have something that relates to man himself. Therefore, when a person absorbs the power of Christ, he can develop those virtues in the intellectual soul which go from like to like, which are not implored from heaven as a reward, but which now come back to the same being as man is. The fifth sentence of the Beatitudes really shows us this characteristic. It differs from all the others in that it says - and even if the translations are not particularly good, they could not conceal this fact - "Blessed are the merciful, for they can obtain mercy!" The person who absorbs the power of Christ will, by pouring his ego into the soul of consciousness and experiencing it purely there, reach his God in this way. [15] It can only be in the ego where the divine substance is absorbed by man. God-filled are those who are pure in their blood or heart - which is the expression of the ego - who allow nothing to enter them but that which is the pure ego, for in it they will recognize God, see God! [16] The expression of the I in the physical body is the blood, which has its center in the heart. Therefore, in the sixth proposition it should be expressed in a proper way that the I can become partaker of God through the quality which it gives to the blood and the heart. What is the sentence? "Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God!"

The next sentences refer to the fact that man lives up into the higher members of his being by developing Manas, Buddhi and Atma. Therefore they only give an indication of what man will experience in the future, and what only a select few can experience now. The next sentence therefore refers to the spirit self, Manas. [17] Those who receive the Christ-impulse will become peacemakers in that part of the human nature which will only gradually develop in the future as the spirit-self, Manas; and they will thereby become "sons of God" in a new sense by carrying the spirit down from the spiritual regions. (This sentence means: "Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called sons of God.") [18] The first member of the upper trinity has already entered them. They have received God, have become the outward expression of the Godhead. [19] God-filled are those who bring peace or harmony into the world; thus they are sons of God! - For thus must be called those who are really inwardly filled with a manas that is to bring peace and harmony to the earth. [20]

Now we must be clear that of everything that develops on earth, remnants from earlier times remain in later times. This remnant is in a certain way hostile to that which always presents itself as a germ for the later times. Thus that which the Christ-impulse brings is placed into the whole development of mankind, but not all at once, but in such a way that remnants remain of that which the earlier development of mankind has brought. It is therefore necessary that those who first understand this Christ-impulse should stand firmly on the ground of it, be completely inwardly permeated by its power, then they will be filled with God in the new sense precisely by developing strength and firmness. God-filled are those who, under the new order, which is under Christ, suffer persecution from that which still protrudes from the old order! [21] What the people of the future can call "full absorption of the Christ into their inner being", the spirit of life, the buddhi, is there for individual chosen ones. But because they are individual chosen ones, the others cannot understand them, and the consequence is that as chosen ones they are also persecuted. Therefore, with reference to those who are persecuted in the present as individual representatives of a future one, the sentence is uttered: "Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness' sake, for in themselves they find the kingdoms of heaven." [22]

And the last sentence of the Sermon on the Mount points directly to the Christ-impulse itself by saying to the apostles: "And God-filled you are to be, you who are specially called to bear the name of Christ into the world. [23] And this last is only implied especially for the most intimate disciples, it is that which refers to the ninth member of man, to the spiritual man, Atma: "Blessed are you when men revile and persecute you for my sake."

Thus in these wonderful sentences, which refer to the nine members of human nature, it is shown how the ego shapes itself when it becomes a Christ ego for the various members of human nature and makes them happy. In a grandiose, majestic way, the Gospel of Matthew expresses in the sentences after the temptation scene how the power of Christ works for the nine-memberedness of man, first in the present, and then how it works in the near future, where those are still called children of God into whom the spirit-self, Manas, shines even now, but where such children of God are only present in individual gifted specimens. This is precisely the marvelous thing: the definite speaking for the first members who are already there, and the leaking out into the indefinite in the last sentences, which apply to more distant futures. [24] (See also: Christ Impulse; Apocalypse of John).

I am the true vine

Alcohol was not on earth earlier - in the Atlantean era; it came later to help people to individualize themselves. It closes man off from his higher faculties and makes him self-enclosed. Hence the use of alcohol in the Dionysian mysteries. Today, however, every person in civilized countries has already reached this stage, and alcohol is now only an evil. Through its use one loses the ability to adapt to others and to understand them. Alcohol is particularly harmful to the esoteric, as it transforms all developed higher forces into forces of the personal ego and repeatedly closes this into itself, tearing the astral body apart, as it were, through the two opposing currents - the higher and lower ego forces. Through the coming of the Christ to earth that principle has been brought by which everyone can consciously achieve his individualization. Therefore Christ Jesus says: "I am the true vine. [25]

Son of Man

Man unfolds from the contents of his soul, from the characteristics of his soul, just as a plant, which has only green leaves, unfolds into blossom and fruit. Thus the human being unfolds in such a way that he holds something like a blossom of his being out of the soul of feeling, the soul of understanding and the soul of consciousness towards that which comes down to him as a divine from above, so that through the reception of the spirit-self, Manas, he can go through a further path into the heights of human development. In this way, people who at the time of Christ Jesus had only developed the outer world in the normal way could say: "Yes, now the mind soul or soul of the spirit is only normally developed, which cannot yet receive a manas within itself, but it will develop out of the same person as his child, as his result, the consciousness soul, which can then open itself to the spirit self, the manas.

And what man had to unfold, so to speak, as his blossom according to his whole being, what grew out of him, what resulted from his nature, what was this called in the Mysteries? What should it be called in the environment of Christ Jesus if the disciples really wanted to make progress? It was called, if we want to translate it into our language, by the expression "son of man"; for the Greek word υιος του ανθωπου does not have the restricted meaning of our 'son' as "son of a father", but of that which results as the offspring of an entity, that which grows out of an entity like the blossom from a hitherto only leaf-bearing plant. [26]

Father in heaven

The powers that we will one day develop in our astral body as spirit self, Manas, are already present in our astral body and have not been developed by us. And likewise, a divine-spiritual life-spirit, Buddhi, is already within our etheric body. Therefore the Christ says, looking at Peter: What is present in your consciousness has not spoken out of you; but something has spoken which you will only develop in the future, which is indeed in you, but of which you know nothing as yet. What is already in your flesh and blood cannot yet speak in such a way that the word emerges: "You are Christ, the Son of the living God", but the divine-spiritual powers lying deep below the threshold of consciousness speak, the deepest even, which are within the human being. - The mysterious higher powers in Peter, what Christ calls the "Father in heaven", the powers from which Peter was born, but of which he is not yet conscious, have spoken out of him at this moment. Hence the words: "What you are present as a man of flesh and blood has not been given to you, but by the Father in heaven."

On this rock in man, which has not yet been destroyed by the surging waves of the already developed consciousness, which speaks as the Father Power, I want to build that which is to sprout forth more and more from my impulse. - And when people develop this foundation, that will result which will be the humanity of the Christ impulse. - That lies in the words: "You are Peter, and on this rock I want to build what can result in a human community, what can result in a sum of people who profess the Christ impulse!" [27]

Son of the living God

(In response to Christ's question to the disciples): "And what do you think that I am?" (In each individual case in the Gospel of Matthew, the "I am" must be particularly emphasized. Peter gave an answer which meant that he did not merely refer to the Christ as the "Son of Man", but that he called him the "Son of the living God". In order to understand this concept, we need to add to the facts we have just stated. While man grows upwards with the other members from below and opens himself to the flowering of the Son of Man, if he is to progress and take up the complete I-consciousness, he must be met from above by that which brings him Spirit-Self, Manas, Life-Spirit, Buddhi and Spirit-Man, Atma. And who is the representative of that which is brought down to him from above, that which points to the most distant human future? We receive the first gift as manas. Whose representative is the one who will receive the gift of the descending spirit-self, Manas? This is the son of the God who lives, the spirit of life, the Buddhi, the son of the living God! Thus the Son of Man, who grows from the bottom upwards, and the Son of the living God, who grows from the top downwards, stand opposite each other. We must distinguish between them. [28]

Binding and loosening

Just as in the Jewish blood, in the threads that passed through the generations, was joined together what was to be joined together in the human race according to the model of the macrocosm, and just as that which was separated in the human race was also separated according to the orders in the heavens, so now that which separates people or holds them together in love should arise out of the conscious ego in the ethical-moral-spiritual relationships. The orders of men should be formed or harmonized out of the conscious ego. This lies in the words that Christ spoke to Peter: "What you will bind on earth - what the deeper nature in you binds - is the same as what is bound in heaven, and what the same nature loosens here below is something that will also be loosened in heaven." In ancient times, all meaning of the human connection lay in the blood relationship. More and more, however, man is to grow into the mental, moral, spiritual associations. The individual karma must unite with the karma of communities. [29]

Forgiveness of sins

Karma must be fulfilled, but someone else can help. In this way, entire congregations can help someone who has committed an injustice. The individual can have his karma so interwoven with the congregation that - because the congregation regards him as one of its members - he is consciously relieved of something that concerns him, so that the whole congregation sympathizes and is willing to help to improve the individual. - If one wants to call the congregation "church", the church thereby imposes on itself the obligation to take upon itself the sins of the individual, to share his karma. This is not what is called "forgiveness of sins" today, but a real bond, a taking on of sins. And it is about the church consciously taking this upon itself. Thus, by weaving the threads of the individual into the karma of society as a whole, a web is woven. And this web, through that which the Christ has brought down from spiritual heights, is to be in its characteristics an image of the order in heaven, that is, according to the order of the spiritual world (Devachan) the karma of the individual is to be connected with the overall karma, not in an arbitrary way, but in such a way that the church organism becomes an image of the order in heaven. [30] (See also: Christ and Karma).

Karma in the Christian sense

Once the idea of karma is fully understood, it will be understood in this Christian sense. It means nothing less than that no human being should set himself up as a judge of the innermost being of another human being. As long as one man judges another, so long does he place the other under the compulsion of his own ego. But if a person really believes in the "I am" in the Christian sense, he does not judge; then he says: I know that karma is the great equalizer. - Karma takes place in the course of the earth's development; we can leave it to this development itself to decide what punishment karma inflicts on man. One would perhaps turn to the earth and say to the accusers: Take care of yourselves! It is up to the earth to express the punishment. So let us inscribe it in the earth, where it is inscribed as karma anyway! (Compare the scene of Christ and the adulteress in the Gospel of John). [31]

False prophets and false messiahs

This ascension into the kingdoms of heaven was taken materially, in that it was believed that the whole earth would ascend, whereas it should have been known that only individual initiates would ascend through their initiation; that is, the view arose among individuals that a transformation of the earth into heaven would soon take place in a material way. And the Christ draws special attention to this by saying that some will come who claim this. He calls them lying prophets and false messiahs! It is therefore quite strange that today some of the Gospel explainers are still talking about the view of a materially approaching kingdom of God being a teaching of Christ Jesus himself. [32]

Sources:

[1] GA 118: The event of Christ's appearance in the ethereal world (1910)

[2] GA 175: Building blocks to an understanding of the mystery of Golgotha. Cosmic and Human Metamorphosis (1917)

[3] GA 93a: Basic Elements of Esotericism (1905)

[4], [6], [11], [13], [14], [16], [18], [20], [21], [23] GA 116: The Christ impulse and the development of the I-consciousness (1909/1910)

[5], [7], [8], [10], [12], [15], [17], [19], [22],[24], [26] - [30], [32] GA 123: The Gospel of Matthew (1910)

[9] GA 94: Cosmogony. Popular Occultism. The Gospel of John. Theosophy on the basis of the Gospel of John (1906)

[25] GA 266/1: From the Contents of the Esoteric Lessons. Volume I (1904-1909)

[31] GA 103: The Gospel of John (1908)

Christ's Teachings: The Lord's Prayer

But the raptured soul of Jesus of Nazareth (at the pagan altar, see: Jesus of Nazareth) felt elevated into the spiritual realms, it felt as if it had been transported into the realm of the sun's existence. And now she heard, as if sounding out of the spheres of the sun's existence, words such as this soul had often heard in the past through the Bath-Kol. But now the Bath-Kol (the spirit that had inspired Jewish prophets - the reverse prayer that Jesus heard at age of about 24 from Bath Kol ^*) had changed, had become something completely different. The voice also came to him from a completely different direction. He heard the words:

Amen
The evils prevail
Witnesses of dissolving selfhood
Self-guilt owed by others
Experience in the daily bread
In which heaven's will does not prevail
Since man separated from your kingdom
And forgot your name
You fathers in the heavens.

It was these words that brought back the soul of Jesus of Nazareth when it awoke from its stupor. [1]

Jesus now knew that what he had then heard as the changed voice of the Bath-Kol - was an ancient sacred teaching, an all-pervading prayer, everywhere in the Mysteries, which had been prayed in the Mystery places, but that today it had been forgotten. [2]

In the disciples, Jesus Christ had people around him who were now in a mood of the soul that was, so to speak, completely new, who had become different through him than those people of whom he had once had to tell his mother that they could no longer hear the old things (see: Jesus of Nazareth). And then the earthly experience of God shone forth in him (as Christ): I have to tell men, not how the gods made their way down from the spirit to the earth, but how men can find their way up from the earth to the spirit.

And now the voice of the Bath-Kol came back to his mind, and he knew that the most ancient formulas and prayers had to be renewed; he knew that now man had to seek the way up from below into the spiritual worlds, that through this prayer he could seek the divine spirit. So he took the last line of the old prayer:

"You fathers in the heavens"

and reversed it, because it is now appropriate for the people of the new time and because he had to refer it not to the many spiritual beings of the hierarchies, but to the one spiritual being:

"Our Father in heaven"

And the second line, which he had heard as the penultimate mystery line:

"And forgot your name",

he reversed it, as it must now read for the people of the new time:

"Hallowed be your name"

And just as people who have to climb up from below must feel if they want to approach the Godhead, so he changed the third last line, which read:

"Since man separated himself from your kingdom"

into:

"To us come your kingdom!"

And the following line:

"In whom the will of heaven does not prevail"

he reversed it, as people could now hear it alone, because no one could hear the old word order anymore. He reversed it, for a complete reversal of the path into the spiritual worlds was to happen; he reversed it into:

"Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven."

And the mystery of the bread, of the incarnation in the physical body, the mystery of everything that had now fully appeared to him through the sting of Ahriman (see: temptation story), he transformed it in such a way that man should feel how this physical world also comes from the spiritual world, even if man does not recognize it directly. So he transformed this line about the daily bread into a request:

"Give us this day our daily bread."

And the words:

"Self-guilt owed by others"

he turned into the words:

"Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us."

And the line that was the second in the old prayer of the Mysteries:

"Witnesses of the dissolving selfhood",

He reversed it by saying:

"But deliver us"

And the first line:

"Evils prevail",

he changed it to:

"From evil. Amen."

And so what Christianity came to know as the Lord's Prayer became what Christ Jesus taught as the new mystery prayer, the new Lord's Prayer, through the reversal of what Jesus had once heard as the transformed voice of the Bath-Kol at his fall at the pagan altar. The preaching of the Sermon on the Mount and other things that Christ Jesus taught his disciples came about in a similar way. [3]

Since these words (the cosmic Our Father) have become known to me, I have found them to be an extraordinarily meaningful meditation formula. They have a power over the soul that is quite extraordinary. [4]

And the Lord's Prayer is a prayer which can not only be prayed, but which can also evoke a mystical mood, and which can also be the object of higher meditation and concentration. However, something has emerged from the Middle Ages which can make prayer and the mood of prayer somewhat impure today, and which can only be described with the word "egoism". [5]

Only in the middle of the Lemurian epoch did what we call the upper trinity of man, spirit-self, life-spirit and spirit-man, Manas, Buddhi and Atma, unite with what we call the four lower members of human nature, physical body, etheric body, astral body and ego.

Imagine a container of water. In this water you will never be able to tell where one drop ends and the other begins. But if you now imagine a number of small sponges immersed in this mass of water, each of the sponges will absorb part of the mass of water. What was previously a uniform mass of water in the vessel is now distributed among many small sponges. This is how it was with human souls, if we may use this trivial comparison. Before, they rested dependent in the womb of the divine primordial spirit, without individuality, but were then absorbed by the human bodies and thus individualized like the water by the sponges. What was then absorbed by the individual bodies, the four lower limbs, has continued into our time, developing further and further, and will continue to develop further and further into the future. In the so-called spiritual or secret science it was always called the upper trinity, and in the Pythagorean school the triangle and the quadrangle were chosen as the scheme for this human being, who originated in the middle of the Lemurian race, so that this scheme results for the composite human being. But this upper, this eternal, which passes through all incarnations, can be seen from two points of view. On the one hand it can be regarded as the primordial substance of humanity, but on the other hand it can also be regarded as a part of the divine essence, which it gave up at that time as a piece or a drop of its own content, and which is now immersed in the four-membered vessel. [6] The matter is thus such that what are the three highest members of the human nature are at the same time the three lower members of the deity nearest to man. Now let us for once grasp them not as human but as divine principles and describe them according to their nature.

That highest principle, which is the Atma in man, which he will form at the end of his present planetary career, we can characterize in the sense of secret science by comparing its primordial nature with something that is only vaguely known to man today: namely, with that which man has within himself as will. The basic character of this highest divine principle in man is of a volitional nature, a kind of volition. What is weakest in man's inner being today, the will, will be his most excellent principle in the future, when man will rise higher and higher.

Today, man is essentially a cognizing being, and his will is actually still limited in the most diverse ways. Man can comprehend the world around him, to a certain extent, in its universality. But think how little of what he can comprehend he is also able to will, how little power he has over what he can recognize. But what he does not yet have today, the future will bring him: His will will become ever more powerful until he has reached his great goal, which in spiritual science is called the great sacrifice. This consists in that power of will where the being that wills is able to surrender itself completely, not only to surrender the little that man is able to surrender with his weak powers of feeling and will, but to surrender its entire being, to allow itself to flow out as an entity that extends into the material.

You will get an idea of what is meant by this, of the great sacrifice, the highest expression of the will in the nature of God, if you imagine the following: Imagine that you are standing in front of a mirror and your image is looking back at you from this mirror. This image is an illusion that completely resembles you. Imagine further that you have died by sacrificing your own being, your feelings, your thoughts, your being, in order to animate this image, to make this image what you yourself are. To sacrifice yourself and give your life to the image, that is what spiritual science has always called emanation, the flowing out. When the will has reached such a stage that it is capable of accomplishing what is called the great sacrifice, then it creates, creates a universe, great or small, and this universe is a mirror image that receives its task through the nature of the Creator himself. Thus we have characterized what the creative will is in the divine essence. [7]

That which we have to characterize as the second principle in the deity, insofar as it has flowed into humanity, is also already given by this comparison: it is the mirror image itself. Put yourself so vividly in the place of a deity who, creating the world, is the center of the universe. If you imagine a point here in this room and instead of the walls, of which there are six, surrounded by a hollow sphere reflecting inside, then you will see yourself mirrored on all sides as the center. You have the image of a deity as the center of will, which is reflected on all sides, and this mirror is the image of the deity itself and the universe at the same time. But the fact that the universe lives and weaves is because the deity emanates when it makes the great sacrifice. The whole universe is animated by the universal will, which expresses itself in infinite multiplicity. This process of infinite multiplication, of infinite multiplication, this repetition of the Godhead is called in all secret or spiritual science, in contrast to the will, the "kingdom". So that you can compare the will with Atma, the spirit-man, the kingdom, or the mirror image of the will, with the Buddhi or the spirit of life.

In infinitely graded entities and in infinite multiplicity the Deity appears in the kingdom, and one distinguishes the individual entities in the sense of the secret science - if one stands on this high level that one can regard them as emanations of the Divine - by giving them their "name". The name is that which man then thinks of as the individual entity, it is that by which the individual members of this great multiplicity are distinguished from one another. It is the third of the three highest human principles that flow out of the divine, and would correspond to manas or the spirit-self.

What we have now gone through here is an ancient doctrine which says that that member of the Godhead which has flowed into human nature as the eternal part consists of name, kingdom and will. We can similarly regard the four lower members of the human being as members of the transient world and as members of man. [8] We can regard the physical body as part of the material part of our planet; its substance is taken from our material planet and returns to it. [9]

In all secret science, the term "debt" has always been used to describe the faulty qualities of the etheric body, that which is a fault against the community, that which flows from the faulty etheric body. The ordinary, trivial word "debt" has a very similar origin to the moral word "guilt", which denotes what one has morally owed to another. Debt is therefore something that is to be attributed. [10]

But that which adheres to the astral body as a faulty quality is called "temptation". Temptation is that by which the individual takes upon himself a personal sin. That which man could sin by becoming such an ego-being, an actually independent being, is indicated in the myth of Paradise. Whereas before he drew from the general, like the drop that is still in the water, which draws its strength from the common mass of water, now he has all the impulses in himself. This is signified by biting into the apple in the myth of Paradise; and it is not for nothing - for all real meanings of words, in so far as they belong to the secret science, have a deep inner connection - it is not for nothing that the Latin malum means "evil" and the "apple". The word "evil" is never used in the secret science for anything other than a transgression from the ego. Now imagine this whole human nature, the lower fourfoldness and the higher threefoldness, placed before your soul, so that you can say to yourself: A divine drop lives in the individual human being, and the human being is in his development towards the divine, towards the expression of his deepest inner nature. - Once he has developed this deepest innermost nature, he has, through gradual development, transformed his own being into what is called the "Father" in Christianity. That which lies hidden in the human soul, that which is the great goal of mankind, is the "Father in heaven". If man wants to develop towards this, then he must have the strength to develop his higher trinity and his lower tetrinity to the point that they maintain the physical body in the right way; the etheric body must live with man in such a way that a balance takes place with that which lives in him as guilt; the astral body must not perish in temptation and the ego-body not in evil.

Man must strive upwards through the three higher members to the Father in heaven, through the name, through the kingdom and through the will. Whatever you may have in your surroundings, consider it holy; and in the name you give it, see something that makes it a member of the divine essence. Now imagine a person who, in meditation, is completely immersed in this sense of development and is supposed to summarize this sense, these seven members of development, in seven petitions in a prayer. What will he say? [11]

To express what is to be achieved with this prayer, he will say before he utters the seven petitions: "Our Father, who art in heaven." This points to the deepest soul of human nature, to the innermost essence of man, which belongs to the spiritual realm according to Christian esotericism. The first three petitions refer to the three higher members of human nature, to the divine content of man: "May your name be sanctified. Your kingdom come to us. Thy will be done. Now we pass from the spiritual realm to the earthly realm: "Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven." "The last four petitions refer to the four lower members of human nature. What shall we say of the physical body so that it may be sustained in planetary life?" Give us this day our daily bread. "What will we say of the etheric body? "Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors." The compensation for what happens through the transgressions of the etheric body. What will we say in relation to the astral body? "Lead us not into temptation." And what will we say with regard to the ego? "Deliver us from evil." The Lord's Prayer is therefore a prayer through which man, in those moments when he needs it, is to rise to the meaning of the development of his seven-membered human nature, and the seven petitions, when they occur even in the most naive man who cannot understand them at all, are then an expression of the spiritual-scientific view of human nature. [12]

Sources:

[1] - [4] GA 148: From Akashic Research. The Fifth Gospel (1913/1914)

[5] GA 59: Metamorphoses of the Life of the Soul - Paths of Soul Experiences. Second part (1910)

[6] - [12] GA 96: Original impulses of spiritual science. Christian Esotericism in the Light of New Spiritual Knowledge (1906/1907)

^* See: https://rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA148/English/SCR2006/19131005p01.html#Note2

Christ teachings: Parables

What emanated from Christ Jesus could work in two ways: On the outsiders in such a way that they heard his words and received a kind of theory with his words; on the others (the disciples) his power worked in such a way that it drew out of their souls imaginations, realizations which in a certain way point up a step higher into the higher worlds. This is given in the expression "those on the outside hear only parables", that is, figurative expressions for the events in the spiritual world - "but you hear what the parables mean, you hear the language that leads you up into the higher worlds." [1]

Parable of the wise and foolish virgins

We have shown above how the human being develops from the bottom up. What is given through the five cultural epochs, etheric body, astral body, sensory soul, intellectual soul, consciousness soul, these five members of human nature grow upwards from below. Man can use them in such a way that he trains them, develops them, uses them in such a way that they have within themselves that content which makes it possible for them, when the time has come, to be permeated by the Christ impulse. If they do not take care of these members through the various incarnations, if they do not train them to receive the Christ, then the Christ can come - they cannot unite with him, they have "poured no oil on their lamps"! These five members can also be left without oil. All those who have not poured oil on their lamps are represented by a wonderful parable in the five foolish virgins. But the five who have the oil can unite with Christ in the right hour. [2]

Parable of the interest coupon

To those who looked at his teaching from the outside, he made it clear how they did not look at some external things merely materially, not just for what they are directly, but as a sign of something else. He wanted to point them to their own thinking, to their own way of thinking.

Christ had a coin given to him and showed them the image of the emperor on it in order to draw their attention to the fact that the coin expresses something special that does not lie in the mere metal, namely belonging to a particular dominion, to a particular ruler. "What is the emperor's, give to the emperor, that is the emperor's", and that lies in the image, not in the metal. But learn, he wanted to say, to regard man in the same way, and what is in him as the bearer and temple of the living God. Look at man only as you look at a coin; learn to see in man the image of God, then you will recognize how man belongs to God.

All these parables have a deeper side than the trivial side that is usually taken. And one finds the deeper side when one knows that Christ did not use parables in the way they are so often used today in our newspaper-paper age. Rather, Christ uses them in such a way that he extracts them from the whole human nature; that if man were to think them out and extend them to his whole nature, he would be compelled to do everywhere what he is accustomed to do, as is proper in the individual sphere. [3]

Sources:

[1] - [3] GA 123: The Gospel of Matthew (1910)

Christ with a halo of rays

As light spreads in the physical world, so the rays of thought spread in the devachanic world, so that we can indeed see how thoughts radiate from every human being. Therefore you will also understand that the Christ is represented with a crown of rays. This is not something fantastic, but corresponds to a perception in relation to the higher vision. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 88: On the Astral World and the Devachan (1903-1904)

Christ after the Mystery of Golgotha

There is no death in the invisible worlds. Christ himself, by descending to our world, went through a death similar to that of human beings. When he became a purely spiritual being again, he still retained the memory of his death. But as an entity of the rank of the Angeloi, in which he continued to manifest himself outwardly. A growing number of beings in the 20th century will be able to perceive the appearance of the etheric Christ, that is, Christ in the form of an Angeloi, [1] as a direct personal experience. [2]

Sources:

[1] & [2] GA 152: Preliminary Stages to the Mystery of Golgotha (1913/1914)

Christ's prophecy

But what could only be prophesied by the Mysteries was that in the course of time a human being would appear with such an astral body that in it, despite Lucifer, the light world of the sun spirit would be able to become conscious through the etheric body without special soul states. And the physical body of this human being had to be such that everything from the spiritual world that can be veiled by Ahriman until physical death would be revealed to it. Physical death cannot change anything within life for this human being, that is, it cannot have any power over it. In such a human being the "I" appears in such a way that the full spiritual life is contained in the physical life at the same time. Such a being is the bearer of the spirit of light, to which the initiate rises from two sides, by being led either to the spirit of the superhuman or to the being of the powers of nature in particular states of soul. In predicting that such a human being would appear in the course of time, the initiates of the Mysteries were prophets of the Christ. [1]

The kingdom of Christ - is both the kingdom of destiny and the kingdom of the dead

Our world, just like the world of natural facts, is permeated by a realm of destiny as the other pole. This realm of destiny is still not given much attention today. It will have to be observed just as much as the realm of the natural. But one will then know at the same time that in this realm of the fateful one is in connection with the dead, one will know that in this realm, which we have in common with the dead, the realm of Christ is contained at the same time, that Christ descended to earth through the Mystery of Golgotha for his activity, in order to have in common with us men on earth that again, which we have in common with the dead, in so far as the dead work in the earthly realm - I do not mean now the exceptional case (see: Dead-earthbound dead), but the normal case - have in common. If man will walk in this realm of destiny as consciously as he walks in the realm of sense-perception, if he feels himself interwoven into this realm of destiny as he walks through the world and does so with his eyes, and in this realm of destiny always feels the forces of the Christ together with the forces of the dead, then mankind will already develop a real, a concrete, a sentient life with the dead. When you feel this or that yourself, when you do this or that yourself, you will experience how you are together with the dear ones who have passed away. Life will be infinitely enriched. [2]

In feeling we dream, in willing we sleep. Because we are sentient and volitional beings, there is a world of the spirit around us into which we cannot see in our ordinary consciousness. We are torn out of this world through perception and thinking. Because we are perceivers and thinkers and enjoy the physical world, we do not know that the dead walk among us. The dead walk among us. Man, when he has developed throughout his life, passes through the gate of death. He remains connected with earthly existence, the threads go down from him into earthly existence. We cannot feel and will without those dead who were karmically connected with us working into our feeling and willing. [3]

Sources:

[1] GA 13: The Secret Science in Outline (1910)

[2], [3] GA 182: Death as a Transformation of Life (1917/1918)

Christ and "I am"

When the human being on earth is conscious of himself as an I-entity, he feels that which lies in his I as the working of God the Father into his soul. In a way, God the Father pours a drop of his own essence, which, however, remains in connection with the whole ocean of God the Father's spirituality, into the being of the individual human being, and the individual human being can then say to himself: God the Father lives in me, the whole fullness of God the Father lives in me. But the whole of humanity lives in being imbued with the essence of God the Father. To experience this as a presence, that is, to say to oneself: I am, that is: God the Father is in me - to experience this as a presence gradually became impossible for humanity. It had to arrive at its own ego, which is productive in form out of its own consciousness. And this productive ego was only possible in connection with the whole cosmic-spiritual world if the individual human being identified with the Christ, that is, with the Son of God. Thus the Christ brought to mankind on earth what the Father God had given to mankind on earth, but he brought it in a new way, so that everyone could now connect it with his ego springing out of himself. And so the Christ could say to humanity: I bring you what you are used to recognizing from the Logos, but I bring it to you in a new way.

I bring it to you in such a way that God the Father has given me what he gave you directly before, but for a different state of consciousness. As his messenger I bring you the treasure of the Father, for every single consciousness of yours, for every single individuality of yours. I no longer want to make you merely human beings who are, so to speak, a member of the whole cosmos, I want, by means of the authority which God the Father has given me, to make every single one of you, if he wants to come, a God-filled human being. Those whom God the Father hands over to me as individuals, I fill with God-consciousness. So the fact that the way in which God-consciousness should come to people is different from the way it used to be is the essence of the Mystery of Golgotha. That is why the words of the Gospel take on a completely different meaning through the Mystery of Golgotha. [1] Christ Jesus has ensured that the Word has not died in mankind, that the paternal substance has remained in mankind. If it had not been for the Mystery of Golgotha, people would have forgotten its content. The Father would have been forgotten if the Son had not maintained the Father's presence. [2]

Sources:

[1] & [2] GA 345: Lectures and Courses on Christian Religious Work, IV On the Nature of the Working Word (1923)

Christ and Ahriman

An opposition to Ahriman is actually only present today in such teachings as flow through anthroposophy. When anthroposophy makes it clear to people that the spiritual-soul being is independent of the physical being, then Ahriman must first give up his hope (of world domination). This struggle of Christ against Ahriman is already possible again, so that an idea of it can arise in the Gospel in the story of the temptation. But the matter can only be fully understood if one realizes, as I have often explained here, that Lucifer plays a greater role in the earlier development of mankind and that Ahriman has only gained an influence on human consciousness since the time of the Mystery of Golgotha. Before that he also had an influence on humanity, but not really on consciousness. If one looks into the human mind, one must say that the most important point in the earthly development of mankind is where man learns to recognize that in the Christ-impulse lives a power through which he himself, when he unites with it, overcomes death in himself. In the Mystery of Golgotha we have not only to see an inner mystical event, but we certainly have to see an outer event, which, however, must not be represented in the sense of outer material historical research, but which must be represented in such a way that it means the taking up of Ahrimanism into the earth evolution, but at the same time in a certain way the overcoming of Ahrimanism. Thus we have a battle of the gods that took place through the Mystery of Golgotha. The fact that a battle of the gods took place there was something that also belonged to the content of the esoteric teachings that the Christ taught his initiated disciples after his resurrection. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 211: The Solar Mystery and the Mystery of Death and Resurrection. Exoteric and esoteric Christianity (1922)

Christ and Archangeloi

During the epochs that follow one another, Christ-Yahweh always reveals himself through different beings of the same rank as Michael. He always chooses, so to speak, a different face with which to address humanity. And depending on which one or the other of the hierarchy of the Archangeloi is chosen to be the mediator between Christ-Yahweh and humanity, very different ideas and perceptions, impulses of feeling, impulses of will and so on are revealed to people. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 152: Preliminary Stages to the Mystery of Golgotha (1913/1914)

Christ and astral light

Through His death, Christ united with the astral body of the earth the moment His blood flowed and brought it new life and light. He dwells in this astral body as the astral light that shines in the darkness. We see in this astral light when we have attained vision. We see physical objects with our physical eyes because they are dark and therefore reflect the sunlight from outside. But when we reach vision through our meditation, the dark shell covering the objects will become thinner and thinner. We will see the astral light shining in them, the light in the darkness, and they will reveal their inner being to us. We will recognize the forces that work in everything, we will live with them. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 266/1: From the Contents of the Esoteric Lessons. Volume I (1904-1909)

Christ and etheric currents

In the course of the earth's development, man is permeated from below by the forces of the higher hierarchies. Everywhere on the surface of the earth, wherever one may go, these forces are present. [1]

But everything that has had an effect on man himself during the Lemurian period is related to that which has had a formative effect on our ruminating animals and which esotericism summarizes in the image of the bull. If nothing else had had an effect on man in the distant past, then man would have become bull-like in his external form. Gradually, however, other forces intervened in the human organization from within the earth; in esotericism they are summarized under the name of the lion. [2] The forces which during the Atlantean period combined with these forces emanating from the earth now came in from outside, from the periphery as it were. These forces are esoterically summarized under the name Eagle. [3]

At that time, at the baptism of John, the tripartite body of Jesus of Nazareth was left by his ego, which was the ego of Zarathustra. This ego flowed upwards, and into this ego flowed, on its departure, the purest part of that current which was already continually flowing in from the world-space, but only to the members of man who are now subconscious. That is why a bird-like figure is given as a correct symbol, the figure of the pure white dove, which represents, as it were, the purest extract of that which was eagle-like or cherub-like in the old sphinx figure. And it is essentially part of the perfection of mankind on earth that this cosmic, this world current flows into the conscious part of man. Why was this current from the world space able to form itself in such a way that it became that Christ-power, that Christ-impulse, which, by working further and further on earth, will completely fill, completely permeate the human being? By absorbing this impulse into his inner being, man will indeed fulfill the truth of Paul's words more and more within himself: Not I, but the Christ in me. In contrast to the other three currents that were there as a result of the earlier development, the new current, which is the purified current from above, will take hold of man more and more, encompass him more and more, but will also increasingly detach him from that which binds him to the earth. [4]

While the above-earth (upper) divine beings, who are (actually) the conceptions of the other (lower) divine beings, only wanted to live in the finer elements, in the warmth element, in the light element, the chemical element, the life element (see: ether species), this being, who later descended through the baptism of John in the Jordan, took with him out of innermost wisdom the powers to which our development had already progressed during the old solar evolution. This being took the element of air with it, so that it remained related to the earth. What is gaseous in the sun is in fact the body of the Christ. That which was previously only in the sun, related to the earth entity, took possession of the physical, etheric and astral body of Jesus of Nazareth at the mysterious moment of John's baptism in the Jordan. And it was in this body of Jesus of Nazareth that the purified, purified current from the cosmic world space first united on our earth with the newly emerging etheric body flowing from the human heart to the brain (see: Etherization of the blood).

With that etheric current, which continually flows as the finest etheric parts from the blood: from the heart to the head, was united during the baptism of John that which came in as a real current, also permeated with airy substance, from outside from the world space. This was the beginning of the possibility for every human soul to permeate itself with that element from the universe which is presented to us in the signature of the dove. There was indeed a correspondence created between the whole universe and its purest extract, which had previously, provisionally one might say, participated in what is esoterically called the eagle current. [5] In Aristotle we find the description that the finest etheric parts flow from the heart to the head and, as these etheric parts touch the brain, are cooled. He knew from ancient traditions what could be observed in even older times through original clairvoyance. And this awareness of the ether currents was still present in a certain way deep into our Middle Ages; we still find a certain awareness of it (even) in the works of Cartesius (see: Descartes). [6]

Sources:

[1] - [6] GA 129: World miracles, soul tests and spiritual revelations (1911)

Christ and good and evil

When we have come so far that we have dropped everything shadowy in our thoughts as well as in our external environment, then we grow into the spiritual world. But in order to place ourselves in the new world in the right way, we must already transform our whole thinking in the physical world through esoteric development, so that we can see through and judge the things and facts of the spiritual world correctly; for it is a completely new world for us, but a world of a greater reality than the one we have known up to now. When our soul life grows stronger and stronger through the concentration of our thoughts, so that our inner self can separate itself more and more from the physical body, then the things of that world will appear before our soul's eye in ever clearer imaginations and visions; We will realize that all the thoughts of goodness, benevolence and nobility that we have had on earth have been transformed into imperishable imaginations, which give the universe its value in our continued life, and that all bad, evil, indeed all lower egoistic thoughts remain behind as waste products. This becomes that which is barren in itself, but which becomes nourishment for that which is to develop out of the germ of good. Just as here on the physical plan the mineral soil provides the nutrients for the plant world, so everything that is ill-conceived becomes the dregs for the germinating thoughts of the good, the true, the beautiful in the elementary world. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 266/3: From the Contents of the Esoteric Lessons. Volume III (1913-1923)

Christ and the phantom of the physical body

In the course of the earth's development the human being has lost the form of the physical body, he does not have that which was intended for him by Gods from the beginning on earth. And it is impossible to understand Christianity if one does not realize that at the time when the events of Palestine took place, the human race had reached the point on earth where this disintegration of the physical body had reached its climax, and where precisely for this reason the danger existed for the entire development of mankind that the I-consciousness, the actual achievement of the earth's development, would be lost. Had the process progressed - more and more of the destructive would have entered the physical human body, and the people who would have been born (later) would have had to live with an increasingly dull sense of self. That which depends on the perfection of the reflection of a physical body would have become more and more dull. Then the Mystery of Golgotha occurred. It occurred that this one man, who was the bearer of the Christ, underwent such a death that after three days that which was actually mortal in the physical body of man had to disappear and that body arose from the grave which is (only) the carrier of the forces of the physical-material parts. That which was actually intended for man by the rulers of Saturn, Sun and Moon rose from the grave: the pure phantom of the physical body, with all the characteristics of the physical body.

If we think of the body of Christ that arose from the grave, we can imagine: just as the bodies of earthly men descend from the body of Adam, in so far as they have the disintegrating body, so the spiritual bodies, the phantoms for all men, descend from that which arose from the grave. And it is possible to establish that relationship to the Christ through which the earthly man inserts this phantom, which has risen from the tomb of Golgotha, into his otherwise disintegrating physical body. [1] This body communicates itself to everyone who acquires the corresponding relationship to the Christ in the course of time. [2] It was always the case with the initiates or adepts that they had to receive initiation outside their physical body, but this did not extend to a resurrection of the physical phantom. Similar things had indeed happened, but never this one, that a complete human death had been passed through and afterwards the complete phantom had triumphed over death. The most important thing is not what Christ Jesus taught, but what he gave to mankind. His resurrection is the birth of a new member of human nature: an incorruptible body. [3]

If the individuality of Zarathustra had not penetrated this corporeality up to the thirtieth year, its eyes would not have been able to bear the substance of the Christ. In order to be able to receive the Christ, this corporeality had to be prepared, as it were, expanded by the individuality of Zarathustra. Throughout the three years, from John's baptism in the Jordan to the actual Mystery of Golgotha, the bodily development of the physical body, the etheric body and the astral body was quite different from the bodily development of other human beings. Because Luciferic and Ahrimanic forces had not influenced the Nathanish Jesus in earlier incarnations, it was possible that from John's baptism onwards - since there was now not a human ego-individuality in this Jesus of Nazareth, but the Christ-individuality - all that was not formed which otherwise must always work in man in his corporeality. That which we call the human phantom, the actual original form, which absorbs the material elements and then releases them with death - degenerated in the course of human development.

From the beginning of human development, this phantom was destined to remain untouched by the material parts that man absorbs as food from the mineral, plant or animal kingdom. The phantom was to remain untouched by this. But it had not remained untouched, for through the Luciferic influence a close connection occurred between the phantom and the forces which man absorbs through the earthly development - especially with the ash components; and thus, instead of going along with the etheric body of man, it now went along with what are decay products. And where the Luciferic influences had been kept at bay, as was the case with the Nathanish Jesus, it became apparent that no forces of attraction were exerted between the human phantom and that which was absorbed as material parts. This is expressed occultly by saying that the human phantom should actually have no attraction to the ash components, but should only have an attraction to the dissolving salt components, so that it takes the path of volatilization to the extent that the salt components dissolve. But that was precisely the actual thing, that with John's baptism, all connection of the phantom with the ash components was destroyed, annihilated, and the only connection remained with the salt components. This also becomes apparent to us when Christ Jesus wants to make it clear to those whom he had first chosen: Through the way in which you feel connected with the Christ-being, the possibility is to be brought about for further human development that the one body risen from the grave - the spiritual body - can pass over to men. - This is what Christ wants to say when he uses the words: "You are the salt of the earth!" When the body was taken down from the cross, the parts were, so to speak, still holding together; but they were in no connection with the phantom, because the phantom was completely free of them. When the body was then mixed with certain substances, which then again had a completely different effect on this body than on another body that was embalmed, it happened that the material substances quickly evaporated after the burial, quickly passed into the elements. The phantom, however, on which the development of the ego depends, was resurrected from the grave. [4]

You can only unite with Christ by the fact that Christ has passed over into the phantom of the physical human body. This is contained in the words: "... the entering into the physical earth"; and man finds this when he connects the physical - even if it is already corrupted as physical - precisely to Christ. This is how renewal occurs in the connection with Christ, which is the result of the Mystery of Golgotha. [5]

Sources:

[1] - [4] GA 131: From Jesus to Christ (1911)

[5] GA 344: Lectures and courses on Christian-religious work, III. Lectures at the founding of the Christian Community (1922)

Christ and Elohim

The Elohim are those beings who remained connected with the sun during the separation of the sun from the moon and earth (see: earth evolution); they belong to the hierarchy called the Exusiai, spirits of form, and from then on to the hierarchies above. Elohim is the collective name for the solar beings; at that time they had chosen the sun as their dwelling place - not as their sphere of activity. Christ is their ruler. However, he does not belong to the hierarchies, but to the Trinity. In Christ we have before us an entity that is so powerful that it has an influence on all the members of our solar system. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 110: Spiritual Hierarchies and their Reflection in the Physical World. Zodiac, Planets, Cosmos (1909)

Christ and earth aura

From the 30th-33rd (life) year most of that is still present that only earth forces still have an effect on the human being. If only that which works on man during this time were to take effect now, then men would already be much more equal on earth. The Christ has now had to use these three years in a very special way - they are three very special years - to enter into communion only with the earth forces in man. There, where the earth forces were still most active and where deformation could occur, development was no longer there, that is where physical death occurred. Thus this Christ-sun being really entered the earth sphere and then united with the whole etheric body of the earth, passed over into the earth aura and now continues to work in the earth aura. [1]

The human soul passes from the earth into the spiritual world, Devachan, the Christ passes from the spiritual world into the earth sphere, unites with the earth in order to pass over into the earth aura through the great sacrifice. This is the transition of the Christ to Devachan. And now in the earth aura the Christ lives his self-chosen devachan. [2]

The whole earth is permeated by the Christ-substance, because it descends to the ether sphere of the earth and can be found in the ether sphere of the earth in all future, but could never descend to physical condensation. [3]

In order to continue the development of the earth from Golgotha onwards, this Christ-being had to enter the earth aura through pain, and humanity will have to feel its destiny in connection with this Christ-pain. Humanity's connection with the Christ-pain will have to become more and more concrete. Only then will it be understood how this pain has continued to work in the earth aura in rejuvenating forces for the development of the earth since the Mystery of Golgotha. [4]

Sources:

[1] GA 165: The Spiritual Unification of Humanity through the Christ Impulse (1915/1916)

[2], [4] GA 148: Aus der Akasha-Forschung. The Fifth Gospel (1913/1914)

[3] GA 129: Wonders of the world, trials of the soul and revelations of the spirit (1911)

Christ and esotericism

People can only be properly led into the spiritual worlds if they are led through Lucifer and Ahriman so that they come to the Christ. If you do not place the Christ at the center [of all esoteric striving], you lead them to Lucifer. [1]

The Christ moves through the world in such a way that he becomes more and more of a mystical God from a cosmic God who has descended to earth, who can be experienced by people in the inner life of the soul. Therefore, at the time when Christ descended, it was possible to realize what his disciples then described by saying: "We have laid our hands in his wounds, we ourselves have heard his word on the mountain. - One could refer to something external. That was the essential thing, that Christ was there outwardly. At that time it would not have been possible to experience him inwardly mystically. The Christ has changed from an extra-soul divinity to an inner-soul divinity, which will take hold of the human soul more and more the closer it approaches this Christ with its soul experiences. [2]

Sources:

[1] GA 266/3: From the Contents of the Esoteric Lessons. Volume III (1913-1923)

[2] GA 113: The Orient in the Light of the Occident. The Children of Lucifer and the Brothers of Christ (1909)

Christ and freedom

The gods (with whom the ancient initiates communicated in the Mysteries) knew everything; from them they could obtain comprehensive wisdom. But there was one thing they could never learn from these gods: those things relating to the birth and death of man. In particular, these gods knew nothing about death as such. But at the same time it was known in these Mysteries that one was to be sent down from their ranks, the one who was later called the Christ, and that he was to become acquainted with death on earth and thereby connect himself with the evolution of the earth and thus form the counterbalance to that which should necessarily have happened through the development towards freedom: the becoming more and more related of man to the atomizing earth. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 212: Human Soul Life and Spiritual Striving in Connection with World and Earth Development (1922)

Christ and the Holy Spirit

The human being really submerges into the sub-nature in a state of sleep, and from this submersion the illnesses emerge again. This is the realm of God the Father. We immerse ourselves asleep in the realm of God the Father, we immerse ourselves in the lower nature, in the realm of the Father. If we take man's vision, it actually represents an illumination of those parts of the human being that are out of the physical and etheric body in sleep, the ego and the astral body. If the human being becomes aware of this, then this is the opposite state of being ill, the other pole of being ill. And the human being is immersed in the realm of the spirit with his astral body and ego. Thus we see that man in his earthly organization can tear himself out of nature in two directions, in the direction of the lower nature towards the Father, in the direction of the supernature towards the spirit, and since the Mystery of Golgotha the Christ is the mediator of both worlds, the mediator of the natural existence, the mediator of the normal human existence, who always has to bring about the harmony between the lower nature and the supernature. In the normal course of sleeping and waking, the sub-nature is always balanced. The supernature is balanced in those seers who always have the possibility of returning to ordinary human life at their own will. If, on waking, a person is unable to balance what he has experienced in the sub-nature, then illness comes, which manifests itself in the physical and etheric body. If the human being is not able to bring into the full waking state, into the natural course of his earthly life, that which he can experience visually in the realm of the spirit, then the soul or spiritual illnesses come about and thus the other pole. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 318: The Interaction of Physicians and Pastoral Caregivers. Pastoral Medical Course (1924)

Christ and hierarchies

In all its powers, in all its impulses, the Christ-being is an essentially higher individuality than all the individualities of the hierarchies which we can only guess at in their full size and fullness. [1]

That which is called Vishvakarman in the language of the holy Rishis, Ahura Mazdao in that of Zarathustra, Osiris in the Egyptian culture, and Christ in the language of the fourth cultural period, has shone in through the gate of the Sun-Spirit of Wisdom, Kyriotetes. He was the gate to direct the occult gaze out into infinite spheres in which the spirits of the higher hierarchies are present; but the entrance was the Sun-Spirit of Wisdom. [2]

The Christ is not only there for humans, but also for the Angeloi and Archangeloi. [3] The Archangeloi breathed in and out heat and fire on the (old) sun. That is why these spirits are called the fire spirits; they were on the level of humanity on the sun. At that time man was at the stage of sleep consciousness (see: Stages of consciousness). These sun-fire spirits already had the I-consciousness. Since then they have also developed further and climbed to higher levels of consciousness. In Christian esotericism they are called archangels, archangeloi. And the most highly developed spirit, which was on the sun as a fire spirit, which is still active on earth today, with the most highly developed consciousness, this sun or fire spirit, that is the Christ, just as the most highly developed Saturn spirit is the Father God. For Christian esotericism, therefore, such a sun-fire spirit was embodied in the incarnate body of Christ Jesus, namely the highest of the rulers of the sun spirits. In order for him to come to earth, he had to use a physical body. He had to be under the same conditions as man in order to be able to work here. [4]

The sun people (during the sun evolution) had also reached a certain high level of development. There were also adepts of the sun who had progressed further than the other sun people. When the Hyperboreans lived in their soft forms in the second epoch of the fourth round (the earth evolution), these sons of the sun were able to incarnate and formed a particularly beautiful race. They were the Solarpitris. They completely transformed the Hyperborean bodies; the other humans would not have been able to do this at that time. In the Hyperborean period, the Solarpitris became the beautiful Apollo people, who had already been raised in the second race. [5] On the old moon the predecessors of man again underwent a certain normal development. But there are also lunar adepts who are ahead of the rest of humanity. These Pitri Beings at the end of the lunar evolution are much further ahead than the others, just as the adepts today are ahead of the rest of humanity. [6] Lucifer is the name given to the lunar adepts; they are the givers of what human intellectuality is. [7]

The principle that leads the earth up to spirituality is Lucifer. In order to live according to this principle, one must first come to love the earth, one must descend to the earth. Lucifer is the prince who carries out his government in the field of science and art. But he cannot descend completely to earth, his power is not sufficient for that. It would be impossible for Lucifer to bring up what is on earth all by himself. This requires not only the power of a lunar adept, but of a solar adept who also takes up the life that expresses itself in the togetherness of human beings, not in art and science. Lucifer is depicted as the winged dragon; in Ezekiel as the winged bull. (This) can only be a solar hero, similar to those who appeared in the Hyperborean period, who was represented in Ezekiel by the winged lion. This hero, who gives the second impetus, is Christ, the Lion of the tribe of Judah, a solar epitome. The representative of the eagle will come later, he represents the father principle. The third is that which will represent an adept who was already an adept on Saturn. Such an adept cannot yet incarnate on earth. Only when man will not only be able to develop his higher nature upwards, but can completely renounce his lower nature and appear creatively, can this highest adept, the Saturn adept, the father principle - the hidden God - incarnate. [8]

Sources:

[1] GA 129: Wonders of the World, Soul Tests and Spiritual Revelations (1911)

[2] GA 136: The Spiritual Beings in the Celestial Bodies and Kingdoms of Nature (1912)

[3] GA 162: Questions of Art and Life in the Light of Spiritual Science (1915)

[4] GA 99: The Theosophy of the Rosicrucian (1907)

[5] - [8] GA 93a: Basic Elements of Esotericism (1905)

Christ and karma

What is the source of this benefit in our earthly development, that there is karma? From no other power does karma come in the whole evolution than from the Christ. [1]

The closer we come to the future, the more people will learn that they were united with the Christ before they were born, that they experienced from him the grace to pay off their old karma in the incarnations. Thus the people of our time will learn that the Christ will reveal himself more and more supersensibly and will govern more and more the threads of karma in the affairs of the earth. As a judge, as a master of karma, people will look up to the Christ in the succession of incarnations when they experience their destiny. People first learned to love their karma through the Mystery of Golgotha. And this will go on and on, and people will learn more and more that under Lucifer's influence alone the earth could never have reached its goal, that without the Christ the development of mankind would have had to perish more and more. [2]

Sources:

[1] GA 107: Spiritual science of human nature (1908/1909)

[2] GA 143: Experiences of the Supersensible. The three paths of the soul to Christ. (1912)

Christ and Karma - Christ Lord of Karma

Towards the end of the 20th century, another significant event will take place; not in the physical world, however, but in the higher worlds, in the world that we initially refer to as the world of the etheric. And this event will have the same fundamental significance for the development of humanity as the event in Palestine at the beginning of our era. And through the fact that this event takes place, the possibility is created that people will learn to see, will see the Christ. This event is no other than that a certain office in the universe for the human development in the 20th century passes over - passes over to the Christ in a more elevated way than has been the case up to now. Christ becomes the Lord of Karma for the development of mankind. And this is the beginning of that which we also find hinted at in the Gospels with the words: He will come again to separate or to bring about the crisis for the living and the dead. - However, in terms of occult research, this event is not to be understood as if it were a one-off event that takes place on the physical plan, but is connected with the entire future development of humanity. It will be up to Christ in the future to determine what our karmic account is, how our debits and credits in life relate to each other. [1]

Man will encounter Christ Jesus more and more as his karmic judge. And it is this fact that has such an effect on the physical world, on the physical plan, that man will develop a feeling for it in such a way that with everything he does he creates something to which he will be accountable to the Christ. And this feeling, which now arises in a quite natural way in the course of human development, will transform itself so that it will imbue the soul with a light which will gradually emanate from the human being himself and which will illuminate the Christ-form within the etheric world. And the more this feeling, which will have an even greater significance than the abstract "conscience", will develop, the more the etheric form of Christ will become visible in the centuries to come. [2] In the future, it will fall to the Christ to integrate our karmic balance into the general earth karma, the general progress of humanity. [3]

When man has passed through the gate of death and has lived through that time in which he can look back on his previous life on earth, has lived through the time up to the point where he has laid down the etheric body, when man passes over into the Kamaloka time, then he steps before two forms. Usually only one of these is mentioned, but for the sake of completeness we can say that man faces two figures before his Kamaloka time, although this only applies to the people of the Occident and to all those people who have had a connection with the culture of this Occident in the last millennia. Moses is the one - man knows very well that he is facing Moses - who holds the tablets of the law before him, in the Middle Ages it was called "Moses with the sharp law", and man has a very precise awareness in his soul of the extent to which he has deviated from the law to the innermost part of his soul. The other figure is the one called "the cherub with the fiery sword", who decides about this deviation. That which confronts the human being through these two figures establishes the karmic account, so to speak. This fact is undergoing a change in our time. The Christ becomes the master of karma. Suppose any man had done this or that evil, he must do a good which compensates for the evil. But he can do this good in two ways, so that it means the same effort for him if it benefits only a few people, or so that it means the same effort for him if it benefits many people. It will be Christ's concern that our karmic account is balanced in the future in such a way, that is, that it is placed in such a world order against the future, when we have found the way to Christ, that the nature of our karmic balancing brings about the greatest possible human salvation for the rest of the earth's development. However, this transfer of the office of judge of human deeds to the Christ is linked to the fact that this Christ also intervenes directly in human destinies. People will gradually acquire the ability to see the karmic balance, the balancing deed that must happen in the future, as in a dream image. [4]

In the Akashic Records there are records that very often do not correspond with what is found in the karmic evolution of individual people. Let us assume that some person lived in the year 733 for my sake and at that time incurred a heavy debt. Now one examines the Akashic Chronicle, at first without having any connection with the Christ. And lo and behold, one cannot find the guilt in question in the Akashic Records. But if you now go into the person who has lived on and examine his karma, then you find: Yes, there is still something on this person's karma that he has to pay off; it should have been in the Akashic Records at a certain point in time; but it is not there. This comes from the fact that the Christ has actually taken upon himself the objective guilt. The karmic justice remains, but with regard to the effects of a guilt in the spiritual world, the Christ steps in, who takes this guilt over into his kingdom and carries it on. The matter has significance not only for the time after the Mystery of Golgotha, but also for the time before the Mystery of Golgotha. It is no mere legend that the Christ really went down to the dead after death. Everything that would accumulate as guilt for the earth would push the earth into darkness, and we would have no planet for further development. We can take care of ourselves in karma, but not of the whole of humanity and not of that which in earth evolution is connected with the whole evolution of humanity. [5]

All souls descend from Christ, and such a time will come when the souls will become aware of this and when they will understand that the balance between the souls can only happen through the Christ. In the primordial beginning there was one soul substance, which then divided into the innumerable differentiated individual souls; through this differentiation karma came into being, which exists in soul connections from person to person. In the time before the event of Palestine, these karmic connections lived out in the blood relationship, were bound to the blood. But precisely at the time of the Mystery of Golgotha, this soul substance gradually dried up, and people would have passed away soulless over the earth at the end of earthly development, would have lapsed into animality in human bodies, which would be caricatures of animal bodies, and the ego [for it is not the ego that dies out; karma is bound to it until the end] would be empty and soulless if the Mystery of Golgotha had not taken place. The Christ is the spiritual-soul progenitor of present humanity, as Adam is in relation to the body, and only by filling ourselves with the Christ-substance, the Christ-impulse, do we escape soullessness, and we do this by absorbing the knowledge of the Mystery of Golgotha and allowing it to live in us. Relationships and the coexistence of man and man will then become more and more soulful. [6]

Sources:

[1] - [3] GA 131: From Jesus to Christ (1911)

[4] GA 130: Esoteric Christianity and the Spiritual Guidance of Humanity (1911/1912)

[5] GA 155: Christ and the Human Soul. On the Meaning of Life. Theosophical Morality. Anthroposophy and Christianity (1912/1914)

[6] GA 266/3: From the Contents of the Esoteric Lessons. Volume III (1913-1923)

Christ and the bone system

There was one thing in human nature that the power of a pre-Christian initiate could not reach. And that was the subtle physical-chemical processes in the bone system. Until the baptism of ChristJesus by John, there was never a human individuality within the development of the earth - not among the initiated and not among the uninitiated - which would have been powerful as far as the chemical-physical processes of the bone system. Through the entering of the Christ into the body of Jesus of Nazareth, the present ego of the Christ became ruler right into the bone system. And the consequence of this was that a body once lived on earth which was able to control its powers in such a way that it could incorporate the form of the bone system, the spiritual form of the bone system, into the earth's development. Nothing would remain of what man undergoes within the earth evolution if man could not assimilate the noble form of his bone system as the law of the earth evolution, if he did not gradually become master of this law of the bone system. The arbitrariness of the Christ, his free will, penetrated with his dominion into the bone system, so that he could, so to speak, work into this bone system for the first time. The significance of this fact can be described as follows: Man conquered the form he has today through his bone system on earth, not on an earlier embodiment of our planet. But he would lose it if that spiritual power had not come which we call the Christ. Man would take nothing but harvest and fruit from the earth with him into the future if that dominion of the Christ over the bone system had not come. [1]

Thus something was transplanted into the earth that can be called the supremacy over death, for it was with the bones that death first entered the world. [2] For the bones are to blame for the death of man; by the fact that man was so formed that he incorporated the solid bone mass, he became entangled with the mineral substance of the earth. Thus death was born to him, and it is not for nothing that death is represented by the skeleton. The effect extended into the bones, as the body of Jesus of Nazareth was glowed through and fired through by the individuality of Christ, by the high spirit of the sun.

When you burn a bone, the cartilage mass burns and the bone ash remains. It is something that becomes clear to you through the fact that bone mineral mass and cartilage mass are held together, so to speak, by the power that is opposed to fire, but therefore also connected with it. Today this is completely removed from the arbitrariness of man; but it was placed in the arbitrariness of him who was later to undergo the event of Golgotha. The body of Jesus of Nazareth, as the only body that has ever existed on earth, was given dominion over the power that holds cartilage and bone ash together through the intuition of the Christ. This is the living power that is able to transform the bones back again one day, that is, to gradually lead them into spirituality, which will happen in the future mission of earth evolution. Therefore, no foreign physical power was allowed to intervene in this bone tissue: You shall not break his leg! The legs of the others who were hung on the cross were broken. The prophet's word had to be fulfilled in him: "Not one of his legs shall be broken", so that what had been communicated to the earth as a great, powerful center impulse would not be destroyed by a foreign influence.

Thus, in the mystery that took place at the baptism of John, the high Sun-Spirit was at work, who, through his separation from the earth, caused humanity to come into physical matter, who had first brought it into ossification: thus he worked that it now received the impulse to lift this ossification, to spiritualize it. [3]

Sources:

[1] GA 112: The Gospel of John in relation to the three other Gospels, especially to the Gospel of Luke (1909)

[2] GA 106: Egyptian Myths and Mysteries in Relation to the Working Spiritual Forces of the Present (1908)

[3] GA 105: World, Earth and Man, their Nature and Development and their Reflection in the Connection between Egyptian Myth and Contemporary Culture (1908)

Christ and Lucifer

Lucifer first appears to the occult aspirant as the archetype of human and also superhuman, so to speak divine greatness, when he confronts man in this way, taken out of his deeds, a seductive being. And the occultist aspirant is, so to speak, only healed a little of the temptation when he looks back at what he himself has become through Lucifer, when he looks at the terrifying image of an animal nature that man has become from incarnation to incarnation through Luciferic temptation and seduction. If this encounter with that which one represents oneself, and which in a certain respect is the guardian of the threshold, has made a terrible impression, then that which can be the Christ offers one a consolation, a hope, so to speak. For in place of death itself, in place of the broken human body, something else appears. And what I am telling you here is an unconditional experience that can be made, that is really made in the way I am telling it: For in the place of death, making us realize that this I can be preserved after all, Christ Himself appears. In other words, we receive an inner image in our consciousness that is completely independent of any memory from our sensory life. To speak of illusion, hallucination, would be the purest nonsense, for one could be blind and deaf and odorless and all sorts of things, and one could still have this experience that presents itself at this point of initiation; Christ would still take the place of death. Imagine that you have Christ before you, who takes the place of death, and Lucifer: absolutely the image that the Gospels themselves present as the temptation scene in the desert. You would not even need to remember this temptation story from the Gospels, you would have it in front of you. [1]

No external impression needs to be there when you have this picture of the temptation of Christ and the defeat of death, so to speak, everything that Lucifer started with man, when you have that before you, what kind of consciousness is that? A consciousness without an external object. [2] If you direct this higher consciousness of the first kind, so to speak, towards the old moon, you have a repetition of this history of temptation. For one then learns that the Christ had already defeated Lucifer for himself on the old moon and that the scene thus described in the Gospels is the second, the repeated fact where the Christ gains the victory over Lucifer, that is, that the Christ on earth rejects Lucifer from the outset. This is for the reason - as you will take it for granted, the Christ has also undergone a development - because the Christ, when he was still less developed for himself on the moon, rejected all the temptations of Lucifer, which at that time still meant something to him, out of his sense of devotion to the highest powers. On the moon the Christ developed all the powers at his disposal to repel Lucifer.

If one now progresses to the second consciousness of a higher kind (see: Levels of consciousness), then one perceives the (still) earlier embodiment state of our earth, the old sun. There we no longer experience the history of temptation. If we turn back to the solar time, then the sun itself still appears to us as one planet among the seven planets, Venus prefigured with Lucifer as the ruler; and at first the two, the sun spirit and the Venus spirit, in other words the Christ and Lucifer, appear as a kind of brothers. The difference in the old solar time between Lucifer and the Christ only becomes apparent when we look within. It is extremely difficult now to find means of external representation to show you what the difference is. We become aware that Lucifer, the ruler of Venus, appears in an extraordinarily luminous form - although spiritual light is meant - so that we have the sensation: All the splendor that can ever come to us through a contemplation that proceeds from the revelation of light is something insignificant compared to the majesty of Lucifer in the old solar time. But we notice within this Lucifer, if we go into his intentions, which are then to be seen through, that he is a spirit who is endowed with an infinitely great pride through all that he has in himself. [3]

This is the seductiveness of Lucifer in his proud greatness, in his pride in his figure of light. That which can be called "unrevealed" light, the light that does not shine outwardly but has great, strong power within itself, this he has in the fullest measure. And next to this, the figure of Christ in the old solar time, who is, so to speak, the ruler of the solar planet, is an image of the fullest devotion to that which is all around in the world. While Lucifer actually appears to be concerned only with himself - one must put all this into human words, although they are not sufficient - the Christ appears as devoted to that which surrounds him in the wide, wide universe. This vast universe was not as it is today. If you were to look at the sun today, you would first look radially at the twelve constellations of the zodiac. They were not externally visible as such at that time. But there were twelve beings who, since the outer space was not filled with light, let their words resound from the depths of darkness, from the depths of darkness, announcing ancient times that were already ancient at that time. These were 12 world initiators. Today the twelve zodiacal pictures stand in the direction of these world initiators, and from them sounds to the soul, which is open to the whole world, the original kind of unspoken world word, which could be formed from the 12 voices. And while - I must now begin to speak figuratively, because human words are not sufficient - Lucifer alone had in himself the urge to irradiate everything with the light present in him and thereby to recognize it, the Christ gave himself up to the impression of this world-word of an inexpressible kind and took it completely, completely into himself; so that they were now united in the Christ-soul, that this Christ-soul was the unifying being of the great world-secrets sounding in through the inexpressible word. Thus we are confronted with the contrast between the Christ who receives the World Word and the proud Lucifer, the Venus spirit, who rejects the World Word and wants to fathom everything with his light. And from what Lucifer and Christ once were, all later development now proceeded. For this had the consequence that the Christ entity had absorbed the comprehensive world word, the comprehensive world secrets, and that the Lucifer entity lost its kingdom, the Venus kingdom, through what I can only express with the word "proud figure of light". For other reasons, which are more remote to us now, the other planetary spirits lost or changed their entities. So it happened that Lucifer lost more and more of his dominion, that Lucifer became a dethroned ruler with his light, so to speak, and that the planet Venus had to make do from then on without an actual ruler, therefore could only undergo a downward development. But the Christ had received the World-Word during the old solar time; and this World-Word has the property that it is kindled into renewed light in the soul by which it is received, so that from the old solar time onwards the World-Word became light in the Christ, and the planet whose ruler was the Christ developed from the old solar time onwards into the center of the whole planetary system, into the sun, and the other planets came into dependence on the sun, also with regard to their spiritual rulers. During the old solar era, the paths of Christ and Lucifer diverged. The path of Lucifer went downwards, he had to lag behind in his development, and for this reason he also remained behind in his development during the time of the moon. The Christ-spirit became a spirit developing forwards. [4]

Sources:

[1] - [4] GA 137: Man in the Light of Occultism, Theosophy and Philosophy (1912)

Christ and Lucifer and the etheric body

This is the meaning of the further development of humanity through the various cultural epochs, that the etheric body enters deeper and deeper into the physical body. This changes the human view, since it depends on the way in which the etheric body is organized. And this again is connected with the fact that the Luciferic beings of such a kind, which reveals itself inner-earthly and inner-spiritually, ascend to cosmic levels of existence, and that the Christ-entity, which is previously a cosmic one and descends to incarnation in the human body, now becomes such a one, which reveals itself inner-earthly and inner-spiritually. This interpenetration of the Apollonian principle with the Dionysian principle, this as it were stepping over each other of the Luciferic and Christ entities, was only made possible by the fact that the human organization changed in this way. But it has not only changed for the judgment of the past, but also for the preparation of the future. We are indeed now living in the age in which the most intimate interpenetration between the etheric body and the physical body is already behind us; we are now already living again in the opposite direction of development. We are living in a time when the etheric body is slowly moving out of the physical body. This is normal human development into the future, that the etheric body gradually leaves the physical body again; and times will come in which the human organization will again look at itself as it did in ancient times, so that we will again feel how the etheric body protrudes above the physical. We are in the midst of this process, and many of the more subtle manifestations of illness in the present would be understood if we knew this. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 113: The Orient in the Light of the Occident. The Children of Lucifer and the Brothers of Christ (1909)

Christ and Lucifer and esoterics

While all gods and spirits can only be found by the observing consciousness above the physical world, the Christ is found within this physical world, even though he is of the same nature and essence as the divine-spiritual beings. Thus only the other gods can be found in the outer world; he is the One who at the same time lives in the human inner being, who, so to speak, leaves the outer worlds of the gods and enters the human inner being. Thus something very significant had happened in the development of the world and humanity. If one had sought a God within, one had previously had to descend to the subterranean gods hidden behind the veil of soul experiences; in the Christ one has such a God who can be found in the outer and in the inner. This is the essential thing that occurred in the fourth period of the post-Atlantean era after the Indian, Persian and Egyptian periods. What was thought and seen more in the abstract in ancient India, that the divine-spiritual world is a unified one, that the "Tat" (see: Tat tvam asi) and Brahman, which emanate from two sides of the soul, are a unity, became living life through the Christ-event. Before, one could say to oneself: The divine that one finds on the way out and the divine that one finds on the way in are one.

Now one could say to oneself: just descend into the human interior. If you partake of Christ, you will find a being that is Apollo and Dionysus in one entity. If we went back to very, very ancient times in the development of mankind and the world, we would find that the soul looks outwards and sees the divine-spiritual world outside; that it looks inwards and sees the divine-spiritual world within; that the soul finds the Apollonian world outside, the Dionysian world within, to use Greek expressions. If one then advances in the development of mankind and the world, one sees a different result. In the most ancient times, when the vast majority of people were observant, the situation was as I have just described. Outside one saw the upper gods, inside the lower gods; and one had these two ways into the spiritual world. If we consider later times, then we have before us a humanity that has become weaker with regard to the faculties of vision. People have lost more and more of their original, old, dull, dim vision. But let us take a time when few people still had natural vision.

These people - we need not go back very far, we also find such people in the Chaldean-Egyptian world - saw the upper gods when they pushed through the carpet of the world of the senses, and the lower gods when they descended into their own inner being. These impressions were clearer and more powerful for those who were initiated to a certain degree. It should be mentioned that at all times there have also been initiates who fully recognized the unity of the two worlds. But these are the pinnacles of humanity. So, let us say, centuries before the appearance of Christ on earth, there were people who had still preserved the old way of seeing, and initiates who could walk on one path and find the upper gods, and others who could walk on the other path and thus find the lower gods. But then came a time when the world which we could call that of the lower gods withdrew more and more from human life, when it was difficult to reach even for one who was initiated to a small degree - a time, however, when it was relatively easy to reach, with a lesser degree of initiation, that which is called the upper gods, the gods lying behind the outer world of the senses. Take, for example, an initiate in the old Jewish-Hebrew world.

It was precisely the initiates in this world who, if they were not initiated to a particularly high degree, could make the experience that in their little seeing they saw into the world in which Yahweh was not merely a concept, an idea, but an ethereal reality, an entity that spoke to them like a human being for the looking gaze, so while for the people Yahweh was a proclamation, something that was only said to be there, for the initiate he was a reality. On the other hand, it would have been more difficult for such an initiate in the old Hebrew world to find something if he had plunged down into his own soul life, if he had sought the realm of the lower gods. He would have had to say to himself: Yes, I cannot penetrate to the bottom there; I find my soul life everywhere, I cannot get through the dense crust of my soul life to the lower gods. Thus the lower gods had withdrawn into a certain unknown darkness. It was the time of the descent of the Christ to earth, in which the Luciferic spirits had withdrawn to a certain degree into darkness. [1]

But if this etheric body now moves out and enters a wrong element, if it does not meet the forces outside that can also have a sustaining and enlivening effect on what has been drawn into it as the Christ principle, then the etheric body, when it becomes partially free, will indeed have the Christ power, but it will enter an element where it cannot live. It would be destroyed by the external forces. It would, because it is crisscrossed, go towards its destruction in an element unsuitable for it and have a destructive effect back on the physical body. What is the second thing that is necessary? It is that this etheric body makes itself suitable to receive the light from Lucifer's kingdom again. Thus the human being, whereas previously he saw Lucifer emerge as an inner experience through the veil of his soul life, must now prepare himself so that he can experience Lucifer as a cosmic being in his environment. From a subterranean deity Lucifer becomes a cosmic one; and man must prepare himself to endow his etheric body with such powers that Lucifer can be a fertilizing, a promoting element and not a destructive one. Already when Zarathustra pointed upwards to Ahura Mazdao, the power of the Christ radiated downwards. And from the other side radiated (see: Mithras) the power of Lucifer. This is reversed. In the future, the power of Lucifer will radiate in from the outside, and the Christ will live within. The human organization must again be influenced from two sides. [2]

Sources:

[1] & [2] GA 113: The Orient in the Light of the Occident. The Children of Lucifer and the Brothers of Christ (1909)

Christ and human sins

If one goes back in the sense of initiatory knowledge to what is really meant when it is said that the sacrifice of Melchizedek was offered in the form of bread and wine, then one comes to see that in the bread, in the correct initiatory knowledge, a carrier of salt was always seen. The Jews did not actually act in the right sense and with the right understanding when they forgot the salt and even emphasized that it was necessary to use unleavened bread for the holy sacrifice. In the bread, which was originally meant, the salt was seen, just as in the wine not the wine as such, as it presents itself in its wine substance, was seen, but the extraordinarily volatile, fluctuating content of sulphur or phosphorus was sought in the wine, which is one and the same in the old term. So if we speak in the correct sense, we must actually say that the sacrifice of Melchizedek - that is, the sacrifice that was performed according to his rite - was offered by salt and sulphur - or by salt and phosphorus - as they are found in the foodstuffs bread and wine.

That is the original conception, and initiation is called "initiation" for the very reason that it always goes back to the original conception. In the Hebrew priesthood, the real bread, which contains salt, was replaced by unleavened bread for a certain purpose that was not humanly intended, because certain secrets were no longer known. What is actually in salt and phosphorus when a person takes them in through bread and wine? In salt and phosphorus lies, through the salt, man's connection with the earth. The more man absorbs salt, the more he connects himself with the earth, and the more phosphorus he absorbs, the more he tears himself away from it, frees himself from it. So what takes place in the human body - not outside the human body - through the connection of the salt with the phosphorus is a process that places the human being correctly into earth existence, for the reason that the salt connects him correctly with the earth, the phosphorus snatches him correctly from earth existence, frees him from it again. It is so that the human being who has salt and phosphorus in him in the right way, stands on the earth in the right way, is connected to the earth strongly enough, but also receives the necessary etheric and astral lightness in order to be free again from the earth forces in his being.

By placing the main emphasis on the unleavened bread, the Jews of later times showed that they no longer wanted to be in contact with the earth, but also wanted to have in the bread that which would carry them beyond the earth. So they wanted a supernatural, not an earthly priesthood, they wanted a priesthood that would rule the earth from outside. This was the case with Judaism, especially at the time of Christ. Because Judaism established a priesthood in its mysteries throughout the ages that was not properly connected with the earth, it could not understand that the being of whom its initiates spoke as the coming Messiah could come to perfection in an earthly body; and it never occurred to the initiated Jews that the Christ could have walked on earth in an earthly body, in the body of Jesus. This only became clear to Paul when he was helped to realize that the Christ was not revealed to him in an earthly body, but in an ethereal body.

But what is gained by going back in this way to the actual original form of the offering of "salt and brimstone"? We can imagine what is achieved by this if we imagine the contrast that existed between the high priest, between Melchizedek, who was also a priest-king, an Adonai, and Abraham. In that current of spiritual life, in which Melchizedek also stood, lived the view of repeated earthly lives (hence there is even a Hebrew word for it: Gilgul). It lived precisely in the mystery community to which Melchizedek belonged in such a way that it was kept hidden from the uninitiated as a mystery, but it was given to all those who had been initiated into these mysteries. Abrahamic Hebrewism was characterized by the fact that it restricted the human view precisely to that which arises for man as something spiritual, if one disregards the repeated earth lives, if one does not go into them, if one still takes into account in a makeshift way the pre-earthly lifetime preceding the one earth life and then considers the post-earthly lifetime. At least that was the teaching of the Pharisees. In Abraham, therefore, the forefather of Judaism, who had the mission of initially not allowing the doctrine of repeated earthly lives to be active within the education of earthly mankind, stood opposite the higher priest, whom he recognized, who transplanted this doctrine onto those who were consecrated by him through the offering of the sacrifice; he stood opposite the concept of Melchizedek at the moment described in the Old Testament. We must place this conception of Melchizedek before our souls in the following way.

It was so that those who became disciples of Melchizedek - which Abraham did not become to the full extent - learned to recognize that man, who here on earth accomplishes the wrong, the evil, besides the good and the right, needs a power which passes over from his present body to the body of the next earth life. Man cannot by himself carry into the body, that is, into the physical and etheric organization of the next earth-life, that which he accomplishes as activity in one earth-life; he can carry it in - and that now in the sense of the time of man's development before the Mystery of Golgotha - by that which is accomplished for him through the cult of salt and phosphorus, in the sense in which Melchizedek performed the sacrifice through bread and wine. This enabled the people of the time before the Mystery of Golgotha to take into the bodies into which they came in the next earthly life the good and evil they had done in the previous earthly life as its consequences. In other words, this is what enabled people to develop karma in the first place. Nothing of the moral activities of one earthly life would have been passed on to the other, future life, if that which must be carried from body to body had not been carried in this way, so that there is a karma, a world destiny of man.

And what would have happened if there had not been such sacrifices of salt and phosphorus, if there had not been priest-kings who had performed these sacrifices and thus become people who, so to speak, carried the other bodies with them through their own momentum and enthusiasm, in order to carry the power of karma from one earthly life to another? Then the good and evil that people have done in an earthly life would have fallen away from them in that particular earthly life and become an inheritance of that power which, in the sense of the Gospel, is called the "prince of this world", not the prince to whom man belongs with his innermost being. It was the constant struggle of the time before the Mystery of Golgotha that the so-called prince of this world - a spirit that had become Luciferic-Ahrimanic, especially a spirit that had become strongly Ahrimanic - took possession of that which in man leans towards evil, so that he could use the power of this evil for himself in the cosmic order. People would then have become increasingly free from this evil. They were not allowed to do so; they were not allowed to do so for the reason that in every new life on earth a new existence of their own would have begun, and they would never have been able to compensate for what is called "sin" themselves.

The sacrifice of Melchizedek therefore consists in the fact that the healing of sins was preserved for people by continually snatching them from the prince of this world and thus giving people the opportunity to bring about a compensation for sins in later life on earth through their own being. The Catholic Church was later careful not to seriously consider this mystery, which it had known for many centuries, even into the Middle Ages, and which is still known today by individual initiates of the Catholic Church, as religious content, for the reason that it is easier to tell people that their sins are forgiven, that is, that they are wiped from the earth, even with indulgences, they are blotted out, instead of telling them that they are not blotted out on earth and do not become a prey of the prince of this world and thereby corrupt man for the eternity of the world, instead of telling them that the healing of sins consists precisely in the fact that man is given the opportunity to make up for his sins in the following life on earth.

(Thus one can) recognize in the right sense what the word means: Christ took the sins of men upon himself, united them with himself. Christ did not come to unite human piety with himself, but he was the one who united himself with the sins of men in order to take the burden of sin upon himself. And when Paul says "Not I, but Christ in me", he means: You humans are to receive the Christ in you, in order to thereby receive into yourselves the stream going into the future of the earth, which contains your stream of sins, but the stream of sins that does not lead to death, but to the compensation of sins. [1]

In the metabolic processes that extend into the movement processes of the limbs, completely different processes take place than outside in nature. Such processes, for example, that give rise to a human thigh bone in such a way that it appears as a marvelous beam structure, these processes that form the phosphoric acid lime, the carbonic acid lime as mineral processes in man, are not found in external nature. But such processes, which are not found in nature, which are found in man in the head processes and in the organization of movement, are, because they are also connected with the soul and spirit of man, now again dangerous to this soul and spirit, and indeed the head processes become dangerous in the Luciferic sense, the metabolic-limb processes in the Ahrimanic sense, and the external healing can only be brought about by supplying the head processes with salt, which remains almost unchangeable in the human nutritional process, and the limb processes with the volatile, fluctuating phosphorus present in the grape juice, which then continues to work in the metabolic organization and permeates the limb system. By consuming the salt we therefore send into our head a decided fight against the Luciferic processes, while by taking in the phosphoric and bringing it to overflow into the limbs we send into them a fight against the Ahrimanic. This is the outer process which the believer must naturally follow in his inner soul processes. So if it is the outer process that you (as priests) bring about in the souls of the faithful through communion, then communion can of course only work in the right way if the inner animation is also renewed again and again from time to time. This must be done by understanding the healing of sins in the broadest sense, so that everything that can be a challenge to sin through the Ahrimanic and the Luciferic in the human nature is now really healed through the priestly work. [2]

Sources:

[1] & [2] GA 344: Lectures and Courses on Christian Religious Work, III Lectures at the Founding of the Christian Community (1922)

Christ and Mysteries

In the Mysteries she was always known, the Christ-being: In ancient India of the seven Rishis she was called Vishva-Karman, who stood in place of the Christ; Ahura Mazdao was called Zarathustra; Osiris was called Osiris in Egypt; Yahweh or Jehovah was called Yahweh by the Jewish people. [1]

Those who were initiated into the Mysteries were brought to the point where their soul came out of their body. The greatest thing was that the student of the Mysteries was placed outside his body before the Christ. [2] Christ did not institute mysteries, he renewed ancient ones. [3]

Sources:

[1] GA 109: The principle of spiritual economy in the context of reincarnation issues. An Aspect of the Spiritual Guidance of Humanity (1909)

[2] GA 155: Christ and the Human Soul. On the Meaning of Life. Theosophical morality. Anthroposophy and Christianity (1912/1914)

[3] He: E.Beltle & K.Vierl [Eds:] Memories of Rudolf Steiner (1979)

Christ and Pontius Pilate

The Christ who enters humanity is pure and spiritual; he is virgin spiritual matter. Now he has descended into contracted, sensual matter. Those who speak esoterically call this the water or the sea. In Genesis, for example, it says: "The spirit of God hovered over the waters. - This means that the spirit hovers over matter. In Greek, this matter is also called "Póntos Pyletós", literally the contracted sea. Man has been drawn into this contracted matter, which has formed his organs. As a result, the active being in the spiritual realm has become a being that passively receives impressions from outside through the sensory organs: man has become passive, a póntos pyletós. This is what distinguishes looking in the spiritual world from looking in the sense world. If we want to have an object before us in the spiritual world, then we first have the thought, and this thought is formed by the spirit in the spiritual realm, that is, man finds the images for all creation in the spiritual realm. In the sensual world man absorbs suffering, man has become passive. We have all become passive, as it were suffering in the contracted matter. That was the original confession of the Egyptian priestly faith. This is the symbolism that the Christ descended to humanity, that he took on matter and became a passive sufferer in the contracted sea, in the Póntos Pyletós. In the course of time this passed over into Christianity, and because the word Póntos Pyletós was thoroughly misunderstood, the misleading passage in the Christian creed arose which reads: "suffered under Pontius Pilate", which is nothing other than the passage quoted in the creed of the Egyptian priests. Man has become a sufferer; he is no longer active, but passive. This is the article of faith which, in the occult symbolism, signifies the so-called Incarnation. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 88: On the Astral World and the Devachan (1903-1904)

Christ and sun

Because the Christ entity took possession of the three bodies, of that in which the ego entity of Jesus used to be, an entity was now connected to the earth which had previously had a dwelling place on the sun. It had been connected with the earth up to the moment when the sun went out of the earth (see: earth evolution). At that time the Christ went out with it and from then on could only develop his power from outside onto the earth. At the moment of baptism the high Christ-Spirit reunited with the earth in the full sense. Previously he worked from outside, overshadowing the prophets and working in the mysteries. Now he was embodied in a physical human body on earth itself. At the moment when the blood flowed from the wounds of Christ on Golgotha, the astral body of the earth was thoroughly changed. At that moment it took on something else, took on other colors. A new power was incorporated into the earth. That which formerly worked from outside was reconnected with the earth, and as a result the attraction between sun and earth will become so strong that sun and earth will reunite, and man with the sun spirits. It was the Christ who made it possible for the earth to reunite with the sun and then be in the bosom of the Godhead. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 106: Egyptian Myths and Mysteries in Relation to the Working Spiritual Forces of the Present (1908)

Christ and the constellation

The three wise men, the magicians from the Orient, the bearers of the ancient wisdom of the stars, the explorers of the word of the world from the starry script of the cosmos, are gifted with the highest wisdom that was accessible to mankind at that time. And this is indicated by the Gospel: Christ Jesus appears, the stars tell us. The eternal word of the world, which lives in the constellations of the stars, tells us that the Christ will appear. In the schools of wisdom it was proclaimed: 354 times since the emergence of the present humanity on earth, Jupiter has completed its planetary orbit. A great year of Jupiter has been completed since the time when the ancient Hebrews, for example, began to think of humanity's existence on earth. According to this world view at that time, an ordinary year had 354 days. 354 Jupiter days have elapsed and these 354 Jupiter days are something that speaks from the wisdom of the world, like the great sentence, and the individual words in it give the orbits of Mercury, and 7 x 7 = 49 Mercury days have elapsed in the same time in which a Jupiter day has elapsed. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 209: Nordic and Central European Spiritual Impulses. The Feast of the Apparition of Christ (1921)

Christ and the experience of death

At the moment of death we are able to absorb what is basically the secret of our consciousness and thus absorb the Christ impulse. Thus, by seeking understanding, feeling and sensation for the Christ impulse, we are actually preparing ourselves to receive the Christ impulse. But we can only have an understanding of that which strikes us in death if the organ of our understanding is liberated, that is, the moment of death does indeed give us the conditions to unite with the Christ, but only when we are liberated from the etheric body is our ego and our astral body, which are the organizations of understanding, also able to see what has united with us. In order for the conditions to be created for this to happen, something else had to happen in the Mystery of Golgotha. After the Christ had, so to speak, entrusted the secret of the coming human consciousness to Jesus in his death on Golgotha, the mighty fact had to occur that Jesus, who contained the Christ, rose to a new life out of that power which is death, that is, the resurrection had to occur so that we could then understand the resurrection when, a few days after death, our etheric body detaches itself from us. In this inner process of dying, of the detachment of the etheric body a few days after death, we live in a certain way the Mystery of Golgotha. For it had to be that life, namely consciousness, emerged from death. But this consciousness itself had to live, so life had to emerge from death. This had not been the case before the Mystery of Golgotha. Only from life had life arisen before. That is why Christianity took its origin from the resurrection and that is why no Christianity that calls itself such is a real Christianity that does not fully penetrate the idea of resurrection in all its vitality. [1] There is no death in the invisible worlds. Christ himself, by descending to our world, passed through a death similar to that of men. When he again became a purely spiritual entity, he still retained the memory of his death, but as an entity of the rank of the Angeloi, in which he continued to manifest himself outwardly. [2]

This is what the Christ does when he penetrates our fruits of knowledge. He does not take away what these represent for our individuality, but when we rise to the realization, which must be the realization of the right earthly man: "Not I, but the Christ in me"; when we know, as it were, the Christ in us in all that we ourselves know, when we ascribe to the Christ the powers that we ourselves use, then what we take into ourselves works not only for us alone, but for all mankind. Then it becomes fruitful for the whole of humanity. Wherever we look on the earth to human souls: the Christ died for all of them, and what the human souls take in in his name, they take in for their own perfection, but also as precious active goods for the whole of humanity. When, after death, we look back in our life tableau on what we have lived through, then it seems to us as if our ideals could have something alien about them. The sensation we go through is that we feel these ideals: they do not actually carry us towards the general human life, they lead us away from the general human life. It is a strong power that Lucifer has over our ideals precisely because they spring so beautifully from the human soul and are not rooted in external reality. That is why Lucifer has such power, and it is actually Lucifer's magnetic pull that we feel in our ideals after death. Lucifer can draw us to himself in a roundabout way through these ideals. But if we infuse that which we spiritually penetrate with the Christ, if we feel the Christ within us, and if we know: That which we take in, the Christ takes into us, then it is when we look back at our ideals that we realize that it is the Christ who makes our ideals his own. He takes our ideals upon himself. The Christ in me infuses my ideals with the reality of substance. These ideals are real seeds for future reality. [3]

Sources:

[1] GA 176: Human and Human Developmental Truths. The Karma of Materialism (1917)

[2] GA 152: Precursors to the Mystery of Golgotha (1913/1914)

[3] GA 155: Christ and the human soul. On the Meaning of Life. Theosophical Morality. Anthroposophy and Christianity (1912/1914)

Christ and the dead

Consider for a moment what it means that man must carry the feeling within himself, namely at a certain time between death and a new birth, that he carries the hierarchies within himself as his inner experience! This could lead man into the most terrible arrogance, which could live as a dark feeling in his soul when he is reborn. In ancient times a barrier against this arrogance was created by the fact that people, by passing through the gate of death and entering the spiritual world, knew to a certain extent that they were not looking at themselves, but that the highest beings of the highest hierarchies lived within them, who imparted the seeing to them. But man has lost this connection in the spiritual world just as he has lost the old atavistic clairvoyance in the physical world. In its place, however, must come that which Paul expressed with the words: "Not I, but the Christ in me", and which attains a real spiritual feeling through the words: "Out of the God we are born; into the Christ we die." When we live through the gate of death with the right feelings of "in Christo morimur", then we find, looking from the periphery, among those beings we look at who belong to the higher hierarchies, who are also elemental beings, but also such beings who are here embodied human souls, or are already disembodied human souls, we also find among all these our own I-being. And we look at the relationship between this ego being of ours and the other beings from the outside. Being able to have this feeling after passing through the gate of death is something tremendously important. For only then are we able to find our way properly back into the embodiment of the flesh if we can have these feelings towards our own ego. But we can only have them if we can owe them to the correct passage through the gate of death with the feeling: "We have died into the Christ." This connection with the Christ gives us the opportunity to see our relationship in the spiritual world with the soul eye of the Christ, to see ourselves as an ego being among other spirit beings. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 168: The connection between the living and the dead (1916)

Christ and dream sleep

Until the Mystery of Golgotha Christ lived in the world we observe in dream sleep, so that the Christ was perceptible to every human being in dream sleep before the Mystery of Golgotha. But no human being was allowed to think - this was something that was made clear to people from the mystery schools - that the being who lives in the Christ could be reached with earthly thoughts, that it could also be found in the waking state. This only became possible through the Mystery of Golgotha, through Christ's passing through death. Since that time he can be thought of as an entity that belongs to earthly life itself. There became a real conception for earth-life of the God who came out of the dream-land into the physical land. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 211: The Solar Mystery and the Mystery of Death and Resurrection. Exoteric and Esoteric Christianity (1922)

Christ and immortality

In Christ Jesus the being which had otherwise stood before the body-liberated soul in the Mysteries stood before people as a human being. This was the beginning of the fact that the powers which man has lost in his earthly development since the beginning of earth, these powers, through which his immortality is guaranteed, come to him again through the Mystery of Golgotha. And man's path through earthly development will continue in such a way that, as man will absorb the Christ more and more, he will discover in himself that which can love in him beyond death, that is, that he can face his God as an immortal individuality. That is why, since the Mystery of Golgotha, the word has become true: "Love God above all things and your neighbor as yourself." [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 155: Christ and the human soul. On the meaning of life. Theosophical morality. Anthroposophy and Christianity (1912/1914)

Christ and sub-nature and supernature

We see that man in his earthly organization can tear himself out of nature in two directions, in the direction of sub-nature towards the Father, in the direction of supernature towards the spirit, and since the Mystery of Golgotha the Christ is the mediator of both worlds, the mediator of the natural existence, the mediator of the normal human existence, who always has to bring about the harmony between sub-nature and supernature. In the normal course of sleeping and waking, the sub-nature is always balanced. The supernature is balanced in those seers who always have the possibility of returning to ordinary human life at their own will. If, on waking, a person is unable to balance what he has experienced in the sub-nature, then illness comes, which manifests itself in the physical and etheric body. If the human being is not able to bring into the full waking state, into the natural course of his earthly life, that which he can experience visually in the realm of the spirit, then the soul or spiritual illnesses come about and thus the other pole. Now let us take physical illness. What happens when the healing process occurs? The human being is led from the experience of the sub-nature to the experience of nature, from the Father to Christ, for Christ is the spiritual life in nature. From the Father to Christ, and this is essentially what the doctor does. Essentially, it is the doctor's task to recognize how the person afflicted by the sub-nature is brought back to Christ after the Father, if we express it figuratively, has relinquished dominion to Christ, the Son. This is precisely what mystery wisdom would express in more modern language. One would say: the initiate is led, after he has a real Christ-consciousness here on earth, on the one side to the Father, on the other side to the spirit. And from the Father, as he becomes aware of the path on which he must be led from the Father to Christ, all healing processes lie on this path. At first you don't believe that the one is connected to the other, but it is. It is so connected that by looking into the healing process you really understand what has happened in the cosmos, that the Father sent the Son to pass through the death on Golgotha; and in what happened in the death on Golgotha you then see not a death, but a cooperation of everything that has happened in the death, which is not a death, but which is the overcoming of death, which is the healing of the whole human being. This is the physician's passage from the Father to the Son until the latter dies on Golgotha. All individual insights into healing always bring us a little further towards understanding this in the end. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 318: The Interaction of Doctors and Pastoral Workers. Pastoral Medical Course (1924)

Christ and the true ego

People did not want to admit to themselves that that which had developed between birth and death under the continual pressing forth of the ego consciousness no longer has a share in the eternal soul core of the human being, but has a share in the body and participates in the fate of the body, that it therefore dies with it. This was especially clear to the first Christians, that the time had come in the earth's development when the soul was indeed endowed with an ego on earth, but thereby died with the body. That the body dies was not what was said in the first Gospel proclamations, but that the soul dies, and that it had already died in the people who emerged from the pre-Christian world development. It was meant as a real word: You have died. - Not the earlier souls had died, for they had not yet taken part in the fate of the body, but you belong to the fate of the generation of those who have died, that is, your souls take part in the fate of the body; for that which you carry here as an ego-consciousness through your physical body is only a reflection of your true ego. - Before the Mystery of Golgotha you knew nothing of this true I when you looked into your own self, but it was not yet separated from the human being. At the time of the Mystery of Golgotha it was separated from the inner self of man, and (it) was raised into the spiritual world, and he has only the reflection of the ego as ego consciousness down here. So if we imagine what man experienced before the Mystery of Golgotha, he then had his soul, in which he experienced the pre-birth, and he had the real I, which he did not perceive at first. After the Mystery of Golgotha, man had his soul, but he no longer experienced the preincarnate in it. Since that time his true ego has been a spiritual one, that is, it does not belong to the earthly world but to the spiritual world, and he has the reflection of this ego through the physical body, the ego consciousness: "... and your ego is separated from you and united with Christ in the spiritual world." He has now descended to earth so that this spiritual world can penetrate the earthly world through him. But man's true self does not live in the world that can be seen with the eyes and that can be approached with the three ordinary faculties, thinking, feeling and willing; it lives in a world that has permeated the earthly world since that time, but it is united with Christ. And one can only know about the true I by knowing about the Christ at the same time; one can only feel the true I if one feels both the essence of the Christ and the essence of the Mystery of Golgotha; the true I can only carry one through if one feels carried away by the impulse that emanates from the Mystery of Golgotha. On the part of Christ in our time everything happens in order to show himself to people together with the true human ego, so that in our time the word of the apostle (from the letter to the Colossians) is to be fulfilled:

You have died, and your ego is separated from you and
united with Christ in the spirit world; but when Christ,
who carries your ego, has himself come before the view,
as we can expect for the first half of our century -
then you too will reveal yourselves with him.

In more recent times, mankind has become more and more conscious of his ego. This does not initially mean an inner penetration with the true ego. To attain ego-consciousness means a separation from the true ego, an experiencing of oneself apart from the true ego. For this true I is one with the world of Christ. He has brought this world of Christ into the earth through the Mystery of Golgotha. Today he is waiting to be seen again through the appropriate preparations [of men], that he may reveal himself to men. Then he will be able to endow the self-consciousness with the inner experience of the true self. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 344: Lectures and Courses on Christian Religious Work, III Lectures at the Founding of the Christian Community (1922)

Christ and warmth

They have absorbed the warmth that once surrounded us. We would come (in the regression in time) to the time when the whole earth was enveloped in an atmosphere of warmth, in which a spirituality was embodied which was equal to those spirits who were on the sun. These have such a high perfection as only those spirits have who reached the goal of their development on the solar planet at that time and who inhabit the sun today. At that time, when this warmth enveloped the earth, it was the carrier of a single spirituality for the whole of humanity. And for a long, long time that which surrounds the earth in warmth was the carrier of a single spirituality for all men, that spirituality which is none other than that of the spirit of the earth itself. Thus our earth is the body or the spiritual expression of the earth spirit. In the blood heat that lives in the human being, which lived outside the human being in pre-Lemurian times, we have the means by which the spirit of the earth penetrates into the human being himself. [1] But when we speak of the spirit that has all the warmth within it, we can only speak of one. Within Christian esotericism it is called the Logos, the Christos himself, the unified spirit of the human race on earth. Up to the point in time when Christ Jesus appeared on earth, everything that was present of the Christ spirit was a unity. It was a unified shell that surrounded the whole earth, which had its bone system, as it were, in the solid earth. If you take the solid earth with all that it contains, and then add the warmth that surrounds the earth, then you have approximately what is called the body of the Christ-Spirit. Hence the beautiful words in the Gospel of John, where Christ Jesus describes himself as the spirit of the earth: "He who eats my bread tramples me underfoot." Man eats the bread that is the body of Christ. And by walking on the earth, man does the other thing: he tramples him underfoot. This is to be taken quite literally. Just as in Lemurian times the Yahweh Spirit (as air, as breath) was poured into the individualities from the element of the spirit, in the same way the Christ Spirit, which has its body in the warmth of the blood, gradually poured itself into the ages that preceded Christ Jesus and into those who now follow him. And when the entire Christ-Spirit has been poured out into the human individualities, then Christianity, the great brotherhood of man, will have conquered the earth. The small tribal and national communities will have given way to the community of the spirit of life, the Buddhi, the community of Christ. [2]

Sources:

[1] & [2] GA 96: Original Impulses of Spiritual Science. Christian Esotericism in the Light of New Spiritual Knowledge (1906/1907)

Christ and members of the being

In the fifth post-Atlantean period, if the soul of consciousness is really to unfold, there must be a real desolation of religious life if it is to remain as it was in the fourth period. (At that time) common dogmas, common religious principles, common religious thoughts had to be poured out on groups of people through power. (In the present time) people will simply not understand that which comes out of the group religions. In the fourth period it was still possible to teach people about the Christ in groups; in the fifth period the Christ is in reality already moving into individual souls. In this period the dogmatic religions will in truth kill religious life. Freedom of thought in the field of religion is the basic condition for the development of the consciousness soul. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 168: The Connection between the Living and the Dead (1916)

Christ before the Mystery of Golgotha

After death we go out into the universe and see the sun from the other side. But when you see the sun from the other side, you do not see it as a physical disk, but as a realm of spiritual beings. And before the Mystery of Golgotha, after death and before the birth, one saw the Christ in the sun from the other side. The Mystery Teachers could remind their students of this sight of the Christ, because the idea could be evoked: Before I was on earth, I saw the sun from the other side. - That was in ancient times, before the Mystery of Golgotha. But now the time came when this memory could no longer be evoked in people. About eight hundred years before the Mystery of Golgotha, people were less and less able to recall this memory: We have, before we came down to earth, seen the Christ from beyond the sun. - And at the time when people could no longer find the Christ beyond the sun in the supernatural, the Christ came down to earth out of infinite grace and infinite mercy so that people could find him on earth. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 226: Human nature, human destiny and world development (1923)

Christ Impulse

When a person is allowed to say: Well, yes, I can be ill, I can be weak, I can die, but from my ego I can make myself stronger, I can send something into my organization that gives me strength, that gives me power directly from the spiritual worlds. - What he calls it is the same. When a person comes to this feeling, then he is seized by the Christ impulse. It is not the person who says that he can have something from a teacher who has gone from incarnation to incarnation, but the person who feels that impulses of power, of strength, can come directly from the spiritual world, who is seized by the Christ impulse. People can have this inner experience, without it people will not be able to live in the future. [1] The entry of the divine consciousness, which speaks through the ego, is the essence of the Christ impulse.

And that this Christ-impulse could enter humanity was brought about by the historicization of the ancient principle of initiation, the Mystery of Golgotha; it is the cause. What will emerge more and more in human souls in the course of their development on earth, even into their most distant future, is that a clear recognition of the Divine-Spiritual, to which man belongs and through which he becomes independent of all earthly becoming, speaks through the ego.

Christianity now sharply emphasizes: All such feeling of the divine, even when it speaks of itself as "Ejeh asher ejeh" - "I am the I-am" is not yet that which shows man in his fullest form, but only when one feels something that is beyond all generations in the spiritual, then one has grasped what works into man as the divine. Therefore one must say in the correct translation of the sentence: Before Abraham was, there was the I-am! - This means that in his ego man experiences an eternal that is more original than the divine that has lived out from Abraham through the generations. [2]

The path to Christ goes on the one hand through supernatural thoughts, on the other hand through the will. Through thought, in that we are convinced from the outset: we are born today as prejudiced people, we must acquire our prejudices through the tolerant abrasion of our prejudices against the opinions of others. With regard to the path of the will, we must say: our will today only receives the right social fire if we have self-acquired idealism, idealism that we have driven into ourselves through our own activity. That gives rebirth. And what we have found in this way by acquiring it as human beings only leads to Christ. Modern theology actually speaks very little of this Christ. This Christ must enter humanity as a social impulse. [3] We are talking about the fact that through the Mystery of Golgotha the Christ impulse has entered into the development of the earth, first of all into the development of humanity, and is now connected with it. People say they do not see it. Yes, they cannot see it as long as they deceive themselves about the human being himself, as long as they look at something quite different from the human being than the human being really is. At the moment when this is not a theory, but a living reality of the soul that enables us to see the supersensible in man, at that moment we develop the ability to perceive the Christ impulse everywhere in our midst. [4]

The natural life of human beings from the fifth post-Atlantean period onwards is a kind of continuous, slow illness. All education, all cultural influences must work towards making people healthy. This is, so to speak, the first, true impulse of the Christ impulse: healing. He is especially called to be the Savior, the healer, in the fifth period. The other forms of the Christ impulse must be in the background. For the sixth post-Atlantean period the Christ impulse must work especially for the visionary. There the spirit-self, Manas, comes into being, within which the human being cannot live without the visionary. And in the seventh post-Atlantean period a kind of prophetic nature, because it must prophetically pass over into a completely new time, will develop as the third; the other three members of the six-part Christ-wisdom will work in the following times. This is the real living-in of the Christ-impulse. A gate has been unlocked by the wisdom of Yahweh. But this gate has become impracticable in the middle of the 19th century. If it is to be passed through alone, then nothing else can come but that all peoples develop Hebrew cultures according to their form. Other gates must be opened, that is, the initiatory wisdom that is known through a second, a third, a fourth gate must be added to the wisdom that has become known through the gate of Yahweh. Only in this way can man grow into other connections than those which are regulated by the blood-bonds, that is, by the breath-bonds, and this will be of particular importance for him in the future. [5]

People do not want to form any idea of how they themselves interact with what the Christ is in. Our mental conceptions do not notice much of the influence of the Christ impulse. But as soon as we look down into the unconscious, into the sphere of feeling and will, then we live firstly in the sphere of elemental beings, but this sphere of elemental beings is at the same time interwoven for us with the Christ impulse. We dive down through our rhythmic system - physiologically speaking, through our emotional sphere - (psychologically speaking), into the area with which the Christ has united himself for earthly existence. There we find, so to speak, the place where the Christ can be found in real terms, not just through tradition or subjective mysticism, but in real, objective terms. At the same time, however, we are living in the epoch from which the events that come from this place have a great objective significance for human life, for they gradually gain an unconscious influence on human decisions, on what people do when they resist them. If people respond to them, they can experience a conscious influence, that is, we can count on them, we can, so to speak, call upon the spiritual worlds that belong to us to work with us. [6] Since the Mystery of Golgotha took place in the development of the earth, everything that relates to human coexistence belongs in a certain sense to this Christ impulse; it does not belong to the individual human being, but to human coexistence. Understood in the sense of Christ Jesus himself, it is a great error to believe that the individual human being can have a direct relationship with Christ. [7]

In the secret schools it is said of those who are able, by their own inner strength, to raise themselves into such a relationship with all their fellow human beings that they freely, without any compulsion, fit into the harmony, that "they carry the Christ within them". [8]

People who can be astonished at the great insights and truths of the spiritual world imprint this feeling of astonishment in their minds, and in the course of time this forms a force that attracts the Christ impulse, which draws the Christ spirit: the Christ impulse connects with the individual soul of man, insofar as the soul can be astonished at the mysteries of the world. The Christ takes his astral body from the earth development from all the feelings that have lived as wonderment in the individual souls of men. The second thing that human souls must develop in order to attract the Christ impulse are all feelings of compassion. And every time a feeling of compassion or joy is developed in the soul, this forms an attraction for the Christ impulse. Compassion and love are the forces from which the Christ forms his etheric body until the end of his earthly evolution. With reference to compassion and love, one could almost speak of a program that spiritual science must fulfill in the future. A third thing that draws into the human soul as if from a higher world is the conscience, to which man submits, to which he attaches a higher meaning than his own individual moral instincts. The Christ is most intimately connected with it: the Christ takes his physical body from the conscience impulses of the individual human souls. [9]

We see how the external understanding of the divine idea of Christ Jesus is born in the Orient, but how it is met in the West by what the human consciousness forms as the conscience. This is why we see the triumphant advance of Christianity developing not towards the East, but towards the West. In the East a religious creed is now spreading, which is in the last consequence - even if a supreme one - of the East: Buddhism is taking hold of the Eastern world. Christianity is taking hold of the Western world because Christianity first created its organ in the West. This shows us in an informal way that the human mind is right when it speaks of conscience as the "God in man". [10] Since that time, human beings have been embedded in the spiritual atmosphere of our earth, which is permeated by the Christ impulse. [11] Man in the time after the Mystery of Golgotha must see the spiritual worlds through the Christ Impulse, (just) as we see the outer colors and so on through the eye (as a sense organ). But just as we do not see the eye itself, so we do not see the Christ Impulse, because we see the spiritual world through it. This is why the Mystery of Golgotha is shrouded in mystery, even historically shrouded in mystery. The healthy eye sees things, does not see itself. If the eye has a splinter in it, which remains there, it sees a black space before it and begins to perceive itself; but this is a pathological perception. Thus a morbid perception of the Mystery of Golgotha would occur if man did not have something in this Mystery of Golgotha that cannot be perceived; (for) what one perceives is connected with the Mystery of Golgotha. So long could men know of the Christ when, paradoxically, he had not yet come. But the moment he came, they could no longer know about him in the same way. [12]

The image that works in the Christ impulse itself cannot be represented in the sense of our time by anything other than the means of spiritual science. In that it deals with visions which one has when one is outside the body, it again has the possibility of seeing the image of Christ in its true form. As long as one is in the body, one must say: The eye can see the colors, but not itself. When you leave the body in the spiritual vision - when you see yourself, you see the eye - you see the Christ impulse through the Christ impulse. [13]

Sources:

[1], [9] GA 143: Experiences of the Supersensible. The Three Paths of the Soul to Christ. (1912)

[2] GA 61: Human history in the light of spiritual research (1911/1912)

[3] GA 189: The social question as a question of consciousness (1919)

[4], [6] GA 194: The Mission of Michael. The Revelation of the Real Secrets of the Human Being (1919)

[5] GA 186: The basic social demand of our time - In a changed time (1918)

[7] GA 193: The inner aspect of the social puzzle. Luciferic Past and Ahrimanic Future (1919)

[8] GA 100: Human development and knowledge of Christ. Theosophy and Rosicrucianism - The Gospel of John (1907)

[10] GA 59: Metamorphoses of the Life of the Soul - Paths of Soul Experiences. Second part (1910)

[11] GA 131: From Jesus to Christ (1911)

[12], [13] GA 176: Human and Humanistic Truths of Development. The karma of materialism (1917)

Christ impulse and Ahriman

Our intellect is the field in which the Christ impulse clashes with the Ahrimanic impulses. Now that the Christ impulse is in the world, Ahriman naturally cannot remove it. He is not that strong; but what he can do is to reshape human ideas in the intellect so that they do not experience the Christ-impulse, but masks for the Christ-impulse, that is, so that people create false images of the Christ. People are exposed to the danger that although they speak of the Christ, they create the image of him which Ahriman prepares for them in their intellect. This is not always the Christ, what this or that Christ-follower calls the Christ. [1]

The cosmic is disappearing more and more through Ahriman's power. How little inclination there is today to recognize the Christ as the great cosmic spirit who descended from cosmic heights into the earthly human body of Jesus of Nazareth in order to dwell therein! All of Ahriman's interest is directed towards distracting people from the spiritual and directing them towards the material, which is indeed also a spiritual, but one that is hidden in the earth. [2] And the fact that people do not want to grasp the concept of Christ through spiritual science stems from the fact that they have a subconscious fear that the Christ impulse, as soon as it is seen through spiritual science, will encounter resistance from Ahriman. How does this come to light now, in our time? In the fact that we have an Ahrimanic natural science and an Ahrimanic history. [3]

Man will receive the Christ impulse within himself and have the Ahriman outside; earlier and (even now) it is the other way round. [4] Through a certain lawfulness in development, Lucifer first approached man during the Lemurian period, and only later, as a result of the Luciferic influence, the Ahrimanic influence. In the future it will be the other way round: The Ahrimanic influence will be strong first and then it will be joined by the Luciferic influence. The ahrimanic influence will work preferably in the waking state, the luciferic influence preferably in the sleeping state or in all those states which are similar to the sleeping state but conscious, in ever more and more developing clairvoyant states of the human soul.

Thus man, because Ahriman is to enter his outer sensual life in the waking state, first needed protection from Ahriman in the waking state. Such protective impulses are given for many, many centuries in the development of mankind before the corresponding danger occurs. While the full consciousness of Ahriman-Mephistopheles is still not there for mankind in general, the protective impulse has occurred through the physical appearance of the Christ in the earth evolution. The fact that the Christ once appeared in the physical body in the earth evolution was the precaution that man may be armed by the reception of the Christ impulse against the necessary influence that will come from Ahriman-Mephistopheles. That man would later be armed when the Luciferic influence is there, man will be armed against this through the appearance of the Christ in the etheric body. This is an influence that will come for another consciousness. [5]

Sources:

[1] - [3] GA 176: Human and human developmental truths. The Karma of Materialism (1917)

[4] GA 124: Excursions into the field of the Gospel of Mark (1910/1911)

[5] GA 145: What significance does the occult development of man have for his sheaths (physical body, etheric body, astral body) and his self? (1913)

Christ Impulse and 3rd Hierarchy

Our time can only be understood if one knows that two currents of spiritual leadership prevail in it. As soon as one cannot distinguish between them and pays fanatical homage to one or the other, one is not in a position to see clearly how our culture is actually progressing. Under the leadership of the unchristianized Angeloi, we have a science today that is completely abstract, completely unspiritual. And we have the urge to go up into spirituality, because in our cultural period in particular the other characterized Angeloi are intervening more and more strongly in the leadership of humanity. All the great spiritual leaders of humanity who are moving forward have exposed themselves to the Christ impulse at some time in the post-Atlantean period, be they angels or archangels (archangeloi) or archai, just as people at the lowest level exposed themselves to this Christ impulse through the Mystery of Golgotha. There we see the significance of the intervention of the Christ impulse in the development of humanity. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 129: World Miracles, Soul Tests and Spiritual Revelations (1911)

Christ Impulse and Kyriotetes and Dynamis

Did the Christ-impulse emerge from the Occident (the West as opposed to the 'Orient', the Eastern World)? Did any people of the Occident give birth to the Christ-impulse out of its ethnicity, out of its racialism? No, it has accepted the Christ-impulse as an impulse that applies to all mankind, even though this Christ-impulse was foreign to the peoples of the Occident in terms of its outward appearance. Western culture thus showed for the first time that it had an understanding for that alienation which is necessary in relation to its own. By renouncing the spirit of movement (see: Dynamis) on Mars as an immediate inspirer, by replacing this inspirer with the spirit of Christ, with the inspirer who speaks (from) the spirit of wisdom (see: Kyriotetes) on the sun, the Occident performed a historic, an important deed. And it is inappropriate for other religious groups to accuse the West of intolerance for the sake of this very thing. The great leaders of the other religions show everywhere that they recognize the spirit of wisdom above the spirits of the movement. Only those who want to make their own spirit of the movement into a kind of leading spirit under a different name, who themselves do not want to take the step of ascending from their spirit to the spirit of the sun, can speak of intolerance on the part of those who have already achieved tolerance. In other areas, first achieve the tolerance that the West has achieved by exchanging its spirit of movement for the spirit of wisdom. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 136: The Spiritual Beings in the Celestial Bodies and Kingdoms of Nature (1912)

Christ's impulse and light

Today we only have dead light. But it was on the rays of this dead light that the Christ once entered and accomplished the Mystery of Golgotha. And if we also have the dead light apart from ourselves today, then we can enliven the Christ within us and thus enliven all the light on earth around us, bring life into the dead light and have an enlivening effect on the light ourselves. In other words, we must enter the new age of light with the right Christ impulse. And it is basically the denial of the Christ impulse that prevents people from seeing correctly how a dark age is passing into the age of light. [1] (See also: Kali Yuga).

Sources:

[1] GA 218: Spiritual Connections in the Formation of the Human Organism (1922)

Christ-impulse and Lucifer

Without being able to attribute it to ourselves in the usual modern sense, without being able to speak of moral transgression, we have the fate as human beings that we humans are Lucifer-filled. In a certain sense we can't help it, we even have to be grateful that it turned out this way. So we had to take on something for which we cannot be fully responsible. [1] Through the existence of Christ on earth we have the power to ascend again without merit, just as the other came without our fault. Just as man has made his astral body worse through original sin, he makes it better again through the Christ impulse. Something flows in that makes the astral body just as much better as it was made worse at that time. This is what is called grace in the true sense. [2]

That which the ancient Hebrews believed to be sanctified by Yahweh in the unconscious state of sleep, man must in modern times become capable of sanctifying while he is awake, in full consciousness. But he can only do this if he knows that, on the one hand, everything that may be natural gifts, abilities, talents, geniuses, are Luciferic gifts that work Luciferically in the world as long as they are not sanctified and permeated by everything that can enter the world as a Christ-impulse. The christened mind snatches from Lucifer that which otherwise works luciferically in the physical existence of man. [3]

Try to come to the conclusion that the thoughts (of spiritual science) are those which are real food for the soul, try to come to the conclusion that through these thoughts not only thoughts enter your soul, but that spiritual life which comes out of the spiritual world enters our soul through these thoughts. Make yourself intimately one with these thoughts and you will notice three things. You will notice that these thoughts gradually eradicate something in yourself which, especially in our time of the age of the conscious soul, so clearly penetrates human souls: that these thoughts, whatever else they may be, eradicate selfishness in man! And secondly, if you feel that at the moment when somehow in the world you are approached by untruthfulness, either because you yourself are tempted not to take the truth seriously, or because untruthfulness confronts you from another side - if you feel, that at the moment when (now) untruthfulness enters your sphere of life, warning you or pointing to the truth, there is an impulse next to you that does not want untruth to enter your life, that constantly admonishes you to stick to the truth: then you will again feel the living impulse of Christ in the face of a life so often inclined to appearances. And thirdly, if you also feel that something emanates from these thoughts which is effective right into the body, but especially in the soul, overcoming illness, making man healthy, refreshing him, then you have felt the third part of the Christ-impulse of these thoughts, which bring us directly into harmony with the harmonies of the universe, because they come from the harmonies of the universe. [4]

Sources:

[1], [2] GA 127: The Mission of the New Spiritual Revelation. The Christ-Event as the Central Event of Earth Evolution (1911)

[3], [4] GA 187: How can humanity find the Christ again? The threefold shadow existence of our time and the new Christ-light (1918/1919)

Christ impulse and Lucifer and Ahriman

But we are never able to have any feelings and sensations at all without entering the sphere of Lucifer. This is the only reason why we can never enter this sphere without the guidance of the Christ-impulse. And on the other hand, let us see how necessary it has become, especially in recent times, to understand the world more and more, to train in science, to master the outer forces of nature. The master of that which is external science, of that which lives in the external forces of nature, is Ahriman. And we would have to remain stupid and foolish if we wanted to flee the Ahrimanic element. It is not a question of fleeing the Ahrimanic element, but of entering again, under the guidance of the Christ-impulse, into that sphere in which Ahriman reigns in the world. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 272: Spiritual Scientific Explanations of Goethe's "Faust" Volume I: Faust, the Striving Man (1910-1915)

Christ-impulse and modern theology

It is characteristic that a theologian at the University of Basel, a colleague (and friend) of Nietzsche, Franz Overbeck, as a theologian in the 70s of the 19th century, was made to think about whether today's theology - since he also had a say in it as a professor - is still Christian at all. And in a very witty book, which made a very deep, if not exactly pleasant, impression on Nietzsche, Overbeck proved this: There may still be much that is Christian in the minds of men today, but there is certainly nothing Christian left in theology; it has in any case become unchristian. - This is how one would like to summarize what Overbeck has presented. People are not even aware of this. They are not even aware, for example, that in a writing such as Harnack's "Essence of Christianity", wherever Christ or Jesus is written, the name can be deleted and simply Yahweh, Jehovah can be written, and the meaning does not change at all. For he understands this meaning especially in such a way that he says: In this Gospel does not belong the Son, but only the Father (very often simply called the "Lord"); that which is called the Son is only the teaching of the Father. - The fact that the essence of the Gospel is the message of the Son is what is Christian. But Harnack no longer has this; he is no longer a Christian. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 255b: Anthroposophy and its Opponents (1919-1921)

7
Conscience

The impulse for conscience was given by the Buddha. [1] We have stepped out (of the spiritual world) through the sensory gate. But we have not lost all the sense of belonging to the beings of the higher hierarchies that has developed in our soul. We carry a subconscious remnant with us. Among many other things, this subconscious residue is also the basis of conscience. Conscience is still a legacy of the spiritual world. [2] Such an inclination as conscience also clings to the etheric body: because the astral body has convinced itself so and so often that this or that is not possible, this inclination forms itself in the etheric body as a permanent quality. [3]

It was in Northern Europe that the sentient soul and the I-consciousness first interpenetrated in the development of mankind. What had happened because the I-consciousness had already established itself in the sentient soul of the European peoples before Christ had entered the development of humanity and before they had absorbed what had developed in Asia? Thus a power of the human soul had been developed with the sentient soul which could only have developed through the fact that the sentient soul, which was still quite virgin and uninfluenced by other cultures, had become imbued with the I-feeling. And this soul force became the conscience. Hence the strange innocence of conscience! Conscience speaks in the simplest, most naïve person as well as in the most complicated soul. It says directly: That is right! That is wrong! - Without any doctrine, without any theory. With the force of an instinct, an instinct, that which tells us: That is right! That is wrong! [4]

Conscience indicates whether we will shrink back or whether we will be blessed when we can see our actions in devachan (see: Life between death and a new birth). Thus, conscience is a prophetic premonition of how we will experience our actions after death. [5]

The word conscience first appeared in Greece around the fifth century before the Christian era. The word conscience comes from the fact that people forgot the pre-natal life, the pre-earthly life, and they gave a word, conscience, to what they nevertheless felt within themselves. And then later came the Church, which now administered conscience. [6]

There is historical evidence that people once began to talk about conscience. It lies between the two Greek tragedians, Aeschylus, who was born in the 6th century, and Euripides, who was born in the 5th century. You won't find any mention of conscience before that. In Aeschylus, too, there is not yet what we call the inner voice, but in him there still appears what is an astral image for man: such apparitions appear that approach man as avenging beings, Furies or Erinyes. The time came when the astral perception of the Furies was replaced by the inner voice of conscience. In a future human cycle, there will again be other abilities and other forms of living out the soul. [7]

Sources:

[1], [4], [7] GA 116: The Christ Impulse and the Development of the I-Consciousness (1909/1910)

[2] GA 170: The Riddle of Man. The Spiritual Background of Human History (1916)

[3] GA 95: Before the Gates of Theosophy (1906)

[5] GA 143: Experiences of the Supersensible. The Three Paths of the Soul to Christ. (1912)

[6] GA 350: Rhythms in the Cosmos and in the Human Being. How does one come to see the spiritual world? (1923)

Conscience and the soul of consciousness

In our physical existence we should bear all that is imposed on us by fate with composure and learn to feel as if it were none of our business, but accept it as calmly and serenely as if our body were a stranger to us. We must also awaken in ourselves the feeling that we are not destined to make progress, but that we can rejoice in the progress of others as much as in our own. For the development of the world it makes no difference who makes the progress, but for us the essential factor is the fight against, the transformation of egoism. The feeling of being able to switch oneself off is one pole of the consciousness soul. The opposite pole, however, which protrudes from the spiritual world, is the conscience. This now holds us back when we want to commit acts that are not in accordance with moral laws. We must allow our conscience to guide and direct us. We must pay attention to the physical plan so that we train our conscience in the right way, because only what we have acquired can be taken into the spiritual worlds. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 266/2: From the contents of the esoteric lessons. Volume II (1910-1912)

Conscience and intuition

That which manifests itself darkly, forebodingly for man in conscience, is a reflection, so to speak a shadow image of the highest, which now only appears in true intuition, in the highest kind of knowledge possible to man at first as an earthling. As an earthling, man really has something of the lowest (the common intuition), and again a shadow image of the highest, which is only attainable in intuition. It is precisely the middle regions that he initially lacks completely as an earthling. He must acquire them: Imagination and inspiration. Intuition in the pure, precisely in the moral feeling, in the content of the moral conscience, is an earthly image of that which then appears as intuition. So that one can also say: When man, as an initiate, as a cognizer, rises to a real intuitive cognition of the world, the world, which he otherwise knows only in the laws of nature, becomes so inward, so connected with him, as otherwise only the moral world is for him as an earthly human being. And this is precisely what is significant in the human being on earth, that we cling to the Most High as if with an innermost dark intuition, which in turn is only accessible to developed knowledge in its true form.

Only through the highest training and spiritualization of the ability to love can that which reveals itself in intuition be attained. It must become possible for man to turn the ability to love into a power of cognition. We prepare ourselves well for this spiritualized ability to love if we break away in a certain way from our attachment to external things, for example, if we make it a regular practice not to imagine the things we have experienced in the sequence of experiences, but to imagine them going backwards. We have to make a considerable effort, drawn purely from within, in order to imagine purely backwards. In this way, we tear the inner activity of our soul free from the tether by which we are otherwise continually pulled, and in this way we gradually bring this inner spiritual-soul experience to the point where the spiritual-soul really tears itself free from the physical and also from the etheric. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 227: Initiations-Insight. The Spiritual and Physical Development of the World and Humanity in the Past, Present and Future, from the Point of View of Anthroposophy (1923)

8
Death

When the body dies is determined by its laws. In general it must be said that it is not the soul and the spirit that leave the body, but that it is released from the body when its powers can no longer function in the sense of human organization. [1]

It is important to realize that when a person passes through the gate of death, he enters a completely different world than is often thought. It is an understandable tendency to imagine this realm beyond death as a kind of continuation of the realm here; but one is mistaken. For it is already difficult to find words from the treasury of our language that make it possible to characterize the experiences between death and a new birth even somewhat adequately. Our language is prepared for the physical world, and we must to a certain extent internalize our relationship to words if we want to make words capable of expressing that which is beyond death. [2] What passing through the gate of death means can only be recognized from a spiritual-scientific point of view, if one is able to look into supersensible worlds. For this is not an event that can be understood through that which takes place in the sensory world. [3] Death is by no means the same thing in the animal and human kingdoms. [4]

It is impossible for the physical plan to give knowledge of life. This knowledge of life must be reserved for supersensible knowledge. As impossible as the sensual knowledge of life is the supersensible knowledge of death. There are states of dreadful isolation of consciousness in the spiritual world, there is a temporary immersion as in a sleep, but there is no death in the higher worlds. Death is impossible in the higher worlds. All the beings we have come to know as the beings of the higher hierarchies are characterized by the fact that they do not know death, that they do not pass through death. Among all the beings of the higher worlds there was only one who had to pass through death, we could also say that this was the Christ. To do this he had to descend to earth. [5]

Man gives himself over to an illusion, a great deception, a maya about what is spread out in space around him for the senses and what he perceives. If he were to recognize the true form, he would not have the image of the senses, but would have the spirit. If he were to recognize death in its true form, then he would see in death that expression which this sense world must have so that it can be the expression of the divine Father-Spirit. In order for our earthly world to come into being at all, an earlier, supernatural world had to condense down to physical matter, down to physical substance, in the earthly sense. Thus the outer world could become the expression of a divine-spiritual world, of such a divine-spiritual world which thus has something like creatures beside and outside itself. All earlier forms of our world existence were such that they were more or less within the divine being. The whole of Saturn was still a body consisting only of warmth. And all the beings on Saturn were still in the womb of the divine Father-Spirit. It was the same on the old sun, even though it was already condensed into air. This air planet, the old sun, contained in its womb, and thus in the womb of the divine-spiritual entity, all its creatures. And so it was with the old moon. Only on earth did creation emerge from the womb of the divine-spiritual entity, becoming something next to the divine-spiritual entity. But what now became next to the divine-spiritual entity, and what also became the garment, the covering, the physical corporeality of the human being, gradually wove itself into, gradually incorporated everything that was present from the spirits that had remained behind. As a result, however, it did not become a creature as it should have been if it had become an image of the divine-spiritual entity. The divine-spiritual entity, after it had carried all creatures, our present mineral kingdom, plant kingdom, animal kingdom and human kingdom in its womb, released them all, as it were, and spread them out like a carpet around itself. And this was now an image of the divine-spiritual entity. It should have remained so. But everything that had remained behind, that had previously been expelled from the divine-spiritual entity, was woven into it. All this was incorporated and the creature was thus, as it were, clouded, made less valuable than it would otherwise have been. This cloudiness arose in the age when the moon separated from the earth, in the age of which we have spoken: If nothing else had come, the earth would have been desolate even then. But man was to be nurtured in such a way that he could gain his independence. He therefore had to embody himself in an external, earthly-physical matter. But within this physical-sensual material was what was present in the remaining beings. [6]

Thus the human being could not help but be embodied in bodily shells in which the beings left behind were. In the first period of Atlantean development there were still beings who were, so to speak, comrades of the human being, insofar as the human being was clairvoyant at that time and could also see those beings who had actually taken up residence on the sun, but who shone towards him in the rays of the sun. For not only a physical sunlight came towards man, but in the physical sunlight beings came towards him, which man saw. And when the human being himself was in a state that could be compared to sleep, then he could say: "Now I am out of my body and am in the sphere where sun beings walk. But then came the time, towards the middle and the last third of the Atlantean period, when the earth became denser and denser in its physical matter, and when man received the disposition to develop his self-consciousness. There were no longer any such beings for man to see. Through the Luciferic influence man was drawn down more and more powerfully into dense matter. Then it became possible for an entity, which must be addressed as a Lucifer entity, to nestle in the human astral body in such a way that the human being descended more and more into a dense physical body. But the entities that used to be his comrades rose higher and higher. [7] One of these beings is represented in Michael, who pushed the Luciferic beings down into the abyss, so that they moved in the realm of the earth. And there they sought to exert their effect in the astral beingness of human beings. Without the entanglement in Maya, man would not have learned to say "I" to himself. But man would have perished in the illusion if the illusion and its powers - Lucifer-Ahriman - had succeeded in keeping man within the illusion. These beings - Lucifer-Ahriman - wanted nothing less than to preserve all beings that are on earth in the form in which they are interwoven in dense physical matter. If they succeeded in making this entity of the spiritual world similar to the physical form, they would, so to speak, snatch heaven from the earth. - Only in this way could the divine Father-Spirit save the memory of the divine origin, by giving the benefit of death to everything that strives into matter. Man would be banished into the earth and forget his spiritual-divine origin if death had not spread over the earth, if man had not always been supplied with new sources of strength between death and the new birth, so as not to forget his divine-spiritual origin. [8]

Let's look at what we want (on earth): There is nothing that is not interwoven with death. Thus death is the beneficent snatcher from an existence that would lead man completely out of the divine-spiritual world. But this man had to come into the physical sensual world, for only there was it possible for him to attain his self-consciousness, his human ego. If he always had to go through death without being able to take anything with him from this realm of death, then he would indeed be able to return to the divine-spiritual world, but unconsciously, without ego. He must enter the divine-spiritual world with his ego. He must therefore be able to fertilize the earthly realm, which is completely interwoven with death, so that death becomes the seed for an I-ness in the eternal, in the spiritual. But this possibility that death, which otherwise would be destruction, is transformed into the seed for the eternal I-ness, has been given through the Christ-impulse. And now, in fact, everything that was there earlier as man's apprenticeship, after man has conquered an ego for eternity, can now disappear, and man can go into the future with his saved ego, which will become more and more a replica of the Christ ego. [9]

Consciousness changes in a certain way after death, it attains a higher degree, becomes clearer, more intense after death than it is in a physical body. [10] While in the course of the waking state, in consciousness, we work on the destruction of our corporeality, we are conversely active at night in the restoration of what we have destroyed in waking life. We are therefore involved in the restoration of our body. In this way we carry out an activity that we cannot perform consciously, that drowns out our consciousness. The moment we become somewhat conscious, the peculiar dream images arise which are so closely connected with our bodily life. We need only recall how sometimes pathological states of the body are expressed in these images. This shows what the consciousness is entangled in. When the physical body is gone after death, then there is no fatigue to repair, then the work of man on his physical body ceases. As a result, however, the forces which are otherwise expended on the physical body during sleep return to the soul itself, and the consequence is that after death the soul can use these forces in itself when it is away from the physical body. Now this power appears as that which is the consciousness of the soul between death and a new birth. To the extent that the soul becomes free from the physical and etheric body and all that belongs to it, a different consciousness arises. [11]

When a person has passed through death, he first has the feeling that he is growing into a world in which he is becoming larger and larger, and that he is no longer, as in this physical world, outside all beings, not facing all other things, but to a certain extent within them, as if he were crawling into all things. At the time immediately after death you do not feel a here and there, but an everywhere; it is as if you yourself had slipped into all things. Then an overall recollection of your whole past life occurs, which stands before you with all its details like a large tableau. This memory cannot be compared with a memory of your past life, however good it may be, as you know it from your life on earth, but this tableau of memories suddenly appears in all its grandeur. This is because the etheric body is in truth the carrier of memory. As long as the etheric body was still in the physical body in earthly existence, it had to work through the physical and was bound to the physical laws. There it is not free; there it forgets, for there all memory steps aside that does not belong directly to the closest thing the human being is experiencing. In death, however, the etheric body, the bearer of memory, becomes free. It no longer needs to work through the physical, and therefore the memories suddenly appear in an unbound manner. In exceptional cases, this separation of the physical and etheric bodies can also occur during life. For example, in cases of mortal danger, drowning or falling. People who have been subjected to such a shock sometimes say that for a few moments their whole life stood before them like a tableau, so that the vanished experiences of their earliest life suddenly reappeared from oblivion with full clarity. [12] (For further information see: Life tableau).

If you look at the human being as he is here on the physical plan, you see his incarnate, but this incarnate (i.e. the color of the skin) would appear differently if you could look at it from the inside out. Seen from the inside out, an average Central European would not be flesh-colored-pinkish, but green-bluish. This green-bluish color also shows itself in the after-effects after death. When the human etheric body expands and the dead person looks at this structure, he sees his incarnate body from the other side, so to speak, in the after-effect. It shimmers greenish-bluish after death. This incarnate shows our entire world of memory, as if painted on a carpet. And the basic inking has great significance, for it is, so to speak, the color of the carpet on which the memory of the dead appears: for white humanity greenish, greenish-bluish, for the Japanese violet-reddish, for the blacks flesh-colored after death. [13] This union with the etheric body gives man the opportunity to live in all the ideas which the last life has kindled in him, to be completely absorbed as in a mighty tableau in all that the last life has given him. But it is a contemplation that lasts a relatively short time, which fades away with the detachment of the etheric body from the ego and the astral body. Indeed, one can say that immediately after the moment of death, the impressions that still stem from the possession of the etheric body begin to fade, to become weaker and weaker, and then that which is decisive after physical death (as a permanent state) asserts itself. What is decisive there is only to a lesser extent correctly imagined by people who want to form ideas about life after death. It is even difficult to coin words for those quite different conditions compared to the conditions experienced in the physical body.

It is easy to believe that when a person has passed through the gate of death, he must first acquire consciousness again. This is not actually the case. What man goes through when he passes through the gate of death is not a lack of consciousness, the opposite occurs. There is too much, an overabundance of consciousness when death has occurred. One lives and weaves completely in consciousness, and just as the strong sunlight numbs the eyes, so one is at first numbed by consciousness, one has too much consciousness. This consciousness must first be dulled so that one can orient oneself in the life into which one has entered after death. This takes a long time, it happens gradually in such a way that after death more and more moments occur in which the consciousness makes such an orientation possible; that the soul comes to itself for a more or less short time and then again enters a kind of sleep-like state, as one could call it. Then, little by little, such moments become longer and longer, the soul enters more and more into such conditions until a complete orientation in the spiritual world is achieved. It is also difficult to form a clear idea of the way in which the person who has passed through the gate of death perceives his environment. Time really becomes space. One does not see the past in the same way as in life one sees the past passing in time, but one sees what has passed before one like a spatial object. So that what had already passed, what had happened, say a quarter of an hour before, then stood before the soul of the deceased (in a concrete case) like a first moment of illumination of consciousness. Then again came a state of stupor in the flooding light of consciousness, in order to move in this state towards those other states in which the soul then gradually learns to orient itself in the spiritual world. [14]

These next experiences after death are quite different from those during life in yet another respect. During purification the human being lives backwards, so to speak. He goes through everything again that he has experienced in life since birth. From the processes that immediately preceded death, he begins and experiences everything again backwards to childhood. And in doing so, everything that did not arise from the spiritual nature of the ego during life comes spiritually before his eyes. Only now he also experiences all this in reverse. For example, a person who has died in his 60th year and who has inflicted physical or spiritual pain on someone in his 40th year out of a surge of anger will experience this event again when he has reached the point of his 40th year in his regressive journey through existence after death. The only difference is that he will not experience the satisfaction that he gained in life through the attack on the other person, but rather the pain that he inflicted on this other person. From the above, however, it can also be seen at the same time that only that part of such a process after death can be perceived as painful which has arisen from a desire of the ego that originates only in the external physical world. In truth, the ego not only harms the other through the satisfaction of such a desire, but also itself; only this harm remains invisible to it during life. After death, however, this whole world of harmful desires becomes visible to the ego. And the ego then feels drawn to every being and every thing in which such a desire has been kindled, so that it can be extinguished again in the "consuming fire" just as it has arisen. Only when the human being has arrived at the time of his birth during his backward journey have all such desires passed through the purifying fire, and from now on nothing prevents him from fully devoting himself to the spiritual world. He enters a new stage of existence. (For more on this, see: Kamaloka).

Just as in death he shed the physical body, and soon afterwards the etheric body, so now that part of the astral body which can only live in the consciousness of the outer physical world disintegrates. For supersensible cognition there are thus three corpses, the physical, the etheric and the astral. The time at which the latter is cast off from man is characterized by the fact that the time of purification is about a third of that which elapsed between birth and death. For supersensible observation, astral corpses are continually present in the human environment, which are cast off by people who pass from the state of purification into a higher existence. This is exactly the same as physical corpses arise for physical perception where people live. [15]

After purification, the ego enters a completely new state of consciousness. Whereas before death the outer perceptions had to flow to it so that the light of consciousness could fall on them, now a world flows from within, as it were, which reaches consciousness. The ego also lives in this world between birth and death. Only then does the latter clothe itself in the revelations of the senses; and only there, where the ego, disregarding all sensory perception, perceives itself in its "innermost sanctum", does that which otherwise only appears in the veil of the sensory announce itself in immediate form. Just as the perception of the self within (in life) takes place before death, the spiritual world reveals itself in its fullness from within after death and after purification. Actually, this revelation is already there immediately after the etheric body has been laid aside; but the world of desires, which are still turned towards the outer world, lies before it like a darkening cloud. It is as if the black demonic shadows, which arise from the desires consuming themselves in the "fire", mingle with a blissful world of spiritual experience. Yes, these desires are now not just shadows, but real entities; this becomes immediately apparent when the physical organs are removed from the ego and it can thus perceive what is of a spiritual nature. These beings appear as distorted images and caricatures of what was previously known to man through sensory perception. Supersensible observation has to say of this world of purifying fire that it is inhabited by beings whose appearance can be horrible and painful to the spiritual eye, whose desire seems to be destruction and whose passion is directed towards an evil against which the evil of the sense world seems insignificant. What man brings into this world in the way of marked desires appears to these entities like food, through which their powers constantly receive new strength and reinforcement. [16] (For further information see: Life between death and a new birth).

Sources:

[1] GA 9: Theosophy. Introduction to Supersensible Knowledge of the World and the Destiny of Man (1904)

[2] GA 161: Paths of Spiritual Knowledge and the Renewal of the Artistic World View (1915)

[3] GA 198: Healing Factors for the Social Organism (1920)

[4] GA 162: Questions of Art and Life in the Light of Spiritual Science (1915)

[5] GA 152: Preliminary Stages to the Mystery of Golgotha (1913/1914)

[6] - [9] GA 112: The Gospel of John in Relation to the Three Other Gospels, Especially to the Gospel of Luke (1909)

[10] GA 158: The Connection of Man with the Elemental World. Kalewala - Olaf Åsteson - The Russian Folklore - The World as the Result of Equilibrium Effects (1912-1914)

[11] GA 61: The History of Man in the Light of Spiritual Research (1911/1912)

[12] GA 108: The Answering of World and Life Questions through Anthroposophy (1908/1909)

[13] GA 181: Earth Death and World Life. Anthroposophical Gifts of Life. Necessities of Consciousness for the Present and the Future (1918)

[14] GA 159: The Mystery of Death. The Nature and Meaning of Central Europe and the European Folk-Spirits (1915)

[15], [16] GA 13: The Secret Science in Outline (1910)

Old Age

In concrete terms, death occurs when a person's entire inner organization has become so physical that a thorough nutritional process can no longer be initiated. This is the death of old age. Death in old age is actually the inability to absorb the substances in the organism. The actual marasmus is actually a failure of nutrition. The body is no longer able to nourish itself, it has become too physical. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 313: Spiritual scientific points of view on therapy (1921)

View of Death from the Other Side

People also like to turn their faces away from death. After death the sight of death is always there - I have often emphasized this - but then it means nothing terrible; rather, as man looks at his own death from the other side of life, there is always the certainty in this sight that he is and remains an ego. But now it is a matter for the dead person to understand that which is revealed to him in the sight of death from the other side of life. [1] (For further information see: Life between death and a new birth).

Sources:

[1] GA 183: The Science of the Becoming of Man (1918)

Encounter with the Higher World

A third encounter with the higher world is the one in which the human being approaches, comes close to the actual spiritual man, Atma, who will develop very late in the future, mediated by a being of the Hierarchy of the Archai. One can speak of the encounter with the Father-Principle. The daily course of the universal processes, the world processes, includes for us the first encounter, the encounter with the Genius (in every sleep). The yearly course includes for us the 2nd encounter, the encounter with ChristJesus (in the holy nights). And the course of the whole human life is completed with the encounter with the Father-Principle. For a certain period of our physical life on earth we are prepared for it, rightly and often unconsciously through our upbringing today, but nevertheless we are prepared for it and then experience - mostly unconsciously for people between the ages of 28 and 42, but fully in the intimate depths of the soul - the encounter with this Father-Principle. Then the after-effect can carry over into later life, if we develop subtle sensations enough to pay attention to what comes into our lives from ourselves as an after-effect of the encounter with the Father-Principle. This encounter with the Father-principle means that the human being has a strong power and support when, as we know, he has to live back after he has passed through the gate of death, in the return course of his life, his life on earth, by passing through the world of the soul. If, through an early death, the encounter with the Father-principle has not yet been able to take place in the deep subconscious depths of the soul, then it takes place at the hour of death. This encounter is experienced at the same time as death. Through the self-willed death, the human being possibly withdraws from the encounter with the Father-Principle in the corresponding incarnation. [1] If at a relatively early end of life the human being has an encounter with the Father-Principle in death, then it becomes apparent that it was necessary in the karma of the human being to bring about the early death so that an abnormal encounter with the Father-Principle takes place. For what actually happens when such an abnormal encounter with the father principle takes place? The human being is then destroyed from the outside; his physical being is undermined from the outside. In truth, this is also the case with an illness. Then the arena in which the encounter with the father principle takes place is still the physical world. Because this outer physical world on earth has destroyed the human being, the encounter with the Father-Principle is revealed at the site of destruction itself, in retrospect of course always visible later. But this also gives the human being the opportunity to hold on to the thought of the place, that is, the earth, from the heights of heaven, where the encounter with the Father-Principle took place, throughout his entire life after he has passed through the gate of death. This, however, leads the human being to work much from the spiritual world into the physical world on earth. [2] Through this encounter (with the Father-Principle) the human being is able to memorize the experiences of the present life so deeply that they can carry over into the next incarnation. [3] Insofar as the course of life leads the human being to the father encounter, it is a reflection of the Saturn orbit. [4]

Sources:

[1] - [4] GA 175: Building Blocks to a Realization of the Mystery of Golgotha. Cosmic and Human Metamorphosis (1917)

Death is the constant companion of man and the Christ Impulse

The human being will experience how the light form of his astral body floats towards him, and he will recognize that this light form consumes his physical body, that every time it leaves him it takes a piece away with it, as it were. And when the figure takes possession of the physical body again in the morning, the human being recognizes that he lives at the expense of dying. This realization can lead people to the deepest sadness and melancholy. They will no longer appreciate their body, their physical body. And while through external culture and the achievements of technology, through airplanes and other things, people's courage will increase enormously, at the same time there will be a disregard for life, people will fall into deep seriousness, into sadness, into melancholy, and the number of suicides will become enormous. While outward courage will grow in the outer sensual life, on the other hand, inner courage will necessarily diminish more and more and give way to cowardice, cowardice in disguise. People are becoming more and more materialistic and do not want to know anything about the spiritual-soul. This is based on a kind of cowardice. The Angeloi foresaw this in the development of mankind and inspired Kant to establish his doctrine of the limits of human cognition. This was necessary in the development of mankind. People who do not find their way to Christ, when they experience the "I live at the expense of dying", fall into a boundless sadness and a deep seriousness, and they actually see the form of death changing beside them. [1] We must clearly recognize that the forces of death and life are within us and that it is up to us to seize the forces of life. If people do not attain the knowledge of Christ, if they reject the Christ-impulse, they will approach a boundless desolation of soul and will only feel death beside them, will only see the forces of death walking beside them and will always have the feeling: I am dying into death. A deep melancholy will seize such human souls; it will produce disgust and weariness of life and result in epidemics of suicide. [2]

Sources:

[1] & [2] GA 266/3: From the contents of the esoteric lessons. Volume III (1913, 1914; 1920 - 1923) (1913-1923)

Creation

Just as man can only become conscious through the collision with reality, so he can only experience himself as a progressive process by destroying the entire physical life in him through the will, just as the brain is destroyed through the life of imagination. But while the latter can be balanced out again through sleep, a new becoming of the will cannot be repaired, but a continuous process of destruction must occur in every life through the impulsiveness of the will. There we see that man must destroy his organism and thus we see the necessity of real death for man. Just as we realize the necessity of sleep for the life of imagination, we now realize the necessity of death for the life of will. For only through the fact that man has his physical organization - (as a mirroring apparatus) - opposing his will, does the will recognize itself in itself, strengthen itself in itself and then go through the gate of death into a life in the spiritual world, where it acquires the powers to build up in a future embodiment that which it has no longer achieved in this corporeality. [1] In the morning (on waking) we only bring with us the forces that can develop our soul life between birth and death. We are not able to influence our other being members. If we could not shatter the physical body and the etheric body, if the physical body could not pass through death, we could not include our experiences in the development. [2]

If man had not been subject to the Luciferic influences, if he had not allowed them to affect him, he would not have become aware that at the moment when the physical body falls away from us, anything other than a transformation in life takes place: The consciousness of death would not have come. For if man had descended less deeply into matter and had retained the threads that link him to the divine-spiritual, he would have known that with the casting off of the physical shell only another form of existence begins. [3] But a special effect of the Luciferic influence was that now man could not feel his individual life on earth as a continuation of a bodiless existence. He now received such earth impressions which could be experienced through the implanted astral element and which were connected with the forces that destroy the physical body. The human being experienced this as the death of his earthly life. And the "death" caused by human nature itself occurred as a result. [4]

Connected with the development of egoism is the form of the - apparent - loss of consciousness which we know as death in the present human life. Death has developed to the same degree as selfishness has developed. Selfishness and death are two sides of the same thing. The higher part of human nature is such that it overcomes egoism again, works its way up to the divine and thus overcomes death. The more a man develops the higher part in himself, the more he develops the consciousness of his immortality. [5]

With the entry into earthly materiality, however, a significant change had taken place in the souls. As long as the souls themselves had nothing material about them, no external material process could have an effect on them. All effect on them was purely spiritual, clairvoyant. In this way, they lived with the spiritual in their surroundings. With the progressive condensation of earthly matter, the soul being gradually lost the ability to shape it. [6] Now, however, a part of the soul's activity has become free, which now turns inwards and forms a part of the body into special organs. And thus an inner life of the body begins. This is the starting point for sensation. Thus an important stage in the development of humanity has been reached. The physical body is deprived of the direct influence of the soul. It is completely handed over to the physical and chemical world of matter. It disintegrates at the moment when the soul, in its effectiveness, can no longer control it from the other parts. And this is when what is called death actually occurs. [7] Death would not be there if the element of earth were not there. [8]

Sources:

[1] GA 61: Human History in the Light of Spiritual Research (1911/1912)

[2] GA 59: Metamorphoses of the Soul Life - Paths of Soul Experiences. Part Two (1910)

[3] GA 116: The Christ Impulse and the Development of the I-Consciousness (1909/1910)

[4] GA 13: The Secret Science in Outline (1910)

[5] GA 96: Original Impulses of Spiritual Science. Christian Esotericism in the Light of New Spiritual Knowledge (1906/1907)

[6], [7] GA 11: From the Akashic Chronicle (1904/1908)

[8] GA 132: Evolution from the Point of View of the Truthful (1911)

Explanation of the Death Process

The human body is made up of parts that have come into being because the originally undivided mass has divided itself into organs, after the original astral body had separated out various things and through these separations standing around it, which were reflected in it, images arose in it. These images became forces in him and formed his etheric body; that is, his etheric body was structured by these manifold images. In this etheric body, which now consists of parts, each such etheric part in turn condensed within itself and the physical body is formed. Each such physical core, which then becomes the organs, at the same time forms a kind of center in the ether. The spaces between the centers are filled by the mere ether mass. We think of the body as being composed of ten parts. These ten parts, which we take as a schema, hold the body together through their relationship; they are images of all the rest of nature and it depends on how strongly they are related. There are degrees of relationship between them and the individual parts. As long as these last, the body remains together; when the degrees of relationship cease, the parts fall apart; the body disintegrates. Since during our earthly development we have put forth the most varied formations, the parts in the etheric body hold together only to a certain degree. Human nature is a reflection of the entities that have emerged. As far as the beings lead a special existence, so far the parts of the physical body also lead a special existence. When the relationship of the forces has become so small that it ceases, we live only until then; the measure of our lifetime is determined by how the entities around us get along. The development of the higher human being now proceeds in such a way that the human being first works on his astral body. The moment man puts ideals in the place of instincts, and duties in the place of instincts, and develops enthusiasm instead of desires, he creates harmony in the parts of his astral body. From then on, the astral body no longer dies, but survives to the extent that it has created peace, to the extent that peace can withstand the destructive forces. In other worlds it only lasts for a short time at first, but the more peace has been established, the longer the devachanic period lasts. When a person has also become a disciple of the spirit, he also begins to create peace in the etheric body. Then the etheric body also survives. With the masters, peace is also established in the physical body; therefore the physical body also survives with them (as a form principle, i.e. reincarnation into the same body model). It is a matter of bringing the different bodies, which consist of individual conflicting parts, into harmony and transforming them into eternal bodies. [1]

We can die because our astral body gradually consumes the forces of the etheric body, and the etheric body in turn consumes the physical body. So that in a sense we also have to observe a building up and breaking down again between the etheric body and the astral body in life, if not in such rapid succession, at least in a certain rhythm. [2]

Sources:

[1] GA 93a: Basic Elements of Esotericism (1905)

[2] GA 169: World Being and Ego (1916)

Head Organization and Self

That which is initiated from the human head and radiates from there through the whole organism is the purely physical process that pours into the whole organism at the moment when death occurs. This moment is always present in the human head, at least starting from it in a centralizing way. It is only paralysed by the process of vitalization from the other organism. The human being actually carries within him the forces that cause him to die, and he would not be an ego if he did not carry within him the forces of dying. Man could only wish to be immortal as a physical human being walking around on earth, as a physical human being, if he renounced having an ego-consciousness. So that one can say: That which is the human ego is intimately connected with that which is death. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 313: Spiritual scientific points of view on therapy (1921)

Life after Death and Time

Life after death means leaving the conditions of the sensual-physical world and entering completely different conditions of space and time. Other principles of time prevail in the spiritual world, which are inwardly changeable compared to those of the sensual world. The time that one experiences there is dependent on the inner developmental processes (of the experiencer) and can therefore not be clearly compared mathematically with a period of time in the physical world. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 324a: The Fourth Dimension. Mathematics and Reality (1905-1922)

Metamorphoses of the Spiritual and Mental through the Process of Death

Just as when we see ourselves in a mirror and then take the mirror away, the image is gone, so our thought life is gone when we pass through the gate of death. Therefore, when man speaks of immortality, he should not reflect on this earthly power of thought. It is not that which goes with him through the gate of death. On the other hand, everything that he has developed as compassion, as after-feeling, as after-perception of the earthly, that goes through the gate of death. And by having compassion for the environment, we develop the strength to now stand in the spiritual world in the beings within, in the element that is the spirit-thought element. The compassion that is separated from the earthly environment through our physicality now flows out into the spiritual environment after death and connects with the thought-spiritual of the world into which we enter when we pass through the gate of death. And by flowing over, as it were, with our fellow-feeling into the thought-spiritual, we ourselves again develop a kind of thought-body, a living thought-body, which is then our own between death and the next birth. For that which is self-awareness in life develops into being inside other beings.

The will as such is not, like the world of thoughts, such that it disappears with death, but it is the source of the content of our self-feelings. If you think that you want something that satisfies you, then this wanting already gives you something that satisfies you, gives your sense of self a certain nuance. If you have done something that does not satisfy you, this also gives your sense of self a certain nuance. The will is not only something that carries out outward activity, but it also strives powerfully back into our inner self. We know what we are from what we can do. And this nuance of self-awareness, this reflection of the element of will within ourselves, is what we take with us into the spiritual world. So it is the will, that is to say actually the radiation of the will back into our sense of self, that we carry into it by immersing ourselves in the beings of the higher hierarchies. And by taking with us that which has increased or weakened our sense of self, we find the power of our karma, our destiny. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 210: Old and New Methods of Initiation. Drama and Poetry in the Change of Consciousness in Modern Times (1922)

Post-death Clarity of Consciousness

Are those souls who were not turned to spiritual life on the physical plane unconscious or in a stupor after death? This question must be answered in a very different way for each great epoch of humanity; there is no absolute answer. In the past, the souls of human beings were endowed with an inheritance that they received when they entered the earth during their first incarnation, which brought them into connection with the earth. These powers have gradually dried up and are being replaced by what is to flow in through the Christ. It must therefore be said for the present that the danger of dullness exists right now. But because a spiritual wave is now beginning for humanity, there is an increasing opportunity to have light. Certainly, the danger is close at hand. But we have just seen today that there is help. [1]

Sources:

[1] Bei 41: Contributions to the Rudolf Steiner Complete Edition. Booklet 41: Guiding Thoughts on the Evaluation of the Present (1973)

Sudden, Premature Death

Think of it, in the ordinary course of things this same person who was killed at the age of 30 would have lived to be 90. By living from the age of 30 to the age of 90, he would have slowly gained a lot of experience in life. What he would have gone through in 60 years in terms of life experience, he would go through briefly, perhaps in half a minute, if he were to be killed in his 30th year. A quick death brought about by external circumstances can, under certain circumstances, quickly cause the experience, the wisdom of the whole life that could still have come to pass. [1] (See also: death spectrum).

Sources:

[1] GA 180: Mystery Truths and Christmas Impulses. Old myths and their meaning. Old myths and their meaning (1917/1918)

Death as Return

Thus (after the end of Kamaloka), depending on how long we have lived, we enter the spiritual world after a longer or shorter time, after decades for example, from which we have stepped out, but only stepped out with our consciousness. We have actually stopped at the starting point and waited until the earthly career of the physical body proves to be fulfilled and we can return to what we were before birth or before conception. One can, I would like to say, figuratively describe the matter as if it actually continues after death. But in truth it is a going back, a living back after death. Time does indeed turn around and return to its starting point. One could say that the divine world actually remains in the place where it stood from the beginning. - Man only makes his exits, his exits from the world of the gods. Then he returns to it and brings back into it what he has conquered outside this world of the gods. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA GA 226: Human nature, human destiny and world development (1923)

Death on the Battlefield

This death on the battlefield is a more intense, a more powerful event in our day than a death that occurs in any other way. As a result, it has an effect on the soul that has passed through the gate of death and has an instructive effect. Death is terrible or at least can be terrible for a person as long as he remains in the body. But when a person has passed through the gate of death and looks back on death, then death is the most beautiful experience that is possible in the human cosmos. For this looking back at this entering into the spiritual world through death is, between death and new birth, the most wonderful, most beautiful, most magnificent, most glorious event that the dead person can ever look back on. Just as little of our birth is ever really present in our physical experience - no human being with ordinary, untrained faculties remembers his physical birth - death is always present for the soul that has passed through the gate of death, from the emergence of consciousness. It is always present, but it stands there as the most beautiful thing, as the resurrector into the spiritual world. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 157: Fates of Men and Fates of Nations (1914/1915)

Death in Animals and Humans

The phenomenon of death in the human being is mixed in with the sensory zone, which justifies bringing death and consciousness together in humans, while in animals they must be brought together: the gradual extinction of the reproductive power. And then, when the reproductive power is extinguished, death occurs for the animal. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 73: The Supplementation of Today's Sciences by Anthroposophy (1917/1918)

Death Imminent and the Spiritual World

Boris did not die, as he had expected, but recovered. Rudolf Steiner later said that the possibility of death had been a given for him at that time. But if a person makes the decision to serve the spirit, his fate can take a different form. [1]

Sources:

[1] Wo1 : Margarita Voloshin: The Green Snake. Memoirs (1954)

Death of Christ

The innocent death on Golgotha provided the proof that people will gradually come to understand: that death is the ever-living Father! And once we have the right view of death, once we have come to know through the event of Golgotha that external death means nothing, that in the body of Jesus of Nazareth lived the Christ with whom we can unite ourselves; only when we have recognized that this Christ has brought about that, although the image of death presents itself on the cross, this is only an external event, and that the life of the Christ in the etheric body before death is the same as after this death, that this death can therefore do nothing to life; when we have understood that we have here before us a death which does not extinguish life, which is itself life, then we have, through what hung on the cross, once and for all the sign that death is in truth the giver of life.

The blood is the expression of the ego. That is why the ego fell into error, more and more into maya or illusion, as the blood became worse and worse. That is why man also owes the increase in the power of his ego to the fact that he has his blood. But again he owes this ego in a spiritual respect to the fact that he learned to distinguish himself from the spiritual world, that he became an individuality. This could not be given to him under any other circumstances than that his view of the spiritual world was first cut through. And what cut him off from this view was precisely death - but this I-ness became more and more independent and autonomous. What in the ego had not promoted mere egoity, egoism, but egoism, had to be driven out. But this was driven out - so that in the course of the future it can be driven out more and more also from the individual egos at that time, when death occurred on the cross on Golgotha and the blood flowed from the wounds. In the flowing blood from the wounds of Christ we therefore see the actual symbol for the excess egoism in the human ego. With the blood flowing on Golgotha, the impulse is given for that which makes the ego an egoist to gradually disappear from humanity. But every physical event has a spiritual event as its counterpart. In the same measure as the blood flowed from the wounds on Golgotha, something spiritual happened. It happened at that moment that for the first time rays went out from the earth into the universe that had not gone out before. The first impulse for our earth to become sunny was given at that time, when the blood flowed from the wounds of the Redeemer on Golgotha. Then the earth began to glow, at first astrally, i.e. only visible to the clairvoyant. But in the future the astral light will become physical light, and the earth will become a luminous body. A world body is not created by the agglomeration of physical matter, but by the creation of a new spiritual center, a new arena, from a spiritual being. The formation of a world body begins from the spiritual. Every physical world body was first spirit. What our earth will one day become is first the auric-astral, which began to radiate from the earth here. This is the first plant of the future sun-earth. But what a human being would have seen at that time with his deceptive senses is a mirage. It is not a truth at all, it dissolves, it ceases to be. The more the earth becomes sun, the more this Maya burns up in the fire of the sun, dissolves in it. But the fact that the earth was then radiated through by a new power, that the foundation was laid for the earth to become sun, gave the possibility that this power would also radiate through human beings. And through that which could radiate into him astrally, this etheric human body could begin to absorb new life force as it needed it for the future. The light of Christ flows into the etheric bodies of human beings. [1]

Since that time the possibility has been given in the etheric bodies of men that something new arises in them, as it were as an effect of the Christ-light, which breathes life, which is immortal, which can never succumb to death. So since that time there has been something in the etheric body of man which is not subject to death, which does not succumb to the mortal forces of the earth. And this something that does not participate in death, which people gradually conquer through the influence of the Christ impulse, now flows back, it flows out into the world space. And this power will form a sphere around the earth that is in the process of becoming sun. A kind of spiritual sphere forms around the earth from the etheric bodies that have come to life. Just as the light of Christ radiates from the earth, we also have a kind of reflection of the light of Christ in the earth's orbit. This is what Christ calls the Holy Spirit. Just as it is true that the earth begins to become the sun through the event of Golgotha, it is also true that from this event the earth also begins to become creative and to form a spiritual ring around itself, which later in turn becomes a kind of planet around the earth. This is how new worlds are formed. But we must understand that we are standing before the starting point of a newly forming sun by looking at the dying Christ. The Christ marries himself to death, which on earth has become the characteristic expression of the Father-Spirit. The Christ goes to the Father and marries himself to his expression, death, - and the image of death becomes untrue, for death becomes the seed of a new sun in the universe. [2]

Sources:

[1] & [2] GA 112: The Gospel of John in relation to the other three Gospels, especially the Gospel of Luke (1909)

Mystery of Golgotha

What the few initiates had seen earlier in the temples of initiation, the resting for three and a half days in a death-like state, through which they had gained the conviction that the spiritual will always overcome the physical, that the spiritual-soul of man belongs to a spiritual world, this was now to take place before all eyes. The event of Golgotha is an initiation carried out onto the plan of world history. However, this initiation is not only accomplished for those who were standing around this event at the time, but for the whole of humanity. And what flowed out from the death on the cross flows from there into the whole of humanity. That which is the surplus substantiality of the ego, the blood, had to flow out. What began when the drops of sweat ran down like drops of blood from the Redeemer on the Mount of Olives had to be continued when the blood flowed from the wounds of Christ Jesus on Golgotha. What flowed then as blood is the sign of what had to be sacrificed as the surplus of egoism in human nature. [1]

The whole astral atmosphere of the earth changed the moment Jesus died, so that events were possible that would never have been possible before. The sudden initiation - as with Paul - would never have been possible before. It was made possible by the fact that through the flowing of the blood of Christ the whole of humanity became one communal self. At that time, the self flowed from the blood of Jesus' wounds. Only the three bodies remained hanging on the cross and were later revived by the Risen One. At the moment when the Christ left the body, the three bodies were so strong that they themselves were able to speak the word that the transfigured one spoke after the initiation: "Eli, Eli, lama sabachtani." (My God, how you have transfigured me). These words would have shown to all who knew anything of the mystery wisdom that it was a mystery. With a slight change in the Hebrew text, this became the words of Scripture: "Eli, Eli, lama asabthani", which means: "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me." [2] (See also: Christ - Life).

Sources:

[1] GA 114: The Gospel of Luke (1909)

[2] GA 97: The Christian Mystery (1906/1907)

Human Death in the Context of the World Order

Even if the bodily form only found its full development later in the course of time, the disposition for this present human bodily form, bodily formation, occurred simultaneously with the entry of the mineral kingdom into the earth development. So that man has in a certain sense entered into a connection as an earth-man, or by becoming an earth-man, between the fourth member of his being, which then developed into the ego, and the mineral kingdom. One could also say that in the human microcosm the ego corresponds to the macrocosmic mineral kingdom. If we look at these forms of the mineral kingdom that can be expressed in geometric shapes, we essentially have before us the form that is intrinsic to the mineral kingdom. And with the incorporation of the mineral kingdom into its cosmic development, the earth has at the same time taken up the tendency to crystallize its mineral substances. Now there is an opposite pole, a polar opposite to this form of the mineral kingdom. This tendency to crystallize must cease when the earth has reached the goal of its development. And every human corpse that we hand over to the earth planet in any form, by burial or by fire or whatever, every corpse in which the human form still works as a mere mineral form, every corpse that is thus abandoned by its soul-spiritual, works just as contrary to the mineral crystallization tendency as the negative electricity works contrary to the positive electricity, or as the darkness works contrary to the light. And at the end of the earth's evolution all the human forms imparted to the earth in the course of this evolution - I say human forms, for in this form of man lies the power tendency, and it is the power, not the substance, that matters - these human forms will have cosmically dissolved the mineralizing tendency, the crystallizing tendency in mineralization. [1]

That which is less mineral in the earth today, less inclined towards crystallization than in the middle of the Lemurian period, is due to the dissolving forms of human bodies. And when the earth has reached its goal, there will no longer be any tendency towards crystallization. All the human forms handed over to the earth will have worked themselves out as the polar opposite and will have dissolved the crystallization. Then the event of human death will also be placed in the whole household of the world order as a purely physical phenomenon. There the bridge is built between phenomena which, like the phenomenon of death, otherwise stand quite incomprehensibly in the household of the world, and those phenomena which natural science describes today. [2]

Sources:

[1] & [2] GA 184: The Polarity of Duration and Development in Human Life. The Cosmic Prehistory of Humanity (1918)

Death by Explosion or Burning and Higher Bodies

Being torn apart does not make the slightest impression on the etheric body. The etheric body is not torn apart. Even if, for example, a leg is amputated, the etheric body is not torn apart as long as the person is alive. A person whose legs were frozen off still retained his etheric legs, even though he walked on stilts. Over time, however, the etheric body dries up somewhat, but after the amputation this does not have the slightest influence. So even if the physical body is completely torn apart under certain circumstances, this does not affect the connection of the etheric body at all. The astral body is actually affected, but it is not torn apart either, but is interspersed with all kinds of formations which are the manifestation of the pain. So the clairvoyant eye sees the etheric body, regardless of what happens to the physical body. Even if, for example, someone burns - not the corpse, but the person - this has not the slightest influence on the etheric body. It does, however, have an influence on the astral body: some time after death it acquires a very special strength because it has to develop counter-forces. [1]

Sources:

[1] Bei 41: Contributions to the Rudolf Steiner Complete Edition. Issue 41: Guiding Thoughts on the Evaluation of the Present (1973)

Death by Illness

The forces that are dedicated to the illness definitely come from the supersensible worlds. We must distinguish between the process of illness and the evolving soul. The forces are by no means exhausted; the process of illness runs completely alongside the process of the soul. When a person passes through the gate of death after an illness, the soul is often so active, so permeated with strength, as if the illness had not taken away strength, but had actually added to it, so that such souls are not weakened, but still strengthened; so that they develop additional strength as a result. [1]

Sources:

[1] Bei 41: Contributions to the Rudolf Steiner Complete Edition. Booklet 41: Guiding Thoughts on the Evaluation of the Present (1973)

Death by Suicide

The actual suicide uses up much of the energy that was not used up on earth by trying in vain to reconnect with the physical body after death. In the book "Theosophy" it is indicated that such a person after life actually spends a large part of his activity on coming close again to the circumstances from which he has torn himself. This consumes a great deal of energy that could otherwise have served the purpose indicated in today's lecture. This is also the case where people who have been imprisoned, let us say, for supposedly or arbitrarily unjust reasons, have imposed starvation on themselves. Here, too, it has been found that this must not be brought about. [1]

Among the various feelings that cling to man in life is especially the actual feeling of existence, the feeling of life, the joy of life in general, of being inside the physical body. That is why it is a major deprivation to no longer have a physical body. We will now understand the terrible fate and the horrible agony of those unfortunate people who die by suicide. In the case of natural death, the separation of the three bodies is relatively easy. Even in the case of a stroke or other rapid natural death, the separation of these higher members from each other has in reality long since been prepared; they separate easily, and the deprivation of the physical body is then only a very slight one. But in the case of such a violent and sudden separation from the body as in the case of a suicide, where everything is still healthy and still holds together firmly, a strong deprivation of the physical body occurs immediately after death, which causes terrible suffering. It is a terrible fate. The suicidal person feels as if he has been hollowed out and now begins a terrible search for the physical body that has been so suddenly taken away. Nothing compares to this.

Some people will now say: The suicidal person is no longer attached to life, otherwise he would not have taken it. - This is a deception, for it is precisely the suicidal person who is too attached to life; but because it no longer offers him the satisfaction of the pleasures to which he is accustomed, because it perhaps denies him many things through changed circumstances, he goes to his death, and therefore the deprivation of the physical body is now unspeakably great for him. [2]

Sources:

[1] Bei 41: Contributions to the Rudolf Steiner Complete Edition. Booklet 41: Guiding Thoughts on the Evaluation of the Present (1973)

[2] GA 95: Before the Gates of Theosophy (1906)

Death of the Spiritual

A kind of spiritual death can also occur during life, caused by premature separation of spirit and body, when the astral plan and the physical plan become confused. Nietzsche is an example of this. In his writing "Beyond Good and Evil", Nietzsche, without realizing it, brought the astral plan down to the physical plan. This resulted in a confusion and reversal of all concepts and, as a consequence, error, madness and death. The dreamlike life of a large number of mediums is an analogous phenomenon. The medium infallibly loses orientation between the different worlds and can no longer distinguish between true and false. [1]

This is what mankind could face in the near future: that it does not recognize the spiritual world, which it should experience through the loosening of the etheric body, that it considers it to be imagination, fantasy, illusion. [2] If man is to live his life properly in the future, when the etheric body has been loosened again, man must have the awareness of what presents itself to this etheric body as knowledge of the spiritual world, it is necessary that mankind, beyond the point where man is completely immersed in the physical-sensual, should keep conscious of the knowledge that there is a spiritual world. The connection between the religious life and the life of knowledge must never be lost. Man has departed from a life among the gods; he will rise again to a life with the gods. But he will have to recognize them! He will really have to know that the gods are realities. Man will no longer be able to remember the old times when his etheric body is loosened again. If he has lost the consciousness of the spiritual world in the middle ages, if he has only acquired the belief that life in the physical body and that which is visible in the physical body are the only real things, then he will float in the air for all the future. Then he does not know his way in the spiritual worlds, then he has lost the ground under his feet. Then he is in danger of what is called "spiritual death", for that which is around him is then unreality, illusion, of whose reality he has no awareness, in which he has no faith, and he dies. This is the real dying off in the spiritual world, something that threatens people if they do not bring the consciousness of this spiritual world with them when they enter the spiritual worlds. He remembers back to the time when he had the experiences in the physical body and says to himself: "Only that which was then was real. We are now in the world of illusions; reality was life in the physical body. - This person looks at the abandoned physical body as at a grave, and what he sees in the grave is a corpse; but the corpse, as the physical body, represents true reality for him. [3]

Sources:

[1] GA 94: Cosmogony. Popular Occultism. The Gospel of John. Theosophy on the basis of the Gospel of John (1906)

[2], [3] GA 102: The influence of spiritual entities on people (1908)

Death by Violence

A person who dies a violent death continues to search for his physical body, for his self, until the time when he would otherwise have died. This search can manifest itself in terrible reactions. In the case of someone who is killed by violence, this in certain cases provokes a tremendous rage against those who caused his death. In the executed person, the blow turns into a counterblow. Thus, from the astral world, the souls of Russians who had been executed for political reasons fought against their own countrymen on the side of the Japanese. This happened in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904, but it is by no means a general rule. [1]

If a person dies violently at a time when his vital forces are still particularly active, then he experiences a tremendous amount at that moment. Squeezed into one moment, he experiences certain things that would otherwise be spread out over a long period of time. What he could have experienced, what would have been spread out over many years, is compressed into a single moment (see also: death spectrum). For the most important thing that one experiences in the hour of death is that in this hour of death one comes to see in truth one's physicality from the outside, how it undergoes the transition from the control of the forces that it once had, when the soul was inside the body, to the fact that it now becomes a natural being, is handed over to the forces of nature, to the external physical forces. When a person suffers violent death, he is suddenly not only handed over to those forces which are the normal ones, but as an organism he is treated like an inorganic, inanimate body (for example) by the bullet shot, he is completely transferred into the inorganic. There is a big difference between withering away and suddenly suffering death as a result of the universe intervening in the human organism from outside, whether in the form of a sphere or in another form. There is a sudden lighting up, a firing up of infinite spirituality. It is an overflaming of a spiritual aura that takes place. And the person who has passed through the gate of death looks back at this flare-up. This flare-up is very similar to what only comes about when people surrender to spiritual concepts. They are almost values that are interchangeable. It is incredibly interesting to see how similar, seen from the other side, from the side of the dead, the sentient thought that one has when he enjoys or creates a work of art, a painting, which is born out of spiritual life, is to the sensation that one has through it without it passing through the consciousness of man - that from outside, let us say, an arm is injured, wounded, and pain arises in man. There is a tremendous relationship between the two events, so that one can occur for the other. [2] In violent death and suicide, the feelings of emptiness, thirst and burning are even more terrible (than in normal camalocal life). The astral body, unprepared to live outside the physical body, tears itself away from it in pain, whereas in natural death the mature astral body detaches itself easily. In the case of violent death, which is not caused by the will of man, the detachment is at least less painful than in the case of suicide. [3] (See also: Karma and death; Suicide).

Sources:

[1] GA 93a: Basic Elements of Esotericism (1905)

[2] GA 174a: Central Europe between East and West (1914-1918)

[3] GA 94: Cosmogony. Popular Occultism. The Gospel of John. Theosophy on the basis of the Gospel of John (1906)

Violent Death and Additional Forces of the Next Life

More powerful than any other stroke of fate is the one in the human soul in which knowledge is so concrete for us, so alive that we grasp the spiritual. Then this fateful experience of knowledge spreads over our whole life, and we also understand the rest of our fate. We understand how our present destiny is brought about from earlier earthly courses. We come together with earlier earthly courses, not remembering, for spiritual experiences as such cannot be remembered directly at all; but something occurs which is much higher than memory: the contemplation of the past. This is what must occur if man wants to investigate something like the violent death that comes into life. One cannot investigate it if one considers only one course of a person's life. It enters this one course of life like a coincidence. Violent death is frightening. But if one sees how the entire life of a human being consists of the periods of life that lie between birth and death, in which he is connected with the body, and the times in between, which are much longer, in which the human being is soulfully in the spiritual world (in life) between death and a new birth, then one finds that that which violently enters human life as death is a significant experience. The soul is, so to speak, snatched away in an instant from the life of the body, through which it is connected with the sense world; it is not spontaneously driven from within into the spiritual world, but is seized by the outer world itself, thereby it is inwardly endowed with a very special power, precisely through the experience of an outer world. It is precisely a law of the spiritual world: the inner becomes the outer as the soul enters the spiritual world. And the outer experience here becomes inner, such an experience as a violent death becomes inner. What is a violent death in one life appears in the next life on earth as a force that emerges from the ordinary world of life. Therefore, when we find in a person's earthly life: This person has been able to accomplish something special at a special time, he has given his whole life a new direction, as if from unknown depths something of power has arisen in his soul: this comes from a violent death in a previous life. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 72: Freedom - Immortality - Social Life. On the connection of the soul-spiritual with the body of man (1917-1918)

Death is Interwoven into all Phenomena and the Change of Consciousness

The constitution of the human soul, the whole constitution of man in general, his self-feeling, is different in the earlier epochs than it became later. It was once the case that man had a clear inner sense of his growth into his earthly sojourn. Man still had a clear memory in his ordinary consciousness that he lived in the spiritual world above before his earthly life. Even if in the last time before the Mystery of Golgotha this consciousness was already greatly weakened, it was nevertheless so significantly present in every human personality in the first, second and third post-Atlantean epoch that man knew: I was also a spiritual being before I became a child. - One reckoned not only with the earthly sojourn, one reckoned with a continuation of the earthly sojourn backwards into the spiritual world. It was this that occurred in the fourth post-Atlantean epoch, precisely in the epoch that coincided with the Mystery of Golgotha, that man saw his earthly life clearly enclosed, so to speak, by the two gates: the gate of birth or conception and the gate of death. This consciousness, this kind of soul constitution, really only came about in the fourth post-Atlantean epoch, from about the eighth century before Christ until the fifteenth century after the Mystery of Golgotha. Since that time a new consciousness has been preparing itself, but we are only at the beginning. You only have to think that only four or five centuries have passed since the beginning of this period. This consciousness is already in the process of development, it is just not yet emerging in most people; it is only emerging in individuals who are particularly predisposed to it. The consciousness that man develops in the fifth post-Atlantean period is such that it is not entirely sufficient for the life between birth and death, but such that death actually always plays a part in life on earth. Man will become aware that he actually dies a little every day, that death is actually constantly beginning in man, that death is constantly there. There are individuals who either fear death very much, because they feel that it is a drain on their earthly humanity; but I have also met people who loved death because it was always with them and who actually always longed for it. This is something that will emerge more and more in the fifth post-Atlantean epoch: the awareness of seeing death walking alongside them. Let me describe it more concretely. Man will perceive in himself that intimate process of fire which is connected with the development of the consciousness soul. In particular, at those moments when he steps out of the sleeping consciousness and into the waking consciousness, man will experience this waking consciousness as a kind of fiery process that consumes him. For the soul of consciousness is already highly spiritual; but the spiritual always consumes the material. And the way in which the consciousness soul consumes the material and the ethereal in man is a kind of intimate process of fire, a process of transformation. [1]

That's how it is for most people today: When they see how good intentions or strong intentions they have evaporate in the next moment, the next hour, the next day, the next month, the prevailing material world view accepts this as something that simply happens. But we will increasingly learn to feel it differently. One will learn to feel how a good intention, which one was too weak to fulfill, eats away at life, diminishes man's moral weight, one will learn to feel how he thereby becomes morally lighter, more insignificant in the universe. Today this is only felt as a weakness of the soul, but not as something that continues to have an effect in the universe. But this will be felt in the future. In the same way, man will experience certain intellectual activities more and more as consuming him, as if consumed by a spiritual fire. These phenomena already exist today, even on a larger scale, but they have not been experienced in this way up to now. There is a way of finding one's way into the spiritual world step by step, for example by taking into account what is given in the book "How to gain knowledge of the higher worlds". This brings about a harmony between spirit, soul and body. But the way most people today live the spiritual life without these exercises, especially the way religious life is practiced in individual denominations, this religious life becomes so effective in a person that it diminishes his moral weight, makes him lighter. For it is a significant change when one feels strengthened or diminished in one's whole humanity by what one is spiritually, when one feels fate not merely as a matter of circumstances that are externally around one and affect one, but when one feels fate as something that makes one morally lighter or heavier. [2]

Think that the fifth post-Atlantean epoch is passing. During this epoch man will change his consciousness so that he will see through the work, the activity, the work of death itself. He will learn to see through it, but he will not see through it in such a way that his age, which he can reach, stands before his soul at every moment. He will see the work of death itself. He will have death constantly around him as a companion. Of course he will have it around him, but what must be newly created in the various spheres of life is that man must have a soul content which makes this having death beside him appear to him as something natural. To have awakened in oneself the powers of eternal soul awakening means: to be able to have death beside oneself as a good friend and companion at all times.

To see all this in a certain sense is in store for man in the sixth post-Atlantean epoch. The sun, as it is now, will have fallen from the sky, the stars will have fallen from the sky. Where the stars now shine in their material abstractness, one will see spiritual beings and spiritual weaves. Thus in the course of the fifth post-Atlantean epoch man's view of himself will change greatly and in the course of the sixth epoch the whole world around man will change. But do not think, for example, that the Initiate sees the world in exactly the same way as the non-Initiate. And so it is with the successive stages of consciousness. The person in the successive stages of consciousness does not see the world in the same way. [3]

Sources:

[1] - [3] GA 346: Lectures and Courses on Christian Religious Work, V. Apocalypse and Priestly Work (1924)

Partial Death and Consciousness

For decades, one of the greatest puzzles for me in the field of natural science and spiritual science has been the question of the nature of the nervous system, this nervous system which contemporary scientific psychologists and psychological scientists consider to be the organ of the soul, which they imagine to have an inner activity going on in the nerves that is similar to other organ activities. Well, yes, such activities also take place in the nerves, but they do not serve the formation of ideas, feelings and will. The processes that take place in the nervous system serve to nourish the nerves, serve to produce nerve substance when it is used up. They do not serve the life of the soul, but they must be there so that the life of the soul can take place. If you look at the nervous system and regard it as something that must be there for the life of the soul, then you have something like saying: The ground must be there so that I don't fall into the depths when I want to walk. As little as I have to do with the floor when I walk - although it is necessary for me - as little does the soul have to do with the nerves, although this nervous system is certainly as necessary to me as the floor. What really underlies the life of the soul in nervous life is not the processes of nourishment, is not the organic processes of the nervous system - as I said, they lead in a different direction - that is what I would now like to describe in more detail. I have quoted the previous personal statement so that you may see that I am not carelessly uttering such a weighty thing as I am about to utter, that what I say about nervous life is hard-won: by living into his nervous ramifications, by organic forces entering into the nervous ramifications, man passes from life into death. Man continually dies into the nerve ramifications when he uses these nerve ramifications for thinking, feeling or willing. Organic life does not pass away like growth, but dies by branching out into the nerves. And by dying, by becoming a corpse, by starving, by paralyzing itself, it prepares the ground for spiritual development, for the purely supersensible soul. Just as when I remove the air from under the recipient of an air pump, create an airless space, then the air flows in all by itself (when a valve is opened) and asserts itself inside, so when the organism continually sends partial death into the nervous system, continually makes itself dead, spiritual life flows into the dead part. Therefore death, partial death, is the basis of consciousness. If one learns to recognize that man does not need to pour his organic forces into his body in order to make this body the seat of the soul, but that man is forced to set limits to his organic experience, to constantly create death for his organic weaving of forces, to constantly withdraw this organic life from the places to which the nerves give opportunity, then one notices how the supersensible soul-life can unfold in the sensuous body within it, after it has, however, first built up this sensuous body. For it is the same soul that thinks, feels and wills in the time from birth, or let us say from conception to death; it is the same soul that is there beforehand. [1]

By placing the body into the world, by mirroring itself in it, the soul-spiritual experiences its own life in the realm of the supersensible. But by developing the upper current described to you earlier, it simultaneously destroys the body, thereby bringing death into it. And just as every consciousness is based on a partial death, so the entire death is nothing other than the withdrawal of the soul from the body, which is the beginning of a different experience of the soul. We know that just as we form our memories for the time between birth and death, so in the supersensible current I have indicated, in the superconscious current, we form the inner man who passes through births and deaths, who is eternal. What I have indicated as the experience of the soul, the self-experience of the soul in the supersensible, is not something that the spiritual researcher produces, it is something that is always in the human being as the characterized second human being, which is otherwise only asleep. Spiritual research is nothing other than bringing to consciousness that which is perpetual in man, that which is also eternal in man, so that it can pass through death. [2]

Sources:

[1] & [2] GA 72: Freedom - Immortality - Social Life. On the connection between the soul-spiritual and the body of man (1917-1918)

Death and Ahriman

Ahriman is the lord of death in the widest circle, the ruler of all the powers which are to bring about within the physical-sensual world that which must necessarily be there in this physical-sensual world as annihilation, as death of the entities. - Death within the sense world is one of the necessary institutions, since the entities would overgrow the sense world if annihilation and death were not present within the sense world. The task of lawfully regulating this death in the appropriate way from the spiritual world fell to Ahriman; he is the lord of the regulation of death. His kingdom in the most eminent sense is the mineral world. The mineral world is always dead; death is, so to speak, poured out over the whole mineral world. But just as our earthly world is, the mineral kingdom, the mineral lawfulness, is also poured into all the other kingdoms of nature. The plants, the animals, the human beings, in so far as they belong to the kingdoms of nature, are all permeated by the mineral, absorb the mineral substances, thus also the mineral forces and laws, and are subject to the laws of the mineral kingdom, in so far as this belongs to the earth being. Thus that which belongs to legitimate death also extends into these higher realms of the rightful dominion of Ahriman. In that which surrounds us as external nature, Ahriman is the rightful lord of death, and in so far as he is this, he is not to be recognized as an evil power, but as a power thoroughly grounded in the general order of the world. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 147: The Secrets of the Threshold (1913)

Death and the Astral Body

The astral body, like the flame consumes the wood, consumes its own foundation; and therein lies the possibility that individual life can exist, because it consumes its foundation again. Death is for it the root of life, and there could be no conscious individual life at all if there were not death. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 55: The realization of the supersensible in our time and its significance for life today (1906/1907)

Death and the Etheric Body

The elements of the earth take over the physical body (after death) and destroy it. The world ether, of which I have told you, works in from the periphery, it radiates in, it destroys that which is imprinted there (as a life tableau) on all sides of the cosmos. So that man has this as his next experience: During my life on earth many things have made an impression on me. It has all entered my etheric body. I survey it, but I survey it more and more indistinctly. As if I were to see a tree that has made a strong impression on me during my life. At first I see it in the size in which it made the impression from physical space. There it grows. It gets bigger, but more shadowy; it gets bigger and bigger, and it grows into a giant, getting bigger and bigger and more shadowy and more shadowy. And so it is: everything grows and becomes more and more shadowy and more and more shadowy until it grows into the whole cosmos and thus becomes completely shadowy, completely disappears. A few days pass. Everything has become gigantic, shadowy as a result of this giganticization and diminishing in intensity, falling away from man as the second corpse. But that actually means: taken away from man by the cosmos. Now man is in his ego and in his astral body. And that which had imprinted itself on his etheric body is now inside the cosmos, it has flowed out into the cosmos. And we see the workings of the world behind the scenes of our own existence. As human beings, we are placed in the world. While we are living our life on earth, the whole world has an effect on us. To a certain extent, we roll up what is working there. The world gives us many things. We hold it together. The moment we die, the world takes back what it has given us. But in doing so, it receives something new. We have experienced all this in a special way. What the world receives is something different from what it has given us. It absorbs our entire experience. It imprints our whole life into its own ether. And now we stand in the world and say to ourselves by first taking this experience with our etheric body: We are really not in the world merely for ourselves, but the world has something in mind for us; the world has placed us here so that it can allow what is in it to pass through us and receive it in turn in the form we have changed. As human beings we are not just there for ourselves, we are there for the world in relation to our etheric body, for example. The world needs human beings, because through them it fills itself again and again anew with its own content. There is not an exchange of matter but an exchange of thoughts between the world and the human being. The world transmits its world thoughts to the human etheric body, and the world receives them back in a thoroughly humanized state. Man is not there for himself alone, man is there for the sake of the worlds. [1]

One cannot keep the etheric body in oneself for long after death, because this etheric body is actually connected to the whole cosmos; it always wants to spread out into the cosmos. If we were to lose our physical body for a moment in life, the etheric body would immediately have the tendency to dissolve into the whole cosmos as if by an elastic force. And it is only through the physical body, in which this etheric body always remains inside, that it is held together during life. If we no longer have the binding power of the physical body, then the etheric body begins to spread out and after a few days it will no longer be there for us due to its great expansion. [2]

Sources:

[1] GA 234: Anthroposophy - A summary after twenty-one years. At the same time a guide to its representation before the world (1924)

[2] GA 218: Spiritual Connections in the Formation of the Human Organism (1922)

Death and Christ

Death is present in the world we live in in a completely different way. Let's start from a very ordinary everyday phenomenon. We breathe in the air and breathe it out again. But the air undergoes a change in us. When it is exhaled, this air, it is death air; as exhaled air it can no longer be breathed, exhaled air is deadly. I only want to indicate this so that you understand what is expressed by the occult sentence: "When the air enters a person, it dies." Death enters for the air with every breath, as man breathes the air. But this is only an appearance. The ray of light that enters our eye must also die, and we would have nothing in the world of rays of light if our eye did not oppose the ray of light as our lungs oppose the air. And every light that enters our eye dies in our eye, and it is from the death of the light in our eye that we can see. Physically we kill the air, we also kill the ray of light that enters us, and so we kill in many ways. Up to the light ether we kill that which penetrates us, we murder it continually, so that we may have our earthly consciousness. But we cannot kill something through our earthly existence. We know that above the light ether there is the so-called chemical ether and then the life ether. These are the two types of ether that we cannot kill. But these two types of ether have no special part in us. If we were also able to kill the chemical ether, then the waves of the harmony of the spheres would continually resound in our physical body, and we would continually kill these waves of the harmony of the spheres with our physical life. And if we could also kill the ether of life, we would continually kill the cosmic life flowing towards the earth within ourselves. We are given a surrogate in the earthly sound, but this cannot be compared with what we would hear if the chemical ether were even audible to us as a physical human being. When the Luciferic temptation came, the advancing gods were compelled to place man in a sphere where death lives in his physical body from the light ether downwards. But at that time these progressive gods said - and the word is probably recorded in the Bible -: "Man has acquired the distinction between good and evil, but he shall not have life. He shall not eat of the tree of life." And another word can be added in the sense of occultism: "And man shall not hear of the spirit of matter."

These regions are those that were closed to man. Only through a certain procedure in the ancient mysteries were the tones of the music of the spheres and the cosmic life pulsating through the world made accessible to the initiates when they were allowed to see the Christ in advance in addition to the body. This is why the ancient philosophers speak of the music of the spheres. By drawing attention to this, we are at the same time pointing to those regions from which the Christ came to us at John's baptism in the Jordan. The Christ came from those regions which had been closed to man through the temptation of Lucifer, from the region of the music of the spheres, from the region of cosmic life. Man had to forget these regions at the beginning of the earth through the Luciferic temptation. But the Christ entered a human body at the baptism of John in the Jordan, and that which permeated this human body was the spiritual of the music of the spheres, that was the spiritual of cosmic life, that was that which still belonged to the human soul during its first time on earth, but from which the human soul had to be banished by the Luciferic temptation. So man is also spiritually related in this sense. He actually belongs with his soul to the region of the music of the spheres and the region of the word, the living cosmic ether. But he was expelled from it. And it was to be restored to him so that he could gradually re-penetrate that from which he had been banished. That is why the words of the Gospel of John touch us so deeply from the point of view of spiritual science: In the primal beginning, when man was not yet subject to temptation, there was the Logos. Man belonged to the Logos. The Logos was with God, and man was with God together with the Logos. And through John's baptism in the Jordan, the Logos entered into human development, he became man. But in order for the Christ to dwell in us, he had to become related to death, related to death, related to everything that is spread out in the world, beginning with the light down to the depths of materiality. The Christ had to be able to enter into that which we carry within us as the corpse of light, the corpse of warmth, the corpse of air and so on. He could only become related to man by becoming related to death. And we must feel in our souls that God had to die so that he could fulfill us, who have conquered death through the Luciferic temptation, and we can say: The Christ in us. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 155: Christ and the human soul. On the meaning of life. Theosophical Morality. Anthroposophy and Christianity (1912/1914)

Death and the Experience of Christ

The Mystery of Golgotha is a salvation of humanity from the disintegration of the physical body, regardless of what people believe or do not believe about it. This brings about the possibility that people can find bodies on earth in which they can also incarnate for a certain, still very far-reaching future. For their bodies, for the possibility of their life on earth, Christ did his earthly work on Golgotha. He also did it for the unbelieving Gentiles. For the spiritual-soul, however, it is necessary that the Christ-impulse can also sink into the soul of man in the sleeping states; for this it is necessary that man knowingly confesses the content of the Mystery of Golgotha. The etheric body, which is always swinging up towards the sun, is held by the Christ; but man's soul-spiritual being, his ego and his astral body, must receive the Christ-impulse - by preparing themselves for it through confession during waking - in the state between falling asleep and waking up. [1] Now you know that after death man experiences the continuation of his etheric body. This dissolution after death is a union with the solar nature that flows through the space in which the earth is located. Since the Mystery of Golgotha, in this etheric body, which is moving away from man, man sees Christ with him, who has become his Savior in the future earthly existence, so that actually, since the Mystery of Golgotha, every man who dies already has before his soul that image of the Ascension which the disciples saw through their particular state of soul. [2]

Sources:

[1] & [2] GA 224: The human soul in its connection with divine-spiritual individualities. The internalization of the annual festivals

Death and the Gabriel Organ

Through the preparation of man in the 16th century by Gabriel to develop a new organ in the forebrain, it has become possible that in the last third of the 19th century, after Gabriel had again ceded the government to Michael, that which we call Theosophy could flow in from the great masters of wisdom and the harmony of sensations, in order to gradually bring the meaning of the Mystery of Golgotha in its full effect closer to mankind. When man now passes through the gate of death, he - each individual - can find his great master, who can already be found by every man living in the physical. [1] (See also: Self Higher).

Sources:

[1] GA 264: On the history and contents of the first section of the Esoteric School 1904 to 1914. Letters, circular letters, documents and lectures (1904-1914)

Death and Birth

Death and birth seem to have moved apart. For the one who researches in the field of spiritual life, they move closer and closer together. For if one follows the path that man penetrates into the moon mysteries (see: Initiate Consciousness) and thus conjures the night into the day, he sees how in all the processes of being born the physical and the etheric body become more and more sprouting and growing; how they emerge from the small ego, how they gradually develop into the human form, how they still show, one might say, an ascending life during earthly life and only in the middle of earthly life, at about the age of 35, do they gradually begin to develop into the human form. Only in the middle of their earthly life, around the age of 35, do they begin to gradually decline, to show a downward life. But now we also see how at the same time another life, which we summarize as the astral body and the ego, actually dies, is subject to death. One sees death interweaving itself into life, the dying marrying the sprouting. And again, if one observes the human being with this initiate consciousness, then one sees, when his body disintegrates, from the 35th year onwards, a beginning of revival in the astral and in the ego being. Only these are disturbed by what is dying all around in the physical and etheric being. And so, through this path of spiritual research, one learns to know death in life, life in death. In this way one prepares oneself to trace back further into pre-earthly life that which one sees dying off while being born, where it shows itself in its full meaning, in its (full) greatness.

And by seeing the astral and the ego-being gradually becoming fresher in the dying earthly life, only just captured by the etheric and the physical, one prepares oneself again to follow that which goes out through the gate of death from the human physical and etheric, to follow it into the spiritual world. Death and birth move closer together, whereas in the ordinary consciousness they exist as separate facts. [1] It is not birth and death that come before the soul as a result of this organ cognition grasped on the initiatic path, but something quite different. Before the recognition of organs, birth and death have even lost their usual meaning, for only the whole person can actually die, not a single organ. The lungs, for example, do not die. Ordinary science today has already grasped this to a certain extent, that when the whole human being has died, the individual organs can be revived in a certain way for themselves (said in 1924). The individual organs do not die, regardless of whether the human being is buried or cremated, the individual organs each seek a way out into the cosmos for their being, even if the human being lies in the earth and the earth above him, when he has been buried, covers him; the organs seek their way out into the cosmos through water, air and warmth. In reality, the organs dissolve and do not die; only the whole person dies. [2]

Sources:

[1] & GA 243: The Initiate-Consciousness. The True and False Paths of Spiritual Research (1924)

Death and the Spiritual World

Death in all its forms does not exist in the supersensible worlds. Only there, where the qualities of the physical world have already to some extent passed over into the entities of the supersensible world, is there something that can be regarded as analogous to death, as with the nature spirits (see: elemental beings). In the actual supersensible world there is no birth and death, but only transformation, metamorphosis. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 143: Experiences of the Supersensible. The three paths of the soul to Christ. (1912)

Death and Hierarchies

All beings that are hierarchically higher than humans have no knowledge of death, they only know different states of consciousness. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 152: Preliminary Stages to the Mystery of Golgotha (1913/1914)

Death and Higher Consciousness

It really is the case that the moment a person reaches a higher level of consciousness, he immediately realizes that death, for example, takes on a completely different form. It looks more like a metamorphosis than the end of a phase of life and so on. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 318: The cooperation of physicians and pastors. Pastoral Medical Course (1924)

Death and the Guardian of the Threshold

Under no circumstances should a person be allowed a real insight into those realms (the supersensible world) before he has acquired the necessary abilities. Therefore, every time at death, when a person, still incapable of working in another world, enters it, the veil is drawn in front of his experiences. He should only see it when he has become completely mature. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 10: How does one attain knowledge of the higher worlds? (1904/1905)

Death and the Ego ('I') Organization

What does the ego organization actually do to the physical body? It continually destroys it, it does the same thing that death does, only this is always balanced out by the fact that the physical body is able to absorb external substances as nourishment, so that you have the polar opposition between ego-organization and nourishment. But the ego-organization means quite the same thing for man, only in ongoing, continuous activity, which death means all at once, summarized as it were. You die continually through your ego-organization; that is, you destroy your physical body inwardly, whereas otherwise, when you pass through death, external nature destroys your physical body from without. The physical body is capable of destruction in two different directions, and the ego organization is simply the sum of the destructive forces within. [1] Our (everyday) ego dies in the spiritual world when we pass through death, but if we are immersed in the spiritual world in the Christ, then we will wake up in the Holy Spirit. [2]

Sources:

[1] GA 316: Meditative Observations and Instructions for Deepening the Art of Healing (1924)

[2] GA 266/2: From the contents of the esoteric lessons. Volume II (1910-1912)

Death and Illness

It was only when man was handed over his ego through sexual reproduction that illness and death entered the human race. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 105: World, Earth and Man, their Nature and Development and their Reflection in the Connection between Egyptian Myth and Contemporary Culture (1908)

Death and Suffering

We suffer so that out of our suffering we can gain the experience to find the balance between our ego, which is permeated by Lucifer, and our divinely permeated organization. Our organization is often lost to us until we are completely permeated in our ego by the laws of evolution progressing in the divine sense. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 143: Experiences of the Supersensible. The three paths of the soul to Christ. (1912)

Death and the Lightness of Light

Every time you fall asleep, you enter the world where the lightness of light reigns. It is the same world that you enter through the gate of death. It is the realm in which Christ lives today. One reaches it by dying out of the physical. The power of the etheric lives in the lightness of light. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 266/3: From the Contents of the Esoteric Lessons. Volume III (1913, 1914; 1920 - 1923) (1913-1923)

Death and Matter

The exodus from paradise certainly consists in the fact that man was originally in the spiritual world, that is, in paradise, and there consisted of imagination, inspiration and intuition, that is, he was in an entirely supernatural existence. And then he was so treated by that which he instigated in himself through the Luciferic influence that he was, as it were, sprayed with that which came through bursting spirit, through matter. It is therefore something with which we are basically filled, something that does not belong to us. We carry it within us, this matter, and because we carry it within us, we must physically die. For by leaving his spiritual state, so to speak, man lives here in physical existence only until matter overcomes that which holds it together. For it is actually such that it constantly wants to burst, and the matter in the bones is only held together by the power of imagination. If it gets the upper hand over the power of the bones, then the bones become unviable. It is the same with the muscles and nerves. As soon as the matter in the bones, muscles and nerves gets the upper hand over the imagination, inspiration and intuition and can burst, the person must discard his physical body. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 134: The World of the Senses and the World of the Spirit (1911/1912)

Death and the Moon's Exit from the Earth

(The moon's exit) happened in such a way that a small outgrowth was formed and a body split off at the end. While the "lunar earth" continued to have a viscous inner core and thick air on the outside, a body split off with a thick exterior and a thin interior. And in this body, if you approach the matter not with prejudice but with proper investigation, you can recognize today's moon. The earth has lost certain substances there, and only now has the mineral substance been able to form in the earth. If the lunar substances had remained in the earth, the minerals could never have formed, but would always have been liquid and in motion. Only the exit of the moon brought death to the earth and with it the mineral kingdom, which is dead. But this is also what made today's plants, today's animals and man in his present (completed) form possible. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 354: The Creation of the World and of Man. Life on Earth and the Working of the Stars (1924)

Death and Lunar Existence

If we were not luciferically seduced, if we saw behind the sensory perceptions that which can be characterized as the moon existence behind them, then we would understand: there lies the corpse of that which still appears to us from the old moon. We would remember, just as we remember at the sight of the corpse of the human being, how he was in life, how he was once when he lived with us, walked before us and spoke with us. So we would look back at the sight of the earth to what it was when it was still alive during the old moon existence. Then we will know that that which is subject to death at all comes from the lunar existence. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 162: Questions of Art and Life in the Light of Spiritual Science (1915)

Death and Natural Science and Spiritual Science

While natural science basically only deals with that which is ascending development, growth, the spiritual researcher learns to recognize the reaching in of descending development, the reaching in of death into development itself. He learns to recognize the role that death plays; he learns to recognize this from concrete facts. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 72: Freedom - Immortality - Social Life. On the connection between the soul-spiritual and the body of man (1917-1918)

Death and Phantom

The physical body is something that disintegrates when a person passes through the gate of death. What disintegrates there is not that which the divine spirits have prepared, so to speak, through four planetary states, so that it should have become the physical body on earth; but the phantom, that belongs to the physical body as something which, like a body of form, permeates the material parts which are interwoven with our physical body and at the same time holds them together. If there had been no Luciferic influence, man would have received this phantom in full force with his physical body at the beginning of his earthly existence. [1]

At the baptism of the Jordan, where the meaningful symbol of the dove appears over the head of Jesus, who is not merely inspired but directly intuited by the Christ, something shoots through the whole body of Jesus of Nazareth right into those limbs which in the present development of mankind are most removed from the influence of man: something happens right into the bones. Today man is able to move his hand, but he has no power to work into the chemical forces of his bones, he is solidified in his bones. The body of Jesus of Nazareth is the only body that has ever existed on earth that was given control over the power that holds cartilage and bone ash together through the intuition of Christ. This is indicated to us by the fact that through this mastery of the bones that power came into the world which is capable of really conquering death in physical matter. For the bones are to blame for the death of man; because man was so formed that he incorporated the solid bone mass, he became entangled with the mineral matter of the earth. Thus death was born into him, and it is not for nothing that death is represented by the skeleton. This is the living force that is able to transform the bones back again one day, that is, to gradually lead them into spirituality, which will happen in the future mission of earth evolution. Therefore, no foreign physical power was allowed to intervene in this bone tissue (of Jesus): You shall not break his leg! - The legs of the others who were hung on the cross were broken. [2]

Sources:

[1] GA 131: From Jesus to Christ (1911)

[2] GA 105: World, Earth and Man, their Nature and Development and their Reflection in the Connection between Egyptian Myth and Contemporary Culture (1908)

Death and Creative Forces

The powers of growth that the growing child in particular has, which sprout and grow out of the spiritual, then recede more in later years, they withdraw, and it is precisely those powers that were there before birth that then fill us out more. But after death, these childlike abilities reappear. Only particularly gifted people retain them into old age. For - as I have already mentioned here - whatever ingenious abilities we have in later years, we owe to the fact that we have remained more childlike than those who do not have these abilities, or have fewer of them. The continuation of childlike abilities into later life equips us with special inventive abilities and the like. The more we are able to retain our childlike abilities despite our maturity, the more creative we are. However, these creative powers are then particularly evident after death. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 202: The Bridge between the World-Spirituality and the Physical of Man. The search for the new Isis, the divine Sophia (1920)

Death and the Soul

The soul is still impressionable after death; (for example) the impression made by the mummified body (of the Egyptians) was deeply imprinted, and the soul was formed according to this impression. Today man would have lost all interest in the physical world if the Egyptians had not had the cult of the mummy. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 106: Egyptian Myths and Mysteries in Relation to the Working Spiritual Forces of the Present (1908)

Death and Self-consciousness

Only by passing through the gate of death again and again when an incarnation comes to an end, and shedding his shells, does man come to the actual consciousness of the self. Without death having entered the world, man would not have come to know self-consciousness. Thus death had to become the great teacher of the physical world. If man had never descended to the physical earth, if he had always remained above in the spiritual spheres, man could never have experienced what is the greatest event of the earth's evolution: the Mystery of Golgotha. The Christ-event can only be experienced between birth and death. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 108: The Answering of World and Life Questions through Anthroposophy (1908/1909)

Death and Ideas

What we can gain here in the physical world in terms of immediate ideas is also bound in a certain way to life between birth and death. For after death we do not form ideas in the way we form them here, but there we see the ideas; there they are our perceptions, there they are present in the same way as colors or sounds are present in the physical world. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 135: Re-embodiment and Karma and their Significance for the Culture of the Present (1912)

Death and Willpower

The element of will unfolds in the body in such a way that - if one recognizes it separately from the body, one can then see how it affects the body - the physical is not formed plastically, but the plastically formed is regressed, is dissolved, atomized, made fluid. The element of will is that which constantly - I ask you not to misunderstand me - I would like to say burns the formed elements of the human being again, lets them go up in flames, spiritually speaking. The expression is meant figuratively, but it means something very important. And we understand the exodus of the human soul from the physical body with death, which only summarizes in a moment that which presents itself in the unfolding of the will to the spirituality of the soul forever. Just as I experience my will in the present moment, how it forms a kind of combustion process, a process of dissolution in the body, how through the destruction the spiritual comes to life in the human body, so I learn to recognize how with the other destruction of the body in death, which is nothing other than the last effect of the will hidden in the body, how there the spiritual returns again into the spiritual-soul world. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 297a: Education for Life. Self-education and pedagogical practice (1921-1924)

Death and Time

Why does the physical body perish after death? Why does it dissolve? The moment death occurs, the corpse is only in space; it cannot participate in time. We become a corpse because of the impossibility of carrying time within us. (There is an analogy in music): The melody works in time. The chord is the corpse of the melody. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 278: Eurythmy as visible singing. (Sound eurythmy course) (1924)

Death Before the age of 15

Our whole life actually consists of preparing for death insofar as we are constantly working on the destruction of the body. If we could not destroy it, we would not be able to achieve perfection at all, because we buy this perfection with the destruction of the external physical body. When a person passes through the gate of death at the age of 13, he does not carry out a very long work of destruction that he could have done. If we follow such a soul, we find it relatively quickly in the spiritual world during a certain period between death and a new birth in, I would say, highly remarkable company: we find it in the midst of those souls who are preparing for a next life in such a way that they must soon come down to this earth, that is, among souls who will soon be incarnated. These souls, who will soon descend into their earthly life, need what these other souls can bring up from the earth to them in order to gain the strength they need to become embodied. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 157a: Destiny formation and life after death (1915)

Death Before the age of 35

Up to the age of 14 one is still in the physical body in such a way that one can easily enter the world of souls who will soon seek their incarnation again. This means that dying at a very young age is connected with experiencing something different in the tableau that one lives through than the one who dies at a later age. And the age of 35 is an important limit. If one (now) dies before the age of 35, then one first experiences the life tableau, then one goes back through the nights. But during the review of the past life one sees as if from "behind the mirror", as if one were looking through the life tableau, the spiritual world that one has left by being born. After the age of 14 to 16, however, it is no longer such direct vision, but from then until the age of 35 it is as if the spiritual life is still reflected everywhere in the life tableau, the retrospective view. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 157a: Formation of destiny and life after death (1915)

Death Before the age of 35 - Effect in the Next Life

When souls who died in the previous incarnation before the age of thirty-five incarnate again, everything makes a strong impression on them. They are strongly indignant, they rejoice greatly, they have lively feelings, and they are quickly impelled to impulses of will. These are the kind of people who are then strongly placed in life, who are given their mission. One does not die before the age of thirty-five for nothing, but is then placed in life in a very specific way. But if you die after the age of thirty-five - things intersect, dying before the age of thirty-five can bring something else, these are just examples, it doesn't have to be like that - it can lead to the fact that in the next life you don't get such strong influences from the things of the world around you. You can't get excited quickly, you can't get indignant quickly. One becomes acquainted with things more slowly, but more intimately, and thus grows into such a life in the next incarnation, through which one works more through inwardness, without being led so definitely towards a certain life task. One will stand in life in such a way that one would perhaps prefer a different task, but can be used to carry out something special, perhaps even against one's will. Because the previous incarnation on earth has made one suitable to work more subtly, one is useful to a wider extent. It may be that one is particularly active in one life. If, as a particularly active nature, one were to be snatched away from life early, it would happen that in the next life one would be destined by one's karma to be placed there with a very specific life task, which one would then carry out without fail. One is as if predestined. But if you are particularly active in one life and live to a later age, then these forces become internalized. Then you have a more complicated task in the next life. External activity then recedes and the need to develop inner activity arises in the soul. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 157a: Formation of destiny and life after death (1915)

Second Death

Paul knew that if Christ had not been resurrected, the soul would be involved in the fate of the body, that is, the division of the elements of the body into the elements of the earth. It would one day happen that at the end of the earthly life the human souls would follow the path made by the material of the earth. But by passing through the Mystery of Golgotha, the Christ snatches the human souls from this fate. The earth will go its way in the universe; but just as the human soul can emerge from the individual human body, so the sum of human souls will be able to detach themselves from the earth and go towards a new world existence. [1]

When Paul talks about death, he is not actually talking about physical death, but about what can happen when physical death leads to spiritual death. Man must become aware of this again, that he must do something in the physical-sensual life in order to connect his consciousness with the soul-spiritual, that he carries something through death, so that the spiritual arises for him from the consuming flame that is always there after death. [2]

Think of the last death that is possible in the evolution of the earth, of the last discarding of the physical body. This last death of the embodiments is what is called the first death in the Apocalypse. And those who have absorbed the Christ principle see this physical body as a shell falling off, so to speak. For them, the etheric body is now important. It is organized with the help of the Christ in such a way that it is adapted to the astral body for the time being, that it no longer has any desire or craving for what is down there in the physical world. On the other hand, there are others who have not absorbed the Christ principle. These others do not have such harmony. They too must lose the physical body, for there is no physical body in the spiritualized earth to begin with. Everything physical must first be dissolved. It remains behind as a desire for the physical, as the unpurified spiritual, as the spiritual hardened in matter. An etheric body remains behind, which has not been helped by Christ to be adapted to the astral body, which is oriented towards the physical body. These are the people who will feel hot ardor of desire for the physical sensuality. They will feel unquenched, burning ardor of desire in the etheric body because of what they have had in physical life and what they must now do without. So in this next time, after the physical has melted away, we have people who live in their etheric body as in a love of being that resonates harmoniously with the astral body, and we have other people whose etheric body lives in discord because they have a craving for what has fallen away in the physical body.

And then in the further development a state occurs where the spiritualization of the earth progresses in such a way that there can no longer be an etheric body. Those whose etheric body is completely in harmony with the astral body cast off this etheric body without pain, for they remain in their astral body, which is filled with the Christ entity, and they feel it as a necessity of development that the etheric body is cast off. For they feel within themselves the ability to build it up again themselves, because they have taken Christ into themselves. But those who in this etheric body have the desire for what has passed away cannot keep this etheric body when everything becomes astral. It will be taken from them, will be torn from them, and now they experience this as a second death, as the "second death". This second death passes unnoticed by the others who have harmonized their etheric body with the astral body by absorbing the Christ principle. The second death has no power over them. The others feel the second death as they continue to live on into the next astral form. Then humanity is in that state where those who have reached the goal of development have completely permeated their astral body with Christ. They are ripe to live over to Jupiter, they draw up the plan for Jupiter development on our earth. This is the plan that is called the New Jerusalem. They live in a "new heaven" and a "new earth": that is Jupiter. This new Jupiter will be accompanied, as by a satellite, by those who are excluded from life in the spiritual, who have experienced the second death, who therefore have no possibility of attaining Jupiter consciousness. [3]

What the apocalypticist is looking at is that there are people who become one with matter, who use up the spiritual powers they possess as old inheritance without joining the Christ. Such a person would gradually lose the devachan, the kamaloka would last longer and longer, and the person would be bound, tied to the heaviness of the earth. Only the black magicians do this today; the ordinary man cannot yet close himself to all wisdom. But the apocalypticist must put everything in perspective in order to point out that it is the impulse of Christ that saves them. In the second epistle it is therefore said that this is the "second death" - the "spiritual death", as Paul calls it. [4]

Sources:

[1] GA 211: The Solar Mystery and the Mystery of Death and Resurrection. Exoteric and Esoteric Christianity (1922)

[2] GA 210: Old and New Methods of Initiation. Drama and Poetry in the Change of Consciousness in Modern Times (1922)

[3] GA 104: The Apocalypse of John (1908)

[4] GA GA 104a: From the Illuminated Scripture of the Apocalypse of John (1907/1909)

The Manner of Death Affects Subsequent Lives

Violent death is frightening. But if one sees how the entire life of a human being consists of the lives that lie between birth and death, in which he is connected to the body, and the intervening times, which are much longer, in which the human being is spiritually in the spiritual world between death and a new birth, then one finds that what violently enters human life as death is a significant experience. The soul is, so to speak, snatched in an instant from the life of the body, through which it is connected to the sensory world; because it is not spontaneously driven from within into the spiritual world, but is grasped by the external world itself, it is endowed with a very special inner power, precisely through the experience of something external. It is a law of the spiritual world: the inner becomes outer when the soul enters the spiritual world. And the external experience here becomes internal; an experience such as a violent death becomes internal. What is a violent death in one life appears in the next earthly life as a force that emerges from the ordinary world of life. Therefore, when we find in a person's earthly life that this person was able to accomplish something special at a special time, that he gave his whole life a new direction, as if from unknown depths something like power arose in his soul, this comes from a violent death in a previous life. These forces that give life a new direction are now being researched a lot, and there are many descriptions of how people suddenly give their lives a new direction. Such things lead back to violent deaths, which of course cannot be sought in any way. For a death that is sought as a violent death would no longer be one that is brought about from outside.

Ordinary death, which is brought about from within at any age, brings with it for the next stages of life that which is more of an evenly flowing life, as it is originally laid down from childhood and birth. A violent death, however, which would be sought by suicide or would be sought by the wish, would impair the human being in such a way that he could not cope with his life in the next course of life, that he would become, so to speak, unstable. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 72: Freedom - Immortality - Social Life. On the connection between the soul-spiritual and the body of man (1917-1918)

Death Experience

Man feels as if he were growing - and then that memory tableau occurs; but first he feels as if he were expanding in all directions - he takes on dimensions in all directions. This seeing of his etheric body in large dimensions is a very important conception; for in the Atlantean times this conception had to be awakened when the etheric body was not yet in such close connection with the physical body as in the post-Atlantean man. So when the etheric body was sometimes still separated from the physical body, and the right measurements were held up to the human being, they took on the forms that the physical body has today. And these forms were inspired above all by those who are the leaders of human development. The various flood sagas, especially the biblical flood saga, contain precise information about this. If you think of the human being in terms of the forms that his etheric body must have in order for the physical body to be formed in the right way, then you have the size of Noah's ark. [1]

(In the training of the mind) one makes a discovery - one of the greatest, most powerful inner experiences that one can have at first on the path of knowledge - one makes the discovery: What you produce out of a power of thought is like a fleeting dream. It cannot approach the memory capacity of ordinary consciousness. But if you really bring to life in yourself that which lives in the volition, as your observation, as your subconscious consciousness, then this is now the consciousness which can grasp the other, which otherwise cannot come to memory, and which can hold it. And now we are at the experience which, with regard to the scientific attitude, can be compared entirely with the way we do it in the outer life of nature, the way we observe the outer life of nature. One looks at the plant. One sees how it reaches germination in the blossom and how this germ, when it is lowered into the earth, is the beginning of a new plant. The end is brought together with the beginning to create a cycle, a circle. In the same way, but at a higher level, the end and the beginning of physical human life are understood. We know that that which was present before birth, or let us say before conception, has united itself out of the spiritual world with that which lies in the physical line of inheritance, which flows and weaves through this physically organized part of man. It is known that this lives itself out in such a way that it brings forth an organ, that this organ brings it to thinking, and that its outermost form brings it to memory; but that in this transformation, having emerged from the spiritual world, it has reached a form which is, so to speak, a supreme flowering, which must now be grasped by a consciousness of a quite different kind from that through which it first emerges from the spiritual world. This consciousness lies like a seed of consciousness, like something that underlies as volition but does not come to consciousness in ordinary volition because attention is not directed towards it. That which lies in the human being in a deathlike manner, connects itself, when the human being passes through the gate of death, with this seed of consciousness which lies in the volition. And ordinary physical life is only like keeping the one and the other apart. We live physically as long as the one and the other are kept apart, as long as we place ourselves between them with our being. In the experience of death it occurs that the first is grasped by the second, that consciousness grasps the former and carries it out again through the gate of death into the spiritual world. [2]

When a person passes through the gate of death, a connection is established for a very short time (three days) between the ego, the astral body and the etheric body, which was not present during life on earth. The experience consists in the person seeing, as if melting away, everything that he has taken in during life on earth through his senses and also through the intellect, which combines the perceptions of the senses. During life on earth we get used to seeing colored things and processes that shine in color before us when we turn our eyes out into the world. But we also retain the impressions of the colors in our memory, even if they are weakened. We carry them with us in our memory. It is the same with the impressions of the other senses. And if we are honest in our self-observation, then we say to ourselves: When we sit in a quiet room and let our memories, that is, our inner being, play, what we experience from within is actually composed of shadowy images of external impressions. We only experience this interconnected structure of physical and etheric bodies when we are inside after waking up. So we actually always experience it from within. When we have passed through the gate of death and our ego and our astral body enter into a certain connection with the etheric body, this connection takes place in the following way. You must now imagine that the whole etheric body turns like a glove when you turn what is normally attached to the skin inside out with all your fingertips and thus turn the inside out. The whole etheric body turns in on itself (actually the point of view of observation turns; see: Paradise imagination towards the end of the article). But this turning around is connected with an immensely rapid enlargement of the etheric body (since it is no longer drawn together by the physical body). It grows, it becomes gigantic, it extends immeasurably far out into the universe. And whereas we were previously inside there with our ego and our astral body, we are now facing the etheric body, which is expanding into the cosmic realm, but we look at it from its other side. That which we previously carried with us without significance is now turned inwards. That which was previously turned inwards and which has significance for us alone during earthly life is now turned outwards, it no longer concerns us at all, it is scattered into the universe. We lose it completely and we get an impression of a completely different world. We must not imagine that we can still have the same world that we had during earthly life after death. This world passes away. To imagine that we could experience the content of earthly life after death, in a different version, for example, is quite wrong; it does not correspond to the facts. What we experience through the turning of the etheric body is of gigantic magnitude compared to the content of earthly life, but it is something quite different. Because the outside is now turned inwards, we experience the whole formation of our earthly life in powerful impressions, which are different from the sense impressions. We do not experience the redness of the rose, but we experience how we have developed the redness of the rose within us as an idea. Then it begins to not be as calm as it is in physical earthly life. It now appears as our inner life, as in a sea of events. We see how this earthly life, this earthly existence, is formed from hour to hour. Yes, we get the impression that this whole earthly life is actually formed by the cosmos. For everything that we perceive grows into the immeasurable, into the cosmic realm, and as we grow outward, we become aware that what was formed in us during our earthly life is now also formed by the cosmos. [3]

The fact that our physical body remains on earth has great, essential significance for those who have passed through the gate of death. You can get an idea of what kind of experience this is if you consider the experiences on the physical plane. It is an experience, let us say, when you experience some new sensation that you have not had before and learn to understand it; you have given your soul something that it did not possess before, a new concept, a new idea. But now imagine such a small experience magnified to something great. It is an infinitely powerful thing that man goes through, which gives him the possibility of seeing, thinking and understanding between birth and death: that he lays down his body, that he hands it over to the planet he is leaving. It is a great, a mighty experience that cannot be compared with any experience of earthly existence. The value of an experience lies in the fact that we have something in the soul that remains as a result, as a consequence of the experience. If we were not able to have this experience when we pass through the gate of death, which we knowingly participate in, the departure of our physical body, we would never be able to develop an ego-consciousness after death. The ego-consciousness after death is stimulated by this experience of the departure of the physical body. [4]

Sources:

[1] GA 93: The Temple Legend and the Golden Legend. As a symbolic expression of past and future secrets of human development (1904/1906)

[2] GA 65: From Central European Spiritual Life (1915/1916)

[3] GA 225: Three perspectives of anthroposophy. Cultural Phenomena, Considered from a Humanities Perspective (1923)

[4] GA 168: The connection between the living and the dead (1916)

Fear of Death

At the moment when a person sees the gate through which one passes in death (as an initiation experience), he also sees numerous forces that hinder him and even oppose him in a destructive way. However, most of these forces are attracted by the fear of death. The greater the fear of death, the stronger its power. Man can only overcome the fear of death, can only look death boldly in the face, if he knows that there is an immortal, eternal core within him, for which death is only a transformation of life, a change in the form of life. As soon as man finds the immortal core within himself through the secret science, he educates himself more and more to overcome all such feelings, and finally also to overcome what is called the fear of death. But the more materialistic a person becomes, the more fearful of death he becomes. No secret science can protect man from seeing the truth behind the scenes. It cannot show him the bliss behind the scenes of life without at the same time showing him the terrible powers, the enemies that lurk behind them. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 56: The Knowledge of the Soul and the Spirit (1907/1908)

Death Horoscope

One could, if one only proceeded with the necessary reverence and dignity, make interesting discoveries if one were to apply the same care that one unfortunately often applies, even for selfish reasons, in order to make an examination of the constellation of birth. Much more selfless, much more beautiful results would be obtained if the horoscope, namely the planetary horoscope, the position of the planets at the moment of death, were to be examined. This is extraordinarily revealing for the whole nature of the soul man, and extraordinarily revealing for the connection of karma with the occurrence of death at a certain moment. Whoever makes investigations in this direction - the rules are the same as for the birth-chart - will arrive at all sorts of interesting results, especially if he has known the people for whom he is doing this more or less well in life. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 174: Contemplations on Contemporary History. The Karma of Untruthfulness - Part Two (1917)

9
Demons

Through initiation we can look into the spiritual world and see the forces and entities that are connected with the most beautiful thoughts and feelings of mankind; but we also see those spiritual powers that are behind the wild passion, behind the wild sensuality and the consuming egoism. What remained in the wide circle (of the old original clairvoyance) with the great majority of people, not the initiates, was precisely the seeing of these wild demonic powers that stand behind the lower human passions. Anyone who can see into the spiritual world can of course see all this for himself. This depends on the development of the human faculties; man cannot attain the one without the other. [1]

Those entities that pervade the astral body are called demons. [2] They make the astral body unfree. You are constantly permeated by such demons in your astral body, and the entities that you create yourself through your true or false thoughts are those that gradually grow into demons. There are good demons that come from good thoughts. But bad thoughts, especially untrue, lying ones, produce demonic forms of the most terrible and horrible kind. The demons of the astral body are the most terrible and horrible. Whatever demons your astral body has produced will strive towards you when you are reincarnated. [3]

There are so many fanatics of their opinion who are not at all satisfied if they are unable to force their opinion on the other person. When this happens, it harms both astral bodies. They take persuasion and false advice with them. What is put into the astral bodies causes entities called demons to emerge from the astral body during the night. These demonic entities have a particularly unfavorable influence on our human development. They buzz through the spiritual space and prevent people from developing their personal view. The entities always work in the direction in which they originated. [4] And all these entities, phantoms, ghosts and demons in turn have an effect on people. When this or that prejudice, this or that foolish fashion appears epidemically in our surroundings, then it is the demons that have been created by man and that are all holding up the straight line of progress. Thus we see how man stops his own progress by being able to be "creative" in the spiritual world. We must become aware of the fact that everything we think, feel and sense has equally, and indeed in a larger context, more meaningful effects than that which is brought about by shooting a bullet. The latter may be bad, but it is only considered more dangerous than the former because man can perceive it with his gross senses, while he does not observe the latter. [5]

As true as it is that the etheric head has become more and more connected to the physical head (thus losing the original clairvoyance), it is also true that a loosening is gradually occurring. We have already arrived at the time when the etheric head begins to loosen again. We must distinguish here between racial evolution and soul evolution. There will be souls in the future who have not done enough (with regard to the development of ideas) while the etheric head was united with the physical head. Today, because of the fusion of the etheric head with the physical head, many are reluctant to accept spiritual truths. Those people who accept spiritual truths now will, when they return later, have absorbed enough in this incarnation to find the connection then. But those who miss out on what must happen now will not find bodies that suit them in the future. For the development of the races will create normal bodies that fit the souls who have not missed anything. Others will be such that the loosened etheric body cannot absorb anything. These people will be a special kind of people who will fall out of the progressive development of humanity.

It takes something to find your way into a future body. Imagine a soul that will live in a body that has a loosened etheric body. The soul would no longer understand if you told it about demons and so on. Today is the time when you can talk about these things. Once the etheric body is loosened again, you can't do that. Now the etheric body is called to completely different perceptions. The etheric body will later live in the spiritual world. This is populated with demons and so on. Then this world of spiritual beings will be around the human being, and if he is not prepared for it now through the teachings about it, then later he will know no advice about these beings. But those who take the knowledge of these beings with them from this incarnation will know how to behave towards them. These knowledgeable people are called to transform these beings into servants of a progressive development in the future. All these demons, ghosts and phantoms - today they are harmful. But in the future we will transform them into servants of the progress of humanity. For this, however, man must prepare himself, (for) soul and race development do not run side by side. In the future, people will be divided into the good and the bad. Compare to this: Apocalypse; Manichaeans; future development. [6]

Sources:

[1] GA 114: The Gospel of St. Luke (1909)

[2] GA 96: Original Impulses of Spiritual Science. Christian Esotericism in the Light of New Spiritual Knowledge (1906/1907)

[3] GA 99: The Theosophy of the Rosicrucian (1907)

[4] - [6] GA 98: Natural and Spiritual Beings - Their Work in our Visible World (1907/1908)

Demons within the human being

One can experience that in meditation one feels completely detached, the etheric body expands, one feels carried out into distant world boundaries - but suddenly one feels again as if spellbound to this world, one cannot get away from it, one sits as if in a vice. That's a good thing. It is our karma from previous incarnations that holds us so tightly. If, as a result of the exercises, we were to ascend into the spiritual world straight away without having cleared our karma, the result would be a deep fall. The leader of these hosts that bind us firmly to the earth is Mehazael. We will get to know him when we descend into our inner being, as well as Samael, Azazel and Azael. We will then truly recognize that our inner being is the field of activity of demons: "And their number is legion!" as it says in the Bible. On our esoteric path, we should get to know these beings so that we can understand them and gradually outgrow them. Azael works in such a way that he balances out what arises through dullness towards the spiritual world. If we acquire serenity, then we take on Azael's work. But this is serenity: not rejoicing in joy, nor lamenting in pain, but recognizing the reality of karmic activity in everything. We should not only believe in the idea of karma in theory, but feel in everything we encounter that karma is effective. [1]

For example, a person could enter the spiritual worlds in a few days according to the zeal he shows in his exercises, but his karma prevents it for many years, and rightly so. Otherwise he would take all his faults and shortcomings with him into the spiritual world (and thus perpetuate them). It is these four classes of beings that we find within ourselves. Their outer form, as they appear to the clairvoyant eye, is not so important; what is more important is how we feel them. It is these beings that the saints and ascetics talk about in their visions. And when they describe the feeling of being attacked with red-hot pincers, they are talking about Mehazael. [2]

Sources:

[1] & [2] GA 266/2: From the Contents of the Esoteric Lessons. Volume II (1910-1912)

Esoteric Lessons II, Lesson 40, GA 266

Yesterday we got to the point in our esoteric training where we place our doppelgänger outside us. It's verily not a pleasant feeling when we see all of what we previously had in us unconsciously objectively before us, which then accompanies us wherever we go. We heard that it's a Luciferic being, Samael, with his hosts who brings the doppelgänger out of us. From this, one sees that Luciferic beings also do good things and not always bad ones. If we always carried our defects in us unconsciously, we could never become aware of the destructive, ruinous things that they do in our body and in the whole cosmic substance. As long as Samael hasn't brought our defects out from within us, as long as we don't see them objectively before us as our doppelgänger, so long the Gods graciously keep us from seeing the ruinous, destructive force of jealousy, hate, envy and other passions and emotions that we stream out into our environment. A clairvoyant sees that these passions tear something down in our physical body and in the cosmos' substance, whereas the good stimulates upbuilding forces. So basically Samael is a blessing for development. He shows us our inner nature all the more accurately the more seriously we take our training in hand. We then see defects objectively which we hadn't paid any attention to previously. Now we'll become increasingly disgusted with them and they'll spur us on to get rid of them.

An esoteric will then unavoidably have a feeling as if he couldn't get any air, as if he would suffocate. This feeling arises because the pupil begins to pay attention to his subtle soul stirrings, especially to the untruthfulness that slumbers potentially in every man. We don't mean the cruder lies and hypocrisies that lower natures generate, but the finer nuances that we don't notice through our superficiality and which we often do not even acknowledge. As an example, let's assume that someone learns that a theosophical lecture is going to be given someplace. He thinks: That's something good, I'll go there—but at the same time he thinks that he'll meet someone there whom he'd like to be with. Nevertheless, he tells himself that this isn't the main reason so that he imagines he's really going there on account of the lecture.

Such things happen every day; one lies to oneself and doesn't want to notice it. But now the untruths we hadn't noticed crowd into our consciousness so we think that they'll suffocate us.

Another example will show us how much men live on the surface in all of their actions and even in their duties. (Followed by the example of teachers who were supposed to be tested a second time and didn't know what was in the textbooks that they used every day.) This superficiality spreads out over our whole soul life, so that we don't even see the lies that we tell ourselves.

When we first begin to exercise we might not notice much progress; thoughts about daily life stream to us from all sides. It'll take a long time for us to notice any results from our exercises and for a second being called Azazel to begin to draw our attention to our superficiality, Samael and Azazel must both bring something out of us, but a third being must bring us something. He must bring us a longing for a higher, spiritual life. The next example shows us what's meant by this. A scientist who's fired by a desire for knowledge and would like to know everything suddenly finds himself at a wall, so that he can't press on with his intellect. In most cases he'll say: A human intellect can go no further, and he will resign himself to this. But others who feel that their soul is more alive will look further and will be led to spiritual science. There they think they can investigate beyond the limits that materialistic science has set up before them. But as soon as they tread an esoteric path, they'll feel like they're drowning. For as a man presses ever deeper into esotericism, the limits move ever further apart until he gets to a point where everything moves away and he's standing over an abyss. He feels no support anymore, everything disappears under his feet. It's only by going further on the path, by eagerly continuing the meditations that it'll dawn on him that maya must fall away before he can know the truth, spiritual reality; Azazel brings us this knowledge; he preserves man from spiritual or intellectual drowning.

Then there's a fourth being, Mehazael. He awakens the feeling in us and makes us aware that we're bound to time and space. The best way to clarify this is to place a condition before our soul that many of us have experienced. This is when we wake up in the morn and feel burdened by duties and worries that are like chains that the new day brings with it. This goes together with another one of wanting to shake off the chains that hold us fettered to this burden that is all the harder to bear since we know that we are powerless against it, that we must end ourselves. Here Mahazael shows us our karma. We'll be able to bear this burden more easily as soon as we tread the esoteric path. Mehazael shows it to us so that we don't resist it uselessly; for thereby we would only make our karma worse instead o shaking if off. And so in the end, these four Luciferic forces are a blessing for us.

We saw that every time we let our rage and hate run wild and we don't master our passions, we pulverize something in us and in cosmic substance, into which our feelings, sensations and thoughts flow continuously. Thereby we not only harm ourselves—we create karma for our environment. So far we've only studied karma theoretically. We'll now see how much deeper and more complicated karma's action is.

To become aware of the whole action of these four beings in us, we must keep on meditating strongly. In addition to meditating on the rose cross and on other things and esoteric verses that are given us, we should try to meditate on feelings and sensations, which is much harder. For instance, if we meditate on sympathy and immerse ourselves completely in this feeling, warmth will stream through us; meditation on antipathy will arouse a cold feelings in us. For instance, if we first meditate on the rose cross and then on a strong will impulse, an impulse for a good deed, we'll then see an inner light and feel a stream of warmth. Our exercises and meditations aren't successful right away; it goes slower with some and faster with others, depending on development and karma One will succeed after fifty times, another will take a whole lifetime, but we should wait patiently and go forward courageously. Where did the sun get the power to appear at the same place every morn and radiate its light?

An esoteric's life should become quite different from what it was before. He's really leading two lives—one that gradually crumbles and dies, and another one that gives him light out of the spirit from which he came. Wise masters in ancient mysteries expressed the dying of the old man and the flaming up of the new man through the Christ spirit in the words: Ex Deo nascimur, In … morimur, because Christ's name was too sacred to utter. Per Spiritum Sanctum reviviscimus.

Demonic beings in the elemental realm and in humans

The elemental spirits live in the elemental forces of the earth's atmosphere, in which live countless spiritual entities that play around the earth in the elemental realm, lower spirits, higher spirits. [1] (See also: elemental beings).

Out there are the air and water spirits (sylphs, undines), the fire and earth spirits (salamanders, gnomes), who work in the elemental realm and who actually represent the egoism of the earth. In ourselves it is the elemental forces. But these changing forces within us, which regulate our everyday life, are embryos, are germ beings, which, only as germs but still as germs, resemble the elemental beings that are contained outside in all weather-related things. We carry the forces of the same world within us by thinking, feeling and willing, which live outside as demonic beings in the elemental realm in wind and weather. [2]

In the time leading up to the Mystery of Golgotha, the inner forces of human souls became more and more like the outer demonic elemental spirits in autumn and winter. These powers of ours were to withdraw from the old currents and activities of the gods, just as the weather forces of our earth withdraw from the workings of the sun in winter. [3]

One can calculate how many millions more people the earth would have to have if all the work done by machines were done by people. It can be said that today there are not only those people on earth with two legs and a head who can be statistically calculated, but 500 million more (as of 1918, today a multiple of that), measured in terms of labor power; the labor power is performed by machines. But there is nothing material that is not backed by something spiritual. These 500 million human forces are the opportunity for just as many ahrimanic demons to reside within human culture. [4]

And an ahrimanic infestation is currently (1920) on the rise, with a hugely powerful force. It is quite terrible how the civilized man of the present is asleep in the face of what is actually developing. Just consider how mechanical forces, machine forces, have developed in recent times. It was not so long ago that people had to use their muscular strength to do what, in a certain sense, they can now leave to the machines, to which they merely tap. What takes place in the machines is based on the forces that man brings out of the earth by extracting the coal. The coal provides the power that then works in our machines. Now, when man gets to the point where a machine is working alongside him, it is as if he hands over to the machine what he used to have to do himself. The machine does it. The machine stands next to him and does the work that he previously had to do himself. You measure what the machine produces by horsepower, and if you want to measure on a large scale, you measure what you produce within a certain territory by the power that a horse produces in a year when it does its daily work. Now take the following: in 1870 - you can calculate this from coal production - six whole and seven tenths million horsepower years were worked within Germany - I am deliberately choosing the war year. In other words, in addition to the work done by people, the machines worked six whole and seven-tenths million horsepower years. So that is a power that has been worked out of the machines themselves. In 1912, 79 million horsepower-years were worked in the same Germany by machine power! Since Germany has almost 79 million inhabitants, this means that a horse works alongside every person throughout the year. And consider the increase from 6.7 million horsepower-years to 79 million horsepower-years within just a few decades!

And now consider these ratios in relation to the outbreak of the terrible catastrophe of war. In the same year, 1912, France, Russia and Belgium together were able to muster 35 million horsepower years; Great Britain 98 million horsepower years. In 1870, the war was essentially fought by men, because it was not possible to mobilize much of the mechanical forces. There were only 6.7 million horsepower years in Germany. In a few decades, things had changed. As you know, in this war the machines essentially worked against each other. What confronted each other on the fronts came from the machines, so that the horsepower years of the mechanisms were actually led to the front. However, it took a long time for Great Britain to mobilize its 98 million horsepower years. But then the total of what came from the mechanical power of these empires amounted to 133 million horsepower-years against 79 million horsepower-years from Germany; about 92 million horsepower-years were obtained by adding Austria. This initially compensated somewhat for the fact that, as I said, Great Britain could not convert its horsepower years so quickly from land cultivation to the front.

In this terrible catastrophe of war, it was really not the wisdom of the generals that confronted each other - although they did indicate certain directions - but the essential thing that confronted each other were the mechanical forces that clashed on the fronts, and which did not depend on the generals, but which depended on the inventions that man had previously made out of his natural science. And what had to happen, as it were, with iron necessity? Let us assume that the horsepower years of the United States of America with 139 million horsepower years have now been sent to the front. You see, quite apart from the genius of the generals, the fate of the world was predetermined by what man had produced in a few decades of machine power. Nothing could be done against this fate of the world, against this necessity, where the results of mechanical forces simply clashed on the fronts.

Yes, what is actually going on here? Man has constructed the mechanisms out of his thinking. By constructing them, he had placed his mind, the mind he had gained from natural science, into the mechanisms. In a sense, the mind had run away from his head and had become the horsepower in his environment. They were now working themselves, having run away. It is not easy for the sleeping civilized man of the present to imagine the furious speed with which this creation of an inhuman-extra-human world has taken place in recent decades. The man I referred to at the end of the second millennium of the pre-Christian era had the Luciferian contamination around him; the spiritual beings for whom he developed his needs and who appeared to him outside of nature. If this is a natural object, the spiritual being appeared in it. Now man lets his spirit flow into matter, into mechanisms. In Germany, for example, every human being has created a horse next to himself out of the human mind, which now works next to him, which was not a horse, but was machine power. It is separated from man, just as these elemental beings were once separated from man, only in a different sense.

They were so separate that man had to turn his Luciferic power to them. Now he turns his ahrimanic power to it. Now he is ahrimanizing it, mechanizing it. We live in the age of ahrimanic contamination. People do not even realize that they are actually stepping back from the world, and that they are incorporating their minds into the world and creating a world next to themselves that is becoming independent. And the great, I would say, diabolical experiment has been carried out since the year 1914; that one ahrimanic entity has basically tipped the scales against the other ahrimanic entity. We have had to deal with an ahrimanic battle almost over the whole earth. It has taken on an ahrimanic character through the fact that man has created a new ahrimanic world in the mechanism that surrounds him. And it is a new ahrimanic world. If you look at the figures: From 6.7 million to 79 million horsepower-years in a few decades, the extra-human mechanical force has increased - the ratio is the same in the other countries - how rapidly the Ahriman has grown in the last few decades! May not the question arise as to whether man should completely lose what is placed in his will, what is placed in his power of initiative? The question can be asked whether man should be led more and more towards the illusion that he makes things, while in reality the ahrimanic forces, which can be calculated by horsepower years, work against each other? [5]

Thus the Ahrimanic becoming of the world is a simple example of calculation in order to know what must happen. And how does man stand beside it? He can stand next to it as the stupid one, whose machines finally run against him, if he finds even more complicated combinations of forces. This Ahrimanization is the modern counterpart to the Luciferization of the world that I spoke of earlier. That is what we must look at. For isn't this perhaps the most obvious thing to prove the necessity that man must now create from within? We will not stop this Ahrimanization, nor should we. Culture demands ahrimanization. But it must be accompanied by that which now works out of the human inner being, which in turn draws wisdom, beauty, power, and thus strength from the human inner being in the imagination, in intuition, in inspiration. For the worlds that will arise there will be human worlds, they will be worlds that stand before us in the spirit, in the soul, while outside the ahrimanic machine forces are at work. And these powers that rise out of the imagination, out of inspiration, out of intuition, will have the power to direct what would otherwise have to overwhelm man around him out of the frenzied pace of Ahrimanization. What comes from the spiritual world, from imagination, inspiration, intuition, is stronger than all the horsepower that can still sprout from the mechanization of the world. But man would be overwhelmed by the mechanizing forces if he did not find the counterweight for them in what he can find from the revelations of the spiritual world, which he must strive for. [6]

Sources:

[1] - [3] GA 150: The World of the Spirit and its Entry into Physical Existence. The Influence of the Dead on the World of the Living (1913))

[4] GA GA 183: The Science of the Becoming of Man (1918)

[5], [6] GA 202: The Bridge between the World-Spirituality and the Physical of Man. The Search for the New Isis, the Divine Sophia (1920)

The demonic in man

Much must be bound up in our human nature. We are already in a certain way of the devil, and only because we have bound the devils in us through the arrangements of the divine-spiritual powers unfolding regularly through Saturn's, the sun's and the moon's development, only because of this are we halfway decent human beings, for which we do not even have such a great disposition as a result of the various temptations. And certain moods, certain moods of the spiritual life are connected with the fact that man comes upon that which is demonic in him. All this demonic is based on the fact that what is bound in him can be unleashed (see: psychopathies). When the ego is unleashed, it develops qualities such as insidiousness, mischievousness, cunning, overreaching, putting oneself in the light, putting everything else in the shadow and so on. When the astral body is unleashed, it develops flight of ideas, discontinuous logic, mania-like states or flight from the world, melancholy, hypochondria. There is a relationship between such pathological phenomena and the corresponding somnambulistic (an abnormal condition of sleep in which motor acts (such as walking) are performed) phenomena. The only difference is that in the somnambulist the organs are not ill, but only suppressed in their normal physical functions, which can be achieved through the influence of hypnotists, magnetizers and the like. That which is bound by our physical nature between birth and death is also bound between death and a new birth. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 174: Contemplations on Contemporary History. The Karma of Untruthfulness - Part Two (1917)

Demonology

Before the Mystery of Golgotha, what can be called human deception was illusion of life; after the Mystery of Golgotha it is illusion of consciousness. When one knows this, one understands a great deal in the development of mankind. Above all, one understands why, before the Mystery of Golgotha, men, who had atavistic clairvoyance, did not see what they saw in its true form, but saw the spiritual beings of the higher hierarchies as demons. The gods of the old mythologies were all demons. This was due to the fact that the illusion of life was there, that man had to think of a kind of false order of nature as a divine order, just as today he has to think of a false order of the body as an order of humanity. The beings of the higher Hierarchy were seen, but through the illusion of life they were transformed into Zeus, Apollo and so on; these are beings of the third Hierarchy, but they are transformed. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 184: The Polarity of Duration and Development in Human Life. The Cosmic Prehistory of Humanity (1918)

Demonomagic^[2] and technologyy

Everything that man incorporates into the earth from the point of view of knowledge, wisdom and beauty and true social life, everything that he works into the outer world in terms of symbols, even if he only forms it in his thoughts, will become a great, pleasing, progressive force for the further development of the earth; they will be real forces and forms of the future. But our machines and our factories, everything that we do only to serve external utility, the principle of utility, will be a harmful element in the next embodiment of our earth. If we imprint symbols on matter that are expressions of higher worlds, they will have a progressive effect; our machines and factories, on the other hand, which only serve external utility, will become a kind of demonic, corrupting effect in the next incarnation of our earth.

So we are shaping our own good forces and also the demonic forces for the next age of humanity. Today, in the fifth post-Atlantean cultural epoch, we are deepest in matter and create the worst demonic forces for the next epoch. Where we transform the ancient sacred into physical-mechanical things, we are working down below the physical plan. The underworld will be what man shapes in this way. We must be aware that the evil powers of earth evolution must also be incorporated. At the time when they have to be overcome, man will have to expend a tremendous amount of energy to transform evil and the demonic into good. But his strength will grow as a result, because evil is there to steel man's strength by overcoming it. All evil must in turn be transformed into good, and it is precisely in the sight of Providence to develop strong energetic effects in man, much greater than if he never had to transform evil into good. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 101: Myths and Legends. Occult signs and symbols (1907)

Demons, Daimons, Spectres and Ghosts

Between birth and death the human being is perpetually within a network of these forces of soul which weave around him on all sides; they are the directing powers of his life. You bear within you all the time the workings of earlier lives; and all the time you are experiencing the outcome of former incarnations.

You will realise, therefore, that your lives are guided by Powers of which you yourselves are not aware. The etheric body is worked upon by forms which you yourselves previously called into existence on the astral plane; beings and forces in the higher regions of Devachan, inscribed by you yourselves in the Akasha Chronicle, work upon your destiny. These forces or beings are not unknown to the occultist; they have their own place in the ranks of similar beings. You must realise that in the astral body and in the etheric body, as well as in the physical body, you feel the workings of other beings; all that you do involuntarily, everything to which you are impelled, is due to the working of other beings; it is not born from nothingness. The various members of man's nature are all the time actually permeated and filled by other beings, and many of the exercises given by an initiated teacher are for the purpose of driving out these beings in order that a man may become more and more free.

The beings who permeate the astral body and make it unfree are known as "Demons." Your astral body is always interpenetrated by demons and the beings you yourselves generate through your true or false thoughts are of such a nature that they gradually grow into demons. There are good demons, generated by good thoughts; but bad thoughts, above all those that are untruthful, generate demoniacal forms of the most terrible and frightful kind and these interlard the astral body—if I may so express it. The etheric body is also permeated by beings from which man must free himself; these beings are called "Spectres", "ghosts." And finally, permeating the physical body there are beings known as "Phantoms." Besides these three classes there are yet other beings, the "Spirits," who drive the Ego hither and thither—the Ego itself also being a Spirit. In actual fact the human being generates such creatures who then determine his inner and outer destiny when he descends to incarnation. These beings work in your life in such a way that you can feel the "demons" created by your astral body, the "ghosts" or "spectres" created by your etheric body and the "phantoms" created by your physical body. All these beings are related to you and approach you when the time comes for reincarnation.

You will remember that religious documents express these truths. When the Bible speaks of the driving-out of demons, this is not an abstraction but is to be taken literally. Christ Jesus healed those who were possessed of demons; He drove the demons out of the astral body. This is an actual process and, the passage is to be taken literally. The wise man Socrates also speaks of his "Daimon" which worked in his astral body. This was a good demon; such beings are not always evil.

There are, however, terrible and corrupt demonic beings. All demons that are born of lying work in such a way as to throw man back in his development; and because owing to the lies of eminent figures in world-history demons who grow into very powerful beings are all the time being created, we hear of the "Spirits of Hindrance", "Spirits of obstruction." In this sense Faust says to Mephistopheles: "Thou art the Father of all hindrances!"

The individual human being, membered as he is within mankind as a whole, has an effect upon the whole world according to whether he speaks the truth or lies; for beings created by truth or by lies produce quite different effects. Imagine a people which was composed entirely of liars, the astral plane would be populated solely by the corresponding demons and these demons would be able to express themselves in constitutional tendency to epidemics. Thus there is a certain species of bacilli who are the carriers of infectious diseases; these beings are the progeny of the lies told by human beings; they are nothing else than physically embodied demons generated by lies.

You see therefore that lies and untruths of earlier ages appear in world-karma as a definite host of beings. A passage in Faust indicates how much deep truth is contained in myths and sagas. You will find there a connection between vermin and lies in the role played by rats and mice in connection with Mephistopheles, the Spirit of Lies. Legends have often preserved wonderful indications of the connection between the spiritual world and the physical world.

The Law of Destiny
30 May 1907, Munich
https://rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA099/English/RSP1966/19070530p01.html

10
Doppelgänger

Doppelgänger - splitting of the personality in esotericism

The consequence of faithfully following the esoteric exercises is the splitting of the personality that occurs. The person will gradually feel as if something is walking beside him, something that thinks along with him, listens in, even, if the person is not very strong inside, speaks along with him. It is a second ego that emerges, a double that has been taken out of oneself. The more seriously a person has followed the esoteric path, the more of his old self he sheds, that is, he sheds one skin after another like a snake. These skins - comparatively speaking - become a second body, a doppelgänger that never leaves you in life. In the ancient Egyptian mysteries, the human being who has cast his double out of himself was called the "Kha-man". The double is chained to the Kha-man in order to constantly remind him of what his former life was like or what he still is like. This is not always a pleasant sensation. But the consciousness of always carrying this double with him will make him aware of his faults so that he should mend his ways. He should constantly feel this presence, otherwise it would become dangerous and he would forget, above all his high ideals and intentions, what his inner life and his faults actually are. The stronger the doppelgänger appears, the better it is for our development, because otherwise we would indulge in great illusions about ourselves. [1]

Through this doppelgänger we become thoroughly acquainted with everything that we have to put out of ourselves. He shows it to us again and again. All the insincerity, unkindness, selfishness and other bad qualities in us are revealed to us through the experience of this doppelgänger. And the fact that we still carry these qualities around with us, that we cannot yet shake them off, causes the feeling of discomfort that the doppelgänger gives us. As long as we still had these bad qualities within us, in our subconscious, as it were in the depths of our soul, we did not yet become aware of them in all their strength. But when the spiritual man develops and grows more and more, when he looks admonishingly at these qualities of our soul, they have a tormenting effect through their presence, which this spiritual man can no longer tolerate. And that is why it is very good when the feeling of tormenting discomfort is very strong, because that is the quickest way to get rid of this double. [2]

Sources:

[1] & [2] GA 266/2: From the contents of the esoteric lessons. Volume II (1910-1912)

Doppelgänger ahrimanic

One must speak of conscious spirituality beyond the threshold of consciousness, not of unconscious spirituality. One must be clear about the fact that man has much of which he knows nothing in ordinary consciousness. It would also be bad for man if he had to know everything that goes on in him in ordinary consciousness. Just think how he would actually have to arrange his eating and drinking if he had to know exactly the processes, physiologically and biologically, that take place from the moment he takes in a meal and so on! This all takes place in the unconscious; spiritual forces are at work everywhere, even in this purely physiological process. But man cannot wait to eat and drink, can he, until he has learned what is actually going on in him? This is how many things happen in man. By far the greatest part of man's being is already subconscious. Another entity takes possession of this subconscious that we carry with us under all circumstances. [1] Shortly before we are born, another spiritual being besides our soul takes possession of the subconscious part of our body. An ahrimanic spiritual being is in us as well as our own soul.

These entities, which spend their lives precisely by using people themselves in order to be able to be there in the sphere in which they want to be there, these entities have an extraordinarily high intelligence and a very significantly developed will, but no mind at all. And we already go through our lives in such a way that we have our soul and such a double, which is much more clever than we are, but has a Mephistophelean intelligence, an Ahrimanic intelligence, and in addition an Ahrimanic will, a very strong will, a will that is much closer to the forces of nature than our human will, which is regulated by the mind.

In the 19th century, natural science discovered that the nervous system is permeated by electrical forces. The electric currents, the forces that are placed into our being by the doppelgänger, do not belong to our being at all; we already carry electric currents within us, but they are purely ahrimanic in nature (compare: electricity).

These beings once decided out of their own will not to want to live in the world in which they were destined to live by the wise gods of the upper hierarchy. They wanted to conquer the earth, they need bodies; they do not have bodies of their own: they use as much of the human bodies as they can use, because the human soul cannot completely fill the human body. So these entities can, as the human being develops, at a certain time before the human being is born, so to speak, enter this human body, and under the threshold of our consciousness they accompany us. There is only one thing they absolutely cannot tolerate in human life: they cannot tolerate death. Therefore, they always have to leave this human body in which they are implanted before it is afflicted by death. This is always a very bitter disappointment, because that is precisely what they want to conquer: to remain in human bodies beyond death. That would be a great achievement in the realm of these beings. [2] (See also: ahrimanic immortality).

If the Mystery of Golgotha had not happened, it would long since have been the case on earth that these entities would have conquered the possibility of remaining within the human being even when death is karmically predestined for him. Then they would have won the victory over human development on earth, and they would have become masters of human development on earth. [3]

In the coming centuries man will have to realize more and more that he carries such an ahrimanic double within himself. This is nothing more and nothing less than the originator of all physical illnesses that emerge spontaneously from within, and to know it completely is organic medicine. He is the originator of all organic diseases. And a brother of his, who is Luciferic in nature, is the originator of all neurasthenic and neurotic (mental) diseases. [4]

Our earth is by no means a being that radiates the same thing to its inhabitants everywhere, but rather very different things are radiated to the most diverse areas of the earth. And there are various forces: magnetic, electrical, but also many more forces that come up into the realm of the living, which come up from the earth and influence man in the most diverse ways in the most diverse places on earth. What the human being initially is in body, soul and spirit actually has little direct relationship to these forces that come up from the earth. But the doppelgänger has a preferential relationship to these forces flowing up from the earth. These beings have a very special taste nature. There are beings who particularly like the eastern hemisphere, Europe, Asia, Africa; they choose people who are born there to use their bodies. Others choose bodies that are born in the western hemisphere, in America. That which we humans have in a faint image as geography is for these beings the living principle of their own experience; they arrange their abode accordingly. And from this you can further see that one of the most important tasks of the future will be to cultivate again that which Paracelsus tore away from atavistic wisdom: geographical medicine, medical geography. [5]

The area where that which flows up from below has the greatest influence on the double, and where it enters into the greatest relationship with that which flows out from the double, and thus also communicates itself again to the earth, is that area of the earth where most of the mountains do not go from west to east, in the transverse direction, but where the mountains go mainly from north to south - for this is also connected with these forces - where the magnetic north pole is close by. This is the area where, above all, a relationship is developed with the Mephistophelian-Ahrimanic nature through the external conditions. And this will bring about much in the progressive development of the earth. Europe will only be able to establish a correct relationship with America if such relationships can be seen through.

Otherwise, however, if Europe continues to be blind in these matters, then it will go with this poor Europe as it went with Greece towards Rome. For America's ambition is to mechanize everything, to drive everything into the realm of pure naturalism, to gradually wipe Europe's culture off the face of the earth. It cannot do otherwise. People develop, like Woodrow Wilson, who are only a wrapping of the doppelgänger, through whom the doppelgänger itself has a very special effect, who are in essence actually embodiments of that which is American geographical nature. [6]

Diseases come from the fact that this being works in the human being. And when remedies are used, the purpose is to give this being from the outer world that which it otherwise seeks through the human being. But all these things are just beginning. Medicine will become a spiritual science. And just as medicine was known in ancient times as a spiritual science, it will be recognized again as a spiritual science. [7]

The spiritual secrets, which on earth - with the help of the twofold forces of magnetism, the positive and the negative - can let the spiritual flow through from the cosmic, come from the twins in the universe; these are midday forces. Even in ancient times it was known that this was cosmic, and it is also known exoterically to scientists today that there is positive and negative magnetism in some way behind the twins in the zodiac. These forces, which come from the twins, can be put entirely at the service of the double. [8] (See also: Occultism of the Unfair West).

It must be recognized how the impulse of freedom must run through all that which dominates the fifth post-Atlantean period. For it is precisely against this freedom of the human mind that the adversary rebels, who accompanies man like a double until death. [9]

The realization of this doppelgänger was certainly present in older times. It had been lost. People had to be protected from taking in anything, not only from taking in the theory of this doppelgänger, but also from coming into contact as little as possible with things that had something to do with this doppelgänger. [10] (See also: America; Columban).

Sources:

[1] - [10] GA 178: Individual Spirit Beings and their Work in the Soul of Man (1917)

The doppelgänger must be controlled

It sometimes happens that the doppelgänger, through the desires and passions attached to him, which we used to indulge in instinctively, wants to cause us to run away with ourselves, so that we get out of control, be it through irascibility, hatred and unkindness, envy or other sudden passions. With the average person this does not usually make much difference. The esoteric, however, should not follow such sudden passions. He must pay much more attention to himself. The esoteric's emotional and instinctive life must become such that it is quite different from that of the average person. Nothing should take place in the esotericist's life that happens out of mere instincts, without him holding it in his own hands, so to speak. It should gradually become an impossibility for him that what the doppelgänger wants should go through with him. He must become master of this double. The impulses which formerly dominated him are now controlled by man from his higher ego-consciousness. Man must penetrate everything instinctive, involuntary or instinctive within the life of the soul with his clear consciousness. It must be left entirely to man's discretion whether he wants to give love in a particular case or not. It is precisely by changing our emotional life in this way from our higher ego-consciousness that we gain a higher feeling for the beauty that weaves through the world, which originates in the love of the world and which also makes true art possible. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 266/2: From the Contents of the Esoteric Lessons. Volume II (1910-1912)

Doppelgängers and Russians

The secret of Russian geography consists in the fact that what the Russian receives from the earth is first of all the light communicated to the earth, which returns from the earth. The Russian loves his earth, but he loves it for the very reason that it is a mirror of heaven. Thus the Russian, however territorially minded he may be, has something extraordinarily cosmopolitan in this territorial attitude - even if it is still on a childish level today. But what the Russian loves about his earth, what he imbues himself with, gives him many a weakness, but also, above all, a certain ability to overcome the doppelgänger nature (see: Doppelgänger). He will therefore be called upon to provide the most important impulses in the age in which this doppelgänger nature must finally be combated, in the 6th post-Atlantean cultural period. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 178: Individual Spirit Beings and their Work in the Soul of Man (1917)

Doppelgängers and self-knowledge

In the esoteric life, special attention must be paid to egoism. We often tell ourselves that we are doing something selflessly, or we feel hatred or envy towards someone that we have not yet realized, and as esoterics we think we have to tell them the truth or that we should not suffer this or that from them. As soon as such feelings arise, we should realize that we are indulging in gross deceptions and that their causes always stem from egoism. Such feelings always express themselves with a feeling of warmth which permeates the etheric body - that part of the etheric body which we call the warmth ether - and affects the physical body through the blood. - We must be clear about the fact that such feelings always have a damaging effect on the development of the world.

The hierarchies, which are employed to direct the karmic connections, then act in such a way that they employ entities of a Luciferic nature, which destroy these effects in us by having a damaging effect on the physical body. With correct self-knowledge, with the realization of our own wickedness, we are pervaded by an icy feeling of coldness, while everything that comes to satisfaction in us, in contrast to self-knowledge, expresses itself in a feeling of warmth. Samael is the leader of the Luciferic beings who work in this coldness, bringing self-knowledge to man. They can be perceived by the clairvoyant in various forms, mostly human-like. While in the case of egoism, envy and hatred we have a feeling of disgust and revulsion on waking up, which is due to the effect of our double, in the case of dishonesty those who are still inclined to it will experience a choking, scratchy feeling in their throat on waking up. He will feel as if he were being pinched with pincers, tormented with a thousand arms. - On waking, a dull esoteric will have a feeling of drowning, like a deluge - the stronger, the more he abandons himself to everyday sensory life. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 266/2: From the Contents of the Esoteric Lessons. Volume II (1910-1912)

Doppelgänger experience

Let us assume, for example, that someone - it need not be a meditator - has seen his double. It could be, for example, that he was planning to go to a party in the evening where the intention was to poison him. Now he enters a half-darkened room and sees himself there. Under the impression of this experience, he does not go to the party and is therefore not poisoned. Now the form in which the experience is clothed is not at all what is important. The most important thing is that the spiritual being that accompanies man from incarnation to incarnation has wanted to make an impression on him. There is such a being, which belongs to the hierarchy of the Angeloi and which is called the guardian angel (see: guardian spirit) of man in the religious creeds. This being cannot, in order to impress man, influence his thoughts in such a way that man would have known mentally: you should not go into that company tonight. - This cannot be because our thoughts, all thoughts except those generated by spiritual science, belong to the physical plan and therefore cannot be influenced by the supersensible. After death and already during sleep we must discard our thoughts, with the exception of the spiritual-scientific ones mentioned. But our feelings and volitional impulses already reach out of themselves into the supersensible, and an impression can therefore be made on them. This happens, for example, in the seeing of the doppelgänger. But it can also be that someone sees his double, not because the angelic being shows him, but because, even if only for a moment, his etheric body has become free and he now sees his physical body in front of him. And it is also possible that one sees one's double simply because one has spoiled one's stomach and thereby the etheric body - perhaps only in those parts that supply the stomach - has become free for a moment. So all this must be carefully distinguished from one another. And it can also be the case that the same impression that has to be made - as in the case of poisoning - is made in different ways. One person may see his double, another may step into a room, while at the same moment a painting falls from the wall with a great and physically inexplicable noise. This is roughly equivalent to writing a message in German letters one time and in Latin letters the other. It therefore makes no sense to ask: is what I have seen real or not? There is no unambiguous reading of imaginations, but one must first learn how to read them. [1]

Like Oedipus with the Sphinx, man of the fifth post-Atlantean cultural epoch has to come to terms with Mephistopheles. He faces this Mephistopheles like a second being. The Greek faced the Sphinx through the blood and respiration process, which had become more energetic; he faced what entered his nature with the more energetic respiration. Modern man, with everything that pushes out of his intellect, his sobriety, stands opposite that which is bound to the nervous process. Prophetically, this confrontation of man with the Mephistophelean, I would say poetically, could be foreseen (in Goethe's Faust). But it will emerge more and more as a fundamental experience the further we get in the evolution of the fifth post-Atlantean period.

While Greek man was tormented by an overabundance of questions, modern man will face the torment of being enchanted into his prejudices, of having a second body next to him that contains his prejudices. The materialistic attitude will dry up the etheric body, and Mephistopheles will live in the dried-up etheric body. [2]

Sources:

[1] GA 266/3: From the contents of the esoteric lessons. Volume III (1913-1923)

[2] GA 158: The connection of the human being with the elementary world. Kalewala - Olaf Åsteson - The Russian Folklore - The World as the Result of Equilibrium Effects (1912-1914)

Doppelgänger experience as an abnormal type of threshold guardian

If at any moment you could look back and see all the marks in your astral body which must be balanced (through the working of karma) before you can make your ascent to certain heights of the occult, you would see your whole account of debts. This must now confront the (spiritual) disciple in a symbolic and tangible form - that which we still have to pay off, that which still hinders us: the unsettled karma. This is the guardian of the threshold. It can also confront us in a very abnormal way. For it can happen when a person returns to physical existence (to a new incarnation) that he still finds his astral corpse. This is then very bad for him, for then his present astral body will be soaked, as it were, by the former astral body, which is a terrible fate. He then has it constantly beside him as a double, and that is the abnormal nature of the guardian of the threshold. [1]

That the Guardian of the Threshold appears in an abnormal way happens when man has such a strong attraction to the one life between birth and death that he cannot stay in devachan long enough because of the low level of inner activity. If a person has become too accustomed to looking outwards, he has nothing to see within. He then soon returns to physical life. The structure of his former desires is still present in the Kamaloka; he then still encounters it. Then his new astral body is joined by the old one; this is the previous karma, the guardian of the threshold. He then has his former karma continually before him; this becomes a peculiar kind of double. Many of the popes of the infamous papal era, such as Alexander VI (Borgia), have had such doppelgängers in the next incarnation. There are people, and it is not at all rare now, who have their former lower nature next to them all the time. This is a specific kind of madness. It will become stronger and stronger because life in the material world is spreading more and more. Many people who are now completely absorbed in material life will have the abnormal form of the Guardian of the Threshold next to them in the next incarnation. All the nervous people of today will be hurried by the Keeper of the Threshold in the next incarnation. They will be rushed into a too early incarnation, a kind of cosmic premature birth. [2]

The human being therefore forms a new astral body, but his old one then joins with it and he drags both through life. The old astral body then appears before him in bad dreams or visions as his second self and tricks, torments and torments him. This is the unauthorized, false guardian of the threshold. This old astral body easily emerges from the person because it is not firmly connected to the other parts of the being and then appears as a double. [3]

Sources:

[1] GA 98: Natural and Spiritual Beings - Their Work in Our Visible World (1907/1908)

[2] GA 93a: Basic Elements of Esotericism (1905)

[3] GA 95: Before the Gates of Theosophy (1906)

The beginning of the doppelgänger experience

But the stage at which this astral body succeeds in imprinting its form on the etheric body, this stage is connected with the fact that it becomes spiritually light around us, that the spiritual world around us becomes manifest, that enlightenment occurs. The first experience which occurs through the organization of the astral body, which thus occurs as an effect of meditation, concentration and so on, could be expressed as an experience of feeling, as an experience of sensation, as an experience which, if one wants to describe it, could best be described as a fully conscious splitting of our whole personality. One says to oneself at this moment when one experiences this: Now you have actually become something like two personalities. The second consists in the fact that the second personality, which is inside the first, gradually acquires the ability to really step out of this first personality in terms of soul and spirit. This experience is already expressed in the fact that the human being now has the experience, albeit sometimes often for a short time, as if he were seeing himself, as if he had, as it were, his own double before him. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 113: The Orient in the Light of the Occident. The Children of Lucifer and the Brothers of Christ (1909)

Doppelgänger experience clairvoyant

Man always has something in his soul which he has not fully mastered, so to speak, for which he has special affects. Ahriman develops a special activity towards such things, which are of such a nature that man is connected with his inner being in a very peculiar way. There are parts of the human soul which can be detached, so to speak, from the whole of this human soul. Because the human being does not exercise complete dominion over such inclusions, Ahriman makes use of them. And through Ahriman's activity, which is unjustified, which arises from the fact that Ahriman oversteps his boundary, the tendency then asserts itself that those parts of the human etheric entity which have the tendency to separate themselves from the rest of the soul life and become independent, allow themselves to be formed by Ahriman so that he gives them the human form. Basically, it is the same with all kinds of thoughts that sit within ourselves, so that they can take on the human form.

When the human being faces these thoughts as a thought being, when Ahriman has the opportunity to make such a part of the human soul independent, to give it the human form, and one lives into the elementary world (astral plan), then one faces this independent part of one's being as one's double. It is always a part of the human soul to which Ahriman gives the form of the human shape. If you are in your physical body, you cannot face yourself; but if you enter the astral plan in your etheric body, you can be in it and still see it from the outside, just as you see your double. This is what is meant by the doppelgänger. It is basically, if one speaks substantially, a large part of the etheric body itself. While one retains a part of it, a part separates itself, becomes objective. You look at it, it is a part of your own being to which Ahriman has given the form that you yourself have. For Ahriman tries to force everything into the laws of the physical world, so to speak. In the physical world the spirits of form, the Exusiai, rule, and they share this rule with Ahriman, so that Ahriman can certainly carry it out with a part of the human entity.

It is relatively an elementary phenomenon, this encounter with the double, and it can occur through special subconscious impressions and impulses of the human soul, even if the person is not clairvoyant. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 147: The Secrets of the Threshold (1913)

The dual nature of man

Once natural science learns to distinguish between the regenerative forces in man and what is present in animality, it will recognize how the creative forces that operate in earthly life in order to lead man out of animality are only awake when man is asleep. So man's actual creative powers are asleep when man is awake. From all this we can see that in man's self-knowledge creative powers, the actual human powers, can only be perceived when man becomes clairvoyant during sleep, that is, when he wakes up clairvoyantly in a state similar to that of other sleep.

In a certain way, the processes that manifest themselves in the sleeping human being will gradually provide scientific indications of these forces that raise the human being above the animal kingdom. But they will always remain just hints. For these forces, when they present themselves to clairvoyant consciousness today, present themselves as such that they cannot show their true, primal form to the senses. One day it will be possible to draw conclusions about these forces from scientific facts. [1]

We must think of the world that surrounds us, which we know as natural forces, as it confronts us in the mineral, vegetable, animal kingdom, reduced to nothingness, but then even further, reduced below nothingness: then the forces emerge, which are the creative forces when man is asleep. [2] (See also homeopathy, which is based on this principle.) But these forces are related to other forces which also develop in man with a certain, one might say, unconsciousness; these are the forces which are connected with human reproduction. We know that at a certain age consciousness awakens above these forces, that from a certain age the human organism is, as it were, permeated from consciousness with the forces that are later called the sensual love of the sexes. What beforehand is like dormant forces that only awaken with sexual maturity are, when they are considered in their very own form, exactly the same forces that restore the destroyed forces in man during sleep. These forces are only concealed because they are mixed with the other human nature. There are invisible forces at work in man which only become guilty when they awaken, which sleep or at most dream until they reach sexual maturity. Thus he who recognizes among these qualities the generative powers which have been withdrawn into childhood, feels the breath of the gods, the divine powers, which are so marvellous because, by later representing man's lower nature, as long as they reign in innocence, they really offer a divine breath. These things must be felt, sensed.

In this way, human nature is divided into two parts, as it were. We actually have two people before us in every human being: one person, who we are from the moment we wake up until the moment we fall asleep, and the other person, who we are from the moment we fall asleep until the moment we wake up. In the one person we are constantly striving to torture our nature to the point of animality with everything that is not knowledge, that is not grasped purely in the spirit. This is during our waking state. But that which elevates us above this human being first reigns as a blissful power innocently during childhood within the generational forces, and reigns when these forces awaken, during sleep, when what has been destroyed by daytime waking is regenerated. Thus we have a person within us who is related to the creative forces in man, and a person who destroys these forces. This second human being, in whom the human-creative forces rule, is actually never there unmixed, because during sleep the physical body and etheric body remain permeated by the after-effects of the day, by the forces of destruction. But when these destructive forces have finally been removed, we wake up again. [3]

This has been the case since the Lemurian age, when the present human race actually began its development. At that time the Luciferic influence on man took place. From this Luciferic influence came, along with everything else, that which today continually forces man to torture himself down to animalism. But that which is mixed in with human nature, that which man does not yet actually recognize, the creative powers, prevailed before the Luciferic impulse as humanity in the first Lemurian times, when man was still completely and utterly permeated by these creative powers. If we follow the human race from this point in the Lemurian period onwards, we always have this dual nature of man before us through everything that has come since. [4]

Sources:

[1] - [4] GA 146: The Occult Foundations of the Bhagavad Gita (1913)

The dual nature of human thinking

Human consciousness must necessarily be self-consciousness at the same time, because it is thinking consciousness. For when thinking focuses on its own activity, then it has its very own essence, i.e. its subject, as its object. However, we must not overlook the fact that we can only define ourselves as subjects and oppose ourselves to objects with the help of thinking. Therefore, thinking must never be understood as a merely subjective activity. Thinking is beyond subject and object. It forms these two concepts as well as all others. So when we, as thinking subjects, relate the concept to an object, we must not understand this relationship as something merely subjective. It is not the subject that brings about the relationship, but thinking. The subject does not think because it is a subject; rather, it appears to be a subject because it is capable of thinking. The activity that man performs as a thinking being is therefore not a merely subjective one, but one that is neither subjective nor objective, one that goes beyond these two concepts.

I must never say that my individual subject thinks; rather, it lives by the grace of thinking itself. Thinking is thus an element that leads me beyond my self and connects me with the objects. But at the same time it separates me from them by confronting me with them as a subject. This is the basis of man's dual nature: he thinks and thus encloses himself and the rest of the world; but by means of thinking he must at the same time define himself as an individual facing things. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 4: The Philosophy of Freedom. Fundamentals of a Modern World View - Results of Mental Observation According to the Scientific Method (1894)

11
Eighth Sphere

In the first half of the fourth round (a round is a Condition of Life – the Earth goes through seven CoL of which we are currently in the fourth, 'mineral'), man first acquires the ability to relate his senses to the mineral kingdom. In the second half of the fourth round he redeems the mineral kingdom. But a part of it remains behind, is eliminated because it is no longer useful to man. This forms the eighth sphere, which is no longer useful for human development, but only for beings of a higher order. [1] It can later serve them as material when it is dissolved into world dust and used to form new worlds. [2]

But now a being can grow together with that which is actually supposed to remain behind as slag. Something must remain from the earth that is later to be what the moon is today. Man must overcome this. But man can like it, then he connects with it. A man who is deeply interwoven with the sensual, the merely instinctive, connects himself more and more with that which is to become slag. That will be when the number 666 (see: Apocalypse) is fulfilled, the number of the beast. Then comes the moment when the earth must move out of the ongoing evolution of the planets. If then man has become too closely related to the sensual forces that are to come out, then that which is related to them and has not found the connection will move to the next globe (see: Jupiter) to pass over with the dross, just as such beings are now inhabitants of the present moon. Man must pass through 7 spheres. The 7 planets correspond to the seven bodies. Saturn - physical body, Sun - etheric body, Moon - astral body, Earth - I, Jupiter - Manas, Venus - Buddhi, Vulcan - Atma. In addition, there is an eighth sphere where everything that cannot join this continuous development goes. This is already formed in the devachanic state. If man uses life on earth only to collect what serves him alone, to experience only an elevation of his own egoistic self, this leads to the state of avitchi in the devachanin. Avitchi is the preparation for the eighth sphere. Religions have formulated "hell" from this concept. [3]

Sources:

[1] GA 93: The Temple Legend and the Golden Legend as a symbolic expression of past and future secrets of human development (1904/1906)

[2] Bei 69: Contributions to the Rudolf Steiner Complete Edition. Issue 69 (1980)

[3] GA 93a: Basic Elements of Esotericism (1905)

Eighth sphere and man

Thus man today, when he regards himself as a creature standing among other creatures, stands in the fourth formation. But he projects into the other formations, for even in sleep man is under the influence of the 3rd Hierarchy. Today he is already in the 5th formation, and the other beings are still further on. In so far as you think of yourself here in your physical body, in your etheric body, astral body and ego, in so far as you think of yourself as a creature on earth, you are in the 4th formation; but you project into the fifth, sixth and seventh formations. Since you live not only in your body, but also outside your body, in sleep or in death, you project into the other hierarchies, and these are further on. But it does not end with the 7th formation. Evolution continues, and as we reach into the higher forms of education, we also reach into an 8th form of education, the famous eighth sphere. We can easily say: In a certain way, by rising to highly developed levels of higher beings, we, by standing in the realm of God or the spiritual realm - as you like - project into the 8th formation, with the finest components of our spiritual being. [1] Now think of the matter pictorially in such a way that you imagine a sea surface, for example, the human being wading in the sea, moving forward in the sea, so that only his head protrudes, then through this picture - it is of course only a picture - you would have the position of the present human being. All that in which the head is rooted we would have to reckon as the 4th stage of development, and that in which man wades we would have to designate as the 8th stage of development (there we find the spirits of form, Exusiai; these have already moved beyond that which we humans initially see as our future development, as the volcanic development). For it is peculiar that man has in a certain way outgrown with his head that element in which the spirits of form unfold their peculiar nature.

Man is to a certain extent emancipated with regard to his main formation from that which is impregnated by the beings of the spirits of form, Exusiai. For it can only be correctly understood that man, in so far as he has to feel a certain creative influence on himself from the spirits of form, does not feel this creative influence directly through the faculties of his head, but feels it through that which is exerted by the rest of his organism as an effect on the head. [2] There, then, where we human beings will stand after the volcanic evolution, stand these creative spirits. There is their sphere, which belongs to them just as the 4th sphere belongs to us. But we must think of these two spheres as intertwined and interpenetrating. We live not only in the fourth sphere, but also in this eighth sphere, because our divine creators live with us in this sphere. If you now consider this eighth sphere, then not only our divine creator spirits live in it, but the ahrimanic entities also live in it. In the 4th sphere the Luciferian spirits live with us, to be precise. The fact that we live in the 4th sphere means that we are in the 4th sphere of our development, we are perceptive and intelligent beings. This Luciferic power is actually intimately connected with the special kind of intelligence which man today still regards essentially as his actual intelligence, which he prefers to use as his intelligence. And yet, this intelligence has only been assigned to man by the fact that the Michael entity has pushed Luciferic spirits down into the 4th sphere of man, and thus the intelligent impulse has actually entered man. [3] Why did people in the time before the Mystery of Golgotha not follow Lucifer's urge to lead them into a world full of light? They did not follow because something was introduced by the higher gods into the earth's development which prevented man from becoming so light in his development that he could follow Lucifer directly. That which is now called the Eighth Sphere was introduced into earth evolution. The Eighth Sphere consists, in one of its aspects, in the fact that man acquires such a pull and inclination towards his lower nature that Lucifer cannot bring the higher nature out of this lower nature.

Every time Lucifer made his efforts to spiritualize people in ancient times, people were too accustomed to the flesh to follow Lucifer. If we go back to ancient times, we find everywhere that religions aim to make people worship that which is earthly, that which gives an earthly connection, that which lives in flesh and blood, so that man is difficult enough not to be led out into the universe. The earth is given the moon as a satellite. This means nothing other than: The earth was given a force that enables it to hold the moon close to it, to attract it. If the earth did not have this power, then the spiritual correlate of this power would also not bind man to his lower nature; for seen from the spiritual, the same power that binds man to his lower nature is the same power with which the earth attracts the moon. So that one can say: The Moon is placed in the universe as an opponent of Lucifer, in order to prevent the Luciferic. [4] Thus the fertilization (during the Lemurian epoch) took place with the manasic forces: the lower astral body merged with the higher astral body. A large part of the former astral body fell away. One part formed the lower parts of the human astral body, and the other, newly added astral body in connection with the head, joined with the upper parts of the human being. What was then peeled off, emerged from this astral body, which was connected to the lindworm structure (see: centaur), could no longer have any further development on earth. As a conglomerate, this formed the astral sphere of the moon, the so-called eighth sphere. The moon actually harbors astral entities that came into being as a result of man having shed something. [5] But it was only possible to transfer the adversary of Lucifer into the lower nature as long as man had not developed his ego in the way that happened at the time of the Mystery of Golgotha. The ego was subdued in ancient times. [6]

An ancient Egyptian (for example) could not have been told: People make history. - He would only have laughed, for he saw that the beings of the 3rd Hierarchy made history, even if he presented it in his own sensualized way. The people of the present carry all this within themselves, but unconsciously of course; it has been drawn down into the subconscious. Now they give themselves over to the belief that history is something that men have made on earth. If we were to look at such a soul in the present, we would say that this soul refuses to enter into the historical life of mankind in reality, it says: I do not want to know anything about the deeds of the Archai, the Archangeloi, the Angeloi; I only want to know from external evidence what people have done since those ancient times. - But this does not allow such a soul to develop, it keeps it in the position it was in in ancient Egyptian times. [7] What men have done on earth since Egyptian times belongs to the fourth level of education, but man himself rises above it, and because since the year 333 he cannot consciously project his whole being into that into which he in reality projects, he stands with his being even above the seventh level of education. By denying that he can project himself into the eighth sphere, man excludes himself from the good beings of this level of education and hands himself over to the ahrimanic spirit of the level of education in question. His thinking becomes ahrimanic instead of divine or spiritual. [8]

A sentence, a content that characterizes the spiritual in the sense of spiritual science, i.e. that has real spiritual content, does not merely remain in one's own etheric body until death, but imprints itself directly out of consciousness into the spiritual-etheric world. A sentence that truly touches the spiritual is imprinted in the etheric matter. Human beings produce of their own accord, even from our 5th post-Atlantean period onwards, only such things (entries) that can be corrected again. But under the influence of Ahriman and Lucifer, if they do not learn to be on their guard against them, they nevertheless engrave what they think, what they carry out under the influence of Lucifer and Ahriman, into the general etheric substantiality of the world. This is now recorded in the same way as otherwise only the results of spiritual science are recorded. [9] (See also: Akashic Chronicle)

Sources:

[1], [7], [8] GA 184: The polarity of duration and development in human life. The cosmic prehistory of humanity (1918)

[2], [3] GA 194: The mission of Michael. The revelation of the true secrets of human nature (1919)

[4], [6] GA 172: The karma of man's calling in connection with Goethe's life (1916)

[5] GA 93a: Basic elements of esotericism (1905)

[9] GA 170: The riddle of man. The spiritual background of human history (1916)

12
Evil

Just as heat is an illusion and behind it is the sacrifice, just as gas or air is an illusion and behind it is the giving virtue, so water as a substance, as an external reality, is only a sensual illusion, a mirror image, and what exists in the true of it is the resignation of some entities to what they receive from other entities. For if this resignation had not occurred, if the renouncing cherubim in question had accepted the sacrifice brought to them, they would - now figuratively speaking - have had the sacrificial smoke inside their own substance; what they themselves had done would have been expressed in the sacrificial smoke. Now, however, they have rejected this sacrificial substance and have thereby passed from mortality to immortality, from transience to permanence. But the sacrificial substance is there for the time being, it is, so to speak, released from the forces that would otherwise have absorbed it, and now does not need to follow the impulses of the cherubim, for these have released it, have rejected it. What happens now with this sacrificial substance? - What happens is that other beings take possession of them, which, because they do not now have this sacrificial substance in the cherubim, become independent of the cherubim, become independent beings who are there alongside the cherubim, whereas otherwise they would be directed by the cherubim if they had taken up the sacrificial substance. The cherubim, through what they resign themselves to, provide the remaining beings with the possibility to remain behind. By rejecting a sacrifice, other beings who do not resign, who give themselves over to desires and cravings and express their wishes, can seize the sacrificial substance and are thus able to join the other beings as independent entities. Now that we have become acquainted with the deeper reason for this remaining behind, we can see that the original guilt, if we want to speak of such an original guilt, is not at all due to those who have remained behind. If the cherubim had accepted the sacrifices, the Luciferic entities could not have remained behind, for they would not have had the opportunity to embody themselves in this substance. So that the possibility existed for entities to become independent in this way, the renunciation occurred beforehand. It is therefore so arranged by the wise world-direction that the gods themselves have produced their opponents. Thus we see that we have not to look for the cause of evil in the so-called evil entities, but in the so-called good entities, which only through their resignation caused evil to arise through the entities that could bring evil into the world. [1]

For Jakob Böhme a pre-earthly event appears in such a way that he says to himself: The Godhead once confronted other spiritual beings. These were, like our present nature at a later stage, a counter-throw of the Deity, through which the Deity brought itself to consciousness. But they behaved towards the deity like the limbs that turn against their own body. For Jakob Böhme, this gave rise to the entity Lucifer. [2]

If we humans were only left to the influence of the sun, we would be a kind of angel (see: Angeloi), but stupid. We would only be links in the organization of the cosmos. The fact that we are independent is due to our existence on earth. But if we were only under the influence of being on earth, if the sun did not have an effect on us, then we would be beasts, predators, beings that develop the wildest instincts. We must have the opportunity to be wild animals so that we can become independent beings. But so that we do not become wild animals, the influence of the sun must counteract the influence of the earth, must paralyze it. And as this happens, you can see through to the origin of evil. It is simply given by the fact that we are bound into earthly existence. [3]

The good is not to be found here in this world, but only outside the earth. Plato already said: "God is the good", - ChristJesus also pointed this out by saying: "No one is good but God alone." Through the good gods, evil is put into matter so that man will learn to turn away from it voluntarily. This is something that can only be said in a special mood. Only in a special state of mind may it be said that substance, matter, is nothing other than concentrated injustice. Concentrated sin is matter! [4]

The same forces that underlie our evil thoughts were emitted on the old moon by the beings of the hierarchies, from the angels (Angeloi) up to the spirits of form (Exusiai). They thereby brought forth the lunar existence. Lucifer and Ahriman, however, remained behind and are only now radiating these forces. Now, however, they are working into the meanwhile further condensed physical, into the physical blood of the human being, and thus evil arises. They are not evil in themselves. The esotericist must let them work on him, but not allow them to reach physical condensation. Then they remain valuable for the good thoughts of the future. [5]

The harmony of progress with its own inhibition is also the teaching of Manichaeism about evil. [6] How must we imagine the interaction of good and evil? We must explain it to ourselves from the harmony of life and form. Life becomes form through the fact that it finds resistance; that it does not express itself all at once - in one form. When a form is formed, life overcomes the form, passes into the germ, in order to be reborn later as the same life in a new form. And so life progresses from form to form. Life itself is formless and would not be able to live itself out perceptibly in itself. The fact that life appears in a limited form is an inhibition of this generally flowing life. It is precisely from that which has been left behind, which appears to it like a shackle standing on a higher level, that form arises in the great cosmos. That which is life is always embraced as form by that which was present as life in an earlier time. (A good) example: the Catholic Church. The life that lives in the Catholic Church from Augustine to the 15th century is Christian life. Where does the form come from? It is nothing other than the life of the old Roman Empire. What was still life in this old Roman Empire has solidified into form. What was once life later becomes form for a higher level of life. Is it not the same with man? The form is that which has come over like a seed from the lunar epoch (earlier earth embodiment). At that time, in the lunar period, kamic (see: Kama) development was the life of man; now it is the shell, the form. The life of a previous epoch is always the form of a later epoch. In this the other problem is given at the same time: that of good and evil; in that the good of an earlier time is united with the good of a more recent time. And this is basically nothing other than the harmony of progress with its own inhibition. This is at the same time the possibility of material appearance, the possibility of coming to manifest existence. This is our human existence within the mineral-solid earth: inner life and the life left behind from earlier times hardened into an inhibiting form. This is also the teaching of Manichaeism about evil. [7] (See also: Apocalypse; Manichaeans).

Sources:

[1] GA 132: Evolution from the Point of View of the Truthful (1911)

[2] GA 62: Results of Spiritual Research (1912/1913)

[3] GA 196: Spiritual and Social Changes in the Development of Humanity (1920)

[4], [5] GA 266/3: From the Contents of the Esoteric Lessons. Volume III (1913-1923)

[6], [7] GA 93: The Temple Legend and the Golden Legend as a Symbolic Expression of Past and Future Secrets of Human Evolution (1904/1906)

Evil - the evil in man

Lucifer has anchored himself in the emotional soul. Ahriman has established himself in the intellectual soul, i.e. in the reworked part of the etheric body. He is in there and leads man to false judgments about the material, leads him to error and sin and lies. Into the consciousness soul, which consists in an unconscious transformation of the physical body, there will creep into this consciousness soul and thus into what is called the human ego - for the ego is absorbed into the consciousness soul - those spiritual entities which are called the asuras. The evil that the Luciferic spirits brought to mankind at the same time as the blessing of freedom, they will completely strip away in the course of earth time. The evil brought by the ahrimanic spirits can be cast off in the course of karmic law. But the evil brought by the asuric powers cannot be expiated in such a way, for these asuric spirits will cause the ego to unite with the sensuality of the earth. [1]

Just as man today consists of the physical body, etheric body, astral body and I, Manas, Buddhi and Atman, so these beings who inhabited Saturn, whom we can compare with today's earthly man in his relationship to the earth, consisted of the I, Manas, Buddhi, Atman, the Holy Spirit, the Word or the Son, and the Father. Theosophical language calls them the "Asuras" (Archai). They are the ones who, from the beginning, have implanted the independence, the I-consciousness and the I-feeling into the physical structure of the human body. There have always been beings who have taken the evil path. Therefore it must be said: These beings, who were the implanters of the ego, who today are far above man, have placed the ego in the service of self-denial, of sacrifice; the others have selfishly pursued their ego. We carry within us the effects of those spirits of the ego who have taken the good path in striving for freedom and human dignity, and we carry within us the germ of evil, because the entities that fell away at that time (during Saturn's evolution) have continued to work. Christianity itself distinguishes between the Father God, whom Christianity regards as the highest ascended spirit of Saturn, and his adversary, the spirit of all evil entities and everything radically immoral, which fell away on Saturn at that time. These are the two representatives of Saturn. [2]

The thinking that should actually be applied to the spiritual world - radically, consistently, violently applied to external sensual reality - does not build up this sensual reality, but destroys it. If we go only one plan higher (astral plan), then we realize through the contemplation of this plan what is actually at work in evil. For if the forces that live in thieves, robbers and murderers were not lived out here in the sense world (unlawfully), but if man were to live them out transformed on the higher plane, they would be fully justified there. That is where it belongs. Evil is a displaced good. Only through the fact that the ahrimanic forces push into our world that which belongs in a completely different world does the nature of evil arise. And so a destructive thinking arises - not a thinking that can wait for fulfillment from the spiritual world - (for example) when the social ideal is spun out of one's own human inner being. [3]

The world has taken on an ahrimanic character. For this had to happen, that the ego, by grasping itself in the physical, then, if it does not rise up at the right time to grasp itself spiritually as a spiritual being, that it then, if it remains in the physical, is seized by the ahrimanic powers. And we see this seizure in the fact that, as little as the sleepy souls want to admit it to themselves, a tendency towards evil is asserting itself everywhere today (1921). [4] In the veins of a man who is only up to evil - even if this cannot be proved with crude instruments - the blood not only flows differently, but is even differently composed than in a man who carries good in his soul. [5]

Sources:

[1] GA 107: Spiritual Science and the Study of Man (1908/1909)

[2] GA 100: Human Development and the Knowledge of Christ. Theosophy and Rosicrucianism - The Gospel of John (1907)

[3] GA 189: The Social Question as a Question of Consciousness (1919)

[4] GA 204: Perspectives of the Development of Humanity. The Materialistic Impulse of Knowledge and the Task of Anthroposophy (1921)

[5] GA 236: Esoteric Considerations of Karmic Connections - Second Volume (1924)

Evil - the evil in man, the inner source of evil

This is what the Mystery student was pointed to when he was led from the Orient to the Mystery colonies, especially Ireland and the West in general: In your inner being, under the faculty of memory, you as a human being carry something within you which goes out to destruction, and if you had not had this within you, you could not have developed your thinking, for you must develop your thinking by the fact that the powers of thought penetrate the etheric body. But an etheric body that is penetrated by the powers of thought acts on the physical body in such a way that it throws its matter back into chaos, destroys it. Therefore, when a human being, with the same attitude with which he penetrates to memory, enters into this human interior, then he enters the region where the human being wants to destroy, where the human being wants to extinguish what is there. We all carry under our memory mirror, precisely for the purpose of developing the human thoughtful ego, the destructive rage, the rage to dissolve matter. There is no human self-knowledge that does not point to this inner human fact in all its intensity. Within Western civilization, man is the envelope of a source of destruction, and actually the forces of decline can only be transformed into the forces of emergence if man becomes aware that he is the envelope of a source of destruction. [1] Realization only draws attention to this focus of destruction. And it is much worse when the focus is there without man being able to point to it with his consciousness than when man takes note of this focus of destruction with full consciousness and enters into the modern development of civilization from this point of view. What first struck the disciples who first heard of these secrets in these mystery colonies was fear. They got to know it thoroughly. They became thoroughly acquainted with the feeling that to look into the human inner being - not dishonestly in the sense of a nebulous mysticism - must inspire fear, is frightening. And this fear was only dispelled among the old mystery students of the West by pointing out to them the full weight of the facts. Then they overcame what must arise as fear through consciousness. When the intellectualist period came along, this fear became unconscious, and as such unconscious fear it continues to work. It works in all kinds of disguises in outer life. The intellectualistic age obscured the view of what is within man; but it could not do away with fear. Man is afraid to look down deeper than into this life of memory, into this ordinary life of thought, which has its regularity only between birth and death. He is afraid to look down into the actual eternity of the human soul, and out of this fear he justifies the doctrine that there is nothing at all but this life between birth and death. - Modern materialism arose out of fear, without having the slightest idea of it. [2]

Evil is nothing other than the chaos thrown outwards that is necessary within the human being. And in this chaos, in that which must be in man, but which must also remain in him as a source of evil, the human ego, the human egoity, must be hardened. This human egoity cannot live beyond the human sensory sphere in the outer world. Therefore the ego-consciousness disappears in sleep. Hence the view of the ancient Oriental sage that one can only penetrate there through devotion, through love, through giving up the ego (see: Nirvana). In the Occident, people have a blood, people have a lymphatic juice that is saturated with egoity, which is hardened in the inner hearth of evil. In the Orient, people have a blood, a lymph, in which the echoes of the longing for nirvana live. [3]

But by penetrating down, we could say, into the inner evil in man and then also becoming aware of how the moral impulses blow into this inner evil, where matter is destroyed, where matter is thrown back into its chaos, then we have the beginning of spiritual being in ourselves. We then perceive the creating spirit within ourselves. For as the moral laws work on matter, which has become one and has been thrown back into chaos, we have within us something spiritually active in a natural way. We become aware of the concrete spiritual activity that is in us and that is the seed for future worlds. We really penetrate to what must be called the "inner word". However, in the attenuated word that we speak or hear in our dealings with our fellow human beings, hearing and speaking are separated, whereas in our inner being, when we dive down below the memory mirror into the inner chaos, we have a beingness where in our inner being itself is spoken and heard at the same time. But at the same time we have entered a realm where it no longer makes sense to speak of the subjective and the objective. Therefore it is also for him who now has an insight into how behind the sensory carpet there is a spiritual world, how the spiritual beings of the higher hierarchies rule and weave, for him it is so that he first perceives these beings through an imagination; but for him, for his seeing, they are permeated by inner life, in that he now hears the word, apparently through himself, but in reality from the world. Compare also: microcosm and macrocosm their correspondence. [4]

Whoever can penetrate through the veil of the outer world of the senses as well as through the veil of his own soul-life, will ultimately make an eminently important discovery, namely that what we find when we penetrate through the veil of the soul-life is in essence the same as what we find when we penetrate through the veil of the outer world of the senses. For a unified spiritual world reveals itself to us, one time from without, the other time from within. The ancient Indian community was in this position of having this great experience of the unity of spiritual life. When the supersensible gaze of the ancient Indian turned outwards, he saw the outer spiritual entities that held together and shaped the phenomena of the world. When he immersed himself in his inner being, he found his Brahman through this mystical immersion in himself; and he knew that what he found behind the veil of the life of the soul was the same thing that had created and ordered the outer world with the great mighty flapping of wings that went through the cosmos. [5]

If one has elevated oneself to supersensible research methods, one sees how those forces that are constructive forces in external nature become destructive in man, how these destructive forces become the carriers of evil in human nature. That which works in man as continued nature also becomes natural, it becomes pathological and thus evil. Nature outside us is neutral towards good and evil, within us it is also physically destructive, pathogenic, evil. And we only maintain ourselves against that which reigns within us as evil by relating to external nature in the life between birth and death in such a way that we only allow it to reach the mirror image of external nature, that we do not grasp in our consciousness what organically reigns in the depths of our human being as the primal cause of evil. We receive the outer impressions of the senses, but we conduct them only up to a certain point. They are not allowed to go down there. These external impressions of nature would have a poisoning effect - this is evident in supersensible knowledge. We radiate them back and form our memory, our recollection. If man were to become conscious of what lies behind his inner mirror, what lies below, where nature becomes evil in him, he would become an evil being through the action of nature in him. [6] And now a significant realization arises which leads over into the religious realm. [7] Just as the Father-experience (God-experience) is simply an experience of perfect, harmonious health, so the Son-experience is that fact which is experienced inwardly when the human being realizes that, by ascending to full I-consciousness, he himself is actually quite natural. And if he does not want to hand it over to evil, then this ego must awaken within earthly life itself to a permeation with divine-spiritual contents. It must become truth: Not I, but the Christ in me. [8] The question of the Father is a question of knowledge. The question of the Son is a question of destiny, a question of happiness and unhappiness. This is not a phrase, it is not something that has merely allegorical and symbolic meaning: Christ the physician, Christ the savior or healer, the one who frees the ego from the danger from which the father cannot free it, because the healthy can also become ill. And health would have to be lost through the I-consciousness. What the Father cannot do, he has given to the Son. The Christ enters into human consciousness in a separate experience alongside the Father. [9]

We do not look down beyond our memory - the sphere of destruction lies down there, beneath our memory. Here all the laws of nature dissolve, all the earthly laws of the world dissolve in man. Here indeed lies a hearth of destruction, and this hearth of destruction must be in us, just as there must be a coating behind the mirror. We need it, otherwise the memory would not be there. So there must be a hearth of destruction within us. For anything to be in the world, there must be spiritual forces to bring it about. In my anthroposophical view, I call the spiritual forces that underlie this focus of destruction ahrimanic forces. The human being is protected by the threshold that is given in his memory mirror, he does not normally enter this hearth of destruction fully without further ado; the concepts of memory are mirrored beforehand. But this hearth of destruction must be there. The ahrimanic forces, which are connected with these destructive forces, that is, with the forces of dissolution for what happens in the physical world, these ahrimanic forces are not actually evil when one looks at the world from their aspect. For that which they do, that which destroys, is not at all evil in the divine plan of the world. But if man now abstracts in such a way that he allows the destructive forces to pass through his memory mirror, then what happens is that something occurs here in the physical world which has its good meaning in the next higher world, which is only displaced in the physical world. So that what we call evil in physical life is a necessary thing in a higher world. It is only possible for man to allow that to enter his sphere of experience which, if he wishes to remain an innocent man, is to a certain extent displaced in it. Thus evil is only evil within the earthly world; and for man only the consequences of this evil remain when he passes through the gate of death, that is, the consequences of his actions. [10]

Sources:

[1] - [4] GA 207: Anthroposophy as Cosmosophy - Part One:. Essential Traits of Man in the Earthly and Cosmic Realms (1921)

[5] GA 113: The Orient in the Light of the Occident. The Children of Lucifer and the Brothers of Christ (1909)

[6] - [9] GA 79: The Reality of the Higher Worlds. Introduction to Anthroposophy (1921)

[10] GA 343: Lectures and Courses on Christian Religious Work, II Spiritual Recognition - Religious Feeling - Cultic Action (1921)

Evil - the evil in man, the inner source of evil and spiritual training

We can rise into our true nature, which happens when the destructive powers of death within us take hold of us more than they usually do; or rather, when they become conscious. But what is experienced there must remain within the human being if it is not to appear in a certain pathological way. Man must not allow it to enter his ordinary consciousness. That is to say, man must not allow this area, which lies in the etheric body, to flow up into his ordinary consciousness, but he must lead his ordinary consciousness down into the etheric body. So what is down there must not penetrate into the ordinary imagination, but the ordinary imagination must penetrate down there.

This area is always referred to in such a way that those who have recognized it, who have seen something of it, say: It is impossible to express in human words what is down there. - You can trace this from the descriptions of the older Egyptian initiations right up to Bulwer-Lytton. But in a certain way, suggestively, we can and must speak about this area today. This source of evil, it is actually constantly within us, it is situated below the life of imagination. It just must not infect the imaginative life, otherwise the imaginations become motives for evil, it must remain below. And the person who wants to look at it there must be so morally strong that he does not let it come up, that he really only sends the consciousness down. But what is this in man for? We carry within us the dying process that develops our thinking. This process is still conscious, but it must descend into the unconscious. For if this process did not continue, our thoughts would never consolidate in such a way that memory could come into being within us. [1]

All kinds of persecution mania are, after all, an overflowing egoism - if that which strikes up there can be so, what must the inward sleeping will be like, that will which covers us with a benevolent creation through sleep! Whoever gets to know it, gets to know all that in man which in the extreme degree can bring man to wickedness. And it is the deep secret of life that we have the balance of our organic activity through those forces which, if they were to dominate man in conscious life, would make him a criminal and an evil-doer. If you ask about the nature of those forces which have a balancing effect on the exhausted forces of life, then you must say - it is evil. This is where it has its task. And when people become aware of it through spiritual training, then it is what older spiritual researchers have also said: In its very essence it must not be characterized, for sinful is the mouth that utters it, sinful is the ear that hears it. - But man must know that life is a dangerous process for man, and that in the subsoil of life, as a force that is necessarily used, evil is definitely present. [2]

Man must pass through the soul of consciousness if he wants to absorb the forces of the spirit-self, Manas, the spirit of life, Buddhi, the spirit-man, Atma. To do this, he must completely unite the forces of death with his own being in the course of the fifth post-Atlantean period, i.e. until the middle of the fourth millennium. He can do that. But he cannot combine the forces of evil with his own being in the same way. The forces of evil are of such a nature in the universe, in the cosmos, that man can only absorb them in his development during the Jupiter period (see: Jupiter development) in the same way as he now absorbs the forces of death. We can therefore say that the forces of evil act upon man with a lesser intensity, taking hold of only a part of his being - if we want to penetrate into the essence of these forces of evil, we must not look at the external consequences of these forces, but must seek out the essence of evil where it is present in his own being. If one wants to look for evil in man, one must not look for it in the evil actions that are carried out within human society, but one must look for it in the inclinations to evil. In which people do the evil inclinations work? Yes, the answer to this can be found if you try to cross the so-called threshold of the guardian in order to really get to know the human being. The answer is: Since the beginning of the fifth post-Atlantean period, all human beings have had a subconscious inclination towards evil. - Indeed, it is precisely in this that man enters this modern cultural period, that he takes into himself the inclinations to evil. There is no crime in the world to which every human being does not have the inclination in his subconscious; whether in one case or another the inclination to evil leads outwardly to an evil act depends on quite different conditions than on this inclination. [3]

These forces of evil prevail in the universe. Man must absorb them, thus planting in himself the seed for experiencing spiritual life with the soul of consciousness. So they are truly not there, these forces that are perverted by the social order, they are truly not there to cause evil actions, but they are there precisely so that man can break through to spiritual life at the level of the consciousness soul. If man did not take up those inclinations to evil, man would not come to have the impulse from his soul of consciousness to receive the spirit from the universe, which from now on must fertilize everything cultural, if it does not want to be dead. [4]

Sources:

[1] GA 206: Becoming human, world soul and world spirit - Part Two: Man as a Spiritual Being in Historical Development (1921)

[2] GA 208: Anthroposophy as Cosmosophy - Part Two:. The Formation of Man as the Result of Cosmic Effects (1921)

[3], [4] GA 185: Historical symptomatology (1918)

Evil - evil in the present

In the fifth age, the forces of illusion will be combined with the forces of evil - the illusion, maya itself will be seized by evil. And all this will be interspersed with intelligence. And people will have to get used to one thing: to perceive the irruption of the forces of evil as the irruption of the laws of nature, of natural forces, in order to get to know them and to know what rules and weaves in the subsoil of things. It is not possible to regard evil from the outset in such a way that one only wants to escape from it in full egoism; one cannot do that. One must penetrate it with consciousness. [1]

When what is called the (first world) war is over - yes, then it will be the case that everything conventional will fail; that all whitewash will fall away from the conditions of life. Humanity has entered a stage in its development where evil and lies must become visible. Everything is already there: the evil, the horrible, the lies, the decay - it is all there, but it is covered up! And it must be revealed! It will show itself in the living conditions of the individual - in marriages, families, friendships and above all in enmities - as well as in the overall life of nations, of states! There will no longer be any inhibitions for certain things. Only those people who can distinguish the essential from the non-essential on the outside and above all on the inside will be able to get through all that is coming without suffering emotional damage! This is very, very difficult and requires constant, painstaking practice. For here lies the most terrible seduction! Humanity will have to fight against the lie - the primal evil! [2]

Sources:

[1] GA 273: Humanities Explanations of Goethe's "Faust" Volume II: The Faust Problem. The Romantic and the Classical Walpurgis Night (1916-1919)

[2] He: E. Beltle & K. Vierl [Eds:] Memories of Rudolf Steiner (1979)

Evil - evil in the future

Just as birth and death have gone from the inside to the outside in human perception, so man must in turn develop something within himself in the fifth post-Atlantean period, which will again go to the outside in the sixth age, which therefore begins in the fourth millennium. And that is evil. Evil is developed within the human being in the fifth post-Atlantean period and must radiate outwards and be experienced externally in the sixth period in the same way as birth and death in the fifth period. Evil should develop inwardly in the human being. Through the experience of evil it is brought about that the Christ can appear again, as he appeared through death in the fourth post-Atlantean period. [1]

From the cosmos, from the cosmic development, the good can only be recognized from the past, from the time of Saturn, the sun and the moon and from half the time on earth. Wisdom and the good are connected with looking back into the past. These inoculate those members of the higher hierarchies who belong to human beings in the time of human nature, in which this human nature has not yet awakened to full consciousness as it has on earth (today). For the following time, for the Jupiter, Venus, volcano time and also for the present time on earth - it is already beginning - for half the time on earth, man must still preserve the good, if he wants to reach the good, must develop the impulses of this good out of his nature; for the forces of evil reveal themselves out of that which is newly approaching. Without these forces of evil revealing themselves, man would not attain free will. Only the possibility of absorbing evil arises from the external conditions. It is thanks to this exposure to evil that man can attain free will, that he can choose between the evil that approaches him and the good that he can develop out of his nature, if he trustingly surrenders to that which has been placed in his nature by his ancestors.

Therefore, these initiates (the leadership of Roman Catholicism and certain Anglo-Saxon brotherhoods) say to those whom they also wish to initiate: There are three layers of consciousness. If man dives down into this subconscious, from which dreams spring up, then he experiences an intimate kinship with other beings, also with other people, which cannot reach up into the present world. If man lives, as is the case in the present, with his day-consciousness in the sensuous or intelligible world, this is the world in which he passes through birth and death. And if man lives his way up into the world which he will enter as a physical man in the future, which he will attain through supersensible knowledge, then this is the world in which he first experiences evil. For it is precisely in this that man's strength must consist, that he is a match for evil, that he can stand his ground in the face of evil. He must be able to get to know evil. The true consequence of this fact is, of course, that it is necessary for present humanity to shed light on the past, which can only be done through spiritual science, so that man may be equal to the necessary confrontation with evil. He can only be protected from evil by immersing himself in the spiritual life of goodness. If one withholds the spiritual life of the good from him, then one does not act as a philanthropist, regardless of whether one is a member of any Masonic order or whether one is a Jesuit. One can (thereby) have the purpose of knowing only the good in the narrow circle itself, in order to dominate helpless humanity with the help of this good, which leads itself into the absurdity of life through evil. [2]

Sources:

[1] GA 185: Historical Symptomatology (1918)

[2] GA 273: Humanities Explanations of Goethe's "Faust" Volume II: The Faust Problem. The Romantic and the Classical Walpurgis Night (1916-1919)

Evil - evil in the future and the Manichaeans

In view of this development of mankind (into a separate evil human race), secret orders were founded centuries ago which have set themselves the highest conceivable tasks. One such order is the Manichaean Order. The members of this order are educated in a very special way for their great task. This order knows that there will be people who will have no more evil in their karma, and that there will also be a naturally evil race in which all evil will still be present to a greater degree than in the wildest animals, for they will do evil consciously, cunningly, with a highly trained mind. The Manichaean Order is already teaching its members in such a way that they will become transformers of evil in later generations. The tremendous difficulty of this task lies in the fact that in those evil races of men there is not, as in an evil child, any good in addition to the evil, which can be developed higher by example and teaching. The member of the Manichaean Order is already learning today how to radically transform those who are by nature completely evil. And this transformed evil will become a very special good after successful work. A state of holiness will be the moral state on earth, and the power of transformation will bring about the state of holiness. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 95: Before the Gates of Theosophy (1906)

Evil - origin and conflict in the heavens

The Luciferic and Ahrimanic element has become what it has become through the lunar evolution. It remained there and carried into the earth evolution what originated in the lunar evolution. For these Ahrimanic and Luciferic beings, the spirits of movement, the Dynamis, come into consideration as creative beings, who are, so to speak, the creators and governors of the lunar evolution (like the spirits of form (Exusiai) for the earth). And they have brought about the angelic being, the Angelos, which is regularly formed on the moon. [1]

In the interval between the evolution of Jupiter (the ancient Sun) and the evolution of Mars (the ancient Moon) a number of entities were detached from the sphere of the Spirits of Motion, Dynamis; they were so placed in the course of evolution that, instead of leading it forward, they placed obstacles in its way. [2] The doctrine of the controversy in the heavens forms an essential, an integrating part of all the Mysteries; it also contains the primal secret of the origin of evil. At a certain point in the evolution of the moon, the dynamis were of very different degrees of maturity. Some longed to rise as high as possible spiritually, while others had fallen behind or at least progressed normally in their development. So there were dynamis who had progressed far ahead of their comrades on the old moon. The consequence of this was that these two classes of dynamis separated. The more advanced ones drew out the solar body, and the more backward ones formed the moon orbiting it. Thus we have first sketched the (original) conflict in the heavens, the tearing apart of the old moon, so that the minor planet, the old moon, comes under the dominion of the retarded dynamis, and the old sun (of the lunar period) under the dominion of the advanced dynamis. From the time when the rulers or Kyriotetes worked to create the old sun until the time of the creation of the old moon, when the Dymanis began their mission, there was a mighty battlefield, a mighty conflict in the sky. The Kyriotetes drew together the entire mass of our solar system as far as the markstone of Jupiter (a body enveloped by the planetary orbit of today's Jupiter), the Dynamis then drew together the entire system as far as the markstone of today's Mars. Between these two planetary milestones in the sky lies the great battlefield of conflict in the middle of the sky. Between Mars and Jupiter you have blasted the army of small planetoids (to date, the data is known for just under 3000 planetoids, but it is estimated that there are 50,000). These are the ruins of the battlefield of the conflict in the sky that was fought between the two cosmic points in time when our solar system was pulled together up to Jupiter and later to Mars. [3]

For the good of humanity, certain dynamis had to be detached. These powers did not become evil at first, they need not be regarded as evil powers, but one can even say that they sacrificed themselves by standing in the way of development. These powers can therefore be called the gods of obstacles. They were the great promoters of development. But they were the originators of evil; for by their running riot, evil gradually arose. [4]

The first who had the possibility to become evil were the Angeloi, because this possibility was only available from the development of the moon. There, from the sun to the moon, the conflict took place in the sky. A part of the Angeloi now rejected this possibility, did not allow themselves to be seduced, so to speak, by the forces that were to lead into the obstacles; they remained with the old nature. So that down to the Angeloi, and still in a part of the Angeloi, we have before us such beings of the spiritual hierarchies who absolutely cannot help but follow the divine will. Those Angeloi who threw themselves into what the Dynamis did in the sky during the conflict were beings that we call Luciferian beings because of their further deeds. These beings then approached the human astral body during the development of the earth and gave man the possibility of evil, but thus also the possibility of developing out of his own free power. So that within the whole sequence of levels of the hierarchies we have the possibility of freedom only with a part of the Angeloi and with man. The possibility of freedom begins, so to speak, in the midst of the Angeloi; but in man it is only developed in the right way. Man has only been preserved from being overpowered by the forces pulling him down by the fact that entities have overshadowed him, that the Angeloi, which had remained above, and the Archangeloi above, have embodied themselves in special individuals and guided man. And this happened until that time when an entity, which until then had only been connected with the solar existence, had come so far that it could now not only, like earlier entities of the higher worlds, enter the physical body, etheric body and astral body of the human being, but that it could penetrate into the human being up to the ego. 110.166f. (See: Christ).

Just as the human being should develop his seven limbs in the course of the earth evolution, so the Angeloi should develop their seven limbs during the moon evolution. Now those Angeloi who correctly formed their seven limbs during the lunar evolution entered the earth evolution, and they have become the spirits who are to mediate between the individual human being and the human group, which is led by a single Archangelos who has formed his seven limbs. But among these there have been those who have only reached six or five limbs, so to speak, who have not fully developed all their seven limbs during the lunar evolution. Therefore they were not able to become leaders of individual human beings as angels or leaders of groups of human beings as archangels during the earth evolution. They are to be regarded as the Luciferic and Ahrimanic entities that stand before us, the lowest hierarchy, as it were; there are those above them when we speak of Ahriman and Lucifer. [5]

Now something arose, a tremendously serious, great, significant cosmic event. One would like to say: it was now in the spirit land (Devachan), or if we speak in the sense of religion, it was in heaven, the regularly developed Archangeloi and Angeloi and that which emerged as an unfinished offspring. And then it turns out that the regularly developed Archangeloi and Angeloi threw these non-regularly developed ones, who had only developed their six or five limbs, down to earth, from the heavens to earth, because they could not be used there. And so, from the beginning of the earth's development, I would say, an invisible kingdom mingled with the substantiality of the earth's development: the kingdom of Lucifer and Ahriman. [6]

Sources:

[1], [5], [6] GA 162: Questions of Art and Life in the Light of Spiritual Science (1915)

[2] - [4] GA 110: Spiritual Hierarchies and their Reflection in the Physical World. Zodiac, Planets, Cosmos (1909)

Evil race of the future

The secret of the Manichaeans was that they had realized that in the future there will be two groups of people, the evil and the good. In the fifth round there will no longer be a mineral kingdom, but a kingdom of the wicked. The Manichaeans knew this. They have therefore set themselves the task of educating people now so that they can later become educators of evil people. In the sect of the Manichaeans, great deepenings have taken place from time to time. [1] Anyone who believes that in such a development a certain number of people are condemned to belong to the realm of "evil humanity" does not see how the mutual relationship between the sensual and the spiritual takes shape in this development. Both, the sensual and the soul-spiritual, form separate streams of development within certain limits. The forms of "evil humanity" arise through the forces inherent in the sensual current. A necessity for a human soul to embody itself in such a form will only exist if this human soul itself has created the conditions for it. It could also be the case that the forms created out of the powers of the sensible would not find any human souls from the earlier time, because these would be too good for such bodies. Then these forms would have to be animated out of the universe other than by earlier human souls. These forms will only be animated by human souls if they have prepared themselves for such an embodiment. [2]

World egoism emanates from the Anglo-American race. From that side the whole earth will be covered with egoism. From England and America come all the inventions that cover the earth like a net of egoism. The English-American culture consumes the culture of Europe (said 1905). Racial development does not go parallel with (the individual) development of the soul. But the race itself goes to ruin. It is in this that the evil race is predisposed. [3]

Just as it is true that man once left behind him that which today forms the animal world, so that which is bad in him today will form a kind of degenerated humanity. At present we can still more or less conceal the good or evil that is in us. A day will come when we will no longer be able to do so, when this good or this evil will be indelibly written on our foreheads, on our bodies and even on the face of the earth. Then humanity will split into two races. Just as we encounter rocks or animals today, we will then encounter beings of pure malice and ugliness. In our day, only the clairvoyant reads the goodness or moral ugliness in beings. [4] After the war of all against all (see: Apocalypse), it will be written on the forehead and in the whole physiognomy whether man is good or evil. The innermost part of a person's soul will be written on his face as a physiognomy; indeed, his whole body will be a reflection of what lives in his soul. And those who have turned away from the spiritual life as represented to us (in the Apocalypse) by the church of Laodicea, who were lukewarm, not warm and not cold, will live on into the other next age as those who delay the evolution of mankind, who preserve the backward forces of development. They will bear the evil passions and impulses and instincts that are hostile to the spiritual on their ugly, unintelligent, evil-eyed faces. In their gestures and the way they handle everything they do, they will form an outward image of the ugliness that lives in their souls. Just as people have separated into races and cultural communities, they will separate into two great currents, the good and the evil. And you will see what they have brought their souls to. [5]

The reunion with the moon will then coincide with the culmination of evil on earth. In contrast, the union of the earth's body with the sun will mark the dawn of bliss, the reign of the elect. [6]

Sources:

[1], [3] GA 93a: Basic Elements of Esotericism (1905)

[2] GA 13: The Secret Science in Outline (1910)

[4], [6] GA 94: Cosmogony. Popular Occultism. The Gospel of John. Theosophy on the Basis of the Gospel of John (1906)

[5] GA 104: The Apocalypse of John (1908)

Evil and regeneration during sleep

We do not learn to recognize how our whole organism, how our limbs are permeated by this inner sleeping will. At the most, in some people, through quite peculiar dreams, something penetrates into the consciousness of what lives in that volition which produces our organism when we are in a sleeping state. What lives in this volition - that is something that rightly lies beyond the threshold of ordinary consciousness. Whoever gets to know it, gets to know all that in man which in the extreme degree can bring man to wickedness. And it is the deep secret of life that we have the balancing of our organic activity by those forces which, if they were to dominate man in conscious life, would make him a criminal and an evil-doer. Nothing in the world is evil or good in itself. That which, when it enters into conscious life, is radically evil, that is, when used in the right place, namely during our sleeping state as regulating organic activity, that is the compensation for the spent life forces. If you ask about the nature of those forces that have a balancing effect on the depleted forces of life, then you have to say: it is evil. Evil has its task. It has its task here. And when people become aware of it through spiritual training, it is what older spiritual researchers have also said: In its very essence it must not be characterized, for sinful is the mouth that utters it, sinful is the ear that hears it. But man must know that life is a dangerous process for man, and that in the subsoil of life, as a force that is necessarily used, evil is definitely present. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 208: Anthroposophy as Cosmosophy - Part Two:. The Formation of Man as the Result of Cosmic Effects (1921)

Evil and spirit - evil in the world

The impulses of evil develop because certain forces that actually belong in the higher spiritual world are misused down here in the physical world. If thieves would use their thieving instincts, murderers their murdering instincts, liars their lying instincts, instead of living them out on the physical plane, to develop higher powers, they would develop very significant higher powers. The mistake is only that they do not develop the powers they develop on the right plan. Evil is good displaced from another plan. [1] Man becomes evil by using in the wrong place the powers that have been given him for his perfection. Evil is in the world because man does not use the powers given to him in a world suitable for these powers. [2] The crime exists because man allows his better nature, not the worse, to be submerged in the physical-corporeal, which as such cannot be evil, and there develops those qualities which do not belong in the physical-corporeal, but which belong precisely in the spiritual. Why can we humans be evil? Because we are allowed to be spiritual beings! Because he must have the qualities that can make him evil; otherwise he could never ascend into the spiritual world. [3]

Sources:

[1] GA 174: Contemplations on contemporary history. The Karma of Untruthfulness - Part Two (1917)

[2], [3] GA 63: Geisteswissenschaft als Lebensgut (1913/1914)

Evil and intelligence

While the Egyptian-Chaldean man felt and perceived in his intelligence his kinship with the whole cosmos, the Greek man perceived through his intelligence that which dominates tombs. We, too, perceive through our intelligence only that which dominates tombs, only we are not aware of it. We comprehend through our intelligence that which is subject to death. But this kind of intelligence, which comprehends the dead, is also transformed. And in the coming centuries and millennia, this intelligence will become something else, something far, far different. We as mankind will enter a development of intelligence in such a way that intelligence will have the tendency to comprehend only the wrong, the error, the deception, and to think out only evil. The secret students and especially the initiates have known for a certain time that human intelligence is moving towards evil in its development, that it is becoming more and more impossible to recognize good through mere intelligence. Humanity is in this transition today. We can say that people, if they exert their intelligence and do not carry within them particularly wild instincts, are still just able to look towards the light of good. But this human intelligence will become more and more inclined to think up evil and to introduce evil into the moral sphere, evil in knowledge, error. And if man were to develop nothing other than his intelligence, then he would become an evil being on earth. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 296: The educational question as a social question. The spiritual, cultural-historical and social background of Waldorf education (1919)

Evil worlds

There is a difference between the astral world and the devachanic world. Our astral world, as we live in it and as it permeates our physical space, is in a certain sense a double world, whereas the devachanic world is in a certain sense a single world. There are, as it were, two astral worlds, one being, so to speak, the astral world of good, the other the astral world of evil, whereas in the case of the devachanic world it would still be incorrect to make this distinction in such an abrupt manner. So we must say, if we look at the worlds from top to bottom: first the higher (also called arupa) devachan, then the lower (rupa) devachanic world, then the astral world (see: astral plan), and then the physical world. Then we do not yet consider the totality of our worlds. There is still a lower astral world below our physical world. The one that is good is above the physical plan, the one that is evil is below it, and this also practically permeates the physical world. So there are two worlds in the astral world which interpenetrate each other and which relate to man in the same way. Because the moon has separated from the earth, the evil astral world has been incorporated into the general astral world. In the future, an evil world will also be incorporated into the devachanic world. Into the evil astral world, to which Kamaloka also belongs, go all the currents that hinder human development. [1] The evil astral world is the domain of Lucifer, the evil lower devachan is the domain of Ahriman and the evil upper devachan is the domain of the Asuras. [2]

Now it is the elemental (astral) world from which the gate closes, so to speak, when one falls asleep in ordinary normal consciousness. And this must be so because the human being flows completely out into this elemental world; he is in it in everything. But he carries his own being, as he is as a human being, into this world. He does lose his ego - that pours out into the world - but that which is not ego, that which is his astral qualities, that which is, let us say, his sense of truth or lying, that which is this or that desire, this or that passion, all these qualities of soul man carries out into this world. He loses his ego; but in ordinary life it is precisely the ego that restrains us, that brings order and harmony to that which permeates our astral. As the ego loses itself, all kinds of instincts, desires and passions that the human being still has in the soul assert themselves in a disorderly way and now penetrate into those beings that the human being finds in the elemental world. This is now a real carrying in. For example, if a person has a bad quality, he really transfers this bad quality to a corresponding being; it is then in the being in question. So if the human being has a particularly bad quality, then he is attracted to such a being in the elemental world, which feels attracted to his bad quality. With the loss of the ego, therefore, the human being would first pour his entire astral being into those entities that permeate the elemental world as bad entities when he penetrates into the macrocosm. And the consequence of this would be that the human being, because he is connected with these beings and yet is weaker than these beings - for they are stronger than he; he has lost his ego, but they themselves have a strong ego - feeds them with his qualities, for which they reward him quite strongly in a negative sense. He gives them nourishment from his astral being, but when he returns to the physical world they give him, for the ego that awakens again, that which is peculiar to them, that is, they strengthen his tendency to evil. Thus we see that it is a wise arrangement for man to lose consciousness. The preparation for this world took place in the ancient Mysteries in that strong trials were imposed on the person concerned beforehand, through which he was strengthened in particular in the moral power of overcoming. [3]

Sources:

[1] GA 107: Spiritual science of human nature (1908/1909)

[2] GA 130: Esoteric Christianity and the Spiritual Guidance of Humanity (1911/1912)

[3] GA 119: Macrocosm and microcosm. The great and the small world. Soul Questions, Life Questions, Spiritual Questions (1910)

Good and evil

What is done here in the sensual world, what is subject to the moral judgment of good and evil, are phenomena behind the scenes of existence that are forward-working and constructive or downward-destructive. [1] The impulses of evil develop through the fact that certain forces which actually belong in the higher spiritual world are misused down here in the physical world. If thieves were to use their thieving instincts, murderers their murderous instincts, liars their lying instincts, instead of living them out on the physical plane, to develop higher powers, they would develop very significant higher powers. [2] One cannot grasp the good without realizing that the good lives in that which is the human astral body or that which is permeated by the ego. [3]

Before the Christ impulse came, man did not have the possibility of deciding on good and evil from his innermost being, it could only be made by individualities, such as the Bodhisattvas, reaching up with a part of their being into divine-spiritual worlds in the course of time, thus not actually taking the decision on good and evil from the innermost part of human nature, but from the divine worlds. They received it through their contact with divine-spiritual beings and then instilled it into the human soul as if by suggestion. Without such guides, people in pre-Christian times would only ever have been able to make poor decisions about good and evil. [4]

We actually live today in a consciousness that is a kind of continuation of the old primordial Persian world consciousness, which lived in Ahriman and Ormuzd (see: Ahura Mazdao). It sees in Ahriman the evil god who resists Ormuzd, and in Ormuzd the good god who destroys the works of Ahriman. It is not known that the Primordial Persian had the awareness that neither Ahriman nor Ormuzd [alone] may be followed, but their cooperation. And their interaction manifests itself in such a form as Mithras was. Ormuzd is a Lucifer-like figure who makes us worldless when we surrender to him, who wants to tear us away from the heaviness and let us burn in the light. Man must find the way between the light and the heaviness, between Lucifer and Ahriman, and therefore we must have the possibility not to think in any dualism, but to think in the Trinity. We must have the possibility to say: The Persian duality Ormuzd and Ahriman is today Lucifer and Ahriman, and the Christ is in the middle, the Christ is the one who brings about the balance. - Now all religious development up to now, especially theological development, has established a very pernicious equation, it has brought the figure of Christ as close as possible to that of Lucifer. It is almost a resurrection of the old Persian Ormuzd when one experiences how Christ is spoken of today. One only ever thinks of duality, i.e. evil in contrast to good. The world problem is not solved by duality, but only by the Trinity. For as soon as you have the duality, you not only have good and evil, but you have the battle between light and darkness, the battle that must not end with the victory of one over the other, but which must end with the harmonization of the two. This is actually what must be brought into the concept of Christ. Christ does not sit down with tax collectors and sinners for nothing. [5] (See also: evil; the true).

Sources:

[1] GA 199: Spiritual Science as Knowledge of the Basic Impulses of Social Formation (1920)

[2] GA 174: Contemplations on Contemporary History. The Karma of Untruthfulness - Part Two (1917)

[3] GA 176: Human and Humanistic Developmental Truths. The Karma of Materialism (1917)

[4] GA 116: The Christ Impulse and the Development of the I-Consciousness (1909/1910)

[5] GA 342: Lectures and Courses on Christian Religious Work, I. Anthroposophical Foundations for a Renewed Christian Religious Work (1921)

13
Formative Forces

The formative powers are entirely supersensible. [1] The archetypes (in the devachan) are the masters of everything that arises in the physical and spiritual world. Countless archetypes often work together so that this or that entity arises in the spiritual or physical world. [2] We know that when man has passed through this life in the supersensible world (in the afterlife) and enters into existence again through a new birth, he becomes in a certain way the self-constructor of his corporeality, indeed of his whole destiny in the next life. Within certain limits, man forms and builds up his body right into the convolutions of his brain with the forces he has to bring with him from the spiritual worlds when he enters physical existence anew through birth. [3]

Man is attracted by that which can arise in the physical line of inheritance. But that which the human being receives as his outer shell by passing through birth must first be given a finer plastic form with the help of a tremendously complicated arrangement of forces which the human being brings with him from the spiritual world and which he receives in such a way that he receives these forces from one order of hierarchies and those forces from another order of hierarchies. If we want to use a figurative expression, we can say: between death and a new birth, the gifts of the beings of higher hierarchies are given to man, and these gifts are the powers which man needs in order to adapt to his own individuality what is given to him through inheritance. [4]

If you count away the nutritive substances and what becomes of them, you have to think of the human organism as a supersensible system of forces behind it, which works in such a way that these nutritive substances can be led in all directions. Only by incorporating the nourishing material into this supersensible form does the human organism become a physical-sensible organism, something that can be seen with the eyes and grasped with the hands. We must therefore imagine a stream of nourishment absorbed by the life process or by the etheric body. The etheric body is responsible for its transformation, for its incorporation into the inner workings of the human organism. [5]

In this way you can imagine the most diverse organs in the human organism: initially supersensible and then filled with physical matter under the influence of the most diverse supersensible force systems. [6] Our etheric body is a structure that has been formed by our astral body. The physical body has slowly emerged from the foundation of the etheric body. [7] The general tide of life is called prana. It flows like water; but if it is formed like water poured into a vessel, poured into the physical body, it is called the etheric body. [8] The etheric body is the molder, the architect of the physical body. It receives the stimulus for the way in which it is to form from the astral body. In this are the models according to which the etheric body gives its form to the physical body. [9]

The consciousness of the plants is anchored in the lower devachan. The forces that underlie all growth and all organic structure are rooted in it. The forces that build up our own physical body are also rooted in it; that is, the forces of our etheric body. 100.34 Processes and events are constantly taking place in the cosmos. Essence lives in the cosmos. All this forms itself, inscribes itself in the etheric body. The etheric body of the human being is in fact a true image of the entire cosmos. There is nothing in the cosmos that is not pictorially and imaginatively expressed and, if you want to use the expression, reflected in the etheric body of the human being. And the astral human body constantly reads what the world inscribes in the etheric human body. [10]

The etheric body, as a sum of currents, of force effects, is the architect of the physical body crystallized out of it, which develops out of it like ice out of water. [11] All the impulses that shape the physical human body are contained in the etheric body. The artist also brings them out of his etheric body when he creates artistically. [12] In the same way (as the physical substance in the physical body) the etheric substance renews itself, although its form and structure remain uniform under the care of the higher ego. [13]

In humans and animals, the astral body holds the etheric together from within. [14] Astral substantialities, which create the physical and etheric bodies and are involved in their creation, take care of them again when the human being leaves them (in sleep). They find them differently than they originally delivered them to man. [15] When one's own astrality is outside, those entities also enter the etheric body. [16]

It is not to be imagined that all spirituality is ever transformed into matter; rather, in the matter we always have only transformed parts of the original spirituality before us. At the same time, the spiritual also remains the actual guiding and leading principle during the material period of development. [17]

The whole human body has been composed of parts which have come into being through the fact that the originally undivided mass has divided itself into organs after the original astral body had separated out various things (the later kingdoms of nature) and through these separations standing around it, which were reflected in it, images have arisen in it. These images became forces in him and formed his etheric body; that is, his etheric body is structured by these manifold images. In this etheric body, which now consists of parts, each such etheric part in turn condenses within itself and the physical body is formed. Each such physical core, which then becomes the organs, forms a kind of center in the ether at the same time. The spaces between the centers are filled by the mere ether mass. [18] Since we have put forth the most varied formations during earthly development, the parts in the etheric body only hold together to a certain degree. Human nature is a reflection of the entities that have emerged. As far as the beings lead a special existence, so far the parts of the physical body also lead a special existence. When the relationship of the forces has become so slight that it ceases, we live only until then; the measure of our lifetime is determined by how the entities around us relate to each other. [19]

Matter crystallizes, so to speak, around certain invisible formative forces. Certainly the forces connected with heredity still play a part, but the most important formative forces of the head are of cosmic origin, are certain crystallizing forces, I would say, to which matter attaches itself in the womb. As invisibly as the magnet sends out its rays, you must also imagine the shape of the head as it works its way in from the cosmos. And just as the iron filings arrange themselves according to the magnetic line, so what the mother produces arranges itself according to the cosmic forms that are incorporated into the head. If you take this idea to help you, then you will already be able to form a corresponding idea of the fact that work is done on the human head during the time between death and a new birth, and that the formative forces for the rest of the organism - but again only more or less, not completely - are applied from the earthly, from what lies in the hereditary relationships through the generations. In this respect, the human being is of earthly and cosmic origin. The most profound mysteries play out in these things, which are revealing not only for the origins of humanity, but actually for the entire cosmos. [20] The formative power of our head and also the entities that are active and creative in these formative powers belong to a completely different world than, for example, the formative power of our chest, the formative power of everything that belongs to our heart, including the arms and hands. And again, the abdominal organs and the legs belong to a completely different world than the other two limbs. [21]

Sources:

[1] GA 142: The Bhagavad Gita and the Letters of St. Paul (1912/1913)

[2] GA 9: Theosophy. Introduction to supersensible knowledge of the world and human destiny (1904)

[3] GA 141: Life between death and the new birth in relation to cosmic facts (1912/1913)

[4] GA 140: Occult Investigations into Life between Death and New Birth. The lively interaction between the living and the dead (1912/1913)

[5], [6] GA 128: An Occult Physiology (1911)

[7] GA 93: The Temple Legend and the Golden Legend as a symbolic expression of past and future secrets of human development (1904/1906)

[8] GA 95: Before the Gates of Theosophy (1906)

[9], [17] GA 13: An outline of the secret science (1910)

[10] GA 156: Occult reading and occult listening (1914)

[11] GA 55: The realization of the supernatural in our time and its significance for modern life (1906/1907)

[12] GA 168: The connection between the living and the dead (1916)

[13] GA 94: Cosmogony. Popular Occultism. The Gospel of John. Theosophy on the basis of the Gospel of John (1906)

[14] GA 136: The Spiritual Beings in the Celestial Bodies and Kingdoms of Nature (1912)

[15], [16] GA 98: Natural and Spiritual Beings - Their Work in our Visible World (1907/1908)

[18], [19] GA 93a: Basic elements of esotericism (1905)

[20] GA 170: The riddle of man. The Spiritual Background of Human History (1916)

[21] GA 161: Paths of spiritual knowledge and the renewal of artistic worldviews (1915)

Image Forces - Constitution of the Image Forces

When our astral body enters the physical and etheric body every morning on waking, it has to adapt itself to what has become of the physical and etheric body from the previous incarnation. The astral body never enters the etheric body in such a way that it can make use of what the etheric body has only become in the present incarnation. But after death this is the case. It is so connected with the etheric body that the astral body senses, perceives, feels what one has as a conclusion, as a result of the life just passed (see: life tableau). And when the astral body separates from the etheric body after a few days, then the whole result of life is in the astral body because it has drawn it out of the etheric body, because it has experienced it in the etheric body for a few days. He then needs a long time to shape what he has now experienced in such a way that a new life on earth can be constructed. [1]

When a person dies, he leaves the physical body behind, and the part of the physical body that he has already reshaped, forces, not substances, emerges. Very little is what man takes with him. But it is what serves to form the new physical body in a new incarnation. [2]

When a being attains a physical existence, the material substance disappears with its physical death. The spiritual forces that have driven this corporeality out of itself do not "disappear" in the same way. They leave behind their traces, their exact images in the spiritual foundation of the world. And whoever is able to raise his perception through the visible world to the invisible, finally arrives at something that could be compared to a huge spiritual panorama in which all past events of the world are recorded, the Akashic Records. [3] Some time after we have passed through the gate of death, our etheric body is taken from us and is not only interwoven into the general world ether, which we see last by looking at one side of our thought-tissue, but there is also interwoven into the general world ether that which the entities of the 3rd hierarchy have worked out. While they work, as it were, on our individual thought-fabric during our life, they then join together the individual thought-fabrics of the one, the other, the third human being, in such a way as they can use them, so that something new arises in the course of the further development of the world. This must be woven into the general world ether, what they can acquire there through the joining together of the individual etheric bodies of the human beings whom they have worked on during the time of physical life. That which we are thus able to give to these beings, the Angeloi, Archangeloi, Archai, forms for the whole time that we then live through between death and a new birth, something that we have to look at, that we have to look towards. And just as we ourselves have to cooperate in the production of that which then unites with physical matter in order to give us a new incarnation, so the sight of what we have given to the great world has an effect on our work. In short, whether we have something to look at from which we can draw new impulses for a next incarnation in this web of thoughts interwoven with the world ether, or whether we cannot, much will depend on this with regard to the way in which we will be able to prepare for our new incarnation. [4]

But that which the Angeloi, Archangeloi, Archai have woven goes so far beyond, in that it is woven into the general etheric world, that it unfolds into a wide sphere, the center of which is the earth. [5] If one wants to speak quite precisely, one must say that something is also taken from the physical body; a kind of spiritual extract of this body, the tincture of the medieval mystics. But this extract of the physical is the same in all lives; it only represents the fact that the ego was embodied. [6]

(During incarnation) the ego first surrounds itself with an astral body. This happens in such a way that it draws everything astral to itself: it is like a shooting together. It is as if you were holding a magnet to iron filings: just as the iron filings attract each other in certain figures, so the ego attracts the astral to itself. But it has received impressions from all the experiences it has had while passing through the astral plan and the devachanic realm, and all this forms the basic forces that contribute to the construction of the new astral body. All the impressions he has had there have a determining effect on his incorporation into his new astral body. The etheric body can no longer be taken care of by its own powers, but requires the help of spiritual beings. [7] This change of clothes with the etheric body takes place at breakneck speed. And then the human being is led by still higher beings to the pair of parents who can give him the suitable material for his physical body. [8]

Before conception, everything that is involved is invisible on the human head; of course, no meteor from heavenly heights enters the mother's womb. But the forces that come into consideration, especially the forming forces, the formative forces of the human head, are active in the time between death and a new conception. It is not necessary to imagine these forces as having the physical form of the head. But there are forces present which bring about, condition this physical form of the head. It is not the form of the head that is formed, but the head is formed according to the form that is transferred from the cosmic expanses into the womb. Matter crystallizes, as it were, around certain invisible formative forces. [9]

All the things that are effective in humanity happen from within, not from without. What is thought and feeling at one time is outer form in the next. And the individualities that guide humanity must implant the thought-form into humanity many millennia beforehand, which is to be external reality afterwards. There you have the functions of thought forms that are stimulated by such symbolic figures (such as Noah's Ark or Solomon's Temple). They have a very real meaning. In Noah's ark you have a symbol from which the dimensions of your present body originate and the effects are the thought form that Noah experienced in the ark. You carry the dimensions of Noah's ark in the dimensions of your physical body today. [10]

Our etheric body is given to us at birth as a particularly perfect structure. At our birth our etheric body is such that it inwardly glitters and shines with all the imaginations that come to it from the great universe. It is a reflection of the universe. And that which man can acquire during his life in education, in knowledge, in powers of will and mind, as he grows old between birth and death, is drawn out of this etheric body. [11]

When we live in this way from our embryonic time through birth, through our first childhood into our life, then that which helps to shape our body is our karma. Between our last death and our present birth we have lived through and have even taken it upon ourselves to live through how we have to experience karma and what we have to give ourselves for a body so that it can live out its karma. In this way, I would say, we have a kneading effect on our body through the forces of the soul. [12]

The succession of physical bodies of human incarnations form a whole in a certain respect from the power side. [13]

If one examines the head, then one has such a shaping, such a formation in the head that the spiritual-soul has flowed completely into the form, has even expressed itself in this form in such a way that it still retains something of its formative powers. And these retained formative powers are those which we can then develop as our thoughts. In a completely different way, the spiritual-soul is the basis of the rest of the human organism. These formative forces do not penetrate so deeply into the rest of the human organism, where they retain a certain independence; there the spiritual-soul lives much more strongly alongside the physical-bodily. In the head the spiritual has flowed much more into matter than in the rest of the organism. If one experiences the formative forces in the human head in terms of the soul, then one finds that what is processed there really expands directly into a spiritual world, that one must really think of the formative forces as coming from the spiritual world. [14]

This human head is actually so constituted soon after conception that its formative powers pass over completely into the material, leaving only a little of the soul behind. In the rest of the organism the soul-spiritual life is still separate, the whole human life as it is led from birth to death in its dealings with the outside world, in its relationship to other people, to the things of this world, to nature and all the spiritual relationships in which we live, to all social relationships; this is expressed in that which is spiritual in us, in the rest of the organism, summarized in the human heart. But because this human organism has received its fixed form at birth, it can initially only remain spiritual-soul. But it is present as a formative force, and as a formative force it passes through death. Our present organism, apart from the head, with all its experiences, retains the formative powers spiritually and mentally, and gives them to the spiritual world when it departs at death, and they form themselves in such a way that they participate in the formation of our head in the next life on earth. And one arrives at the great and significant law: In what are the inner formative powers - mind you, inner formative powers - of our head, we have the educational result of what the rest of the organism, apart from the head, was predisposed to in a previous earth-life. [15] There the whole lower human being is transformed into what now becomes the spiritual disposition for the later head. And then one sees the human being transforming further as a spirit-form, again back into the region of the 2nd Hierarchy, into the region of the 3rd Hierarchy. Now this transformed spirit-form must, so to speak, be given what will become chest organs, what will become limb organs, metabolic organs - for it is basically only the anlage for the future head. That is what must be set. From where do the spiritual impulses for this attachment come? Yes, the Beings of the 2nd and 3rd Hierarchy graciously gathered them up when man was on the first half of the path. (See also: Life between death and a new birth). They have taken them from his moral nature; they now bring them down again and form from them the disposition for the rhythmic and for the metabolic limb-man. Then, in this later time of existence between death and a new birth, the human being receives the spiritual ingredients for the physical organism. This spiritual form enters the embryonic and carries into it what now becomes physical forces, etheric forces, but which are only the physical image of what we carry with us from the earlier life as misunderstanding and hatred of man, out of which our limbs have been spiritually formed. [16] By restraining our limbs in this way, we can develop in them the will which is then the disposition for the following lives on earth. [17]

Sources:

[1] GA 163: Chance, Necessity and Providence. Imaginative cognition and processes after death (1915)

[2] GA 97: The Christian Mystery (1906/1907)

[3] GA 13: The Secret Science in Outline (1910)

[4], [5] GA 174b: The Spiritual Background of the First World War (1914-1921)

[6] GA 109: The Principle of Spiritual Economy in Connection with Questions of Re-embodiment. An Aspect of the Spiritual Guidance of Humanity (1909)

[7], [8] GA 100: Human Development and the Knowledge of Christ. Theosophy and Rosicrucianism - The Gospel of John (1907)

[9] GA 170: The Riddle of Man. The Spiritual Background of Human History (1916)

[10] GA 93: The Temple Legend and the Golden Legend as a Symbolic Expression of Past and Future Secrets of Human Development (1904/1906)

[11] GA 159: The Mystery of Death. The Nature and Meaning of Central Europe and the European Folk-Spirits (1915)

[12] GA 165: The Spiritual Unification of Humanity through the Christ Impulse (1915/1916)

[13] GA 136: The Spiritual Beings in the Celestial Bodies and Kingdoms of Nature (1912)

[14], [15] GA 65: From the Central European Spiritual Life (1915/1916)

[16] GA 230: Man as the Harmony of the Creating, Forming and Shaping Word of the World (1923)

[17] GA 208: Anthroposophy as Cosmosophy - Part Two:. The Formation of Man as the Result of Cosmic Effects (1921)

Formative forces and hierarchies

The Exusiai (the Elohim of Genesis) had already created a unity out of human multiplicity in thought. Only with the Exusiai this unity was still an ideal form, a world-thought form. The Archai formed an etheric form from it, but in such a way that this etheric form already contained the forces for the emergence of the physical form. [1] The archangel hierarchy (Archangeloi) gives man that for his etheric body which corresponds to the form in the physical body which he owes to the Archai. What man carries within himself of inner forces in order to be on earth in such a way that he simultaneously snatches himself from the earth with posture, movement and gesture, he owes to the creation of the Archangeloi in his etheric body. [2]

Sources:

[1] & [2] GA 26: Anthroposophical Guiding Principles. The Path of Knowledge of Anthroposophy - The Michael Mystery (1924/1925)

14
Hierarchies

Before diving into the subject of the Hierarchies, the author felt a pause is necessary to allay any potential confusion in naming conventions used in the following.

There are four 'Hierarchies' (capital 'H'). Within each Hierarchy there are (in the first 3) three 'hierarchies' (lowercase 'h'). In the terminology used here you will read of human beings as the '4^th Hierarchy' and the '10^th hierarchy'.

There have been those who have (themselves) exchanged the term 'hierarchy' to 'order', such that within each of the first 3 Hierarchies exist three 'orders' of Angelic beings. As has been said before, avoid as much as possible getting bogged down in language nuances that you find confusing, which is the reason the author has added this explanation here.

A tabular illustration of this helps to understand this differentiation:

A.K.M.D.

Just as we live through our physical body with the air environment and with the heat environment, we also live through our thoughts with the environment of the hierarchy of the third order, and we live through our feelings and our will impulses with the beings of the hierarchy of the second order and with the spirits of will (of the first order). Thus we are inside the universe (see: macrocosm). [1]

The Angeloi, Archangeloi, Archai can be recognized in their spirituality, and we must know, when we give them form as painters and the like, that they only have this sensual form because they are interwoven into the soul-spiritual elements, into the essence of the higher hierarchies. We must know, for example, when we paint them wings, that these wings are from the entities of the second Hierarchy, which lend them their substantiality, but that they receive a head from the first Hierarchy, which lend them this form and its content. We must only be quite aware that we can only see what is within the third Hierarchy - Angeloi, Archangeloi, Archai - in spirit. This has tremendous historical significance, because if you take writings from ancient times that deal intimately, so to speak, with these spiritual worlds, you cannot read them at all without being aware of the fact that by living in the spiritual world we first perceive the lowest hierarchy in a spiritual way, so to speak, while we still perceive the higher hierarchies with the ingredients of the sense world. And you must be aware that the old initiatory wisdom, which described this quite correctly in the way I am describing it now, has gradually led to all kinds of misunderstandings in times of spiritual decadence. Thus we always find in the more worldly initiates of the Middle Ages that the lowest hierarchies, the Seraphim, Cherubim, Thrones, are close to the earth, and that one ascends through Dynamis, Kyriotetes, Exusiai to the Angels, Archangels and elemental forces. Just take a look at medieval books that are illustrated, and you will not know why the angels sit above the seraphim. This is because these processes were no longer intimately known and no longer imagined in a completely organic way. The error arose in particular when the originally quite pure teaching became contaminated by the symbols of the Babylonians during the time of the Jewish-Babylonian captivity in the pre-Christian period through the contact of the Jews with the Babylonians, and through the Kabbalah, through medieval Jewish mysticism, this error of the hierarchy of the spiritual hierarchies spread further. 346 248f

The vision of the spirit into the world of the supersensible has been lost to the souls. Today, when souls are born, they face the physical world through their bodily sense organs and see only the outer physical. They can no longer see that which surrounds the outer physical as the spiritual-soul in the beings of the higher hierarchies. [2]

All these realms (of the higher hierarchies) must not be understood in such a way that names are invented which should always apply to one or the other entity. The names that can be used are mostly not names that designate individualities, but names that designate dignities or offices, as it were. Thus, if one gives a name to an entity that has worked during the solar period, one can no longer use the same name (for this individuality) if one wants to designate this entity in relation to its work on earth, for there it is more advanced. [3] I have not shied away from using the names for the higher spiritual entities that were common in the first Christian centuries. The Oriental would choose other names. [4]

The beings of the higher hierarchies are not merely thought beings, they are real beings, they have substance, and that which they have of substance we do not experience in our thoughts, but in our will, especially in the will that is governed by love. And by placing the moral impulses into the world, which is otherwise only a world of images for us, we bring down the substance of the higher beings into our world. What we really do out of moral impulses means nothing other than bringing down into our world the substance of the beings of the higher hierarchies. [5] Just as the things around us relate to us, so we ourselves relate to the beings of the higher hierarchies: they imagine us, they think us. We are taken in by them, just as we ourselves take in plants, animals and people. And we must feel secure by being able to say to ourselves: The beings of the higher hierarchies think of us, they introduce us. These beings of the higher hierarchies take hold of us with their souls. [6]

We sleep not only during the night, but also during the day. We are not fully conscious of the whole inner experience, and in so far as we sleep during the day, the beings of the higher hierarchies also live in us during the day. The Angeloi, the Archangeloi and the Archai live in this I, extending their impulses from the spiritual world. In that which is most dormant, in the determined will, the power of the Archai lives first. The Angeloi and the Archangeloi also live in volition, but the deepest impulses of volition always come from the Archai. The power of the Archangeloi lives in man's feelings and the power of the Angeloi in his thinking. One can say: as an unconscious self-awareness, the will-giving Archai, the feeling-giving Archangeloi and the thinking-giving Angeloi are in us. And all this strives and weaves into the ego and ultimately becomes what man calls his inner soul life. [7]

The astral, etheric and physical bodies are permeated with forces from the beings of the higher hierarchies. But this does not prevent them from playing up into the conscious ego, that these forces flow from the hidden depths of the human being and play up into the conscious ego. [8]

At the moment when man passes through the gate of death, he is taken up by a multitude of spiritual entities. We have our personal leading spirit from the Hierarchy of the Angeloi; but above them we have the spirits from the Hierarchy of the Archangeloi, who immediately intervene when the human being passes through the gate of death, so that he then immediately has his existence in a certain respect in the plural, because many Archangeloi are involved in his existence. So when the human being dies and lives into the spiritual world again, these three limbs (Manas, Buddhi, Atma) develop very clearly, to a certain extent prefiguring a future human existence. Thus, just as man develops spiritually and mentally in his present life between birth and death, he also has a clear development after death, only that he is then attached, as it were by an umbilical cord, to the spiritual entities of the higher hierarchies. [9]

You do not come into contact with a being from the Angeloi hierarchy by attacking his hand, but you come into contact with him by living with him in the same way as you live here with your thoughts, with your feelings. These entities come into your thoughts, into your feelings. Really, we express it correctly when we say: these entities live in us. [10] It will be quite impossible to know anything special about the structure of the hierarchical order of the higher spiritual entities if one does not enter into the consciousness of these higher spiritual entities. One really (only) knows something about these higher beings when one knows in which state of consciousness each of these beings lives. [11]

For the fact that we study spiritual science, we receive help from the spiritual world. It is not merely the things we learn, the insights, but it is the beings of the higher hierarchies themselves who help us when we know about them. [12]

We rightly call this world of sensory phenomena a world of appearances, a world of phenomena. But this is only correct because at first we humans perceive nothing more of this world with our ordinary consciousness than precisely these phenomena, the appearances, the outer appearance; as the Oriental says: the Maya. But at the moment when consciousness awakens and becomes imaginative (see: imagination), this whole sensory world is fulfilled, or rather, it is transformed into a world of weaving images, this world immediately shows the world of the Angeloi, the angels, woven into itself. And when we come to inspiration, we are inspired everywhere from this world. It transforms into a world of inspiration. The beings of the Archangeloi, the archangels, weave themselves into this inspiration. It is the world of intuitions that we experience later. There we penetrate, instead of having only the world of the senses before us, to the world of the Archai. Now, however, when we have penetrated around us to the world of the Archai, then it is also possible for us, with the help of this world of the Archai, to look back again at what we have already experienced from higher hierarchies in earlier lives between death and a new birth. We become aware of how behind the Archai within this world lie the beings who are called the Elohim in the Bible, the Exusiai. [13] If you really develop within yourself the thought-experience in which you feel yourself connected with the circumcircle, you will finally have the impression of the third hierarchy through the thought-experience: Angeloi, Archangeloi, Archai. [14]

The gaze that has gone as far as the expanses of the world, when it continues through the experience of memory, sees into things. So it is not that you penetrate still further out into indefinite abstract expanses, but the continued gaze that sees into things; it sees the spiritual in all things. It sees, for example, in the light the working spiritual entities of the light and so on; it sees in the darkness the spiritual entities working in the darkness. So that we can say: the experience of memory leads into the second Hierarchy (Exusiai, Dynamis, Kyriotetes). [15]

You cannot inwardly grasp with full consciousness how you, in my opinion, behaved twenty years ago in the gesture on some external occasion, without you, if you really take the matter inwardly deeply and seriously and energetically, also coming to grasp the communion of the spiritual and physical in all things. But then you have arrived at the experience of the first Hierarchy. The memory experience, it lets us become dawn ourselves when we face the dawn. It allows us to feel all the warmth of the dawn, to experience it inwardly. But if we ascend to the experience of gesture, then that which confronts us in the dawn will unite with everything that allows us to experience colorful, sounding things in the objective. We learn to recognize when we still direct our gaze towards the dawn, when it still appears to us almost as before in the mere memory experience, we experience what the thrones are like. And then the dawn dissolves. The colorful becomes being, becomes alive, becomes soul, becomes spiritual, becomes being, speaks to us of the relationship of the sun to the earth, as it once was in the old solar time, speaks to us in such a way that we experience what cherubs are. And then, when we live on in our souls, enthusiastically and reverently enraptured by this twofold revelation of the dawn, the revelation of the throne and the revelation of the cherubim, then that which constitutes the essence of the seraphim penetrates into our own inner being from this dawn that has become a living being. [16]

Above the seraphim are divine beings of such sublimity that human comprehension is not sufficient to comprehend them. [17] If we were to ascend above the seraphim, we would enter the realm of the divine Trinity. What is it that the seraphim, cherubim and thrones have that is so special above all other beings in the world? They have what has been called the "direct sight of the Godhead". They see the deity in its original, true form, just as this deity is. But they see themselves only as the executors of the divine will, of the divine wisdom. [18] If we go down to the next hierarchy, to the Exusiai, Dynamis, Kyriotetes, we must say: they no longer have the sight of the Deity so directly; they no longer see the Deity in its original form as it is, but in its revelations. [19] (See also: Guidance of the Earth's Development).

Hierarchies - hierarchy

The name Jehovah (see: Yahweh) does not denote an individual being, but a hierarchy. Many beings can occupy the Jehovah rank or move into it. Eliphaz Levi has repeatedly emphasized that the names Jehovah, Archangeloi, Angeloi and so on refer to orders of rank. [20] The names of the hierarchies (see: Dionysius Areopagita) are not proper names, but names for certain levels of consciousness of the great universe, and the beings move from one level to another. [21] All these hierarchies are in a constant state of development. [22] Therefore each hierarchy has countless degrees and gradations. [23]

Hierarchical ascent

Michael has undergone an elevation to a higher level, from the spirit of the people to the spirit of the times, by becoming the messenger of the Christ from the messenger of Yahweh. It is not enough to speak of Michael, because precisely if one wants to understand the evolution of mankind, one must understand Michael in his evolution, that he is the same being who set the tone for the preparation of the Mystery of Golgotha, and now in our time sets the tone for the understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha. But then he was a spirit of the people, and now he is a spirit of our time. We have been able to follow Michael, a spirit who has risen, so to speak, who, in order to impart a new impulse to humanity, has risen or is rising from the rank of the Archangeloi to the rank of the Archai. The place is filled by another being who follows. [24] As long as man dwells on earth, however high he may be, one can always speak of that individuality which guides him from incarnation to incarnation. The individual guidance of people is subject to the Angeloi. When a person goes from being a Bodhisattva to a Buddha, his Angeloi is released, so to speak. Such Angeloi then ascend into the realms of the Archangeloi after fulfilling their mission (see also: Buddha). Thus at one point we really grasp the ascension of an Archangeloi to the being of the Archai and the ascension of an Angelos to the Archangeloi. [25]

State of development of the Hierarchies

These different spiritual entities have already cooperated during earlier embodiments of our earth, only that this cooperation has taken place in a manner different from the present one. Each time a new embodiment occurred, i.e. the Saturn, Sun, Moon and Earth states, there was a different kind of interaction between these hierarchical entities, because each of these states through which our Earth has passed represents a particular task which these hierarchical entities set themselves. We can certainly speak of the fact that each of the states through which our earth has passed, and the states through which it will still pass, signify and have signified a special mission in cosmic development. [26]

If one wants to describe the present situation quite correctly, one must say: (Today) man lives on Earth towards Jupiter. The lunar Pitris (Angeloi) live on Jupiter towards Venus and the fire spirits (Archangeloi) live on Venus towards the volcano [Vulcan]. Once a being has reached the volcano stage itself, it has become a creator. The spirits of form, the Exusiai, are now in this position during man's development on earth. They are therefore the creators of earthly man. Yahweh is their representative. [27] Nothing is unlimited (in powers and abilities), not even among the beings of the higher hierarchies. [28]

Hierarchies - Relationships between them

However, we must not think that we can now strictly separate these areas (of the individual hierarchies) from each other, that we can draw firm boundaries between them. Our whole (physical) life on earth is based on the fact that watery and airy and solid things interact with each other, that warmth penetrates and permeates everything. There is no solid (for example) that is not in some state of warmth. We find warmth everywhere in the other elementary states of existence. Therefore we may say: We also find the work of the Elohim, the actual power element of the warmth, everywhere. It has poured itself into everything. Even if it had to have the activity of the Spirits of Will, Thrones, the Spirits of Wisdom, Kyriotetes, the Spirits of Movement, Dynamis, as its precondition, this element of warmth, which is the manifestation of the Spirits of Form, permeated all the lower stages of existence during the earthly existence. - Thus we shall not only find in the solid, as it were, the substantial foundation, the body of the thrones, but we shall see this body of the Spirits of Will interspersed and interwoven with the Elohim themselves, with the Spirits of Form. [29]

Sources:

[1] GA 167: Present and Past in the Human Spirit (1916)

[2], [28] GA 140: Occult Investigations into Life between Death and New Birth. The Living Interaction between the Living and the Dead (1912/1913)

[3] GA 113: The Orient in the Light of the Occident. The Children of Lucifer and the Brothers of Christ (1909)

[4], [26] GA 121: The Mission of Individual Folk-Souls in Connection with Germanic-Nordic Mythology (1910)

[5] GA 156: Occult reading and occult listening (1914)

[6] GA 275: Art in the Light of Mystery Wisdom (1914/1915)

[7] GA 161: Paths of spiritual knowledge and the renewal of artistic worldviews (1915)

[8] GA 143: Experiences of the Supersensible. The Three Paths of the Soul to Christ. (1912)

[9] GA 293: General Study of Man as the Basis of Pedagogy (1919)

[10], [11] GA 163: Chance, necessity and providence. Imaginative Cognition and Processes after Death (1915)

[12] GA 168: The Connection between the Living and the Dead (1916)

[13] GA 208: Anthroposophy as Cosmosophy - Part Two: The shaping of man as the result of cosmic effects (1921)

[14] - [16] GA 232: Mystery designs (1923)

[17], [20], [21] GA 93a: Basic Elements of Esotericism (1905)

[18], [19], [23] GA 110: Spiritual Hierarchies and their Reflection in the Physical World. Zodiac, Planets, Cosmos (1909)

[22] GA 124: Excursions into the Gospel of Mark (1910/1911)

[24], [25] GA 152: Precursors to the Mystery of Golgotha (1913/1914)

[27] GA 262: Rudolf Steiner / Marie Steiner-von Sivers: Correspondence and documents 1901-1925 (1901-1925)

[29] GA 122: The Secrets of the Biblical History of Creation. The Six-Day Work in the First Book of Moses (1910)

Hierarchies - 1st Hierarchy

The strongest, first Hierarchy reveals itself as that which is spiritually active in the physical. It shapes the physical world into the cosmos. The third and second hierarchies are the serving entities. [1] If one wishes to evoke an idea of the first Hierarchy (seraphim, cherubim and thrones), one will have to seek to form images in which the spiritual - only supersensibly visible - reveals itself working in the forms that appear in the world of the senses. Spirituality in sensuous imagery must be the content of thoughts about the first Hierarchy. [2] One can approach it spiritually if one sees the facts existing in the natural and human kingdoms as the deeds - creations of a spiritual being working in them. The first hierarchy then has the natural and human kingdoms as its effect, in which it unfolds. [3] When you wake up in the morning, you also immerse yourself in your physical body. Of this physical body, which the Mystery Being therefore calls the temple of man, what external anatomy and physiology reveal is really only the outermost shell. You can only get an idea of this miraculous structure of the human physical body if you know that it is the creature of the interaction of the entities of the first Hierarchy. And if we live between death and a new birth, then we do not live with the creature, but with the creators themselves. [4]

Everything that is food also has an inner side. What you see with the outer senses and what you experience with the outer senses in food has no connection to our deeper nature. You can take care of your daily metabolism with what your tongue tastes, what your stomach digests, digested in such a way that it can be verified with the ordinary science of today, but you can never take care of the other metabolism that leads, for example, to your first teeth falling out and getting new ones at about the age of seven. What makes up this metabolism does not lie in what is perceived by the ordinary senses from food, but lies in the deeper forces of food, which today no chemistry can somehow bring to the surface. What man takes in as food contains a deeply spiritual side, that spiritual side which is also very strongly active in man, but only when he is asleep. For the spirits of the highest hierarchies, the seraphim, cherubim, thrones, live in what your food is. Your food has an outer side when you taste it, when you dissolve it in pepsin or ptyalin; but in this food lives something world-shaping, so world-shaping that in the forces that live sub-sensibly in the food are the impulses for the change of teeth, for sexual maturity, for the later metamorphosis of human nature. [5]

With the third stage of clairvoyance (see above) we perceive entities of the 1st hierarchy, the spirits of the will or thrones. We then perceive entities which we cannot characterize otherwise than by saying: They do not consist of flesh and blood, nor of light or air, but they consist of that which we can only perceive in ourselves when we become aware that we have a will. In relation to their lowest substance they consist only of will.

People who make such an impression on us that their wisdom seems impersonal, that their wisdom appears like the blossom and fruit of a mature life, evoke in us a sense, even if only an inkling, of what (as cherubim) is working on us from our spiritual surroundings. [6] Such wisdom, which is not gathered in decades, like the wisdom of outstanding human beings, but such wisdom, which is gathered in millions of years of world creation, flows towards us in sublime power from the beings we call the cherubim.

Even more difficult to characterize are those beings who now make up the highest of the first category and who are called the seraphim. [7] Like a gaze that has matured in life and speaks like decades of experience, or like a sentence that is spoken in such a way that we do not merely hear its thoughts, but that we hear: the sentence, in being uttered with such a sound, has been won in pain and in life's experiences, it is not a theory, it has been fought for, it has been suffered, it has passed through life's battles and victories into the heart - if we hear all this through an undertone, then we get an idea of the impression which the trained occultist has when he soars up to the entities which we call seraphim. [8]

With the beings of the first Hierarchy it is so that they also objectify themselves, that they imprint their own being, separate it as in a skin, in a shell, which is, however, an imprint of their own being. This now separates itself from them and remains present in the world, even if they separate themselves from it. So they do not carry their creation around with them (like the second hierarchy), but this creation remains, even if they leave it. Thus a higher degree of objectivity is attained than that attained by the second Hierarchy, (for) where they create, they must remain with what they have created, so that their created things do not perish. The own life of the beings of the first Hierarchy is such that it perceives itself by allowing such objective, independent, self-separating beings to emerge from itself. For these beings of the 1st Hierarchy, their inner state of consciousness, their inner experience, lies in the creation, in making beings independent. The descendants of the 1st Hierarchy are the Spirits of the Circulation Times, the Spirits who order and direct what happens in the Kingdoms of Nature in rhythmic sequence and repetition. The Beings of the 1st Hierarchy separate from themselves those Beings who order the alternation of winter and summer, so that the plants sprout and wither again, but also everything that follows rhythmically and repetitively in the kingdoms of nature, like day and night, like the change of year, like the four seasons. [9] In our earthly equilibrium the whole interaction of the Hierarchies presents itself in such a way that we must look for what we call the 1st Hierarchy - the Thrones, Cherubim and Seraphim - as something that works out of the earth in relation to this equilibrium. Of course, you must imagine that this Hierarchy originally unfolds its forces out of the Universe towards the center of the Earth, and that the way in which man becomes aware of these forces does not correspond to their direct direction, but to the reverse direction which they experience by being reflected back. [10]

It is the most beautiful thing that one can actually see in human life, the development of the child through learning to walk, learning to speak, learning to think - when one gets an impression of what is so beautiful in human life; and when, on the other hand, one is able to see how the metal melts in the fire: then the spiritual form of that which leads in the child to learning to walk, to learning to speak, appears to one. The more liquid, the more fleeting the metal becomes, the more the learning to walk, the learning to speak, the learning to think of the human being arises from the glowing, liquid, volatile becoming of the metal in the fire - and one sees the intimate kinship of this metal experiencing its fate with that which appears dampened by the fiery forces of the worlds in the child's learning to speak, walk and think, and one says to oneself that the entities of the 1st Hierarchy have two sides to their working. One is that side where they can speak to us from the spiritual world, into which we enter in the middle of life between death and new birth, and where we then learn through them the secrets of planetary and other cosmic activity. The other side is this, where they work into the visible world - on the one hand into the child's learning to speak, think and walk, on the other hand into all that which underlies our earth process, in that fire has a part in this earth process, in that in fire the metals melt, burn up.

The melting and burning up of metals in the forces of fire built up this globe. We see into older times where the globe was built up: In the melting metal through forces of fire we see the one course of the deeds of the seraphim, cherubim, thrones within the earthly world. The thrones were particularly active in the creation of the earthly body, the seraphim and cherubim quietly cooperated. In the child's learning to think, to walk and to speak, however, the cherubim play the greatest, the main role. [11] Thus you have the upward currents that you can see in the merging metals; if you go far enough out into the cosmos, they turn back, they return and are then the same forces that raise up the child. What you see on one side, you find on the other. And so you get an idea of the ascending and descending world forces that work in the world being, of the metamorphoses, the transformations of these world forces. But then you will also get to know in its true sense that which in ancient times was associated with the science of that time: the old sacrifices. [12]

If we look at the pole of our actions, our accomplishments, we also have a continuous dying and coming into being within it. At this pole we perceive with greater difficulty (than at the pole of perception) that which lives spiritually within it; we then perceive the l. hierarchy. [13]

In dreamless sleep-consciousness man experiences his own being united with the spiritual being of the world without his own consciousness. If the sleep consciousness is confronted with the inspired consciousness as its other pole, man becomes aware that the first Hierarchy is present in his experience. [14] At the same moment that one enters into this realization of one's own true self, one also becomes aware of that which now lives in another world, in the actual spirit world. One meets the beings of the first hierarchy: seraphim, cherubim, thrones. And just as one finds one's ego there again, of which one actually has only a reflection here in earthly life, so one finds its true spirit form for the whole world of the earthly environment. [15]

When we are here on earth, we have the feeling that the spiritual beings of the divine world are above us. When we are over there in the sphere between death and a new birth, we have the opposite idea. The Angeloi, Archangeloi and so on, who guide us through life on earth, live with us to a certain extent on the same level after death; directly below them are the beings of the 2nd Hierarchy. With them we work on the formation, the shaping of our inner karma. And while with the Beings of the second Hierarchy we work out the inner karma between death and a new birth, which then appears in the image in the healthy or sick state of the next earth-life, while we are engaged in this work, while we are thus working with ourselves and the other human beings on the bodies which then appear in the next earth-life, the Beings of the first Hierarchy below are active in a peculiar way. With regard to a small part of their activity, they are in a state of necessity. They must reproduce - for they are the creators of the earthly - that which man has formed in earth-life, but reproduce it in a quite definite way. Think of it, man accomplishes certain deeds in his will in earthly life - this belongs to the first hierarchy. These deeds are good or evil, wise or foolish. The entities of the first hierarchy, seraphim, cherubim and thrones, must form the counter-images in their own sphere. For all good, for all evil, counter-images must be formed by the Beings of the first Hierarchy. Everything is judged under the first hierarchy, but also shaped. And while one is working on the inner karma with the second Hierarchy and with the departed human souls, one sees between death and a new birth that which seraphim, cherubim and thrones have experienced in our earthly deeds. We see in them that activity which results as the just balancing activity from our own and other people's earthly deeds. [16] We carry our inner karma into our inner organization. We bring it to earth as our abilities, our talents, our genius, our folly. What the gods form down there, what they have to experience as a result of our lives on earth, confronts us in the next life on earth as the facts of fate that come to us. [17] The seraphim, cherubim and thrones form the consequences of what we have sown on earth among themselves. What we have committed as evil deeds has evil consequences in the cosmos. We see seraphim, cherubim and thrones in our actions, which are the result of our evil deeds. And we gradually learn to recognize that in the development of the world what happens among seraphim, cherubim and thrones is the heavenly living out of our karma before we can live it out on earth. What the seraphim, cherubim and thrones experience in their existence as gods is properly balanced when we experience it in our next earthly life. Our karma is thus first exemplified supernaturally by seraphim, cherubim and thrones. Yes, the gods in their spirituality are the creators of everything earthly. They must first experience everything themselves. They experience it in the sphere of the spiritual; then it is realized down here in the sphere of the sensual-physical. And so we experience in ourselves what we have owed to the world through our previous deeds, so we experience in the model of the gods that which is to happen through our life. [18] (See also: Cherubim; Seraphim; Thrones).

Sources:

[1] - [3], [14] GA 26: Anthroposophical Guiding Principles. The Path of Knowledge of Anthroposophy - The Michael Mystery (1924/1925)

[4] GA 184: The Polarity of Duration and Development in Human Life. The Cosmic Prehistory of Humanity (1918)

[5] GA 188: Goetheanism, a Transformation Impulse and Resurrection Thought. Human Science and Social Science (1919)

[6] - [7] GA 136: The Spiritual Beings in the Celestial Bodies and Kingdoms of Nature (1912)

[10] GA 121: The Mission of Individual Folk-Souls in Connection with Germanic-Nordic Mythology (1910)

[11], [12] GA 231: The supersensible human being, anthroposophically understood (1923)

[13] GA 192: Spiritual Scientific Treatment of Social and Pedagogical Questions (1919)

[15] GA 84: What did the Goetheanum want and what should anthroposophy do? (1923/1924)

[16], [17] GA 235: Esoteric Observations on Karmic Connections - First Volume (1924)

[18] GA 239: Esoteric Observations on Karmic Connections - Fifth Volume (1924)

Hierarchies - 2nd Hierarchy

One can approach the second Hierarchy spiritually if one sees the facts of nature as manifestations of a spiritual being living in them. The second Hierarchy then has nature as its abode in order to work in it on the souls. [1] The second hierarchy lives in breathing, in all the rhythmic activity of man. The Bible has described this quite correctly. Those spirits who are the Elohim, with Yahweh, are introduced into man through the breath. [2]

The second Hierarchy reveals itself as a spiritual-soul that works in the etheric. Everything etheric is a revelation of the 2nd Hierarchy. However, it does not reveal itself directly in the physical. Its strength reaches only as far as the etheric processes. Only the soul and the etheric would exist if only the third and second Hierarchies were at work. [3] Everything that works into the human etheric body is done by the entities of the second hierarchy. When you wake up in the morning and immerse yourself in your etheric body, then you are actually immersing yourself in the creatures of the entities of the second hierarchy. And when we live between death and a new birth, we do not live with the creature, but with the creators themselves. [4] When we have passed through the gate of death, we meet the souls of the departed people who have lived with us on earth, but above all we meet the spiritual beings of this second hierarchy; the third hierarchy too, of course, but the second hierarchy is more important. Together with them we work in the time between death and a new birth on all that we have felt in our life on earth, what we have put into our organization. In union with the Beings of this second Hierarchy we work out the next life on earth. [5] It is the 2nd Hierarchy which is actually the soul, the spirit of the solar life. We enter this realm (see: Life between death and a new birth). It is in this realm that we spend most of the time between death and a new birth (during our passage through the spheres). [6]

If one wants to evoke a conception of the 2nd Hierarchy - Kyriotetes, Dynamis, Exusiai, one will have to seek to form images in which the spiritual does not reveal itself in sensuous forms, but in a purely spiritual way. Spirituality, not in sensuous but in purely spiritual imagery, must be the content of thoughts about the second Hierarchy. [7] In dream consciousness man experiences his own being united in a chaotic way with the spiritual being of the world. If the imaginative is placed opposite the dream consciousness as its other pole, man becomes aware that the second hierarchy is present in his experience. [8]

When, through the power of our cognitive faculty, we rise to survey our own astral body, that is, that which was present in us before we descended to earthly existence, that which we will carry with us again when we have passed through the gate of death, then we know: It is the world of the astral that we are entering. Just as we meet the third hierarchy when we organize ourselves up to our etheric body, so we meet in this world, in which our own astral body becomes visible to us, it is the world of the astral that we are entering. Just as we meet the third hierarchy when we organize ourselves upwards to our etheric body, so in this world, in which our own astral body becomes visible to us, we meet the second hierarchy: Kyriotetes, Dynamis, Exusiai. And this second Hierarchy does not appear to us now for the real sight in flooding colors, in flooding tones, but it appears to us in such a way that it announces and reveals to us individual meanings within the Logos that waves through the world. It speaks to us. [9]

With the entities of the second Hierarchy, we experience, by immersing ourselves in them, that not only is their perception a revelation of their being, but that this revelation of their own being is preserved as something independent, which is separate from these entities themselves. [10] That which the beings of the second hierarchy objectify, that which they create out of themselves, remains present as long as these beings remain connected with what they have created. Where the beings of the second hierarchy create, they must remain with the created, so that their created things do not perish. [11] It is evident to the occult eye that every time the being secretes such an image of itself, such a kind of shell of itself, which bears the imprint of itself, life is then aroused within the being. The arousal of life is always the result of such self-creation.

Thus we must distinguish in the beings of the 2nd Hierarchy between their outer side as "creating themselves in the impression, in the image, objectifying themselves" and their inwardness as life-excitation, as when liquid continually trickles into itself, freezing and secreting its image outwards, (at the same time) occult perception hears something like spiritual sound, music of the spheres. It is like spiritual sound, not like spiritual light as with the beings of the third hierarchy. When the clairvoyant gaze is directed towards all that is formed around us in nature, and when it disregards everything else in the beings and looks only at the forms, then this clairvoyant gaze perceives from the totality of the beings of the second hierarchy those whom we call spirits of form, Exusiai. [12] If we allow ourselves to be stimulated by this contemplation (with clairvoyant vision) of the becoming of living beings: how the forms change, how they are in living metamorphosis, then what we call the category of the spirits of movement, the Dynamis, confronts us for clairvoyant vision. It is now more difficult to consider a third category of such beings of the second hierarchy. Here we have to consider neither the form as such nor the movement, the change of form, but that which expresses itself in the form. The clairvoyant consciousness must first educate itself in the way in which a person's outer form becomes an expression of his inner self. There, however, one will achieve nothing more than an intuition, a suspicion of what lies behind the expression, behind the gesture, behind the facial expression, behind the physiognomy of the person. But if the clairvoyant eye, which has already trained itself up to the second stage of clairvoyance, if it allows the physiognomy, the gesture, the facial expression of the human being to have an effect on it, then it evokes within itself stimuli through which it can gradually educate itself to see the (spirits of wisdom, the Kyriotetes). After one has thus educated oneself in man, one then turns to the plant world and educates oneself further in the plant world. [13]

When we perceive the gesture, the physiognomy of the plant world and in the color of the flower something like physiognomy, then the occult inner gaze, the occult perception and the occult understanding are enlivened, and we then recognize the Kyriotetes, whom we call the spirits of wisdom. This name is comparatively chosen for the reason that when we look at a person in his facial expressions, in his physiognomy, in his gestures, we see his spiritual, his wisdom sprouting outwards, we see it come to life.

Thus we feel how spiritual entities of the second hierarchy permeate all nature and express themselves in the overall physiognomy, in the overall gesture, in the whole facial expression of nature. Flooding wisdom passes vividly through all beings, all kingdoms of nature, and not merely a general flooding wisdom, but this flooding wisdom is differentiated into a fullness of spiritual entities, into the fullness of the spirits of wisdom, Kyriotetes.

The spiritual entities that are split off from the 2nd Hierarchy and descend into the realms of nature are the group souls of plants and animals. [14] The entities of the 2nd Hierarchy can create something like an image of themselves, but it remains connected with them and cannot separate itself from them. They must remain with what they have created so that their created things do not perish. [15]

2nd hierarchy and the types of ether

Behind light and air stands the 2nd hierarchy. [16] Life streams onto the earth from world space and is absorbed by the beings. This comes from the spirits of wisdom, the Kyriotetes. Thus we look into the distance of the worlds and first look up to the sun, in which these forces are concentrated for us, and see streaming life, weaving sound, forming light, the trinity of the second hierarchy, penetrating in from space. From below, the highest of the Hierarchies, the Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones, flow towards us. Interwoven into all the work above the earth, working more within the beings, is the third. Hierarchy. [17]

2 Hierarchy and the Metal Veins of the Earth

When we descend to the metal veins of the earth, we find that these metal veins of the earth are traversed on their paths, on their courses, by the Beings of the second Hierarchy. [18]

2nd Hierarchy and our sensual existence

These Beings of the second Hierarchy preferably have their abode in the Sun. From the sun they rule the visible world, which is their revelation. So that we can say: If we have the earth here, if we have the sun somewhere looking down upon the earth, then we have behind the working of the sun, in the working of the sun, through the working of the sun, the working of the second Hierarchy, the Kyriotetes, Dynamis and Exusiai. On the radiations, which are the acts of the second Hierarchy, are borne all the sensuous impressions which can be exerted on man, all the impressions which come to our senses during the day while we are awake. So that in a certain sense we speak correctly when we say: In and through and behind the working of the solar in the circle of our physical-sensuous existence stands the supersensible world of the second Hierarchy. [19]

Sources:

[1], [3], [7], [8] GA 26: Anthroposophical Guiding Principles. The Path of Knowledge of Anthroposophy - The Michael Mystery (1924/1925)

[2] GA 188: Goetheanism, a Transformation Impulse and Resurrection Thought. Human Science and Social Science (1919)

[4] GA 184: The Polarity of Duration and Development in Human Life. The Cosmic Prehistory of Humanity (1918)

[5] GA 235: Esoteric Observations on Karmic Connections - First Volume (1924)

[6], [19] GA 236: Esoteric Observations on Karmic Connections - Second Volume (1924)

[9] GA 84: What did the Goetheanum want and what should anthroposophy do? (1923/1924)

[10] - [15] GA 136: The Spiritual Beings in the Celestial Bodies and Kingdoms of Nature (1912)

[16] GA 233a: Mystery Places of the Middle Ages. Rosicrucianism and the Modern Principle of Initiation - Easter as a Part of the Mystery History of Humanity (1924)

[17] GA 121: The Mission of Individual Folk-Souls in Connection with Germanic-Nordic Mythology (1910)

[18] GA 231: The Supersensible Human Being, Anthroposophically Grasped (1923)

Hierarchies - 3rd Hierarchy

The Beings of the third Hierarchy - Angeloi, Archangeloi, Archai - actually make history, and man takes part in the work of this third Hierarchy by having his consciousness as a personality from it, his consciousness as a human being, as a historical earth being. Through your astral body you are connected with the historical life of mankind. [1] In the waking consciousness of the day, man first experiences himself in the present world age. This experience conceals from him the fact that the third Hierarchy is present in his experience during waking hours. [2]

Behind what the senses see, the beings of the third hierarchy are actually spreading out. So that you can say: Sensory perception = 3rd hierarchy; food substance = 1st hierarchy, and in between is the 2nd hierarchy, which lives in breathing, in all rhythmic activity of the human being. [3] The 3rd Hierarchy reveals itself as a purely spiritual-soul. It weaves in that which the human being experiences completely inwardly in a spiritual way. Neither in the etheric nor in the physical could processes arise if only this Hierarchy were at work. The soul could be there alone. [4] If one wishes to evoke a conception of the 3rd Hierarchy, one will have to seek to form images in which the spiritual does not manifest itself in sensuous forms, but also not in a purely spiritual way, but in the way in which thinking, feeling and volition manifest themselves in the human soul. Spirituality in soul-like imagery must be the content of thoughts about a third hierarchy. [5] One can approach the third hierarchy spiritually if one learns to know thinking, feeling and willing in such a way that one becomes aware of the spiritual working in the soul. Thinking initially only presents images, not a real thing in the world. Feeling weaves in this imagery; it speaks for something real in man, but cannot live it out. Volition unfolds a reality that presupposes the body but does not consciously participate in its formation. The beingness that lives in thinking in order to make the body the basis of this thinking, the beingness that lives in feeling in order to make the body a co-experiencer of a reality, the beingness that lives in willing in order to participate consciously in its formation, is alive in the third hierarchy. [6]

If we now look with occult vision into the worlds that are initially hidden from the outer physical world, then we encounter beings there who cannot lead such an independent inner life as the human being leads. The next category of spiritual beings we encounter are those who, when they lead their inner life, are immediately transferred through this inner life into a different state, into a different state of consciousness than the life they lead in the outer world and with the outer world. In their case, therefore, no separation needs to occur between different parts of the being (as with human beings), but in themselves, as they are, they simply bring about a different state of consciousness through their will. Now the perceptions of these entities are not like the perceptions of humans. Man perceives through the fact that an external world approaches him through his senses. He surrenders, so to speak, to this external world. These entities do not perceive such an outer world as man perceives it with his senses, but they perceive as man perceives - but this is comparative - when he himself speaks, for example, or makes a hand movement and perceives his own hand movement, or when he, let us say, expresses his inner being in some facial expression, in short, when he expresses his own nature. Thus, in a certain way, all perception is at the same time a revelation of their own nature in those beings of a higher world of which we have to speak here. And they actually only perceive their own nature as long as they want to reveal it, as long as they express it outwardly in some way.

They are, we can say, only awake by revealing themselves. And when they do not reveal themselves, when they do not enter into a relationship with the environment, with the outer world through their will, then a different state of consciousness occurs for them, then they sleep in a certain way. However, their sleep is not an unconscious sleep like that of humans, but their sleep means for them a kind of diminution, a kind of loss of their sense of self. They do not sleep like humans, but something enters their own being like the revelation of spiritual worlds that are higher than themselves. They are then filled within themselves by higher spiritual worlds. [7] Instead of perception, they have revelation, in which they experience themselves. Instead of inner life they have the experience of higher spiritual worlds, that is, instead of inner life they have spirit fulfillment. [8] To the occult eye the spirit-fulfillment of the beings of the 3rd Hierarchy appears in the image, in the imagination like a kind of spiritual light. [9] These beings are always physiognomic in their permanent nature. They have emanated, as it were, from the world beings of the higher hierarchies, in that their whole spiritual-soul nature is expressed in their spiritual form for those who can see them in the imagination. [10]

Just as you are connected with the air through your breathing, you are connected with the 3rd Hierarchy, with Angeloi, Archangeloi, Archai, through your main organization, that is, the lower main organization, which is covered only by the outer lobe of the brain - this belongs solely to the earth. Just as we actually only carry our human ego in the outer lobes of our brain, we carry Angeloi, Archangeloi and so on immediately below in our main organization. This is the scene of their activity on earth. There are the points of attack of their activity. If the 3rd Hierarchy did not concern itself with our thinking, with what goes on in our head, we would have no memory in ordinary life on earth. The Beings of this Hierarchy hold within us the impulses which we receive with our perceptions. [11]

At the moment when this continual dying and being born again becomes real to us, when we really see it, when we do not merely conceive of it abstractly, but when we really see a corpse continually becoming a human being and a child coming into being, at that moment we stand within the perception of the third hierarchy. We cannot perceive this dying and being born, this Prana and Shiva of nature, without finding the whole of nature transformed, dissolved, as it were, into the deeds of spiritual entities of the 3rd Hierarchy. [12]

Not only are the four elements mixed in man, but the beings of the 3rd Hierarchy are mixed with each other; they fill his body, as it were, as well as the material, they move in and out of the physical body of man. [13]

How does the occultist find these beings of the third hierarchy? The first thing that he who undergoes occult development must have as an inner experience is that he strives in a certain way to overcome the inner life of the ordinary normal consciousness. The more the occultly developing human being is able to become relaxed towards that which is his egoistic experience, towards that which concerns him alone, the nearer he is to the gateway to the higher worlds. [14] But in order to arrive at something that is completely free from the particular, egoistic inner being, man must also discard that coloring of his inner experience which is still influenced by the outer world. This can only happen if the human being is given the opportunity to experience something within himself that does not come from the outside world at all, something that corresponds to what we can call inner inspirations, that which only grows and flourishes within the soul itself. From the special inner life man can ascend in such a way that he feels that something is revealed within him which is independent of his special, egoistic existence. That which we can call inspiration already begins with dry, sober mathematics. But people do not usually realize that inspiration begins with dry mathematics, because most people regard this mathematics as something tremendously boring and therefore do not like to have anything revealed to them by it. But with regard to inner revelation, it is basically no different with moral truths. This recognition of a revelation through the inner being, conceived as a feeling, as an inner impulse, is a powerful pedagogical force in the inner being of man when he surrenders to it meditatively. When he first says to himself: In the sense-world there is much about which my arbitrariness merely decides, but out of the spirit things reveal themselves to me about which my arbitrariness can do nothing and yet which concern me, to which I must prove myself worthy as a human being - if man allows this thought to grow stronger and stronger, so that man can be conquered by his own inner being, then he grows beyond mere egoism, then, as we also say, a higher self, which knows itself to be one with the spirit of the world, overcomes the ordinary arbitrary self. We must develop something like this in us as a mood if we want to reach the gate that leads into the spiritual world. For if we often give ourselves over to such moods, then they prove to be fruitful, especially when we bring them into our thoughts as concretely as possible, and especially when we cherish such thoughts, absorb such thoughts into ourselves that seem true to us and yet contradict the sense world. Such thoughts can at first only be images, but such images are extraordinarily useful for the occult development of man. [15]

What love is, is something so complicated that no human being should have the arrogance to define love. We perceive it, but no definition can express love. But a symbol, a simple symbol, a glass of water which, as it is poured out, becomes fuller, that gives us the qualities of the action of love. Such images are useful for occult development. From them we realize that we are lifted above ordinary ideas, that if we want to ascend to the spirit we must form ideas that are almost opposite to those applicable to the sense world. Hence they find that the formation of such symbolic conceptions is an important means of ascending into the spiritual world. Then the human being comes to recognize that through him, through every human being, lives something spiritually being-like that is higher than himself, the human being, in this one incarnation with his egoism. When one begins to recognize that there is something above us like a being guiding us ordinary human beings, then one has the first form in the series of beings of the third hierarchy, those beings which are called the angels or Angeloi. By going beyond himself in the way described, man first experiences the influence of an angelic being into his own being. Just as the individual now has his guide in this way and the occult gaze, when we go beyond ourselves, beyond our egoistic interests, draws our attention to it: You have your guide, so there is now also the possibility that the occult gaze is directed towards groups of people, tribes, peoples and so on. Such groups of people, tribes, peoples belonging together have a leadership just as the individual person has it in the way described. In Western esotericism, such leaders of peoples or tribes who live in the spiritual world and have revelations as their perceptions, spirit experiences as their inner being and whose deeds are expressed in what a whole people or tribe does, are called archangels or archangeloi. [16] The third category of the 3rd hierarchy we call time spirits or Archai. If we observe that which surrounds man in the spiritual world, that which is, as it were, around him as his own individual leader, if we observe that which lives there spiritually, rules invisibly and actually instigates us to our impersonal actions and to our impersonal thinking and feeling, then we have in it first of all the entities of the 3rd Hierarchy. The occult eye perceives these entities. For him they are realities. But the normal consciousness also lives under their power, even if this consciousness does not perceive the Angelos, for it is under his guidance, even if unconsciously. And so the human groups are under their Archangeloi and the times and the people of their times are under the leadership of the time spirits, the Archai. [17] For a long time, even if one goes through an occult development, it will remain the case that one merely has a kind of feeling. Only when one has gone through all these feelings and sensations for a long time with patience and perseverance will one be able to pass over to what may be called clairvoyant vision of these beings of the third Hierarchy. [18]

But if we were to go back in the development of our planet, then we would find more and more that these entities, which actually only live in the cultural process of man, continually bring forth other beings from themselves. Just as a plant casts off a germ from itself, so the entities of the 3rd Hierarchy bring forth other entities, they have offspring, as it were, but these are now in a certain respect of a lower order than themselves. Certain descendants of the Archai are those beings that we have come to know as the nature spirits of the earth (see: elemental beings of the solid). Those who cut themselves off from the Archangeloi are the nature spirits of the water. And those who cut themselves off from the Angeloi are the nature spirits of the air. [19] (For further information see: elemental beings).

When we have enlightened ourselves to this extent, when we have illuminated ourselves inwardly in this way, and experience ourselves as it were in the second human being, in the etheric body, then we also enter the world that reveals itself to us at least initially in its images, the world of the Angeloi, Archangeloi, Archai. The way in which we are surrounded by these beings is such that they appear to us in the qualities, I would like to say, which are also given to us here in the sense world through our senses. If we look at this world in which the third hierarchy appears to us, then we do not have colors adhering to things, not tones sounding from things and so on, but we have, one cannot even say, colors flowing through space, but in time, flowing tones, vibrating warmth and coldness. That which is colored is not stretched across the surface of things, but fluctuates, undulates.

But one simply knows, through those forces by which one has placed oneself in these worlds, that just as one suspects something material behind the colored things in the physical world, that when one beholds in this world some flooding cloud of color, a flooding, one might even say, color organism, there is a spiritual-spiritual thing that rules and weaves in it, which (now) belongs to the third hierarchy. [20]

The spirits of the hierarchies of the Angeloi, the Archangeloi and the Archai had a lively interest in dealing with human beings. Now this interest ceases in the present. It began to cease in the middle of the 15th century, when the 5th post-Atlantean period began. These beings of the higher hierarchies regarded it as their ideal to obtain a perfect image of man. They could not achieve this until our time because man had not yet reached the peak of his perfection. They had to wait until they had brought man so far that he presented an image of his perfection before their spiritual eyes. Therefore, in earlier times, instinctive cognitions, sensations and volitional impulses arose in man's subconscious: these were the deeds of these beings. Man could not bring this forth from himself voluntarily, he did it instinctively; but they were the deeds of these beings. And these beings were interested in man's progress, for only when they succeeded in bringing man as far as he has been since the middle of the 15th century did they have the image before them that they had to have before them because of their own development. Now they have the human being so far. Now they are no longer interested in man from this point of view. That is why man is so spiritually abandoned in the present, because the spirits have lost a certain interest in him. That is why he so easily becomes an opponent of all spirit knowledge in the present, because the spirits no longer work on him. For those beings who are directly above us in the hierarchical order (Angeloi), the interest in this respect has lapsed. And man must now reawaken this interest out of his own free will. He must, as he was formerly induced by his body to develop in his instincts towards the spirit, now develop out of his free cognition towards the future towards the spirit. He must, as it were, of his own accord give new material to the higher beings to occupy himself with, by leaning upon them and seeking to obtain concepts which are their concepts, which now go beyond what is instinctively planted in us. [21]

In the people of earlier times, certain thoughts arose instinctively. It is precisely those people in whom certain thoughts arise instinctively who are described as geniuses. Today there is little genius in the people of the earth. For the forces of genius no longer arise from the bodily organization, because the entities of the three higher hierarchies no longer work on this bodily organization. They have lost their interest in shaping the human body. This is what makes the human being of the present day so arrogant in certain respects that he is actually finished with regard to his bodily organization. He will no longer be able to go through the rest of his earthly development in the perfection of his physical earthly form. No further perfection of his organization will result from the body itself. What had formerly risen instinctively and ingeniously in the human soul was from the body and at the same time, because it was the work of the gods, had an organizing power in the body. Now we have to work on our soul-spirit itself. And what we work on soul-spiritually, what we reveal from the spiritual world through spiritual scientific research, will become something in our human soul that will again interest the beings of the three higher hierarchies. They will be in the thoughts and feelings that we bring out of the spiritual world. In this way we will re-establish relationships with the beings of these hierarchies. [22] (See further: Higher Beings presently working in man; Higher Beings as Inspirers).

While we think and remember our thoughts, the beings of the next Hierarchy work, as it were, from outside according to their nature, just as they can use our thoughts. So imagine every human being in such a way that this is only one side of his thought life, what takes place for his consciousness. While he is thinking, the beings of the hierarchies mentioned constantly hover around him and work with the help of his thoughts. These are their materials. And what they work on in this way is part of what is needed so that Jupiter, Venus and Vulcan can one day emerge from the earth. And our whole life, right up to death, the above-mentioned beings of the higher Hierarchy work on the thoughts, in so far as they are, as it were, enclosed by our being, from outside. And when we pass through the gate of death, after some time our etheric body is taken from us and woven into the general world ether (see: Akashic Chronicle). Not only that which we finally see by looking at one side of our thought tissue is woven into the general world ether, but also that which the aforementioned entities have worked out. While they work, as it were, on our individual thought-fabric during our life, they then join together the individual thought-fabrics of the one, the other, the third human being, in such a way as they can use it, so that something new arises in the further development of the world. This must be woven into the general world ether (see: ether), what they can acquire there through the joining together of the individual etheric bodies of the human beings, which they have worked on during the time of physical life. That which we are thus able to give to these beings, the Angeloi, Archangeloi, Archai, forms for the whole time that we then live through between death (see: Life between death and new birth), something that we have to look at, at which we have to gaze. Our soul's gaze is constantly directed towards that which we were able to contribute to the general etheric fabric of the world. And just as we ourselves now have to cooperate in the production of that which then unites with physical matter in order to give us a new incarnation, so the sight of what we have given to the great world has an effect on our work. In short, whether we have something to look at from which we can draw new impulses for a next incarnation in this web of thought interwoven with the world ether, or whether we cannot, much will depend on this with regard to the way in which we will be able to prepare for our new incarnation. [23]

But that which the Angeloi, Archangeloi, Archai have woven goes so far beyond, in that it is woven into the general etheric world, that it unfolds in a wide sphere, the center of which is the earth. In his further course (of post-mortal life) man now sees this fabric, not from within, but from without. And his further life is a kind of enlargement, a merging into the universe. [24]

3rd hierarchy and types of ether

Behind the so-called chemical ether (or clay ether), color ether and so on and the water stands the third hierarchy. [25]

3rd hierarchy in consciousness in antiquity

In ancient times, no human being felt his soul-spiritual being as bound to the body as the human being of today. But this man of pre-Christian times had a living consciousness of the beings of the third Hierarchy. He already had that. By knowing that my soul is not identical with my body, he had a clear consciousness that this soul is not bound to the blood or to the muscles and so on, but that this soul is bound to the entities of the third hierarchy. [26]

3rd hierarchy and colors

In Aristotle's time it was still known, if one asked, I would say, within the Mystery, where the colors came from, that the entities of the third Hierarchy had to do with them. That is why Aristotle said in his Harmony of Colors that color means the interaction of light and darkness. But this spiritual element, that behind the warmth one has to see the entities of the first Hierarchy, behind the light and its shadow, the darkness, the entities of the second Hierarchy, behind the colored glittering in a world context the entities of the third Hierarchy, was lost. And there was nothing left but the unfortunate Newtonian color theory, about which the initiates smiled until the 18th century, and which then became the creed of those who are physical experts. You really don't have to know anything more about the spiritual world if you can speak in terms of this Newtonian theory of color. And if one is still inwardly incited by the spiritual world, as was the case with Goethe, one resists it. One puts down what is right, as he did, and rails terribly. [27]

3rd hierarchy and the Christ Impulse

Under the leadership of the non-christianized Angeloi we have received a science today that is quite abstract, quite unspiritual. And we have the urge to go up into spirituality, because the angels (who became Christian in the Egyptian-Chaldean period) are intervening more and more strongly in the leadership of humanity, especially in our cultural period. All the great spiritual leaders of humanity who are moving forward have exposed themselves to the Christ impulse at some time in the post-Atlantean period, be they angels or archangels or archai, just as people at the lowest level exposed themselves to this Christ impulse through the Mystery of Golgotha. [28]

3rd hierarchy and Exusiai

These Spirits of Form are, so to speak, the governing forces of earthly existence, of the present metamorphosis of our planet. These Spirits of Form, however, work, as we know, through other Spirits whom we call Archai, Archangeloi, Angeloi according to ancient names in our modern way. [29]

3rd Hierarchy and mountains with quartz rock

We get to know the marvelous thing when we climb up into the high mountains, into the regions of the quartz pebbles, that there the rocky peaks are entwined and interwoven by the beings of the third Hierarchy, the Angeloi, Archangeloi and Archai. [30]

3rd Hierarchy and Life Tableau

The life tableau shows vividly how, in one moment, what we have lived through since our birth, in this moment also lives within this current of our own life events, that of which one can say: The third hierarchy now lives within the world of colors, sounds and so on that has been released from matter. [31]

3rd Hierarchy and the dead

These are the two basic experiences of being together with human souls between death and a new birth: that one is either inside the souls or outside. One is also alternately inside or outside with those one knows. Meeting them, these souls, always consists of feeling one with them, of being inside them. Being outside means not paying attention to them. Just as one looks at something here: there one perceives it; when one looks away, one no longer perceives it. There you are inside with regard to human souls if you are able to turn your attention to them; you are outside if you cannot. In what I have now explained to you, you have, I would say, the basic structure for the soul's being together with other souls for the time between death and a new birth. In a similar way, the human being is inside or outside between death and a new birth in relation to the beings of the other hierarchies, Angeloi, Archangeloi and so on. Only, the higher a realm is, the more the human being feels connected to this realm after death, feels carried by it; he feels it powerfully carrying him. So the Archangeloi carry the human being more powerfully than the Angeloi, the Archai again more powerfully than the Archangeloi and so on. [32]

Sources:

[1], [26], [29] GA 184: The Polarity of Duration and Development in Human Life. The Cosmic Prehistory of Humanity (1918)

[2], [4] - [6] GA 26: Anthroposophical Guiding Principles. The Path of Knowledge of Anthroposophy - The Michael Mystery (1924/1925)

[3] GA 188: Goetheanism, a Transformation Impulse and Resurrection Thought. Human Science and Social Science (1919)

[7] - [9], [14] - [19] GA 136: The Spiritual Beings in the Celestial Bodies and Kingdoms of Nature (1912)

[10], [30] GA 231: The Supersensible Human Being, Anthroposophically Grasped (1923)

[11] GA 235: Esoteric Observations on Karmic Connections - First Volume (1924)

[12], [21] GA 192: Spiritual Scientific Treatment of Social and Pedagogical Questions (1919)

[13] GA 105: World, Earth and Man, their Nature and Development and their Reflection in the Connection between Egyptian Myth and Contemporary Culture (1908)

[20], [31] GA 84: What did the Goetheanum want and what should anthroposophy do? (1923/1924)

[22] GA 193: The Inner Aspect of the Social Enigma. Luciferic Past and Ahrimanic Future (1919)

[23], [24] GA 174b: The Spiritual Background of the First World War (1914-1921)

[25], [27] GA 233a: Mystery Places of the Middle Ages. Rosicrucianism and the Modern Principle of Initiation - Easter as a Part of the Mystery History of Humanity (1924)

[28] GA 129: Wonders of the World, Soul Examinations and Spiritual Revelations (1911)

[32] GA 182: Death as a Transformation of Life (1917/1918)

Hierarchies - 4th hierarchy

Man himself is the 4th Hierarchy. Those who know have spoken of the original man before the Fall, who was still present in such a form that he had power over the Earth just as the Angeloi, Archangeloi, Archai had power over the Moon existence, the second Hierarchy had power over the Sun existence, the first Hierarchy had power over the Saturn existence. And with this 4th Hierarchy came, admittedly as a gift from the upper Hierarchies, but as something which the upper Hierarchies first had like a possession, which they guarded, which they did not need themselves: life came. The 4th Hierarchy, the human being, appeared, interspersed with life, flowing through with shimmering colors. And in this moment of cosmic becoming, the forces that became active in the iridescence of color began to form contours. The life that inwardly rounded off the colors, covered them, rounded them off, called forth the solid crystalline (see also: life ether). And we are inside the earthly existence. [1]

Man would be the 4th Hierarchy, in three gradations of the human. But because man has asserted his strong urge towards the physical, he has not become the being on the lowest rung of the hierarchies, but the being at the top, on the highest rung of the earthly kingdoms of nature. [2]

At that time, however, such a realization was definitely connected with the fact that the earth was also understood as such a world body, which has its intelligence and its demon. But it was precisely the essence that was connected with this concept of celestial intelligence and celestial demonology that was completely lost, for this essence was expressed precisely in the following. The earth was naturally also regarded as being regulated in its inner activity, in its movement in the cosmos, by a sum of intelligences which could be summarized under the intelligence of the earth star. But what else was the intelligence of the earth celestial body for these personalities? Today it is extremely difficult to talk about these things at all because people's ideas have moved so far away from what was taken for granted by sensible people at that time. The intelligence of the earthly body was man as such. Man was regarded as the being who had received from the world spirituality the task, not merely, as today's man thinks, of walking about the earth or riding about on the railroad, buying and selling goods, writing books and the like, but man was conceived in such a way that he had received from the world spirituality the task of intervening in a regulating, ordering, lawful way in everything that relates to the position of the earth in the cosmos. Man was conceived in such a way that it was said that through what he is, through the forces he harbors within his being, he gives the earth the impulse for its movement around the sun, for its movement further in world space. At that time there was still a feeling that this was once allotted to man, that man was really made the master of the earth by the world spirituality, but that he did not prove equal to this task in the course of his development, that he had fallen from his height. Today one only very rarely encounters the echoes of this view where knowledge is spoken of. After all, everything that is thought of in the religious view of the Fall of Man goes back to this idea. It is about the fact that man originally had a completely different position on earth and in the universe than he occupies today, that he fell from his height. But apart from this religious view, where one believes to have knowledge that is methodically acquired, today there are actually only echoes of that old knowledge, which emerged from instinctive clairvoyance, of man's former task and of his fall into his present confinement within such narrow limits. (Even today - in 1924 - you can still hear it under certain circumstances): Man must actually - otherwise he could not have the striving in him that he has, otherwise he could not develop in his highest examples the great idealism that he often develops - man must actually be a comprehensive being by nature, but one who has somehow brought upon himself a cosmic sin, through which he has been limited into today's earthly existence, so that today he actually sits as if in a cage. Certainly, one still encounters this view here and there as a latecomer to that old view. [3]

Each being, when it has evolved, becomes a leader and guide at a higher level of those beings and forms through which it has passed. Here we see a picture of the future. When man has spiritualized himself to such an extent that he no longer needs the physical body, man will act as a spiritual leader on the world from outside. Then the task of this planet will have been fulfilled. He will then move on to another embodiment. The earth will then receive a new planetary existence. Humans will then be the gods of the new planet. The human body, abandoned by the spirit, will be a lower realm. We now carry a double nature within us: that which will rule on the next planet and that which will be the lower kingdom. Just as the earth will incarnate anew, so it has also emerged from earlier developmental processes, and just as human beings will be the gods of the next planet, so the beings now guiding us were human beings on the previous planet, and they had as their lower nature what we human beings are on earth. Being on earth means the cosmos of love, being on the previous planet means the cosmos of wisdom. We should develop love from the elemental to the highest. [4]

Behind the life element and the earth is the fourth hierarchy or the human being. [5]

Sources:

[1] - [3], [5] GA 233a: Mystery Places of the Middle Ages. Rosicrucianism and the Modern Principle of Initiation - Easter as a Piece of the Mystery History of Humanity (1924)

[4] GA 55: The realization of the supersensible in our time and its significance for life today (1906/1907)

Seraphim (of the 1^st Hierarchy)

The first beings who are, so to speak, around the Godhead itself, who, as it has been beautifully expressed in Western Christian esotericism, "directly enjoy the sight of God", are the seraphim, cherubim, thrones. Seraphim is a name that has always been interpreted by all those who have understood it correctly in the sense of the old Hebrew esotericism itself, in such a way that the seraphim have the task of receiving the highest ideas, the goals of a world system from the Trinity. [1] That which, so to speak, the planetary systems speak to each other through the universe in order to become the cosmos, is regulated by those spirits whom we call seraphim. [2]

One would have characterized the seraphim as beings for whom there is no subject and object, but for whom subject and object coincide, who would not say: Apart from me there are objects - but: The world is, and I am the world, and the world is I - who know only of themselves, and in such a way that these entities, these seraphim, know of themselves through an experience of which man has a faint afterglow when he, well, let us say, has the experience that puts him into a glowing enthusiasm. [3] It would only be possible to get an idea of the impression, of the impression which the seraphim make on the occult gaze, if we take the following comparison from life. Like a view that has matured in life and speaks like decades of experience, or like a sentence that is spoken in such a way that we do not merely hear its thoughts, but that we hear: the sentence, by being pronounced with such a sound, has been won in pain and in experiences of life, it is not a theory, it has been fought for, it has been suffered, it has gone through life battles and victories into the heart - if we hear all this through an undertone, then we get an idea of the impression which the trained occultist has when he soars up to the entities which we call seraphim. With the entities of the 1st Hierarchy it is so that they also objectify themselves, that they imprint their own being, separate themselves as if in a skin, in a shell, which is, however, an imprint of their own being. This now separates itself from them and remains present in the world, even if they separate themselves from it. So they do not carry their creation around with them, but this creation remains present in the world, even when they leave it. Thus a higher degree of objectivity is achieved than that attained by the second hierarchy. [4]

The organs through which the human being currently perceives the physical world light up (during Saturn's development) in their first subtle etheric dispositions. Human phantoms, which in themselves still show nothing other than the light-primordial images of the sense organs, become recognizable to the clairvoyant faculty of perception within Saturn. - These sense organs are thus the fruit of the activity of the Archangeloi; but not only these spirits are involved in their creation. At the same time as these Archangeloi, other beings appear on the scene of Saturn. Beings who are so far advanced in their development that they can make use of those sense germs to observe the world processes in Saturn's life. They are beings who can be regarded as "spirits of love", seraphim. If they were not there, the Archangeloi could not have consciousness. They look at the processes of Saturn with a consciousness that enables them to transfer them as images to the fire spirits. They themselves renounce all the advantages they could gain from watching Saturn's processes, all enjoyment, all pleasure; they give it all up so that the Archangeloi can have it. [5] The light images produced by the Archangeloi shine outwards through the sensory germs. The human ancestor is thus elevated to a kind of luminous being. Through the luminous sources of the human ancestors, the seraphim radiate something of their essence onto the planet. Without there being any necessity for them, they now radiate something of their nature through "free will". The Christian secret doctrine speaks here of the revelation of the seraphim, the spirits of all-love. [6]

The thunder and lightning coming out of the cloud is also not something that comes out of nothing. For the seer, this activity is based on the weaving and being of the seraphim. [7] The seraphim really appear in that which flashes out of the cloud as lightning, or in that which emerges as fire in the volcanic effects, in such a way that their imperceptibility becomes perceptible in these gigantic effects of nature. The ancients were aware that the greatest effects, which are really common to the solar system, announce themselves from a completely opposite side in the fire and thunderstorm effects, in the earthquakes and volcanic effects. The most creative that lies in the seraphim and cherubim announces itself through its most destructive side, curiously enough. It is precisely the reverse side, it is the absolute negative, but the spiritual is so spiritually strong that its imperceptibility, its non-existence, is already perceived by the senses. [8]

Sources:

[1] GA 110: Spiritual Hierarchies and their Reflection in the Physical World. Zodiac, Planets, Cosmos (1909)

[2], [4] GA 136: The Spiritual Beings in the Celestial Bodies and Kingdoms of Nature (1912)

[3] GA 233a: Mystery sites of the Middle Ages. Rosicrucianism and the Modern Principle of Initiation - Easter as a Part of the Mystery History of Mankind (1924)

[5] GA 13: The Secret Science in Outline (1910)

[6] GA 11: From the Akashic Chronicle (1904/1908)

[7] GA 122: The Secrets of the Biblical Story of Creation. The Six-Day Work in the 1st Book of Moses (1910)

[8] GA 180: Mystery Truths and Christmas Impulses. Ancient Myths and their Meaning. Ancient Myths and their Meaning (1917/1918)

Cherubim (of the 1^st Hierarchy)

The seraphim have the task of receiving the highest ideas, the goals of a world system from the Trinity. The cherubim, the next lower level of the (highest) hierarchy, have the task of developing in wisdom the goals, the ideas, which are received from the highest gods. The cherubim are therefore spirits of the highest wisdom, who know how to translate into realizable plans that which is given to them by the seraphim. [1] The coordination of the movements of one planet with the other, the fact that in the movement of one planet consideration is given to that of the others, corresponds to the activity of the cherubim. So the regulation of the joint movement of the system corresponds to the activity of the cherubim. [2] The element of consciousness of the cherubim is to be imagined as a completely clarified element in consciousness, full of light, so that the thought immediately becomes light, illuminating everything. [3]

People who make such an impression on us that their wisdom seems impersonal, that their wisdom appears like the blossom and fruit of a mature life, evoke in us a sense, even if only an inkling, of what is working on us from our mental, from our spiritual environment. Such wisdom, which is not collected in decades, like the wisdom of outstanding people, but such wisdom, which is collected in millennia, in millions of years of world creation, flows towards us in sublime power from the beings we call cherubim. [4]

There are such beings who are shaped like a very complicated bird's body - but of immense beauty - gifted with powerful wing-like organs and with a head similar to a human head. The great teachers of the religions who were able to look inside were well acquainted with this type of being. And if you think back to earlier times, to the cherubim (for example on the Ark of the Covenant) or the griffins, which are somewhat less real but at least meant to be so, i.e. figures that stand between genii and mythical creatures, you can see the human attempt to recreate such genius-like beings. [5]

We call the entities that have approached the Archangeloi (on the old sun) from the spiritual space and received them cherubim. So we have the approaching cherubim all around the old ball of the sun. Just as, if I may use the comparison, our earth is surrounded by its atmosphere, so the old sun was surrounded by the realm of the cherubim for the benefit of the Archangeloi. These great universal helpers presented themselves in very specific etheric forms. And our ancestors, who still had an awareness of this significant fact through their tradition, depicted the cherubim as those peculiar winged animals with differently shaped heads: the winged lion, the winged eagle, the winged bull, the winged man. And that is why the schools of the first initiates of the post-Atlantean period gave names to these cherubim approaching the old sun from four sides, which then became the names bull, lion, eagle and man. Through the four types of cherubim it was possible for the Archangeloi to dwell longer in the realm of the spirit that surrounded the old sun. The influence of these cherubim had a revitalizing effect in the spiritual sense. The cherubim had the described effect on those beings of the old sun who had, so to speak, risen to the light element, who knew how to live in the light element. But this element of light could only be acted upon during a sunny day, when light streamed out into the universe. But there were also sunny nights. Now the cherubim worked into the dark gas. It is due to this effect that on the old sun, out of the solar fog, the first plant was formed into what we today call the animal kingdom. On the ancient Saturn, the first structure of the human body was formed from the warmth; on the ancient sun, the first smoke-like moving animal bodies were formed by the cherubim shapes reflected in these solar gases. [6]

That is why those of our ancestors who were acquainted with this spiritual cosmology from the Mysteries called these beings, which worked in from the various sides of the universe on the ancient sun, the zodiac. Thus the animals initially became solar images of the zodiac. Our animals are caricature-like successors of those animals that become on the sun. Basically, each such cherubic figure has a kind of descendant or companion to the left and to the right. If you imagine that each of the four cherubic figures has two companions, then you have twelve forces and powers in the orbit of the sun, which were already present in some form on ancient Saturn. We have twelve such powers that belong to the realm of the cherubim. Now you may ask, what about the names of the zodiac today? Through a later transformation, the eagle has had to accept the name Scorpio; man is called Aquarius. [7]

All the remaining behind of entities, all such working in through remaining behind, is based on the resignation or renunciation of higher entities. We have said that the Thrones, the Spirits of Will, offer sacrifices to the Cherubim, not only during the Saturnian time, but they continue to do so during the solar time. And in sacrifice lies the very essence of all the relationships of heat or fire existing in the world. In this picture we have the sacrificing thrones and the cherubim who accept the sacrifice; but we also have those cherubim who do not accept the sacrifice, but return what comes to them as a sacrifice. Now that the bestowing virtue of the spirits of wisdom, Kyriotetes, so to speak, flows into the sacrificial warmth, we see the sacrificial smoke ascending during the old sun, of which we have said that it is then thrown back through the Archangeloi in the form of light from the outermost circumference of the sun. But now we still see sacrificial smoke that is not accepted by the cherubim, so that it flows back, backs up. This backing up creates a ring cloud, as it were; and on the very outside we have the reflected masses of light. [8] From these accepted and rejected sacrifices something arises within the old sun that we can call a doubling of the entire solar substance. The sun in this ancient time can only be compared with an external figure if we compare it with our present Saturn: the sphere surrounded by a ring. [9] Now those Cherubim who have renounced the sacrifice, that which lies, as it were, in the sacrificial smoke, have renounced it for the reason that they thereby withdraw themselves from the qualities of this sacrificial smoke. And these properties include, above all, time and thus coming into being and passing away. During the old solar evolution we come to a separation of time and eternity. Eternity was achieved through the resignation of the cherubim during the solar evolution. If we saw time come into being on Saturn, we see certain relationships being snatched away from time during the solar evolution. This is already being prepared during the Saturnian time, so that eternity does not only begin during the solar time. But it can only be seen clearly and distinctly, so that it can be expressed in concepts, during the solar period. [10]

For if this resignation had not occurred, they would have had - now figuratively speaking - the sacrificial smoke in their own substance; what they themselves had done would have been expressed in the sacrificial smoke. Suppose these cherubim had performed this or that. Then it would have appeared, expressed outwardly, through the changing clouds of the air, that is, in the outer form of the air would have been expressed what the non-resigning cherubim would have done with the sacrificial substance. Now, however, they have rejected it and have thereby passed from transience into permanence. But the sacrificial substance is there for the time being, it is, so to speak, released from the forces that would otherwise have absorbed it, and now does not need to follow the impulses of the cherubim. What happens with this sacrificial substance is that other beings take possession of it, which thereby become independent beings that exist alongside the cherubim. If the cherubim had accepted the sacrifices, the Luciferic beings could not have remained behind, for they would not have had the opportunity to embody themselves in this substance. [11] Thus we see that we have not to look for the cause of evil in the so-called evil entities, but in the so-called good entities, which only through their resignation have caused evil to arise through the entities that could bring evil into the world. [12] The seer directs his gaze upwards and sees how in the aerial form, in which the dynamis reign, the cherubim are at work, so that the watery substance, which rises from the realm of the Kyriotetes, can gather itself into clouds. The cherubim rule in the orbit of our earth just as truly as the thrones, kyriotetes, dynamis rule within the elementary existence of our earth. [13] Air is, as it were, an illusion, and behind it stand the mighty beings whom we call the cherubim. [14]

When we come out of the world of thoughts, it flickers back inside the nervous system. We do not perceive this flickering in our ordinary life. Thoughts live in us, which are not spiritual beings in us, but what we perceive is a kind of reading of the corpses of thoughts. But the fact that these thoughts are reflected as a living being has its great significance in the world order. What happens now with this spiritual light that enters (the human being)? The cherubim come, collect this light and use it to further the world order. When we think, thought light radiates out of us, and this illuminates the world in which the cherubim live. [15]

The last idea that one comes to at all when one approaches Saturn, going backwards - the sacrificing spirits of the will, thrones that direct their victims up to the cherubim - it goes no further, the world is as if boarded up. Time is born through sacrifice. - But time is not the abstract time we usually speak of, it is an independent entity. Entities are born which consist only of time; these are the spirits of personality, the Archai. The sacrificial smoke of the thrones, as it were, which gives birth to time, is what we call the warmth of Saturn. [16]

Sources:

[1], [6], [7] GA 110: Spiritual Hierarchies and their Reflection in the Physical World. Zodiac, Planets, Cosmos (1909)

[2], [4] GA 136: The Spiritual Beings in the Celestial Bodies and Kingdoms of Nature (1912)

[3] GA 233a: Mystery Places of the Middle Ages. Rosicrucianism and the Modern Principle of Initiation - Easter as a Piece of the Mystery History of Humanity (1924)

[5] GA 101: Myths and legends. Occult Signs and Symbols (1907)

[8], [9], [16] GA 132: Evolution from the Point of View of the Truthful (1911)

[10] - [12] GA 132, page 49f (1979 edition, 102 pages)

[13] GA 122: The Secrets of the Biblical Story of Creation. The Six-Day Work in the 1st Book of Moses (1910)

[14] GA 121: The Mission of Individual Folk-Souls in Connection with Germanic-Nordic Mythology (1910)

[15] GA 156: Occult Reading and Occult Hearing (1914)

Thrones - spirits of the will (of the 1^st Hierarchy)

They are those spirits who are called "radiant lives" or "flames" [in Christian (occult) science "thrones"]. [1] If we look back at Saturn, we can say: This Saturn consists only of human beings. There is as yet no animal kingdom, no plant kingdom and no mineral kingdom on it. The entire sphere of Saturn is composed only of the first human plants. Like a blackberry made up of individual berries, Saturn was made up of human beings. And what belonged to Saturn surrounded it and had an effect on Saturn from the surrounding area. Human thinking and even human clairvoyance can hardly presume to see into that sublime development which the thrones had to undergo before they were able to sacrifice that which could form the first plant for the human physical body. [2]

When the evolution of Saturn began, they had already attained a soul of consciousness which man will only attain after his volcanic life, that is, a high creative, superspiritual consciousness. These "creators" also had to pass through the stages of humanity. This happened on world bodies that preceded Saturn. However, their connection with the development of humanity remained until the middle of Saturn's life. In secret science they are called "radiant lives" or "radiant flames" because of their sublimely fine radiant bodies. And because the material of which this body was made bears some distant resemblance to the will of man, they are also called the "spirits of will". These spirits are the creators of Saturnian man. The material body that the human being receives in this way is the first structure of his later physical body. One can therefore say that the germ of the physical human body is laid during the first Saturn cycle by the spirits of the will; and at that time this germ has the dull Saturn consciousness. [3] Around the middle of the 7th Saturn cycle, man is so far advanced that he can work unconsciously on his own material body. Through this activity of his own, man, in the complete dullness of Saturn's existence, creates the first seed of the actual spiritual man, Atma, which only reaches full development at the end of man's evolution. The seed of the spiritual man, Atma, is completely permeated by the power of these spirits of will and then retains this power through all subsequent stages of development. [4]

What was present as a basic substance, what these spirits of will sacrificed, was then worked into by the other spiritual entities, the other hierarchies, into which the spirits of personality, the Archai, also worked themselves, who formed their own humanity, if I may say so, in this matter of will. And it was also this substance of will that acted as the warmth element in the old Saturnian existence and in which the first anlage for the physical human body was formed. But you must not believe that such spiritual beings as the spirits of will conclude their work at a certain stage. Even if they had, so to speak, done the main work on Saturn, they continued to work during the course of development through the sun, moon and earth. And in a certain respect they remained in the substantial for which they had first sacrificed themselves. We can say that during the old Saturn's existence they were so far advanced that they let their own substance flow out as warmth, sacrificed it substantially, so that their fire flowed into the planetary existence of the old Saturn. Then they hardened this fire during the old solar existence into the gaseous. But it was also they themselves who condensed their gaseous into the watery during the old moon existence, and during the earth existence they further condensed their watery into the earthy, into the solid. Behind everything that confronts us as solid, the spirits of the will, the thrones, work and weave. [5]

Just as we otherwise look at the alien being outside us, so at the third level of clairvoyance we look at ourselves as an alien being from the alien being. With the third level of clairvoyance we perceive the beings of the 1st hierarchy. We then perceive entities which we cannot characterize in any other way than by saying: They do not consist of flesh and blood, nor of light and air, but they consist of that which we can only perceive in ourselves when we become aware that we have a will. In relation to their lowest substance they consist only of will. [6]

One attains the consciousness that the spirits of the will or the thrones sacrifice their own being to the cherubim. This is the last conception one comes to at all when, going backwards, one approaches Saturn. And by experiencing this sacrifice of the spirits of will to the cherubim, something is released from our being. This can now only be said with the words: Through the sacrifice that the spirits of will make to the cherubim, time is born. - But now time is not the abstract time of which we usually speak, but it is an independent entity. Now we can begin to speak of something that is beginning. Beings are born that consist only of time. These are the spirits of personality, the Archai. We have also described them as time spirits, as spirits who regulate time. But those who are born as spirits are really beings that consist only of time. The sacrificial smoke of the thrones, as it were, which gives birth to time, is what we call the warmth of Saturn. [7] These spirits of will have in fact built or, rather, composed the solid ground on which we walk. Those who, as esoterics, gave names to the products of the Spirits of Will within our earthly existence, they called these Spirits the thrones, because they have indeed built us the thrones on which we lean as on a solid ground, on which all other earthly existence continues to rest as on its solid thrones. [8] And the element of thrones is to be imagined as bearing us in grace, bearing the world. [9]

The fact that man can stand on solid ground is due to the fact that forces radiate in from all sides of the universe. The sphere of the forces radiating in constantly meets that of the forces radiating out, and where they come together they form a boundary, so to speak, and that is the surface of the earth. So what you see as a surface is only an illusion, which is the result of forces radiating in and radiating out, which act in such a way that they stop each other just at the surface in question. What streams out is essentially the same as what we must call the effect of the thrones. These spirits radiate their forces from the earth in all directions, and that which comes in from the world-space is essentially what we can call the incoming, working forces of certain spirits of movement, Dynamis. For if only the spirits of will were working from within the earth and only had a counterpart in the spirits of movement, then the earth would be in a perpetual flow, in a perpetual stream. The planet would not yet be able to come to rest at any point. It would then not be as fluid as the sea today, it would not be as easily wave-throwing and wave-forming an element as water, but it would throw and form waves in a denser mass. Thus the earth would still be formed today by the cooperation of the spirits of will and the spirits of motion, if another working had not occurred, a working which is extraordinarily lasting, and which expresses itself on our earth's surface by incorporating into the forces of will, which cooperate with the spirits of motion, that which we call spirits of form, exusiai. So you can imagine that the Exusiai, dancing as it were on the waves, bring the moving masses to rest, casting them into forms, so that we have to record a cooperation of three kinds of forces. That which appears outwardly on our earth preferably as a liquid element - not our present water, however, but the ancient liquid element which has been brought to rest by the spirits of form - we must regard as the outermost manifestation of the thrones. [10] The spirits of will are the group souls of the minerals. [11] The planet has an inner impulse that drives it through space, just as man has an inner impulse of will that drives him to take his steps, to walk through space. That which guides the planet through space, that which regulates its movement in space, that which makes it move around the fixed star, for example, corresponds to the spirits of will. [12] Just as the thrones then built up the first embodiment of our earth out of the universe, so they still work now. We can actually only see these Spirits of Will in that, when they become Luciferic, they show themselves in a certain way in those phenomena which we find as meteors in the region of the earth and which come in as if from the universe. [13] (See also: Comets).

Sources:

[1], [3], [4] GA 11: From the Akashic Chronicle (1904/1908)

[2] GA 112: The Gospel of John in Relation to the Three Other Gospels, Especially to the Gospel of Luke (1909)

[5], [8] GA 122: The Secrets of the Biblical History of Creation. The Six-Day Work in the 1st Book of Moses (1910)

[6] GA 136: The Spiritual Beings in the Celestial Bodies and Kingdoms of Nature (1912)

[7] GA 132: Evolution from the Point of View of the Truthful (1911)

[9] GA 233a: Mystery Places of the Middle Ages. Rosicrucianism and the Modern Principle of Initiation - Easter as a Part of the Mystery History of Humanity (1924)

[10] GA 121: The Mission of Individual Folk-Souls in Connection with Germanic-Nordic Mythology (1910)

[11] - [13] GA 136, page 201 (1984 edition, 246 pages)

Spirits of Freedom or Spirit of Love – 10th Hierarchy

The spirits of the immediately higher Hierarchy were called messengers (Greek: Angeloi) and arch-messengers (Archangeloi) to indicate that they do not carry out their own orders, but that they carry out the orders of those who are above them. In man, however, a hierarchy will mature which carries out its own orders. Through the development of Jupiter, Venus and Vulcan, man will mature into the executor of his own impulses. Even if he is not yet ready today, he will mature into this. After the Archangeloi and Angeloi, the Spirit of Freedom or the Spirit of Love will have to be added to the series of Hierarchies, and this is the tenth of the Hierarchies, starting from the top, which is admittedly in the process of development, but it belongs to the Hierarchies. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 110: Spiritual Hierarchies and their Reflection in the Physical World. Zodiac, Planets, Cosmos (1909)

Humanity – the Tenth Hierarchy

The future of Man and Christ as the representative and enabler of that development.

The future of humanity is to become the tenth spiritual hierarchy (after the nine spiritual hierarchies that developed before Mankind): Mankind is to become the hierarchy of the Spirits of Freedom and Love. No true Love is possible without Freedom. Man is the first class of spiritual beings who is not acting upon higher divine impulses and guidance, but who - thanks to the Luciferic influence - has freedom of choice. This means that with Man, something new enters into the cosmos. The (divine) 'design choice' for this development in our solar system evolution implied the Fall of Man and the required intervention of a divine being - Christ - to 'correct' or overcome this, to balance out the gift of Freedom with the overriding gift of Love, the choice for the Good. The evolution of [a] spiritual hierarchy such as humanity is a development along a 'ladder' defining stages of different Conditions of Consciousness, and the concepts we denote by planetary spirit and zodiac are stages along such future development.

Aspects of this Development

• The great mission of Man is to bring Freedom into the world, and with Freedom firstly that which one calls Love in the true sense of the word. For Love without Freedom is impossible. The earth is the Cosmos of Freedom and Love and humanity is in process of development to become the tenth of the hierarchies, the Spirits of Freedom of Spirits and Love (1909-04-18-GA110)
• The Mystery of the Earth is expressed in the words: 'To make the Trinity into a Quaternary': when an absolute equilibrium comes about between the three forces of Thinking, Feeling and Willing, a fourth element is added and that element is Love. (1910-06-11-GA121)
• Until the 12-13th centuries, people could talk about Man being the Fourth Hierarchy and bringing life, after the first three hierarchies H1, H2, H3 brought the elements and ethers in the previous planetary stages of Old Saturn, Old Sun and Old Moon (1924-01-04-GA233A and 1924-01-11-GA233A)
• Freedom and Love:
  • We attain freedom by irradiating the life of thought with will,we attain love by permeating the life of will with thoughts. We unfold love in our actions by letting thoughts radiate into the realm of the will; we develop freedom in our thinking by letting what is of the nature of will radiate into our thoughts. And because we are a unified whole, when we reach the point where we find freedom in the life of thought and love in the life of will, there will be freedom in our actions and love in our thinking. Each irradiates the other: action filled with thought is wrought in love; thinking that is permeated with will gives rise to actions and deeds that are truly free. Thus, you see how in the human being the two great ideals, freedom and love, grow together. (1920-12-19-GA202)

Sources:

https://anthroposophy.eu/Christ_Module_10_-_Tenth_Hierarchy

On Freedom

The spiritual hierarchies in creation make part of a complex cosmic fractal with cascading interdependencies as the cosmic breath of brahma pushes up and down like the cylinders in an engine. Each hierarchy is structurally interconnected and channels through the energy of the Logos, thereby giving expression of characteristics at that level. This spiritual reality is such a complex multidimensional process that it is beyond comprehension for contemporary mainstream human waking consciousness.

Humanity is the first level in creation that has been set free from this pattern. Through a divine intervention on Old Sun, a Luciferic influence was created in the spiritual hierarchies that cascaded down to finally cause, in the current planetary Earth stage of evolution, and due to the influence of backward Luciferic beings, the fact that Man was wrestled free from the guidance of the spiritual hierarchies [in order to have the opportunity to achieve freedom] (something that no other spiritual hierarchy in creation has been given).

This was a gradual process starting in the Lemurian epoch with the Development of the I, as it is the Luciferic influence that triggers freedom in the Human I. This event corresponds to the seduction by the snake in [the story of the] Fall described in the Bible and the Book of Genesis. Though it caused 'side-effects' as human karma, evil in the world, and the start of reincarnation ... this luciferic infection did contribute in a unique way to the divine plan of creation, and these things are the price to pay for the unique fact or capability of true freedom: Man is the first spiritual being that has freedom of choice, without being completely guided by higher hierarchies.

The reason and wisdom in this development is that Freedom is required for Love, as Love is about giving rather than receiving, and selflessness rather than selfishness, ultimately the selfless sacrifice of one's self for another. This requires consciousness to be able to choose freely for the one or the other, which is exactly the mission of the planet Earth and the Human 'I'.

This was achieved through a stepwise approach with divine impulses of Jehovah and Christ that combined and countered the Luciferic influences.

A spiritual hierarchy which has Freedom as a pathway to becoming the creative spirits of Love, represents a breakthrough in the evolution of the cosmos, which is why humanity is the 'crown of creation' and the exciting plan of the Gods who are developing mankind into becoming Gods.

In this development, the human 'I' is thereby a 'sharp two edged sword' and will lead both to the highest and the lowest in Man.

The 'price to pay' for this freedom will require a major 'cleanup' in facing evil, not just in the current Post-atlantean epoch but down to future planetary stages of evolution, a stepwise redemption with multiple phases. Mankind will be split into good and evil subraces, whereby the greater good will face and redeem the greatest evil.

In current times, humanity as a whole is only mature enough to become free and independent in relation to the consciousness soul, an evolution that was initiated in the 15th century. In the future, the spiritual and moral influx will further permeate the intellectual soul and sentient soul, so people will find the impulses for the good flowing from their own soul and have a firm direction in actions and work.

Sources:

https://anthroposophy.eu/Freedom

On Love

Love is a word that is linked and filled by people with many meanings. There's the love of a mother for her child, physical love, the love of blood based relations. All these are very human, specific to our current few epochs of incarnate life.

True love is spiritual, it is a cosmic principle. That spiritual love is buddhi or christos, a principle beyond space and time, in the higher spirit world, and it originates even higher. Its essence, for us to relate to, to practice and learn, is giving and selflessness, and the desire to give so much and so deep that it becomes sacrifice, depending on the state of consciousness. Still a long long way to go for humanity, how far is not the reality of 'love the other like yourself' (re Golden rule) .. Earth is just the seeding stage.

These are all words of concepts, and may sound far off, but in the depth of meditation and one's soul, in praying and compassion, and in our living relationships towards others, the human being can connect to all this in a very real and practical way.

As is described by Paul's First Letter to the Corinthians, known as the 'Hymn to Love' (see below) humanity is still in the very early kintergarten stage of learning and aspiring this spiritual love. Mankind will will become spiritual ever more, and so will our faculty of love evolve over the next epochs and planetary stages of evolution

• Love requires freedom, the freedom to choose giving over receiving
• Pure love is selfless - selflessness is the key characteristic as opposed to egoism
• The highest form of love is Sacrifice
• Difference of love with egotistic variants: "a large part of the so-called love of doing good is masked self-love" (1918-12-12-GA186)
• The delusion of so-called selfless actions caused by egoism, physiologically: "such feelings become manifest with a feeling of warmth that goes through the warmth ether part of our life body and also works on the physical body through the blood" (1911-10-24-GA266)
• There is a hundred times more hatred than love among human beings (1924-03-30-GA239)
• A Man with the disposition to be hurt by everything that happens, who goes through life with a perpetual grudge because everything hurts him ... this trait in the character invariably leads back to a previous incarnation when he gave way to intense hatred (1924-03-30-GA239)
• God is supreme love: love is the absolute good and the all-embracing attribute of the Godhead (and not omnipotence (absolute power), not omniscience (absolute wisdom), the other two attributes of the Trinity) (1912-12-17-GA143)
• Humanity is on its way to become the Tenth Hierarchy of the Spirits of Freedom and Love
• Human love of blood-relationships, as a result of the first divine impulse by Jehovah and first seed stage preparing towards spiritual love
• Related: Manicheism as the countering of evil with good to overwin and redeem it^*

^* Manicheaism studies the function of evil and of suffering in the world, whereby evil is an integral part of the cosmos, collaborating in its evolution, finally to be absorbed and transfigured by the good. Manicheism is a spiritual stream founded by Mani or Manes, an incarnation of a Bodhisattva of the White Lodge, around the 3th century AD. It spread quickly from Persian to both Europe and Asia and became an important religious stream, but was then vigorously persecuted and repressed by the Persian and Roman empires and thereby disappeared around the 5th century. When Manicheam movements such as the Cathars arose again in the middle ages, they were again eradicated by the Catholic inquisition.

Sources:

https://anthroposophy.eu/Love

Comets

In the comets we have to see something that basically streams in from the world space with a similar kind of being as the group souls of the minerals. The group souls of the minerals belong to the realm of the spirits of will. Beyond them now lie the entities which essentially underlie cometary life. But everywhere there are Luciferic entities; so also within the comets, which are on the level of thrones, not seraphim or cherubim. This gives the comet a mineral nature, so it appears as a mineral impact in the planetary system, and in other words we see in the comets world bodies that fly in from the cosmos at a time when the planetary system is already formed, and which therefore do not get as far as the bodies within the planetary system itself, but remain at a much earlier stage. [1] The comet has remained in the stage of the old lunar existence. The comet has therefore not progressed to the normal earthly existence. So that we have a piece of later Jupiter, born much too early, in the present moon, which is thus frozen, not viable, and we have a piece of old moon existence protruding into our present earth development in our comet. [2]

We can actually only see the spirits of will, thrones, in that when they become luciferic, they show themselves in a certain way in those phenomena which we find as meteors in the area of the earth and which come in as if from outer space. As the comet passes through the planetary system, the mineral is joined to that which also comes from the spirits of will. And the consequence can be that mineral matter attaches itself, which is then attracted by the earth and falls down, which is of course not the comet. [3] In the comets we have to see something that basically streams in from the world space in a similar kind of entity as the group souls of the minerals; these belong to the realm of the spirits of will. Beyond them are the entities that essentially underlie cometary life. But everywhere there are Luciferic entities; so also within the comets, which are on the level of the thrones, not of the cherubim and seraphim. This gives the comet a mineral nature, so it appears as a mineral impact in the planetary system, and in other words we see in the comets world bodies that fly in from the cosmos at a time when the planetary system is already formed, and which therefore do not get as far as the bodies within the planetary system itself, but remain behind at a much earlier stage. [4]

The comet is an accumulation of kama, desire matter, without the corresponding spirit matter. [5] It is actually the laws of the old lunar existence that the comet carries into our existence. It has preserved this and has thus entered our existence. It has taken on the present matter of the solar-earth system, but has remained in terms of movement and its nature at the level of natural law that our solar system had when the earth was still the moon. [6]

There are people who imagine a solar system, in the solar system comets, they say: The comet appears, then it goes through a huge long ellipse and then it comes back after a long time. That's not true for many comets. Comets appear, they go out, disappear here, stop, but form again from the other side and come back from there, describing curves that don't return at all. It is quite possible in the cosmos that comets somehow disappear out of space and come back at another place in space. [7]

We are inside the lunar sphere with the earth. In a certain respect, we are also in the solar sphere, we are in the sphere of the planets. They are not merely that which moves in the lemniscates and which is there at that point (the visible celestial body), but the point is only a particularly distinct part - I said: like the fruit court in the egg of the human embryo. But if you consider this, you will say to yourself: I am looking at the earth, I am looking at the sun. But two spheres push into each other, and these spheres express themselves in such a way that they come, as it were, from oppositely directed matter, from the center of the sun, towards which negative matter radiates, from the center of the earth, from which positive matter radiates. Positive and negative materiality interpenetrate. This interpenetration is quite inhomogeneous. And now imagine in this interpenetration the collision of certain density ratios, then you have given the conditions that simply through the one substantiality, which is penetrated by the other, such phenomena as the comets arise. These are continually becoming and continually passing phenomena. [8]

In the moon we have the corpse of the planetary system, in the sum of the planets we have the body, namely the physical body, in the fixed star itself, radiating from it, we have the etheric body of the planetary system. And indeed a continuous stream of etheric life goes out from the fixed star to the outermost edge of the planetary system and flows back again. [9] When we describe a planetary system, we must say: A planetary system consists of its moons, that is its corpse; of its planets, that is its physical body; and of all this, of which the fixed star proves to be the conductor, that is its etheric body. We find the astral in it by itself, for we get to know it by knowing that beings dwell in it. Just as man dwells in his shells, so the beings of the higher hierarchies dwell in the corpse-shell, in the physical shell and in the etheric shell of the planetary system. I would like to say that we do not have to take care of the astral body first, we already have it through the esoteric view, which is directed inwards. But even if you consider human life on earth, you will admit that through this human life a sum of astral entities and forces, of astral forms arises, which are actually harmful, inhibiting for life. Erroneous, ugly, evil thoughts are constantly emanating from man himself, they go out into the astral world and live on there (for a more detailed description see: Astral Plan). So that the astral sphere of a planet is filled not only with what are the normal substances of its spiritual being, but also with this emanated astral. And if we were to look at all the harmful forces produced by the various Luciferic spirits, we would find a vast number of harmful astral substances within a planetary system. And the occult view, which has the opportunity to observe a comet's life for a while, shows us that everything cometary in general and everything meteoric within our planetary system always endeavors to gather around itself the harmful astral products in the planetary system and to carry them away (again). The occult view shows us that the comet does indeed dissolve at the point where it disappears from physical view and now makes its way through a world that is not limited within the usual three spatial dimensions. [10] With the exception of a few comets that have truly elongated elliptical orbits, most of the comets are such that the comet comes from one side and disappears to the other, and when it comes back, it has re-formed. Why? Because, as it approaches, it exerts attraction - it is at first merely a kind of spiritual center of force, it forms only because this spiritual center of force attracts everything of harmful astral currents and develops around it. [11] The sphere of the comets extends to the sphere of the cherubim and seraphim. [12]

The comet is a kind of food (against entropy) for the planetary systems. When such a comet enters, there is always some change in the motion; and so one never arrives at a completely regular motion. The irregularity in the motion or in the rest of the whole planetary system therefore comes from the comets. [13] So that in reality the motion cannot be (exactly) calculated. [14] The good wine years actually stem from the fact that the earth has become hungry. It leaves its fertility more to the sun, and the sun causes the goodness of the wine. If the earth has a good wine year on the one hand, you can be almost certain that a comet will soon follow. Then come bad wine years. [15]

In 1906, during the congress in Paris, I drew attention to the fact that spiritual research can say from its knowledge of cometary nature: Because compounds of carbon and oxygen play the same role on earth that the compounds of carbon and nitrogen played during the old lunar existence, that is, cyanic compounds, the cometary existence must contain cyanic acid-like compounds, cyanic compounds composed of carbon and nitrogen. In the last few weeks (March 1910) this fact has been reported in the newspapers as an external spectral-analytical fact. [16]

Just as something quite special enters into individual family life with a new citizen of the earth, so something quite different enters into the progress of the human race on earth through this appearance of the comet, which breaks through the ordinary progress of world existence. Something new is actually born, as it were, when the comet enters the world. Thus Halley's comet is one of those that, as it appears periodically, always gives birth to something quite specific new in human life. With each new appearance, a new impulse was born for mankind to drive down the ego from a spiritual world view in order to take a more materialistic view of the world. [17]

Sources:

[1], [3], [4], [9] - [12] GA 136: The Spiritual Beings in the Heavenly Bodies and Kingdoms of Nature (1912)

[2] GA 118: The Event of the Appearance of Christ in the Ethereal World (1910)

[5] GA 95: Before the Gates of Theosophy (1906)

[6], [16], [17] GA 116: The Christ Impulse and the Development of the I-Consciousness (1909/1910)

[7] GA 202: The Bridge between the World-Spirituality and the Physical of Man. The Search for the New Isis, the Divine Sophia (1920)

[8] GA 323: The Relationship of the Various Fields of Natural Science to Astronomy. Third Course in Natural Science: Celestial Science in Relation to Man and the Science of Man (1921)

[13] - [15] GA 353: The History of Humanity and the Worldviews of Civilized Peoples (1924)

15
Higher Self

If man (in Lemurian times) had only remained under the influence of the divine-spiritual beings who created him, he would not have become free, but would always have recognized the spiritual through matter. These guiding creators now wanted to prevent the danger that the whole etheric body would also be permeated by Luciferic influences. Therefore they separated a part of Adam's etheric body and retained it in the spiritual worlds. And this etheric body is the higher self with which we should reunite, with which we are only a whole human being. The esoteric should say to himself: Over there, this higher self, which actually belongs to me, is waiting for me to reunite with me, and in my meditation I should strive towards it with all my fervor, I should form myself into a chalice that receives this higher self. - St. Paul, who was an initiate in these matters, uses quite the right terms when he speaks of the "old" and "new" Adam. The first time this union of the retarded etheric body with a human being took place was when Jesus of Nazareth was born, of whom the Gospel of Luke tells us. This boy Jesus received the etheric body of Adam. With this part of the etheric body, the high, guiding creative beings had retained the ability of individual thinking and (individual) language for man. Man does think, but it is not thinking that he produces individually himself, but he takes from the divine substance of thought that floods the world. Nor does man have an individual language, but high spiritual beings gave groups of people a common language. People should only acquire their own thinking, their own language, by reuniting with their higher etheric body. Since the ability to speak lies in this etheric body, the legend is understandable which tells that the boy Jesus did not need to learn language, but spoke to his mother after his birth in a language she understood. By the fact that this etheric body of Adam united with a physical human body for the first time, it was subjected to the law to which every spiritual being that descends into matter is subject, the law of number, of multiplication. Just as the seed laid in the earth brings forth the ear with its many grains, so the body of Jesus was the earthly womb for the etheric body of Adam, the point of passage to multiplication, and it is these multiplied etheric bodies that await us. The guardian of paradise stands exactly at the point where we slip into deep sleep, where we lose consciousness. If we did not lose it here, we would see him. But an insight into the world of the archangels (Archangeloi) would destroy us, because we are not up to it. (T)herefore this archangel, who occupies our etheric body, is called our higher self (T)herefore we strive for union with him. [1] (For further information see: Higher self).

Sources:

[1] GA 266/1: From the Contents of the Esoteric Lessons. Volume I (1904-1909)

Higher self and meditation

The esoteric practitioner must be aware, by embarking on such a training, that he will be confronted with results from outside which he might ask himself: would this also have happened to me if I had not become an esoteric practitioner? The esoteric should make the most intimate observation of life and self his duty. The fact that he has entered this path should be at the center of his life, for he is a small center of spiritual life, and this radiates - more or less unconsciously - to his surroundings and causes the events that approach him. Through higher development the disciple leaves his lower self alone, even if only for a short time during the day, the lower self with which he stands in ordinary life, through which he enters into contact with the outer world. During meditation he leaves it to itself, depriving it, as it were, of a guardian who otherwise constantly controls it, who partly regulates, partly suppresses, or at least keeps in check its character traits. Because this lower ego is now left to its own devices, even if only for a short time, qualities creep out from all sides from hidden corners of our nature which we often thought we had already overcome, the suppression of which seemed quite easy to us. And this can in some ways make a person worse if he does not maintain the strictest control over himself. In addition to our meditations, we are given certain exercises to support us in this. Above all, the esoteric should keep in mind in his daily meditation that his whole striving is to reach his higher self, and reflect on what this higher self is. He should not believe that he should offer anything to this higher self, but should adopt a wait-and-see attitude towards it, expecting everything from it. It meets the disciple on his path in three ways; that is the regular way. The first time it happens in a completely fleeting way, and in order to notice it, it requires the attention that the esotericist should have for everything. For it is in dreams that what is called the doubling of the ego takes place.

For example, you have something planned or a problem is bothering you. Then someone appears in your dream who advises you what to do, who solves the problem, someone who is better, smarter than you. You should pay close attention to such dreams. In the course of your development it happens that in moments of helplessness, or in moments when you have made a decision, you hear a gentle voice advising you against this decision, for example. It is often a decision that one has made to the best of one's knowledge and conscience, and if one now follows this voice, which nevertheless advises against it, it can happen that one has apparently done the wrong thing, but in the vast majority of cases one will immediately realize that one has done the right thing by following the voice. If you now practice heeding it, you will realize that you have something in you that is higher than your own reason, wiser than yourself. And the third moment, when you face your higher self, is a very important, sacred one. This is during meditation. For a few moments only, you will unite with him. But to achieve this, we must completely silence our lower nature. We must extinguish everything that fills us with antipathies and petty feelings towards the world and life. In general, the student must always keep the law of polarity in mind when observing himself. This means that if he has a bad quality and wants to eradicate it, he must also look for the opposite pole of this quality within himself. It is certainly there. The presence of one quality certainly also causes the opposite pole, even if one should not believe it, and this must be eradicated; then the other disappears with it. For example, if a person feels fear within himself, he has hatred within him as an opposite quality, however hidden, however complicatedly clothed, and must drive it out. Fear disappears of its own accord. The higher self will only unite with us when such qualities have been eradicated in the moments of meditation. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 266/1: From the Contents of the Esoteric Lessons. Volume I (1904-1909)

Higher beings that are currently at work in people

At the boundary between the soul of understanding and the soul of consciousness, beings we call Angeloi intervene. It is they who condense what otherwise only takes place consciously in opinions, in concepts, who condense it into what one can call sensations and what one can call feelings. That which is inwardly felt, sensed, is already a condensation of thought. There are forces behind us that help us.

Let us now go to the other boundary between the intellectual soul and the sentient soul. There we have still higher beings who intervene. It is they who stimulate the will in us, who force the thought through to the will: they are the archangels or archangeloi. But when we enter into a relationship with our environment, then it is the spirits of the personality, the Archai; we already feel the resistance of the world when we intervene in its structure. Thus, in the intermediate realms between the individual soul forces, there are spiritual beings who guide us, who carry us through, who have the task of transforming into deeds, into forces, what man, left to himself, can only experience as thoughts within himself.

Indeed, as soon as we immerse ourselves in these subconscious regions of the soul's life, there is the possibility that the battles that take place and must take place within the spiritual world will also enter the arena of our consciousness. Where the Angeloi beings intervene, there are also the Luciferic beings who are the opponents of the Angeloi. If only the Angeloi were to intervene, our mind would reach for that which is beautiful, only for that which corresponds to our human dignity. The Luciferic beings lead us to that which we ourselves do not agree with in calm reflection, but which draws us towards it. Where the Archangeloi intervene, the ahrimanic beings can also intervene, leading us to transform our judgment into error, our search for truth into lies. But the moment we come to feelings, to impulses of will, other beings intervene, including those that counteract the ascending beings. This is the point that basically everyone who is somehow involved in occult research should be aware of. [1] See also: Asuras.

Sources:

[1] GA 127: The Mission of the New Spiritual Revelation. The Christ-event as the central event of earth evolution (1911)

Higher beings who lower themselves into people and inspire them

The development of mankind would proceed quite differently if nothing else came into consideration than the causal connections between one incarnation and the next or between previous and subsequent incarnations of man. However, in every incarnation, more or less - and especially in the case of historically leading personalities - quite significant other forces continually intervene in human life and make use of man as a tool. From this it can be concluded that the actual karmic course of life, which lies purely in man himself, is modified through the incarnations. [1]

If we ask what was then (in earlier times) brought into this human soul from outside, so to speak, what was sunk into it by beings of the higher hierarchies, then we can say: It is the same thing that man will later attain as his own activity, as his own activity, when he will have lifted himself up to what we call Atma. And just as man himself will then work within himself (in the future), so beings of higher hierarchies worked on the Indian soul. We can say quite well that a work of higher beings took place within the etheric body of the ancient Indians. And what was woven into the etheric body was the kind of work that man would later achieve when Atma worked on the etheric body. - In the Persian culture it was then the case that Buddhi worked in the astral body, in the sensory body. - And in the Chaldean-Babylonian-Egyptian culture, Manas worked in the sentient soul. It was not until the Greco-Latin period that the human being became fully active in his own soul life, so to speak. [2]

Now, however, we have been beyond this cultural epoch for some time; and whereas in pre-Greek times it was the case that higher beings, so to speak, penetrated into the human core of being and worked in it, in our time we have to fulfill an opposite task. We must first be able to acquire in a completely human way what we have worked out through our ego, what we are capable of absorbing through our activity from the impressions of the outside world. But then we must not remain at the standpoint where the people of the Greco-Latin period remained, by working out only the human, the pure humanity as such. Rather, we must carry up what we work out and weave it into what is to come; we must, so to speak, take the direction upwards towards what is to come later: Manas or spirit self. But this is only to be expected in the sixth cultural period. In this respect we are truly living in a transitional epoch. [3]

Sources:

[1] - [3] GA 126: Occult History. Esoteric Observations on the Karmic Connections of Personalities and Events in World History (1910/1911)

16
Kamaloka

From the moment the spirit is no longer embodied, it can therefore no longer continue its formation. The spirit must free itself from it, insofar as it was connected to the individual physical life through it. One may ask: Is not this "body of desire" also destroyed with death? The answer to this is: No, to the extent that in every moment of physical life desire outweighs satisfaction, to that extent desire remains when the possibility of satisfaction has ceased. Only the desireless man dies without retaining a sum of desire in his spirit. And (such) a sum must, as it were, subside after death. The state of this decay is called "abiding in the place of desire" Kamaloka. [2]

In the world of the astral, the soul will have to purify itself from that which chains it to the earthly, from the drives, passions and instincts which are necessary for earthly life but which cannot possibly cling to the human soul on its further journey. After it has freed itself from all this, it wanders through the actual spiritual land. [3] The Kamaloka is in the lunar sphere. [4]

At the moment when the soul has passed through the gate of death, the ahrimanic entities swarm in in particular. They are there in abundance, and it is not surprising that they are there, for they are the spirits of destruction. Their regular activity is to work on the destruction of the physical organization. That is part of their trade. They just must not stay there too long. People who have absorbed spiritual understanding keep these beings at bay. But these spirits have great power over the materialistically thinking souls, over the souls who do not acquire an understanding of the spiritual world. Greek mythology has beautifully portrayed this spurning of the understanding of the spiritual world in the figure of Tantalus. This is the one to whom the gods placed food, but in such a way that he could not reach it, and then watched him suffer torment as a result. You can see many such Tantaluses today. They are all materialistic souls who do not want to acquire an understanding of the spiritual world. They are tantaluses in the sense that after death during the Kamaloka period, when they go through their lifetime - backwards, in a third of the time lived (on earth) - everything is snatched away from them. Then they have the feeling everywhere when they see what they have lived in: Why did I do this or that? They see that one of the destructive spirits is about to come and snatch it away from them, so that they find: I didn't really do it for anything. The spirits of the higher hierarchies cannot see them when they return to life, and so everything must seem pointless to them. [5]

When a person passes through the gate of death, he has a short time after death, like a review of his entire life on earth (see: life tableau). This is followed by a period of sleep. And then, after a few months or years, the person wakes up on the astral plane, in Kamaloka. This awakening is followed by the Kamaloka life, which consists of reliving earth life at three times the speed. And at the beginning of Kamaloka life a very significant event occurs for every human being. A spiritual individuality shows us all that we have done selfishly in the last life, like a list of all that we have sinned. The more vividly you imagine this process, the more correctly you imagine it: as if at the beginning of Kamaloka life such a figure really wanted to present itself with the register of our physical life. Most people with a European education recognize Moses in this figure. [6] What does Moses show us when he stands before us with our register of sins? He shows us what is on one side, on the wrong side of our karma. (Therefore) it is indeed important for the soul of our time that through the inspiration of Buddhism the doctrine of karma can be understood. But the reality of karma after death is shown to us by the Old Testament figure of Moses. As souls become more and more permeated with the supersensible Christ, the transformation of the Moses figure into that of Christ Jesus will take place after death. But this means nothing other than: our karma comes into a connection with Christ, Christ grows together with our karma. In the future of human incarnations, Christ becomes more and more intertwined with karma (see: Christ - Lord of Karma). This gives our karma something essential, something viable. [7]

Every life is such that one can say: it offers us many things, but the possibilities of experience are far greater than what man actually takes in. When man passes through the gate of death, he feels, or wants to feel, everything that he, I cannot say, knows, but of which he feels: You could still have experienced it. All the indeterminate affects, all the possible experiences that life could have brought us and has not brought us, all this enters into the connection with the previous life, into what the soul goes through. In particular, what the soul should have done according to its perception appears as strong, intense inner experiences. For example, what the soul has become guilty of towards other people, what it has violated against others, all this emerges as the feeling of a lack of love, of which we are not even aware in the life between birth and death; this is felt intensely. [8]

After death we become aware of everything we have lived through during the night. Night after night comes back to us. The dead person relives his life, but he experiences it in the detour of his experiences through the nights. The Kamaloka period lasts as long as the night sleep period, which is about a third of the entire earthly life. [9]

Man goes through the Kamaloka period backwards. He goes through life backwards to the moment of birth. This is the basis of the beautiful sentence of the Christian message, which says when man actually enters the spiritual world or the kingdoms of heaven: "Until you become like children, you cannot enter the kingdoms of heaven!" This means that man lives back to the time when he experiences his childhood moments, and then, having completed everything backwards, he can enter the devachan or the kingdom of heaven. [10]

After the etheric body has separated from the astral body, a consciousness arises that is much stronger than a vivid dream. It experiences the reality of the astral world (see: astral plan). This state is called Kamaloka, which literally means: place of desires. However, it does not refer to a place that is beyond the physical world. The astral world is within our physical world. The worlds differ only in that one world is recognizable through a different kind of organ than the other.

The more man has freed himself in this life from being satisfied by the senses, the more he has appropriated the beautiful, the good of the world, the pure, the bodiless ideas, the faster the Kamaloka period passes. If he has even settled into the spiritual world, if he has imbued his soul with the ideas and thoughts that lie behind the world of the senses, then his kamaloka time is short. [11] A person can obtain pleasure in life, but not after death. But desire does not cease, for it has its seat not in the physical but in the astral body. But because the physical instrument (for satisfaction) is missing, the possibility of satisfying this desire is also missing. Such people look down in Kamaloka into the physical world which they have left, they see that which could still give them pleasure from all that is below in the physical world, but they cannot enjoy it because they have no physical instrument, and thus that burning thirst comes into them. [12] This is not a torment from without, but the torment of the unfulfillment of the still existing capacity for enjoyment. [13] The whole environment during the Kamaloka period depends on the mood of the soul, depends on the fact that what must be described as the elementary world is modified into the world of the soul by the fact that one sees mainly dissolving etherity in this elementary world (astral plan). [14]

It is not a question of whether our wishes, desires, passions and so on are in the superconscious, in the ego-consciousness, but whether they are also in the astral, in the subconscious. Both have the same burning effect after death, and the wishes and desires that we have concealed here in life actually have an even more intense effect after death. [15] (In the astral world) the drives and passions take on animal forms. As long as the human being is embodied in the physical body, his astral body takes on the form of this physical body. But when the outer body is gone, then the drives, desires and passions, as they are in their animal (nature), come to the fore in their own form, to break through. In the astral, in Kamaloka, man is thus approximately similar (to animal nature) through his passions. [16] Of course, this state is not only an agonizing one; it is only agonizing until this astral body has weaned itself from the desire for pleasure. So the more the astral body had needs here in physical life, the longer this state lasts. But from this you can already see that, depending on the quality of the needs that the human being has had in the past life, the astral body in Kamaloka can encounter not only agony, but also under certain circumstances something very good and pleasant. For example, he then experiences pleasantly every joy he has had in beautiful nature. In order to enjoy this pleasure in beautiful nature, we must have eyes to see, but beauty is something that transcends the physical, and therefore this state is also the source of heightened pleasure in Kamaloka life. Such things are the causes of the greatest joys and wonderful experiences, even during the Kamaloka period. A person can make this time more beautiful if he frees himself from attachment to purely physical pleasures. [17] We also live through all the spiritual things we have already experienced between birth and death, we also live through the good events of life in such a way that we have them before us again, as it were, in a mirror image. [18] This Kamaloka time is therefore not always a horrible or unpleasant one. In any case, man becomes more independent of physical desires, and the more he has already made himself independent in life and acquired interests in looking at spiritual things, the easier this Kamaloka time will be for him. He becomes freer through it, so that man becomes grateful for this Kamaloka time. The feeling of deprivation in the physical life becomes bliss in the kamaloka time. Thus the opposite feelings occur, for all that one has learned in life to be gladly deprived becomes pleasure in the kamaloka time. [19]

But he who in ordinary life is able to see through the physical through a penetration into art, into the facts of knowledge, to that which penetrates through the veil of the physical in the spiritual secrets of existence, he who grasps even by intuition the revelations of the spirit through the veil of the physical, for him the time of purification will be shorter, for he will pass through the gate of death prepared for all that which can come in satisfaction only from the spiritual world. [20] During the entire Kamaloka period, the human being feels as if he were properly divided up in space. You feel piecemeal wherever you have, so to speak, something to look for, so that if you consider all the events of your life in this way, you will literally feel fragmented during the whole passage through the period after death. [21] One feels, for example, that one part of one's being is in Munich, another in Mainz, a third in Basel and still another part far outside the earth's circle, perhaps on the moon. One feels fragmented, so to speak, and the spaces in between as not belonging to oneself. This is the peculiar way of feeling astral: as if spread out in space, transferred to different places, but not filling the intervening space. And this sensation lasts throughout the entire Kamaloka period, which the human being lives through regressively until birth. It is always a living through of such pieces that belong to you. This is then structured together with the rest of the Kamaloka life. First you feel yourself in the person with whom you were last connected and then back in all the people and other beings with whom you had contact during your life. For example, if you once beat a person in Mainz, you will experience the beating itself, the pain you inflicted on him, at the appropriate time after your death. So if the person is still in Mainz, a part of your astral body feels itself in Mainz after your death and experiences the matter there. If, on the other hand, the beaten person has died in the meantime, you will feel where he himself is now in Kamaloka. Of course, we are not only dealing with this one person, but also with many others who are scattered on earth and in Kamaloka. You are everywhere; this allows you this interrupted being that constitutes the physicality in Kamaloka. It makes it possible to experience in all others what you have had to do with them, and you thus form a lasting connection with all those with whom you have come into contact. [22] In the Kamaloka period the etheric form of man enlarges more and more, so that its outermost limit is encircled by the orbit of the moon. All human beings fill the same space enclosed by the moon's orbit. [23]

Initially, the camalocal life is characterized by the fact that we are locked up in ourselves and the lock-up in ourselves is the prison, all the more locked up at first, as we cannot return to any physical life. Only when we live through this camalocal life in such a way that we gradually come to the realization - one only comes to it gradually - that all that is there cannot be removed from the world in any other way than by experiencing ourselves in a way other than through mere desires and so on, only then is our camalocal prison broken. [24]

Now the astral body in Kamaloka would not be able to come to the consciousness of agonizing deprivation if it did not have the opportunity to constantly remember what it has enjoyed and desired in life because it is still connected to the remains of the etheric body. And the weaning off is basically nothing other than a gradual forgetting of that which chains man to the physical world. [25]

To the same extent that a person becomes accustomed to the physical connections in Kamaloka, his consciousness also brightens again. After the sharp, clear picture of the overview of his life, a darkening of his consciousness occurs in the afterlife, the stronger the desire for the physical becomes. [26] Consciousness in Kamaloka is clouded by the removal of personal guilt. [27] All Kamaloka actually takes place in the sphere between the earth and the lunar orbit; but the actual Kamaloka which is significant for man is much closer to the earth than, let us say, to the lunar orbit. Souls who have not developed much at all in the way of sensations and feelings that go beyond earthly life, so to speak, also remain connected with the sphere of earthly life for quite a long time, linked by their own desires. One can remain connected to the earthly sphere through quite different instincts and desires than one usually thinks. For example, very ambitious people, who are particularly concerned with having this or that status within earthly relationships, who attach the greatest importance to having such status, which is dependent on judgments within earthly humanity, also develop an affect in their astral body that makes them earth-bound souls for a long time, so to speak. There are manifold reasons that hold people back in the earth sphere. And the vast majority of what is conveyed to people from the spiritual worlds through mediumship actually comes from such souls and is essentially what these souls strive to cast off. It need not even always be remembered that such souls remain bound to the earth by quite ignoble motives, although this is usually the case; it can also be worries which are felt for what one has left behind on earth. Such worries for friends, relatives and children left behind can also act in a certain way like a kind of heaviness and hold the soul back in the earthly sphere. [28]

What is most effective in Kamaloka after death are the emotional movements and moral impulses. Ideas about the world of the senses die away, only those of the supersensible can be taken away. On the other hand, after death, the emotions haunt us quite powerfully and remain. For they are what keep us in Kamaloka for a certain time. For example, a person who was very bad would not be able to ascend into devachan at all between death and rebirth because of his remorse, but would have to incarnate again without it. Since he had no good emotions, the lower devachan is also closed to him. [29]

Everything that one has learned to do without in life becomes a pleasure in the Kamaloka time. When the third corpse emerges from the human being, then everything that the human being cannot use in the spiritual world will float away with the astral body. These astral corpses are visible to the clairvoyant, and it takes 20 to 40 years for them to dissolve. Just as an extract, a certain essence, remains for all eternity for the actual human being after the etheric corpse has departed, a certain essence also remains for him for all eternity after the astral corpse has departed as the fruit of the last embodiment. [30] (See also: Life between death and a new birth).

Sources:

[1] GA 101: Myths and legends. Occult Signs and Symbols (1907)

[2] GA 34: Lucifer – Gnosis. Basic essays on anthroposophy and reports from the magazines "Lucifer" and "Lucifer – Gnosis" (1903-1908)

[3] GA 88: About the astral world and the Devachan (1903-1904)

[4] GA 94: Cosmogony. Popular occultism. The Gospel of John. Theosophy based on the Gospel of John (1906)

[5], [9] GA 254: The occult movement in the nineteenth century and its relationship to world culture. Significant from the outer intellectual life around the middle of the nineteenth century (1915)

[6], [7], [23] GA 130: Esoteric Christianity and the Spiritual Leadership of Humanity (1911/1912)

[8] GA 63: Humanities as a commodity (1913/1914)

[10], [25] GA 107: Humanities (1908/1909)

[11] GA 96: Original impulses of the humanities. Christian esotericism in the light of new spiritual knowledge (1906/1907)

[12] GA 104: The Apocalypse of John (1908)

[13], [27] GA 95: In front of the gate of Theosophy (1906)

[14] GA 147: The Secrets of the Threshold (1913)

[15], [28] GA 140: Occult studies on the life between death and new birth. The living interaction between the living and the dead (1912/1913)

[16] GA 324a: The fourth dimension. Mathematics and Reality (1905-1922)

[17], [21] GA 100: Human development and knowledge of Christ. Theosophy and Rosicrucianism – The Gospel of John (1907)

[18], [20] GA 119: Macrocosm and microcosm .. The big and the small world. Soul Questions, Life Questions, Spiritual Questions (1910)

[19], [30] GA 108: Answering world and life questions through anthroposophy (1908/1909)

[22] GA 99: Theosophy of the Rosicrucian (1907)

[24], [29] GA 143: Experiences of the supernatural. The three ways of the soul to Christ. (1912)

[26] GA 109: The principle of the spiritual economy in connection with re-embodiment issues. An Aspect of Human Spiritual Leadership (1909)

17
Karma

Everything that is about us is the result of an activity. There is no being that was not first an activity. All being is the effect of an activity. This applies to all areas of existence, to all plans. This is the law of karma in the most comprehensive sense of the word. Every being is the result of an activity. If someone is to be a happy person (for example), he must have created the happiness himself in a previous existence. Happiness, which man enjoys, is the result of some beneficial activity that has emanated from him. [1]

Just as children hit the skittles when something goes wrong, so it is when people blame other people for what happens to them. What happens to them is karmic. It is not only the fault of one part, but also of the other. One must therefore come to understand that what is caused by another is also his fault. [2]

Sources:

[1] GA 89: Consciousness – Life – Form. Basic principles of spiritual-scientific cosmology (1903-1906)

[2] GA 266/3: From the contents of the esoteric hours. Volume III (1913-1923)

Karma - etheric body defects result in future physical illnesses

The qualities that the etheric body has in one life appear in the physical body in the next life. So if someone has bad habits and character traits and does nothing to get rid of them, this will appear in the next life as a disposition of the physical body, and this is actually the disposition to illness. Strange as it may sound to you, this disposition to certain diseases, and especially to infectious diseases, actually stems from bad habits in the previous life. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 100: Human Development and the Knowledge of Christ. Theosophy and Rosicrucianism - The Gospel of John (1907)

Karma - formation of karma

In every human being there is another human being down below, underground as it were. In this other person also lives the better person, who always resolves to do better next time in a similar case after an action he has committed, so that the unconscious resolution to carry out an action better in a similar case always quietly resonates. And only when the soul has been liberated from the body will this resolution become a decision. The intention remains germinating in the soul; then the decision follows later. And the resolution is seated in the spirit man (see: Atma) just as the intention is seated in the life spirit (see: Buddhi) and as the pure desire is seated in the spirit self (see: Manas). [1]

Everything that is factual on the physical plane, everything that is something that is done, that lives itself out, that has an effect in the physical world, from the step and the movement of the hand to the most complicated processes, for example the building of a house, comes to the human being as a real physical effect from outside in a later embodiment. You see, we live from the inside outwards: what lives in the astral body as joy, pain, pleasure and suffering reappears in the etheric body, what is rooted in the etheric body in lasting drives and passions appears in the physical body as a disposition, but what one does here, so that one uses the physical body for it, that appears as external fate in the next embodiment. Thus what the astral body does becomes the fate of the etheric body, the etheric body becomes the fate of the physical body, and what the physical body does comes back as an effect from outside in the next embodiment as a physical reality. There you have found exactly the point where external destiny intervenes in human life. This effect of destiny is something that may sometimes be absent for a long time, but it must certainly reach the human being. One can always see, if one follows the life of a human being through the various embodiments, that his life in a subsequent embodiment is so prepared by beings who are effective in the incorporation into his physical body that he is led to a certain place so that his destiny will befall him. [2]

We are constantly changing our environment with our actions. This creates new mirror images, which now become our karma. This is a new life that springs from within. [3] Astral entities are constantly forming under the influence of our actions. All actions are accompanied by astral entities, these are our skandhas, which carry out our karma. But all physical facts also leave behind astral entities in the astral. For example, Cologne Cathedral corresponds to a very specific entity on the astral plane. Through everything that happens on earth, when all physical matter is reworked and the earth dissolves, the next astral globe (Jupiter) is formed by itself. It is simply there as the astral entities, as the effect of all previous physical processes. Therefore man must continually work in karma. He must rectify the grotesque astral entities that he has messed up in the next life, otherwise they would be there as senseless creatures for the next globe. This is karma that man must mend. [4]

In so far as man is a man of the senses, a man of the glands, a man of digestion, he has no eternal value through this activity. As the form sprays into these activities and, so to speak, supplies the organism with disintegrating form, that is, with matter, so that sensory activity, glandular secretion and digestive activity come about, it also becomes tangibly apparent that we are dealing with disintegrating form, with a form that is crumbling apart. Of what we can generally refer to as the process of disintegration of form or as the shooting of form into matter, these are special processes, special processes. The situation is quite different when we go to the nervous activity, the muscular activity and the bone existence of the human being. To a certain extent, in the bone system there is imagination that has become material, imagery that has become material, in the muscle system inspiration that has become material in mobility, in the nervous system intuition that has become material. What remains when the bone system materially disintegrates is the imagination; it is not lost. It remains in those substances that we also have in us when we have passed through the gate of death and enter Kamaloka or Devachan. However, we retain a pictorial form in us which, when the really trained clairvoyant looks at it, is not exactly similar to the bone system, but which, when the somewhat less trained clairvoyant lets it affect him, even outwardly has something similar in the pictorial form to the human bone system, which is why death is not at all incorrectly imagined under the imagination of the bone skeleton. This is based on a clairvoyance which, although untrained, is not entirely off the mark. And mixed in with this imagination is what remains of the muscles when they disintegrate materially: there remains the inspiration of which they are actually only the expression, for they are actually only inspirations imbued with matter. Inspiration remains with us when we have passed through the gate of death. And in the same way, the intuition of the nervous system remains with us when these nerves themselves approach their processes of decay or disintegration after death.

These are all real components of our astral and etheric body. As the human being carries this nervous system through the world, intuition is actually constantly present at the points where the nerves permeate the human organism, and this intuition emanates the spirituality that the human being always has around him like an aura of rays. We always radiate intuition to the same extent as the nerves decay. [5] So that you can already see from this that when man uses his physical nervous system, wears it out, causes it to crumble, he is not insignificant for the world. For what he uses his nerves for depends on what intuitively perceptible substances radiate from them. And again, by using his muscles, man radiates substances that can be grasped through inspiration. This radiation is such that it constantly populates the world with all kinds of extremely finely differentiated movement processes. Through the radiation from the bones, when they disintegrate, to a certain extent man actually leaves behind images of himself wherever he goes, i.e. spiritual images that can be perceived through imagination. The unpleasantness that one sometimes feels when one enters a room that was previously occupied by another, unpleasant person, is based on these imaginations. [6]

But what happens to everything that we radiate in this way? In this way, man gives the world what it rebuilds itself from the building blocks. Man carries his individual soul through the gate of death; the earth carries what has become of man's intuitions, inspirations and imaginations over to the (future) Jupiter existence. [7]

That which man can radiate into his surroundings in this way is clearly divided into two parts: into a part of inspiration, intuition, imagination, on which, one might say, the general cosmic existence is dependent, which it absorbs - the general cosmic existence absorbs this. But it repels other things, it does not absorb them. And the consequence of this is that these intuitions, inspirations and imaginations, because they are not absorbed anywhere, remain there on their own. They remain in the cosmos spiritually, they cannot be dissolved. They remain there until man comes and destroys them himself through emanations that are capable of destroying them. And as a rule, no other person has the ability to destroy these emanations thrown back from the cosmos than the person who has emitted them himself. And here you have the technique of karma, here you have the reason why we have to meet all those things of imagination, inspiration and intuition in the course of our karma that are rejected by the cosmos. We have to destroy them ourselves, because the cosmos only accepts what is intellectually correct, emotionally beautiful and morally good. It rejects everything else. Judgment is held by the powers of the cosmos not only at certain times, but basically this judgment is something that runs through the entire development of the earth. [8]

Between birth and death the human being is continually enclosed in such a connection of forces which spiritually surround him from all sides, and these are the directing powers of his life. Thus you see that you actually carry the effects of previous lives within you all the time, that you always experience the effects of previous embodiments.

So you must be aware that you are guided in your life by powers that you yourself do not know. What affects the etheric body are formations which you yourself have previously produced on the astral plan, and what affects your destiny are entities, forces on the higher parts of the Devachan, which you yourself have inscribed in the Akashic Chronicle. These forces or entities are placed entirely in the hierarchy of similar entities. You must be aware that you feel the effects of other entities in the astral body as well as in the etheric body and in the physical body. Everything that you do involuntarily, everything that you are urged to do, happens through the effect of other entities. It does not happen out of nothing. The various limbs of the human nature are constantly really permeated and filled with other entities, and the initiated teacher has a good part of the exercises done (by the spiritual students) in order to drive them out, so that the human being becomes freer and freer.

The entities that permeate the astral body and make it unfree are called demons. You are constantly permeated by such demons in your astral body, and the entities that you yourself create through your true or false thoughts are those that gradually grow into demons. There are good demons that come from good thoughts. Bad thoughts, however, especially untrue, lying ones, produce demonic figures of the most terrible and horrible kind, which permeate the astral body, if one may put it that way. Similarly, spectres or ghosts permeate the etheric body, and finally there are those that permeate the physical body, these are the phantoms. Apart from these three, there are other entities that drive the ego back and forth, these are the spirits, just as the ego itself is a spirit. In fact, man is the evoker of such entities, which, when he comes down to earth, determine his inner and outer destiny. All this has a relationship to you, it strives towards you when you are re-embodied. [9] In a certain sense, we choose the time at which we come down into the world according to the inner qualities we have within us. And this determines the inner necessity with which we work. [10] If we live in this way from our embryonic time through birth, through our first childhood into our life, then that which helps to shape our body is our karma. Between our last death and our present birth we have lived through and have even taken it upon ourselves to live through how we have to experience karma and what we have to give ourselves for a body so that it can live out its karma. We work in this way, kneading, I would say, through the soul forces on our body. We even have a localizing effect by placing ourselves in the place in the world where we can live out our karma. So we work out our personal destiny with the consciousness we have between death and a new birth. [11]

The physical world that the human spirit enters is not a foreign scene to it. The traces of his deeds are imprinted in him. [12] We leave our marks everywhere, and the feeling of being connected with the things with which we have come into contact through our actions remains in our subconscious. In the subconscious, everyone has the feeling that they must return to what they have come into contact with through their actions. This is also the basis of our karma. Because we actually make our mark everywhere, that is why we have such a sense of community with the world. [13]

Actually, the living out of karma on the part of human beings can only be described as a kind of hunger and satiety. When a person is born, he is hungry to do what he does, and he does not let up until he is satiated. Pushing towards the karmic event is a result of such a general spiritual hunger. These forces that express themselves as such a hunger, which then leads to karmic fulfillment, these forces that express themselves in this way, are concentrated in the heart. [14] The heart is also an extraordinarily interesting organ with regard to spiritual scientific investigations. The heart is in fact only the organ that expresses the blood movements; the heart has no activity at all in relation to the blood movement. [15]

The remorse that radiates into our consciousness is that which is reflected from our experiences through the heart. This is what spiritual knowledge of the heart teaches us. But when we look into the interior of the heart, the forces also gather there through the entire metabolic and limb organism. And because that which is connected with the heart, with the powers of the heart, is spiritualized, that which is connected with our outer life, with our actions, is also spiritualized. The forces that are prepared in the heart are the karmic dispositions. The heart is the organ that carries into the next incarnation what we understand as karma through the mediation of the metabolic organism of the limbs. The moral nuance of the metabolism is actually stored up in the heart and carried over into the next incarnation as karmic force. [16] If you look into the interior of your heart, you can perceive quite well - though now in latency, not in a fully realized image - what you will do in the next life. [17]

The person who not only works with the physical brain, but who can make use of the soul material in order to be just as conscious within the soul as the ordinary person is conscious within the physical body, his memory now also extends further. He who is conscious in the physical and only lives in the soul and spirit has only the memory of what has happened to him from birth to death. He who is conscious in the soul has the memory of his birth up to a certain degree. But he who is conscious in the spiritual realm sees the law of cause and effect in its real connection. [18]

In an incarnation (or better: within an incarnation), the karmic effects can actually only manifest themselves mentally. For example, the effects of envy (already) manifest themselves in certain weaknesses and lack of independence. In one incarnation we do not have those thorough, profound influences on our bodily organization that would enable us to get any further with the karmic effects than a spiritual basis. These things only work into the body, into the structure and organization of the body, in the next incarnation. [19]

Of course, a person cannot escape karma, at least in the rarest of cases, and in these cases karma must be transformed. But in one incarnation the soul can resist the full realization of karma, thus postponing this karma to a later incarnation.

Something happens after the death of people in the elemental world that is like a figurative sequence of unlived karma. With the spectrum of death something happens that is like a prophetic image of what must one day take place, what should have taken place but has not yet taken place. So one experiences unfulfilled destiny, karma, when one clairvoyantly observes the death spectrum. That which is human individuality passes over almost immediately after death to a kind of cosmic existence, the ego and the astral body, and is connected, even through days, with the death spectrum, the etheric body, so that the unlived karmic will of human individuality is active out of the cosmos into the death spectrum. [20]

Sources:

[1] GA 293: General knowledge of man as the basis of pedagogy (1919)

[2], [9] GA 99: The Theosophy of the Rosicrucian (1907)

[3], [4] GA 93a: Basic elements of esotericism (1905)

[5] - [8] GA 134: The world of the senses and the world of the spirit (1911/1912)

[10] GA 166: Necessity and freedom in world events and in human actions (1916)

[11] GA 165: The spiritual unification of humanity through the Christ impulse (1915/1916)

[12] GA 9: Theosophy. Introduction to supersensible knowledge of the world and human destiny (1904)

[13] GA 181: Death of the earth and world life. Anthroposophical gifts of life. Consciousness necessities for the present and future (1918)

[14] - [17] GA 205, page 108f (1967 edition, 247 pages)

[18] GA 53: Origin and goal of man. Basic concepts of spiritual science (1904/1905)

[19] GA 125: Paths and goals of the spiritual human being. Questions of life in the light of spiritual science (1910)

[20] GA 161: Paths of spiritual knowledge and the renewal of artistic worldviews (1915)

Karma - formation of karma and the technique of transmission

If we are still alive in our etheric body after death, then the memory tableau is formed (see: life tableau); this means that the memories of our past life remain bound to our etheric body. When we have discarded our etheric body some time after death and what our personality has initially retained in terms of memories and memory content has been entered into the general life ether, then we still live completely in our astral body (see: Kamaloka). In this astral body we are actually connected with the external effects of our life. This is also shown externally by the fact that after death a person has to relive his world of deeds, everything he has done or accomplished with other beings on earth. And just as - after we have shed our etheric body a few days after death - our personal memories are inscribed in the general life ether (see: Akashic Chronicle), so in the time in which we are still connected with the astral body, all our deeds are inscribed in the general world ether. They are there and we remain connected with them in the same way as we remain connected with the memories of our personality, which are inscribed as a permanent note in the world ether, only our deeds are, as it were, inscribed in another world note. As we relive the deeds of our last life, all this is entered into the general world ether and we remain connected to it. Through our astral body we therefore belong permanently to our deeds, insofar as we are earthlings. In reality, this is karma: what is entered into the general world-astrality from our deeds in life. [1]

Catholic clerics certainly talk about man having to look at his sins eternally, or suffering because of his sins. But this does not agree with the observation that can be made. The soul that has passed through death is indeed in this state. But if someone asks: Does the soul suffer? -then one is in a certain sense embarrassed to answer. The suffering is there, but the soul desires the suffering because strength comes from overcoming the suffering. In this case, one is at a loss for a term. One cannot say that the soul suffers, but the soul would be unhappy if it did not carry the consequences of its transgressions within itself after death, and then as qualities. That which is action in life, or rather the character of the action, is transformed into qualities, and these qualities are transformed in the life between death and a new birth into powers, abilities and so on, which are then born into the person through the next birth. And this transforms into unconscious desires, which then determine the karma (in the next life) between birth and death. Therefore it is also so - and many people who have known nothing at all of any repeated earth lives have asserted this quite out of themselves - that if one examines the early earth life since birth from a certain point in life, one finds that the events (in life) are so connected that one arrives at one's unimportant and important life deeds through unconscious wishes. One cannot overlook the fact that the force that brings one to experience this or that is identical with the unconscious desires that bring one to this or that. [2]

How do karmic balances come about? If someone has harmed another person, this must be balanced out karmically between them. For this to happen, however, the people concerned must be embodied at the same time. What brings people together, what forces bring this about? The technique of karma is as follows: Evil has happened, person A has suffered it, the other person B enters Kamaloka, but must first see this case in the life tableau. Then this suffering inflicted on the other person does not hurt him, but in the Kamaloka time B also comes back to this case when reliving it, and B now has to go through this pain of the other A, in the other self (in A) he has to go through it. So the emotional content is added (in B); it imprints itself like a stamp in the astral body (of B). He takes something of the pain with him as a yield, a force remains in him (B) as a result of what he had experienced in the other person. Thus another suffering or joy that he has to live through becomes a power again, so that he takes a large amount of power with him into devachan. When he returns to a new embodiment, this is the force that draws together all the people who have experienced something together. They have lived in each other during the kamaloka time of the one and have absorbed these forces. Thus there may be three or more Kamaloka people in one physical person in order to live out their case. [3]

After all, people live in the spiritual world completely within each other, and they are carried by the very forces that have been stored up in their lives on earth. After death we do not come into relationship with just any people, but precisely with those people with whom relationships have arisen in good and evil. But these relationships make it so that we live not only in ourselves, but also in the other. That which is to happen in the karmic balance in the next life on earth through man A, you (B) cause yourself through your living over into man A. Only through the fact that man A then descends again into the physical earth world, does he make what you have actually put into him into his own deed. And A then meets you in the next earthly life with that which you actually want to inflict on yourself through him. So that the conditions of karma in the course of the world are those which exist in the time between death and a new birth through the living together of karmically connected human beings. [4]

That which lives in the consciousness in the relationship of people to the rest of the environment is actually only one side. There is actually infinitely more living in the human soul than that of which it is conscious. And so there is also infinitely more going on between two people who are together in life than that which takes place in the consciousness of one or the other person. And so between all people who meet. A great deal takes place in the deep undergrounds of consciousness. It remains in these depths and sometimes emerges. There is an alternating emergence and regression, but also a complete remaining in the subconscious. But what takes place in the depths of the soul, what is not experienced in the conscious mind, only in the subconscious, is therefore still in the soul and works in the soul. To simplify the example: We meet a person, we experience something with him in a conscious way, but precisely through this we also experience something deeper, something deeper is still stimulated in the soul. It lives on in us, lives on in him. It continues to work and is carried through the gate of death, it is further developed within the spiritual world in the life between death and a new birth in preparation for a new life on earth. Everything that is lived through in the depths of the soul is carried through the gate of death in such a way that I can compare it to saying: As you all know, there is the possibility in outer physical existence to make a room empty of air. If you then open somewhere, then the outer air penetrates into this airless space. A space that is empty cannot develop any forces; but it is precisely the outside world that penetrates it.

If it were full, the external would not be able to penetrate. By carrying through the gate of death that which is laid down in our soul, i.e. in the subconscious, in the wider circumference of the conscious life of the soul, so that it often lives in our soul as a feeling of happiness, it creates, as it were, an empty space in the soul, comparatively speaking, of course, the physical translated into the spiritual; for this is how it presents itself to the observing consciousness. With this emptiness the human being lives between death and a new birth and in turn enters a new life on earth through birth. And so he carries an empty space into this new earthly life as a result of the earlier earthly lives - comparatively speaking. Through this soul-empty space he draws the corresponding conditions of the outer world to himself. Through it the beings and the blows of outer destiny come to him; through it he finds a human being whom he met in one life, (meets) with him again. He attracts it by the fact that that which was his fullness in the soul has become emptiness, which is absorbent for certain events. This is, I would say, roughly speaking, the technique of how one earth-life works into another. [5]

In this (post-mortal) extract of the etheric body, everything that has come in during life, for example from a life of excess, or what the human being has absorbed as the result of correct or incorrect thinking, acting or feeling, is now contained as in an essence. The person takes this with them into the time until the new birth. When the human being comes into existence again through a birth, the essence of his former etheric body is something that pours itself back into his new etheric body, something that permeates the new etheric body during its construction. Therefore, in his new existence, the human being has in his etheric body the results of how he lived in previous lives. [6]

Let us summarize once again what has been said about the after-death experiences (see: Life between death and new birth). The first is that everything experienced in earthly existence passes by without man experiencing pleasure and suffering (life tableau). The second is that in a retrograde course of life man undergoes the sufferings (in general the effects on other people) which he himself has caused (Kamaloka). Two things remain for the human being. The substance of the etheric body goes out of him, but the forces of the etheric body remain; the extract of all experiences remains as a residue, as it were. This extract is saturated with the deeds he has committed. He takes the experiences from Kamaloka with him and carries them up into Devachan. The material which man must rid himself of before entering the higher life is now released. The astral plan around him is interspersed with astral corpses. That is what man cannot take with him into Devachan. If you want to understand what the human being does in Devachan, then you first have to keep in mind how life takes place here on earth. The way in which experiences are processed here on earth is such that only the very smallest part is extracted from these experiences; much more could be extracted from each event. This becomes clearest when we look at the matter in reverse (using an example). Remember how you learned to write. This was connected with a wide variety of experiences. These experiences all come together to form a single one, the ability to write. What initially took place externally in the world is transformed into a skill. Such a possibility, such an opportunity is determined in all experiences: they can later be transformed into abilities. Such a transformation takes place after death. When a person is reborn, many things appear as abilities, as dispositions. [7]

How is it that man finds himself in the very situation into which he is led in his new incarnation? We still have to speak of mysterious effects that take place around the human being. When a person has a thought, a wish, a feeling, then these are initially experiences in the astral body. His sensations, his thoughts, which are expressed in the aura, are at the same time forms on the astral plane. What a person experiences in the soul in physical life has a corresponding form in the astral space. Everything that man experiences in his deepest soul has a mirror image on the astral plan. But what is a characteristic of the etheric body continues on the devachanic plane. Just as every thought produces a form on the astral plane, so every quality of the etheric body now produces its counter-image on the devachanic plane. Actions also have their counter-image in the higher worlds, namely on the buddhi plan. Man continually populates the astral plan with forms of thought, the devachan with forms of his inclinations, the buddha plan with imprints of his actions. All this constantly surrounds us on the higher planes. That is one side. Now there is another side to it. Imagine that you have done something to someone, an action that has harmed him. During the kamaloka period, you experience this in yourself. What you then take with you as the pain that you have experienced in the other person becomes a force that is inscribed on the buddha plan. The unfolding of this power is prepared by the fact that it is inscribed on the buddha plan. The human being is guided towards everything that is inscribed on the buddha plan. Through the experiences that have come to him in Kamaloka, he reconnects with the consequences of his actions on the Buddha-plan. Because man cannot yet live on the buddha plan, he cannot do this himself. He must have guides.

These are the Lipikas, the gods of fate. They guide man into his destiny because he is not yet able to grasp it himself. [8] The entities that regulate the connection between the counter-images and man are of great significance. Everything that man arranges in his thoughts takes place on the mental plan. There, in the devachan, he builds up the character of his thought body for the new life between death and new birth. There are the counter-images of his earlier thoughts. He attaches them to his mental body, which has been freed from the physical and astral, and thus forms his future mental body according to the mental images he has created. On the other hand, he would not be able to connect the counter-images of his experiences and actions with himself. This is subject to external regulating entities, the masters of karma, the Lipikas, who bring the created counter-images of the feelings and deeds of the person on the buddhi and nirvana plan into connection with him - who already has the kamic (astral) and other sheaths around him (as an embryo) - for the following incarnations. [9]

Such personalities who already (in the life between death and the new birth) begin to prepare the shaping of the karma of the following life in the Venus and Mercury spheres, often become extraordinarily significant personalities in their following life on earth. But for the vast majority of people, the main part of what is lived out as karma in earth life is worked out within the solar sphere, where we are the longest. [10]

Everything that we experience externally without being particularly affected internally has an effect on our astral body in the next embodiment and attracts corresponding feelings, sensations and thought properties. If one has used one's life well, looked at a lot, acquired a lot of knowledge, the consequence of this is that the astral body is reborn in the next life with special talents in these directions. Experiences are thus formed in the astral body in the next embodiment. But what one senses, feels, pleasure and suffering, what is the inner experience of the soul, affects the etheric body in the next embodiment and causes a lasting tendency in it. He who experiences much joy will have an etheric body with a temperament inclined to joy. He who endeavors to do many good deeds will, through the feelings that are developed in the process, have developed a talent for good deeds in the next life. He will also have a carefully developed conscience and will be a moral person. That of which the etheric body is the carrier in this life, the lasting character, the dispositions and so on, appears in the physical body in the next life, in such a way that, for example, a person who has developed bad inclinations and passions in his (previous) life will be born with an unhealthy physical body in the next life. On the other hand, a person who has good health, who is able to endure much, has developed good qualities in the previous life. [11]

A life that has the tendency to love everything around it, that responds lovingly to every being, a life that pours out love, will have a physical body in the next embodiment that will look young and flourishing for a long time. A life filled with hatred, which is full of antipathy towards other beings, which criticizes and nags at everything and wants to withdraw from everything, causes a physical body that ages and wrinkles early due to these inclinations. In this way, the inclinations and passions of one life are transferred to the physical body of the next incarnation (for further information see: Laws of Karma). [12]

We can find our way around a person's karma by looking back at his three previous incarnations. If we take the incarnation of a person in the present and, starting from this present, look back over the three previous incarnations, then it is possible to draw certain conclusions for the next three incarnations. [13]

A person can only consciously create inclinations for future incarnations if he or she is able to imagine now. Therein lies the secret of how the great founders of religion have worked beyond their time. The images they have given people have triggered inclinations for subsequent incarnations. A religion is the emotional world of future races; it can therefore perish outwardly, for it lives on in the inclinations. Today the tendencies that were implanted in humanity in the 13th and 14th centuries are coming out. It is important that the materialistic images of the present should not take hold in human hearts, for they would endow men in future times with the most brutal tendencies, which are directed merely towards the world of the senses, if they are not counterbalanced by spiritual ideas. [14]

Thinking always contains a background of feeling and willing, feeling a background of thinking and willing, willing a background of thinking and feeling. The feeling and willing of the thought life contain the karmic result of previous earth lives. The thinking and willing of the emotional life determine the character in a karmic way. The thinking and feeling of the life of will tear the present life on earth out of the karmic context. In the thinking and volition of thinking, man lives out his karma of the past; in the thinking and volition of volition, he prepares the karma of the future. [15]

If the effect that two people exert on each other reaches into the will, into the mind, into the character, then there is a karmic affinity, then the two people are brought together by common experiences in past earthly lives. If an impulse emanates from a person that only reaches into the intellect, the aesthetic sense, so that we only like the person, only dislike him, then it is not something that the moon (as karma keeper) has made, but something that the sun is only now making and which will only find a continuation in the future. So that by a sensible observation of man one can come to feel where karmic relations are present. [16]

Sources:

[1] GA 133: The Earthly and the Cosmic Human (1911/1912)

[2] GA 343: Lectures and Courses on Christian Religious Work, II. Spiritual Recognition - Religious Feeling - Cultic Action (1921)

[3] GA 95: Before the gates of theosophy (1906)

[4] GA 236: Esoteric Considerations of Karmic Connections - Second Volume (1924)

[5] GA 66: Spirit and matter, life and death (1917)

[6] GA 120: The Revelations of Karma (1910)

[7], [8] GA 96: Original impulses of spiritual science. Christian esotericism in the light of new spiritual knowledge (1906/1907)

[9] Bei 71: Contributions to the Rudolf Steiner Complete Edition. Issue 71: Marie Steiner and Beatenberg (1980/1981)

[10] GA 239: Esoteric Considerations of Karmic Connections - Fifth Volume (1924)

[11], [12] GA 99: The theosophy of the Rosicrucian (1907)

[13] GA 113: The Orient in the light of the Occident. The Children of Lucifer and the Brothers of Christ (1909)

[14] GA 93a: Basic elements of esotericism (1905)

[15] GA 26: Anthroposophical principles. The path of knowledge of anthroposophy – The Michael Mystery (1924/1925)

[16] GA 240: Esoteric Considerations of Karmic Connections - Sixth Volume (1924)

Karma - Christ the Lord of Karma

When man has passed through the gate of death and has lived through that time in which he can look back on his previous life on earth, has lived through the time up to the point where he has laid down the etheric body, when man passes over into the Kamaloka time, then he faces two figures, but this only applies to the people of the Occident and to all those people who have had a connection with the culture of this Occident in the last millennia. After his death, man confronts two figures: Moses is the one - man knows very well that he is facing Moses - who holds the tablets of the law before him, in the Middle Ages it was called "Moses with the sharp law", and man has a very precise awareness in his soul of the extent to which he has deviated from the law to the innermost part of his soul. The other figure is the one called "the cherub with the fiery sword", who decides about this deviation. That which confronts the human being through these two figures establishes the karmic account, so to speak. This fact is about to change in our time: in our age, the Christ will become the Lord of karma for all those people who have gone through what we have just discussed after their death. The Christ assumes his office of judge. Let us assume that some person has done this or that evil, then he must do a good that compensates for the evil. But he can do this good in two ways, so that it may mean the same effort for him if it benefits only a few people, or so that it means the same effort for him if it brings salvation to many people. It will be Christ's concern that our karmic account is balanced in the future in such a way, that is, that it is placed in such a world order against the future, when we have found the way to Christ, that the nature of our karmic balancing brings about the greatest possible human welfare for the rest of the earth's development. However, this transfer of the office of judge of human deeds to the Christ is linked to the fact that this Christ also intervenes directly in human destinies. [1]

People will gradually acquire the ability to see the karmic balance, the balancing deed that must happen in the future, as in a dream image. [2] The closer we come to the future, the more people will learn that they were united with the Christ before birth, that they experienced from him the grace to pay off their old karma in the incarnations. Thus the people of the fourth post-Atlantean period looked up to Jesus of Nazareth as the bearer of the Christ. Thus the people of our time will learn that the Christ will reveal himself more and more supersensibly and will increasingly govern the threads of karma in the affairs of the earth. They will come to know that spiritual power as that destiny which the Greeks could not yet recognize: which will lead men to carry out their karma in the most appropriate way in the next incarnation. As a judge, as a master of karma, people will look up to the Christ in the succession of incarnations when they experience their destiny. People will stand by their destiny in such a way that they will be stimulated to deepen their souls more and more until they can say to themselves: This destiny is not given to me by an impersonal power, this destiny is given to me by the one with whom I feel related in my innermost being. In karma itself I perceive what is related to my being. I like my karma because it makes me better and better. This is how one learns to love karma, and then this is the impulse to recognize the Christ. [3]

What is the source of this benefit in our earthly development, that there is karma? Karma comes from no other power in the whole evolution than from the Christ. [4]

We must distinguish between the consequences of sin for ourselves and the consequences of sin for the objective course of the world. If one looks at the time of human development since the Mystery of Golgotha, and one approaches the Akashic Chronicle without being imbued with the Christ Being, one is very easily misled. For in this Akashic Chronicle there are records that very often do not correspond to what is found in the karmic evolution of individual human beings. Let us assume that some person lived in the year 733 for my sake and at that time incurred a heavy debt. Now one examines the Akashic Chronicle, at first without having any connection with the Christ. And lo and behold, one cannot find the guilt in question in the Akashic Records. But if you now go into the person who has lived on and examine his karma, then you find: Yes, there is still something on this person's karma that he has to pay off; it should have been in the Akashic Records at a certain point in time; but it is not there. This comes from the fact that the Christ has actually taken upon himself the objective guilt. The moment I penetrate myself with the Christ, when I search the Akashic Chronicle with the Christ, I find the fact! Christ has taken it into his kingdom and carries it on as an entity. Karmic justice remains, but with regard to the effects of guilt in the spiritual world, the Christ steps in, takes this guilt into his kingdom and carries it on. [5]

Through karma, the deed of the Christ becomes a cosmic law, and through the Christ principle, the revealed Logos, karma achieves its goal, namely the liberation of souls to self-consciousness and their equality of essence with God. The law of destiny is gradual redemption, the Christ is the Redeemer. [6]

Christ becomes the master of karma for the development of mankind. And this is the beginning of that which we also find indicated in the Gospels with the words: He will come again to separate or to bring about the crisis for the living and for the dead. But in the sense of occult research this event is not to be understood as if it were a one-off event that takes place on the physical plan, but is connected with the whole future development of mankind. And while Christianity and Christian development have hitherto meant a kind of preparation, the significant thing now occurs that the Christ becomes the Lord of karma, that it will be incumbent upon him in the future to determine what our karmic account is, how our debits and credits relate to each other. [7]

To classify our karmic balance in the general earth karma, the general progress of mankind, that will fall to the Christ in the future. And it happens essentially in the time in which we live between death and a new birth. - The epoch begins in which people will have an idea, perhaps even a clear picture, a feeling (of what the karmic balance of this deed will be like) the moment they have done something. [8]

Sources:

[1], [2] GA 130: Esoteric Christianity and the Spiritual Guidance of Humanity (1911/1912)

[3] GA 143: Experiences of the Supersensible. The Three Paths of the Soul to Christ. (1912)

[4] GA 107: Spiritual science of human nature (1908/1909)

[5] GA 155: Christ and the Human Soul. On the Meaning of Life. Theosophical Morality. Anthroposophy and Christianity (1912/1914)

[6] GA 94: Cosmogony. Popular Occultism. The Gospel of John. Theosophy on the basis of the Gospel of John (1906)

[7], [8] GA 131: From Jesus to Christ (1911)

Karma - intervening in the karmic balance

If we remove certain causes which would otherwise have been there and which would have visited certain people through their karmic involvement, we can thereby influence people's karma. However, this influencing does not mean that we remove it, but that we direct it in a different direction. We only create the need to seek out other opportunities and influences when we remove any influences. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 120: The Revelations of Karma (1910)

Karma - Gender

On average, it is true that one male and one female incarnation alternate. Exceptionally, however, several incarnations in the same gender may follow one after the other - the largest number that has been observed was seven - but then the gender changes. However, these are exceptions; as a rule, the genders alternate in successive incarnations. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 100: Human Development and the Knowledge of Christ. Theosophy and Rosicrucianism - The Gospel of John (1907)

Karma - Laws

In a lecture one can only state the facts of the law of karma in a narrative way, and this shows the maturity of the spiritual-scientific aspirant, that he can now accept these things as facts, as results, and then think about them further and seek them out in life. The individual life shows the effects of karma in the most varied ways; only the human view of life does not usually go very far. People usually look over themselves or their fellow men with attention only for a short period of life, because their view is not sharpened by the spiritual eye. [1] First of all, however, it must be emphasized that life is not determined solely by previous incarnations, but also, even if only to a small extent, by the present life. This law that we encounter there, how the past, present and future of man are connected, is called the law of karma in the literature of spiritual science. It is the true law of human destiny. In the effect of the law of karma in each individual life we have only a special case of the great law of the cosmos, for what we call the law of karma is a very general cosmic law, and its validity in human life is only a special case. If we realize any connection at all between any preceding conditions and subsequent effects, we are already thinking in terms of this law. [2]

The soul from one earthly life is transformed into the body in another earthly life; the body from one earthly life is transformed into the soul in another earthly life. In this respect it really is the case that those who want to look at karmic connections sometimes have to look at small things. It is extremely important not to focus on things that we otherwise consider to be particularly important in life. [3]

The change that the astral body undergoes in this life occurs in the next incarnation in the etheric body by having a formative effect on it. For example, if someone wants to be born with a good memory in the next life, he should endeavor to remember as much as possible and to recall everything he experiences. [4] The physical body is the factor through which our actions in the world are carried out, for what we do is done through movements made by our physical body. Our external fate in the next incarnation depends on our actions. Whether we are born poor or rich, in this place or that, in this environment or that, is the result of the actions of our physical body in previous lives. If we commit bad deeds, we are born into a bad environment; good deeds give us a good environment. [5] The actions of the previous life are expressed in this one as external life destinies. The inclinations, the temperamental disposition and so on of the past life are transformed into the physical, healthy constitution of this life. [6] Since the qualities of the etheric body thus influence the physical body of the next life, the healthy or weak organization of the human being in one life depends on his inclinations and habits in the previous life. The causes of disease are indeed moral. [7]

The life of imagination is the activity of our astral body. The nature of this imaginative life has an effect on the etheric body in the next life, that is, on the lasting moral disposition of the human being. Let us consider the mood of a Schopenhauer who was a pessimist. To view life pessimistically or optimistically is a characteristic of the etheric body, and in the pessimist this attitude is caused by the fact that such a person has had unsatisfactory or unhappy experiences in his previous life. If someone makes many disparaging judgments about his fellow men, if he is such a critic, this tendency of one life will express itself in the next life in such a way that the person concerned will age early and show little youthfulness at all. [8] The ideas, sensations, etc., of a long life, which transform the astral body, will only bring about an influential change in the etheric body in the next life. [9] Things that affect the astral body in one life manifest themselves in the next as a disposition of the etheric body. If a person lies frequently in his life, this is only due to a characteristic of the astral body in that particular life. The repetition of lying, however, gradually communicates itself to the etheric body, and as a result a careless, phlegmatic type of personality appears in the next life, which is based on certain characteristics of the etheric body. If a person inflicts much pain on his fellow men, this is also initially based on characteristics of the astral body; but here too the repetition works in such a way that something is communicated to the etheric body which shows itself in the next life as a melancholic disposition, which is also based on characteristics of the etheric body.

If a person develops a certain habit that is contrary to meaning, this is based on characteristics of the etheric body in the corresponding life. In the next life, however, it becomes apparent that these habits have had an effect on the composition of the physical body. One can actually recognize the cause of a pathological disposition in the formation of bad habits in a previous life. For example, one can say the following: a thoughtless life (lack of the astral body) leads in the next existence to an easy-going disposition, which manifests itself in particular in forgetfulness and amnesia; in a subsequent life, forgetfulness appears as a pathological disposition, which is currently often referred to as "nervousness". The law of karma will (therefore) only be understood correctly if it is not understood in the sense of the ordinary administration of justice, but in a much higher (and more comprehensive sense). [10] Infectious diseases (for example) lead back to a particularly developed egoistic sense of acquisition in the previous life. [11] People who habitually act selfishly in one life age early in the next life and shrink early. Staying young and fresh for a long time, on the other hand, stems from a loving, devoted previous life. [12]

Karma is woven by the ego between falling asleep and waking up. Karma is woven apart from that in man in which freedom lies. Karma is not woven from free or unfree thoughts, karma is woven from the mind and will. Karma comes up from the depths of human nature, from the dreaming mind and the sleeping will. [13] Man weaves his karma during sleep, but he harvests what he needs to weave it during waking hours. For that which he weaves are the threads which he must work out of a general love of man, or the threads which continually break and form a bad karma for the next life, these are those which are woven out of hatred of man, for love of man and hatred of man come into consideration above all as creative forces for karma. [14]

From the night, karma gradually intervenes in a person's daily life, and we take something very specific with us from the night into the day. Whoever can properly reflect on how he experiences a particularly significant event in his life on any given day, and whoever has a more intimate, finer self-observation, will then easily feel, when he, let us say, experiences this significant event of his life in the afternoon, how he can feel that already from the morning there was the restlessness in him to be pushed towards this event. Most people who can feel something like this will actually have the feeling that they have been running from the morning towards such an event, which has a meaning in life. To a certain extent, the whole of the previous day has been colored by such an event, even if it is a completely unexpected, if it is a truly fateful, unexpected event. On days when we go through something meaningful in life, we wake up differently than on days that go on in the usual rut. The more a person observes that indeterminate, one might say semi-mystical thing that can shine into his life from sleep, the more he comes to pay attention to his karma. [15]

The whole karmic past passes by with every sleep. While the human being, preferably in what he can experience when he falls asleep, has a small foretaste of the karma that is being formed for the future, when he wakes up he has a faint, albeit very faint, sense of the karma that he carries. The moment of waking up is one of which one must say: it means a faint intimation of all that man carries within him from his past lives on earth. However, this is absorbed by everything through which the astral body and the ego radiate when they spread from the tips of the fingers and toes into the human being (see the articles: Awakening; Awakening experience). But it is the case that a very difficult karma, a karma on which one is heavily burdened, has the peculiarity that it beams up into one's head, as it were, all that which is unhealthy deposited matter, whereas a good karma actually beams up the good deposited matter. And that is where the spiritual and the natural meet. All kinds of unhealthy deposits in the human organism are brought up into the head by evil karma, by the residue of everything we have done in an evil sense. One then feels the head growling and dull from what is the evil karma. [16]

Between falling asleep and waking up, the astral body weaves and wanders within the being of the astral world (astral plan); but within this astral body, between falling asleep and waking up, we still carry the ego. But this is not yet able, insofar as it is the I of the present, to enter the physical body. For here the human being shares the fate of the rest of nature, the duality of spirit with matter. What takes place in man in this struggle between spirit and matter, which shines into him, which consists in the will to overcome the dualism of spirit and matter in the outer physical world on earth, as an inner conflict behind the scenes of his existence, even when he is awake, takes place behind the scenes of existence in sleep. For the human being, this is initially how it unfolds in ordinary consciousness, concealed by sleep. A real spiritual vision, however, reveals to us what is actually at work there as a creative principle from long past earthly lives that is opposed to combustion. And we become aware of how the earlier earth lives pulsate through our will, preparing our destiny from moral impulses, how, when we enter into sleep, what the human will otherwise accomplishes from its instincts, emotions and conscious intentions while asleep, even when awake, how this weaves itself between falling asleep and waking up into the being that is concealed from man in the present through sleep, but which in our next life on earth will unfold as an effective will pulsating through our blood in the combustion process of the future body as the creative I - this creative I, which will then again have been increased by that member which we have unfolded in this life on earth between birth and death and have added to that which has come to us in the manner described from the earlier lives on earth. [17]

Sources:

[1] GA 108: Answering World and Life Questions through Anthroposophy (1908/1909)

[2] GA 99: The Theosophy of the Rosicrucian (1907)

[3], [15], [16] GA 239: Esoteric Considerations of Karmic Connections - Fifth Volume (1924)

[4], [5] GA 97: The Christian Mystery (1906/1907)

[6] - [8] GA 94: Cosmogony. Popular occultism. The Gospel of John. Theosophy based on the Gospel of John (1906)

[9], [11], [12] GA 95: Before the Gates of Theosophy (1906)

[10] GA 34: Lucifer – Gnosis. Fundamental essays on anthroposophy and reports from the magazines "Lucifer" and "Lucifer – Gnosis" (1903-1908)

[13], [14] GA 224: The Human Soul in Its Connection with Divine-Spiritual Individualities.. The Internalization of the Annual Festivals (1923)

[17] GA 84: What did the Goetheanum want and what should anthroposophy do? (1923/1924)

Karma - Laws: Living conditions

What appears when an individuality appears in two successive lives on earth may not be very similar on the outside. Rather, it depends on the most inner aspects. [1] People who are especially connected with each other karmically go through the development of humanity in groups and meet again and again on earth. As a rule, we do not meet people on earth who were incarnated in a time other than ours in the past. [2] We are karmically connected to many more souls than we think. [3]

The ongoing life of people on earth takes place in rhythms. I would like to say that one human impulse generally moves from one earthly life to another, another human impulse moves from one earthly life to another, and they are separated from each other in a certain way, they do not come together in earthly life. In the long life between death and a new birth, people do come together; but in earth life it is indeed the case that one always comes down to earth again with a limited circle of people. It is precisely for the repeated earth lives that contemporaneity has an inner meaning, an inner importance. [4]

Very often the people with whom we come together around the age of thirty are so interwoven with us in earlier incarnations that we can be related to them, usually at the beginning of the immediately preceding incarnation or even earlier, as parents or siblings. It need not be so, but many cases show spiritual-scientific research that it is indeed the case that our parents, the persons who stood by us at the beginning of our previous life, who placed us in the physical plan, from whom we later outgrew, are so karmically interwoven with us that they are brought together with us again in our new life not in our childhood, but only when we have stepped out onto the physical plan. It does not have to be this way, because spiritual scientific research very often shows that we are only brought together in a next incarnation with those who come into question as parents, as siblings, as blood relatives in general, with whom we found ourselves together in this incarnation around the thirties. So the acquaintances around the thirties in any incarnation can turn out in such a way that the people who come into consideration are related to us by blood in a previous or subsequent incarnation.

The reverse is also true. If we look at those personalities whom we choose least arbitrarily through external forces that are suitable for the physical plan, that is, our parents and siblings with whom we met at the beginning of our lives, when we consider them, we very often come to the conclusion that we have chosen the very persons who guide us into life from childhood onwards, around the age of thirty, in another incarnation, as if arbitrarily with our own powers; in other words, that in the middle of the previous life we chose those who have now become our parents and siblings. [5]

Those people with whom we met in our very first childhood, parents, siblings, playmates or other childhood surroundings, are as a rule those personalities with whom we developed relationships in the previous or some earlier incarnation in such a way that we made this or that acquaintance around the age of 30. In the descending life we are then brought together with personalities who may or may not have had anything to do with us in the previous life. They have then had something to do with us in a previous life, when particularly characteristic events occur, as they so often do in human life, when some decisive point in life - let us say, a severe test of life through bitter disappointment - occurs. Then it happens that in the second half of life we are reunited with people who were already connected with us in one way or another. As a result, the relationships shift and some of the things that were caused earlier are removed. In the second half of our lives, however, we are led into the path of people with whom the karma that has been spun cannot be completed in one lifetime. [6]

If you try to use spiritual insight to get to the bottom of something like a broken childhood friendship, you will find the following. If one goes back to an earlier life on earth, one usually finds that the two people who had a friendship in their youth in one life, which then broke up, had a friendship in an earlier life on earth in a later life. First of all, if one examines the cases more closely, it becomes apparent that the urge to get to know the person with whom one had a friendship in older years in the same way as he could be in youth, leads one in the next life to really get to know him as a childhood friend. This has a great influence when this urge arises in one or both of them, goes through death and then lives itself out in the spiritual world between death and a new birth. Because then there is something in the spiritual world, like staring at youth. You have this very special longing to stare at your youth, and you do not develop the urge to get to know the person again in old age. And so the friendship of youth, which was predestined from the life you lived through before you descended to earth, breaks up. In all the cases that I am aware of, it has always been the case that if these people had remained united in a later life, if the friendship of youth had not broken down, they would have grown weary of each other because they had formed the friendship in a previous life, which was a friendship of age, too selfishly. The selfishness of friendships in one earth life takes its karmic revenge in the loss of these friendships in other earth lives. [7]

It is very often found that the individual earth lives, I would like to say, seen according to their configuration, complement each other. This in particular is often found: If you meet a person who has a strong influence on destiny - of course these things only apply as a rule, they are not valid for all cases - but if you meet a person in middle age in an incarnation, you may have had him next to you in terms of destiny at the beginning (or) end of life in a previous incarnation. Then the picture is like this: you live through the beginning (or) end in one incarnation together with the other person, and in another incarnation you do not live through the beginning and end, but you meet him in the middle of life.

Or it may turn out that as a child you are bound to some person by fate. In a previous life on earth you were connected to the same person just before you died. Such reflections occur extremely frequently in the contexts of destiny. [8]

All those souls who are embodied today in what we call the East will seek their next embodiment in the West. Western people will seek their next embodiment more in the East. The middle will have to form a mediation. [9] (For further information see: Incarnations of peoples).

To say that people deserve misery because they did bad things in their previous lives is of course nonsense, because this is not the fate of each individual, it is the common fate of each individual. But everyone experiences it in this life. Just think how much misery a person experiences in the present life. It does not come from the previous life. But in the next life, he will have the consequences of the misery of now. The result will be that he will be wiser and that the spirit world will be able to enter him more easily. So that the present misery is already an education for the future. [10]

In the time when the cosmic in the Christ was most destroyed, mostly those people have been incarnated who, when they come back today, do not find the connection to life, because in their previous incarnation, where they were also already clever and intelligent, they could not possibly know anything about the connection of the earth with the spiritual life in the cosmos through their time formation. Because they staggered through life, as it were, as if the earth were completely closed in on itself and nothing could be seen outside but physical stars, they turn, as it were, staggering through their re-incarnation to the real life acting on them. This is how one looks into the fate of human beings. One comes to realize how the formation of time has had this influence on a very large number of people, that it has superficialized them and they already appear in this life with the disposition to superficialization; for this is how you experience these people who once lost the connection with the spiritual powers in the cosmos in a previous incarnation: they cannot find the connection with earthly life in the next incarnation, for which the incarnation in question was decisive. All cosmic thoughts, however, should not merely bring contemplation into our lives, but will and action. And then we must consider: How will it go in the future if, in addition to the non-grasping of the spirit in the cosmos, there is also the non-grasping of earthly life, the going through the trivialities in the same way as through the depths of life? - This is where the contemplation of karma becomes really serious. [11] (For further information see: Earth Evolution - Future).

Today we can still tell from people's physiognomies, especially when they are young, where they come from. One day we will have people whose physiognomy will only indicate how they were in the previous incarnation, when they reached spirituality. Then the others will stand beside them - and what will karma mean then? Then karma will have shed the usual karmic affinities. In this respect, those who know how to take life seriously will be able to tell you: You were, or still are, karmically connected to many who cannot enter spirituality. And in addition to perhaps some life relationships, one feels a deep alienation, in a quite justified way a deep alienation: the karmic connection that otherwise takes place in life falls away, it disappears. And there remains, I would like to say, between someone who stands out there in the field of materialism and a person who stands in the field of spirituality, nothing else remains karmically - but that remains - except that he must look at him, that he becomes particularly attentive to him. Today's materialists will have to look to today's spiritualists in the future. That will have remained of karma. And why is that? How can materialists prove something today? By the fact that they have it before their eyes, by the fact that they can grasp it with their hands. Those who stand in the field of materialism will see with their eyes, will be able to grasp with their hands those with whom they were formerly karmically connected, the physiognomy, the whole expression of what the spirit is; for it has now become physiognomically creative. Thus it will be proved for the eyes, proved in man, how the spirit is creative in the world. [12]

Sources:

[1] GA 240: Esoteric reflections on karmic connections - Sixth volume (1924)

[2], [11] GA 239: Esoteric reflections on karmic connections - Fifth volume (1924)

[3] GA 174b: The spiritual background of the First World War (1914-1921)

[4], [7], [8] GA 235: Esoteric reflections on karmic connections - First volume (1924)

[5] GA 135: Reincarnation and karma and their significance for contemporary culture (1912)

[6] GA 130: Esoteric Christianity and the spiritual guidance of humanity (1911/1912)

[9] GA 196: Spiritual and social changes in human development (1920)

[10] GA 350: Rhythms in the cosmos and in human beings. How does one come to see the spiritual world? (1923)

[12] GA 237: Esoteric reflections on karmic connections - Third volume. The karmic connections of the anthroposophical movement (1924)

Karma laws: teacher - pupil

As a rule - as occult observation shows - it is not the case that in a previous life on earth the teacher was again the teacher of the person concerned, but that he was in a completely different relationship to him. When one is confronted with a teacher or an educator - even if in image - one takes up the thoughts, the ideas, in the right pedagogy. If this is the case, it usually leads back to an earlier relationship on earth, where one has absorbed not thoughts but feelings from the personality in question, which can be conveyed in the most varied ways through life. Let us assume that someone has the opportunity in this earthly life to have a great deal of inner heartfelt sympathy for this or that person with whom he does not particularly have a life relationship today, whom he only meets, but who is tremendously sympathetic to him. It can then be the case that these sympathies, which are developed in the present earthly life, lead to the person concerned, who develops these sympathies, having the person for whom he develops these sympathies as a teacher, as an educator in a subsequent earthly life. And what has happened objectively? If one develops emotional sympathies with someone, then this depends on what the entities of the second Hierarchy, the entities of the Exusiai, Dynamis, Kyriotetes unfold in and around the human being. If then in the next life the influence does not take place in a roundabout way through the feelings, but in a roundabout way through thoughts and conceptions, then the entities of the second Hierarchy have handed over what they did in a previous life to the entities of the third Hierarchy, to Angeloi, Archangeloi, Archai, and they now work within the human being. So that, think of this: when our karma develops from one earth-life to another, it means that deeds, real deeds, pass from one Hierarchy to another, that something tremendously significant happens in the spiritual cosmos. Basically, one should regard the fate of a human being with a tremendous reverence, with deep inner awe, because in contemplating the fate of a human being, one stands before the whole world of the gods. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 236: Esoteric Observations on Karmic Connections - Second Volume (1924)

Karma laws: love, joy, understanding of the environment

Such gifts or ungifts, understanding of the environment, obduracy towards the surroundings, these did not arise out of nothing, but are the results of our previous earthly existence. If you now use initiation science to look at a person who has quite a lot of understanding for his human and non-human environment, and you then go back - with initiation science - to the previous earthly life, then you find what qualities the person had in the previous earthly life, and how they have been transformed into an understanding of the environment. And one then comes to the conclusion that a person who has an understanding of the environment was of such a nature in the previous earth life that he could experience much joy. That is very interesting. People who were unable to experience joy in their previous life on earth cannot come to an understanding of people or the environment. In every person who has this understanding, you will find that they were a person who could take pleasure in their surroundings. But this was also acquired in a previous life on earth. And how does one come to have this joy, this talent, this ability to take pleasure in one's surroundings? You come to it when you have developed love in previous earthly lives. Love in one earthly life is transformed into joy; the joy of the next earthly life is transformed into an understanding grasp of the environment in the third earthly life. In this way one sees earth life after earth life, and in this way one also gains understanding for that which radiates from the present into the future.

People who can hate a lot carry the talent of being painfully touched by everything into the next life on earth as a result of their hatred. This is the case when you study a person who has to go through life as a real "zwiderwurzen" because he is painfully touched by everything, always suffering. You can have compassion, that's the right thing to do, but it always takes you back to a previous life on earth where he couldn't get beyond hatred. Please do not misunderstand me. When there is talk of hatred, man says to himself I do not hate, I love everyone. He should only examine himself once to see how much hidden hatred lies at the bottom of the human soul. Yes, these connections only really become clear when you hear people talking about each other. Really - think of such statistics - much more bad things are said about a person than is said in praise or appreciation. And if you were to take these statistics, you would find that people are hated a hundred times more than they are loved. Yes, it is so, but people usually don't realize it because they believe they are always entitled to hate and find it incredibly excusable when they hate. But this hatred develops into a capacity for suffering, a capacity for pain in the next earthly life, and into a lack of understanding, into obduracy in the third earthly life, which does not want to approach anything, cannot delve into anything. These are spiritual connections that lead from one earthly life to the next. People who cannot fall ill, who are always in the best of health, usually look back from this earthly existence to earlier earthly existences in which they had the deepest interest. In general, the soul from one earthly life is transformed into the body in another earthly life; the body from one earthly life is transformed into the soul in another earthly life. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 239: Esoteric Observations on Karmic Connections - Fifth Volume (1924)

Karma - Laws: Metamorphoses of qualities and activities

A thinker becomes a thinker by mainly occupying in his thinking that which falls away with the earth life, and by leaving unoccupied that which sends the forces over into the next incarnation and participates in the formation of the head - such a person will appear in a new earth life with a soft flesh, with tender soft flesh, the whole surface of the body, the skin, will be very well formed. So people with many freckles were certainly not thinkers in a previous earthly life. [1]

If someone goes through life with great attention, then he must be mobile, if he does not have an exclusively sedentary lifestyle, - and such people are very difficult to observe karmically today, because they did not exist in earlier times. But now - in earlier times - a person, when he became aware of the things around him, always had to go to these things, he had to make his limbs active. The whole body came into activity, not only the senses, which belong to the head system, but the whole body came into activity. What the whole body does when the human being is attentive carries over into the formation of the head in the next life on earth. The head of the human being in the next life on earth then becomes such that it has a very strong urge to send such forces into the rest of the organism, which then attaches itself in the next life on earth (the embryonic development starts from the head), - that the forces of the earth have a very strong effect on this organism. And the result is that such a person gets everything in special formation that depends on the forces of the earth. This means that he gets large bones, strong bones, he gets, for example, extraordinarily broad shoulder blades, the ribs are well developed. And the peculiar thing is: if such earth-related forces from the earlier life on earth have a strong effect, then the hair grows very quickly. In such a person we will see that he goes courageously through life. [2] So we can say that certain physical processes can only be understood when we look back to previous earth lives. A person who got to know the world in a previous earthly life has fast-growing hair; a person who got to know the world little in a previous earthly life has very slow-growing hair, which lies on the surface of the body, whereas those who were most intensely interested in a previous earthly life, who were over-intensely interested, who stuck their nose into everything, have shaggy hair. [3]

The soul that is formed in one earth-life through interest in the visible world is expressed in the health or illness of the body in the next earth-life. 235.92fIf we scurry through life in such a superficial way, with nothing of interest to us, then we can be sure that we will become a fearful hare in the next earth-life. This, however, is again due to the fact that, if the inattentive person's uninvolved being connects little with the environment, the head organization in the next life will have no relationship with the earth forces. The bones remain undeveloped, the hair grows slowly; man very frequently has O or X legs. [4]

Joker:

When man has passed through a series of earth lives, or at least through one earth life in which he has lived like one half asleep, he then becomes in the next earth life one who cannot preserve seriousness. [5]

The fact that someone becomes a great artist, for example, is something that needs to be conditioned in his karma to the smallest extent. But what he does in this art, how he behaves in this art, that is something that is particularly conditioned in karma. [6] I have never found a person who has a sympathetic face, a sympathetic facial expression, who did not enjoy painting in a previous earthly life. People with unsympathetic facial expressions - which also plays a role in human karma, which has a significance for fate - have always been those who have passed by works of art dully and indifferently, phlegmatically. But these things go much further. There are people who have never looked up at the stars throughout their lives - and this was already the case in earlier earthly ages - who are not interested in anything in this direction. In their next life on earth, these people are born with a somewhat flabby body, or if they are given the model by their parents' strength that leads them beyond this, they become flabby and powerless in the body that they then build for themselves. People who, for example, have absolutely no interest in music in this day and age, who are indifferent to music, will most certainly be reborn asthmatic or with lung disease in their next earthly life, or will be born suitable for lung disease or asthma. [7]

Musical people

are those who in a previous life easily found the transition from happiness to sadness, from sadness to happiness, who could go along with everything. This shifted to the inner self, and this gave rise to the rhythmic transitional ability that the musical soul gives. [8]

The love of the previous life on earth, which flowed out from the person, is transformed into joy when it returns from other people. So that when a person does something towards his fellow human beings in an earthly life that is borne by love, whereby love emanates from him, goes along with the deeds that promote the other person, then the metamorphosis in the passage through life between death and a new birth is such that what is emanating love in one earthly life metamorphoses in the next earthly life, transforms into joy flowing towards the person. [9] But that which is experienced in the joy between birth and death is in turn reflected in the most diverse souls with whom one was together on earth and who are now also in the life between death and a new birth. And this reflection, which then comes in many ways from the souls of the people we know, has an effect in turn. We carry it again in our astral body when we descend to the next life on earth - now we are in the third life on earth. And again it is switched on, imprinted in our astral body. And now, as a result, it becomes the basis, the impulse for an easy understanding of people and the world. If we can take pleasure in the interesting behavior of people, understand the interesting behavior of people in an earth incarnation, then this points us back to the joy of the previous earth incarnation, to the love in the further preceding earth incarnation.

Now the deeds that are done in a rigid sense of duty or in convention, "because it's convenient", do not evoke joy in the next earthly life, but by passing through the souls through that reflection, just as I have described, they evoke something in the next earthly life that could be called: One feels that one is more or less indifferent to people. And that which some people carry through life, that they are indifferent to people and suffer from it - they rightly suffer from it, for people are there for each other and man is dependent on not being indifferent to other people - that which one suffers is precisely the result of the lack of love in a previous earthly life. That which flows to us as indifference on the part of other people makes us for the third life on earth a person who knows nothing right to do with himself. [10]

Let us assume, however, that a person commits certain harms against his fellow human beings out of hatred or a tendency to antipathy. One can think of all the stages that can occur. One can, let us say, harm his fellow human beings with a criminal feeling of hatred. But he can also, and I'll leave out the intermediate stages, be a critic. Everything that is brought about by people in this way towards other people or even towards sub-human beings, all this in turn is discharged in soul states, which are now also reflected in the life between death and a new birth. And then, in the next life on earth, out of the hatred comes that which flows to us from the world as a sorrowful being, as unpleasantness caused from outside, as the opposite of joy. You will say: Yes, we experience so much suffering, is it really all due to greater or lesser hatred in the previous earthly life? If you want to think without prejudice in this area, then you have to realize how great the illusion is that makes you feel good and to which you therefore easily succumb when it is a matter of denying yourself any feelings of antipathy towards other people. People actually go through the world with much more hatred than they think, at least with much more antipathy. And it's like this: hatred is usually not experienced at all at first, because it gives the soul satisfaction. It is covered up by the satisfaction. When it comes back as suffering that flows to us from outside, then the suffering is noticed. Just think of a coffee party, how much antipathy is dumped on people! As it flows out, people don't notice it; but when it comes back in the next life on earth, it will be noticed. And it inevitably comes back. (So) a large part of the suffering that flows towards us from the outside is the result of hatred that was stirred up in earlier earthly lives. [11] When we return to the third earthly life, the result of the suffering that flows towards us and is then unloaded into the soul is initially a kind of dullness of spirit, a kind of dullness of insight towards the world. For one can always be sure that being foolish in any earthly life is always the result of hatred in a certain earlier earthly life. [12]

If someone realizes: I am an envious person, he works very hard to get rid of this characteristic. But it can be very deep-seated, so deep that he can strive to get rid of envy, but he is not morally strong enough. Something very peculiar occurs. Envy is a luciferic quality. Envy undergoes a metamorphosis which emerges in the human soul in such a way that man now becomes a critic who seeks out everything possible in his fellow human beings in order to be able to reproach them. This addiction to blame is nothing other than transformed envy. If this is the case, then Ahriman has you in his clutches. In karmic terms, the result is strangely the same whether one allows envy to emerge originally or in a transformed form as criticism. If you follow a person who was envious in youth or a critic until later in life, you will see that people who were eaten up by envy in youth come to have insecurity in old age. They gain no firm ground, cannot relate to other people, cannot advise themselves, are happy when they can say: This is what this or that person advised me to do. This is a karmic consequence of envy or transformed envy in the same life. [13] Someone who has developed a lot of envy in a previous life is reborn as a person who already has that in the outer body organization which makes him a helpless person. [14]

Lying

is a characteristic of the etheric body and stems from Ahriman. If a person has a habit of lying at a certain age, or if he lies a lot as a result of a bad upbringing, a certain shyness always appears later in life, an inability to open his eyes to people. Those who have been mendacious reappear (in the next life) in such a way that they have no proper relationship with their environment. He cannot be loved by the people around him, he feels repelled by them, love is hard to come by.

It will not be long before people realize that the law of karma is a matter of course. People are born into the circumstances into which they belong. Weakness and helplessness are the consequences of earlier envy, and we come together with this child because it has envied us. And it comes to us with its shy nature because it is we who have been lied to so often by the being in a previous incarnation. [15]

These connections of lying and shyness, of envy and lack of independence, which can already be observed in one incarnation, are karmic connections. Basically, karma works in such a way that it is still expressed like a quiet fulfillment in the same incarnation, but it becomes decisive for the character in the next incarnation. [16] Moral qualities must indeed have a karmic effect. They may well change again in a human incarnation, but in the next incarnation they must descend into the physical organization. We have said that lying can already become a shyness in the same incarnation, that man thereby withdraws into himself. All the more will lying in one incarnation produce the quality of timidity in the next. Such a person is born as an anxious, fearful character. He will not only be shy towards the people around him, but he will also fall into certain pathological states of fear and anxiety. [17]

If I study a man's gestures, in so far as these gestures are innate in him, they can become a bookmark for me of the way in which he has come to terms with thinking in earlier lives. What is first inwardly thought becomes outwardly gesture. [18]

Sources:

[1] - [6] GA 236: Esoteric reflections on karmic connections - Second volume (1924)

[7], [9] - [12] GA 235: Esoteric reflections on karmic connections - First volume (1924)

[8] GA 169: World essence and ego (1916)

[13] - [15] GA 127: The mission of the new spiritual revelation. The Christ event as the central event of the earth's evolution (1911)

[16] Bei 45: Contributions to the Rudolf Steiner Complete Edition. Issue 45 (1974)

[17] At 45: Contributions to the Rudolf Steiner Complete Edition. Issue 45 (1974)

[18] GA 163: Coincidence, necessity and providence. Imaginative knowledge and processes after death (1915)

Karma - Laws: Reincarnation of talents

Most of the ideas commonly formed about reincarnation and karma are erroneous. Many reincarnation chains are set up in such a way that one simply believes that the previous incarnation can be found by finding the abilities that appear in the present one in the previous one. This is usually the wrong approach. For real observations with the means of spiritual science usually show the exact opposite. People, for example, who in the previous incarnation were good calculators, good mathematicians, appear in the present incarnation in such a way that they show no aptitude for mathematics at all, that they lack mathematical talent. And if you want to know what talents you most probably had in the previous incarnation, you would do well to think about what you have the least ability for in this incarnation. These things are true on the one hand, but are often thwarted by other facts on the other. For example, it may be the case that someone had a special mathematical talent in the previous incarnation, but died early, so that this mathematical talent was not fully expressed; then he will be born again in the next incarnation with a mathematical talent, which will then present itself as a continuation from the previous incarnation.

If one goes into this further, then the fact emerges that what one does externally in one incarnation, what one has for an external or internal profession, enters into the inner organ formation in the next incarnation, for example in such a way that, if one was a particularly good mathematician in one incarnation, what one has acquired there in the mastery of numbers and figures has been taken along and worked into a special elaboration of one's sense organs, for example the eyes. And people who see very well have this careful training of the forms of the eye from the fact that they thought in forms in the previous incarnation. Another case known to occultists is that in which an individuality in one incarnation lived particularly intensively in architectural forms: what it felt there became implanted as forces in the inner life of the soul and chiseled out the tools of hearing particularly finely, so that this individuality became a great musician in the next incarnation. It did not become a great architect, because the forms of sensation which were based on architecture became organ-building, so that nothing remained but to feel music to a high degree. [1] Those people who, for example, have a special disposition to learn languages in one incarnation, will not have this disposition in their next incarnation, but they will have the disposition to make more impartial judgments than the rest of mankind. [2]

Sources:

[1] & [2] GA 135: Re-embodiment and Karma and their Significance for the Culture of the Present (1912)

Karma - collective karma and the spirit of the people

There are such beings who guide physical development from higher plans. Their lowest development is in the astral matter. Every people, every race, every tribe has a common astral matter, the incarnation matter for the people's spirit. The spirit of the people always reaches its development somewhat earlier than the individuals in the people. The spirit of the people can accumulate karma from the middle of a cycle. We contribute to the karma of the people, the race and so on. This is called collective karma. It is a reality. It is brought about by the fact that those beings who are one step ahead also have karma. The international aspirations (for example) belong to an even broader spirit that encompasses the entire astral matter of the earth, the real earth spirit. The physical earth is also the physical body for this earth spirit, the planetary Logos, which, when one rises to it, signifies the karma of the whole earthly development. International aspirations are the first approach to that great unity which will arise on the astral plan. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 89: Consciousness - Life - Form. Basic Principles of Spiritual Scientific Cosmology (1903-1906)

Karma - human development

Because man was prematurely transferred down into the earthly sphere (through Lucifer's seduction), the Ahrimanic spirits intermingled with what man was able to see and comprehend. As a result, man fell into error, fell into what could actually be called conscious sin. What did those spiritual beings who wanted to keep man in his progress do against this seduction, against error and illusion from the sensual? They have done something about the fact that man is now really only rightly - of course this has come slowly and gradually, but here lie the forces as to why this has happened - put in a position, so to speak, to gain the possibility again out of the sensual world to get over error and sin and evil, that is, they have given man the possibility of bearing and working out his karma. So if those beings who had to make amends for the seduction of the Luciferic beings brought suffering and pain into the world, and indeed also what is connected with it, death, then those beings who had to repair what flows from the error about the sensual world have given man the opportunity to remove all error again through his karma, to blur all the evil that he has caused in the world. For what would have happened if man had only fallen prey to evil, to error? Then man would have gradually become one with error, so to speak, he would have been unable to progress; for with every error, with every lie, with every illusion, we throw an obstacle in the way of progress. It would be impossible to achieve what is man's goal if the opposing forces, the forces of karma, were not at work. Without karma, our progress in the human career would be impossible. Karma does us the favor of having to make up for every mistake. Thus karma appeared as the result of the deeds of Ahriman. [1]

Today we have something in the human being that we can actually describe as a battle: the battle that is taking place between the Luciferic powers, which place themselves in our astral body, and those powers that work on us through our ego, through our earthly attainments. For the powers whose opponent is Lucifer can only work on us through our ego. If we acquire clarity and a correct assessment of ourselves, we can only do so with the help of the powers that work on our ego. To do this, we have to use our ego. That is why we can say: by our ego rebelling against the Luciferic powers, Yahweh fights in us against Lucifer; that which is responsible for the good world plan fights against that which rebels against this world plan in its sole validity, and we are standing with our innermost being in this battle of Lucifer with other beings. We ourselves are the scene of this battle. And the fact that we are the scene of this battle draws us into karma, but only indirectly through the fact that this battle with Lucifer is taking place. If, on the other hand, we look outwards, we are drawn into the Ahrimanic powers. [2]

When spiritual science itself will first insert itself as a destiny into the karma of humanity, when it will find the ways and means to seize the souls, and in this way will be able to defeat the opposing forces, the materialistic superstition, when that which is connected with the worst enemy of humanity, which captivates the human gaze into the sense world, can be further investigated, then you will see that then the possibility will also be offered to have an external effect on the karma of humanity. Look in the materialistic superstition of men for the reasons why the initiates must remain silent about those events which are connected with the great karma of mankind. We see a scientific enterprise that is often not dominated by the Faustian pursuit of truth, but is instead linked to vanity and ambition to the greatest extent. How much scientific research is brought into the world because the individual is only looking for something for himself. If you add all this up, you will see how strong the force is that spreads against the view into the world that is hidden behind the outer sensual appearances. When humanity clears away this fog, then the time will have come when humanity can be helped to a certain extent with regard to certain mysterious natural phenomena that emanate from the enemies of humanity and intervene deeply in human life. Until then, this possibility does not exist. The secret doctrine has the fate that in some things it must first put the question on the right track, so that the question can be asked correctly before it can be answered correctly. But again, do not take this as if the mysterious connection between the earth catastrophes and human karma did not fall within the mysteries that can be investigated. It does and it can be investigated. But there are reasons why today only the most general of these deepest secrets can penetrate into the world. Let only through spiritual science a realization come to mankind that it is possible that their own deeds are connected with natural events, then the time will also come when mankind will gain the understanding precisely from this realization that these things can be answered in a question, as it is demanded. This time will come. For the secret science can go through many different destinies. It may even be that its influence will be paralyzed, that its influence will be limited to a very narrow circle. But it will make its way through humanity, it will settle into the karma of humanity, and then the possibility will be created that humanity itself can influence the karma of humanity. [3]

Sources:

[1], [3] GA 107: Spiritual science of human nature (1908/1909)

[2] GA 120: The Revelations of Karma (1910)

Karma - actions of the physical body result in external destiny

Through a bad habit in and of itself I have not yet done anything; but if this bad habit drives me to action, then through this action I change the outer world. And everything that has such an effect in the physical external world comes back to us as external fate in the external world in the next life. So the deeds of the physical body in this life become our destiny in the next life. We experience this by being placed in this or that life situation. So whether a person becomes happy or unhappy in this or that situation in life depends on the deeds of his previous life. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 100: Human Development and the Knowledge of Christ. Theosophy and Rosicrucianism - The Gospel of John (1907)

Karma - Disorder of Karma

We see, caused by cosmic events, a division among the Angeloi who were formerly united with Michael. But these beings form the karmic development. It is not the case that every human soul can walk alone, nor that every Angelos who leads human beings can walk alone, but that the hierarchy of the Angeloi works together. Karma is lived out in cooperation. Of course, if I am connected with people in one life on earth and we carry this out in the next life, then the Angelos of one person must come together with the Angelos of the other. There has to be an interaction, and in many cases this has happened.

That is the tremendously shattering, I would like to say, the crushing thing that is taking place on earth in the Ecumenical Council of 869. It is the signal for something monstrous that is happening up there in the spiritual world, which has already occurred and is occurring more and more, is that the Angelos of one human soul, which was previously karmically connected with another human soul, did not go together with the Angelos of this other human soul. One Angelos of two karmically connected human souls remained with Michael, the other went down to earth. In the period between the foundation of Christianity and the consciousness-soul age, which was preferably signalized by the ninth century, by the year 869, it had to happen that disorder came into the karma of men! This is one of the most significant words that can be uttered in relation to the recent history of mankind. Disorder has come into the karma of modern humanity. In the following lives on earth, not all experiences were correctly placed in karma. The chaos of recent history, which brings more and more social and other chaos, cultural chaos, into recent history, which does not allow a goal to be reached, is the disorder into which karma has been brought because a split occurred in the hierarchy of the Angeloi belonging to Michael.

With the replacement of the dominion of Gabriel by the dominion of Michael, the power is brought in by Michael, which in turn is to bring order to the karma of those who have gone with him. [1] (For further information see: Michael). Just as the Ahrimanic entities have their most essential influence on that which lies in heredity, so the Luciferic entities have their essential influence on that which is man's adaptation to external conditions. They can approach the human being when he establishes his relationships with the outside world. They entangle the human ego in the outside world. In this way, however, they often bring this ego into confusion in relation to karma. [2]

Sources:

[1] GA 237: Esoteric Observations on Karmic Connections - Third Volume. The karmic connections of the anthroposophical movement (1924)

[2] GA 232: Mystery Formations (1923)

Karma - primordial karma

If all humans (ancestors) had been fertilized with monads in Lemurian times, the whole human race would have become much better. The first evil happened because some monads refused to incarnate. As a result, there were some human bodies that were only very weakly spiritually fertilized and others without any spirit at all. In the first Lemurian human race, those who had received only a small spark were not very suitable for forming a culture and soon perished. On the other hand, those who received nothing at all expressed their lower nature in a special way. They mixed with the animals. This gave rise to the last Lemurian races. The wild animal instincts lived in wild, animal-like human forms. This caused a deterioration of the whole human substance. The whole deterioration of the races also caused a deterioration of the earth. This is the origin of the primordial karma. It was then that the first seed of karma was planted. Everything later is a consequence of the primordial karma; for, if the monads had all hatched into human forms at the right time, men would have had the security of the animal, they could not have erred, but they could not have developed freedom. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 93a: Basic Elements of Esotericism (1905)

Karma - behavior towards karma

I am caused by karma in a very specific way, but at any moment the account book of my life can be changed by new entries. Whoever can see how his life is caused can also say to himself: my account closes actively or passively, and I must add this or that action in order to cancel out the bad in life, in order to be gradually freed from what I have accumulated as my karma. This is what we see as the great goal of human life: to be liberated again from the karma that has once been caused. [1]

(The view that) the whole world order must always be specially arranged for the sake of each individual human being, so that it serves the harmonious course and balance of each individual in human life, i.e. that in one life the conditions are always brought together in such a way that exactly the balance must be created for what has arisen in a previous life, but this point of view is not tenable. Facts occur in every incarnation which represent the first events in the life of every human being and these will have their karmic balance in the next life. Karma is not fate! Something is carried from every life into later ones. [2] In the life of every human being, events constantly occur that have nothing to do with his merit or guilt in the past. Such events find their karmic balance in the future. But whether a person's experience is the effect of his karmic past or the cause of a karmic future must first be determined in detail. And this cannot be decided by the mind accustomed to the physical world, but only by occult experience and observation. [3]

If we see a person coming into existence in poor health, we can assume that envy played some role in his previous incarnation. If we have such people in our environment, we must tell ourselves that karma has brought us together with this person for some reason. We can be the very person that the other person once envied. What can we do for this person? - If karma is a fact and can be taken as truth, then it must be shown that if we behave correctly towards such people now, we can achieve a favorable result with such a weak person who has just been born into this environment. You have something to forgive the person, so do it - we will tell ourselves that, but not him - and we will act accordingly, and then we will wait and see how the person becomes stronger and stronger, how he becomes healthier. Part of recognizing karma is knowing that the karma of others is none of our business. Helping him is our task alone. That his karma is fulfilled will come of its own accord. But we, we have to do everything to change his karma in a favorable way. Knowing and feeling this is part of a deep understanding of karma and its laws.

We have said that lying can already become shyness in the same incarnation, that the person thereby withdraws into himself. All the more will lying in one incarnation produce the quality of timidity in the next. Such a person is born as an anxious, fearful character. He will not only be shy towards the people around him, but he will also fall into certain pathological states of fear and anxiety. If we have to assume that someone has committed a lot of lies in a previous incarnation, how do we act sensibly towards him? Well, we tell ourselves - not him - and must make it the guideline for our actions: He will have lied to us a lot in a previous incarnation; he has put us on the wrong track. We must now try to teach him fruitful truth worthy of appreciation. The one who is karmically united with him must immerse himself lovingly and devotedly in his soul life. We must repay falsehood with truth; these are two opposite poles which are able to create a kind of balance. The secret here is that not everyone can have such a favorable effect on such a person, but precisely the one who is karmically connected with him. Whoever does this will see how favorably he can act if he can give positive truth and understanding. Karma is a real law, and success will manifest itself in a very strange way. We will have an infinitely healing and liberating effect on such people if we respond lovingly to their weaknesses. If we are able to live with our being completely in theirs, we will have a rejuvenating effect on other people.

There are two ways to approach people: either understanding or rebuke. Censure rebounds on ourselves and creates new karma; understanding, on the other hand, gives a treasure that the other person then carries within themselves, dissolves karma, smoothes it out, eradicates it. This is an extremely important fact for life. We can now summarize the result of these observations in a sentence which is of a profound truth of life, namely that basically one is able to benefit oneself very little, but to harm oneself very much; but that one is able to benefit others very much, - but can harm them little through one's own vices. Thus by being good one can do much good to others; by being bad one can do much harm to oneself, but not much harm to others. [4]

Sources:

[1] GA 53: The origin and goal of man. Basic Concepts of Spiritual Science (1904/1905)

[2] GA 120: The Revelations of Karma (1910)

[3] GA 34: Lucifer - Gnosis. Fundamental Essays on Anthroposophy and Reports from the Journals "Lucifer" and "Lucifer - Gnosis" 1903 - 1908 (1903-1908)

[4] Bei 45: Contributions to the Rudolf Steiner Complete Edition. Issue 45 (1974)

Karma - Reconciliation with karma

The man (of earlier times) who was now to attain occult knowledge had above all to turn his gaze from the outer world to his own soul forces. But since he remained an active person in the outer world, his occult development was basically, one might say, his own business, the business he had for himself. In the outer world he remained a man among other men, a man with the duties that life had once brought upon him. This was already expressed in a particularly strong way in the very first thing that the occultly developing human being had to do with regard to his soul power. The first thing such a person had to do could be expressed in words: He had to reconcile himself with his karma in relation to everything that concerned his will. So reconciliation with one's karma - one's fate, we could also say - was the first responsibility of the occultly developing human being. What is called "reconciliation with one's karma" in this context is rather a special kind of culture, of education, of self-education of feelings and emotions. If you consider that man once begins his occult development, you will admit that before the time when he begins his development he has lived in the manner of outer men, has lived as man lives among men; that is, he has taken this or that position in life, has had to make these or those thoughts his own, because these thoughts gave him the possibilities of really fulfilling the outer actions which he had to perform for his profession or for his other position in life.

He has also recognized certain duties, a circle of duties, which custom or his community has given him. It can be assumed from the outset that a person who was not exactly in harmony with what the world around him demanded of him, i.e. who was not a dutiful person, would not have the urge to develop occultly. As a rule, the people who could be called upon for occult development were those who had real abilities for their position in life and who were also inclined to adapt themselves to the circle of duties prescribed by custom and social order. But in that which is in man as his abilities, his skills in his position in life, in that which is around man as the circle of duties recognized by him, lies actually the positive karma into which man has been placed. This is the expression of his karma. He should set up the will so that a person standing outside and observing someone who is developing occultly will not notice any noticeable difference between the way the occultly developing person behaved earlier in his life position and the way he behaves later, after he has already taken a few steps in occult research. So do not interfere in the outer life of the physical plan with what occult research gives you: that is reconciliation with your karma, that is resignation to achieving advantages in the outer life position through occult means. "You should not use your occult development to gain an advantage over your fellow aspirants in the outer life, but you should conduct yourself in the outer life according to the same rules that you have conducted yourself by up to now", this was impressed upon those who underwent occult development time and time again. Thus, however, the egoistic will of man is excluded from all occult striving from the outset. It was quite deliberately excluded. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 137: Man in the light of occultism, theosophy and philosophy (1912)

Karma - understanding of karma

What will this understanding, which is acquired through social understanding, become in the next earthly life? It becomes the understanding of karma. But no man can acquire social understanding in any other way than by acquiring an understanding of the spiritual. You see how things are connected, you see how social understanding depends on spiritual understanding, on a spiritual conception of the world and world view, and how that which must occur as a conscious recognition of destiny in the course of human development depends on it for people who then pass through the gate of death with social understanding, are reborn and after rebirth will understand their destiny. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 191: Social Understanding from Spiritual Scientific Knowledge (1919)

Karma - karma of the people

Just as karma accumulates in the evolution of Saturn, in that one has to reckon with that which has come into being, so karma also accumulates in a people while the culture is being built up. This karma is present in its highest point, in its strongest measure, where the people have, so to speak, born the original, elementary forces out of themselves. Now we have seen that there are guiding entities everywhere. We have seen on earth how higher spiritual beings, angels, archangels, elemental forces, descend and how they guide humanity where it cannot yet help itself forward and lead it to a certain height. These are the spiritual entities of the Hierarchies, which have reached their perfection and maturity in earlier times. But when this height is reached, when the spirits, so to speak, descend from heavenly heights to guide the peoples, when the spirits have reached their goal, then other spiritual beings must make themselves leaders, guides of the corresponding peoples. If the peoples are still to rise in a certain way beyond their peak, then leading personalities must voluntarily give themselves up to be carriers of higher spiritual beings; only then is it possible to carry on what lay in the original plan, so to speak, by exceeding certain stages But one thing must happen in this case: those who descend into beings who are to be the leaders of the peoples, who are to continue the culture after a certain point, must, because karma has accumulated, take this karma upon themselves. This is the important law of taking on the karma of peoples and races. From a certain point in time, the leading personalities must carry the karma of peoples or races within themselves, take it over in a certain respect. That is the essential thing, that such individualities as Hermes, for example, had to take over what lay in the karma of their people, what had accumulated to a certain degree up to that time. These things are mirror images of the great cosmic processes on the individual planet. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 110: Spiritual Hierarchies and their Reflection in the Physical World. Zodiac, Planets, Cosmos (1909)

Karma - perception through practical karma exercises

We block ourselves from the spiritual world if we allow ourselves to make quick judgments in such areas. The true spiritual researcher is careful not to draw conclusions; he lets things come to him. [1]

Let us assume by way of trial that we have brought about all pain and suffering in such a way that the cleverer one in us would have led us to them, because we recognize that we have them necessarily as a result of our imperfections and yet can only rise above our imperfections through pain and suffering. And then let us try the opposite: we attribute our joys to ourselves as if they were not our merit, but as if they had been given to us by spiritual powers. It may be a bitter pill for some vain people to think this way. But to go through it on a trial basis is certainly something that, if a person's mind is quite intensely capable of such an idea, leads to the basic feeling, because it transforms itself again and, insofar as it is incorrect, rectifies itself: Something lives in you which has nothing to do with ordinary consciousness, which is actually deeper than what you have consciously experienced in this life; there is therefore something in you which is a failed human being in you who likes to turn to the eternal divine-spiritual powers that live through the world. We become aware of the eternal spiritual core of our being through such thought exercises. [2]

The karmic connections are not those that can be gained in one fell swoop. We must acquire the highest insights of life, the most important insights that illuminate our lives, slowly and gradually. [3]

Just as spiritual beings of a higher order, the Angeloi, willed for us during the lunar evolution, so now the spiritual beings of a higher order work by determining our karma from one incarnation to the next. The Angeloi do not work in our will, but they do work in the ongoing stream of our karma. What each of us will do tomorrow is already karmically determined in us today. If we did not have the task of developing our will on earth, we would be able to see through our karma. We would be able to see through it to such an extent that we could possibly foresee our life in the near future. But by beating the will into the karmic stream, it obscures our view of what will happen to us, say, the next day. Only when the will is completely silent can something of what happens not through us, but with us, be seen through. [4] It is certainly the case that when one approaches the spiritual worlds for the human being, on the one hand everything spiritual loses its abstractness, it becomes powerful, it becomes impulsively effective. On the other hand, the physical, that which is also expressed physically in the human being, loses its, one could actually say, materiality, acquires a spiritual meaning, acquires a certain place in the whole context of human life. [5]

Everything cult-like, not only the external cult-like, but the understanding of the world in images, works in such a way that man enters into his inner being. That's where you find yourself inside. How often have I therefore had to say: man must meditate in images so that he can really enter into his inner being. And so, when one looks back at the earlier man, one has this in this earlier man: on the one hand, his outward view and his feelings are, as it were, closed off by the architectural, intercepted within himself; inwardly, the view is intercepted by the fact that man imagines his soul life inwardly, as it can then be presented to him outwardly in the images of the cult. On the one hand, you descend into your inner self, on the other hand, looking outwards, you encounter what is there in the architecture, in the temple architecture, in the church architecture. It all comes together in a strange way. Between that which lives within and that upon which the gaze is cast back, there is a middle field which man does not see at all in ordinary consciousness, because he does not allow his outer gaze to be intercepted by a truly internalized architecture and because he does not allow his inner gaze to be intercepted by the imaginative, by the pictorial. But what lies in between: if you walk around in life with this, if you walk around with an inner knowledge deepened by imagination and with a sensory perception healed by outer architectural forms, which are now really built out of the human, then you will get the feeling that older people had for the blows of fate. What happens is perceived as coming from earlier earthly lives.

This very Goetheanum building^*, with the way in which more and more anthroposophy would have been practiced in it, would have been the education for karmic seeing. [6]

Sources:

[1] - [3] GA 135: Re-embodiment and Karma and their Significance for the Culture of the Present (1912)

[4] GA 157: Human destinies and the destinies of peoples (1914/1915)

[5] GA 235: Esoteric Observations on Karmic Connections - First Volume (1924)

[6] GA 236: Esoteric Observations on Karmic Connections - Second Volume (1924)

Karma - possibility of perception for the initiate

One can look at fate with recognition. That peculiar, inner, intimate emergence of the other person in oneself points to past karma. If I feel a person in such a way that he actually grasps me inwardly, not only in the senses and in the intellect, but inwardly grasps me, that my will is involved in how he grasps me, he is karmically linked to me from the past. With a somewhat finer, more intimate sense, man can therefore feel how another is karmically linked to him. So when initiation occurs in a person, he not only experiences the other person with whom he was karmically linked in such a way that he says to himself: "He works on my will, he works in my will - but he actually experiences the other person personally within himself. And if someone who is initiated meets another person with whom he is karmically connected, then this other person is in him with an independent language, with independent expressions and revelations, so that he speaks out of him, as otherwise a person standing next to us would speak to us.

So what is otherwise only felt in the will, the karmic connection, occurs for the initiate in such a way that the other person speaks out of him, as otherwise a person standing next to him would. So that for the person equipped with initiation science the karmic confrontation means: the other person not only works on his will, but he works in him as strongly as a person standing next to him would otherwise work. [1] What lives in the depths of our will is like a waking dream. And for the initiate, this waking dream becomes a full consciousness. Therefore he hears the one who is karmically connected with him speak from within himself. Of course, he always remains rational, so that he does not go around and speak to all kinds of people who speak to him, and then also speaks from them as an initiate; but he may also get used to addressing the people who are karmically connected to him and speak from him in a very concrete way, even if he is not physically opposite them, as if in a dialog, whereby things definitely come to light that also have a real meaning. [2]

Sources:

[1] & [2] GA 234: Anthroposophy - A summary after twenty-one years. At the same time a guide to its representation before the world (1924)

Karma - man's ability to perceive karma

Many people of those who are gifted with meaningful life, who cannot live at all without enlightening themselves (i.e. have an instinct for knowledge), have lived in earlier embodiments in such a way that they have known something directly in the soul of the fact of re-embodiment. Even today there are still numerous people on earth who know about it and for whom re-embodiment is an absolute fact. But the other, more robust human natures, they come over from lives in which they knew nothing of previous earthly lives. With them there is no urge to burden themselves much with conscience about the deeds of their lives, nor to worry much about explanations. Many people in the Occident are of this type, and it is precisely the character of Occidental culture that people have, so to speak, forgotten their previous lives on earth; but we are at a turning point in our culture where the memory of past lives on earth will be revived. Today (1912) it is still the case with a few people, but it will certainly become a general characteristic of people in the course of the 20th century. And that will be the case: Suppose a person had done this or that and afterwards had a guilty conscience. That's how it is now. But later, when the spiritual context is re-established, the person who has done this or that will feel the urge to move back a little from his deed, as if his eyes were bound. And then, like an image, like a kind of dream image, something will appear to him that will have to happen in the future because of his deed. For all people who have not heard of spiritual science, this will be something terrible. We are now standing as if in a forecourt of time, where the karmic balance will appear to man in a prophetic dream image. And now imagine this experience becoming more and more intense over the course of time, then you have the man of the future who will see how his deeds will be judged karmically.

How is it that people are able to see this karmic balance? It has to do with the fact that in the past people had no conscience, but were tormented by the Furies after bad deeds. That was the old clairvoyance that has passed. Then came the time when they no longer saw the Furies, the middle time, but when what the Furies used to do appeared inwardly as conscience. And now we are gradually approaching a time when we will see something again, namely the karmic balance. The fact that man has once acquired conscience enables him now to look consciously into the spiritual world. [1] For those people who are people of the present, the next earthly life will already have a dark feeling of previous earthly lives. And just as people today, when they notice that they are not particularly clever, do not attribute this to themselves but to their disposition, usually looking for it in their physical nature according to the view of today's materialism, so the people who will be those who come back from the present will at least already have a dark feeling that will worry them: If they are not particularly clever, there must have been something there that was connected with feelings of hatred and antipathy. [2]

This will be people's way into the future (for the perception of karma): People will first have to acquire a fine sense of it, so that their will is experienced in meeting another person, so that they feel that person. In a period of about 7 to 9000 years in the future, all people on earth will hear the other people with whom they are karmically connected speaking within themselves. [3]

Sources:

[1] GA 143: Experiences of the Supersensible. The three paths of the soul to Christ. (1912)

[2] GA 235: Esoteric Observations on Karmic Connections - First Volume (1924)

[3] GA 240: Esoteric Observations on Karmic Connections - Sixth Volume (1924)

Karma - the way to perceive the karma of any human being

If you want to get to the karma of a person, you must not look at his profession, his social circumstances or his ability or inability, but you must go deep into his soul, into the qualities, into the abilities that can basically be expressed in every profession. Because you have to look at what the person was in his previous life on earth. One must begin by looking through everything external and looking at what is internal, what is purely human, what makes a person a human being, an individual human being. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 346: Lectures and Courses on Christian Religious Work, V. Apocalypse and Priestly Work (1924)

Karma - how does karma work in the shaping of destiny - an example

I (i.e. Rudolf Steiner) was able to observe quite clearly "how karma works in human life" in my relationship to Goethe's work. Fate is made up of two factual formations that grow together into a unity in human life. One flows out of the urge of the soul from within; the other approaches the human being from the outside world. My own spiritual impulses went towards the contemplation of the spiritual; the external spiritual life of the world brought Goethe's work to me. I had to harmonize the two currents that met in my consciousness. - I spent the last years of my first phase of life justifying myself alternately to myself and to Goethe. My presentation of Goethe's ideas was a struggle over many years to understand Goethe better and better with the help of my own thoughts.

Looking back on this struggle, I have to say to myself: I owe him a great deal for the development of my spiritual experiences of knowledge. This development proceeded much more slowly than would have been the case if Goethe's task had not been fated to interfere with the course of my life. I would then have pursued my spiritual experiences and presented them just as they would have appeared before me. I would have been drawn into the spiritual world more quickly; but I would not have found any reason to dive into my own inner self, struggling. Thus, through my work with Goethe, I experienced the difference between a state of soul to which the spiritual world reveals itself as if by grace, and one which, step by step, makes one's own inner being more and more like the spirit, so that when the soul experiences itself as a true spirit, it can stand within the spiritual world. But it is only in this standing within that one feels how intimately human spirit and world spirituality can grow together in the human soul. At the time when I was working on my interpretation of Goethe, I always had Goethe beside me in my mind like an admonisher, calling out to me incessantly: He who advances too rapidly on spiritual paths may indeed arrive at a narrowly defined experience of the spirit; but he emerges from the richness of life impoverished in reality. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 28: My Course of Life (1923-1925)

Karma - effect on the soul

You sleep through what is actually going on inside you in the act of will. But therein lies the true self. Karma rules in the will. All the impulses from previous lives on earth are at work in the will. Only they are also immersed in sleep in the waking human being. [1]

The way you think now, the way you imprint the memories on the etheric body, will come to light in the next incarnation as your hidden gesture play, as your innate gesture. This means that when I study a person's gestures, insofar as these gestures are innate to him, they can become a bookmark for me for the way in which he has come to terms with thinking in previous lives. [2]

If we examine karma by occult means, we find that in most cases we have not earned the joy we experience, and that we should regard joy in such a way that we accept it gratefully as sent by the gods, as a gift from the gods, and say to ourselves that the joy we experience today should spur us on to work, that we should absorb the forces flowing to us through joy and use them in a beneficial way. We must regard joy as a kind of down payment for the future. With pain, on the other hand, our deeds have usually been such that we have earned it, that we always find the cause in our present or past lives. [3]

If one goes back to earlier incarnations in the case of believing natures, in whom faith may even appear as an important fact of their life only in later life, one finds the curious fact that these are individualities who were knowers in earlier, previous incarnations. The knowledge of their previous incarnation, the rational element of reason of the earlier incarnation has just been transformed into the element of faith of the present incarnation.

If you now approach people who, as particularly materialistic people, no longer believe but only want to know, you will find dullness in the previous incarnation. [4]

What has worked as conscious forces in one life works as unconscious forces in the next life - what happens in a more or less unconscious way is explained in this way. [5] When we show our deepest feelings of friendship towards people in one incarnation, we are probably preparing an outer relationship, a blood relationship or something similar. It is similar in another area. The way we think about something that appears to us as the most unreal thing in this incarnation will be the most decisive thing, the thing that determines the actual impulses for the next incarnation. What we have only in our innermost being in the present incarnation, that we will have most manifestly in the next. And whoever lies a lot or has a tendency to accept this or that with a light heart will become a careless person in the next incarnation, for what we think, how we think, how we relate to the truth, that is, what is inward in this incarnation, will be the measure of our behavior in our next incarnation. If, for example, without examining a person very carefully, we think he is a bad person in this incarnation, whereas if we were to examine him carefully he might turn out to be a good or at most a half-good person, if we carry this thought through life unchecked, it will turn out that by forming judgments about people in this way we will become incompatible, quarrelsome, detestable people in the next incarnation. Here again we have an extension of the moral and humane element in our soul. [6]

It may be that one is particularly active in one life. If, as a particularly active nature, one were to be snatched away from life early, one would be destined by one's karma to be placed in the next life with a very specific life task, which one would then carry out without fail. One is as if predestined. But if you are particularly active in one life and live to a later age, then these forces become internalized. Then you have a complicated task in the next life. External activity then recedes and the need to develop inner activity arises in the soul. [7]

The will to experience karma comfortably leads precisely to the fact that it takes revenge in physical illness, physical accidents and the like. [8] From those actions whose thoughts are greater than the execution, that is, which we commit out of idealism, mirror images remain in the astral body, which are again transferred to the etheric body. [9] These actions leave behind such impressions which show themselves in later life as courage to face life, as security in life, as balance in life. This then continues into the interior of the physical organism. [10] This is something that has such a lasting effect beyond death that it contains further vitalizing forces, even for the next incarnation. [11] He who has been a liar reappears in such a way that he has no proper relationship to his environment. He cannot be loved by the people around him, he feels repelled by them, love is hard to come by. [12] If a man has been mendacious, his actions, which arise from mendacity, will again produce the most violent affects in life after death against the man himself, and a strong tendency against mendacity will show itself. Then man will bring with him in later life not only a weak organization, but an organization which is, so to speak, incorrectly constructed, which shows irregularly constructed inner organs in the finer organization. And where did the tendency to mendacity itself come from? We have to go back even further (in the incarnations). And there spiritual science shows that a flighty life which knows no devotion and no love, that a superficial life in one incarnation expresses itself in the tendency to mendacity in the next incarnation. Thus we can trace the karmic effects of three successive incarnations: Superficiality and flightiness in the first incarnation, propensity to mendacity in the second, and physical disposition to disease in the third. [13]

A person who has thought, felt and acted very egotistically in one embodiment, when he sees the fruits of his egotistical thinking, feeling and acting after death, is filled with powerful affects against his former actions. He acquires tendencies within himself which are directed against his own nature; these express themselves in an inherently weak organization in the new life. Taken according to the essence, not according to the outward impression. [14]

With the wide spread of selfish prudence in our present time it is possible, so to speak, to follow just this path of human souls; for we come back to times in which we find many, many people in previous incarnations who, because of their undeveloped organs, had only a very dull interest even for the ordinary sense world, not only for the supersensible world. And then we come back to a third incarnation, which often lies for these souls in what we call the fourth post-Atlantean cultural period, where more arbitrary atheism, arbitrary lack of interest in the supersensible worlds prevailed in the most diverse regions of the earth than is believed today. [15]

There is another way in which life can proceed in three successive incarnations. They have always existed in the course of humanity's development on earth, souls who are, so to speak, believers, instinctively believing for the reason that, out of a certain spiritual egoism, they want to expect a kind of reward or compensation for their physical life on earth in the hereafter. How many people do we see today who hold on to the prospect of a spiritual world, but fanatically and narrow-mindedly reject everything that does not give them the direction of the faith into which they were born. A deep egoism can be rooted in these souls, even though they are people who believe in the beyond. When a person enters earthly life again through a next birth, he becomes, for example, a hypochondriac, a hypersensitive person who is already destined by his bodily disposition to be so affected by the outside world that he walks through existence grumpily, dissatisfied and unsatisfied, and is always so touched by this existence that he always believes himself to be hurt by it. If he then enters spiritual life again through the gate of death, then, as is evident to the clairvoyant eye, everything ahrimanic has a particularly deep influence on such a soul. And this Ahrimanic gives all the forces which man then gathers between death and a new birth such a coloring, such a form, that man brings these forces into existence through the next birth in such a way that he then, without being able to do anything about it, becomes narrow-hearted in his imagination and feeling in a certain way through his mere disposition, that he becomes unable to survey the world impartially. Many spirits that we find among us, who have a certain narrow-mindedness, who are unable to get out of certain barriers with their thoughts, who are afflicted in a certain way with shyness, who, even if they make an effort, still remain narrow-minded in a certain way, owe this karma to the conditions described. [16]

In one life man, through his arbitrariness, disdains to develop any spiritual connection with the spiritual worlds; in the next life he has no power to acquire even the organs through which he could think, feel, will the truths of spiritual life. Then he remains dull and inattentive to the spiritual conditions, and the spiritual life passes him by as if in a dream, as is the case with so many people. And when such a soul then passes through the gate of death again, then it is a real prey for the Luciferic powers. And the peculiar thing is that in the next life in the spiritual world, in the life following the dull and inattentive one, such a person is very well illuminated by the beings and facts of the higher hierarchies, but now not through what he has acquired in earthly life, but through the light which Lucifer pours into his soul. Lucifer now illuminates the higher world for him. When we meet people in life who have worked up their corporeality in such a way that they can use their intellect well, also acquire certain skills by which they can elevate themselves, but do so only to their own advantage, when they use their gifts only to gain what is important for them and their being, when they are therefore quite ruthless, dryly having their own advantage in mind, as there are quite many people in our time, then the seer very often finds that they have gone through that prehistory which has just been characterized. [17]

If you look around in life, you will find inadequate, half-thinking widespread. If, with the help of supersensible research, one traces the path of such a person and arrives at the regions through which the soul has passed between the last death and the last birth, where he has thus become illogical in this way, then the seer often finds that in the spiritual worlds man has encountered the higher spiritual entities and forces under the guidance of Ahriman. Ahriman has given him the opportunity to receive the gifts of the higher Hierarchies only in such a way that in life he stands still everywhere with his thinking before the real facts. (In the previous life on earth) one finds in such people that they were hypochondriacs, grumpy people who did not want to approach the world and its facts and entities, for whom it was always uncomfortable in a certain respect to gain any relationship to the environment. And if you then go back further, they prepared themselves in their third-last life so that they developed a certain mood of soul at that time, even if it can certainly be called religious, but only out of egoism. They were people who were only pious, perhaps even mystical natures out of egoism, just as mysticism very often comes about out of egoism, in the way that a person says: I search within myself in order to recognize God within myself. - And if one pursues what he seeks there, it is only his own self that he makes into God. [18]

Let us assume that in some incarnation we are seduced by the influence of Lucifer - that is, by the fact that we develop egoistic or other drives, desires and instincts in ourselves that are attributable to Lucifer's influence - in such a way that we bring transgressions upon our soul. Let us assume that it is a fault that is based particularly on the powers of the intellectual soul. It is then transformed in the state between death and rebirth in such a way that that which, for example, the intellectual soul has done wrong, shows itself in its effect in the etheric body. Therefore it can happen that the powers of the intellect soul, as they confront us now (in the next incarnation), work logically intact, so that the actual human inner being is completely intact, but that through the cooperation between the intellect soul and the pathological part of the etheric body, an error is projected from this etheric body in a certain direction. This shows us how Ahriman is attracted to our own etheric body by Lucifer. [19] Whoever goes through something like this, for example, that he falls prey to the symptoms of persecution mania in a certain incarnation, will, when he steps through the gate of death again, have before him all the facts which he has committed as a result of his ahrimanic damage, and he will have them before him in all their absurdity. This will be the power that heals him thoroughly for his next incarnation. While you cannot do anything with external logical reasons, if you apply the truths of spiritual science and if you have enough time and opportunity to do so, you will be able to exert impulses on the person concerned to such an extent that you will be able to do in one incarnation, so to speak, what can otherwise only happen in a roundabout way from one incarnation to the next: namely, to work from the intellectual soul into the etheric body. The truths of the physical plan are not capable of bridging the gap between the sentient soul and the sentient body, between the mind soul and the etheric body, or even between the consciousness soul and the physical body. [20]

If the ideas of reincarnation and karma only become a drive towards egoism, then they do not lift our culture, they push our culture down all the more. Acting out of this drive to become a good person in order to experience the most sympathetic things possible in the next incarnation is double egoism, it is not just simple egoism. But for many people this double egoism came from the ideas of reincarnation and karma. So that one can say: Our civilization has so little altruistic-religious impulse that it is impossible for it to conceive even such ideas as reincarnation and karma in the sense that they become impulses to altruistic and not to egoistic action and feeling. [21]

Sources:

[1] GA 235: Esoteric Observations on Karmic Connections - First Volume (1924)

[2] GA 163: Chance, Necessity and Providence. Imaginative cognition and processes after death (1915)

[3] GA 130: Esoteric Christianity and the Spiritual Guidance of Humanity (1911/1912)

[4] - [6] GA 135: Re-embodiment and Karma and their Significance for the Culture of the Present (1912)

[7] GA 157a: The Formation of Destiny and Life after Death (1915)

[8] GA 237: Esoteric Observations on Karmic Connections - Third Volume. The Karmic Connections of the Anthroposophical Movement (1924)

[9] - [11] GA 124: Excursions into the Field of the Gospel of Mark (1910/1911)

[12] GA 127: The Mission of the New Spiritual Revelation. The Christ-Event as the Central Event of the Earth Evolution (1911)

[13], [14], [19], [20] GA 120: The Revelations of Karma (1910)

[15], [16] GA 140: Occult Investigations on Life between Death and New Birth. The Living Interaction between the Living and the Dead (1912/1913)

[17], [18] GA 141: Life between Death and the New Birth in Relation to Cosmic Facts (1912/1913)

[21] GA 191: Social Understanding from Spiritual Scientific Knowledge (1919)

Karma - effects on the physical body

That which is head endowment in man loses itself relatively soon after death. On the other hand, that which in the unconscious belongs to the lower organization, that becomes particularly important between death and a new birth. But while it is generally the case that from one earthly life into the next earthly life the organization outside the head becomes the head of the next incarnation in terms of its form and spiritual content, what is volitional in the head of the human being has a particular effect on the limbs in the next incarnation. The sluggishness of thought enters into the slowness of the limbs, just as, conversely, the slowness of the limbs of the present incarnation is expressed in the sluggish, slow thinking of the next incarnation. [1]

Everything that has to do with the feet can be lived out in the organization of the head in the next earthly life, while what we have in the head now can be lived out in the organization of the legs in the next earthly life. The one who is well versed in these things can see in the way someone appears, in the way he places his toes, how the thinking was in a previous incarnation. And he who follows the peculiarity of a man's thoughts, whether he thinks quickly, fleetingly, or measuredly, deliberately, is often led to see truly how he walked in a previous incarnation. [2] By having the magical principle of man in the metabolic-limb system, which in turn works in karma, karma brings the head of man over from one life on earth to another. Karma is therefore directly effective in the shaping of your head. And if you begin to develop an unbiased view of man in this field, you will gradually learn to read much of his karma from the physiognomy of his head. The future karma is in the metabolic-limb system; it is spiritually hidden, invisible. [3]

When there are karmic impulses at work deep in the sub-soils of the soul, one has the peculiarity of finding a resemblance in the physical expression of a subsequent incarnation - it is so in rare cases, but it is the case - a resemblance to the previous incarnation. [4] But if one looks into human life, then it actually shows itself in reality before clairvoyant insight that in the deeper impulses of human nature, in the deeper substrata of the soul, that which was in a previous life on earth comes to life again in a different form. [5] All that which in an earthly life was merely idea, sensation, inner spiritual being, is transformed in the passage of time, which we pass between death and a new birth, into what is physically active in human life, and we carry within us much that is physically active which was merely spiritual in earlier earthly lives. In this way we must also find something of destiny in illness, we must not fall into the superstition that illness can only be cured by spiritual means. This requires physical means similar to the physical. But if we face the fact with full understanding that the physical effects of the present go back to the spiritual effects of earlier earth lives, then we can say to ourselves: that which we would otherwise carry over from the illness into the next earth life, we heal for a subsequent earth life by diverting our thoughts from that which was imperfect in the human being and directing them towards that which is perfect in the human being. [6]

A person who thinks a lot in one earthly life will be a thin, lean person in the next earthly life. A person who thinks little in one earthly life, but lives more in the grasp of the outside world, will tend to put on a lot of fat in the next earthly life. There really is such a connection between the spiritual and moral way in which a person lives in one earthly life and his physical constitution in the next earthly life. [7]

If the part from the middle of the chest to the neck is shorter than the lower part of the torso, then we are dealing with a person who has gone through such a spiritual life in the time between death and a new birth that he has very quickly made the ascent in the life between death and a new birth (see this) up to the middle. There it went very quickly. Then he slowly and comfortably descends to the new life on earth. They show from the beginning that they are very much in need of sleep. But that, in turn, is connected with the previous life on earth. A person who was dull for life in the previous earth life, not through disposition but more through education and through his life, not so much that he was not interested, but who was dull - he could not really do anything right, he did not set out to grasp things properly, he could even be attentive, stick his nose in everywhere, but it remained with curiosity and with a superficial grasp - such a person then has no interest in the first half of life between death and a new birth. He only becomes interested when it has gone beyond the midnight height of life and he descends. On the other hand, a person who gets into the habit of penetrating everywhere with his intellect, also penetrating everywhere with his mind, such a person becomes very interested in the first half, in the ascent, and quickly goes through the descent. (Then) you have to deal with a person whose upper part from the neck to the middle of the chest is longer than the lower part from the middle of the chest to the end of the torso. So that in the physiognomy, indeed in the measurements of the human mid-body, one has the after-effect of the way in which man passed through the first half of the passage from death to a new birth as compared with the second half. [8]

There are people who, I would like to say, ascend very high into the spiritual, and people who do not ascend so high, for whom the midnight height (the greatest distance from earth) is not so high. Such people who ascend very high will eat in order to live. Those who do not ascend high will live to eat. [9]

The phenomenon of left-handedness is a distinctly karmic phenomenon, a phenomenon of karmic weakness. A person who has overworked himself in the previous life, so that he has overworked himself, not only physically or intellectually in his work, but generally spiritually or mentally or in his mind, and who then comes in a subsequent life with a strong weakness as a result, is not able - the part of the person in the new life that comes from the life between death and the new birth is particularly concentrated in the lower person; the part that comes from the previous life is more in the head part - to overcome this karmic weakness that is now in the lower person. As a result, that which otherwise develops strongly becomes weak, and the left leg and the left hand are particularly engaged and used as a substitute. The predominance of the left hand leads to the right frontal lobe of the brain being used in speech instead of the left. If you give in to this too much, this weakness may also remain for the following, i.e. third earthly life. If you do not give in to it, the weakness will balance itself out.

If the child is encouraged to do everything equally well on the right and left, writing, drawing, working, then the inner man is neutralized in such a way that the ego and the astral body are lifted out in such a way that the man becomes completely limp in the next life. In any case, the etheric body is stronger on the left than on the right, the astral body is more developed on the right than on the left. This must not be circumvented, it must be taken into consideration. No mechanical compensation should be attempted. [10]

Sex.

A man may have richer experiences, even more scientific ones: his experiences do not go as deeply into the life of the soul as is the case with a woman. In women, the entire experiential environment is deeply imprinted in the soul. As a result, the experiences have a stronger tendency to have an effect on the organization, to clasp the organization more strongly in the future. And so a woman's life takes on the tendency to reach deep into the organism through her experiences in one incarnation and thus to shape the organism itself in the next incarnation. A deep working into, a deep working through of the organism now means, however: to bring forth a male organism. A male organism is brought forth by the fact that the forces of the soul want to imprint themselves more deeply into the material: The man is the karma of the woman. [11] Man's nature is thus more condensed, more contracted; it has been pressed more, made stiffer, harder by what the inner man is in man; it has been made more material. Now a stiffer brain is above all an instrument for the intellectual, less for the psychical. What can be described as a man's intellectualism comes from his stiffer, more rigid brain. One could speak of a certain degree of "frozenness" of the brain. This, however, causes the man to grasp more of the externals, to take in less of those experiences that are connected with the depths of the soul life. And what he takes in does not go deep. [12] (Thus the present man) takes up the tendency between birth and death to penetrate less into the organization in the next incarnation. From this, however, arises the tendency to build up a woman's body in the next incarnation. The woman is the karma of the man.

Only in rare cases does the same sexual incarnation repeat itself; it can repeat itself at most seven times. The rule, however, is that every male organization strives to become female in the next incarnation, and vice versa. [13]

Humanity will gradually learn to take karma into account in that which peculiarly rushes into human life around the time of sexual maturity. At the moment in life when man becomes capable of producing a human being of his own kind, the impulses which he has represented in earlier lives on earth also appear in him. [14]

Sources:

[1] GA 235: Esoteric Observations on Karmic Connections - First Volume (1924)

[2], [3], [5], [14] GA 239: Esoteric Observations on Karmic Connections - Fifth Volume (1924)

[4] GA 238: Esoteric Observations on Karmic Connections - Volume Four. The Spiritual Life of the Present in Connection with the Anthroposophical Movement (1924)

[6] GA 240: Esoteric Observations on Karmic Connections - Sixth Volume (1924)

[7] - [9] GA 236: Esoteric Observations on Karmic Connections - Second Volume (1924)

[10] GA 300c: Conferences with the Teachers of the Waldorf School. Volume III: Conferences 1923-1924 (1923-1924)

[11] - [13] GA 120: The Revelations of Karma (1910)

Karma of the earth

Because the mineral kingdom has separated itself in the course of the earth's development, it is there as a special kingdom for all subsequent times. Previously, humans, animals and plants developed in such a way that there was no underlying mineral kingdom. In order for the other kingdoms to achieve later progress, they had to eliminate the mineral kingdom. Thus something has happened with the fact of the formation of the mineral kingdom which all later earth development has to reckon with. What follows from the formation of the mineral kingdom will be fulfilled in all other beings. Human beings, animals and plants have excreted the mineral kingdom, and the mineral kingdom strikes back at them. Thus we see that it is possible to speak of a karma of the earth. [1]

He who knows the secret of man from today's initiation science, that actually the most important, the most essential organ, which needs physical substance, is the head, so that it can work through this physical substance with the spiritual forces, and who further knows that in the limb-metabolic man the essential is the spiritual substance, The one who thus spiritually sees through this mystery of the human being and then looks back on this human earthly existence, actually feels like an enormous debtor to the earth. He continually withdraws something from the earth. He comes to say to himself: the earth actually needs the spiritual substance he carries within himself during his earthly existence. He should actually leave this behind for the earth when he passes through death, for the earth needs spiritual substance continually for its renewal. He cannot, because he would not be able to cover his human path through the time after death. He must take this spiritual substance with him for the life between death and a new birth, because he needs it, because he would, so to speak, disappear after death if he did not take this spiritual substance with him through death (see: Phantom of Man). Only in this way can he undergo the changes he must undergo, that he carries this spiritual substance of his limb-metabolic man through the gate of death into the spiritual world. And so man would not be able to succumb to future incarnations if he were to give the earth what he actually owes it, this spiritual substance. He cannot. He remains a debtor. This is something that cannot be improved by anything at first, as long as the earth is in its middle state. At the end of life on earth it will be different. Initiation cannot be separated from the occurrence of such cosmic sufferings, for example, as when one says to oneself: Simply by maintaining my human nature I must make myself a debtor to the earth. I cannot give to the earth what I would actually have to give to it if I were cosmically quite righteous.

It is similar with what is in the head substance. The fact that spiritual forces work in the material head substance throughout life on earth alienates this head substance from the earth. [2] But in order to be human he must also continually permeate this substance of his head with the spiritual forces of the extraterrestrial. And when the human being dies, it is something extraordinarily disturbing for the earth that it must now take back the head matter of the human being, which has become so alien to it. This main substance, which is actually quite spiritualized, which carries spiritual results in itself, basically has a poisoning effect on the whole of earth life, actually disturbing this earth life. The human being must actually say to himself when he sees through these things: it would be righteous of him to take this substance with him through the gate of death, because it would actually fit much better into the spiritual region that the human being passes through between death and a new birth. He cannot do this, for if he were to take this spiritualized earthly substance with him, man would continually create an enemy for all his development between death and a new birth. It would be the most terrible thing that could happen to man if he were to take this spiritualized head substance with him. This would continually work on the destruction of his spiritual development between death and a new birth. This debt can only be compensated for in the Jupiter, Venus, Vulcan stage, so to speak. So it is not only by going through a single life on earth that one creates karma, but one creates karma, world karma, cosmic karma in general, by being an earthling, by inhabiting the earth and drawing his substances from the earth. [3]

Sources:

[1] GA 120: The Revelations of Karma (1910)

[2], [3] GA 230: Man as the Harmony of the Creating, Forming and Shaping Word of the World (1923)

Karma of the world bodies

The individual world bodies maintain their movement after they have, so to speak, come to an end for themselves, after they are, so to speak, finished for themselves. From the moment the planet has come to its conclusion for itself, those entities that belong to it must again reckon with its dissolution, with its disappearance from the world context. There is no escape from this, things must be dissolved in the same way they were assembled. Thus the karma of the first half of evolution is fulfilled in the second half. The creation of the world is the creation of karma; the destruction of the world in the most comprehensive sense of the word is nothing other than suffering under karma and, in turn, the eradication of the karma in question. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 110: Spiritual Hierarchies and their Reflection in the Physical World. Zodiac, Planets, Cosmos (1909)

Karma of higher beings

As Lucifer develops his activity from time epoch to time epoch, Ahriman joins in - and gradually corrupts that which Lucifer has brought about on earth. - The world development of mankind is a continuous working between Ahriman and Lucifer. If Lucifer did not work in humanity, the zeal and fire for the continuous stream of human development would be missing; if Ahriman were not there, who destroys again from people to people what does not come from the continuous stream but only from the Luciferic impact, then Lucifer would want to continue the individual cultures forever. Thus you see here Lucifer conjuring up his own karma, which is a necessary consequence of the development on the old moon. And the consequence is that he must always chain Ahriman to his heel. Ahriman is the karmic fulfillment of Lucifer. Here we look into the karma of the higher beings by the example of the Ahrimanic and Luciferic beings. There is also karma up there. Everywhere there is karma where I am. And Lucifer and Ahriman naturally harbor egos within themselves; therefore the effects of their deeds can rebound on them. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 120: The Revelations of Karma (1910)

Karma positive

As a rule, the people who could be called upon for occult development (in ancient times) were those who had real abilities for their position in life and who were also inclined to adapt themselves to the circle of duties prescribed by custom and social order. But in that which is in man as his abilities, his skills in his position in life, in that which is around man as the circle of duties recognized by him, actually lies the positive karma into which man has been placed. This is the expression of his karma. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 137: Man in the Light of Occultism, Theosophy and Philosophy (1912)

Karma not lived out - death spectrum

Of course, a person cannot escape karma, at least in the rarest of cases, and in these cases the karma must be transformed. But in an incarnation the soul can resist the full realization of karma. By not recognizing our karma in a particular incarnation, by resisting it, we can, so to speak, postpone this karma to a later incarnation. And after the death of (such) people, something happens in the elemental world which is like a figurative sequence of unlived karma. With the death spectrum, the etheric body, something happens that is like a prophetic image of what must one day take place, what should have taken place but has not yet taken place. So one experiences unfulfilled destiny, karma, when one clairvoyantly observes the spectrum of death. It can be said that something happens to the ether spectrum of a person after death that could have happened in life but has not happened. [1] People in earlier times have always seen such death spectra, but today it is no longer known, because this is an ability that has been lost. [2]

Sources:

Quotes: [1] & [2] GA 161: Paths of Spiritual Knowledge and the Renewal of the Artistic World View (1915)

Karma and first childhood

That which the human being carries from his earlier life on earth into his present life on earth, he carries in the very first years of childhood, when the question of freedom is not even considered. In that period of life in which the consciousness of freedom emerges, we have actually already brought in most, by far the most, of what we are supposed to bring into this earthly life from earlier earthly lives. And if someone has a very specific experience in the thirty-fifth year of life, he has already paved the way for this experience in the very first years of childhood. The first steps of life are the most important and essential for the destiny. In general, the observation of the human being in the first years of childhood is something particularly sublimely interesting. I have to use this expression again and again. I have drawn your attention to what is learned by the child in the first years of life: walking, speaking, thinking. This is what the child acquires. The person who can now properly observe how the child takes its first steps, how it firmly puts its feet on the ground or quietly puts its feet on the ground, how it steps forward bravely or fearfully, how it bends its knee more or less strongly, how it needs the index finger more than the little finger, Anyone who takes a good look at all that is connected with walking, with the balance of life in general, into which man finds himself in the three directions of space, who takes a good look at all that is connected with it, will see precisely how karma is expressed in this learning to walk. You can see how a child puts its feet down strongly from the outset when it learns to walk. You look back to see how this is connected with a previous life on earth. You find that the child has behaved bravely and courageously in some life situation in previous earthly lives. The bravery and courage of previous earth lives is expressed in a pictorial and sensual way in the way the child places its feet. And it is precisely in learning to walk that one can observe a wonderful reflection of human karma in the child. The individual karma, this personal karma that one has as an individual human being, expresses itself particularly in this learning to walk. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 226: Human nature, human destiny and world development (1923)

Karma and the etheric body

The etheric body sees the karma from previous earthly lives from the time it wakes up until it goes to sleep, and the karma to come from the time it goes to sleep until it wakes up. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 181: Earth death and world life. Anthroposophical gifts of life. Necessities of Consciousness for the Present and the Future (1918)

Karma and etheric body extract

(After experiencing the life tableau) the main limb of the etheric body is cast off like a second corpse and that something remains behind like an extract, like an essence of the etheric body. The human being takes this extract with him through the Kamaloka and Devachan times and brings it back into the next existence. While the human being is in Kamaloka, however, everything that the human being has experienced in terms of deeds, everything that has an effect on human karma, for which he has to create a balance, is inscribed in this life extract. All this connects in a certain way with this extract from the etheric body, which extends from one incarnation to the next. Everything that the human being carries from one incarnation to another is contained in this extract of the etheric body; and this is what the human being brings back with him when he re-enters existence through birth. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 114: The Gospel of Luke (1909)

Karma and Christ

Karma and the Christ are the epitome of all evolution. Karma is the law of cause and effect in the spiritual world; it is the spiral of development. The Christ-power intervenes in the development of this karmic line as a guiding axis. This force has been at the heart of every human soul since the coming of Christ to earth. [1] (See also: Christ - Lord of Karma).

Sources:

[1] GA 94: Cosmogony. Popular Occultism. The Gospel of John. Theosophy on the basis of the Gospel of John (1906)

Karma and thinking, feeling and willing

Karma works in the revelations of the will, but the effect remains in the unconscious. By raising that which works unconsciously in the will to the imagination, karma is grasped. One feels one's destiny within oneself. If inspiration and intuition enter the imagination, then the result of previous lives on earth becomes perceptible in the working of the will in addition to the impulses of the present. The past life proves to be effective in the present. The feeling and willing of the thought life contain the karmic result of previous earth lives. The thinking and willing of the emotional life determine the character in a karmic way. The thinking and feeling of the life of will tear the present life on earth out of the karmic context. In the thinking and volition of thinking, man lives out his karma of the past; in the thinking and volition of volition, he prepares the karma of the future. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 26: Anthroposophical Guiding Principles. The Path of Knowledge of Anthroposophy - The Michael Mystery (1924/1925)

Karma and the future

We do not have to push everything back into the past. We must realize that facing karma in the right way leads us to say to ourselves: An illness that strikes me now need not be the result of past weaknesses of the soul, but an illness can occur in the first place. But karma does apply. If an illness or misfortune strikes me in this earthly life, the balance will come, or this misfortune, this illness can be the balance. This means that one must always reckon with the future when one speaks of karma. The relationship one has to karma is that one becomes unshakeable in the recognition of the general justice of the world, that one knows: everything balances itself out, but not in such a way that one simply tears up the series of earth lives through the present and blames everything on the past.

And if a misfortune comes as the first step in karma, then the right attitude is to say to oneself: If man were to meet only what he wishes for, he would become quite weak through a life course that is like this. Under certain circumstances we would live comfortably and well in one or two earth lives, because only that which we desire would come upon us, but in the third or fourth earth life we would be paralyzed mentally and spiritually, because no effort at all would arise in us to overcome resistance. Resistance can only be overcome when the unexpected, the undesirable comes. But if we develop the right strength in the face of resistance, if we take enough love of humanity into our sleep, then that which is woven by the ego in connection with the Archai as karma is shaped in such a way that the right balance takes place in the next life on earth. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 224: The human soul in its connection with divine-spiritual individualities. The Internalization of the Annual Festivals (1923)

Karma and earth

If you approach the earth from world space, you will experience it enclosed in an atmosphere of human karma that surrounds it like a warm, loving cloak from which your own karma speaks to you in a worldly way. If you learn to meet the guardian (of the threshold), you will experience how your karma envelops you like a cloak of warmth, how it smiles lovingly at you. Our thinking should shine into the universe. But if people do not think, feel and want spiritually, if they refuse to consciously step before the guardian, then no human experience shines into the world space. In the 19th century, when people had stopped thinking spiritually, human thinking was not enough to make the earth shine. But a star must shine. Therefore, in the last third of the 19th century, the higher animal group souls had to stand up for it and send out their light. It was then that the cosmic shame of humanity began to radiate out into the cosmos. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 266/3: From the Contents of the Esoteric Hours. Volume III (1913-1923)

Karma and esoterics

A further danger (apart from moral deterioration) lurks for the esotericist in the course of his karma, which he is working to transform and control. Here the phenomenon occurs almost regularly that the person working intensively on his internalization becomes lax towards external karmic phenomena and conditions. Previous karmic transgressions, which the esotericist has brought upon himself and which have triggered in him the strong urge for karmic compensation between death and a new birth, place him in relationships and bring him into connection with personalities towards whom he would now be able to fulfill his karmic obligations. In normal exoteric development, the karma would slowly unwind or partially work itself out. If the disciple is too busy with his esoteric development and does not pay sufficient attention to the external circumstances that make up his destiny, then karma will come crashing down on him. And what otherwise takes place over years or in various incarnations must now, of course, have a concentrated effect on him under severe shocks. Here he can come to the brink of despair and also bring disaster upon his surroundings, drawing them into the karmic collapse. But even in the simplest initial exercises he has the consolation that there are forces that also hold and support him. We should and may always remember this. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 266/2: From the Contents of the Esoteric Lessons. Volume II (1910-1912)

Karma and history

In the planned progress of human development we must see something that is connected in a similar way as the karmic events in individual human life are connected. [1] We have two things to observe. Firstly, something that must come into being and perish, so that the second part of this whole - the smallest part in terms of quantity - can continue as a permanent entity. For we must reckon this as part of the plan of human development, that ultimately, when the earth has reached its goal, the results which are thus gradually incorporated from the individual cultures into the whole of human development will be made fruitful for all the individualities, no matter what destinies they have undergone. [2] The great events in the course of human development can only come about through the fact that they are borne by certain individuals. Persons must assume the intentions of development at a certain point in time. Such personalities as Charlemagne, Aristotle, Luther and so on had to live in the time in question not for their own sake but for the sake of the world, but their personal destinies are therefore intimately interwoven with what happens in the world. But can we therefore say that what they do coincides with what they have previously earned or what they have previously owed? Take the case of Luther: all that he experienced and endured cannot be attributed to his karmic account alone; you must realize that what is to happen at a certain point in the development of humanity occurs through the placement of certain individualities. These individualities must be led down from the spiritual world regardless of whether they are sufficiently advanced for themselves to be led down, for they are led down for the purposes of human development. And a karmic path may have to be interrupted or prolonged at an early stage so that the personalities concerned can be placed in life at a certain point in time. Fates are imposed on people which need have nothing to do with the previous karma. Therefore, as true as it is that a Luther is placed in life for the sake of humanity and can endure destinies which have nothing to do with his earlier karma, it is equally true that what he accomplishes there will again have something to do with his later karma. Karma is a universal law, and everyone must live through it. But we must not understand it in such a way that we only look back into earlier embodiments, but we must understand it in such a way that we must also look forward. Therefore we can certainly say that from this point of view we can see that only a later life can justify previous incarnations, in that things have already happened to us which are not in our karmic line. [3]

We see how man is placed in one place in order to achieve something for the whole of humanity. We see that not only in individual human life, but in the whole of humanity, there are connections between causes and effects that extend over long periods of time. And we can see from this that the individual law of karma will intersect with the laws which we can call the karmic laws of humanity. Sometimes, however, this intersection is not very transparent. Think what would have become of our astronomy if the telescope had not once been invented. Now it is well known that the telescope was invented because children were once playing with lenses in an optical workshop, where by "chance", you could say, they put optical lenses together in such a way that someone subsequently came up with the idea that this could result in something like a telescope. - Think how deeply you must search in order to come to the individual karma of the children and the karma of humanity that the telescope was invented at a certain point in time! Try to think this together and you will see how the karma of single individuals and the karma of humanity as a whole intersect and interweave in a strange way. [4]

Sources:

[1] - [4] GA 120: The Revelations of Karma (1910)

Karma and the history of the present

Since we see how what occurred after the first third of the 19th century, especially within German spiritual life, differs radically from what was previously the basic tone, the basic character of this spiritual life, we ask about the origin. In these last two thirds of the 19th century we see personalities emerging whose individualities we are compelled to trace back to their earlier lives on earth. The gaze of those who can undertake such research is initially drawn back, due to the general character of our age, not actually to the Christian past lives of the personalities appearing in it, but to Mohammedanism, to Arabism. [1] Now we know that Arabism spread outwardly through Africa, southern Europe and Spain into Europe under the impact of Mohammedanism. People usually talk about the battle of Charles Martel at (between) Tours and Poitiers as if it had driven Arabism out of Europe. But there was a tremendous spiritual force in Arabism. And the strange thing is that when Arabism had been outwardly beaten back from Europe as a political, as a warlike power, so to speak, the souls of those who had set the tone within Arabism, after they had passed through the gate of death, occupied themselves intensively in the spiritual world with how they could continue to shape the influence of Arabism for Europe. [2] The souls who had been great in Arabism reappeared, and they carried Arabism in its inner impulses into a much later time, without carrying over its outer forms. And so we see that the very current of thought that emerged as the leading one in the last two thirds of the 19th century was deeply influenced by the spirits that emerged from Arabism. [3] For indeed, that is the secret of the strange development of scientific thought in the second half of the 19th century, that almost all the bearers of this more originally thinking and feeling scientific current were Arabs in their previous life on earth. [4]

In our time certain moods are returning to Europe which are karmically connected with the 9th century of European development. Just as the spiritual world was backed up to the East at that time, so it must now be reincorporated into the physical plan. [5]

Sources:

[1] - [3] GA 240: Esoteric Observations on Karmic Connections - Sixth Volume (1924)

[4] GA 235: Esoteric Observations on Karmic Connections - First Volume (1924)

[5] GA 292: Art History as an Image of Inner Spiritual Impulses (1915/1916)

Karma and sexual maturity

With sexual maturity, the human being is completely placed in earthly relationships, there he enters into his relationships with earthly relationships, there the earthly is integrated into the human being, and so the main thing in the emergence of the second human being between the seventh and fourteenth year is actually what he brings with him from the pre-earthly existence, therefore his own karma only begins to work after sexual maturity. Then the earthly influences it. This reaches a conclusion in sexual maturity and the third human being is now formed. The second human being is cast off substantially and the third human being is formed. He does not go as far as form, he only goes as far as life. If he were to go as far as form, then we would get third teeth, because the human being is now oriented towards external conditions. It is in the external conditions that man in turn absorbs the extra-human. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 316: Meditative Reflections and Instructions for the Deepening of the Art of Healing (1924)

Karma and hierarchies

During the night, the astral body participates in the life of the higher hierarchies. And this is also the case with the ego. Thus we may say: When man sleeps, he is not merely resting for daily life. Then he works in the spiritual world. For those who really, truly look into human life, the moral world order is that in which man lives just as strongly when asleep as when awake in air and light. When we die, we take out language - the same applies to karma - we die and throughout life we have been connected in a correct or more or less deficient way with the world of the Archangeloi (they govern language). This has been repeated in every sleep. We carry out through the gate of death into the spiritual world that which the Archangeloi have given us in sleep. We can then find our way in the right way into the spiritual world, which is the Logos, which consists of the cosmic elements that have their image in the words of language; we can find our way into the spiritual world for life between death and a new birth. But it is not that simple. When we pass through death, we no longer have a physical body. What the Archangeloi have given us from each state of sleep is sufficient to work, to utilize it between death and a new birth. But when we wake up as physical earthlings, we have to immerse ourselves in the physical body again. The Archangeloi cannot convey this to us. Higher hierarchies have to be involved: the Exusiai and Kyriotetes. They must bring into the instincts and desires of the physical body, which otherwise resists us, what we have first attained in union with the archangels through the spirituality of language. Then it flares up as a voice of conscience. [1] So if we look around in the physical world and find that one person or another develops conscience so strongly that his physical body acquires better instincts, better instincts, then, as a result of the idealism of his language, Kyriotetes and Exusiai have worked on him in the right way.

And again, when man comes into the right connection with the Archai through general human love, he works out his karma in such a way that in the next life on earth he learns to walk, to balance, to dexterize the arms, to master the glandular system and so on in the very first period of childhood, when we sleep our way into life on earth. For we have acquired the ability to work, so to speak, in union with the Archai between death and new birth. But in order that the human being here on earth may acquire in the right way a fine feeling, a keen awareness of his own deeds, it is necessary that the Hierarchy of Dynamis should work in connection with the Archai.

If a person lacks a general love of humanity, a real interest in his human surroundings, he will not find the right connection to the Archai. Thus he spoils his opportunity to weave his karma for the next earth life in the right way, and further earth lives must come through which he can compensate for this. But for this earth life he still has the disadvantage that he gets less and less strength to carry the judgments that are formed, satisfaction or dissatisfaction with what legs and hands do, out into the physical body. For we cannot do this ourselves, we must come together with the dynamis in the right way through increased human love. They then carry the power into our physical body in the right way to carry out the right thing. Otherwise we collapse, even though we realize what is right.

The highest hierarchy, seraphim, cherubim, thrones, they want to carry what we do out into the world. Exusiai, Dynamis, Kyriotetes carry out of sleep as moral power that which we grasp in thought into our physical being. The seraphim, cherubim and thrones in turn carry this out into the world, so that our own moral forces become world-creating forces. So when the earth will one day pass over into the Jupiter state and our moral forces will perform their proper functions in this transformation, the seraphim, cherubim and thrones will of course only have something to do with it if we give them the necessary documents for it. If we give them destructive powers by becoming weaker and weaker, then we are working on the destruction of the earth, not on the construction of Jupiter. [2]

Between death and a new birth we develop our relationships, our relations, with the entities, Angeloi, Archangeloi, Archai, in a body-free state. And after that our inner, I would like to say, our entity karma, that karma which depends on how our etheric body composes our humors, how it makes us big or small and so on. But the Beings of the 3rd Hierarchy have only this power. And with the guidance that we can receive from them, depending on how we are prepared in our previous life on earth, with this guidance to form our etheric body from the etheric expanses, this happens in the last time before we descend from the superphysical existence into the physical existence. So that our gaze must first fall on that which works into our destiny, into our karma from our inner constitution. The pleasure and discomfort of life are connected with what our inner quality is by virtue of our etheric body. [3]

Now we come to that which deeply determines our destiny, our sympathies and antipathies, which finally bring us that which belongs to our destiny in a much wider scope than merely the forces of growth.

These sympathies and antipathies are deeply interlinked with our entire human destiny. They live in a world in which the 2nd Hierarchy, Exusiai, Dynamis, Kyriotetes now live. That which is the earthly image of the high, glorious forms of this 2nd Hierarchy lives in the animal kingdom. But that which these entities, when we associate with them between death and a new birth, transplant into us, lives in that which we carry into the physical world as our innate sympathies and antipathies from the spiritual world. When one sees through these things, then such concepts as ordinary heredity become really childish. For in order for me to carry some inherited characteristic from my father or mother, I must first develop the sympathies or antipathies for this characteristic in my father and mother. So it does not depend on my having inherited these qualities merely through some lifeless natural causality, but it depends on whether I have had sympathy with these qualities. [4] And these sympathies and antipathies are formed under the influence of Exusiai, Dynamis, Kyriotetes in the life between death and a new birth. These sympathies and antipathies then allow us to find the people in life with whom we have to continue to live in accordance with our previous lives on earth. This is formed out of our inner human structure.

We can say that the first component of karma is inner well-being or discomfort. The second are sympathies and antipathies. We have ascended into the sphere in which the forces for the formation of the animal kingdom lie by coming to the sympathies and antipathies in human destiny. Now we ascend into the actual human realm. We do not only live together with the plant world, with the animal world, we live together with other people in the world in a way that is particularly decisive for our destiny. [5] We are cast into the realm of events, of experiences, which determine our fate in life. In this realm, the beings of the 1st hierarchy, seraphim, cherubim and thrones are at work. For in order to guide in the world that which works there, every human step, every stirring of the soul, everything that is in us, in such a way that the destinies of men arise, a greater power belongs to it than that which works there in the plant kingdom, than that which has there the Hierarchy of the Angeloi, Archangeloi, Archai, and that which has there the Hierarchy of the Exusiai, Dynamis, Kyriotetes. To this belongs the power that belongs to the most exalted beings. For what lives out there lives in our actual ego, in our ego organization, and lives over into an earth life from a previous earth life. This requires those entities that transform moral deeds into worldly deeds, that metamorphose. They transform that which emanates from us in one earth life into our experiences in the next earth life. They work in that which is an event, an experience in human life. [6]

All that which man has produced through his most earthly being and handed over to the cosmos after death, what man has developed in himself by having a material organization governed by the earth, what he must hand over to the seraphim, cherubim and thrones after death, what he lets flow into the cosmos in this way, he actually receives in turn by the way in which the Angeloi, Archangeloi and Archai work through his head organization in a new earth life. Man hands over what he has prepared for himself as his destiny to the seraphim, cherubim and thrones and receives it in turn from the Angeloi, Archangeloi and Archai. They carry it into the activity that he carries out in a new life on earth. In this way that which he handed over to the first Hierarchy on leaving the last earth-life is taken up into his new earth-fate from the hand of the third Hierarchy. What man has left to the highest Hierarchy, he receives back from the hand of the third Hierarchy, and together with the third Hierarchy he must bring it back into the world balance during his earthly existence through balancing deeds. [7]

When the human being returns (in the life between death and new birth), Saturn, Jupiter and Mars have in the meantime cosmically communicated to the third Hierarchy - Angeloi, Archangeloi, Archai - what they have experienced and seen in the human being who has imperfectly passed them by (better: passed through). These beings now interweave this with man, so that he contains inscribed within himself what he has to do, what he has to balance. There the karmic demands are inscribed in the human nervous-sensory system, in the human head system. [8]

When our karma develops from one life on earth to another, it means that deeds, real deeds, pass from one hierarchy to another, that something tremendously significant happens in the spiritual cosmos. Basically, one should look at the fate of a human being with a tremendous inner reverence, with deep inner awe, because by looking at the fate of a human being, one stands before the whole world of the gods. [9]

As a certain part of the world reveals itself to us during our earthly existence, we learn to recognize that this particular part has been chosen from the infinite series of possibilities that the cosmos contains by some member of the hierarchies to show us from our birth to our death. One is shown this, the other that. The fact that he is shown one or the other is a matter for the consideration of the hierarchies. The hierarchies remember, just as our human being remembers. The basis for the memory of the hierarchies is looking back to our previous lives on earth. Depending on whether they see this or that from our previous life on earth, they bring the corresponding piece of the cosmos before the soul. Even in what we see of the world lies karma, given to us by the world of the hierarchies.

Memory in there of our short present life on earth in our human memory. Memory of the hierarchies out there of what human beings have ever done. The emergence of the thoughts of memory, the entry of the thoughts of memory in the form of what man initially sees of the cosmos, the shaping of human karma - a thought of shattering clarity: for it teaches us that the whole cosmos is at the service of the work of the Hierarchies in relation to man. From this point of view, what is the cosmos there for? So that the gods have a means in the cosmos to bring the first form of karma to man. Everything that is around us in the cosmos is a storehouse for the gods to show us the first form of our karma, depending on what we have done. The world is the storehouse for the demonstration of karma on the part of the gods. This is how we are placed in the world, and this is how we can gain a relationship to the actual secrets of our existence in relation to the world. [10]

Sources:

[1], [2] GA 224: The Human Soul in its Connection with Divine-Spiritual Individualities. The Internalization of the Annual Festivals (1923)

[3] - [6] GA 235: Esoteric Observations on Karmic Connections - First Volume (1924)

[7] GA 216: The Basic Impulses of the World-Historical Becoming of Humanity (1922)

[8] - [10] GA 236: Esoteric Observations on Karmic Connections - Second Volume (1924)

Karma and higher beings - gifts of man to higher beings

After we have been able to obtain information about Lucifer and Ahriman, we can gain a different relationship to these powers, we can reap the fruits of what has been done, we can, so to speak, relieve Lucifer and Ahriman of their work. However, the deeds of Lucifer, which he has brought about and which have always led to disappointment when committed by ourselves, will have to be turned into their opposite. These deeds of Lucifer had to arouse desires, had to lead man to that which could lead to evil. If we ourselves are to counteract Lucifer, if we are to take care of his affairs in the future, it will only be love that can take the place of Lucifer's deeds. And it can also be that which flows to us from the outer world by taking away more and more of the darkness that we weave into outer matter. When we remove more and more of this darkness, when it disappears, and we manage to completely overcome the ahrimanic influence in this way, then we will be able to recognize the world as it really is as an earthly world. Then we will gradually approach such knowledge as can only be the property of spiritual science today: We will penetrate to what matter really is, to the nature of light. By penetrating to the light, man himself will develop the spiritual counter-image of light. And the spiritual counter-image of light is wisdom. As a result, love and wisdom will enter the human soul. By developing wisdom and love, we develop those elements that will flow out again from our souls themselves as gifts for those who sacrificed themselves as Luciferic and Ahrimanic powers in the first half of the earth's evolution in order to give us what we need to achieve our freedom. We will have to give these powers what we develop in wisdom and love. [1]

This is the other part of the karma of the higher beings, that we develop a love that does not merely remain in humanity, but is called to penetrate the cosmos. We will be able to pour love into beings higher than ourselves, and these beings will feel it as a sacrifice. It will be soul sacrifice. Soul sacrifice will flow up to those who once let their offerings flow down, just as the smoke offerings once flowed up to the spirits in times when people still had spiritual goods. At that time, people could only send up symbolic incense offerings to the gods. In the future, people will send streams of love up to the spirits, and something will flow down again from the sacrifice of love: higher powers will flow towards man, which, directed by the spiritual, will intervene in our physical world with ever greater power. These will then be magical forces in the true sense of the word. This is how we see the course of human development, as human karma and the karma of the higher beings are lived out. And we now also understand how the plan of development relates to individual karma. Suppose a superhuman individuality had worked this or that in the year 1910, which was then carried out on the physical plan by a human being, a contact is thereby established between this superhuman individuality and the human being. The human being is then interwoven into the karma of the higher beings. This is a closed correspondence. But then a current flows to him from the higher worlds which brings something into his life; in it he now has a new item which has been added to his karma and which tips the balance (in the "karmic balance") to one side or the other. Thus human karma is fertilized by the general karma that flows through the world. Let us look, for example, at Miltiades or some other personality: there they had to stand on the great plan of the history of their people, there this or that was conditioned by the karma of the higher powers - and there they were placed in their positions. Into their individual karmic account flowed that which was to be bestowed upon humanity as a whole. And by carrying it out, by connecting deeds and achievements to it, it became their individual karma. - So we also live and weave with our individual karma in the macrocosm as a small world, as a microcosm. [2]

Sources:

[1] & [2] GA 120: The Revelations of Karma (1910)

Karma and initiation

Before a person has the science of initiation, one thing is always important to him, the other unimportant out of a dark urge. The initiate would prefer to sit on a chair and let the world run its course, because it doesn't matter - or so it might seem to him - whether one thing happens and the other doesn't and the like. There is then only the correction - it will not remain so, because the science of initiation also brings something else - there is only the one correction for the fact that the initiate in question does not sit down on a chair, let the world run its course and say: I am indifferent to everything - there is only the correction: to look back into earlier earth lives. Then he reads the task for his life on earth from his karma. He then consciously does what his earlier earth lives impose on him. He does not refrain from doing so because he thinks that his freedom is thereby impaired, but he does it because, by coming to what he has experienced in earlier earth lives, he simultaneously becomes aware of what happened in the life between death and a new birth, how he saw it as reasonable to do the corresponding subsequent deeds. He would feel unfree if he were unable to fulfill the task he was given in his previous life on earth. So neither before nor after entering the science of initiation is there a contradiction between karmic necessity and freedom. Not before entering the science of initiation for the reason that man remains with his ordinary consciousness within the realm of freedom and the karmic necessity takes place outside as if it were natural; he does not have anything that feels differently from what his nature gives him. And afterwards, because he has become completely in agreement with his karma, he does not consider it reasonable to act in the sense of karma. He who looks back with initiatory science to earlier earth lives knows that he becomes free by fulfilling his karmic task, that is, by moving into the house he built for himself in earlier earth lives. [1]

When the inner soul corresponding to feeling is awakened outside the body, then this soul begins to unfold a knowledge through which all kinds of things light up out there, through which one not only feels oneself as if spread over space, but through which one perceives something that is in this space, that surges as a being in this stream of time. And now you know: You experience yourself in your astral body. You experience yourself in your astral body outside the physical body in such a way that the content of what you previously only felt yourself to be comes to life. If you now look back at what you used to see of yourself, what was described earlier as the outer world, so to speak, the luminous body with the dark circulation of thoughts of the etheric body inside it, then the moment you concentrate on the astral, on the starry life of the astral body outside the body, what you have left, the abandoned body, appears different to you. If you now look back at the physical body that you have left, then the glow can stop, then the circulation of thoughts stops. To a certain extent this can be done arbitrarily, but it is replaced by an image of our own being, which appears to us - it cannot be said otherwise - as our personified karma.

That which we carry within us as human beings, because of which we prepare this or that fate for ourselves, is as if rolled up. Our karma, our destiny, personified, stands before us. And in such a way that we have the immediate realization: How your muscles are built up in your earthly life, how your whole muscular system is, it is a creation of this your destiny, your karma. Now comes the time when we say to ourselves: How different is sometimes maya from the truth. As long as we are on the physical plane, we believe that this muscle man consists of the fleshy muscles; in truth, these fleshy muscles are the crystallized karma. And they are so crystallized that the human being carries his crystallized karma in his muscular system down to the finest chemical composition. [2] And in our muscular system lives the spirit, crystallized for the outer physical plan, which without our obvious knowledge leads us wherever we must go, must come, in accordance with our karma. [3] When we move from wanting to actually doing something, when we carry it out, then our wanting separates itself from us. And that in which we then, I would like to say, swim inside, in which we weave and live by carrying out the action, which we only imagine - we are not inside the action with our consciousness, we only imagine it - but that which is inside the action itself, the content of the action, that is ultimately the same thing that is inside the mineral beyond the surface of the minerals and constitutes the mineral consciousness. If we could sink even deeper into unconsciousness, we would actually arrive where the mineral consciousness weaves. This consciousness also absorbs the inner contents of our actions, which then continue to have an effect in the course of our karma. [4]

And when we fall asleep, for those who live in objective cognition, this falling asleep has something in common with the will. When the will is brought to full consciousness, one realizes quite clearly that one sleeps into one's own organism. Just as dreams otherwise descend, the motives of volition enter our organization. One learns to distinguish between this sleeping into the organism, which first of all lives itself out in our ordinary actions - these are external actions, we carry them out between waking and falling asleep - but not everything that lives inside our emotional life lives itself out in our actions. We also accomplish life between falling asleep and waking up. And what we would otherwise push into our actions, we push out of ourselves through the same process of falling asleep. We push a whole sum of will impulses out into the purely spiritual world in which we find ourselves between falling asleep and waking up. We learn to observe them through imaginative cognition, (thereby) we perceive in them what remains present in terms of action orientation beyond death, what goes with us beyond death. You see, we experience our becoming karma here on the other side. Between the will and the action, we experience our becoming karma. Past and future karma then come together in the imaginative consciousness.

What I have described to you here is of course always present in man. Every time a person wakes up, every morning when he wakes up, he passes through the region of his past karma; every evening when he goes to sleep he passes through the region of his future karma. Through a certain attentiveness, man can grasp the past objective even without special training in presence of mind, without, of course, recognizing it as clearly as I have now described it. But he can perceive it; it is there. And then everything is there that he carries within himself in his moral impulses, both good and bad. But it is even more frightening to perceive what lies between the will and the action, what one can hold back. There one gets to know oneself insofar as one has made oneself during this life. [5]

That the clairvoyant knows something of karma is due to the fact that he learns to use the etheric body as he would otherwise use the physical body. If one learns to use it, one cannot avoid seeing a reality in karma. For from waking to falling asleep the etheric body is concrete, grasped as reality, this, that it looks at karma, namely from waking to falling asleep the karma from previous earth lives, and from falling asleep to waking the karma that is becoming. [6]

Such research, which seeks the gates to enter the spiritual man from the physical man in the right way, only has a promising result if it is carried out in the right way. So that in such work, as is the case here (in medicine), not only the research powers of the present are used, but precisely the research powers that result from taking up the karmic threads that arise from the history of human development. One must, so to speak, work with the forces of karma in order to discover the secrets involved. [7]

If initiates meet a person who has an effect on their will (i.e. they are karmically connected to this person), they also have an effect on their inner language. He does not only speak when he faces you, but he speaks out of us. If one is initiated into the secrets of world existence, the relationship of the human being is twofold: You meet people, you listen to them. You leave them again: you no longer need to listen to them when you are far enough away from them. - But you meet other people, you listen to them; then you can walk away from them and then they speak from within you: they are there, they speak! Well, for the initiated person it is as I have just described it to you, that he actually carries the people within him with the full coloration of his voice who have an effect on him in this way. For the other, non-initiated people it is more emotional, more sentient, but it is also there, subconsciously very strongly there. [8]

Sources:

[1] GA 235: Esoteric Observations on Karmic Connections - Volume One (1924)

[2], [3] GA 153: Inner Being of Man and Life between Death and New Birth (1914)

[4], [5] GA 207: Anthroposophy as Cosmosophy - Part One:. Traits of the Human Being in the Earthly and Cosmic Realms (1921)

[6] GA 181: Earth Death and World Life. Anthroposophical gifts of life. Necessities of Consciousness for the Present and the Future (1918)

[7] GA 238: Esoteric Observations on Karmic Connections - Volume Four. The Spiritual Life of the Present in Connection with the Anthroposophical Movement (1924)

[8] GA 240: Esoteric Observations on Karmic Connections - Sixth Volume (1924)

Karma and illness

Those people who are bursting with health initially had a keen interest in the visible world in a previous life on earth. [1] If we are particularly strong in this or that organ, this points to a previous life in which this organ, in which we are now particularly strong, was once particularly ill. We were not able to heal it completely back then. However, the forces were called upon which now make this organ appear to be particularly strong. [2]

The illnesses of the physical body in one life reappear as physical beauty in the next life, so that either one's own body is elevated in beauty by the illness it has borne and becomes beautiful in its outer form in the next life, or it is rewarded for the illness it has borne with its surroundings through infection by the beauty of its surroundings. Beauty therefore develops karmically from suffering, pain, deprivation and illness. Even the sense of beauty is developed in this way. [3]

If someone is dull to anything visible in his surroundings, then he remains unable to work in certain areas between death and a new birth. He cannot get close to certain entities. Other human souls with whom he was together on earth remain alien to him. This would last forever, there would be a kind of eternity of hellish punishments, if it could not be changed. That man now decides between death and a new birth to descend into earthly life and to feel that which is an inability in the spiritual world in the diseased body, that is the only compensation, that is the only cure. That which arises from within in relation to health and illness, in the roundabout way I have just characterized, is karmically determined. The world only becomes explainable when one is able to see beyond earthly life. [4]

Of course, not all pain that comes to us from outside has to be rooted in our previous life on earth. It can also be an original pain, which is then lived out karmically in the next earthly life. But a large part of the suffering that comes to us from the outside is the result of hatred that has been stirred up in previous earthly lives. [5]

The spiritual entities that deal with human beings work the illness into the web of karma. That is their business. However, it is a business that does not link things together as closely as they are linked by pathology here on earth. Here you can't heal a person who becomes ill at the age of 17 at the age of 45. But with regard to karma shaping, however, it is the case that what goes on in any incarnation as a disease process - whether healed or not - is woven into karma, but perhaps in 3000 years, because time has quite different scales within the spiritual world. [6]

Now it will no longer seem incomprehensible that the curability or incurability of an illness also lies in karma. If you realize that the karmic aim of falling ill is to further man and make him more perfect, then the prerequisite is that if man, according to the reasonableness he brings with him from the Kamaloka time when he enters a new existence, falls ill, he will then develop those healing powers which mean a strengthening of his inner man and the possibility of reaching higher. Let us assume that in the life he still has to live, the person has the powers to progress in this life himself with what he has gained through the illness, thanks to his other organization and his other karma. Then the healing has a meaning. Then healing occurs and the person has in this case achieved what he was supposed to achieve and what was shown by the presence of the illness. Let us now assume that the situation for the person is such that he overcomes the illness and develops the healing powers and is now faced with a life that would make demands on him that cannot be fulfilled with the degree of perfection that he has already attained: He would indeed gain something through the cured illness, but it would not be possible for him to gain so much - because his remaining karma does not permit it - that he could become a healer to others with what he has gained for himself. Then it happens that his deeper subconscious says: "Here you have no opportunity to receive the full power of what you are supposed to have. You had to enter this incarnation because you had to gain that measure of perfection which you can only attain in the physical body by overcoming an illness. You had to gain this; but you cannot develop it further. Now you must go into circumstances where your physical body and other forces do not disturb you and where you can freely process what you have gained in the illness. - This means that such an individuality seeks death in order to process between death and a new birth what it cannot process in life between birth and death. Such a soul goes through the life between death and new birth in order to further develop its organization with all the stronger powers it has gained in overcoming the illness, so that it can work all the more in the new life. [7]

With this in mind, it remains for us to give an indication of what happens with chronic forms of illness that lead neither to a proper cure nor to death, but to chronic conditions, to a kind of infirmity or the like. Here it is the case that the healing process within the human body shells has taken place, so that in a certain sense the illness has been overcome. But in another sense it has not been overcome; that is to say, everything that was intended to create a balance between the etheric body and the physical body has been achieved, but the disharmony that existed between the etheric body and the astral body has not been balanced. This remains, and the person oscillates back and forth between trying to heal and not being able to heal. In such a case it is always of particular importance that the human being makes the best possible use of what he has achieved in terms of real healing. And this happens least of all in life. [8] (See also: Chronic disease).

Even today man with his ordinary consciousness is exposed both to the temptations of Lucifer, who works out of the passions and affects of his astral body, and to the temptations of Ahriman, who penetrates man from outside through errors and deceptions in relation to the outer world. As long as the human being lives in an incarnation and the ideas put up a barrier so that what happens from Lucifer and Ahriman cannot penetrate deeper and find an obstacle in the ideas, what the human being does remains subject to moral or intellectual judgment. As long as man sins against morality between birth and death by following Lucifer, or sins against logic and sound thinking by following Ahriman, it remains a matter of the ordinary conscious life of the soul. But when man passes through the gate of death, the life of imagination, which is bound to the instrument of the brain, ceases. There begins another form of conscious life. Then, in fact, all these things penetrate down into the subsoil of the human being and intervene in that which, after the Kamaloka, has an organizing effect on the next existence and impresses itself on the plastic forces which now build up the threefold human corporeality. There errors which follow from devotion to Ahriman become forces of disease which infect the human being from the etheric body, and excesses, i.e. things which in life are subject to moral judgment, become causes of disease which work more from the astral body. Thus we see how indeed our errors from the Ahrimanic in us - and to these are also to be reckoned the conscious errors: lies, untruths - become causes of disease, if, however, we do not stop at one incarnation, but consider the effect of one incarnation on the following one; and we see how the Luciferic influences also become causes of disease in the same way. [9]

Take, for example, a disease such as pneumonia. It is an effect in the karmic sequence which arises from the fact that the person concerned can look back during his Kamaloka time to a character which had in it a tendency and inclination to sensual excesses, which had in it, so to speak, a need to live sensually. Let us not confuse what is ascribed now in an earlier consciousness with what appears in the consciousness of the next incarnation. At first it has nothing to do with that. But what the human being sees during the Kamaloka period will be transformed in such a way that forces will imprint themselves on him which will overcome the pneumonia. For it is precisely in the overcoming of pneumonia, in the self-healing that man strives for, that human individuality works against the Luciferic powers, wages a formal war precisely against the Luciferic powers. Therefore, overcoming pneumonia is an opportunity to shed what was a lack of character in a previous incarnation.

The matter presents itself to us differently when we see the peculiar processes occurring in what we call pulmonary tuberculosis in today's language, when the self-healing forces go into action, which express themselves in that the harmful influences that arise are surrounded, framed by sheaths like connective tissue; then the whole is filled with calcareous matter, which forms solid inclusions. A person can have such inclusions in his lungs, and many more people carry such things around with them than is usually believed; for these are the people in whom a tuberculous lung has passed over into healing. Where such things have happened, a battle has again been waged by the human inner being against what ahrimanic forces have done. It is a process of outward defense. We have thus shown how the two principles, the ahrimanic and the luciferic, are in fact ultimately active in the course of illness. And it could be shown in many respects for this or that form of illness how one should actually distinguish between two types of illness: ahrimanic and luciferic illnesses. If one were to take this into account, one would also be able to gain correct principles for the appropriate help that can be given to the sick. In all that we have to do with hot or cold, we have a type of luciferic disease. [10]

What is due to ahrimanic influence is directly due to Lucifer; but if the Luciferic influence was so strong that it challenged the ahrimanic influence, then the ahrimanic influence is the more insidious. It lies deeper down, not only in the transgressions of the astral body, but in the transgressions of the etheric body. In a consciousness that lies below the consciousness of pain, the ahrimanic influence appears with a damage that need not be accompanied by pain, with such a damage that in the organ concerned, where the damage expresses itself, leads to this organ becoming unusable. - Let us assume that in an incarnation an ahrimanic influence had been at work and had caused what an ahrimanic influence can cause. The human being now lives through the time between death and a new birth - and reappears in a new incarnation. Then it becomes apparent that some organ is seized by the ahrimanic effect, in other words: In this organ the etheric body is seated much deeper than it should be; the organ is much more permeated by the etheric body than it should be. In such a case, because of the defective organ, the human being is tempted to become even more entangled in error - that which Ahriman accomplishes in the world. But here the opposite effect occurs just as the opposite effect in pain occurs with the Luciferic influence. The opposite effect occurs in such a way that the moment the danger exists that we chain ourselves too much to the physical-sensual world and thereby rob ourselves of too much of what could lead us up into the spiritual world, the organ is destroyed at that moment, that it is either paralyzed or made too weak to work. So a process of destruction occurs. - So when we see that an organ is destroyed, we must realize that we must actually owe this to benevolent powers: the organ is taken from us so that we can find our way back into the spiritual world. It is indeed the case that - if there is no other way - organs are destroyed by certain powers or that we are equipped with diseased organs so that we are not pushed too deeply into the illusion. [11]

So if someone has a liver disease which as such is not accompanied by painful experiences, we are dealing with the effect of a previous ahrimanic influence. Legends and myths have always known and expressed the deepest wisdom. The liver is a good example of this. For it is an organ that can most easily be effective for the slipping of the human being into the physical-illusionary world. And the liver is at the same time the organ that actually chains us to the earth. This truth is connected with the fact that the vulture gnaws at the liver of the being who, according to legend, brought man the power that was to lead him into earthly life and make him really effective there, namely Prometheus, not because it is supposed to cause Prometheus a particularly deep pain. Myths always coincide with physiological facts (the liver has no sensation of pain). The vulture gnaws at the liver because it does not hurt! For it should be pointed out that Prometheus brought mankind something that could entangle them more deeply in the Ahrimanic, if the opposite, balancing effect could not happen. [12]

The disposition that leads to infectious diseases is based on a pronounced egoistic acquisitiveness in the previous life on earth, which thinks in a selfish way of gathering riches for itself. This egoistic urge for acquisition and wealth is a characteristic of the etheric body that emerges in the next life as a disposition for infectious diseases. [13]

Let us assume that someone has lived in the last life in such a way that he has worked out of an ego feeling that was far too weak, out of an ego feeling that went far too far in its devotion to the outer world, so far that it worked with a lack of independence and self-lostness that is no longer appropriate for our present human cycle. What will then take place in the next incarnation will not come to consciousness very much, it will take place more or less in a subconscious region. The person concerned will strive towards such an incarnation, which will offer the greatest resistance to his sense of self, so that he will need to tense his sense of self to the highest degree. Such individualities, burdened with this karma, seek access to opportunities where they can be exposed, for example, to an epidemic such as cholera. This can then have the effect that in the next incarnation the sense of self has grown to a considerable degree.

Let's take another glaring case and, so that you can see the connection, the opposite case. A person sees during the Kamaloka period that he has carried out a series of actions under too strong a sense of self, which have flowed from too much self-building. He sees that he must moderate his sense of self, that he must curb it. He must again seek out an opportunity where, in the next incarnation, his three bodies will give him the opportunity to ensure that his sense of self finds no barriers anywhere in the body - no matter how hard he tries - that it leads everywhere into the bottomless pit and leads itself ad absurdum. The conditions for this are created when the person concerned is drawn to an opportunity that brings him malaria. [14]

If a man has acted much under the influence of affects, he will likewise, in the Kamaloka period, undergo acts which have been done under the influence of affects in general. This will give him the tendency to experience something like this in his new incarnation, in his own corporeality, by overcoming which he performs actions that can have a balancing effect on certain actions of his previous life. In particular, there is that form of illness which we know in modern times as diphtheria, which appears in many cases when such a karmic entanglement is present. [15]

Let us suppose that in later life a personality gets the measles. We find that this case of measles has occurred as a karmic effect of such occurrences in a previous life, which we can describe in something like this way: In a previous life the individuality in question was one that did not like to concern itself with the outer world, not exactly in a grossly egoistic sense, but nevertheless concerned itself a great deal with itself. In the case of the personality I am referring to, it was a case of trying to cope with life by pondering inwardly how one should behave in this or that case. The weakness of the soul which resulted from this in the course of life led to the generation of forces in the life between death and rebirth which exposed the organism to a measles attack at a relatively late stage of life.

Let us now assume that this personality had succeeded, before the measles case occurred, in doing something to improve itself thoroughly, that is, to acquire such strength of soul that it would no longer be exposed to all possible self-deceptions. Then this strength of soul thus acquired would have led to the measles disease not being contracted, because what had already been brought about in the organism during the formation of this organization would have found its balance through the stronger soul forces which would have been drawn upon through self-education. [16] (However, it must also be said:) We must not push everything back into the past. We must be clear that facing karma in the right way leads us to say to ourselves: An illness that strikes me now need not be the result of earlier weaknesses of the soul, but an illness can occur in the first place. But karma does apply. If an illness or misfortune strikes me in this earthly life, the balance will come, or this misfortune, this illness can be the balance. This means that one must always reckon with the future when one speaks of karma. The relationship one has to karma is that one becomes unshakeable in the recognition of the general justice of the world, so that one knows: everything balances itself out, but not in such a way that one simply tears up the series of earth lives through the present and blames everything on the past. And if a misfortune comes as the first step in karma, then the right attitude is to say to oneself: If man were to meet only what he wishes for, he would become quite weak precisely because of a life course that is like this. Under certain circumstances we would live comfortably and well in one or two earth lives, because only that which we desire would come upon us, but in the third or fourth earth life we would be paralyzed mentally and spiritually, because no effort at all would arise in us to overcome resistance. Resistance can only be overcome when the unexpected, the undesirable comes. But if one develops the right strength in the face of resistance, if one takes enough love of humanity into sleep, then that which is woven by the ego in connection with the Archai as karma is shaped in such a way that the right balance takes place in the next life on earth. [17]

Sources:

[1], [4], [5] GA 235: Esoteric Considerations of Karmic Connections - First Volume (1924)

[2] GA 116: The Christ Impulse and the Development of the Ego-Consciousness (1909/1910)

[3] GA 95: Before the Gate of Theosophy (1906)

[6] GA 318: The Cooperation of Doctors and Pastors. Pastoral-Medical Course (1924)

[7] - [12], [14] - [16] GA 120: The Revelations of Karma (1910)

[13] GA 97: The Christian Mystery (1906/1907)

[17] GA 224: The Human Soul in Its Connection with Divine-Spiritual Individualities. The Internalization of the Annual Festivals (1923)

Karma and illness - influence through physical measures

Whether these or those things are discovered or whether measures are taken which make it possible to intervene karmically in this or that direction does not depend on the opinion or arbitrariness of people, but occurs when it is supposed to occur. But this notwithstanding: If we remove certain causes which would otherwise have been there and which would have visited certain people through their karmic involvement, we can thereby influence people's karma. That is why these people are not freed from what is challenged in them as a karmic effect, but they are urged to seek out other effects. From this you can see that for a karmic balance, which we would be able to remove to one side, a balance would have to arise again in another direction. We only create the necessity to seek out other opportunities and influences when we clear away any influences. [1]

The souls who are saved in this way today in terms of health are therefore condemned to seek this karmic balance in another way. By giving them greater physical comfort through a healthier life, by making their physical life easier, the soul will be influenced in the opposite way, so that little by little it will feel a certain emptiness, an unsatisfactoriness, an unfulfilledness. And if it were to go on in such a way that the outer life became more and more pleasant, more and more healthy, as one can have it according to the general ideas in the purely materialistic life, then such souls would have less and less incentive to progress within themselves. In a certain sense, a desolation of souls would occur in parallel. Anyone who takes a closer look at life can already notice this today (1910). Thus souls suffer more, while the outer life is made healthier. [2]

Sources:

[1] & [2] GA 120: The Revelations of Karma (1910)

Karma and illness - healing powers

Every emotion of the soul, wherever it occurs, is in some way modified love. And when we have interwoven, as it were, the inner and outer aspects of the human being, we have woven his outer physicality out of light and his inner soul out of love in a spiritualized way.

The Luciferic entities are particularly interested in weaving light into love. Therefore, the Luciferic entities are indeed at work everywhere where our inner being, which is actually woven out of love, somehow comes into contact with light, where it is present in any form; and light confronts us in all material existence. If we only somehow come into contact with light, the Luciferic entities appear and the Luciferic interweaves with love. In the course of the embodiments, this is how the human being came into the Luciferic element in the first place: Lucifer has interwoven himself with the element of love. So that into that which is woven out of love, the element of Lucifer presses itself, which alone can bring us that which not only allows love to be a complete devotion, but which permeates love with wisdom. Otherwise, without this wisdom, love would be a self-evident force for which man could not be responsible. In this way, however, love becomes the actual ego-power, into which the Luciferian element is woven, which was otherwise only outside in the material world. By absorbing the Luciferic element, the human being interweaves the material existence in his own body with a soul that is woven out of love, but into which the Luciferic element is interwoven. The love interwoven with the Luciferic element, which impregnates itself into the material, is the cause of illness working from within. Are we allowed to help here? Can we in any way eliminate everything that has forced its way in from the Luciferic element with all its consequences in pain? We can only provide real help by supplying love, so that the karmic element plays itself out in the right way. We must instill love so that what flows in as an act of love can be of help. All those acts of healing that are more or less based on what can be called psychic healing processes, which today are often referred to in layman's terms as "magnetizing", have this character of infused love. [1]

How can we now bring out from outside the corresponding influences that have flowed in from within through an incorrect soul substance, through an incorrect love substance? What happens to the body when something incorrect flows in? For spiritual science, something happens that in some way turns woven light into its opposite. Everything that presents itself in reality as the defilement of that which is woven from light is a darkness or gloom woven into it from Ahrimanic or Luciferic influence. But this darkness was only woven into it by the fact that this human corporeality became the carrier of that which lives through the incarnations as "I". Now man today takes the basis for the material from that which he has gradually put out of himself in the course of development. This is the animal, vegetable and mineral kingdoms. They also contain the various materials, that is, things woven from light for earthly existence. In the three kingdoms around us we have something which man, through his Luciferic or Ahrimanic influence, has never been able to contaminate by himself, in so far as he works from his substance of love. Thus every substance outside differs from that which man carries within himself as substance. This is the reason why for everything that man can more or less spoil in his outer substantiality, there must be something to be found outside that represents the corresponding thing in a pure state, without the human damage being inside. What exists outside in the world without damage is the external remedy for what is correspondingly damaged. If you bring this to the human entity in the right way, then you have the specific for the corresponding damage. [2]

Sources:

[1] & [2] GA 120: The Revelations of Karma (1910)

Karma and life account

We will always find that our current human inner and outer destiny can be summarized by having a kind of "life account", so to speak, where we write all wise, intelligent, wise experiences on one side, and all unintelligent, all evil and ugly experiences on the other side. There will be a surplus on one side or the other, and at one moment in life this will also mean the fate of that moment. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 120: The Revelations of Karma (1910)

Karma and human interaction of the initiate

For those who have undergone initiation at a certain level, the experiences become much more concrete. A person stands in front of you (for example), he speaks to you, he tells you something, you hear it. The initiate can hear the inner, the spiritual language, just as the outer is heard. With all the clarity with which people speak to you, the person with whom he was karmically connected in the past and whom he meets in the present life speaks for the initiate. He hears an inner language. You will say that the initiate has a whole bundle of people within him, some of whom speak to him more clearly, others less clearly. That is also the case. But at the same time it is a vivid proof of the way in which one has spent the previous life on earth. I said that the great registrars, the lunar beings (see: Primordial Teachers) register the destiny; but the moment the initiate meets another person with whom he was karmically connected in the previous earth life, he is illuminated as if by the light of the full moon by the registrations of the other person with whom he is karmically connected. What we think and do at present does not speak to us, but after a certain time, after a not so long time, what we have done, what is registered on the moon, speaks and comes to life. The Akashic images are life images: when you encounter the content of a past earth life, you get to know yourself and get to know another person. What you have in common from your past life on earth comes to life again, so it is no wonder that you can hear this resurrection speaking from within in the other person. In a period of about 7-9000 years in the future, all people on earth will hear the other people with whom they are karmically connected speaking from within. [1]

While for the ordinary consciousness there is only the inner sensation that one receives the other person (the karmically connected one) into one's will and does not judge him according to the outer impression, for the initiate it occurs that what is actually visible to him is that which was the previous earthly life of the personality that confronts him. Not only does this physical person appear with his spiritual-soul content, but behind him, as it were, shadowy earlier earth lives, perhaps several earlier earth lives. With one acquaintance you get to know a whole series of people who are as objective as the person you have before you in the physical. [2]

Sources:

[1] & [2] GA 240: Esoteric Observations on Karmic Connections - Sixth Volume (1924)

Karma and pedagogy

A child with little talent will go back to earlier lives on earth in which it hated a lot, and spiritual science will then be used to find out who it might have hated. For they must find themselves in some environment, the people who have been hated and towards whom deeds have been committed out of hatred. And then it will be possible to do something to develop special love at a child's age for those people for whom there was special hatred in earlier earthly lives. And one will see that through such concretely applied love the mind, the whole constitution of the soul in general, will brighten. What can help education will not lie in general theories about karma, but in concretely looking into life in order to realize that, after all, children are brought together in a class by fate. And in the centuries to come, education will gradually have to be placed much more in the context of human life. One will have to see in a child from where that which lives itself out in a metamorphosis as incomprehension in earthly life is reflected or mirrored in the life between death and a new birth. As an educator, you will be able to see what strange karmic threads are spun from one life to the next through previous lives. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 235: Esoteric Observations on Karmic Connections - First Volume (1924)

Karma and periodicities within life

We are constantly going through such things with our soul life which strike into our emotional life and which are the reaction of the world to what we have somehow experienced in the emotional sphere in the previous seven-year period. So such an event, which somehow excites us emotionally, in turn resounds in our soul life in the next phase of life. People do not usually pay attention to such things. Anyone who makes a little effort can observe such things externally. Who hasn't experienced that someone you know well may suddenly be in a bad mood, and you don't even know where it comes from. People change out of the blue, as they often say. If you follow things and really have an eye, a soul's eye, for the particular behavior of a person, if you can feel by name what such a person says between the words, or what he says in the words, then you will be able to go back to some such - as I have characterized it - earlier emotional event that aroused him. And in the whole intervening period something has actually happened in the world that would not have happened if the person had not had that emotional arousal. But the whole thing is a process which, apart from the fact that man experiences it, also takes place objectively outside of man.

You see how many opportunities there are for these things to take place outside the human being, which are there through the human being, and which are simply objective world processes. Into these objective world processes there mingles that which happens among the elemental beings, also such elemental beings as I have recently characterized, outside the human being. I brought them together in another relationship with the respiratory system and the rhythmic system. Here you see them interacting with the rhythmic system in a roundabout way through the emotional impulses. These things, if we understand them correctly, compel us to say that the human being continually produces something around himself like a rather large aura. But in the waves he throws up there, elemental beings mix in, which, depending on the person, can influence what comes back. So think of it this way: you have an excitement; you radiate it. When it comes back to you, it is not uninfluenced, but in the meantime elemental beings deal with this arousal. And when it then has an effect back on the human being, then you get back the effect of the elemental beings with what these elemental beings have started with what is outside you. Through what the human being spreads as a spiritual atmosphere, he comes into interaction with elemental beings. Everything that happens to a person's destiny in the course of their life is connected to these things. We also have a kind of fulfillment of our destiny within the course of our lives. Not true, if we experience something today, it has a meaning for later. But this is the way in which our destiny is actually carved out for us. And elemental beings who feel drawn to us by our own nature are involved in the carpentry of our destiny. They feel attracted to us, they have an effect on us. [1]

Just as we live in the outer physical air, just as we live among the results of the mineral, vegetable and animal kingdoms, so we live with our initially subconscious parts of humanity, with our rhythmic system in the spiritual sphere of the elemental beings. And there so much of our destiny is carpentered as can be carpentered in the course of life between birth and death. Only by being fully awake with the head do we stand out from this interplay with the elemental beings. We are not integrated into the realm of the elemental beings only through our awake head life. There we rise, as it were, above the surface of the elemental sea in which we as human beings are constantly swimming. So that we can say that what we call our destiny, our karma, need not be so mysterious to us if we look at how it is only the magnification of that which we can study within human life itself in the recurrence of such events. They do not come back unchanged, these events, they come back greatly altered. [2]

Sources:

[1] & [2] GA 194: The Mission of Michael. The Revelation of the Real Mysteries of the Human Being (1919)

Karma and the cosmic retro-reflection forces of metals and the power to straighten up in infants

The way in which the child straightens up from crawling to orient itself in the world is one of the most wonderful things that can be observed in earthly life, this coming to oneself of the child, of the human being. The forces that I have often described for this orientation of the child work inwardly in the forces of the metals. And as the child learns to straighten up from its horizontal position by crawling, it is irradiated by the metallic retro-reflective force. This actually straightens the child. If you see through this connection, you have another moment at the same time. This is that one gets to know the connection of man as he lives here on earth in his actions, in his being, with his earlier life on earth. It is the same ability to see through the workings of the metals in the cosmos and the karmic connection of successive earth lives. The one comes with the other, and the one is not there without the other. These are the same abilities. And that is why I once said to you in a quite different context: In this power of orientation, in this straightening up of the child from crawling to walking, to standing, in this learning to speak, learning to think, lies that which works in from earlier earth lives. I expressed it like this at the time. This is because with the ability to see the reflective power of the metals comes the ability to see through the connection between the human being in his present earthly life and earlier earthly lives. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 232: Mystery Formations (1923)

Karma and sleep

When a person, as a spiritual researcher, comes to imagination and thus has his life tableau before him, then something else always becomes visible at the same time. You cannot have one without the other. One cannot have the imagination, the real spirit-knowledge of the previous life on earth, without those experiences that we have always had during sleep, from falling asleep to waking up, appearing in a strange way like a memory. I have told you what these experiences are like. If, on the one hand, we receive the imagination, on the other hand we receive, especially strongly, when the inner silence of the soul occurs, a view of what the human being experiences in the state of sleep. If we shine down into the sleeping that lies in the volition during waking, then we come to the karma that works in from earlier earthly lives. When we begin to see through the experiences between falling asleep and waking up, then we see how karma is woven together from the free actions we are currently performing, which will only be realized in the next life on earth. That which we experience as our thinking during the waking hours is what we experience in the etheric body, in the body of formative forces. That which goes on behind it in the astral body and in the ego can only be experienced if one consciously penetrates into the events that the ego and the astral body go through when they are separated from the physical body and the etheric body in sleep. This is where the karma of the future begins. This is veiled for us during the day by the outer thoughts that are in the etheric body. But in the depths of the soul, even during the day, it weaves itself together with that which is in the unconscious sleeping will as the karma that comes over from the past. And so one can point very precisely into this karma of the human being. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 226: Human nature, human destiny and world development (1923)

Karma and temperament

The melancholic temperament is caused karmically especially when a person in the previous life was forced to live in the smallest, narrowest circle, to be much alone, to be always occupied only with himself, so that he could not arouse any interest in others. On the other hand, he who has known much, who has met with many things and has not merely looked at them, with whom the previous life has dealt harshly, becomes a choleric. If you have had a pleasant life without many struggles and hardships, or even if you have seen a lot, passed by many things, but only looked at them, then all this always passes on karmically to the next denser body in the basic being in the next life. One becomes a phlegmatic or a sanguine. [1]

It can happen that if a person is forced into loneliness through his incarnation and would be left behind as a result, he compensates for this in the next incarnation by becoming a sanguine, who can be attentive to everything. [2]

Sources:

[1] GA 95: Before the Gates of Theosophy (1906)

[2] GA 295: The art of education. Seminar discussions and curriculum lectures (1919)

Karma and rage

Pushing towards a karmic event is a consequence of a general "feeling of hunger"; one is driven towards it. These forces, which live themselves out in this way, are concentrated in the heart. And when they are pressed out and thus come into consciousness in the present incarnation: they remain present in the heart, but they come into consciousness, images of them are formed, which then form stimuli; then this gives rise to rage. Rampage is basically nothing other than the premature living out of a karmic force in this incarnation for the following incarnation. And this misplaced coming to appearance, which in this case is brought about by Luciferic forces in particular - everything that is brought about prematurely in the world is brought about by Luciferic forces - this coming to appearance of the karmic forces of the next incarnation in a previous incarnation forms the rage. [1] When something lives in our sphere of will that man cannot cope with in his imagination - you have to develop very radical concepts when you talk about these things - then he begins to rage. That is the essence of raving, of raving madness, that something lives in the sphere of will which man cannot grasp with his imagination. And if men will not make themselves comfortable to enter into the comprehension of the spiritual world, in order to embrace through the comprehension of the spiritual worlds that which is already taking shape in the sphere of will, then the raving in the world will become greater and greater. [2]

Sources:

[1] GA 205: Human Becoming, World Soul and World Spirit - Part One:. Man as a Bodily-Soul Entity in his Relation to the World (1921)

[2] GA 188: Goetheanism, a transformation impulse and resurrection thought. Human Science and Social Science (1919)

Karma and death - karma and birth

Through the Luciferic influence birth now became an act through which man establishes such intense connections between the outer and inner man that what man can experience in the spiritual world in the time before was wiped out. Through the luciferic influence the human being was robbed of his memory of previous spiritual experiences. Imagine if the Luciferic influence had not been there; then everything from food to sensory impressions would have a far more subtle effect on man. He would permeate everything he experiences as interaction with the outside world with what he has experienced between death and rebirth. What now penetrates us as denser materiality destroys our human corporeality piece by piece from our birth onwards. Starting from our birth, we absorb a denser materiality than we would have absorbed without the Luciferic influence, so that we slowly destroy our corporeality until it has become completely useless with the onset of death. From this we see that the Luciferic influence is the karmic cause of man's death. If there were not this form of birth, there would not be this form of death for man. Birth and death are karmically connected. [1]

In a stillbirth the astral body has already connected with the physical body, the two lower bodies are also in order, but the astral body of the human germ withdraws again, so that the human being is born dead. The physical body is shaped in its form through purely physical inheritance. Now the composition of the humors can be incorrect, while the parents are otherwise spiritually and mentally well suited to each other. Then no proper physical body comes into being; the human germ receives a physical body in which the higher bodies cannot establish their abode. The physical body only thrives to the extent that higher beings can dwell in it. [2]

A child who died at an early age could be examined with regard to its previous life, and it was found that it had been quite well disposed in its earlier life and had also used these dispositions well. He had become quite an able member of human society, but he was somewhat weak-sighted. These weak eyes and the fact that he was less able to see accurately gave all his experiences a special flavor. There was a little something missing everywhere that could have made it better; the human was always a little behind because of his weak eyes. He could have achieved something quite extraordinary if he had had good eyesight. He died and was incarnated again a short time later with healthy eyes, but only lived for a few weeks. In this way, however, the members of the being had learned how to get healthy eyes, and the human being had been given a little bit of life in order to acquire what he had still lacked, a correction of the previous life, as it were. The pain of the parents is of course compensated karmically, but they had to be the instrument for this correction. [3]

Those who die young.

There are people who die young, let's say before the age of 35, in which case they are even closer to the world they came out of at birth. And the age of 35 is an important boundary. You cross a bridge, as it were. The world from which you emerged withdraws and you give birth to a new spiritual world from within. And now a person dies before the age of 35. If he is then re-embodied, the power that he has not used in the lifetime that would follow the 35th year of life accrues to him in a certain way. This power, which they have spared there, adds up with the powers with which they incorporate themselves into the next incarnation, and thus such souls are born in bodies through which they are able, mostly in their youth, to face life with strong impressions. These are the people who are then strongly placed in life, who receive their mission. [4]

For example, if a person is led through the gate of death at a very early age, say 11 or 13, he has a short Kamaloka period, but he is still very close to the world he left at physical birth. If one has just this in one's karma, then such a life, which has already closed with the 12th year, is also followed by a review in the first days after death, but one has it in such a way that it comes to one more from the outside, whereas if one dies in the 50th, 60th or 70th year, one has to do much more oneself to get the review. You get it through your own activity. And by having to live through this life after death in different ways, people are prepared for the next life in different ways. It may be that one is particularly active in one life. If, as a particularly active nature, one were to be snatched away from life early, one would be destined by one's karma to be placed in the next life with a very specific life task, which one would then carry out without fail. One is as if predestined. But if you are particularly active in one life and live to a later age, then these forces become internalized. Then you have a more complicated task in the next life. The outer activity then recedes, and the necessity arises for the soul to develop inner activity. 157a. 51f

When a violent death intervenes in a life, it manifests itself in the next life on earth in such a way that this death continues to have an effect by somehow bringing about a change in the direction of life in very specific years of the next life, as if inwardly challenged. The human being can be forced into other ways of life, into a permanent change in the direction of his will. Such a radical change in the direction of his will has its origin in a violent death in his previous life. For concrete research shows how often that which occurs in death is important for the middle of the next life. If death occurs spontaneously from within through illness or ageing, then death has much more significance for the life between death and a new birth than for the next life on earth. [5]

Let us assume that we have been induced by a Luciferic influence to pass from a previous religious or spiritual point of view to one where man says: "I want to enjoy life here! -, where he has thus made the leap into the sensual with all his might. Then something like this challenges the ahrimanic influence in such a way that exactly the opposite is caused. Then it happens that a person, as he goes through life, seeks out a point where he can leap from the sensual life into the spiritual. The upper consciousness does not notice this; but the mysterious subconscious, which is chained to the physical body and etheric body, now drives man to seek out the place where he can wait out a thunderstorm, where there is an oak tree, a bench beneath it, and the lightning strikes! His subconscious has made him fulfill what he did in a previous incarnation. Here we have the reverse. Thus we understand an effect under a Luciferic influence in a previous life, and as a consequence an influence of Ahriman in the present life. Ahriman must cooperate here to the end that we switch off our superconsciousness to such an extent that in this case our whole human being follows only the consciousness of the etheric body or the physical body. [6]

There is a researched case where a number of people perished in a natural disaster. However, this then led to these people feeling united at a later time and proving to be strong enough to undertake something together in the world as a result of their common fate. That catastrophe was the cause that in later life they had thoroughly grown out of the habit of clinging only to matter, so that for their later life they brought with them an attitude which led them to the spiritual. [7]

Sources:

[1], [6], [7] GA 120: The Revelations of Karma (1910)

[2], [3] GA 95: Before the Gates of Theosophy (1906)

[4] GA 157a: The Formation of Destiny and Life after Death (1915)

[5] GA 178: Individual Spirit Beings and their Work in the Soul of Man (1917)

Karma and misfortune

Let us take the case where a prosperous human life is taken by misfortune. The spiritual researcher is confronted with the following. If he pursues this soul beyond death, it becomes evident that in passing through this misfortune it has absorbed powers which are capable of preparing higher intellectual faculties for the next earthly life than would have been prepared if this misfortune had not been brought about. [1] In passing through the forces which destroy physical life, the soul acquires powers of invention which dominate, direct and penetrate the physical world. [2]

The devoted natures inclined towards the spiritual here on earth owe this to their life of martyrdom in a previous incarnation. The earth could not progress if people did not sacrifice themselves. [3]

When such elemental events (natural catastrophes) occur, it is not the ordinary natural laws of the earth that are at work, it is the old moon that begins to rumble, although it orbits outside in the universe in its present form, but it has left forces behind in the earth after it has left it. But there is, I would like to say, a conspiracy in the universe which culminates in the fact that not only that which accompanies our earth with the present moon is used, but also that which has remained behind in the earth rumbling like a moon. But this is used by the ahrimanic powers. And ahrimanic powers can intervene in the life thread of humanity. And so one can also see how it is ahrimanic powers who, in such a case, stretch out their voluptuously satisfied faces from the depths of the earth when such natural disasters occur. (See also: Earth's interior - layer of fire).

Let us assume that a person of 30 years of age is seized by such a catastrophe, he would have reached the 65th year according to his karma for my sake. A person enters the spiritual world in a different way than with lived-out karma. Something is thereby carried into the spiritual world that would otherwise not be there: an etheric body that could still have been on earth, an astral body, an ego organization that could still have been on earth. Things destined for earthly life are carried into the spiritual world. [4] Then the gods have to look at this earlier life on earth and say: There is something there that has not experienced the effects it should have experienced. There are unused causes. And the gods can now take that which is there as unused causes, bring it to the human being and thereby strengthen him for the next earthly life precisely with regard to his inwardness. So that, as it were, the power of that which prevailed as a cause in a previous incarnation now bursts forth all the more powerfully in him in the next incarnation. Then the human being, whereas otherwise, if he had not been afflicted by such a catastrophe, he might have appeared in the world with inferior abilities, or even with abilities that would have been in a completely different field than they are when he appears in the next incarnation, then the human being appears as a completely different one for the balancing of karma. But he also appears with special peculiarities. For in a sense his astral body is condensed because unused causes are incorporated into it. A natural catastrophe evokes in the person who is afflicted by it an intensified memory of everything that is contained in his karma as a cause. The intellectual qualities of a person are condensed in his astral body during a natural disaster. [5] If you are involved in a natural event, you feel that you can learn a lot from it for the future. If something happens to you through people, it is usually a fulfilled karma. [6]

On the contrary, a railroad catastrophe, a civilizational catastrophe in general, causes us to forget our karma. As a result, however, a strong receptivity arises for the impressions that the human being receives anew from the spiritual world after death. And the consequence of this is that such a person now has to ask himself: what about the unused karma in me? And while a person's intellectual qualities in particular are condensed in his astral body during a natural catastrophe, his volitional qualities are condensed and strengthened during civilization catastrophes. This is how karma works. [7]

A disaster need not even be caused in any way by the previous life. It can occur spontaneously; it will only have its consequences for the following life and also for all lives between earth lives, because we very often see that out of misfortune, out of suffering and pain grows that which is differently formed consciousness in the spiritual world. [8]

Sources:

[1], [2] GA 63: Spiritual Science as the Good of Life (1913/1914)

[3] GA 157a: Formation of destiny and life after death (1915)

[4], [5], [7] GA 236: Esoteric Observations on Karmic Connections - Second Volume (1924)

[6] GA 300a: Conferences with the Teachers of the Waldorf School. Volume I (1919-1924)

[8] GA 178: Individual Spirit Beings and their Work in the Soul of Man (1917)

Karma view of a pre-incarnation through observation

One does not gain such an insight when one ponders over the initially imposing expressions of a personality; one feels it excited by the traits of the individuality which apparently accompany such expressions, but in reality deepen them indefinitely and enter into the intuition. Nor do you gain it if you seek it while you are with the personality, but only when the strong impression lingers and becomes like a vivid memory in which what is essential in external life is extinguished and what is otherwise "unessential" begins to speak a very clear language. Anyone who "observes" people in order to unravel their previous lives on earth will certainly not reach their goal. Such observation must be felt as an insult inflicted on those being observed; only then can one hope that the long past of the human being will be revealed in the present, as if by a destiny coming from the spiritual outside world. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 28: My Course of Life (1923-1925)

Karma atmosphere around the earth

If you approach the earth from world space, you will experience it enclosed in an atmosphere of human karma that surrounds it like a warm, loving cloak from which your own karma speaks to you with worldly power. If you learn to meet the guardian, you will experience how your karma envelops you like a cloak of warmth, how it lovingly fans you. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 266/3: From the Contents of the Esoteric Hours. Volume III (1913, 1914; 1920 - 1923) (1913-1923)

Understanding Karma Leads to Serenity

What characteristics must we specially cultivate if we wish to work in a beneficial way on our will life?

Most beneficial of all in our will nature is the influence of a life directed in its entire character towards a comprehension of karma. We might also say a soul life which strives to develop, as its primary characteristic, serenity and acceptance of our destiny. And what better way can one find of developing this acceptance, this calmness of soul in the presence of one's destiny, than by making karma an actual content in one's life?

What do we mean by this? It means that — not merely theoretically but in a living way — when our own sorrow or the sorrow of another comes upon us, when we experience joy or the heaviest blow of fate, we shall really be fully aware that, in a certain higher sense, we ourselves have given the occasion for this painful blow of fate.

Our serenity, our acceptance of our karma in all occurrences, strengthens our will. We grow stronger in facing life with serenity, never weaker. Through anger and impatience we become weak. In the face of every occurrence we are strong when we are serene. On the contrary, we become continually weaker in will through moroseness and an unnatural rebellion against destiny.

Sources:

GA 130 – Esoteric Christianity and the Mission of Christian Rosenkreutz – Lecture 2 – Leipzig, 5th November 1911
https://rsarchive.org/GA/GA0130/19111105p01.html

18
Language

The "word" is exposed to danger in two directions, which can come from the development of the consciousness soul. It serves the communication in social life, and it serves the communication of the logically-intellectually recognized. In both directions the "word" loses its own validity. It must adapt to the "meaning" it is supposed to express. It must make us forget how there is a reality in the sound, in the sound, and in the sound itself. The beauty, the brilliance of the vowel, the characteristic of the consonant is lost from the language. The vowel becomes soulless, the consonant spiritless. And so language steps completely out of the sphere from which it originates, out of the sphere of the spiritual. It becomes the servant of intellectual, cognitive and spiritual social life. It is completely torn out of the sphere of art. True spiritual perception falls quite instinctively into the "experience of the word". It learns to feel the soul-borne sound of the vowel and the spiritually powerful painting of the consonant. It gains an understanding of the secret of the development of language. This secret consists in the fact that once divine-spiritual beings were able to speak to the human soul through the word, whereas now this word only serves communication in the physical world. [1]

In language we have really not merely given what modern materialistic science believes, but we have given something in language which is often connected with the not fully conscious human experience, which often takes place in the subconscious human regions, which is therefore also permeated by spiritual beings. Spiritual entities live in the language of man, work in it, and as man forms words, creates words, elemental entities force themselves into his words through the spaces in which men converse with each other. That is why it is so important to pay attention to certain intimacies of language, and not simply to abandon oneself to the arbitrariness of the life of the passions when one speaks. [2] What we perceive in language is the reflection of the life of higher beings from a higher world, the reflection of their inner development in the world in which we find ourselves in the time between birth and death. [3]

That in which man is not yet so independent (as in actions), but in which another spirit is still involved, that is speech. Thus we make impressions in a world behind which stands not only the physical, but life. In the world of life there remain the imaginations of what we are talking about, formative forces that create new races. [4]

When you feel air, you must realize that it is a spiritual substance that completely surrounds the physical body, and that with every breath you inhale not only physical air, but also spirit. It is the spirit, which has its body in the air, that has made it possible for people to speak. For it is the very mechanism of the human organism which makes the present breathing process possible that also makes speech possible. Language developed in the Atlantean period, and the highest expression of language was that which the "I" learned to pronounce at the end of the Atlantean period. This is a process that begins in the Lemurian period and gradually reaches its perfection towards the end of the Atlantean period. [5]

Thought lives in the breath. Thought is a force that can act on the air we breathe. We can follow those impulses of will that are expressed in speech if we look with our imagination into the whole weaving and working of that which pervades the physical body and the etheric body as the soul. [6]

When a person sings or speaks, a spectrum of the whole person always comes to light in the tone and vocalization. What you hear is the tone, is the vowel. But that which comes to light for the clairvoyant consciousness is basically a whole human being, the whole human being in a form of movement. [7] (See also: Eurythmy).

How would man think, and how would he speak and hear what is spoken, if only the spirits of form (the biblical Elohim) and their servants created and guided the earth. If this were the case, if no Luciferic and Ahrimanic influence had asserted itself in the earth's development, then there would have been complete harmony between speaking and thinking in this earth's development from the outset. We must first seek this harmony through a certain objectivity. [8] If only the Luciferic Angeloi had come, the delusion of unity (of the internationality of the conceptual world, of the uniform dogmatics extending over the whole earth) would indeed have come over the earth; but the individual languages would have developed in such a way that, if one only overcame the delusion of unity in one's mind, one could still feel in the different languages what lies in them. But once the world of imagination had been torn away from the Luciferic Angeloi, it was then easy for the Ahrimanic Archangeloi to drive the language down another step; so that there was then no longer any possibility of developing the language in such a way that the feeling for the immediate imagination would have remained in it. [9]

By gradually turning language into a sign, the Luciferic-Ahrimanic element will be overcome. But if it had not come at all, an intimate harmony between speaking and thinking would have developed in mankind; that is, it would have come about in such a way that man would have a perception, a living feeling for that which lies in the sound of speech, for that which lies in D, T, Th and so on, which he does not have today. The one-sidedness of thinking, which is not at all expressed in speech, is something we must take into consideration, for it is something that is already branched off from speech. It would have appeared in a much more intimate connection with speech if no ahrimanic-luciferic effects had intervened in earthly existence. People would permeate the linguistic with their innermost life sensations, they would, so to speak, be inside the sound, but at the same time experience the concept, the idea inside the sound; they would not feel both separately, but feel both as one. This is how the spirits of form, the Exusiai, have designed it for man. [10] And according to the intentions of the Spirits of Form, people should not have distinguished themselves according to linguistic characters on earth, but the difference between nations was conceived by the Spirits of Form in such a way that it should only be based on natural foundations, on geographical and climatic differences. Man was to feel himself to be a nation by feeling himself to be connected with certain powers which were naturally at work in the natural foundations of his existence. On the other hand, if the intentions of the spirits of form alone had been carried out, it would have been possible for man to understand from the outset what lies in the word. Different languages would already have existed. But men would not have been different in the understanding of languages; but in the perception of what lies in the individual sound, in the individual letter, man would indeed have heard the other language, but he would not have heard the fullest part of the sound, of the word; in the word, in the sound within, he would have heard the conception, on the wings of the word the conception would have come to him. One does not now understand the foreign language for the reason that the ideas are not in the word at all, because the words are divorced from the ideas. [11]

The human etheric body is involved in the sense of hearing. But this etheric body, as man has it today, is incapable of giving off anything in truth without permanent loss for us, as the sensory body still can. The etheric body has already been so formed since Atlantean times that it can no longer give anything away, for man would then have to do without such things in his life force. It must therefore happen in a different way if a hearing effect is to come about. Here, therefore, man can no longer emit anything. Man cannot develop a higher sense out of himself than the sense of warmth. If something that man himself does not have were not to enter into man here, no sense of hearing could come about. Man must therefore be permeated by beings that penetrate him like a sponge. These are the beings we call Angeloi, who have already passed through the human stage in the past. They send their astral substance into us human beings as a foreign astral substance, which the human being appropriates and allows to work in him and flow out. It flows through the ears towards what is carried to us through sound. On the wings of these entities, as it were, we step into that inner being which we learn to recognize as the soul of things. Now there is still a higher sense, namely the sense of speech or word or sound. Where this comes into consideration, man again has nothing that he could give away of his own accord. Here, therefore, beings must intervene whose substance is similar to that of which the human etheric body consists. Of course they also have the corresponding astral substance, but this is pushed out into the environment. They must enter the human being, they give their etheric body and the human being can then let this power flow out into the environment. These are the Archangeloi. They cause the human being not only to hear the sound, but also to experience it in an understanding way. These beings are nothing other than what we call the folk spirits. While in the sense of hearing the Angeloi express their work externally through air effects, by treating the air in the ear, the Archangeloi oppose what happens in the air outside with other effects. Through them, the effects of juices are produced in a watery substance. The circulation of the humors is brought in a certain direction by what they cause. For example, the fact that man perceives the corresponding sense of sound in the A is also brought about by the finer humors. The outer expression of this work lies in the fact that the physiognomies of the people are formed. Hence we may say that the humors flow differently in a man, and the whole organism acts differently, according as that Archangeloi being imparts this or that sense of sound to the people to whom it belongs. [12]

For example, if a people say "Aham" - I in Sanskrit - for I, whatever other theories they may have about the human I, they do not matter, but the two A's in succession give an original organization, and the member of this people must have such a sense of the I as corresponds to these two successive A's. If a people combine I with ch, a quite different effect occurs. When a people combines I with ch, a quite different effect occurs. Such a people must have a different conception of the I. This is the effect of spirits who stand on the level of the Archangeloi in the hierarchical order and who permeate man with that which is sound and quicken his watery substance. It is also one of the greatest experiences for the person ascending to the supersensible when he begins to feel what a difference there is in the formative power of sounds. Then it can also be felt what meaning lies in it when someone feels compelled to call some being by the name "Eve". If the person concerned wants to express something else that relates to it like the spiritual to the sensual, he could use the mirror image of it and thus get "Ave" as a sequence of syllables for the greeting to Mary. This creates an opposite feeling in the human organism than when he speaks "Eve". Another reversal of "Eve" with the J in front of it would be the word "Yahweh", as a designation for God in the Old Testament. All the relationships between Yahweh and Eve can be recognized by those who penetrate the sound when they progress to higher knowledge. Language did not come about arbitrarily; it is a spiritual product. In order to perceive it in its spirit, we have the sense of sound. [13]

The development of language also depended on the development of memory. As long as man did not preserve the past, he could not communicate what he had experienced through language. And because the first beginnings of a memory took place in the last Lemurian period, the ability to name what was seen and heard could also begin at that time. Only people who have a memory can do something with a name that is attached to something. The Atlantean period is therefore also the period in which language found its development. And with language a bond was created between the human soul and things other than man. The latter produced the sound word within himself; and this sound word belonged to the objects of the outside world. And a new bond also comes into being between man and man through communication by means of language. Now the forces in the souls of these first Atlanteans still had something natural about them. In a sense, these people were even more closely related to the natural beings around them than their successors. Thus the sounds they produced were also something natural. They did not merely name things, but their words had a power over things and also over their fellow human beings. When the first Atlantean pronounced a word, this word developed a power similar to that of the object it designated. It was because of this that words had healing powers at that time, that they could promote the growth of plants, tame the rage of animals, and similar effects. All this became less and less powerful in the later Atlantean sub-races. One could say that the natural abundance of strength gradually disappeared. The first Atlanteans perceived this abundance of power as a gift of mighty nature; and their relationship to nature had a religious character. Language in particular had something sacred for them. And the misuse of certain sounds, which had an inherent power, was something impossible. Every human being felt that such misuse would bring him tremendous harm. The magic of such words would have turned into its opposite; what, used in the right way, would have brought blessing, would, if used sacrilegiously, have become a ruin to the originator. In a certain innocence of feeling, the first Atlanteans attributed their power not so much to themselves as to the divine nature at work within them. [14]

You can no longer do that today, words have lost their old suggestive value, their power. In ancient times, the power of human commonality flowed from soul to soul as people spoke to each other. Just as we breathe in the common air when we are together in a hall, so in ancient times there was a spiritual power of commonality in what people spoke to each other. This has been lost in the progressive evolution of humanity. The word has become more and more deified.

Such word formulas (see also: mantras), which had an effect far beyond the ordinary, were handed down in the Mysteries. Now you can understand that they could not be betrayed, because the fact that man knew these formulas gave him a great power over other men which could not be abused. It is an absolutely real truth that when the old Hebrew temple priest pronounced what in ordinary life was called the Word, but which had a certain composition of sound, then, when he pronounced it in the right way - because in those ancient times it was so that in that composition of sound lay the power - it actually occurred to the people to whom he spoke that there was another world around them, spiritual, but this spirituality was real. [15]

Ancient people learned to think from their words, and in ancient times there were no other thoughts than those that came from words. [16] Only then will man recognize the various secrets of language, when language is traced back to its origin, namely when it is itself traced back to imaginative cognition. When the sound is grasped by the imagination, poured into it to fill it as a shell, then it becomes the sound, the real sound. [17]

If we go back to the very ancient times of mankind, we find that the will is intensively involved in the formation of words. If we now go back to those very ancient times when men expressed their relationship of will in language, that is, to the last times of Atlantean development, language, or that which lived in language as a being from the Hierarchy of the Archangeloi, was something different from what later existed in this relationship. In those ancient times words were certainly expressions of human reaction processes, of what man saw himself compelled to do under the influence of the world. Expressions of will were almost the only expressions that the most ancient languages had during the evolution of man. This came from the fact that the Archangeloi came to language by way of intuition. As long as their language-forming power was based on intuition, the Archangeloi gave themselves up to the next higher hierarchy, the Kyriotetes, Dynamis, Exusiai. There they stood. And from what they experienced through their intuitive standing in this hierarchy, they were able to instill the language-forming power into life on earth. In the next epoch the Archangeloi progressed in such a way that their language-forming power flowed from inspiration. They now listened to the inspirations of the first Hierarchy, the Thrones, Cherubim, Seraphim, and out of this inspiration they instilled the language-forming power into earth-life. [18] If we go back to the first times of post-Atlantean development, even as far as Egyptianism and Chaldeanism, we find everywhere how the source from which the Archangeloi draw in order to impart language to man is inspiration. There the language becomes such - it undergoes a metamorphosis - that above all the words become the expression of human feelings and sensations in general. The old language of will is replaced by a language of feeling. And the preferred state is that in which what is felt in the external process or the external being is what was also felt when the sounds articulated into words came from the depths of the human being through the organs of speech. [19] The language of feeling prevailed right into Greek times, for example among the philosophers up to Plato. The first philosophical philistine is the great universal mind Aristotle. Then we come to the time when the Archangeloi, by imparting language to man, are no longer subject to inspiration but to imagination. And language becomes the language of thought. People are speaking more and more from their thoughts, language is to a certain extent approaching the abstract element of man. This is based on something very significant. The Archangeloi have received the intuitions from the 2nd Hierarchy, the inspirations from the 1st Hierarchy, the imaginations - yes, at first there is no hierarchy beyond the first. That is why certain Archangeloi beings have had to resort to bringing the imaginations, that is, the images of the language-forming power - for these are the imaginations - from the past, i.e. to continue what has gone before. The immediate source of the power to form language ceased. An ahrimanic element entered into language. And this, which the Archangeloi felt about themselves in the Upper One, expressed itself in humanity in that language became more and more abraded, paralyzed, no longer existing as something as alive as in earlier times. Consider what a tremendously significant thing is expressed in this fact. Something comes into human life which actually needed a higher hierarchy than the first hierarchy. One has only to feel this in its tremendously comprehensive significance, and one is made aware of how a time had come when the gods had to grow beyond that which was contained in the first Hierarchy. [20]

What took place on earth, and what appears in the human mind as a realization of the event of Golgotha, is the image of something immensely more comprehensive, more grandiose, more powerful, more sublime, which took place in the worlds of the gods themselves. And the Christ's passage through death on Golgotha is an event through which the 1st Hierarchy reached up into a higher realm. That is why I have always had to tell you that the Trinity actually lies above the Hierarchies. But it only came to this in the course of development. And that is why, among many other things, the event of Golgotha is also connected with the fact that when people gradually absorb the Christ-impulse more and more, they in turn receive the living source of language through the Christ-impulse. A revitalization of the creative power of language in the human being can only occur if people increasingly take hold of the Christ-impulse as a living thing, so that the Christ-impulse becomes precisely the creative power of language. [21]

Let us only imagine that, as man undergoes an elevation, this elevation of man also constitutes an elevation of the higher hierarchies. Let us be clear about the fact that the imaginations of the Archangeloi will presently become living imaginations when the Archangeloi receive more and more of the Christ, who will have found his dwelling-place in the hearts of men on earth, who will enter into the imaginations of the Archangeloi as an impulse. [22]

Language is not part of what man is predisposed to from the outset. The acquisition of language depends on the ego dwelling among other human egos. If man is transplanted (alone) to a distant island, he does not learn to speak. [23]

And now let's take a look at our human being today: How did man become what he is today for spiritual science? What gave him the particular form that distinguishes him from all other living beings in his environment; what actually makes him human? Language, which is expressed in sounds, is what makes him human. The phonetic creates the human form from the animal form. [24]

Mythical, figurative expression has been devalued. People do not feel that there is something behind the imagination. This process will extend to language itself in the course of the 5th post-Atlantean cultural period, especially among the English-speaking population. Not only were images devalued as a means of expression, but the word as such was devalued. Just as the image is being fought from the materialist consciousness today, so the word will be fought in the future. It will be said that the word is not capable of expressing anything true through itself. [25] In former times men learned much through the genius of language, and they did not actually think very much themselves; they let language think for them. Today, people only make progress if they can emancipate themselves from language with their thoughts and feelings. To a certain extent, language today runs like a mechanism in which we are caught up, and instead of us, Ahriman is actually living more and more in the development of language. Ahriman actually speaks today when people speak. And people must gradually become accustomed to understanding themselves from something quite different than the mere wording of the languages. One must be much deeper in life in order to understand other people today than in the age when what people had exchanged with each other was still preserved on the wings of language.196.80 In the East, however, man is completely grown together with his language. The spiritual-soul lives there, lives in language. The man of the West lives in his language as in a garment; the man of the East lives in his language as in himself. That is why the man of the West could accept the scientific view of life, pour it into his language, which is only a vessel. The scientific world view of the West will never gain a foothold in the Orient, because it cannot immerse itself in the languages of the Orient. [26] The further east we go, the richer the language, the further west the poorer. America is therefore the poorest; it has the least vocabulary in its language.

The prayers of the old languages lose their ancient power when they are translated into newer languages. There is much more power in the Latin words of the Pater noster than in the Lord's Prayer. The language of the old Lord's Prayer is Aramaic. Whoever spoke it in the Aramaic language felt magic power. [27] When a child speaks Greek, it actually speaks only with the larynx and the chest; when it speaks Latin, something of the whole person always resonates. French is very similar to Latin. When it speaks English, it almost spits out the letters; the chest is less involved in this than in speaking French, where much, much is thrown off. The word dies out towards its end, especially in English. [28]

In a certain way we have distanced ourselves from the inner content of language - this is a characteristic social phenomenon of the present - we have distanced ourselves so far from the content of language that we can say one thing and the opposite, the other, with the same words and phrases. [29]

Sources:

[1] GA 28: My Course of Life (1923-1925)

[2] GA 275: Art in the Light of Mystery Wisdom (1914/1915)

[3], [8] - [11] GA 162: Questions of Art and Life in the Light of Spiritual Science (1915)

[4] GA 93a: Basic Elements of Esotericism (1905)

[5] GA 96: Original Impulses of Spiritual Science. Christian Esotericism in the Light of New Spiritual Knowledge (1906/1907)

[6] GA 82: So that the human being may become fully human. The Significance of Anthroposophy in the Spiritual Life of the Present (1922)

[7] GA 161: Paths of Spiritual Knowledge and the Renewal of the Artistic World View (1915)

[12], [13] GA 115: Anthroposophy - Psychosophy - Pneumatosophy (1909/1911)

[14] GA 11: From the Akashic Chronicle (1904/1908)

[15] GA 172: The Karma of Man's Vocation in Connection with Goethe's Life (1916)

[16] GA 171: Inner Impulses for the Development of Humanity. Goethe and the Crisis of the Nineteenth Century (1916)

[17], [23] GA 127, page 94 (1975 edition, 256 pages)GA 127: The Mission of the New Spiritual Revelation. The Christ-Event as the Central Event of Earth Evolution (1911)GA 122: The Secrets of the Biblical History of Creation. The Six-Day Work in the 1st Book of Moses (1910)

[18] - [22] GA 224: The human soul in its connection with divine-spiritual individualities. The Internalization of the Annual Festivals (1923)

[25] GA 181: Earth Death and World Life. Anthroposophical Gifts of Life. Necessities of Consciousness for the Present and the Future (1918)

[26] GA 200: The New Spirituality and the Christ-Experience of the Twentieth Century (1920)

[27] GA 97: The Christian Mystery (1906/1907)

[28] GA 294: The Art of Education. Methodical-Didactic (1919)

[29] GA 192: Spiritual Scientific Treatment of Social and Pedagogical Questions (1919)

Mantras

In ancient times, the power of human commonality flowed from soul to soul as people spoke to each other. Just as we breathe in the common air when we are together in a hall, there was a spiritual power of commonality in what people spoke to each other in ancient times. This has been lost in the progressive evolution of humanity. The word has become more and more deified. Word formulas, which had an effect far beyond the ordinary, were handed down in the Mysteries. Now you can understand that they could not be betrayed, because the fact that man knew these formulas gave him a great power over other men which could not be abused. [1]

Mantras produce vibrations of the word that correspond to the vibrations of thought in the Akashic Matter. The Christmas saying "Gloriam in excelsis deo et pax hominibus bonae voluntatis" (for example) has a mantric effect in Latin. [2]

The Yogi, to a certain extent, radiated his soul and thoughts through the breathing process. He drove all this soulful thinking more into himself. And the result of this was that a special sense of self, a special sense of "I" emerged from his soul, he felt as if he had been taken back to the time when he was a spiritual-soul being within a spiritual-soul world. And out of what came over him, out of the relationship of this now awakened self to the whole universe, those wonderful ancient poems, for example the Bhagavad Gita, came into being. And if you read the Bhagavad Gita with the awareness that it was actually the soul that had returned to the spiritual world with the heightened sense of self that said everything that Krishna or other ancient initiates who had attained such a sense of self breathed out, then you are reading these ancient poems correctly. So we can say that those ancient sages stood out from the masses of the population at that time and strictly separated their self from the outside world. But they did not separate it through egoistic thoughts, but through a transformed breathing process which, as it were, submerged with the soul into the inner rhythm of the air. One felt how the thoughts passed through the respiratory currents, and with this immersion of the thoughts, which, I would like to say, passed through the respiratory currents like snakes, one felt one's self inside the universe of the world, and one then expressed what could reveal itself out of this sensation in certain words and sayings. And so the mantric sayings, the mantrams, were formed out of the altered breathing process, in that the words that were carried by this breathing process were, as it were, lifted off. And while in older times the essential thing was the breathing process and its experience, it then became these sayings. That became part of the tradition, that became part of the historical consciousness of the people, and from that essentially the later rhythm, beat and so on of poetry developed. [3]

The path that is taken through the three senses (sense of speech, sense of thought, sense of self) (to human understanding) was taken in a different way by the ancient, especially Indian, sages for the purpose of higher knowledge. He did not, so to speak, allow the power of the soul to penetrate through the word when listening, when perceiving speech, in order to come to an understanding of the other person through the word, but he remained with the word itself. He lived into the word with his whole soul life. This then led to the formation of such a life in sayings, in the so-called mantras. A power arose in the soul from the recitation and repetition of the mantram, which now did not lead over to other people, but which led into the spiritual world. And then, in this way, instead of living over to the ego of the other person, one comes to live up to the egos of individualized spiritual entities that surround us just as we are surrounded by the entities of the sensual world. [4]

It is the case with occult sayings that if they come to others unlawfully, they lose their effect, for the act of transmission is part of the effectiveness of the school. [5]

Sources:

[1] GA 172: The Karma of Man's Vocation in Connection with Goethe's Life (1916)

[2] GA 264: On the History and Contents of the First Section of the Esoteric School 1904 to 1914: Letters, Circular Letters, Documents and Lectures (1904-1914)

[3] GA 212: Human Soul Life and Spiritual Striving in Connection with World and Earth Development (1922)

[4] GA 322: Limits of the Knowledge of Nature (1920)

[5] GA 270/3: Esoteric Instructions for the First Class of the School of Spiritual Science at the Goetheanum. Volume III (1924)

19
Lucifer

The name Lucifer means: the bearer of light. Lux means light, fero: I carry. [1] We summarize certain forces which play a part in the world becoming and which also have man in their currents as Luciferic on the one hand and Ahrimanic forces on the other. With such words it is just so that one must acquire for years that which is inherent in such words, otherwise they remain phrases. But if one has the content, then one has something in these words that one must have, just as the electrician has two impulses in his positive and negative electricity, which he must have in order to be able to speak of the matter. It is a matter of carrying the scientific spirit that prevails in inorganic natural science today up into spiritual life, but not in such a way that one becomes a monist in the common sense, but that one actually metamorphoses the way of thinking that prevails there for the higher branches of spiritual life, and also expresses it in these higher branches. But if someone were to speak of positive and negative soul forces with reference to the soul and spiritual life, he would fall into the utmost abstraction. But exactly the same way of thinking that correctly speaks of positive and negative in the inorganic field, speaks of Luciferic and Ahrimanic in the soul-spiritual field. We can also define what is luciferic and ahrimanic in the abstract. We can say that the human being as we actually have him before us, as we ourselves are, is a state of equilibrium; he is actually only ever something that is a balance between two poles, between the Luciferic pole and the Ahrimanic pole.

On the one hand, everything in us tends towards the fantastic, the rapturous, the one-sided, and, if it degenerates, towards the illusionary. If we did not carry this Luciferian extreme within us, we would never be able to become artists. The other pole is the ossified, the rational, the sober. Physiologically speaking, the ahrimanic in us is everything that forms the forces in us that make us bony. The Luciferic in us is everything that forms the forces that organize us into muscles and blood. [2]

Think for a moment that we as human beings actually have the task of experiencing within ourselves what the balance beam experiences when it is constantly swaying and only has one equilibrium position, swaying back and forth between left and right. Thus, as human beings, we really must sway between the Luciferian and the Ahrimanic. Related, very related to the Ahrimanic is always the thought, which only leans on the outer sense world. And the will that leans on the experiences of our body, that rises in the egoistic impulses of our body, has a constant tendency to take on a Luciferic character. Thus the soul is also interwoven with the Luciferic and Ahrimanic. [3]

The principle that leads the earth up to spirituality is Lucifer. In order to live according to this principle, one must come to love the earth, one must descend to the earth. Lucifer is the prince who carries out his government in the field of science and art. Lucifer is depicted as the winged dragon; in Ezekiel as the winged bull. [4] Lucifer is a power that has an enthusiasm for wisdom that is as vehement as the sensuality of the animal. The greed for the development of wisdom, that is Lucifer. [5]

Again and again it must be urged that certain conceptions, notions and ideas which must have meaning within our spiritual science should not become mere word-conceptions, that one should not approach these conceptions of spiritual science, which in many respects represent a new spiritual heritage of mankind, with old conceptions and inner habits of soul. Thus it is especially necessary that one does not approach such ideas as the "Ahrimanic", the "Luciferic" with all the usual feelings and ideas that one simply harbors when one forms the words in question. We need only imagine how in more southern regions there is a demon conception that we encounter with our feelings when we pronounce the name Lucifer. But we should not, when we get the spiritual-scientific ideas of Lucifer, have the same, I would like to say, quite repellent ideas and feelings as we had with the old demon ideas. Nor may we readily apply the ideas that arose in the human soul when the medieval ideas of the devil were awakened to our Ahrimanic. We must realize that the world as it stands before us is, so to speak, a state of equilibrium. [6] (But the reverse is also true). While people believe that with such a juxtaposition, as found in Milton's "Paradise Lost" or in Klopstock's "Messiah", one is dealing with the divine and the infernal elements, one is actually dealing with the Luciferic and the Ahrimanic elements. There is no consciousness of the truly divine element, whereas the divine names are attached to the Luciferic element.

This delusion in which we find ourselves is nothing other than the result of that false view of the world which, for the people of the newer culture, the newer civilization, sprouts up everywhere from the world by opposing heaven and hell. Heaven is regarded as divine, as they describe it, and hell is regarded as the devilish, whereas in truth we are dealing on the one side with the heavenly called Luciferic and on the other side with the hellish called Ahrimanic. [7] Remember, the Christ impulse can only be understood if it is seen as the balance impulse between the Ahrimanic and the Luciferic. [8] (See also: trichotomy).

It is only a matter of bringing about a state of equilibrium in the human mind. And because this is so, one can fall prey to the Ahrimanic and the Luciferic, precisely when one believes that one is rejecting everything Ahrimanic-Luciferic. One can sin against reality, but reality cannot be suppressed! So someone who wants to guard against the Ahrimanic will very easily fall prey to the Luciferic, someone who wants to guard against the Luciferic will very easily fall prey to the Ahrimanic. The point is that we find the balance, that we do not shy away from anyone, that we as human beings have enough courage to confront both, let us say, the Ahrimanic fear and the Luciferic hope or desire. But our contemporary culture does not love this; it loves the Ahrimanic and the Luciferic in certain respects without knowing it, and of course without wanting to. It believes itself to be on guard against it, but falls into it all the more. There are philosophers who say that they strive for unity. That's nice, but it's purely Luciferian! Others strive for diversity and want nothing to do with unity. This too can bear fruit today, but it is Ahrimanic. Only he who seeks unity in multiplicity, and again seeks multiplicity in such a way that unity is revealed through multiplicity, strives for equilibrium. It is only a question of finding the possibility of doing this in reality. [9]

If we want to characterize Lucifer and Ahriman personally, we can say: Lucifer is a haughty spirit who prefers to take a bird's-eye view and overlook many things; Ahriman is a morally lonely spirit who does not allow himself to be seen easily, who lives in the subconscious of man, who works on the subconscious of man, who conjures up judgments from this subconscious. [10]

The Luciferic element presents itself as multiplicity because it strives for multiplicity, so it is better to say "the Luciferic spirits". If it were entirely up to the Luciferic spirits, we would become children, young men and virgins, we would be instilled with the good knowledge of time, but we would get sclerosis at the age of about 28 and soon after that we would go mad, so that what we can develop as human understanding would be expelled as sclerosis, and what we absorb in youth could be spiritualized automatically. The Luciferic spirits want to take us into the spiritual world straight away and not let us go through Jupiter and Venus and volcanic development before we become cosmic beings. This is a current that wants to run as fast as possible with the human being; it is a hasty current. The Luciferic spirits want to rush along with us and lead us into cosmic beingness as soon as possible. The Ahrimanic spirits want to erase our past and lead us back to the starting point with the earth, preserve us on earth and then take us back to where we were as Saturnian beings. It is a retrograde movement. Life is ultimately composed of a premature and a retrograde movement, and the state of equilibrium between the two must be found. [11]

One cannot do anything in independence or in educational or culture-promoting activity in the human individual faculties and powers without coming into contact with the Luciferic forces. In those regions through which man passed before he entered physical existence through birth or conception, the Luciferic power could not directly approach human abilities and powers. Incarnation in the physical human body is the means by which the Luciferic powers can access human abilities and powers. [12] For by the fact that the faculties enter the body, they become Luciferic, and if one believes that the faculties arise from the body, one believes in Lucifer. And if one believes that needs arise from the human body, one believes only in the Ahrimanic nature of these needs. [13]

Man's mission in the post-Atlantean period, which consisted in the conquest of the physical-sensual world, necessarily led to alienation from the spiritual world. Lucifer veiled for man that from the spiritual world which had flowed into the human astral body without his intervention up to the middle of the Atlantean period. If the life body, the etheric body, had not been partially separated from the physical body, man would have been able to experience this area of the spiritual world as an inner revelation of the soul. Due to the Luciferic influence (see below: Luciferic influence) he could only do so in special states of soul. Then a spiritual world appeared to him in the guise of the astral. The corresponding beings revealed themselves through such figures, which merely bore the limbs of the higher human nature, and on these limbs the astral-visible symbols for their special spiritual powers. Superhuman figures revealed themselves in this way. [14]

Imagine that a moment could now occur in your ordinary life on earth when all your perceptions would cease. You would no longer be able to see, hear, think, feel or want anything new. All previous ways of living would cease and you would only know what you can remember. This is exactly the situation you are in when you ascend into the spiritual world with clairvoyant consciousness. The soul experiences itself in such a way that it can say of itself: You are now only what you have been, your existence consists in your being, present and future have no meaning for you at first, your being consists in your being. And when a person goes through this experience, when the clairvoyant soul penetrates to him, only then does one begin to have a real understanding of Lucifer. Lucifer is a being who, within the world order, has come to be only such a being, to be only a past, to be only what past earth epochs have given, what past world epochs have brought to Lucifer's soul. And Lucifer's life consists of fighting for the present and the future with his past, while the other divine-spiritual beings in the proper course of earthly development have condemned him to the past. Thus Lucifer stands before the clairvoyant gaze, preserving in his existence divine-spiritual things of the origins of the world, carrying all the glories of the world in his soul and condemned to say to them only: they have been in you. And now his eternal struggle begins to fight for the present and the future of this past in the world order. By experiencing the similarity of Lucifer, the macrocosmic similarity of Lucifer with the microcosmic being of the human soul on the threshold between the elementary world (see: Astral Plan) and the spiritual world (see: Devachan), one experiences the very deep tragedy of this figure of Lucifer. [15] The Luciferic powers are those that remained behind during the old lunar period; today they work into our earth development with those forces in human life that are actually lunar forces, which cannot take place at all within our earth development in the world plan that corresponds, for example, only to those powers whose opponent is Lucifer. Thus Lucifer works into the plan of another entity. [16]

If you remember that our earth was once one entity with the sun and moon, that the sun separated itself from the earth in order to be a dwelling place for more highly developed entities, which were then to work into our earth from outside, and that still higher entities remained united with the earth after the separation of the sun in order to lead out the moon. These were the same beings who, from within, stimulated a new life, a spiritual life in the human being and saved him from mummification. Within the life of the soul the paths were to be sought to those gods who were connected with this beneficent process of the separation of the moon. If we first look only at these two realms, the realms of the sun gods and moon gods, so to speak, we have a difference that we can describe as: gods located outside in the heavens and gods located below the soul: and we describe the way out as the sun way and the way into the soul as the Luciferic way. And Lucifer's beings are those who did not take part in the separation of the sun from the earth at the time when the sun separated from the earth. And certain other beings who are the highest benefactors of humanity, but who initially had to remain hidden and did not participate in this separation from the sun, did not really belong to any of these kingdoms. These were the beings who had remained behind during the old lunar evolution and had not reached the level they could have reached as spiritual beings, who at that time stood much higher than men on the moon. What did these beings miss out on back then? They missed the opportunity to participate in the separation of the sun during the subsequent earth evolution. They would have been called in a certain way to go out from the earth like the sun spirits and to work down from the sun. They failed to do so. The result for these beings was that they attempted in a certain way to separate themselves from the earth with the sun, but then could not endure the conditions of the sun's development and fell back to the earth. They, who were now in a very special situation, tried to continue their own development on earth with the help of human development. They could not approach the human ego; they had not risen to it during the old lunar evolution. Those beings who had moved out of the earth with the sun were able to approach the human ego. And those beings who had separated from the moon could also approach it from within. The beings who had fallen back from the sun were the ones who approached the human soul when it was not yet ripe to receive the revelation of those higher benefactors who had separated out the moon. These beings approached the human soul too early. If man had, so to speak, completely waited for the beneficial effect of those spiritual beings who worked from the moon, that is, into the interior of his soul, what happened earlier would have happened later. These moon gods would have slowly matured the soul of the human being until a corresponding ego development would have become possible. But in this way the other entities approached the human being and poured their effect into the human astral body from within instead of into the ego, just as the moon gods do, so that these entities sought the same path through the interior of the soul on which the actual moon gods later also worked; that is, these entities joined the Luciferic realm. And it is they who are symbolized by the serpent in the biblical document. They are the beings who approached the human astral body too early and who worked in exactly the same way as all other beings who work from within. [17]

And if we describe the entities working from within as Luciferian entities, we must also describe these retarded entities as such. But they are the ones who approached man when he was still immature for such influences, the ones who became his seducers on the one hand, but who also provided him with freedom, the possibility of becoming independent in the astral body from those divine entities who would have taken his ego into their protection, who would have poured into him from the outset what can be poured into the ego from divine spheres. But these Luciferic entities approached the human being's astral body, imbued it with everything that can inspire him with enthusiasm for all that is higher, spiritual, and thus had an effect on his soul and, as higher beings, became in a certain way the human being's seducer. And we must refer to this type of Luciferian entity as man's seducer, we must therefore say: That which approached man in the course of the earth's development and brought him freedom on the one hand, and the possibility of evil on the other, came from within, it came from Lucifer's kingdom. For these entities could not announce themselves from the outside, they had to creep into the soul's interior; from the outside man can be approached by what comes to his ego, not merely by his astral body. So you see that in the vast realm of the light-bearers, the Luciferic entities, there are sub-genera of which we can very well understand that they could become the seducers of man. But we can also understand very well that it was precisely because of these entities that strict measures were taken where people could be introduced into the realms beyond the veil of the soul world; for those people who were led this way into the interior of the soul not only met the good Luciferic entities there, which enlightened man from within, but they first met these Luciferic entities, which then acted as his seducers, which in particular incited pride, ambition and vanity in the soul. We must make ourselves thoroughly familiar with the fact that we should never try to encompass the worlds that lie behind the sensual world and behind the world of the soul with the concepts of understanding prepared by our present-day culture.

When we speak of Luciferic entities, we should get to know the whole extent of the realm of these entities, all their genera, varieties and species. Then we would see that not everywhere where the dangerousness of a certain kind of Luciferic entities is spoken of, there is an awareness of the whole extent of the corresponding realm; that one can be right when one speaks of certain genera of the Luciferic realm as this or that document speaks; but that at the same time one must take into account that the reality is wider, infinitely wider, than people can usually know. [18]

If one wants to characterize what Lucifer is for mankind as a whole, one cannot do so more intimately than by presenting the matter in such a way that Lucifer approaches the powers of woman and works into the world with the help of the specifically feminine powers, and man is then seduced by woman with the help of Lucifer. This symbol had to be placed before mankind, and it had to stand there when the fourth post-Atlantean period was there, where men were first to understand the relationship of Lucifer to man, where they were to feel it, to sense this relationship, to bring it to consciousness. There was no better way to become aware of Lucifer's relationship to man than by studying the beginning of the Bible, how the serpent approaches the woman, how the woman takes hold of his powers, and thus the seduction, the temptation of the world began. This significant symbol was the most effective for this fourth post-Atlantean cultural period, even if it had already existed earlier. The secret of Lucifer is contained in this symbol. We must place the Luciferian secret in the Lemurian period (see: Lemuria). [19]

The interaction between gods and humans was initially expressed in what we call the love of humans for each other. The gods receive the love pulsating in humans and live from it, just as the animal lives from the oxygen that the plant prepares for it. The love living in the human race is the food of the gods. All the power of the gods at the beginning of the evolution of mankind is based on this love, which entwines itself around the two sexes. Love existed before the emergence of bisexuality (see: separation of the sexes). It existed before as a fully conscious love. Now, when the bisexual human being came into being, the consciousness of love darkened. It became a blind instinct. The consciousness of love had ascended to the gods. The gods feed on this blind impulse of human love, it becomes the bright light for them. Under the influence of the gods, who had attained their perfection through their earlier evolution, man would have remained without the astral light, without knowledge. These gods had no other interest than that man should live on earth. Lucifer, however, had to make up for what he had neglected in the past. He could now only do this if he made use of the human being. Sensual existence was present in the human kingdom. Lucifer had no sensual existence. He had to use the bodies of men in order to advance himself. Therefore he had to give man the gift of seeing in the light that which the gods had implanted in him. The gods had implanted love in him, Lucifer had to induce him to see it in the light. So now we have man, the formed form, the wisdom; furthermore Lucifer, who gives light to mankind; and God, who floods man with love. Lucifer has a much more intimate relationship with man than the gods enthroned in love. Lucifer has opened man's eyes. When man opens his eyes and looks out into the world, Lucifer looks out into the world within man. He completes his development in man. Insofar as man rested in the bosom of the gods, he was a child of God. Insofar as he strove for knowledge, he was a friend of Lucifer. This is expressed in the legend of Pardieses. Yahweh shapes man. He is the spirit of form. He would have created people so that they lived in love, without the light. Then Lucifer, the serpent, came and brought man the light of knowledge and with it the possibility of doing evil. Now Yahweh tells man that the love that has joined with the knowledge of Lucifer will bring pain. Yahweh restrains the deeds of the one who has implanted knowledge, the light of love, by adding pain to love. [20]

Wherever man creates something in his imaginative, emotional and spiritual life that is not roughly attached to the world of the senses but rises above it, Lucifer is the power that tears him away from the world of the senses. The history of the development of philosophy (for example) is a continual demonstration of Lucifer's inspirations. For all creation that rises above the world of the senses is due to the legitimate powers and activities of Lucifer.

But now Lucifer can transcend his domain. All that which is soul-feeling in the physical-sensual world is that over which Lucifer is master. And he has the tendency to detach this soul-feeling, to peel it out of the physical-sensual world, to spiritualize it, and to set up a Luciferian kingdom for himself on a special, one might say isolated island of spiritual existence with all that he can catch, capture, of soul-feeling in the sensory world. [21]

You can get an idea of how Lucifer can get to people (through the example of love). Love, where the cause of love does not lie in the lover but in the beloved being, is that form of love in the world of the senses which is absolutely immune to all Luciferic influence. But now, if you look at human life, you can soon see that another kind of love also plays a part in human life, the kind of love where one loves because one has certain qualities oneself which feel satisfied, delighted, pleased when one can love this or that being. One then loves for its own sake; one loves because one is of this or that nature, and this particular nature feels its satisfaction by loving the other being. You see, this love, which one could call an egoistic love, must also be there. It must not be missing in humanity. For everything that we can love in the spiritual world, the spiritual facts, everything that can live in us through love as a longing, as an urge up into the spiritual world, to embrace the beings of the spiritual world, to recognize the spiritual world: it naturally also springs from sensual love for the spiritual world. But this love for the spiritual must, not may, but must necessarily happen for our sake. We are beings who have their roots in the spiritual world. It is our duty to make ourselves as perfect as possible. [22] Now Lucifer has a tendency to mix these two worlds together. Everywhere in human love, where man loves in the physical-sensual world with an egoistic touch, for his own sake, it happens because Lucifer wants to make sensual love similar to spiritual love. Then he can tear it out of the sensual world and lead it into his special realm. Lucifer finds the best recruits for his kingdom among people who can believe that it is necessary to cultivate certain (practical) forms of love life for the advancement of their own person. Lucifer strives everywhere to tear the soul-feeling away from the sensual, to make it independent, to enforce it with egoism and selfishness. [23]

All raptures, all confusion of obstinate opinions, all eccentric opinions, all false, rapturous idealisms, stem from the dark side of Luciferic impulses. [24]

Lucifer has, so to speak, made a part of the spiritual world behind man invisible to him. For when the human being's own passions, instincts and desires arose in his astral body, they obscured the spiritual entities of the world from which the human being was born, which otherwise always remained visible. Hence it was that in those great oracular places the ancient Atlantean initiates had prepared themselves to see that part of the spiritual world which had been obscured by the influence of Lucifer. The hosts of Lucifer (on the other hand) were visible at all to the Atlantean people, who in their twilight clairvoyant consciousness - in states of sleep and in the intermediate states between sleep and waking - were able to live themselves into the higher spiritual world. When a part of the world of light became accessible to these people, a part of the world directed against the world of light also became visible. And as delightful and magnificent as the noble figures of the world of light appeared in their astral colors, the figures belonging to the opposite, seductive world appeared terrible and horrible. [25]

The fact that Lucifer worked on man in the Lemurian period did not spoil anything for man other than the influence that man still had in the Atlantean period, in that he was able to work on the forces of air and water. [26] Lucifer basically only brought man under the influence of those forces which are connected with the wind and water forces. [27]

You must get an idea of what it means that in the nature surrounding mankind not only that which appears to the sober consciousness of today as nature and confronts us as natural laws was revealed, but that grandiose beauty, that is, beautiful appearance, was revealed in powerful, pictorial revelations of spiritual beings that looked out of every spring, out of every cloud, out of everything. It was towards the end of the 2nd millennium of the pre-Christian era, not as in even older times, where of course all this was also there; but it was, I would like to say, more naturally there. At that time man had to partake of this grace by doing something himself. He did not have to do it in the way that we now seek a higher spiritual development out of full consciousness, but he could - and it was even a quite doubtful ability - develop desires for this spiritual that revealed itself in nature, he could fire up his powers of need, his driving forces; then the spiritual revealed itself to him, as it were, out of nature. And in this kindling of the driving forces, the forces of need, lay a strong Luciferic gift. Therefore, the world of culture and civilization at that time was strongly infested with Lucifer. [28]

If you speak from the point of view of clairvoyant consciousness, the expression has no meaning: Here is a being that is temporal - or: Here is a being that is eternal. What underlies existence - moment and eternity - is always and everywhere. The question cannot be posed in any other way than this: How is it that eternity once appears as a moment, that the eternal once appears temporally, and that a being in the world takes on the form of the temporal? This comes from nothing other than the fact that wherever our sensual being appears, it is at the same time permeated by Luciferic beings. And as far as the Luciferic being plays a part, eternity is turned into temporality. A being that appears somewhere in time is as much an eternal being as it is able to free itself from the Luciferic existence, and it is as much a temporal being as it is subject to the Luciferic existence. [29]

In the occult schools and mysteries it has always been understood that the middle man, the man who carries the heart, is to be assigned to the sun, and the man who carries the head, either to the whole starry heavens or preferably to the moon. The lower man is that region of the whole human nature which is assigned by the upper gods to the realm of Lucifer. But just as the things in the upper man are connected with the moon, and in the middle man with the sun, so the influences of Venus are connected with the form that confronts us when we cross the threshold of initiation; this is the star that astronomers today call Venus. Venus is therefore the realm of Lucifer. First of all, through the initiation we learn that the lower human being is the area of the whole human nature that is assigned to the realm of Lucifer by the upper gods. [30] Those forces which find their symbolic-physical expression by coming to us as the light of Venus, the morning and evening star, that these physical rays of Venus, which are sent into the world space, are the symbolic-physical influence of Lucifer on man. Lucifer did not limit himself to working on the lower human being. He would only have an effect there when Venus shines with its full disk, as (comparatively) with the full moon. You know that Venus has just such phases as the moon, i.e. that there is a waxing, a full and a waning Venus. The quarters have the same effect on the breast man as the quarters of the moon. But Venus, which has a spiritual effect, has an effect on the head man, so that an expression of what spiritual effects are in relation to man can be seen in the interaction of Sun, Moon and Venus in the sky. Mind you, an expression of what is in the human spirit. [31]

Sources:

[1], [20] GA 97: The Christian Mystery (1906/1907)

[2], [3] GA 192: Spiritual Scientific Treatment of Social and Pedagogical Questions (1919)

[4], [5] GA 93a: Basic Elements of Esotericism (1905)

[6] GA 169: World Being and Ego (1916)

[7], [8] GA 194: The Mission of Michael. The Revelation of the Real Secrets of the Human Being (1919)

[9] GA 169, page 105f (1963 edition, 182 pages)

[10], [11] GA 184: The Polarity of Duration and Development in Human Life. The Cosmic Prehistory of Humanity (1918)

[12], [13] GA 195: World New Year's Eve and New Year's Thoughts (1919/1920)

[14] GA 13: The Secret Science in Outline (1910)

[15] GA 147, page 111f (1969 edition, 168 pages)

[16] GA 120: The Revelations of Karma (1910)

[17], [18] GA 113: The Orient in the Light of the Occident. The Children of Lucifer and the Brothers of Christ (1909)

[19] GA 272: Spiritual-scientific explanations of Goethe's "Faust" Volume I: Faust, the striving man (1910-1915)

[21] - [24] GA 147: The Secrets of the Threshold (1913)

[25] - [27] GA 107: Spiritual Science of Man (1908/1909)

[28] GA 202: The Bridge between the World-Spirituality and the Physical of Man. The Search for the New Isis, the Divine Sophia (1920)

[29] GA 138: Of Initiation. Of Eternity and the Moment. Of Spiritual Light and the Darkness of Life (1912)

[30], [31] GA 137: Man in the Light of Occultism, Theosophy and Philosophy (1912)

Lucifer - the rightful task

There is a rightful task of Lucifer, a task which lies entirely in the sense of the general world order, to detach man and all souls in the world in general in a certain respect from mere life and absorption in the sensual-physical. Because of the existence of Luciferic powers, man is in a position to prevent his thinking from getting stuck in the mere portrait-like reproduction of the physical-sensual world; he can rise above it in free thinking. He does this, for example, in his philosophizing. From this point of view, all philosophizing is an inspiration of Lucifer. [1]

In the middle of sensuous life there is a minimum of that power which does not develop on the basis of the body, but which is supplied to man from the supersensible world by a detour through the will. In this epoch of life the soul develops a strong subconscious inclination, but one that works its way up into consciousness like an impulse, towards becoming one with the physical body organization. Through the forces of its own being, the soul strives, so to speak, to turn away from the spiritual world in which it lived before it entered sensory existence. Now this striving is counteracted by another power, which is originally not related to the powers of the human soul, but which in the course of the world comes to influence this soul. This force is not only active in man at the time of midlife, but throughout his entire life. In midlife it only makes itself particularly noticeable by preventing the turning away from the spiritual world. In general, however, it also makes itself felt within the constitution of the soul in human inclinations which can be described as unjustifiably arrogant. It is effective when the human being considers himself to be of a higher nature than corresponds to the degree of his developmental maturity. And it is also effective when a person feels driven to act in a way that, for example, is morally contrary to his nature as a human being. It may seem strange that a force which prevents a person from turning away from the spiritual world can also be a source of straying from the good. But supersensible knowledge, like sensory knowledge, shows that there are forces in the course of the world whose action in one direction is necessary and beneficial, but whose action in another direction can be the opposite. [2] In relation to the sensuous world the human soul can develop free will and make it a part of its own being by the fact that it is held back with a part of its being in the spiritual sphere by the Luciferic forces even during its stay in this world. The same power which in midlife saves man from becoming one with the bodily organization is also the image of his free will. Through it his life is lifted away from the mere natural context in which he stands through his bodily organization. [3]

If we look at the old religions, Lucifer was not always the one who brought destruction. In the old Indian religions, the wise, the leaders, those who enlighten people with the spirit, are called serpents. It is the same in many religions. [4] Just as man was when he began his development on earth, life rested in him at first; the gods kindled it again for a new earthly development. The kingdom of man and the kingdom of the gods, if we relate them to each other, are like wisdom and love. That is why occultism, all deeper religious creeds - including Christianity - speak of God or the gods as love, the vitalizing, sprouting principle. First of all, the sprouting and budding principle gives rise to sensual love. Therefore, in the Jewish religion of the Old Testament, Yahweh is presented as the giver of the sensual drive, as the giver of growth and multiplication. In the sensual instinct lies the principle of further development, which drives from the imperfect to the perfect, which is the development from animality up to where love establishes states. Man has always had to regard that which drives him forward, that which brings him upwards, as a gift, as the revelation of a divine principle. The Luciferic principle enters between him and the gods. This enables him to take into his own hands that which lives unconsciously in him as a divine principle, in his unconscious instinct for reproduction and development. In this way he will rise to independence and freedom in his development. And why is that? Because that which lives in Lucifer is closer to him, is, so to speak, a younger brother of the divine principle. At that time, when the development was still in an older phase, the gods themselves were on the level of humanity, they sought their own development independently within the level of humanity. But now that they have developed, man is a creature among them; now they dominate man and work in man. [5]

The gods have risen from egolessness to selflessness, to devotion and to the overcoming of all special existence. The Luciferic in man, with the greater part of his being, is still enclosed within the ego; it still lies within human interests themselves. Thus we see that all that which lives in man as selflessness and willingness to sacrifice is the divine principle in man, and that next to this divine principle is the Luciferic principle. It is that which not only strives towards divinity in complete devotion with the abandonment of the self, but which, with enthusiasm indeed, but precisely out of the deepest interest of the self, striving upwards to the high levels of perfection, says: "Not merely because I love them, but because the higher perfection coincides with that which I must love, I want to strive towards it as a human being in divine freedom. The divine powers do not strive for this perfection. Through Luciferian striving, however, I make divine perfection my own being. If this Luciferian principle were not in man, then man would be led to perfection in a certain passivity, in a certain inactivity, carried by the gods. [6]

We can now realize the significance of Lucifer's influence if we ask ourselves what would have happened if there had been no Luciferic influence since Lemurian times, then man would have developed in such a way that he would have remained a being until the middle of the Atlantean period, which in all impulses of the astral body, in all motives of the astral body would have followed the influences of certain spiritual entities standing above man, which through their influence would have led man right into the middle of the Atlantean period. Man would have remained much more angelic if this influence of Lucifer had not occurred in the Lemurian period. But, on the other hand, he would have been led by the higher beings as if by a tether. In the middle of the Atlantean period something would have approached man as if with one blow: his eyes would have been fully opened, and he would have had around him the carpet of the entire physical-sensual world; but he would have seen it around him in such a way that behind every physical thing he would have immediately perceived a divine-spiritual, a world of divine-spiritual substrata. So while up to then, if man had looked backwards in his dependence into the divine womb from which he had emerged, he would have seen the deities of light acting upon him, shining into his soul, directing and guiding him, then it would have occurred to man - this is not merely an image, but corresponds in a higher degree to reality - that the full, clearly recognizable world of the senses would have been spread out before him. But this sense world would have presented itself as something transparent, behind which the other divine-spiritual beings would have appeared, which would have taken the place of what man would have lost behind him. A spiritual world would have closed behind him, a new spiritual world would have opened before him. Man would have remained a child in the hands of higher, spiritual-divine beings. Independence would not have entered the human soul. [7]

Lucifer cannot unite anything calculable with the nature he has given to his being. His ideal is cosmic unconditional intelligence and will. This Luciferian tendency is appropriate to the world order in those areas where free action is supposed to prevail. And there Lucifer is the legitimate spiritual helper of the unfolding of humanity. Without his help, freedom could not enter the spiritual-soul of man, which is built up on the basis of the calculable physical. But Lucifer wants to extend this tendency to the entire cosmos. And then his activity becomes a battle against the divine-spiritual order to which man originally belongs. This is where Michael steps in. He stands with his own being in the incalculable; but he brings about the balance between the incalculable and the calculable, which he carries within himself as a world-thought, which he has received from his gods. [8]

We understand each other in this simple way only by the fact that we have a common intelligence, only by the fact that the common intelligence derives precisely from the Luciferic spirituality. [9]

Sources:

[1] GA 147: The secrets of the threshold (1913)

[2], [3] GA 35: Philosophy and anthroposophy (1904-1923)

[4] - [6] GA 54: The world riddles and anthroposophy (1905/1906)

[7] GA 107: Spiritual science of human nature (1908/1909)

[8] GA 26: Anthroposophical Guiding Principles. The path of knowledge of anthroposophy - The Michael Mystery (1924/1925)

[9] GA 194: The Michaels program. The Revelation of the Real Secrets of the Human Being (1919)

Lucifer - Endeavors with man

The gates, the windows, where the Ahrimanic and Luciferic entities enter the world and carry out their plans by attacking people in the state of dimmed consciousness and making them obsessed with themselves. For Ahriman and Lucifer do not work in an inexplicable, horrible way, but by people coming to meet them in their state of consciousness. [1]

Lucifer wants everything that works into consciousness to work from within; therefore all visionary life, which is only pressed out from within, as it were, has a Luciferic character. Lucifer has not the slightest understanding for the harmless enjoyment of what comes from outside. He has understanding for all that which is kindled by all kinds of inner things, for the fact that someone arouses a passion within himself which he indulges in, which causes him lust, so that what otherwise remains subconscious is called into consciousness as far as possible. But despite his wisdom - for Lucifer naturally has a high wisdom - he cannot understand a harmless joke. And one can protect oneself against Luciferic assaults, which he easily undertakes, by trying to live in that which amuses in a harmless way, which entertains man in a harmless way from the outside. He does not like that at all, Lucifer. [2]

There is an unjustified impulse in the turning of one-sided religion against science. This one-sided religious world-view is itself animated, one might say infused, especially by the Luciferian element. For striving for religious deepening and hating scientific penetration into spiritual worlds is what Lucifer wants from man. Lucifer could not achieve his goal better than if all people were merely religious. This religiousness has a tremendously strong egoistic element. Out of egoism, people want to be saved, out of egoism they want to lead the kind of life they imagine after death. And really, the most pious people who move us with their piety - it is Lucifer who controls their religious feelings. Lucifer would much rather have pious souls who have a sense of the spiritual, the good, which they strive for out of selfishness. For he does not want only criminal souls, he wants to introduce pious souls into his element. [3]

The Luciferic beings (as inhabitants of the old moon) did not live in an environment like today's earth. They could not breathe the air, so they could not absorb the spirit. This is because absorbing spirit corresponds to breathing air. So they were compelled to carry out in the heat principle what happens today in the air. Now you can imagine that these entities, which have given man free consciousness, independence, are in a certain way connected with fire. For this reason, when they appear, they are linked with a certain greed to everything that appears in man as warmth, as fire. Greed is attached to man's own warmth. Thus the givers of knowledge and freedom are connected with something that tries to incarnate itself in the warmth of the human being in the way it used to happen on the moon. This is the connection between knowledge and between birth and death, illness and so on in the world. With knowledge, birth and death and illness came into the world; man bought knowledge with it. Hence we also see the connection between certain heat phenomena and illness, namely fever. This is the origin of fever. There were still traditions of this until the 19th century. [4]

The blood, if I am to express myself roughly, should only ever have brought it to a fine membrane formation, as it were, up to the beginning of the material, so that it only ever shoots out of the spiritual for a moment, becomes a little matter just up to material perception, then shoots back into the spiritual and is again absorbed by the spiritual. The blood has a disposition for this. So the blood should be a continuous mere shining, shining in the material and should actually be something completely spiritual. This is what it would have become if, at the beginning of evolution on earth, people had only received their ego from the spirits of form; then people would feel this ego through the resistance that this momentary glow in the blood signifies. In the glow in the blood man would feel the "I am", and that would be the organ of his perception of the I. But that would be the only sense perception. But this would be the only sense perception that man would have at all. Instead of man seeing colors, hearing sounds, perceiving tastes, he should actually live in the ruling will. It was intended that he should look down from the spiritual universe, into which he would be placed as mere imagination, inspiration, intuition, upon a being on earth or in the vicinity of the earth, of which he would not feel: I am in there, - but: I look down there, it belongs to me, the only material thing that shines out to me is spiritual blood that is becoming material, and in it I perceive my self. [5]

Now Lucifer came and made man perceive not only his ego as sense perception, but also everything that he already had on the moon as his astral body: thinking, feeling and willing. The ego was mixed with this. But this made it necessary for man to fall down into matter. The expulsion from paradise is the fall into matter. And at first this change happened to the blood of man. And so the blood substance, which was actually supposed to return to the spiritual, sprays into the rest of man the moment it becomes material and fills the rest of his organization. That is the direct deed which he has accomplished in the material, this Lucifer, that he has actually fabricated the blood, as it is, as matter, while he has at least only brought disorder into the other things. The blood is what Lucifer has thrown down so that Ahriman could catch it, so that both can now approach man. [6]

Sources:

[1] GA 176: Human and Humanistic Developmental Truths. The Karma of Materialism (1917)

[2] GA 170: The riddle of man. The Spiritual Background of Human History (1916)

[3] GA 159: The Mystery of Death. The Nature and Meaning of Central Europe and the European Folk Spirits (1915)

[4] GA 93a: Basic Elements of Esotericism (1905)

[5], [6] GA 134: The World of the Senses and the World of the Spirit (1911/1912)

Lucifer - Image

If you want to depict Lucifer from the inside, how will you actually have to depict a lunar being? One will have to depict a human head and something like a snake hanging from it: the not yet ossified spine. This is how Master Bertram from the 13th or 14th century depicts Lucifer on the tree between Adam and Eve. You can see the picture depicted like this in the Hamburg Museum. The painter painted it, so the knowledge of the spiritual world was still alive at that time. Until the knowledge of the figure of Lucifer, the knowledge of the spiritual world was alive. [1] Master Bertram saw in the etheric what was actually there with Lucifer and painted accordingly. It was unconscious, instinctive clairvoyance. When the woman first sees Lucifer, he is naturally modeled on the female face. [2]

With Lucifer we will have to deal with a peculiar type of upper head formation that is only reminiscent of the human one. There is all movement of the spiritual, there is nothing that forces us to keep the individual limbs of the forehead within fixed limits, as is the case with humans, but each individual one on the upper head is as mobile as the fingers and hands are mobile on the arm. This can only be taken for granted if the movements are the real movements found in Lucifer. And then above all it is to be noted that in this form there is that which has remained in the Lucifer being from the moon existence. This is placed over the actual countenance, which recedes very deeply into it. You can already imagine from this description that we are dealing with something quite different from the ordinary human countenance. It is as if the head of the skull were in itself, with that which is the human countenance tucked in below. And then there is something else: a certain connection between the ear and the larynx, especially in Lucifer. The ear and larynx have only been cut apart in man since his earthly existence; they were a single organ in the lunar existence. The small wings on the larynx were mighty enlargements that then formed the lower auricle. Mighty auricles were formed there, while the upper ear, which now goes outwards, is formed from the forehead. And what is separated today, so that when we speak and sing, it goes outwards and we only listen with the ear, went inwards during the moon period and from there into the music of the spheres. The whole human being was an ear. This comes from the fact that the ear was the wings; so that you have ear, larynx and wing formations that move harmonically and melodically according to the vibrations of the world ether, which then bring forth the peculiar appearance of Lucifer; which bring forth what is macrocosmic, for Lucifer has only localized what is actually only cosmic. Lucifer must look like an elongated face, because he is all ear, the wings are all ear, an elongated auricle. Ahriman, on the other hand, is exactly the opposite, and it is natural that wherever in Lucifer's modeling something is powerfully extended, where in Lucifer's modeling we fully develop, in Ahriman's modeling there are only hints. Whereas with Lucifer the frontal wing is powerfully developed, with Ahriman it is the lower jaw. The whole materialism of the world is expressed in the formation of the masticatory and dental system. [3]

In order to understand the figure of Lucifer, you have to think of what appears as the spirit form of Lucifer in a very strange way. Imagine that which is most Ahrimanic in man away from the human form, that is, the head away, but instead imagine the ears and the auricles, the outer ear, considerably enlarged, naturally spiritualized and formed into wings and shaped into an organ, but the organ wrapped around its body, the laryngeal wings also enlarged; so that head, wings, ears form one organ together. And the wings, the main organ, is the one that results for the figure of Lucifer. Lucifer is an expanded larynx, which becomes the whole form, from which a connection to the ear then develops through a kind of wing, so that one has to imagine: Lucifer is such a form which receives the music of the spheres, takes it into this ear-wing organism; and without the individuality speaking along, the universe, the music of the spheres itself, again expresses itself through the same organ, which is transformed forward into the larynx. [4]

The head is formed in such a way that the cranial region, especially the forehead, is powerfully developed. Whereas in humans these parts up there are relatively immobile, in this being everything is mobile. Everything is an expression of the soul. The lower part of the face is very receding. But then the peculiar thing is that there is a connection between what in man has atrophied into the larynx and the ear in this form. The laryngeal lobule arches upwards and forms the lower part of the ears. The upper part is formed by the forehead. On the other side are two structures reminiscent of bird wings, between which a body is then spread out, which is as if it were a reshaped human face in its entirety. Wings and larynx and ear are formed in one, so that one will recognize: with the wings the being lives inside in the harmony of the spheres, vibrates through space, through the waves of the harmony of the spheres, and this localizes itself in the ear. [5] .

Another image of Lucifer is apt: If you allow mere egoism, the absence of a cosmic feeling, and if you allow good will and well-believed social desires to express themselves everywhere, then the Luciferic being emerges from what is speaking. With these social demands, which are aroused in the world without cosmic feeling, man spews out of himself that which then becomes the beautiful Lucifer. He lives in human beings themselves, in their stomachs, which are corrupted by social instincts - but spiritually grasped -, in their corrupted lungs, there lives the Luciferic source. It wrings itself free, man spews it out of his whole being. That which initially wriggles out of man himself in a slimy way and takes on the appearance of beauty and thus beguiles man - these are images, but they are the realities of our time. What has become of the culture of recent times is basically nothing other than what could be described as the marriage between the bony and the slimy. [6]

Sources:

[1] GA 167: Present and past in the human spirit (1916)

[2] GA 168: The connection between the living and the dead (1916)

[3] GA 157: The fates of people and nations (1914/1915)

[4] GA GA 181: Earth death and world life. Anthroposophical Gifts of Life. Necessities of Consciousness for the Present and Future (1918)

[5] GA 159: The mystery of death. The nature and meaning of Central Europe and the European folk spirits (1915)

[6] GA 203: Man's Responsibility for World Development through his Spiritual Connection with the Earth Planet and the Star World (1921)

Lucifer - man's possibility of counteracting

Lucifer could do much good if he confined himself to his field of leading people to ego-consciousness. Lucifer stands behind all art, behind true free science. But he seduces man into exaggerated self-consciousness, into self-exaltation. The only counter-effect we have against Lucifer is the deepest humility and self-modesty. How many people say to themselves in the evening, when they look back on their day's work, that it was the gods who guided their actions! Most believe they can be proud of what they themselves have achieved. If we nurture in ourselves a spirit of humility and modesty, we will protect ourselves from Lucifer. If we develop contentment within ourselves, Ahriman cannot get close to us. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 266/3: From the Contents of the Esoteric Lessons. Volume III (1913, 1914; 1920 - 1923) (1913-1923)

Lucifer - limits to his power

As long as man is on earth, Lucifer will have power over him. But that is the tragedy of this being; Lucifer's power does not extend beyond the earth. All pain, all suffering is caused by Lucifer and is connected with this tragedy. Knowledge on the physical plane, such as all science, art, even medial spiritualistic knowledge, is Luciferic knowledge, which is doomed to death, just as the exhaled air is killed. Theosophical knowledge, on the other hand, is something substantial that builds up the body of knowledge, the future spirit-self on Jupiter. [1] Lucifer is a tragic figure, he knows that his power over humanity ends with the earth. All the pain and suffering in the world is Luciferian. Man was formerly in the aerial circle of the earth, only through Lucifer did he fall into the watery and earthy element: this is the basis of the image of the Fall of Man. [2]

Sources:

[1] & [2] GA 266/2: From the contents of the esoteric lessons. Volume II (1910-1912)

Lucifer - What kind of forces are the Luciferic beings?

They are such forces that belong to beings that remained behind in their development during the previous earthly embodiment, in the old lunar time, and thus did not enter into the full hardening of earthly existence into which man has entered, but remained at a stage that lies before the materialization of man. As a result, their powers have remained more spiritual than the human being is. In their development they have only been able to reach a stage that is more spiritual than the stage at which man goes through his earthly embodiments. By permeating human nature with their powers, they have caused this human nature to have more spirituality in it than it should actually have. If these Luciferic forces had not been there, man would personally have something spiritualized in his astral body in the unconscious forces subordinate to the conscious ego forces, as the Luciferic forces are, but not the forces he has now. In his lower nature man has become more spiritual through the Luciferic influence than he would otherwise have been. Man would have received all that he should have received on earth from the progressive powers, but he would not be as spiritual as he is today. He would be without the Luciferic influence. But man would not have anything else either. Without this influence man could not have had freedom, for if this Luciferic influence had not come, he would carry out all his actions in such a way that, when he had to do this or that, he could only have looked to the motives which would have come to him in the form of ideas flowing to him from the spiritual world. Whatever man would accomplish on earth, he would accomplish it in such a way that he would look at the idea that underlies it like a picture that shows him what has to happen, without him having to form this idea. It would be like an inspiration from the higher worlds, and it would have such an effect on him that he could not possibly resist it. He would follow the will of the gods as a matter of course. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 150: The World of the Spirit and its Entry into Physical Existence. The influence of the dead into the world of the living (1913)

Lucifer at work

In mystical esotericism, as we see it in Meister Eckhart, Ruysbroek, Tauler, Suso and so on, Lucifer is present; in this pure devotion to the divine, in this pure, noble striving for the spiritual, Lucifer is present in a good way and one can say that he was "pious" in the souls of these mystics. But as soon as a personal note flows into this pure striving, this devotion, as soon as the mystic gives himself up for his own pleasure in devotion, this would mean an encroachment by Lucifer. We must be vigilant that nothing of this kind enters into our striving. In mystical contemplation it is relatively easy to watch, but it is more difficult in visionary vision. Lucifer is also in this. He deceives the mystic into believing all sorts of things which he can hardly distinguish from the true visions. There is something subjective mixed into all vision, for example, certain apparitions, illusory figures or the like are repeated in the individual. One must direct one's attention to this. Here, too, one must watch. If one sees eyes or faces, or imagines them, one is not so easily exposed to error, and one thereby gains the strength to repel Lucifer. Lucifer is at work in everything emotional, in mystical contemplation, in everything visionary, as well as in all enthusiasm, also in artistic activity, in what an artist creates, what is created in the artist. There can be materialists who are completely absorbed in the outward appearance of the material, who express themselves only in it; if one is then fortunate enough to look into their souls, one finds there a deeply religious striving, a longing for the divine. Here, too, Lucifer is the instigator. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 266/3: From the Contents of the Esoteric Lessons. Volume III (1913, 1914; 1920 - 1923) (1913-1923)

Lucifer thinks in a [person]

If man had become what the progressing hierarchies wanted, then everything would have been different, then man would have experienced an imaginative world in sleep, albeit different from what it was on the old moon. The images he would have seen in this state he would have remembered during the day, they would have guided and fertilized him in his life. - But now Lucifer has taken possession of our thoughts and thereby clouded our imaginative world. He thinks in everything in us. When we now enter the spiritual worlds and attain vision, we experience that Lucifer thinks in us in this way, and this is a very shattering experience. That is why the good divine beings veil Lucifer from us in order to protect us. So it is not Lucifer who darkens our night consciousness. So we see how wrong it is to say: I think. The esoteric can also recognize it so clearly when he does his meditation. Thoughts assail him and he cannot get rid of them despite all his efforts. He is very sad that things are going so badly, but he realizes that it is not he who has the thoughts that are so much stronger than himself. He realizes that the often incomprehensible dreams also come to him from outside. In reality most, about two thirds of the thoughts come from Lucifer. He thinks in man. People get the wrong idea about thinking. The value of thinking does not lie in how much one learns, understands and how much knowledge one has, but in how one progresses through thinking, what powers one develops through it. You can see this in scholars, for example, who have a great deal of knowledge but are no further along spiritually than when they were students. It is said of such people that they have dried up, and the clairvoyant can actually see how the astral body has shrunk. One should say, "It is not I who think, but Lucifer who thinks in me." If Lucifer had not intervened, then people would have had images from memory when they desired something while awake, and these would have guided them, not the external circumstances. When man becomes aware that other beings are thinking in him, then he can say: It thinks me. It can have a good effect on him if he connects this with the right feeling, namely with piety. With the second word, "I feel", it is easier to see that it is quite wrong. The instincts and desires that live in us are not produced by us, but for the most part they control us. Two thirds of these feelings, at best half, come from luciferic and ahrimanic beings, through the Maya of the outer sense world. Man's feelings would have been quite different if only the progressive beings had been at work. Then man would have been in an archetypal world during the night. There, for example, he would have seen the archetype of a flower. If he had then seen the flower during the day, he would at the same time have seen the archetype as etheric forces surrounding the plant. In this way, forces also weave through the human being, and if he makes this his feeling and his vision, it can have a positive effect on him. He can recognize the plant as something related to himself and bring to his consciousness the interconnectedness of all beings in the mantric words: "It weaves me! But it must be done with the right feeling, with the feelings of gratitude. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 266/3: From the Contents of the Esoteric Lessons. Volume III (1913, 1914; 1920 - 1923) (1913-1923)

Lucifer hinders spiritual development

Why is it that the esoteric, even if he has practiced concentration and meditation for years, has still not attained a vision of the higher worlds? In order to answer this question clearly, let us imagine what meditation actually is. When we want to meditate, we have the will to turn away from external things, we wish that they should no longer exert any influence on our thoughts, they should not disturb us in our devotion to the spiritual. But external events and thoughts about them constantly push themselves in front of our meditating soul, they want to turn us away from our meditation, they defend themselves against our devotion, so that we have to fight against them with our utmost willpower. If we want to examine who is actually resisting our better will, the following example may give us some clarity. Suppose a stranger approached us and said to us, "You are a flighty person." Ninety-nine times out of a hundred we would be very disturbed by this, for we had thought up to now that we were a very good esotericist who had seriously searched our own inner selves as to our faults, and now a stranger comes along and says the opposite. Just as the stranger places himself in front of us, so in all the thoughts that come between our meditation, something also appears in front of us that we think we do not know, and yet it is our own self that is revealed in all these thoughts and that shows us how flighty we actually are and how little we can detach ourselves from our daily preoccupations and desires. For what always penetrates us during our meditation, when we have the desire to separate ourselves from external things and connect with the spiritual, is our streaming life of desires. In the images of our daily life it flows incessantly into our thinking and resists when we want to connect with the spiritual realm. That this is the case can be to our benefit, since we get to know ourselves in all these images and thoughts in our constantly flowing life of desire; it must bring us to self-knowledge, which we have practiced very fleetingly up to now. But mostly we will still look for all kinds of excuses, for we do not want to accuse ourselves, and that is the reason why the view into the spiritual world still remains closed to us; our ego of desire draws a veil over it. If we were to turn our attention away from the events and experiences of our life of desire, if we were to turn our ego towards the spiritual and focus all our devotion on it, we would have succeeded long ago. If, to use a trivial example, we would only pay as much attention to our meditation as we do to conversations of all kinds that we have in company, or to news about our dear fellow men, we would make rapid progress in our knowledge of the higher worlds, we would then push back our resisting ego. What are our thoughts but memories of past events, and these events are nothing but the desires we have felt. If they had not become a pleasure to us, we would not have kept them in our memory. Just examine your memory, and you will find that everything that you have most enjoyed is engraved in it. Everything that has remained indifferent to us, that has not particularly interested us, of which we have, so to speak, enjoyed nothing, has disappeared from our memory. We love Ahriman and Lucifer too much, they accompany us throughout our lives precisely because we love them so much. And why do we love them so much? Lucifer and Ahriman caress us by casting their light rays over the things of the world and our eyes become aware of things through contact with the rays. We must recognize Lucifer and Ahriman with open eyes in all our doings, and especially where these two powers want to stand in front of our meditation to deny us the view into the spiritual world, for the moment has dawned that we must strive to develop ourselves to spiritual knowledge through the forming of spiritual organs of clairvoyance in us, so that these organs do not dry up and consume themselves. Slowly and gradually we must move towards the spiritual. 266/211up

Experiencing Lucifer meditatively - Lucifer's voice

After meditation, it is good to take a break, empty the soul completely and just wait to see what imaginations come to us from higher worlds. - Much also depends on the mood and condition of our soul: we should only approach our exercises with full devotion and joy, with the greatest dedication. The experiences that occur vary greatly depending on the individuality and karma of the meditator. I would like to pick out two from the abundance of them today: One is being lifted out into space, into infinity. You feel as if you have been expanded, as if you have been lifted up; naturally, this is linked to leaving the body. As you are lifted up, you see a reddening; yellowish-reddish clouds come towards you, from which shapes gradually crystallize. This experience triggers a feeling of delight, of bliss. There is also a second experience, that of diving down, of sinking into the depths. This gives you a feeling of constriction, of constriction. The spiritual beings that you experience during this immersion appear to you in blue-violet shades of color. They trigger in us a feeling of reverential awe and cause us to take a kind of introspective look at ourselves. They show man as he really is, all his faults and mistakes, all his moral weaknesses in all their greatness and reprehensibility. These beings emerging from the depths also make us see clearly what habitual mistakes and wrong thinking produce in us. The beings that appear to us in a bluish-violet light and make us see our mistakes belong to the Angeloi, while the upper beings, the reddish-yellow light figures, who pronounce their judgment like punitive justice, belong to the Archangeloi. These experiences can also come to people in other ways, namely through sounds, tones. It is then even more frightening, even more difficult to bear, when the archangel announces his judgment in this way with a voice of thunder. But when a person has come to this hour, which occurs after he has had the apparition with the Guardian of the Threshold, then he must have got rid of the shuddering, the fear. Just to be understood, one example is mentioned, but the imagination can just as well show something else. Man can see the figures rising from the depths in blue-violet hues with sorrowful, pain-filled faces. These high beings feel sorrow for us and our mistakes; this awakens in us a feeling of boundless shame. If man now recognizes his mistakes and repents, he will also see the faces of these beings radiate with joy. Man must feel this connection between the microcosm and the macrocosm. The beings that descend upon man in reddish-yellow clouds of light and surround him in circles, as often as he is the center, trigger a feeling of fear in him as punitive justice. But this can be accompanied by a feeling of joy when these entities show him what developmental possibilities are available in him and how it is up to him to realize them. But whenever the human being has these two experiences, when these figures that have gathered from the reddish clouds try to unite with the blue-violet figures rising from the depths, something like a conflict arises in him. He clearly hears a voice saying: "Don't believe that, believe what comes from your own soul. That is equivalent to what you see out there in the cosmos! This is Lucifer's voice, and it is the greatest temptation man can have, since Lucifer outshines all other entities in beauty, cunning and seduction. Like the blue-violet entities, he also rises from the depths. We must also be clear about the fact that form is no longer important in these areas. The spirits of form, the Exusiai, the Elohim, as the Bible calls them, have their significance on earth. Within the spiritual worlds we find that we can rise above them and approach the spirits of movement, the dynamis. One thing we should never forget: the feeling of deepest gratitude towards the higher beings and the spiritual worlds. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 266/3: From the Contents of the Esoteric Lessons. Volume III (1913-1923)

Lucifer supersensible

Man would never have become a self-contained, free being if Lucifer had not carried the egoity from the (old) moon over to earth. Thus one gets to know Lucifer in the inner experience as the nocturnal spirit, so to speak. And it is connected with the change that takes place with our self and with our astral body during our occult development that we feel ourselves at night in the company of Lucifer. You will perhaps find this quite fatal at first, if you let the idea cling to the surface, that when a person becomes clairvoyant and falls asleep, he realizes that he comes into the company of Lucifer during the night. But if you think more carefully, you will soon realize that it is wiser to learn to recognize Lucifer, that it is better to know that you are in his company - than to believe that he is not there, and that you only have him invisibly and effectively within you with his powers. You also have that during the day.

But in a certain way, people were not allowed to see him after they became aware of him, so to speak, during his seduction in the Lemurian time, because that original seduction in the Lemurian time would then have been joined by nothing but partial seductions. Therefore, the divine-spiritual entity, which was concerned with the progress of man, had to draw a veil over the vision of the night. With this, however, everything that man would otherwise see during sleep was lost to him. The moment the veil covering the night with darkness was drawn away, we would find that Lucifer was at our side. [1]

If one encounters Lucifer as a soul in the supersensible worlds, he appears there as the great bearer of light, who leads one, as it were, to carry all the treasures, all the essence that is there in the spiritual worlds, down into the world of the senses and to create a reflection and revelation of it in the world of the senses. And if one follows Lucifer in the supersensible worlds in this endeavor, then one works towards fulfilling the eternal world task, so that all that is unmanifest becomes manifest, so that all that is eternal is entrusted to the moment, so that all that flows in the indeterminate eternal can be captured in the inner greatness of the individual moment. Therefore it is when man enters the supersensible worlds either through initiation or through death that Lucifer really works in him as a bearer of light, and the dangers to which (then) man is exposed to Lucifer in the higher worlds are only actually present when man brings into the higher worlds to too great an extent that which is supposed to constitute his position within the senses in relation to Lucifer. [2] What then is the individual greatness in the individual soul other than that which is the germ of the greatness in all the world development of mankind? How did Homer, Shakespeare, Dante, Goethe influence mankind? By the fact that they were egoities, that within them were whole worlds, worlds that emerged only from within themselves, from their egoity. But in this way - by a detour through the egoities - the impulses of spiritual life are carried in, which from epoch to epoch impart the greatest, namely the spiritual deeds of mankind. Lucifer is in there again. He is the bearer of light, the impulse and the power of all that is great, which radiates into the evolution of mankind from the great punctual eternal force gushing out of the individual human soul. Lucifer exerts a good influence on the human soul when he becomes the stimulus for drawing out of the human soul all that man can sacrifice as his individuality at the altar of human evolution. Lucifer becomes an evil being, that is, what he does becomes evil, when he gives such impulses to the human soul that it only wants to lead everything into itself for self-gratification. How the deeds of the beings work in the world must be followed when these beings have been pointed out to us. The effects of the supersensible entities can be described as good and evil; the entities themselves never again. [3]

In order to enter into a relationship with Lucifer in the supersensible world, one basically only needs to have purified and cleansed oneself of all dross of incorrect egoism, of all egoisms in the senses, then Lucifer will be a very good guide, especially in the supersensible worlds; one will not easily fall prey to him, so to speak. [4]

Just as unlawful Moon, Venus and Mercury beings have their abodes in the solid and liquid components of the earth, so also unlawful Mars, Jupiter and Saturn beings have their conditions of existence, figuratively speaking their abodes, in the warmth and in the air which surrounds the earth. And these beings have a great influence on the human being during his sleep state. They are the ones who, so to speak, want to induce man every night to absorb the influence of the starry world. They want to lift man completely away from earthly existence. They want - and incidentally they have wanted this from the beginning of the emergence of the human race on earth - that man should spurn the earth, that he should not awaken to freedom on the earth, where alone he can awaken to freedom, but that he should remain a moral automaton, as he was in the previous metamorphosis of earth formation during the moon's existence on earth. [5]

Sources:

[1] GA 145: What significance does the occult development of man have for his sheaths (physical body, etheric body, astral body) and his self? (1913)

[2] - [4] GA 138: On Initiation. Of Eternity and the Moment. Von Geisteslicht und Lebensdunkel (1912)

[5] GA 219: The relationship of the starry world to man and of man to the starry world. The Spiritual Communion of Humanity (1922)

Lucifer and Ahriman - willing and intelligent human being

Thus, today the assertion of the unified soul is made and it is believed that the soul as such originates in the same way with intellectual thinking as with loving willing, whereas, as I have just indicated, a distinction must be made if one really, actually wants to understand the human being. That which we think through mere intellect as a world-view can therefore never approach reality, remains hallucination, because it comes from an interpenetration of our intellect with spiritual entity which does not belong to this world: with ahrimanic-spiritual entity which does not belong to the world order into which we look out with our eyes. It is the same on the other side with regard to the will, which is interspersed with Luciferic essence. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 184: The Polarity of Duration and Development in Human Life. The Cosmic Prehistory of Humanity (1918)

Lucifer and Ahriman a duality

The good gods once created these oppositions themselves, albeit in a previous time, so that freedom could enter in this way, so that man could not come to an unfree love through the external arrangement of forms, so that man could come from within to a unity of the human name over the whole earth, from within. They first, I would like to say, fragmented human beings through the opposition, so that they could then, after the physicality was fragmented, give them unity again in the spirituality, in the Christ. [1]

Wisdom, which is the inner counter-image of light, wisdom that can unite with love, and love that permeates itself with wisdom, will find the right way to work back on that which is immersed in the wisdom of the outer world. If we are to gradually participate in the other half of the development, to overcome Lucifer and Ahriman again, then we must permeate ourselves with wisdom and love. By developing wisdom and love, we develop those elements that will flow out again from our souls themselves as gifts for those who sacrificed themselves as Luciferic and Ahrimanic powers in the first half of the earth's evolution in order to give us what we needed to attain our freedom. We will have to give these powers what we develop in wisdom and love. [2]

Thus we have two hosts in our earthly human environment, the host in the air, which would like to make man moral, but would lift him away from the earth, and the ahrimanic entities immediately below the earth's surface, which would like to pull man down, to keep him always on the earth.

These two kinds of entities are in the mineral kingdom, in the vegetable kingdom, in the animal kingdom, and also in the ordinary physical kingdom of man, in so far as he does not live excessively in impulses, in passions, in desires; they are there in such a way that they must get along with each other. [3]

The breathing process develops according to two one-sidednesses, according to the Luciferic one-sidedness, in that we think, and according to the other one-sidedness, according to the will process, according to the Ahriman side, the metabolic processes. We oscillate back and forth between Lucifer and Ahriman, and the equilibrium position, the middle ground, is the breathing process through which we stand within the great harmony. [4] One can say that man is actually constantly exposed to the danger of either becoming too soft or too hard. If you have a magnet, you know that the magnet attracts the iron. We have two kinds of magnetism in the magnet. We have positive magnetism and negative magnetism. One attracts the magnetic needle, the other repels it. There is something invisible inside the (magnetized) iron. There is also something invisible, supersensible in the hardening, and this - if you have the gift, you can observe it - is called ahrimanic. If there were only ahrimanic forces, we would constantly become corpses, and we would become pedants, completely petrified people; we would constantly wake up, we would not be able to sleep. The forces that now soften us, rejuvenate us, that bring us to imagination, these are the Luciferic forces, these are the forces that we need so that we do not become a living corpse. But if only the Luciferic forces were there, we would remain children all our lives. These two opposing forces must be present in man. [5]

Only when one will learn to speak of the Luciferic and Ahrimanic in human nature without superstition, with scientific exactness, as one speaks today without superstition, without mysticism, of positive and negative magnetism, of positive and negative electricity, of light and darkness, only then will one be able to gain such a knowledge of man which is equal to the abstract knowledge of inorganic nature which we have gained in the course of the last centuries. Only then can there be (a true) science of man, when we ascend from the poor concepts of the positive and negative, from the poor concepts of polarity, as we find them in inorganic nature, to the fulfilled concept of the Luciferic and Ahrimanic in man. [6] (Likewise) one will only have a psychology when one is able to see this polarity in the soul. [7] (Also the concept of) force and matter coincide completely with Lucifer and Ahriman. [8]

If the development of mankind had gone on until the middle of the Atlantean period without the influence of Lucifer, man would by then have developed a highly clairvoyant consciousness of images. There would have been something in his soul which, through his power, would have revealed the outer world to him in inner pictures; he would not have perceived the outer objects through his eye. Through the Luciferic influence man saw the physical world earlier, but not correctly; he saw the outer world as through a veil. The divine-spiritual beings had intended for him to develop in such a way that he would have perceived the outer world instead of the inner world perceived in the image of the dull clairvoyant consciousness, but in such a way that behind every sensuality there is a spirituality. He would have seen the real spirit behind the physical world.

Because the Luciferic beings pulled man down to earth too early, the outer world has become such to man that the world of the spirit behind it is covered to him, and he sees the physical opaquely, otherwise he would see through it to the spiritual source of the world. Because man descended into matter too early, this matter became too dense for him. He could no longer penetrate it. But from the middle of the Atlantean period onwards, other spiritual beings who had remained behind were able to mingle with this matter, so that it became clouded, as if permeated by smoke, and man could no longer see the spiritual. These are the Ahrimanic entities. Ahriman is the spirit that spreads matter like a veil over the spiritual and makes it impossible to recognize the spiritual world. And these two spirits hold man back in his development towards spirituality. And it was the Ahrimanic influence in particular that asserted itself in man and caused the destruction of a part of the earth: Atlantis. [9] Everything that enters the world also forms a Luciferic and an Ahrimanic counter-image. [10]

Sources:

[1] GA 165: The Spiritual Unification of Humanity through the Christ Impulse (1915/1916)

[2] GA 120: The Revelations of Karma (1910)

[3] GA 218: Spiritual Connections in the Formation of the Human Organism (1922)

[4], [8] GA 176: Human and Human Developmental Truths. The Karma of Materialism (1917)

[5] GA 349: On the Life of Man and the Earth. On the Essence of Christianity (1923)

[6], [7] GA 210: Old and New Methods of Initiation. Drama and Poetry in the Change of Consciousness in Modern Times (1922)

[9] GA 109: The Principle of Spiritual Economy in Connection with Re-embodiment Questions. An Aspect of the Spiritual Guidance of Humanity (1909)

[10] GA 173: Contemplations on Contemporary History. The Karma of Untruthfulness - Part One (1916)

Lucifer and Ahriman and their polar activity in the course of time

Egyptian man - as the man who lived before the Mystery of Golgotha - was still permeated by Luciferic powers. If luciferic powers are found within man, if luciferic powers move, permeate and weave through man's inner being, then the consequence is that the ahrimanic is expressed in its effectiveness in his outward appearance. Therefore the Egyptian rightly sees a world picture in which Ahriman-Typhon is active, because he himself was permeated by Lucifer. We must be clear that present-day humanity is permeated by Ahriman, is inwardly moved and permeated by Ahriman in the same way that the Egyptian world was moved and permeated by Lucifer. But then, when Ahriman is at work within, man sees his world in a Luciferian form. Lucifer is that power which wants to carry into the present world picture that which was present in earlier stages, which wants to make permanent that which was present in earlier stages. Everything that was moral in earlier stages is naturally present in the present. Lucifer now has every interest in detaching the moral as such, which always has its great significance as a present, because it has a germinal effect on later world creation, from the world picture and allowing only what is naturally necessary to appear in the outer world picture. Just as the Egyptian looked out into the world and had to see Ahriman-Typhon as the one who takes away his Osiris, so we must look at this world picture that has become Luciferic, at the mathematical-mechanical world picture of our present astronomy and our other natural sciences, and must be clear to ourselves that the Luciferic rules here just as the Typhonic-Ahrimanic ruled in the Egyptian world picture. Just as in wind and weather, in the storms of winter, the Egyptians imagined that Ahriman-Typhon was at work, so must modern man, when he sees through the matter, imagine that Lucifer appears to him in sunshine and starry brilliance, in planetary and lunar movement. Just as we have the Copernican-Galilean-Keplerian world view, it is a Luciferian structure. Precisely because it corresponds to our Ahrimanic powers of cognition, its content - I ask you to distinguish this precisely - is a Luciferic one. We have not lost Osiris or Christ, we have lost what we have in the place of Isis. Lucifer killed her for us. And not as Typhon lowered Osiris into the Nile and then first sank into the earth that which had been killed, but the Isis being, the divine wisdom killed by Lucifer, has been transferred out into the world spaces. As we look out into this ocean and see the star connections only according to mathematical lines, that which spiritually permeates this world is buried in them, killed the divine Sophia, killed this successor of Isis. [1]

During the Egyptian-Chaldean period, the human soul could look at what was happening and say in a certain way: the Ahrimanic influences come from one side and the Luciferic influences from the other. In Egyptian culture it was still very easy to distinguish between the two externally. In the Greco-Latin cultural epoch it was already the case that, one might say, Lucifer and Ahriman met immediately before the human soul. And they balanced each other out. In our time it is so that in the outer world Lucifer and Ahriman make a kind of alliance with each other, their impulses in the outer world are already tied into a knot before these impulses reach the human soul. This makes it particularly difficult for the human being to untangle this knot, to find his way through this tangle. Everywhere in our cultural movement we have Luciferic and Ahrimanic threads intertwined in a colorful way, and no sooner will one gain a healthy view of our cultural conditions than until one realizes that in very many agitational currents, indeed in very many abstract ideas and external events that are being taken at present and into the future, the tangled threads of Luciferic and Ahrimanic impulses are at play. And no one today is more in a position to deal fully with these Luciferic and Ahrimanic elements than he who tries to follow the spiritual path of knowledge, to equip the soul with clairvoyant powers. 147.135fWe can say that in the Lemurian age there is a certain strength of Luciferic influence, which grows, then again diminishes, and this Luciferic strength becomes very slight and then disappears completely in the Atlantean age, only to rise again in the post-Atlantean period. So that basically in the Atlantean age - I am not talking now about individual human beings, but about the development of mankind - there is little of the direct influence of the Luciferic in the historical development of mankind. However, the Ahrimanic development was particularly strong in this age and will weaken again in the post-Atlantean period. We must be clear that we must always bear this in mind: When Lucifer works particularly strongly, he calls forth Ahriman in the subconscious. So if the Luciferic curve (a wave form) is particularly present in our 5th age, this does not mean that because Lucifer is particularly active, Ahriman is outside our circle; on the contrary, it is precisely because Lucifer is particularly active among the historical forces that Ahriman is particularly active in the subconscious regions of man. [2]

The Mysteries (of antiquity) were supposed to give human knowledge, it was mediated indirectly through Lucifer, and man acquired it through ahrimanic forces. It was now completely bound to the state of equilibrium between ahrimanic and luciferic forces. Now, at the time when the old world came to an end, when the Mystery of Golgotha came from the other side, a slight surplus of ahrimanic forces arose for mankind. Now, since the 16th century, something similar is happening again, a kind of renaissance of the ahrimanic forces. And through the strength of these ahrimanic forces it was brought about that human soul-life was driven towards abstractness, up to that abstractness which then confronts us in the Roman being. [3] Thus Ahrimanic and Luciferic influences never stand alone. They always interact with each other and in a certain sense maintain a balance.

(In the individual human being) Lucifer pushes out from within, Ahriman works in from without, and the world picture is formed in between. If in any incarnation man's inner being becomes stronger, if he is more exposed to inner influences, then he will give himself more to the Luciferic influence for those things where the inner being works in such a way that man is more seized by pride, vanity and so on. In an incarnation where man is less attuned by his total karma (see: Karma) to follow the inner influences, he will more easily fall prey to the errors and seductions of Ahriman. It may be mentioned at this point - because it is extremely important - that the temptations from both sides must be resisted especially by the one who tries to strive for a higher development and to penetrate into the spiritual world, be it by wanting to penetrate behind the phenomena of the outer world into the spiritual or by wanting to descend mystically into his own inner being. When penetrating into the spiritual outer world, which lies behind the physical world, there is always what Ahriman presents in the way of deceptive images; if a person wants to descend mystically into his own soul, the temptations of Lucifer are always possible to a particular degree. Therefore, if the mystic has not paid much attention to his moral culture, then, if he succeeds in penetrating a little into his inner being, he may run the great danger of calling up the retrograde force of Lucifer's influence even more strongly than has been the case hitherto, and of becoming even more vain and arrogant than before. That is why it is so necessary to ensure beforehand through character training that we have an antidote to the temptations of vanity, megalomania and arrogance that approach us in all cases. And we cannot do enough in acquiring precisely those qualities that lead to modesty and humility. On the other hand, it is necessary for man to protect himself against the delusions of Ahriman when he tries to reach the spiritual foundations of things through a development that leads behind the phenomena of the outer world. If he does not try to attain a character formation that makes him inwardly strong and vigorous, that allows him to be firmly built on his inner being, then it can very easily happen that the person in question - especially if he is lucky in going out into the spiritual world - falls prey to Ahriman, that Ahriman deludes him with illusion upon illusion, hallucination upon hallucination. [4] Lucifer and Ahriman are necessary in our earthly existence, and we cannot escape them, but can only come to master them properly, really master them properly.

Above all, we should be quite clear about the fact that as we progress in spiritual-scientific self-education, we must first of all work ourselves out of our connection with the outer world. Lucifer has placed us in the outer world. We will not get any further by letting Ahriman transform what we otherwise want. The next step we must take is to divert the world from us, so that we are in danger of becoming really more selfish than we were before. [5]

In the future man will be forced to realize that he will be accompanied by Ahriman-Mephisto throughout his waking life. But this, of course, also corresponds to the opposite image, and that is that man will approach a future which, every time he wakes up, will give him the impression, like a dream just flitting along - and then more and more clearly and distinctly - that your nocturnal comrade was Lucifer. You see from this that man, through the occult development of his self and his astral body, can foresee something of what will occur in the future of mankind, can sense something of the companionship of Ahriman and Lucifer. [6]

Thus man, because Ahriman is to enter his outer sensual life in the waking state, first needed protection from Ahriman for the waking state. Such protective impulses are given many, many centuries in the development of mankind before the corresponding danger occurs. While the full consciousness of Ahriman-Mephisto is still not there for mankind in general, the protective impulse has occurred at the beginning of our time development in the physical appearance of the Christ in the earth development. The fact that the Christ once appeared in the physical body in the earth evolution was a precautionary measure to ensure that man would be armed through the reception of the Christ impulse against the necessary influence that would come from Ahriman-Mephisto. That man would later be armed when the Luciferic influence is there, man is armed against this through the appearance of the Christ in the etheric body. This is an influence that will come for another consciousness. [7]

At the moment when the etheric body of Jesus of Nazareth, in which the Christ was now (after John's baptism), had become a complete quickener of the physical body, the etheric body of the Christ appeared transfigured. Lucifer and Ahriman were expelled from the physical body of the Christ at this moment! The great example is there, which must take place in the future in the whole of humanity: The impediments of Lucifer-Ahriman must be expelled from the physical body through the Christ-impulse! And man's earthly body must be so enlivened by the Christ impulse that the fruits of the earthly mission are taken over into those times which will replace the earthly times. [8]

(For) these entities want nothing less than to preserve all entities that are on earth in the form in which they are interwoven in dense physical matter. When, for example, a plant grows, grows out of its root, pushes up leaf by leaf to blossom, then Lucifer-Ahriman's intention is to bring this forcing and growing further and further, that is, to make this entity, which is developing there, similar to the physical form, to preserve it as it is, and thus to snatch it away from the spiritual world. And with all animals, too, the Luciferic-Ahrimanic entities have the tendency to make them similar to the body in which they are and to make them forget their divine-spiritual origin within matter. And the same applies to humans. Man would be banished into the earth and forget his spiritual-divine origin if death had not spread over the earth, if man had not always been supplied with new sources of strength between death and the new birth, so as not to forget his divine-spiritual origin. [9]

We see how Ahriman and Lucifer work together. Lucifer wants to have the human souls out and establish a planet of his own with them; Ahriman must now support him by the fact that, while Lucifer sucks the juice out of the lemon, so to speak, Ahriman squeezes it out by hardening what remains. And that is what he tried to do (for example) in the Roman Empire. Lucifer and Ahriman were disappointed (though by the Greco-Latin period). They have continued their efforts, and the fifth post-Atlantean period will still realize and learn to understand how strong these onslaughts are, which have only just begun, and which, because the onslaughts emanating from the remaining beings are always the weakest at the beginning of a period, become more and more powerful, and therefore the need to understand these onslaughts becomes greater and greater. The forces of these powers are always turned in such a way that they fit into the continuing world plan, so to speak, so that one can see that they belong to it. They are needed as opposing forces (because here too the "actio equals reactio law" applies, as in physics. There, for example, in order to hold 1 kg on a plane, one must be able to push against the weight with the support point with 1 kg). [10]

Everything that challenges Lucifer finds its answer through Ahriman. As Lucifer develops his activity from time epoch to time epoch, Ahriman joins in - and spoils bit by bit what Lucifer has brought about on earth. - The development of the human world is a continuous work between Ahriman and Lucifer. If Lucifer were not working in humanity, the zeal and the fire for the continuous stream of human development would be missing; if Ahriman were not there, who destroys again from nation to nation what does not come from the continuous stream, but only from the Luciferic impact, then Lucifer would want to continue the individual cultures forever. So here you see Lucifer conjuring up his own karma, which is a necessary consequence of the development on the old moon. And the consequence is that he must always chain Ahriman to his heel. Ahriman is the karmic fulfillment of Lucifer. [11]

Youth is preferably characterized by the Luciferic, old age by the Ahrimanic. The Luciferic is more characteristic of women, the Ahrimanic of men. When we look into the past, we look preferably to the Ahrimanic; when we look into the future, into that which is still to be germinal, we look preferably to the Luciferic. If we look at the British (or American) empire, we are looking into an Ahrimanic realm; in the case of oriental state institutions, we are looking into Luciferic realms.

In the whole social structure of human life, the Luciferic has sometimes played a most disastrous role. Even small children are taught at school to "be first". Think of the Luciferian ambition that played a role when people wanted to be first! Then again, titles and medals and everything that goes with them. Think of how the social structure was built up by the Luciferian! But this time is coming to an end, an Ahrimanic one is taking its place: Free way for the most capable! [12] The most dreadful mechanization of human life will emerge if one wants to find out who is gifted by means of talent tests. [13]

Sources:

[1] GA 202: The Bridge between the World-Spirituality and the Physical of the Human Being. The Search for the New Isis, the Divine Sophia (1920)

[2], [3] GA 184: The Polarity of Duration and Development in Human Life. The Cosmic Prehistory of Humanity (1918)

[4], [11] GA 120: The Revelations of Karma (1910)

[5] GA 162: Questions of Art and Life in the Light of Spiritual Science (1915)

[6], [7] GA 145: What Significance Does the Occult Development of Man Have for His Sheaths (Physical Body, Etheric Body, Astral Body) and His Self? (1913)

[8], [9] GA 112: The Gospel of John in Relation to the Three Other Gospels, Especially to the Gospel of Luke (1909)

[10] GA 171: Inner Impulses for the Development of Humanity. Goethe and the Crisis of the Nineteenth Century (1916)

[12], [13] GA 182: Death as a Transformation of Life (1917/1918)

Lucifer and Ahriman and their polar influence in modern history

In the time from Augustine to Galileo, man had to defend himself against the Luciferian in order to strive for a state of equilibrium. In more recent times, man has to defend himself against the Ahrimanic in order to strive for his state of equilibrium. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 210: Old and New Methods of Initiation. Drama and Poetry in the Change of Consciousness in Modern Times (1922)

Lucifer and Ahriman culturally

We can therefore say that Lucifer has a hand in everything that is traditionally theological, in everything that is artistic and degenerates into the mannered and stiff, in everything that is Renaissance-like; while Ahriman has a hand in everything that is merely external, spiritless natural science, which cannot discover the spirit in nature, and in everything that is external mechanism in human activity. The Luciferic angelic beings, who have saved themselves from traditional life right up to the present day, have every interest in actually preventing man from doing anything. They want to keep man at least in his inner soul life. Man has become a personality. But these angelic beings do not want to let man flow out in his deeds into the experience, into the revelation of his will impulses. They want to keep him in inner contemplation. They seduce him into mysticism, they seduce him into false theosophy. They tempt him to lead a merely inward, contemplative life, to observe instead of acting. They turn him into a contemplative who would like to sit all day and ponder all kinds of worldly riddles, but who does not want to transfer what lives in his spirit into external reality. They want to create what is external science through purely external observation. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 208: Anthroposophy as Cosmosophy - Part Two:. The Formation of Man as the Result of Cosmic Effects (1921)

Lucifer and Antichrist

We have three classes of beings at the beginning of the earth's evolution: Human beings who are to receive their fourth principle fully formed on earth, a class of Luciferic beings who are to form their sixth principle, and a class of Luciferic beings who are to form their seventh principle, who thus stand higher than man by virtue of the fact that they are to form the sixth and seventh principles, who thus in this respect tower above man. But in this respect they also tower above the Christ, for the Christ is to express his fourth principle on earth in devotion to man. It will not be the Christ who, let us say, will stimulate people to express something other than the actual I, the innermost human being, to ever higher and higher levels in the future. It will be the Luciferic spirits who will then lead man beyond himself in a certain respect. The Luciferic entities have developed the fourth, fifth and sixth principles and are therefore in a certain sense higher than the Christ. In practical terms, this will be realized in the future in such a way that through the absorption of the Christ principle into this human nature, this nature will be deepened more and more, this human nature will absorb more and more light within its own being, that the human nature will have to feel light and love as something that is intrinsic to it. The internalization of the human soul into infinite depths will be the gift of the Christ impulse. The other spirits, who have higher principles than the Christ, even if only of a microcosmic nature, will in a certain way lead man beyond himself. The Christ will internalize man, but also make him humble; the Luciferic spirits will lead man beyond himself, make him clever, clever, ingenious, but in a certain way also make him arrogant, teach him that he could become something superhuman already during his earthly development. [1]

A time will come when the matter will be understood in such a way that the most powerful, the most important of these Luciferic spirits, who will want to lead men beyond themselves, so to speak, will be raised to the shield and regarded as a great leader of men. Thus the Christ-spirit and the spirit of this entity will stand opposite each other: the Christ-spirit, from whom men will be able to hope to receive the powerful macrocosmic impulse of their fourth principle, and the Luciferic spirit, which in a certain respect will want to lead them beyond it. If people can stay with it and say to themselves: We must only attain from the Luciferic spirits that to which we look up as we look down to our lower nature, men would do right. But as people will come to say: "Look, the Christ only gives the fourth principle, but there are the spirits who give the sixth and seventh, then the people who think this way towards the Christ will worship and raise the Antichrist on their shield. The Christ brings to mankind the fourth macrocosmic principle, which, because it is macrocosmic, is infinitely more important than all microcosmic principles - it is stronger than them, even though it is related to the human ego. [2] The leader of those spirits who have developed six principles in this way, i.e. who have come close to perfection on the moon, is the Antichrist, who can already look very similar to the Christ. [3]

Sources:

[1] - [3] GA 130: Esoteric Christianity and the Spiritual Guidance of Humanity (1911/1912)

Lucifer and breathing

Breathing is a material image of the spiritual process of embedding the monad in the lower human being. Breathing means: the drawing in of the monad. The Luciferic entities (in their lunar nature) could not breathe in air, so they could not absorb the spirit. For the absorption of spirit corresponds to the breathing of air, so they were compelled to carry out in the heat principle what happens today in the air. For this reason, when they appear, they are bound with a certain greed to everything that appears in man as warmth, as fire. [1] Lucifer is connected with everything that has not yet grown to the distinctness of the individual senses, everything that approaches man indistinctly, undifferentiated. In other words, Lucifer is connected with the experience of breathing, with the experience of inhaling and exhaling. The moment the breathing process is disturbed in any way, breathing is immediately transformed from the way it normally occurs, namely as an unconscious process to which we need not pay attention, into a conscious, more or less dreamlike conscious process. And if the breathing process becomes too energetic, if it makes greater demands on the organism than this organism can achieve, then Lucifer has the possibility of penetrating the human organism with his breathing. The nightmare, where the human being comes to dream consciousness through disturbed breathing, so that experiences of the spiritual world can interfere, and also all experiences of fear and anxiety, which are connected with nightmares, have their origin in the Luciferic element of the world. Everything that changes from the ordinary breathing process to choking, to the feeling of being strangled, is connected with this possibility of Lucifer interfering in the breathing process.

But there is also a more subtle experience that presents this experience of strangulation in a more refined way, so to speak. Every time the human soul is approached by something that becomes a question or a doubt about this or that in the world, then there is a more refined experience of strangulation. But also everything that is connected with questions and doubts, everything that is connected with the fact that we are unsatisfied because the world approaches us and demands an answer, or because we are forced to give an answer by what we are, is connected with the Luciferic. [2] What happens now when a more energetic breathing process occurs? The etheric body and everything connected with the etheric nature of the human being is, as it were, extended too far; it wants to tear the physical body apart, so to speak. The Luciferic has the tendency to express itself in an etheric body that is expanded in relation to the human form. What kind of form emerges when the expanded etheric body, which is not suitable for the human being but for the Luciferic being, asserts itself and appears in form before the human soul? The sphinx. It is actually this that chokes us. It emerges as the raiser of doubt, as the tormentor of questions. Everywhere, the Luciferian can enter the blood of man through the respiratory system. [3] f

Sources:

[1] GA 93a: Basic Elements of Esotericism (1905)

[2], [3] GA 158: The Connection of Man with the Elemental World. Kalewala - Olaf Åsteson - The Russian Folklore - The World as the Result of Equilibrium Effects (1912-1914)

Lucifer and consciousness

While our entire daily experience should actually be transferred to the entire nocturnal experience, the truth is that what we have acquired during the day only enters the astral body, but is received by Lucifer in the ego, so that Lucifer experiences in us in the time from falling asleep to waking up what lives on in us and weaves from the day's knowledge, from what we have acquired from waking up to falling asleep. We can therefore say that during our sleep, in our ego, Lucifer enjoys our daily experiences instead of us. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 162: Questions of Art and Life in the Light of Spiritual Science (1915)

Lucifer and blood

In blood we have given something which, as a substance itself, has directly suffered the Luciferic influence. Lucifer has no influence on the substances as such, for these substances only come into being through what he has done, that he has, as it were, displaced the bodies. On the blood, however, he has a direct influence as matter, as substance. [1] While the blood was destined to burst forth and immediately disappear again as matter, Lucifer caused the blood to enter into gross matter. This is the direct act that he accomplished in matter. [2] Man is actually blood, and in so far as he is blood, he is the walking Lucifer-Ahriman himself, who is thus continually carried about. If man had retained what his blood should originally have become, he would feel within himself the seven Elohim. [3]

Sources:

[1] - [3] GA 134: The World of the Senses and the World of the Spirit (1911/1912)

Lucifer and Bodhisattva

One can speak of a recurring embodiment of the Bodhisattva, but one must know that the Bodhisattva has stood behind all the human beings in whom he embodies himself as part of that entity which is itself the personified all-wisdom of our world. Thus we look at the element of wisdom which in older times communicated itself to humanity from the Luciferic worlds. When we look at this, we are looking at the Bodhisattvas. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 113: The Orient in the Light of the Occident. The Children of Lucifer and the Brothers of Christ (1909)

Lucifer and Brahmanism and Buddhism and Taoism

The Luciferian entities that remained behind at the Mystery of Golgotha have, so to speak, created a vanguard in certain souls, which they took possession of after their last death. These are souls who lived at the time of Tauler and Meister Eckhart in the 13th century, and who belonged to the community of the (Beguines and )Begards. They are now trying to confuse minds in the times to come, and they use the old religions of Brahmanism and Buddhism as a means to do so. They were the right thing for their time when they were given to the ancient Indians, and Brahmanism in particular was a much more spiritual religion than Christianity still is today. But the fact that this is not already more advanced is due to the fact that since the Middle Ages Europeans have missed the opportunity to properly develop what is coming to them. Above all, however, a high spiritual culture will sweep over from China like a tidal wave, which will greatly impress the Europeans, because its great age, which reaches back to Atlantis, makes it far superior to present-day Christianity. [1] This vanguard serves to reinforce the Luciferian influences already present. These are spirits who are not incarnated now, who are now sending their influences out of the spiritual world.

But this is what the luciferic spirits that have remained behind want to arouse in us, the memory of the past as something that still exists and brings salvation in the present. If the teachings of the ancient Brahmins or of Buddhism, which promoted the development of mankind in their time, were still transmitted to people in exactly the same way now, it would be as if the memory of our soul had been transferred across the ages into the present. We would be living in hallucinations. An esoteric should stand firm in his center. [2]

Sources:

[1] & [2] GA 266/2: From the contents of the esoteric lessons. Volume II (1910-1912)

Lucifer and Christ

The principle that leads the earth up to spirituality is Lucifer. It would be impossible for Lucifer alone to lead up what is on earth. This requires not only the power of a lunar adept, but also of a solar adept, who also absorbs the life that expresses itself in the togetherness of human beings, not in art and science. [1] It would be possible to assemble the mineral kingdom through Lucifer, but Lucifer could not animate it. Man could never have given life under the influence of the other powers. Therefore a sun god had to come, a higher being than Lucifer. The most excellent of these is Christ. As Lucifer represents the mana element, so Christ represents the Buddha element. [2]

Had man, when he descended into matter, received only the form bestowed by Yahweh, he would have remained impersonal. Lucifer is therefore the principle that allows man to become truly a human being independent of the gods. The Christ or Logos manifesting himself in man is the principle that allows him to ascend again to the Godhead. [3]

Sources:

[1], [2] GA 93a: Basic Elements of Esotericism (1905)

[3] GA 94: Cosmogony. Popular Occultism. The Gospel of John. Theosophy on the basis of the Gospel of John (1906)

Lucifer and Christ for the esotericist

Lucifer initially appears to the occult aspirant as the archetype of human and also superhuman, so to speak divine greatness, when he confronts man in this way, taken out of his deeds, a seductive being. And the occult aspirant is only healed of the temptation a little, so to speak, when he looks back at what he himself has become through Lucifer, when he looks at the terrifying image of an animal nature that man has become from incarnation to incarnation through Luciferic temptation and seduction. If this encounter with that which one represents oneself, and which in a certain respect is the guardian of the threshold, has made a terrible impression, then that which can be the Christ offers one, so to speak, a consolation, a hope. For in place of death itself, in place of the broken human body, something else appears. And what I am telling you here is an unconditional experience that can be made, that is really made in the way I am telling it: In the place of death, Christ himself takes the place, making us realize that this I can be preserved after all. In other words, we receive an inner image in our consciousness that is completely independent of any memory from our sensory life. To speak of illusion, hallucination, would be the purest nonsense, for one could be blind and deaf and odorless and all sorts of things, and one could still have this experience that presents itself at this point of initiation; Christ would still take the place of death. Imagine that you have Christ before you, who takes the place of death, and Lucifer: absolutely the image that the Gospels themselves present as the temptation scene in the desert. You don't even need to remember this temptation story from the Gospels, you would have it before you. [1]

No external impression needs to be there when you have this image of the temptation of Christ and the defeat of death, so to speak, everything that Lucifer started with man, when you have this before you. And what kind of consciousness is that? A consciousness without an external object. [2] If one directs this higher consciousness, so to speak, towards the old moon, one has a repetition of this history of temptation. For we then learn that the Christ had already defeated Lucifer for himself on the old moon, and that the scene thus described in the Gospels is the second, the repeated fact where the Christ gains the victory over Lucifer, that is, that the Christ on earth rejects Lucifer from the outset. This is for the reason - as you will take it for granted, the Christ has also undergone a development - because the Christ, when he was still less developed for himself on the moon, rejected all the temptations of Lucifer, which at that time still meant something to him, out of his sense of devotion to the highest powers. On earth Lucifer was no longer dangerous to Christ; there he rejected him without further ado. On the moon, however, Christ developed all the powers at his disposal to repel Lucifer. If one now progresses to the second consciousness of a higher kind, then one perceives the still earlier embodiment state of our earth, the old sun. There we no longer experience the history of temptation. If we turn back to solar time, then the sun itself still appears to us as a planet among the seven planets. Venus is prefigured with Lucifer as the ruler; and at first the two, the Sun Spirit and the Venus Spirit, in other words the Christ and Lucifer, appear as a kind of brothers. The difference in the old solar time between Lucifer and the Christ is not so readily apparent from a consideration of their outer nature, but only becomes apparent when we look within. And it is extremely difficult to find means of external representation to show you what the difference is. Consider what I am going to say as an attempt to characterize as well as possible the difference between the Christ and Lucifer as seen by the clairvoyant consciousness in the old solar time.

We realize that Lucifer, the ruler of Venus, appears in an extraordinarily luminous form - although spiritual light is meant - so that we have the sensation: All the splendor that can ever come to us through a contemplation that proceeds from the revelation of light is something insignificant compared to the majesty of Lucifer in the old solar time. But we notice within this Lucifer, when we go into his intentions, which are then to be seen through, that he is a spirit who is endowed with an infinitely great pride through all that he has in himself. [3]

This is the seductiveness of Lucifer in his proud greatness, in his pride in his light form. That which can be called "unrevealed" light, the light that does not shine outwardly but has great power within itself, this he has in the fullest measure. And next to this, the figure of Christ in the old solar time, who is, so to speak, the ruler of the solar planet, is an image of the fullest devotion to that which is all around in the world. Whereas Lucifer actually appears to be concerned only with himself - one must put all this into human words, although they are not sufficient - the Christ appears to be devoted to that which surrounds him in the wide, wide universe. This vast universe was not as it is today. If you were to look at the sun today, you would first look radially at the twelve constellations of the zodiac. They were not externally visible as such at that time. But there were twelve figures, twelve beings, who, since the outer space was not filled with light, let their words resound from the depths of darkness, from the depths of darkness. The word "word" is again only a surrogate to indicate what it is all about - these were words that announced ancient times, times that were already ancient at that time. They were 12 world initiators. Today the 12 zodiacal pictures stand in the direction of these 12 world initiators, and from them sounds to the soul, which is open to the whole world, the original kind of unspoken world word that could be formed from the 12 voices. And while - I must now begin to speak figuratively, because human words are not sufficient - Lucifer alone had in himself the urge to irradiate everything with the light present in him and thereby to recognize it, the Christ gave himself up to the impression of this world-word of an inexpressible kind and took it completely, completely into himself; so that they were now united in the Christ-soul, that this Christ-soul was the unifying being of the great world-secrets sounding in through the inexpressible word. Thus we are confronted with the contrast of the Christ who receives the Word of the World and the proud Lucifer, the Venus spirit, who rejects the Word of the World and wants to fathom everything with his light. [4]

And from what Lucifer and Christ then were, all later development now proceeded. For this had the consequence that the Christ entity had absorbed the comprehensive world word, the comprehensive world secrets, and that the Lucifer entity lost its kingdom, the Venus kingdom, through what I can only express with the word "proud figure of light". For other reasons the other planetary spirits lost or changed their entities. So it happened that Lucifer lost more and more of his dominion, that the kingdom of Venus was lost to him more and more, that Lucifer became a dethroned ruler with his light, so to speak, and that the planet Venus had to make do from then on without an actual ruler, therefore could only undergo a downward development.

But during the old solar time the Christ had received the world word; and this world word has the property that it ignites itself to renewed light in the soul by which it is received, so that from the old solar time the world word became light in the Christ, and the planet whose ruler was the Christ developed from the old solar time to the center of the whole planetary system, to the sun, and also the other planets came into dependence on the sun, also with regard to their spiritual rulers. During the solar period, the paths of Christ and Lucifer diverged. The path of Lucifer went downwards, he had to lag behind in his development, and for this reason he also remained behind in his development during the lunar period. The Christ-Spirit, the Sun-Spirit, became a spirit that developed forwards and was finally able to appear on earth in the form often described to you. [5]

Sources:

[1] - [5] GA 137: Man in the Light of Occultism, Theosophy and Philosophy (1912)

Lucifer and Christ and the etheric body

This is the meaning of the further development of humanity through the various cultural epochs, that the etheric body enters deeper and deeper into the physical body. This changes the human view, since it depends on the way in which the etheric body is organized. And this again is connected with the fact that the Luciferic beings of such a kind, which reveals itself inner-earthly and inner-spiritually, ascend to cosmic levels of existence, and that the Christ-entity, which is previously a cosmic one and descends to incarnation in the human body, now becomes such a one, which reveals itself inner-earthly and inner-spiritually. This interpenetration of the Apollonian principle with the Dionysian principle, this as it were stepping over each other of the Luciferic and Christ entities, was only made possible by the fact that the human organization changed in this way. But it has not only changed for the judgment of the past, but also for the preparation of the future. We are indeed now living in the age in which the most intimate interpenetration between the etheric body and the physical body is already behind us; we are now already living again in the opposite direction of development. We are living in a time in which the etheric body is slowly moving out of the physical body. This is normal human development into the future, that the etheric body gradually leaves the physical body again; and times will come in which the human organization will again look at itself as it did in ancient times, so that we will again feel how the etheric body protrudes above the physical. We are in the midst of this process, and many of the more subtle manifestations of illness in the present would be understood if we knew this. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 113: The Orient in the Light of the Occident. The Children of Lucifer and the Brothers of Christ (1909)

Lucifer and Christ and freedom

Lucifer is the bringer of the personal freedom of the individual human being, Christ is the bearer of the freedom of the whole human race, of all humanity on earth. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 150: The World of the Spirit and its Entry into Physical Existence. The influence of the dead in the world of the living (1913)

Lucifer and evil

The same forces that underlie our evil thoughts were emitted on the old moon by the beings of the hierarchies, from the angels up to the spirits of form, Exusiai. They thereby brought forth the lunar existence. Lucifer and Ahriman, however, remained behind and are only now radiating these powers. Now, however, they are working into the meanwhile further condensed physical, into the physical blood of the human being, and thus evil arises. They are not evil in themselves. The esotericist must let them work on him, but not allow them to reach physical condensation. Then they remain valuable for the good thoughts of the future. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 266/3: From the Contents of the Esoteric Lessons. Volume III (1913, 1914; 1920 - 1923) (1913-1923)

Lucifer and thinking

That which the Luciferic beings have brought with them into the development of the earth, into which they have interwoven themselves, is above all that which has always been the world of thought that permeates human culture, the intellectualistic world of thought, the rational world in the best sense of the word, the world of wisdom. If we go back to the origins of humanity, we find that the sources of pagan wisdom are always to be found in Luciferic beings. Man would have had to remain childlike if he had not been able to receive constant instruction from all kinds of luciferic beings coming out of the Mysteries. In ancient times, wisdom could not be obtained from another source for the progress of mankind. Thus the initiates of ancient times had to receive it from the luciferic hands, and they had to make the commitment not to fall prey to the other aspirations of the luciferic entities. [1]

Speaking and thinking are originally quite Luciferic in nature, except that these arts were, so to speak, taken from Lucifer by the sages of primeval times. If you want to flee Lucifer, then you must decide to be mute in the future and not to think. You can still recognize the Luciferian element in your thinking today. Ahriman has already fallen upon the languages, which have long been differentiated and adapted to the earth, who has brought about the differentiation, who has reduced the uniform language into the differentiated language of the earth. Goethe is one of the people who thought the least Luciferian. But this makes it necessary to stick as closely as possible to the concrete individual. The moment one generalizes, the moment one unifies, one is already approaching Luciferian thinking. [2]

That this is so with our thinking, our intellect, our imagination, is connected with the former separation of the Moon from the advancing Sun. How we as human beings perceive our thinking and our imagination is connected with the fact that certain Luciferic beings from the Hierarchy of the Angeloi, who did not participate in the reconnection of the moon with the sun, live in our intellect through what they have become, so that something Luciferic lives in our intellect and closes us off from looking at what is inwardly moving and forming. So, in a sense, Lucifer dwells in our thinking. The essence of this Luciferian is that we do not perceive that which has been predisposed and developed in us by the regularly progressing divine-spiritual entities, but perceive that which Lucifer, so to speak, makes out of this normal development. What do these Luciferian Angeloi, who are in our intellect, want? At that time they did not want to take the step of uniting the moon with the sun. If they had taken the step at that time, then they would have, so to speak, connected imagination and thinking with human nature in the right way. They did not do this, and so now they contribute nothing. But now, during their earthly existence, they want to do what they did not do then, what they should have done during the moon's development. For if we were not seduced by Luciferic entities in the manner indicated, we would not relate thinking to ourselves in the way we do now, but would look back to the lunar evolution and say: "A long time ago our thinking wanted to connect with our inner being, wanted to belong to us. - But we do not say this, we say: We appropriate the thoughts of the world and now absorb them into ourselves. - But this is true Luciferian seduction. In the sense of the progressing divine-spiritual entities we would think: The world of the senses is spreading out there, just as we see it. But at the moment when we go over to thinking, we look back to the old moon existence and lead the whole earthly world of the senses back to the old moon existence. Something like a connection with a seemingly past star would light up for us, but it would still be there and live in our world of thoughts. We would feel connected with the present past and would see through the Luciferian illusion that Lucifer is holding up a carpet, a veil, in front of the luminous lunar existence because he failed to unite with the solar existence at that time. And he deceives us into believing that we absorb all that which we should see as shining into us from the old moon existence - that is, from the eternally new moon existence - in the same way as our thought content, which now settles in us through our brain and rests in us as earth people. So we have been cut off from that wonderful, powerful memory of the old moon existence by what has happened. We do not always see in the background, I would like to say, as if shining into the back of our neck, the explanation for everything that the senses conjure up for us. We would walk through the world, our senses directed outwards to sensory existence, and would feel, as if attesting our neck and the back of our head, the old, ever new moon existence, which would offer the explanation of the real living concepts that are cosmic and do not work into us from the outer earth things. [3]

Two images of the world are thus thrown into confusion: the image of the earth and the image of the moon. We would be able to keep them apart: the one by directing our senses forward, the other by receiving the appearance from behind, and we would have to prevent this from interweaving in our cognition. We cannot; Lucifer throws them into confusion. [4]

Basically, all our daytime knowledge is influenced by the fact of Luciferian seduction, it is the fulfillment of having partaken of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Our nocturnal, sleeping ignorance, our darkness of sleep spreading over our consciousness, is simply the effect of not eating from the tree of life. For we spend this life - this is a fact that can shake you - from falling asleep to waking up in the arms of Lucifer, I would like to say. At the same moment that man was punished by not being allowed to eat from the tree of life, Lucifer was condemned to continually eat from this tree. Our life and weaving in the subtle etheric element is something that Lucifer takes possession of, so that something does not happen that was actually predestined for man by the Yahweh deities, namely to bring into the etheric body and into the physical body what weaves and lives there in sleep. [5]

But now, on waking up, there is something that must be understood if we want to understand the necessary development of life that is to come today through the spiritual-scientific world view: What is woven there, what is actually felt there, when at particularly favorable moments this life and weaving is brought into our consciousness like an echo, what is woven there, should come into our physical and etheric body on waking up. For what is weaving there is our astral body. It lives and weaves in the billowing ocean of the world; and what it weaves there, what it experiences and experiences there, should enter both our etheric body and our physical body. In reality, it only enters the etheric body. Not because it is held back, but because through a mysterious pact between Lucifer and Ahriman, which has just occurred as a result of the earth development interwoven into Luciferic and Ahrimanic development - because in the moment of awakening Lucifer hands over to Ahriman what should actually enter the physical body. [6] Ahriman experiences Lucifer's experiences in our physical body during our sleep. In other words, this is the reason why we cannot bring our nocturnal experiences into our daytime consciousness ourselves. It is only while they are making their bargain with each other that some things come to our consciousness in the ordinary dream, as they pass from the hands of Lucifer into the hands of Ahriman. The fact also occurs that we acquire knowledge from the moment we wake up until we fall asleep; but the moment we fall asleep, this knowledge ceases to be conscious for us; that is, it passes out of our ego. We traverse Ahriman's realm with our consciousness from the moment we wake up until the moment we fall asleep. Lucifer - we must always separate this - has brought this about; but it is not the realm of Lucifer in which we weave and live from waking to falling asleep, but it is the realm of Ahriman, because Ahriman is in our physical body. He constantly helps us when we want to acquire knowledge through the physical body. When we fall asleep, Ahriman lavishly repays the gift that Lucifer gave him when he woke up. When we fall asleep, Ahriman gives Lucifer what he has experienced with us throughout the day. In our physical body Ahriman enjoys during the day, in our ego Lucifer enjoys during the night. [7]

The fact that Lucifer makes use of our ego prevents us from living through what we experience as knowledge during the day, what we think up about the world, what we judge, distinguish, connect in the world, also during the night. We would really live through it if we could continue it through the night. The original intention of the Yahweh deities was that we should gather our knowledge during the day and live through it, work through it, during the night. We would have a science that would truly be a living science, where every concept we experience would be alive in us, where we would also know that concepts we experience during the day are shadows of living beings. At night, all concepts would wake up to life, and we would realize that everything is elemental living beings. Every night Lucifer sucks out the life of science for himself, and we are left with only the abstract concepts, the dead concepts given to us by science. [8] What would happen if we were not subject to the fact that on waking Ahriman takes up that which is nightly experience in us? We would get into our day consciousness the whole connection with the night experiences. In other words, we would get the whole spiritual world into our daytime consciousness, and what we have as daytime consciousness would be mixed with what we experience at night. Instead of the knowledge entering the physical body and showing itself at every turn, it remains stuck in the generality. And we feel it within us in such a way that we can say to ourselves: The spiritual is there, it lives and weaves in the world, but it does not concretize itself to us. Above all, what we experience of the spiritual cannot become knowledge. It would become knowledge for us if it entered the physical body. It remains faith because it is only experienced in the etheric body. So you see, faith is knowledge stuck in the etheric body. [9]

The scholastics still grasped the content of revelation through concrete thoughts. The dogmas were (however) gradually thought through so little that people came to drop them altogether. On the one hand, this is fully justified, and if people can no longer follow the dogmas to the point of seeing, it is natural that they should drop them. But what do they come to then? Then they arrive at the most abstract thoughts of dependence on some quite indeterminate eternal or infinite. Then thoughts are no longer formed plastically, which carry the content of revelation within them, but then only some dependence on some infinite is felt darkly mystically. This path has also been taken in more recent times. It is the one that leads to the Luciferic. And just as surely as the path of the knowledge of reason has led to the Ahrimanic in modern times, just as surely can the other path lead to the Luciferic. [10]

Sources:

[1], [2] GA 191: Social understanding based on knowledge from the humanities (1919)

[3] - [9] GA 162: Questions of art and life in the light of spiritual science (1915)

[10] GA 213: Human questions and world answers (1922)

Lucifer and thinking in meditation

Lucifer lives in thinking, including thinking in meditation. We therefore make a covenant with Lucifer in the thinking of meditation. Now we must let go of thinking in meditation, i.e. empty ourselves, let go of the content of meditation, detach the power of thinking from thinking. Through arbitrary suppression with an awake consciousness we voluntarily kill, with consciousness, that which comes from Lucifer. It is a matter of generating concentrated attention without an object. To be attentive to an object, that is the beginning of meditation, then one must divert the attention and return the thinking to the gods; that is the meaningful thing. And only then does one enter the true, spiritual world. After man has succumbed to the temptation of Lucifer, who said to man: "You will be like the gods!" - then the deity says: "No!" - And the gods take life away from what Lucifer has given, i.e. they add death to it. When one enters the spiritual world, one has the experience: one experiences the power that plastically forms the human body; one comes behind oneself. The power of judgment, the distinction between good and evil, is what man learns to recognize through Lucifer. By detaching thinking from the brain, one experiences oneself outside of one's brain. It is like circling your brain in currents; that is how you feel. You literally sneak around your brain afterwards. If one continues what is otherwise ordinary thinking and feels connected with the processes that otherwise always precede it, (feels connected) with that through which the thinking process arises, then one gets to know a feeling that can be expressed in this way: one is literally afraid to let it come to thought. It takes a certain amount of overcoming to communicate such truths and facts, these spiritual ideas, which you have experienced outside the brain, because you now get to know what actually works in the human being. One sees the process of destruction of ordinary thinking. The spiritual researcher manages for a while not to exercise the process of destruction. He stands beside his brain. Devotion to the universe without agitation is part of spiritual research. Then the spiritual researcher learns to do everything arbitrarily that is otherwise done by man involuntarily, in his sleep. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 266/3: From the Contents of the Esoteric Hours. Volume III (1913, 1914; 1920 - 1923) (1913-1923)

Lucifer and the Babylonian corruption

Everything that is capable of bringing man below his own spiritual level is included in what the apocalypticist calls the Babylonian temptation. Man is only truly human when there is complete harmony in him between the principle of the material and the spiritual, that is, when the material does not play up into emotions uncontrolled by the spiritual. That is precisely what it is all about and we must understand this very well. For even the apocalypticist could not speak as he does if he assumed that emotions, passions and everything that comes from the sphere of the will and the sphere of the mind were completely unjustified from the outset. To declare the emotions and passions to be unjustified, this ascetic striving in the wrong sense, also springs from the emotional, the passionate. For he who does not feel strong enough to permeate his passions with spirituality in such a way that he places them at the service of the good evolution of the world, is just paying homage to his emotion of weakness. Even if he wants the good evolution - if he becomes impoverished in his emotional sphere, he will pay homage to his weakness. So it is not a question of tearing out the emotions, not of tearing out the affects and passions, but of ensuring that the emotions do not remain uncontrolled by the spiritual. And all that which represents the emotions in human life, be they great or small, which remain uncontrolled by the spiritual, all this is summarized in the Apocalypse in the name of that city Babylon, in which ruled - I would like to express it stereotypically - the apostasy from spirituality through the passions. We only have to translate the strong, crude expressions of that time - they were not crude for that time - into our language. The old way of thinking is not to form abstract concepts, but always to refer to the concrete (the whore of Babylon), to something that is characteristic. This is also how the apocalypticist speaks of Babylon. Why Babylon in particular? In Babylon, or rather at the site of Babylon, there were really high mysteries in ancient times, in which one could be initiated into the secrets of the supernatural cosmos, in which one could learn secrets about the starry worlds and their spiritual content.

It was precisely in Babylon that the oldest Babylonian priests used the human powers of dream clairvoyance in a way that we would call mediumistic clairvoyance today. And it was in such a way, in a certain sense mediumistic, that the wonderful ancient Babylonian teachings were formed. We can see today that mediums, even if they initially appear to be suitable for conveying spiritual information - this happens in many cases, but it would have to be controlled by insightful initiates - are exposed to influences that are morally very questionable. Mediums, because there is a certain disproportion between what they reveal and what they are, are often no longer able to distinguish truth from lies; and this can extend to an area where morality can no longer be separated from immorality. A human being becomes a medium - and this was also the case with the Babylonian priests - when the ego and the astral body are drawn out of the physical and etheric body by external force. But the moment the medium's ego and astral body are pulled out of the physical and etheric body, another power is already inside this ego and astral body. Depending on whether the initiator who brings this about has good or evil intentions, whether he belongs to the left or the right, it can be a good or an evil power. In ancient Babylonian times, excellent insights and revelations came to light in this way. But in later times and today, the disadvantage becomes apparent: when the medium returns to the physical body, what happens? You see, the logic used in the physical world to distinguish between lies and truth in the physical world cannot be used in the spiritual world. It is a complete mistake to believe that the concepts of lie and truth, as they are rightly used in the physical world, can also be applied in the spiritual world. There is nothing in the spiritual world that should be distinguished in this way. There are entities there that are good and those that are evil. You have to recognize them from within, because they do not tell you what kind they are. But even the evil ones are true in their nature.

Of course this is difficult to comprehend, just as everything that confronts us when we enter the spiritual world is difficult to comprehend. [1] Therefore the true initiate must have a certain constitution of soul for seeing in the spiritual world. He must feel fully responsible for the fact that the moment he returns to the physical world he has to work with physical concepts. The medium cannot do this because he does not go over into the spiritual world with consciousness. When it returns, the ego and astral body fill the physical and etheric body with a way of thinking that is correct for the spiritual world, but which corrupts all moral feelings and sensations valid in the physical world. Therefore the medium becomes corrupted towards truth and lies, and this then affects everything else. One can indeed say that Babylon has undergone this development from the highest, most significant revelation of the spiritual worlds to a terrible corruption. What relates first of all to the principle of spiritual revelation, also in relation to the general human life into which it extends, can lead to a strong corruption, so that man, after he has entered into spirituality, becomes more immoral than he was before with his ordinary humanity. Hence Babylon was taken as the representative of moral corruption. And the expressions that appear in the Apocalypse mean nothing other than those that were common for corruption at that time.

But since then, the whole of humanity, which has continued that which lived in Babylon, has become a city of Babylon over the whole world. This is what the apocalypticist means. The city of Babylon is to be found among humanity on earth today. It is where there are people who have fallen victim to the Babylonian temptation. And this attitude of men is what must fall before that final state of which the apocalyptic speaks can come. If we examine what is at work in the "Babylonian corruption", we find that the Ahrimanic principle is at work everywhere in this Babylonian corruption. Ahriman is in man, and he is a power that is initially close to man within the world as a whole. He is in the emotions, which are corrupted in this way. The opposite pole to the Ahrimanic is the Luciferic. The Ahrimanic lives in that which falls in Babylon, and the Luciferic is opposed to it. What kind of picture must present itself to the apocalyptic when he looks at this? The image of the exultant attitude of the Luciferic angels. We must not conceal this from ourselves. It has always been the great error of some world views that the bad is to be found just opposite the best, that, for example, the evil principle below is always met by the good from above. But that is not the case! Here in this chapter of the Apocalypse (Acts 19), below is the Ahrimanic - Babylon - and above, where the angels rejoice over the fall of Babylon, is the Luciferic. That which is intoned above as a rejoicing of the angels is the voice of Lucifer. The Christ principle is always the balance between these two. Only when the trinity of the world constitution is understood in the right way can one also understand what the apocalypticist is saying here. It is utterly incomprehensible to the ordinary human mind to think that pure, good spirits would raise their voices in jubilation when the torments described here come upon people below. Of course, this becomes immediately understandable if one sees this as a cry of rejoicing from those beings who, basically, before the world came into being in which man experiences his spiritual formation, were against the world coming into being in this way. The Luciferic entities want to keep the whole evolution on a quite different spiritual level; they do not want that union, that marriage of spirit with matter, which has taken hold in earthly existence, so that they actually feel in their souls: Now that what has been seized by Ahriman is being eliminated from earthly existence, we have the satisfaction that at least a part of earthly existence will not continue and will fall out of earthly evolution. In this respect a grandiose honesty of vision speaks from this picture described by the apocalypticist. [2]

Sources:

[1] & [2] GA 346: Lectures and Courses on Christian Religious Work, V. Apocalypse and Priestly Work (1924)

Lucifer and the spirits of darkness

A decades-long battle has taken place in the spiritual realms. This battle, which began in the early forties (of the 19th century), ended with the defeat of certain spiritual entities that had been active like rebels in the spiritual world during these decades and were thrust into the realm of human evolution as dark spirits in the fall of 1879. These spirits of darkness, the Luciferian-Ahrimanic beings who now walk among us, are of the same kind as those spirits of darkness who in ancient times were also thrown from the spiritual world, i.e. from heaven to earth, and who at that time had certain tasks, even into the Greco-Latin period. They had this task throughout the entire Atlantean age. [1] (For further information see: Lucifer and Michael; Spirits of Darkness).

Sources:

[1] GA 177: The Spiritual Backgrounds of the Outer World. The Fall of the Spirits of Darkness (1917)

Lucifer and the people who want to flee from Lucifer

Just think, somewhere - forgive the paradox - I won't say where it might be, suppose that on some (hill-shaped) island there was a humanity which had the opinion that one had to beware of Lucifer at all costs, that one had to keep him as far away from people as possible. This would not prove that the people of this island have the best knowledge of Lucifer, but it would prove something else, namely that these people, through their peculiar disposition, would only be able to turn everything Lucifer can give them into evil. The views that people on this island would have about Lucifer would only be characteristic of the people on this island, never of Lucifer! I don't want to say whether this island exists. Look for it yourself in the development of the world. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 138: On Initiation. Of Eternity and the Moment. Of Spiritual Light and the Darkness of Life (1912)

Lucifer and the element of warmth

What does this mean: I have become acquainted with the elements? The first element in which man was created was warmth. And actually, when the earth was created, it was intended that man should send streams of heat from outside into his body. Summer warmth and winter cold, which he now experiences in his body as an individual human being, he should feel as his ego flowing into him from outside, so to speak. He should feel this ego as connected to all other egos. That the warmth is now drawn into us, into our blood, is Lucifer's deed. The second element with which we are closely connected is air. We should actually have the feeling that the air out there is us, that we flow into the body with it with every breath and revitalize it. Instead, we feel the air as something coming to us from outside and return it as something poisonous, as something that kills. And this killing air is where Ahriman confronts us. The solid and the liquid in us, the physical body and the blood. We perceive them as ourselves. But we should identify so little with our respective personalities that, even if we get to know our earlier incarnations, we regard them only as transit stations. We should never say: we have been this or that. For in doing so we conflate our eternal self with a transitory one. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 266/2: From the Contents of the Esoteric Lessons. Volume II (1910-1912)

Lucifer and elemental beings of the ether

Just like the lower elements, earth, water, air, the higher elements, light, the chemical ether, the life ether, are also inhabited to a certain extent by elemental beings. But these elemental entities are very different from the elemental entities of the lower elements. The beings of light, but especially the beings of life, do not strive for multiplicity. The entities of the earthy element strive most strongly for multiplicity. The beings of the etheric elements strive for unity. They cannot really be distinguished from one another. The individualities are not distinct. These entities strive to combine the one into the other. An older power of initiation of certain initiates or initiates, from whom the deeper teachings of the Old Testament originate, has turned knowledge preferably towards this etheric element. And after this convergence of the ethereal element into the one, the impression was formed which then lived out in monotheism, in the strict monotheism of Judaism. This religion of Yahweh was initially created primarily through the spiritual view of the etheric region.

If these beings are again ignored by men, if men do not turn to spirituality and say to themselves: Up there is not only the sun, but with solar warmth and sunlight beings penetrate down to earth from the ether - if men just stop at the outer comprehension of the material, then these beings find the possibility to connect with the Luciferic. So that if mankind does not grasp, on the one hand, the danger that threatens from the Ahrimanic through the connection of the Ahrimanic with those entities that live in the lower elements, and the danger that threatens from the Luciferic through the connection of the Luciferic with the striving for unity of the etheric elements, then the possibility would exist that in the earth's future the earth would become something quite different from what, according to the initial intentions, the earth was actually meant to become. [1]

By going up to these beings of light, to the elementary beings of the ether, we come to another outer world. This world, however, is not only contained in the physical light, but also in that which streams down to us as spiritual with every ray of sunlight: there we find such beings as we find in the earthly elements. But in those etheric elements we find entities that do not want to connect humanity with the earth in the way that is the intention of the Ahrimanic powers, which hold back the earth in its development, but they do not want to let man come to the full realization of the earthly, they want to stop his development before the earth reaches its goal. The ahrimanic entities would like to bring the earth as far as it serves their purposes; the other entities are intent on not allowing that which is inherent in human development from the beginning to come to full fruition, to hold it in earlier stages. But then they were able to make the decision to form an alliance between Lucifer and the elemental powers of the etheric. While Ahriman and his powers can enter the human being if the human being closes himself to the knowledge of the spiritual, Lucifer and the powers that are in the etheric can enter the human being if the human being fails to deepen his inner being properly. And so today the hostile powers from above and below stand before man. And the powers that live in the warmth, these fire spirits that live in the flooding warmth, but also live in our blood, which pulsates through us with warmth, are the mediators between the Luciferic and Ahrimanic elements. [2]

Sources:

[1] GA 211: The Solar Mystery and the Mystery of Death and Resurrection. Exoteric and Esoteric Christianity (1922)

[2] GA 212: Human Soul Life and Spiritual Striving in Connection with World and Earth Development (1922)

Lucifer and Elohim

At the beginning of the Lemurian period, when what the Bible describes as the battle between the Elohim and Lucifer took place, the latter interfered with his fire in the hearts of human beings. But the heart was predestined to be something completely different; it was created by the Elohim to be their dwelling place. Something can be small in the physical world and large in the spiritual world, and vice versa. So the heart is physically only a small thing, but in reality the heart is something very large in the spiritual world and was destined to be the dwelling place of the Elohim. When Lucifer moved into the human heart, however, the Elohim kept a place for themselves, they can still dwell there, and this expresses itself in human life as something that does not belong to Lucifer with his consuming fire, in it a direct God-inspiration still reaches man. And we see that at important moments in human history this voice of conscience has become objective for people and has stood before them. So it was with Moses, on whose soul the fate of his entire people weighed. He climbed Mount Sinai. In the burning bush (i.e. in the fire that Lucifer kindled) he heard the voice of his God, who later gave him the commandments on Sinai, which became the basis of all later human laws. [1]

This realization that Lucifer is enthroned with his fire in our heart, and that Ahriman cools this fire in the head, has always been held by the ancient initiates, and a last remnant can be found in Aristotle (who was no longer clairvoyant himself), who said that heat emanates from the heart to the head and is cooled there. The heart; spiritually speaking it is infinitely large, for it is the house of the gods. The Elohim have chosen it as their abode, but in the Lemurian period Lucifer took possession of it. The Elohim let the imaginations, the inspirations and the intuitions flow into it, but Lucifer burns them in his furnace of passions and turns them into sensory perceptions. 266/.3.322f

Sources:

[1] GA 266/3: From the contents of the esoteric lessons. Volume III (1913, 1914; 1920 - 1923) (1913-1923)

Lucifer and earth

As true as gravity, electricity and magnetism are forces that today participate in the formation of the earth on a larger scale, it is also true that what we call Luciferic influence is a force without which the formation of the earth could not have taken place. And we must include this Luciferic influence among the forces constituting the earth. Therefore, especially Oriental accounts of creation also place paradise - not as finely as in the Bible - in the earth's orbit, not on the earth itself, and they understand the expulsion from paradise as a descent from the earth's orbit to the earth's surface. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 122: The Secrets of the Biblical Story of Creation. The Six-Day Work in the 1st Book of Moses (1910)

Lucifer and esotericists

The previous embodiment of our earth, the old moon, the cosmos of wisdom was (so) that it was completely permeated, permeated with wisdom. But one power, which is now incorporated into the earth, was missing: love. And so Lucifer is also completely imbued with wisdom, but he does not know love at all. He has given himself completely to wisdom, he has become intoxicated by it, and therefore he wants to make all beings, the children of earth, full of wisdom. And therein lies the great temptation for man again and again. Lucifer, whose powers live in us, tells us something like this: You will see into all circumstances, you will know everything, everything will be clear to you if you take me in completely - he wants to give people wisdom without love; it leads to selfish knowledge. Lucifer still believes that he will win people to become soldiers in his armies, and he is working hard to achieve this. Lucifer is present in all knowledge and cognition, in all perception. There is only one thing where he cannot get to us, namely when we immerse ourselves in wisdom without any external impression in our meditation, then we escape Lucifer. We defeat Lucifer by completely filling our ego with the content of meditation. Lucifer cannot enter the ego, only the astral body. The Christ impulse is love. Lucifer is redeemed through Christ. People who absorb Lucifer on the (future) Jupiter will then be powerful beings; but it will be like a burning of these I's in wisdom without love. [1]

The human soul comes into contact with Lucifer and Ahriman to a much more intense degree when it embarks on the path of clairvoyant consciousness. When it goes out of the physical world and tries to penetrate into the higher worlds, Lucifer and Ahriman approach this human soul and try to accomplish many things with it. [2]

Just as external science becomes Ahrimanic, so the higher development of man's inner being simply becomes Luciferic when he mystically deepens this inner being as he is born with it. In every human being who today, without taking self-education (see: training) into his own hands in order to mystically deepen that which already lies within him, awakens to the Luciferic, the Luciferic becomes particularly powerful. This will testify to the fact that in every human being today, if he even begins to ponder about his inner being, the Luciferic arises. This Luciferic is actually terribly powerful in present-day humanity. Today, this Luciferian is expressed in an egoism that most people do not even notice in themselves. Just think how often you meet people today who, when they have done something, are satisfied if, as they often say, they have done it in such a way that they have nothing to reproach themselves for, that they have done it to the best of their knowledge and conscience. This is a purely Luciferian point of view that is put forward. For in what we do in life it is not at all important whether we need to reproach ourselves or not, but it is important that we grasp things objectively, quite apart from ourselves objectively, that we carry out things out of objective facts. [3]

Lucifer has great understanding for the fact that someone evokes a passion in himself which he indulges, which causes him lust, so that what otherwise remains subconscious is called into consciousness as far as possible. In bad occult circles the alliance with Lucifer is sought, whereby an attempt is made to work on the human being in such a way that in a voluptuous way a vision is evoked in him, that is, a vision is evoked from within. [4]

We can call our own progress, which we make by developing ourselves occultly, progress in mysticism, for this progress is first of all inner progress of the soul. We bring ourselves, out of our ordinary personality, into a different condition of our individuality, of our whole being. Step by step we bring ourselves into a different constitution. This inner progression, this progression and advancement of the soul, one can call it mystical progress of the soul, as it seems to be experienced inwardly at first. But what inward mysticism is, is not merely this mysticism, but at the moment in which one has developed to perceive the mildness looking down from the spiritual world, at that moment one is objectively inside the world of the Angeloi, the world of the Angeloi reveals itself. And the moment we learn to recognize how real effects of strength and power enter us, we are in the world of the Archangeloi. So every stage of inner mystical progress means being transported into another world. We cannot reach a certain stage of inner mystical development without being transported into another world. Let us assume, for example, that we work on ourselves, that we reach the stage of such a development through which we can live in the world of the Angeloi through our inner abilities. But we are selfish, egoists, we have remained unloving people, then we carry our self, which is destined for the physical world, into the world of the Angeloi. And instead of feeling the gentle gaze and the gentle will of the Angeloi resting on us, we feel those spiritual powers that can ascend through us, that, instead of looking at us from outside, become free through us from their, let us call it, underworld, by lifting us up into a higher world. Instead of the world of the Angeloi overshadowing us, or rather overlighting us, the corresponding world of Luciferic beings comes out of us. And if we live ourselves up into the world of the Archangeloi under the same conditions, so that we have indeed reached the stage of mystical development through which we can stand within the world of the Archangeloi, but without developing the feeling of wanting to receive the influences of the spiritual world through grace, then again we carry our self up into the world of the Archangeloi. And instead of the Archangeloi then penetrating us within this world, impregnating us with their powers, instead the entities of the ahrimanic world, the world of Ahriman, rise out of us and are around us. [5]

At first it seems quite terrible to say: The world of Lucifer appears on the plan of the Angeloi, the world of Ahriman appears on the plan of the Archangeloi. In reality, however, there is nothing terrible about this fact. The terrible thing is not that we encounter Lucifer and Ahriman, but it occurs when we encounter them and do not recognize them, that is, when they dominate us without our being consciously aware of them. If we really want to practise fruitful occultism in the field of the Angeloi, we must ask at the moment when we expect the Angeloi to rest their spiritual gaze on us: Where is Lucifer? - He must be there! For if we cannot answer the question: "Where is Lucifer?" - then he is within us. But he must be outside us in this field, we must be facing him. [6]

Now there is indeed a certain difference in the realization of the Angeloi and Archangeloi and the realization of Lucifer and Ahriman. I have mentioned this: We perceive the Angeloi by not perceiving their form as authoritative for them, but by their mildness flowing into us; the Archangeloi allow their strength, their power to flow into our feelings, into our will. Lucifer and Ahriman, in the spiritual world they are like figures that are only translated into the spiritual, that do not provide contact, but like figures that can be addressed as spiritualized repetitions of the physical world. You can see from this that it is important to acquire in our mystical clairvoyant development not only the ability to see figures in the higher world, but also to develop consciousness: You are beheld, higher will rests upon you. This latter consciousness must be added to the consciousness of clairvoyantly seeing figures.

You see from this that higher development consists not merely in the acquisition of clairvoyance, in the acquisition of that which is often called clairvoyance, but in the acquisition of a certain constitution of soul, a certain mood of soul, a certain relationship to the beings of the higher world. And the development of the visionary faculties must go hand in hand with the other development of the soul to a different constitution, to a different mood. We must see from this that under all circumstances we must learn not only to see in the higher world, but also to read in the higher world. [7]

Sources:

[1] GA 266/2: From the Contents of the Esoteric Lessons. Volume II (1910-1912)

[2] GA 147: The Secrets of the Threshold (1913)

[3] GA 191: Social Understanding from Spiritual Scientific Knowledge (1919)

[4] GA 170: The Riddle of Man. The Spiritual Background of Human History (1916)

[5] - [7] GA 154: How does one acquire an understanding of the spiritual world? The Influx of Spiritual Impulses from the World of the Departed (1914)

Lucifer and esotericists of old

Thus, while all gods and spirits can only be found above the physical world for the observing consciousness, the Christ is found within this physical world, even though he is of the same nature and essence as the divine-spiritual entities. Thus only the other gods can be found in the outer world; he is the One who at the same time lives in the human inner being, who, so to speak, leaves the outer worlds of the gods and enters the human inner being. Thus something very significant had happened in the development of the world and humanity. If one had sought a God within, one had previously had to descend to the subterranean gods hidden behind the veil of soul experiences; in the Christ one has such a God who can be found in the outer and in the inner. This is the essential thing that occurred in the fourth period of the post-Atlantean era after the Indian, Persian and Egyptian periods. What was thought and seen more in the abstract in ancient India, that the divine-spiritual world is a unified one, that the "Tat" and Brahman, which emanate from two sides of the soul, are a unity, became living life through the Christ-event. Before, one could say to oneself: The divine, which one finds on the way outwards, and the divine, which one finds on the way inwards, are one. Now one could say to oneself: One only descends into the human interior. If you partake of Christ, you will find a being that is Apollo and Dionysus in one entity. We have seen that the spiritual beings who are in the outer world as divine-spiritual beings are represented for man, as it were, by the most powerful of their beings, by the Christ, who as an outer being simultaneously becomes an inner being. How is it then with the other entities which we have described in a certain respect as Luciferic entities? Could one also say that the beings who were under the guidance of Dionysus also develop into the human soul life, and that from the other side some Dionysus, a Luciferic being, embodied himself as a human being? Can the same be said? No, you cannot say that. That is precisely the experience of spiritual development, that one cannot say the same of this world. And here we come to something that is quite fundamentally and essentially connected with all human and world development.

If we went back to very, very ancient times in the development of mankind and the world, we would find that the soul looks outwards and sees the divine-spiritual world outside; that it looks inwards and sees the divine-spiritual world within; that the soul finds the Apollonian world outside, the Dionysian world within, to use Greek expressions. If one then advances in the development of mankind and the world, one sees a different result. In the most ancient times, when the vast majority of people were observant, the situation was as I have just described. Outside one saw the upper gods, inside the lower gods; and one had these two ways into the spiritual world. If we consider later times, then we have before us a humanity that has become weaker with regard to the faculties of vision. People have lost more and more of their original, old, dull, dim vision. But let us take a time when few people still had natural vision. These people - we do not need to go far back, we also find such people in the Chaldean-Egyptian world - saw the upper gods when they penetrated through the carpet of the sense world, and the lower gods when they descended into their own inner being. These impressions were clearer and more powerful for those who were initiated to a certain degree. It should be mentioned that at all times there have also been initiates who fully recognized the unity of the two worlds. But these are the pinnacles of humanity. [1] Take, for example, an initiate in the ancient Jewish-Hebrew world. Initiates in that world, even if they were not initiated to a particularly high degree, were able to experience that in their small vision they saw into the world in which Yahweh was not merely a concept, an idea, but an ethereal reality, an entity that spoke to them like a human being to the looking eye. So while for the people Yahweh was a proclamation, something that was only said to be there, for the initiate he was a reality. On the other hand, it would have been more difficult for such an initiate in the old Hebrew world to find something if he had plunged down into his own soul life, if he had sought the realm of the lower gods.

Then he should have said to himself: Yes, I cannot penetrate to the bottom there; I find my spiritual life everywhere, I cannot get through the dense crust of my spiritual life to the lower gods. Thus the lower gods had withdrawn into a certain unknown darkness. It was the time of the descent of the Christ to earth, in which the Luciferic spirits had withdrawn to a certain degree into darkness. And in outer humanity one could only hear more during these times: There are mysteries; those who are initiated into the mysteries attain the ability to penetrate through the powers of the soul life into the Dionysian world. - There was a dark sense of something that could be explored by people in the deep secrets of the Mysteries. But it was only something that was hinted at, something that very few people had a clear idea of at the time of the expectation of Christ. They had much clearer ideas about the external gods. There were many people who still had a vivid experience of these outer gods. But now humanity is advancing in its development. And what is the result of this progress? Outer humanity will transform its spiritual culture; more and more the Christ will settle into outer humanity. But also in the Mysteries one will recognize the nature and essence of the Christ, whom one has hardly begun to understand today. So the God who could be seen in the time of Zarathustra, when the gaze turned to the sun and looked, and who descended to earth, this God will be grasped more and more intimately by the human soul. The God who was the ruler of the outer world will become more and more inner. The Christ walks through the world in such a way that from a cosmic God who descended to earth he becomes more and more a mystical God who can be experienced by people in the inner life of the soul. Therefore, at the time when Christ descended, it was possible to realize what his disciples then described by saying: "We have laid our hands in his wounds, we ourselves have heard his word on the mountain. - One could refer to something external. That was the essential thing, that Christ was there outwardly. At that time one could not have experienced him inwardly mystically; one could not have grasped his Dionysian nature; one had to experience him first as an external historical Christ.

But this is the progress in the Christ-consciousness of mankind, that it goes deeper and deeper into the soul, that people will be able to see more and more inwardly, that they will live through their own soul experiences more and more mystically inwardly and will experience more and more the Christ in their own soul, the mystical Christ, in addition to the outward Christ. See how in the so-called mysticism, which appears in the first period of Christian development through Dionysius the Areopagite, who was a friend and disciple of Paul, how the Christ is first recognized through external occult abilities. And all the descriptions of this first Christian occult school are such that the Christ is essentially described according to those qualities which he unfolds in the outer worlds, which could be experienced through the instinctively looking gaze directed outwards. And let us go back a few centuries in the development of mankind and see what has become. Look at the medieval mystical development, at the deep inner experience of a Meister Eckart, a Johannes Tauler and so on up to our more recent mystics - there are people who look down into their own inner being. Just as in ancient times one looked into the inner self in order to see through this inner self and penetrate to Dionysus, so the newer ones penetrate, can say like Master Eckart: Although the historical Christ is a fact, although he has developed in history, there is the possibility of climbing into one's own inner self and finding the inner mystical Christ there. In this way, the human soul develops to find the Dionysian nature of Christ, the mystical Christ, not only in the outer world, but also within. At that time, if one immersed oneself in the inner life of the soul, one did not find the Christ, but the Dionysus. Today, if one has developed in the appropriate way, one finds an inner Christ-entity. The Christ has changed from an extra-soul divinity to an inner-soul divinity, which will take hold of the human soul more and more the closer it approaches this Christ with its soul experiences. [2]

When the Christ has worked in the soul for a while, then this soul, by being permeated by the Christ-substance, becomes ripe through its Christianization to penetrate again into the realm of the Luciferic entities. At first the initiates of the Rose Cross were able to do this, and little by little these initiates of the Rose Cross will carry forth what they can experience about the Luciferic principle, and will pour out upon the world that great spiritual marriage which consists in the fact that the Christ, who has poured himself as substance into the human soul, is now comprehended with those spiritual faculties which mature through the influx of the Luciferic principle in a new way into the spirit of individual human beings. [3] Already when Zarathustra pointed upwards to Ahura Mazdao, the power of the Christ radiated downwards. And from the other side radiated the power of Lucifer (see also: Mithras). This is reversed. In the future, the power of Lucifer will radiate in from the outside and the Christ will live within. The human organization must again be influenced from two sides. From a subterranean deity to a cosmic one, Lucifer will become. [4]

Sources:

[1] - [4] GA 113: The Orient in the Light of the Occident. The Children of Lucifer and the Brothers of Christ (1909)

Lucifer and feeling

The Luciferic spirits have taken up residence in the astral body. Otherwise only the spirits of form, the Exusiai, would have taken possession of this astral body. They would have imprinted on this astral body those powers that give man the human face, that make man the image of the gods, the spirits of form. All this would have become of man, but man would have remained dependent on these spirits of form throughout his life, through all eternity. Otherwise man would have remained so, if the Luciferic entities had not come, that he would always have longed to return to his home, to the spiritual realms from which he had descended. He would not have found pleasure in what surrounded him on earth, he could not possibly have found interest in earthly impressions. He came to this interest, to this desire for earthly impressions, through the Luciferian spirits. They forced him into the earthly sphere by penetrating his innermost being, his astral body. [1] The Luciferic spirits have given man sensual desire; the higher beings have taken their antidote in the sense that man could now not necessarily fall into this sensual world, by placing sickness and suffering in the wake of sensual desires and sensual interests, so that in the world there is just as much suffering and pain as mere interest in the physical, sensual world. Both are completely balanced, there is no more of either in the world: just as many sensual desires, just as many sensual passions as illness and pain. [2] Hope or lust are luciferic. [3] In every sympathy there is in a certain way the Luciferic. [4]

We can say that Lucifer closes us off from the cosmos through his existence. He only allows us to feel that which lives within us from feelings and impulses of will. If he did not close us off in this way, then instead of feeling the emotions and the will coming up from his subconscious, as if from his inner being, man would perceive everything that shines into him from the cosmos through solar time. Just as man should actually perceive in his intellect the old moon behind the ordinary existence of the senses, so he should see the radiant world sun rising behind his feelings and behind his impulses of will. In the feelings and in the will he would have to see - like the kernel in the fruit - the essence of solar life shining through the feeling and the will. We are luciferically closed off from this. We believe that feeling and will are only something within us; we do not feel, so to speak, that all feelings and all will contain living solar forces within them. If we felt these solar forces, if we really felt the spiritual light shining in the midst of feeling and will, then we would have a vision of the cosmos, precisely through this shining of the spiritual light of the world in feeling and will. We would directly perceive an outside through our inside. This has been spoiled for us by those Luciferic spirits who have an archangel nature and have not taken part in the step of separating the moon from the sun. It had to be brought back to us by the fact that this cosmic-sunlike came into the development of humanity through the Mystery of Golgotha, the whole reality of which man must first absorb into himself, must experience inwardly: "Not I, the Christ in me." And from there, more and more of that inwardly shining, shaping thing is formed in him. The cosmic light, like sunlight, permeates feeling and will and unites with the intellectual, so that we attain a unified view of the world by learning not merely to have the Christ impulse live in feeling and will, but to let it flow into the world of understanding and imagination. [5]

Sources:

[1], [2] GA 107: Spiritual science of human nature (1908/1909)

[3] GA 169: Weltwesen und Ichheit (1916)

[4] GA 166: Necessity and freedom in world events and in human action (1916)

[5] GA 162: Questions of art and life in the light of spiritual science (1915)

Lucifer and genius

What does one become by being possessed by a high Luciferian spirit? A genius, which - because it is possessed as a human being and the actual human nature is overshadowed by this higher being - is impractical for ordinary activities, but has a pioneering, leading effect in some area. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 130: Esoteric Christianity and the Spiritual Guidance of Humanity (1911/1912)

Lucifer and gold

The spirits that have an astral effect on the minerals from the higher hierarchies are the spirits of wisdom, the Kyriotetes, while the spirits of movement, the Dynamis (who are below the Kyriotetes) have an etheric effect. However, the spirits of wisdom have become Luciferian. This rebellion against their own kind is achieved by the fact that they simply do not take part in the development that the others do. They simply remain behind on an earlier level. These luciferic spirits of the second hierarchy, instead of sending astral currents from the sun to the minerals, now stream etheric currents down to the earth. In this way, however, a certain basic mineral substance was formed, which received its inwardness directly from the sun. So it was not from the planets, but from the sun that this substance received its inwardness, and that is gold. The balance of the earth in relation to the mineral kingdom would exist if all etheric influences on the minerals came from the planets and only the astral influences from the sun. However, there are also direct etheric influences from the sun that disturb the balance. This balance had to be restored by the wise world leaders. The stronger Luciferic etheric forces had to be countered by the forces which paralyze this effect in a certain way, which cancel it out. They have now been created by separating a part of the earth's disturbed equilibrium substance and orbiting the earth as the moon. Thus the etheric currents from the sun are met by those etheric currents which now flow from the moon to the earth from the completely opposite side and restore the balance. And from the spirits of wisdom, which have separated the moon and have now become, as it were, the opponents of the Luciferic spirits of wisdom from the sun, those etheric forces flow through the earth which have now led to silver as a substance. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 136: The Spiritual Beings in the Celestial Bodies and Kingdoms of Nature (1912)

Lucifer and Yahweh and Elohim

The earth gets the moon as a satellite means nothing else than: the earth got a power through which it can keep the moon close to it, can attract it. If the earth did not have this power to attract the moon, then the spiritual correlate of this power would not bind man to his lower nature either; for seen from the spiritual, the same power that binds man to his lower nature is the same power with which the earth attracts the moon. In truth, the moon prevents man from falling into the Luciferic temptation, as the cosmic correlate of that which in man is the attachment to his lower nature. In order to spiritualize this lower nature, not to tear the souls out of the lower nature, a subconscious mechanism was needed, for this could not take place in consciousness, otherwise man would have sunk down to an animal, otherwise he would have consciously followed the lower nature. There had to be something in the lower nature that he was unconscious of, that he did not follow, but as a human being, as a being on earth, followed that which flowed into his lower nature as divine. The God of the Old Testament, Yahweh God, was particularly concerned that man should remain on earth. [1]

The gods of Yahweh's followers were ready to descend into the human brain. But other spirits had not completed their development, and instead of entering man's brain on earth, they connected with his astral body. They obtained a dwelling place in man's animal nature, where the passions arise, and at the same time they gave these passions a higher impetus. They allowed enthusiasm to flow into the blood and into the astral body. The Yahweh-gods had given the pure, cold form of the idea; but through these spirits, which may be called Luciferic, man became capable of becoming enthusiastic about these ideas and of passionately taking sides for or against them. If the Yahweh Gods modeled the human brain (as spirits of form), the Luciferic spirits linked this brain to the physical senses through the branches of the nerves that end in the sense organs. Lucifer lives in us just as long as Yahweh. Everything that flows through the senses and gives man an objective consciousness of his surroundings, he owes to the Luciferic spirits. If he owes the life of thought to the gods, he owes it to Lucifer that he becomes conscious of it. Lucifer lives in his astral body and is active in his sensory life mediated by the nerves. That is why the serpent says in Genesis: "Your eyes will be opened. - These words can be taken literally, for in the course of time the Luciferian spirits have opened up man's senses. [2]

With regard to our spiritual will system and our bodily metabolic limb system, we are parts of the Elohim (above: Yahweh Gods); we are asleep. We are not set apart. We are set apart in relation to our head system. This separation happened because certain spiritual beings, who would have become Elohim if they had progressed properly in evolution, did not become Elohim (Exusiai), but remained behind on the level of the Archai or Archangeloi. If we look at them occultly today, they belong to the same sphere to which the Angeloi, the Archangeloi belong and their effectiveness has had to be limited to not working on the whole human being, but they work on the head system. Angeloi, Archangeloi and Archai also work in this sphere. These entities, which are retarded Elohim, are actually the opponents of the other Elohim. The other Elohim have cut man off from themselves; but they could not have given him freedom because they have their influence (as creators) on the whole of man. On the other hand, the spirits of form that remained behind limited themselves to the head, and through this they gave man reason, the intellect. These are essentially the Luciferic spirits. At a lower level, they are givers of will. The Elohim give the will to the whole human being, but they give the head its will. Otherwise the head would only be full of will-less ideas. Ideas only become rational when they are imbued with will and become the power of judgment. This comes from these spirits. [3]

These spirits, who are actually spirits of form, but who confront us in the spiritual world among the hosts of the Angeloi, Archangeloi and Archai, these spirits imprint on man all that which would not allow him to descend to full earthly existence. They actually want to keep him above the mineral kingdom. And in particular, these spirits have no inclination whatsoever to allow man to somehow mediate everything that has to do with our technology. In a way, they are angry about that. That is why they are also opponents of the Elohim, because the Elohim, who have solidified man in the dust of the earth, as the Bible puts it, have dragged him down into the mineral kingdom. But this in turn has given other spirits access (see: Ahriman). [4]

Sources:

[1] GA 172: The karma of man's profession in connection with Goethe's life (1916)

[2] GA 94: Cosmogony. Popular Occultism. The Gospel of John. Die Theosophie an Hand des Johannes-Evangeliums (1906)

[3], [4] GA 203: Man's responsibility for world development through his spiritual connection with the earth planet and the starry world (1921)

Lucifer and the Shining Sun

The ancient Hebrew secret doctrine looks at the sun and says: In the sun, the invisible Spirits of Wisdom work, visible only to the spiritual eye, not to the physical eye. For the latter, the principle of Lucifer radiates down. What is externally visible in the sun principle is Lucifer; but within it, mysteriously, invisible to the physical eye, works everything that is accessible through the Spirits of Wisdom, who form the gateway to it (thus, to something even higher). One of these Spirits of Wisdom separated and sacrificed itself and took up its place on the moon, from which it works to tame the light, but also to eradicate the spiritual element of Lucifer. Hebrew antiquity saw in Yahweh an emissary of those true, higher spiritual beings, to whom the view is opened through the Spirits of Wisdom when one gazes spiritually at the sun. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 136: The Spiritual Beings in the Heavenly Bodies and Natural Kingdoms (1912)

Lucifer and Love

Every spiritual impulse, wherever it occurs, is in some way modified love. And when we have intertwined, as it were, the inner and outer aspects of man, we have woven his outer physicality from light, and we have woven his inner soul in a spiritualized way from love. Love and light are the two elements, the two components that permeate all earthly existence: love as the earthly existence of the soul, and light as the outer material earthly existence. The Earth is the cosmos of love. The Earth has the mission to weave love into everything. Thus, everything that is so closely connected with earthly existence has no interest that is not somehow touched by love. But the Luciferic beings have such an interest; they remained behind on the Moon, in the cosmos of wisdom. They have a particular interest in weaving light into love. Therefore, the Luciferic beings are at work wherever our inner being, which is actually woven from love, somehow comes into contact with the light, wherever it is present in some form; and light, after all, confronts us in all material existence. If we come into contact with the light in any way, the Luciferic beings appear, and the Luciferic element is woven into love. Through this, in the course of incarnations, man has first entered the Luciferic element: Lucifer has woven himself with the element of love. So that into what is woven from love, the element of Lucifer presses itself, which alone can bring us that which makes love not only a complete devotion, but which permeates love with wisdom. For otherwise, without this wisdom, love would be a self-evident force for which man could not be responsible. In this way, however, love becomes the true ego-force, into which the Luciferic element, which was previously only external in the material, is woven. Love permeated with the Luciferic element, which impregnates itself into the material, is the cause of illness working from within. [1]

Thus, ultimately, in everything that becomes a cause of illness in this direction, we must see something in the element of love that has been impaired in the soul by the Luciferic influence, something to which we must add something. We must infuse love so that what flows in as an act of love can be of help. All those healing acts that rely more or less on what can be called psychic healing processes have this character of infused love. In some way, what is applied in psychic healing processes is connected with the infusion of love. [2]

If we ourselves are to counteract Lucifer, if we are to take care of his affairs in the future, only love can replace Lucifer's actions; and love will be able to do so. [3]

Sources:

[1] - [3] GA 120: The Revelations of Karma (1910)

Lucifer and mendacity

As with envy, man also has an antipathy towards lies and seeks to combat them. In the case of lying there is the other case that, when it is fought, Ahriman hands over the reigns to Lucifer - and then a quality creeps into the astral body of the human being which appears as very, very strong egoism. This is then restrained mendacity. [1]

Sources:

[1] Bei 45: Contributions to the Rudolf Steiner Complete Edition. Issue 45 (1974)

Lucifer and matter

When we have come so far that we have dropped everything shadowy in both our thoughts and our external environment, then we grow into the spiritual world. But in order to place ourselves in the new world in the right way, we must already transform our whole thinking in the physical world through esoteric development, so that we can see through and judge the things and facts of the spiritual world correctly; for it is a completely new world for us, but a world of a greater reality than the one we have known up to now. We are entering a world of real things and beings, and we connect with it, we grow into this world. It penetrates us, we lose our earthly thoughts to this world; one could say: we lose our head to that world, in that the beings and things of that world draw into us, as if we had stuck our head into an anthill. Then we become aware of the elementary world. When our soul life grows stronger and stronger through the concentration of our thoughts, so that our inner self can separate itself more and more from the physical body, then the things of that world will appear before our soul's eye in ever clearer imaginations and visions; We will realize that all the thoughts of goodness, benevolence and nobility that we have had on earth have been transformed into imperishable imaginations, which give the universe its value as we live on, and that all bad, evil, indeed all lower egoistic thoughts remain behind as waste products. This becomes that which is barren in itself, but which becomes nourishment for that which is to develop out of the germ of good.

Just as here on the physical plan the mineral soil provides the nutrients for the plant world, so everything that is ill-conceived becomes the dregs for the germinating thoughts of the good, the true and the beautiful in the elementary world. That is why the occultist can think up the bad, the false so quickly and imagine it in his mind. But he does not allow it to progress; he knows that he can only go as far as the point where it remains a thought; he does not allow it to pass over into action, into reality. He only allows it to prepare the ground from which the seed of good can grow. And this is how it actually happened in the world order; this is also how the mineral kingdom of the earth came into being. On the old moon the Elohim thought the error - that was in place there - and from this matter, the mineral kingdom on earth came into being, and from this earth material - earth dust - Jave-Elohim was able to create man and gave him his physical shell. Lucifer, however, who now stands on a similar level to the Elohim on the old moon, still wants to continue to do the same. He can only make use of men for this, he can only think the error within men. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 266/3: From the Contents of the Esoteric Lessons. Volume III (1913, 1914; 1920 - 1923) (1913-1923)

Lucifer and meditation

Budding esotericists often come and complain about the thoughts that assail them during their meditation. This is actually a sign of progress, that one feels these thoughts; it proves that we no longer have Lucifer and Ahriman only within ourselves, but that we are beginning to perceive them as powers outside ourselves, for such thoughts that arise are entirely of Lucifer and Ahriman. If everything had remained as it was originally intended, then after the Luciferic temptation man would never have been able to forget his thoughts. He would always have had access to the Akashic Records, but it would have been Lucifer and Ahriman who would have written them down for him. Therefore, the good gods had to arrange it so that man could also forget his thoughts. Everything that sinks down into the unconscious is dead, but Lucifer and Ahriman devour it all. They make it a part of their being, and as Luciferic and Ahrimanic nature it comes out again in people in meditation. As soon as someone sets out to meditate, hope rises in Lucifer: Maybe I will still be victorious in the world after all! And then he assaults the person with their discarded thoughts. This is what man actually loves, this going from thought to thought, and contemplation, the remaining filled with one thought content, is not what he loves. Just observe how long a non-esoteric (an esoteric still has a certain (self-imposed) compulsion) carries out a resolution, for example, to give thanks for the rising of the sun every morning, like the Essaean disciple, if he has voluntarily resolved to do so. How few will go further than a few days! In reality, man does not love the spirit at all. He has to force himself to keep certain thoughts in his soul for a long time. It is actually Lucifer and Ahriman whom man loves in truth. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 266/3: From the Contents of the Esoteric Lessons. Volume III (1913, 1914; 1920 - 1923) (1913-1923)

Lucifer and metamorphosis of the human form between incarnations

If the divine beings did not (now) make use of the luciferic spirits, our limb-man would not be able to transform from the present to the next incarnation. The luciferic beings are necessary for this. We owe it again to the Luciferic beings that, as we die, the form which the limb-man still has now is gradually transformed into the further form which it is to have in the next incarnation. Then, in the middle of the path between death and a new birth, Ahriman must enter to take over the other task: to transform the head again in the appropriate way. Into the next incarnation we carry over from the limb-man what becomes the head. But this would become a demonic being if we did not have the Luciferic powers connected with us to thank for the fact that the transformation could take place from the demon, which would be a mere spiritual-soul being (see also: centaur), into the human form of the next incarnation. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 183: The Science of the Becoming of Man (1918)

Lucifer and Michael

Intelligence has only been allotted to man by the fact that that higher entity, of which I have spoken as the Michael entity, has pushed Luciferic spirits down into the sphere of man and thereby the intelligent impulse has actually come into man. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 194: The Mission of Michael. The Revelation of the Real Mysteries of the Human Being (1919)

Lucifer and morality

There is only one power from which Lucifer withdraws: morality. This is something that burns Lucifer like the most terrible fire. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 120: The Revelations of Karma (1910)

Lucifer and envy

Envy is now a characteristic in which the Luciferian power in man expresses itself. Envy is a very bad quality, which is why people have an antipathy towards it. People try to get rid of envy. Once man has recognized envy in himself, he tries to fight Lucifer as the originator of envy. Lucifer simply hands the matter over to Ahriman, and he clouds human judgment and it is a lie. They manifest themselves in very specific judgments that we make about others. These judgments are then such that we do not envy the other, but blame him. It is a secret envy that creeps into our etheric body; there it shows itself as a judgment that lives itself out in this way. [1]

Sources:

[1] Bei 45: Contributions to the Rudolf Steiner Complete Edition. Issue 45 (1974)

Lucifer and law

Man does not need to learn to love his right. There is a natural connection between Lucifer and the right in feeling, in sensing the right. And wherever rights are asserted, Lucifer is involved. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 158: The Connection of Man with the Elemental World. Kalewala - Olaf Åsteson - The Russian Folklore - The World as the Result of Equilibrium Effects (1912-1914)

Lucifer and the realm of duration

Above the beings of the Exusiai there are only beings who belong to the realm of duration. But there are those among them who masquerade as time beings, who enter time. Just as the ahrimanic beings enter space, there are beings who enter time. These are the Luciferic entities, entities that actually belong in the hierarchical order to the Spirits of Wisdom, the Kyriotetes, but act as Spirits of Form, as Exusiai, because they work in time. These Luciferic powers have within themselves the possibility of translating into time, so to speak, that which would otherwise appear to our human perception to be purely spiritually permanent, of giving it the appearance of temporal progression. [1] When you develop a volition, for example when you say: I want to go for a walk! even if it is such an insignificant volition, as soon as you put this volition into practice, you are spiritually in a region where the Luciferic spirits fight against spirits of other hierarchies. [2] (See also: Region of duration).

Sources:

[1] & [2] GA 184: The Polarity of Duration and Development in Human Life. The Cosmic Prehistory of Humanity (1918)

Lucifer and the religions of old

If we go back to ancient times, we find everywhere that religions aim to make people worship what is earthly, what gives earthly context, what lives in flesh and blood, so that man is difficult enough not to be led out into the universe (by Lucifer). [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 172: The Karma of Man's Vocation in Connection with Goethe's Life (1916)

Lucifer and oxygen

When you approach the guardian of the threshold, you realize that oxygen is the revelation of all the spiritual beings that give life to man. There is a battle in the air: the Luciferic oxygen beings fight with the Ahrimanic nitrogen beings. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 270/1: Esoteric Teachings for the First Class of the School of Spiritual Science at the Goetheanum. Volume I (1924)

Lucifer and sexuality

With Lucifer it is not a question of any idea coinciding with objectivity, but of those ideas being developed which produce as much consciousness as possible in the human being. This expanded consciousness, in which Lucifer has an interest, is at the same time connected, when it is brought forth, with a certain inner lust in man. And this lustfulness is again Lucifer's domain.

Up to a certain point in the Atlantean period, all sexuality took place unconsciously. Beautiful myths of the various peoples point to this unconscious character of the sexual process in the older times. It was only brought into consciousness in the course of time. Lucifer has an essential part in bringing the unconscious into the conscious and ever more conscious. This is Lucifer's endeavor: to evoke consciousness in man outside the time intended for it, outside the right cycle of time, that is, to evoke consciousness about something where this degree of consciousness would actually be properly developed at another time. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 170: The Riddle of Man. The Spiritual Background of Human History (1916)

Lucifer and the senses

That which is the network of the sense of touch, which is touched inwardly by the expanding ego, gives the perception of the ego. If it had remained with its original purpose, then we would not have such perceptions through the sense of touch as we have now. We would feel collisions with the outer world in such a way that we would feel our ego, but we would not speak of the perception of an outer world. Since our development from Lemurian times onwards, our organism had to be transformed so that it became a tactile organ for the inner ego, capable of perceiving the outside world through touch. And this is a Luciferic act, it is due to a Luciferic influence. As a result, our ego experience has become so specialized that we experience the outside world through touch, which of course has also clouded our ego experience. So the Luciferic, which has shaped the sense of touch, is mixed into the ego experience. So there is an inner mixed with an outer, just as in the sense of speech an outer is mixed with an inner. The sense of speech was intended to perceive only words, which then do not need to sound, i.e. to perceive meaning. Speech as an inner sense has been mixed into this. Here (with the sense of touch) it was an inner sense, and an outer sense has been added, the perception outside.

That which is the organ of the sense of life, through which we perceive and experience our inner formations, our inner constitution, has now been transformed in a similar way by a Luciferic influence; for originally we were only destined in this respect that our astral body should perceive itself inwardly, experience itself in our life organism. Now, however, the ability to experience the inner constitution of the body, the inner constitution of the human being as a feeling of well-being or displeasure, has been mixed into this. This is Luciferic influence that is mixed in there. Just as here the ego is bound together with the sense of touch, so here the astral body is bound together with the sense of well-being or dis-ease of our life constitution. And again, our movement organism was originally prepared in such a way that we would only experience the interaction of our etheric body with our movement organism. To this was added the ability to perceive and experience our inner mobility, the sense of movement itself. Another Luciferic impulse. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 170: The Riddle of Man. The Spiritual Background of Human History (1916)

Lucifer and sensory perception

If we were not seduced by Lucifer, if we could see the moon behind the sensory perceptions, then we would understand: there lies the corpse of that which still appears to us from the old moon. We would remember, just as we remember at the sight of the corpse of man, how he was in life, how he was once, when he lived with us, walked before us and spoke with us. In the same way, when we look at the earth, we would look back to what it was when it was still alive during the old moon existence. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 162: Questions of Art and Life in the Light of Spiritual Science (1915)

Lucifer and moral ideals

Who is it that works in us to conjure up moral ideals from our nature? It is Lucifer. He compels us to generate our moral ideas, our free morality out of ourselves. Man owes it to Lucifer that he must generate his moral freedom out of himself. Freedom does not exist in nature. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 150: The World of the Spirit and its Entry into Physical Existence. The influence of the dead in the world of the living (1913)

Lucifer and moral ideas

Through the Luciferic influence something more spiritual has entered our astral nature. Thus not only does the idea of morality work in the ego-consciousness - which would work in such a way that it would not occur to any man to do evil, since the idea of good for an action would be placed directly before his spiritual eye by divine-spiritual entities - but the instincts and passions also work. This idea would not be able to appear in the ego-consciousness at all if its astral nature, individually shaped by the Luciferic influence, did not oppose it. This Luciferic influence has had the effect that purification must occur in our nature, out of the unconscious towards consciousness, that we must work our way up to conscious moral ideas and motives in the struggle with ourselves, and then follow these ideas of our own accord. Thus it is Lucifer who makes us capable of following moral ideas after we have worked them out for ourselves. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 150: The World of the Spirit and its Entry into Physical Existence. The influence of the dead on the world of the living (1913)

Lucifer and the social order

Everything that permeates the social order from the money side is Ahrimanic, and the rule of money is an Ahrimanic rule. And everything that we have brought into the external structure of life, into the social structure, that is all that is office and dignity. By assuming an office in the outer life structure, we attract Lucifer to us. The privy councillor belongs to Lucifer, and the money he has in his pocket belongs to Ahriman. Theology and militarism belong together, there is an inner kinship between them, this is where Lucifer lives himself out. [1]

On the side of (today's) spiritual life, there is the terrible Luciferian aspect that the spiritual man is forced into offices, that the humanity of man perishes in office and dignity. For every office dresses man in a Luciferian uniform. [2]

Sources:

[1] & [2] GA 192: Geisteswissenschaftliche Behandlung sozialer und pädagogischer Fragen (1919)

Lucifer and the dead

At the point in time that lies halfway (in life) between death and a new birth, one feels removed from the earth, the earth as it were beneath oneself, far away, and feels that one has arrived in the sun in one's life in the spirit world. For just as one felt united with the earth in earthly life, one now feels united with the sun and its entire planetary system. And that is why in our modern occultism so much importance is attached to understanding how Christ came to us as a solar being, because it is necessary to understand how he leads us to the sun through the Mystery of Golgotha.

Now begins the time when we, as a real being facing ourselves, get to know that which has always been called Lucifer. When you now feel yourself in the sun, you do not feel yourself in flowing physical light, but you feel yourself in pure spiritual light. And from this point onwards you feel Lucifer as a being who is no longer an opponent as before, but you feel him more and more as a being who is quite justified in the world. One now feels the necessity, in the further course of life after death, to regard Lucifer and the Christ being as two powers with equal rights. [1] If the Christ did not accompany us, the memory of our life on earth would fade; for that which connects us with the earth beyond the time described is actually the experience that we have connected ourselves with the Christ. Through our new life in the spiritual world we gain a completely new interest in Lucifer and his world. We then find that now that we have become free from earthly interests, we can face Lucifer without any harm. And we make the strange discovery that Lucifer only has a harmful effect on us when we ourselves are caught up in the earthly. Now he appears to us precisely as the being who can explain to us what we have to live through further in the world of the spirit, and for a longer time we dwell in the experience of conquering what Lucifer can then give us in these expanses of the spiritual world. And for this life that we are now going through, it does indeed seem to us that Christ has given us all the past that lies behind us, and Lucifer is preparing us for the future reincarnation. If we go through this Martian life consciously and can remember it later on earth through initiation, we experience that everything we do not carry within us as experiences from our earthly existence through the great world space, that everything we do not have from the earth is given to us by Lucifer. [2]

The time is approaching more and more when people will only be able to pass through life after death with Lucifer if they have already properly sensed and become acquainted with the Luciferic impulses in the human soul during this life. Those people - and there will be more and more of them in the future - who do not want to know anything about Lucifer, and that is certainly the majority, will know all the more about Lucifer after death. For not only will he be at their side, but he will continually siphon off their soul forces, he will vampirize people. In doing so, they will deprive themselves of powers for the next life, because they will give them to Lucifer in a certain way. [3]

We do not see through what Lucifer is, if we have not done so beforehand through occult science or initiation, through mere life after death. Only when we have arrived beyond the solar sphere do we learn to recognize him as he was before he became Lucifer, when he was still a brother of the Christ. For the fact that he became different only occurred at the time when Lucifer remained behind and detached himself from progress in the cosmos. And that which he can do evil extends only as far as the sun. Above that is a sphere where Lucifer can develop his activity as it was before his detachment. [4] The same qualities are only pernicious in the wrong place. Here in the physical world Lucifer weaves a relationship that is pernicious. But after death, from the sun on, Lucifer must assist man. Between Lucifer and Christ he must make the further way. Christ preserves his soul with all that the soul has already acquired in previous incarnations. The task of the Luciferic power is to support the human being so that he learns to utilize the powers of the other beings of the Hierarchies for his new incarnation in the right way. [5]

Sources:

[1], [2], [4], [5] GA 140: Occult Investigations on Life between Death and New Birth. The Living Interaction between the Living and the Dead (1912/1913)

[3] GA 150: The World of the Spirit and its Entry into Physical Existence. The influence of the dead on the world of the living (1913)

Lucifer and the dead who died in youth

The main tendency of the Luciferic powers, in so far as they dwell within us, is to make us as spiritual as possible, possibly to tear us away from all material life. This is why they make us believe in ideals that are not natural powers, but are powerless in the present natural order. And if, in the course of the future earth period, man were to fall completely under the influence of Lucifer, so that he would believe that ideals are only imaginary things to which the mind can orient itself, then this man would follow the Luciferic powers. Just as Ahriman, on the one hand, presents us with a world that is a mere natural order, so Lucifer, on the other hand, presents us with a world that consists purely of imaginary ideals. And at present, I would say, a balance is only being brought about in the areas that still lie in the human unconscious. But people must become more and more aware of this matter, otherwise they will not get out of this dilemma, they will not be able to build a bridge between idealism and realism, but this bridge is necessary. What currently creates a kind of balance is the following. When very young people die at present, for example children, these children - it is the same with young people - have just looked into the world; they have not fully lived out their existence here on the physical plane. Because they have only lived a part of earthly life, they bring something from earthly life with them into the spiritual world that you cannot bring with you when you have grown old. If you die young, you have lived through life in such a way that you still have much of the powers you had in the spiritual world before you were born. In this way you have created an intimate connection between the spiritual that you have brought with you and the physical that you have experienced here. And through this intimate connection you can take something that you acquire on earth with you into the spiritual world. And what is carried over there by children and young people gives the spiritual world a certain gravity that it would not otherwise have, that spiritual world in which people then live together inside, that gives a certain gravity to the spiritual world and prevents the Luciferian powers from completely separating the spiritual world from the physical. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 183: The Science of the Becoming of Man (1918)

Lucifer and Venus

We have powerful, high, important beings under their leader (Lucifer) within our spiritual earth development, who really carry within themselves the longing for a star out there in the universe, which they regard as their true home, but on which they cannot be because they had to leave the (old) moon and go to earth without having completed their development. This is the most striking feature of the Luciferic beings when we look at them cosmically. And the clairvoyant consciousness actually gets to know what is characterized in the Venus star by looking into Lucifer's soul and thus has the tragic longing for Lucifer within the earth, like a wonderful cosmic homesickness for the star Phosphoros, Lucifer(us) or Venus.

For everything that Lucifer has cast off like a shell, everything that was cast off from the Luciferic being at the old death of the moon, just as the physical body is cast off from the human soul at death, shines down from the heavens as Venus. This longing, which the Greek soul felt as Lucifer's longing, was also felt by this same Greek soul as belonging to the substance of Venus. The Greek did not see the mere physical planet, but he saw that which had split off from the Luciferic entity, how the physical body splits off from man when he passes through the gate of death, and how the earthly body will split off when the earth has reached the goal of its development. The only difference is that the physical body of man is destined to disintegrate, but the body of a Lucifer is destined, when he falls out of the soul entity, to shine as a star in heavenly space. [1]

Now that which has gone out of the bodies of the gods into the universe has become a star. Stars are bodies of the gods whose souls continue to work in the world in a different way, independently of these bodies, just as Lucifer had become independent of his body, Venus, and continues to live in our earthly development. [2]

But this is the difference between all planetary gods and the Christ God, that the Christ God, in the sense of the above, leaves no such physical star behind when he dies on earth, leaves no remnant behind that would have remained unspiritualized, but passes over completely into the spiritual and passes over as spirit with the human souls to the Jupiter existence. [3] (For further information see: Christ; End of Earth; Jupiter Evolution; Venus).

Sources:

[1] - [3] GA 129: World Miracles, Soul Tests and Spiritual Revelations (1911)

Lucifer and the true ego

The spirits of form, the exusiai, are those which enable man to learn to speak, think and walk upright. Those spirits that throw him down, as it were, so that he (as a child) moves on all fours, that he cannot speak and does not develop his thinking in his first period of life, are those spirits that he must first overcome in life, that give him an incorrect form to begin with. These are spirits who should actually already be spirits of movement, dynamis, but who have lagged behind in evolution and are not yet even at the level of the spirits of form. They are Luciferic spirits who have come to a standstill in their development, who work on man from outside and hand him over, so to speak, to the element of heaviness, from which he must only gradually rise through the real spirits of form. As we thus observe man as he enters physical existence through birth, we see in these efforts which he makes to give himself what he is to have later in life, the really advancing spirits of form in battle with those spirits who should already be spirits of movement, but who have remained at an earlier stage. With Luciferic spirits we already see the spirits of form in battle, and in this field the Luciferic spirits are so strong, so powerful, that they do not allow the consciousness of the ego to arise, which rules there. Otherwise, if luciferic spirits did not hold this consciousness down, man would show during this time: You are a fighter; you feel yourself in the horizontal position and consciously want the vertical position; you want to learn to speak and think! He cannot do all this because he is wrapped up in the Luciferic spirits. There we look forebodingly towards what we will gradually recognize as the true ego as opposed to an ego that merely appears to consciousness. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 141: Life between Death and the New Birth in Relation to Cosmic Facts (1912/1913)

Lucifer figure in the Goetheanum

I have tried to reproduce that which forms down there (in the living lime at springtime) in the figure of Ahriman, who was created pictorially over there (in the Goetheanum) in the dome and has just been created sculpturally in the wooden group; likewise that which would form into a Luciferic figure in the Luciferic from earth vapor and cloud surges, if it could absorb the etheric of the earth.

With this, however, the two extremes of the human being are drawn into earthly life itself: that extreme of the human being which the human being would become if he were to absorb the living lime under the influence of Ahriman, so to speak, and thereby gradually become one with the earth, would be dissolved in the whole livingly sentient earthly being, that is the one extreme. The other extreme is what man would become if the Luciferic beings succeeded in carrying out what they wanted, namely to make a haze of carbonic acid rise from below, so that breathing would have to disappear, so that men would thus disappear as physical humanity, but so that the etheric bodies would unite with that which is up there as astral, Luciferic angelic being. Man hovers between these two extremes. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 229: The co-experience of the course of the year in four cosmic imaginations (1923)

Luciferian development and future

The macrocosm, the great world, is just as much in development as the microcosm, the human being, the small world. Schematically, the following applies to the earth:

1. polar root race repetition of the Saturn principle Throne
2. hyperborean root race repetition of the sun principle Cherubim
3. Lemurian root race repetition of the moon principle Seraphim
4. atlantic root race earth center Christ
5. our root race further development
6. premonition of the Jupiter development
7. premonition of the Venus development

The Christ principle thus continues to develop through the (Earth) Jupiter period and is fully developed only around the middle of the sixth, the Venus epoch (its anticipation in the 7th epoch of Earth development). From the middle of the Atlantean period onwards, the Christ principle can only take effect in the first germinal beginnings. In human beings this happens through the formation of the first ego-germ. The first direct real influence occurred in our (5th, i.e. the post-Atlantean) time in the revelation on Mount Sinai, where the Christ revealed himself to Moses under the name of Yahweh. Then the direct connection of the Christ with the earth took place through the baptism in the Jordan and the three years in the body of Jesus of Nazareth. The Christ impulse thus flowed into humanity at the same time as the ego impulse. Christ therefore signifies the macrocosmic ego. The further development of the fifth, sixth and seventh principles on earth can therefore only be possible inwardly as a kind of premonition. No higher body can be given to man than the physical body built up with the fourth macrocosmic principle. Only on Jupiter do we receive the fifth and on Venus the sixth body and so on. Therefore, compared to the Greco-Latin period, there is now something like an inner contradiction in man between spirit, soul and body, which will become more and more perceptible (see: Threshold transition of mankind in the present time).

Let us now look at the counter-effect of the Luciferic spirits from this perspective. The Luciferic spirits originate from a higher Hierarchy than the human being: the Hierarchy of the Angeloi, who, however, did not come to terms with their overall development on the Moon, where they passed through their stage of humanity. Therefore they remain incapable of finding the connection to the fourth macrocosmic principle in their further development. On the moon, however, the Luciferic spirits have already developed their fourth and fifth principles and so on in anticipation, so to speak, but still without the macrocosmic fourth principle, without the Christ impulse, which was not yet there. The Luciferic spirits are therefore already in a certain sense precocious, anticipating something, but not in harmony with the cosmos. Normal development therefore presents the Luciferic spirits with something "simpler", which they consider themselves superior to. And times will come when, through the power of the higher principles, the fifth or even sixth principle, the Luciferic spirits will have a great influence on humanity, which is falling prey to them. [1] Can we not already perceive the signs of this everywhere today? In art and science and so on, everywhere we encounter a certain precocious higher development which, however, seems to lack the inner core of truth, the harmony with the eternal. The leader of those spirits who have developed six principles in this way, who have thus come close to perfection on the moon, is the Antichrist, who can already look very much like the Christ. Today, the majority of mankind has already fallen under the influence of the Luciferian spirits. Hence the need to promote now that which man on earth can only receive inwardly through meditation. Hence the necessity of spiritual science. [2]

The earth as a star impulses the human ego from its center. And what man receives from the earth for the unfolding of his self-consciousness also comes from the spirit-world working within the earthly. - The fact that the solar world gives man what he needs for his astral being stems from the effects that took place during the old solar time. There the earth received the ability to unfold the ego impulses of humanity. It is the spiritual from this time that the earth has preserved from the solar nature, but which is protected from extinction by the present solar effect. The earth itself was once the sun. Then it spiritualized itself. In the present cosmic age, the solar nature works from outside. This continually rejuvenates the ageing spiritual from the past. At the same time, this presently active solar nature protects the prehistoric from falling into the Luciferic. For that which continues to work without being absorbed into the forces of the present falls into the Luciferic. [3]

Michael (as the face of Christ) remains with all his activity within a supersensible region which, however, borders directly on the physical world of the present phase of development. Thus the possibility can never arise that through the impressions which people receive from Michael's being, they might lead their view of nature into the fantastic, or that they might wish to form the moral-practical life in a world shaped by God but not animated by God, as if impulses could be there which need not be carried ethically and spiritually by man himself. Whether thinking or willing, one will always have to approach Michael by placing oneself in the spiritual realm. If it were otherwise: if Michael worked in such a way that he brought his deeds into the world, which man must presently recognize and experience as physical, then man would experience in the present from the world that which in reality is not in it, but was. If this happens, then this illusory grasp of the world leads the human soul from its appropriate reality into another, namely into a Luciferian one. The way in which Michael brings the past into effect in the present human life is the way in which it is held in the sense of the right spiritual progress of the world, which contains nothing Luciferic. To have this position in relation to the light of Michael rising in human history also means finding the right path to Christ. One will have to find the way to Christ within oneself. [4] To fall into Luciferic illusions is not to become fully human, not to want to progress to the stage of freedom, but to want to remain at too early a stage of development - as God-man. [5] This is precisely the task of man in his development on earth, that he takes into himself the intellect that was formerly generally poured out over the planetary (the predecessor of the earth was, after all, the cosmos of wisdom), that he takes this intellect into himself, that he unites himself with it. Thus, it is an impulse of man's development that he makes knowledge his personal affair, that he can infuse it with enthusiasm, that it can pass into him so that it is seized by his hearty fire. And if the latter does not happen, if he stores up the knowledge in an impersonal way, then something does not happen that should happen in the sense of the earth's development. The mind of mankind is not seized by the culture of the intellect; this develops, so to speak, only in the head and floats too far from the surface of the earth merely in the heads. But that which is not grasped by the heart, that which is not grasped by the human mind, is awaited by the Luciferic spirits. The only way to wrest that which is the world of the intellect from the Luciferic spirits is to permeate it with the mind, to make it a personal matter.

And what is happening in our time, what has been happening for a long time and what must be changed, is precisely that we allow earthly existence to become prey to the Luciferic world in a roundabout way through the cold, sober dryness of the intellect. Thus the earth is held back in its development, thus the earth is held back at an earlier standpoint. It does not come to its end. And if people continue for a long, long time to pursue the impersonal nature of so-called science, then the result will be that people will lose their soulfulness altogether. In the end it will turn the earth into what can be called a dead planet with automaton-like people on it, who will lose their spiritual-soulfulness in this way. [6]

The Luciferic powers strive to snatch us completely from temporal life, to give us such thinking, feeling and willing that it trickles in entirely from the region of duration. These beings strive to inspire us with a certain amount of thinking, feeling and willing from childhood onwards without our intervention and then to maintain it throughout the course of our lives. If they were to prevail, our entire temporal life would wither away. We would finally - even very soon, it would have happened long ago if these beings had triumphed - strip off, cast off the physical corporeality, the bodily-spiritual being, and we would become pure spirits. They want to lift man away from the earth, they want to give him a pure existence in the realm of duration. In order to achieve this, the Luciferic beings continually try to make the intelligence we have as human beings automatic, and they try to suppress the free will in us, so that we can accomplish what is incumbent upon us out of the will of the gods. We would be able to become purely cosmic beings, in whom everything that is thought and action proceeds automatically, as in the hierarchy of the Angeloi. [7] These Luciferic spirits would like to take us immediately into the spiritual world and not let us go through Jupiter, Venus and Vulcan evolution before we become cosmic beings. [8] By eradicating, with the help and only with the help of the Christ, all those qualities of the human being that come from Lucifer, we as human beings gradually liberate the Luciferic powers as well. And there will come a time when the Luciferic powers, which during the lunar evolution had to sink down into a certain lower development for the salvation of human freedom and did not have the opportunity on earth to experience the Christ-power themselves, will experience the Christ-power through the human being and be redeemed.

Man will redeem Lucifer if he absorbs the power of Christ in the appropriate way. And this in turn makes the person stronger than he would otherwise have been. For imagine if man had not received the Luciferic powers: then the Christ-power would radiate, but it would not encounter the obstacles of the Luciferic powers, and man would not possibly be able to progress as far as he can in the good, in the true, in wisdom, if he has to conquer these opposing powers. [9]

Sources:

[1], [2] GA 130: Esoteric Christianity and the Spiritual Guidance of Humanity (1911/1912)

[3] - [5] GA 26: Anthroposophical Guiding Principles. The Path of Knowledge of Anthroposophy - The Michael Mystery (1924/1925)

[6] GA 203: Man's Responsibility for World Development through his Spiritual Connection with the Earth Planet and the Star World (1921)

[7], [8] GA 184: The Polarity of Duration and Development in Human Life. The Cosmic Prehistory of Humanity (1918)

[9] GA 110: Spiritual Hierarchies and their Reflection in the Physical World. Zodiac, Planets, Cosmos (1909)

Luciferian spirits

Luciferic spirits want an independent spiritual life. They therefore cut themselves off, they split themselves off, so that above them is the being of the higher hierarchies. There they dissolve the connection and split themselves off as independent entities, preserving their own light within themselves by robbing, as it were, that which should only fulfill them and ascend to the higher hierarchies. They rob it for themselves, fill themselves with it within themselves and thereby develop an independent side. This is an idea that can provide us with information about processes in the cosmos, without which we would not be able to comprehend a (luminous) star system, or the existence of the stars in general, as we know them as human beings with physical consciousness. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 136: The Spiritual Beings in the Celestial Bodies and Kingdoms of Nature (1912)

Luciferic spirits and the development of the human form

How did the animals below us come to earth with their stiffened organizations? - They came down through us! They are the descendants of those bodies that we no longer wanted to occupy after leaving the moon because they had become too coarse. We left these bodies behind in order to find others later. We would not have been able to find others later if we had not left those first ones then. For we had to seek our progress on earth after the sun had come out. - There we have just the process that we left behind, so to speak, certain beings among us, so that we ourselves could find the possibility to ascend higher. In order to reach higher, we had to go to other planets and leave the bodies down there to decay. In a certain sense, we owe what we are to what remained down below. Yes, we can describe this "owing" much more precisely. We can ask ourselves: How was it even possible for us to leave the earth during the critical period? It is not so easy for a being to go wherever it wants.

It was then, during the earth evolution, that what we owe to the Luciferic spirits occurred for the first time. The Luciferic beings were our guides who took us away from the earth evolution during the critical period. They told us, as it were, that a critical time was coming down there; you would have to leave the earth! - It was the Luciferic spirits under whose guidance we left the earth, the same Luciferic spirits who brought into our astral body at that time the Luciferic principle, the tendency to everything that we call the possibility of evil in us, but at the same time also the possibility of freedom. If they had not taken us away from the earth then, we would always have remained chained to the form we had created then, and now we could at most hover around the form from above, but would never be able to move into it. So they took us away and combined their own being with our being. When we realize this, we can now understand why we absorbed the Luciferic influences as we departed. The organizations which did not share this fate of being led into very special regions of the world at that time, which remained connected with the earth, remained below without the Luciferic influence.

They had to share our earthly destiny with us - but could not share our heavenly destiny with us. And when we came back to earth, we had the Luciferic influence in us, but not those other beings, and through this it became possible for us to lead life in a physical body and yet a life independent of the physical body, so that we could also become more and more independent of the physical body. But these other beings, which did not have the Luciferic influence in them, represented what we had made of them, what our astral bodies were in the interim between the exit of the sun and the exit of the moon, that is, what we had freed ourselves from. We look at the animals and say: Everything that the animals represent in cruelty, in voracity, in all animal vices, apart from the dexterity they have, we would have in us if we had not been able to put them out of ourselves! - We owe the liberation of our astral body to the fact that all the coarser astral qualities have remained behind in the animal kingdom of the earth. And we can say: Blessed are we that we no longer have this within us: the cruelty of the lion, the cunning of the fox, that it has been drawn out of us and leads an independent existence apart from us. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 120: The Revelations of Karma (1910)

Luciferic forces

The Luciferic forces strive to bring into the present existence that which has long since passed away in the world existence, that which therefore cannot really be in the present existence according to the laws of existence. If man pursues the cosmically conservative, if he wants to bring into the present that which was the correct form of existence in the past, then he falls into the Luciferic in a wrong way. If, for example, he takes that view of the world which lives in blurred images that were only fully justified in ancient cosmic ages, if he allows everything that lives in his soul to blur into one another, then he is surrendering to Luciferian existence in the wrong way. When he gives the external material existence such a form that it expresses something which it cannot express through its own natural laws - marble can only express the mineralogical laws - when man imposes on marble that which it can never express through its own natural power, then plastic art comes into being. Then that which cannot be a reality in such a sensual being, then unreality is conjured into existence. And that is precisely Lucifer's endeavor, that he wants to lead man away from the reality in which he finds himself between birth and death to a reality which was, however, a direct reality for other ages, but which cannot be the right reality for this age. [1]

The Luciferic forces actually work in spirals when they are pure. The Ahrimanic acts tangentially in its directional forces. [2] Where the lines of force are that are drawn in physics today, there is nothing; but all around is the Luciferic element. That which can be explained as force and matter is in reality explained as Lucifer and Ahriman. [3] When we are children, the youth-making, the Luciferic forces predominate in us; but deeply withdrawn in human nature are also the senile forces. And both types of forces must be present in the human body. Through the Luciferic forces that are in it, it has a constant possibility, I would say, to develop towards the phosphoric, towards warmth. In extreme cases, in the case of illness, these forces work in such a way that the human being enters into fever, into pleurisy, into inflammatory conditions. But this tendency to fever, to inflammatory conditions, is always in him. It is only kept in check, kept in balance by the ahrimanic forces that want to solidify him, that calcify him, that mineralize him. And this is the essence of man, that there is a state of equilibrium between these two polar opposites. [4]

When you look out into the vastness of the cosmos and you see, I would like to say, the ensemble of stars, we have this special sight, the sight of the Milky Way, the sight of the otherwise starry sky for the reason that it is the revelation of the Luciferic essence of the world. What surrounds us, shining, radiant, as it were, is the revelation of the Luciferic essence of the world; it is that which is now as it is because it has remained at an earlier stage of its existence. [5]

That which should actually have worked in another time becomes, if it remains, the Luciferic; that is the essence of the Luciferic. [6]

It was precisely in the fourth post-Atlantean period (the Greco-Latin epoch) that the Luciferic forces had a particularly strong effect. They detached man from the cosmos, for these forces are always intent on isolating man egoistically, detaching him from the whole spiritual cosmos, even in his knowledge of the connection with the physical cosmos. This is why there was no natural science when this detachment was at its peak. What was at work at that time in the separation of sensuous knowledge and supersensible dogmatism was of a Luciferic nature. This withering away of the supersensible powers of man - which then led to the purely animalistic form of socialism, which must now befall mankind in a devastating and destructive manner - is due to Luciferic forces. [7]

The Luciferic beings want to keep man, even after he has received the mineral organization into his being, at the earlier stage, which was appropriate to the state before he received the mineral organization. - These Luciferic beings have the intention of gradually eradicating the earthly from the whole development of mankind. [8]

If we want to fight Lucifer at all costs, we can do so in a very safe way: we need only prevent man from developing a memory; all memory is a Luciferic force. [9]

Sources:

[1], [4] GA GA 210: Old and New Methods of Initiation. Drama and Poetry in the Change of Consciousness in Modern Times (1922)

[2] GA GA 205: Becoming Human, World Soul and World Spirit - Part One:. The Human Being as a Bodily-Soul Entity in His Relation to the World (1921)

[3] GA 176: Human and Humanistic Truths of Development. The Karma of Materialism (1917)

[5] GA GA 203: Man's Responsibility for World Development through his Spiritual Connection with the Earth Planet and the Star World (1921)

[6] GA 195: World New Year's Eve and New Year's Thoughts (1919/1920)

[7] GA 181: Earth Death and World Life. Anthroposophical Gifts of Life. Necessities of Consciousness for the Present and the Future (1918)

[8] GA 197: Opposites in the Development of Humanity. West and East - Materialism and Mysticism - Knowledge and Faith (1920)

[9] GA 150: The World of the Spirit and its Entry into Physical Existence. The Influence of the Dead on the World of the Living (1913)

Luciferic forces and spiritual perception

People believe they see light, in truth, people do not see light on the physical plane, but they see colors, nuances of color, lighter and darker colors, they only see the effect of light, but light itself passes invisibly through space. We see the reflection of the light, but we do not see the light itself. When one moves up into the higher worlds, one is really surrounded by floating light, just as one is surrounded by floating air in the physical world. Now you do not come up with your physical body, you do not need to breathe up there, but you come up with that part of your being which needs the light just as the body needs the air in the physical world. The element of life up there is light, one might say light-air, which is the need of existence there, just as air is the need of existence for the human being in the physical world. This light is in fact permeated, interspersed by something similar to the way the air around us is permeated by cloud formations. But they are water. But this water on the physical plane can also be compared with something that is up there. That which meets us there like floating, hovering formations in the flooding light, like clouds floating through the flooding air, that is weaving, living sound, weaving sound formations, that is music of the spheres. And what you will perceive further is flowing, weaving life itself.

One would like to speak, for example, of "light air" or "air light". This does not exist on the physical plane. Up there, however, there is air light, light air. In the world into which one penetrates, one also learns to know the absence of the life element, the necessary amount of light air and air light, in that one feels uneasy, feels painfully touched in the soul: a state that can be compared to the state on the physical plane, when one cannot find breath for lack of air. [1]

And one also encounters the opposite state there, the state of true, genuine, one might say holy air of light, the state of living in this pure, holy, and seeing spiritual beings who can make themselves quite noticeable within this air of light and do their work there. They are all those beings who are under the guidance of Lucifer. [2]

The moment we enter this region without proper preparation, through inadequate or improper preparation, Lucifer gains the power to deprive us of the air of light. He puts us in spiritual respiratory distress. This does not have the effect of shortness of breath on the physical plane, but rather that we now, like a polar bear when it is brought to the south, long for what can come to us from the spiritual treasure, from the spiritual light of the physical plane. For that is precisely what Lucifer wants: that we do not concern ourselves with what comes from the higher hierarchies, but hunger for what he has brought into the physical plan, if we have not trained ourselves sufficiently through our preparation. But what does this look like in concrete terms? Suppose someone makes preparations which have led him to really ascend to the higher worlds, that is, to really reach this upper region. But let us suppose that he does not make the proper preparations for this, for example, that he forgets that, in addition to all the exercises, man must at the same time ennoble his moral feelings, his moral sentiments, that man must tear out of his soul earthly, ambitious feelings of power - one can ascend to the higher worlds, even if one is an ambitious, vain, power-lusting person, but then one carries earthly vanity, earthly lust for power up into these higher worlds - if a person has not thus purified his moral feelings and emotions, then Lucifer above takes away the air of light, the air-light. Then one perceives nothing of what is in reality above, then one longs for what is below on the physical plane; one breathes, as it were, that which one has been able to perceive on the physical plane.

One believes, for example, that one can only see what can only be seen in a spiritual way, in the light air, only when one breathes air light. You believe that you can see different incarnations of different people. But that is not true, you cannot see them because you lack air light. But you suck up into this region what is going on below on the physical plane, and describe all kinds of things that you have acquired below on the physical plane as if they were events in higher worlds. There is, so to speak, no better, or rather worse, means than to lift one's soul up into the higher worlds with earthly, vain desires for power. But if one does this, one will never be able to bring down true research results from these higher worlds, but what one brings down will only be an illusion of what one has thought up on the physical plan and the like. [3]

Sources:

[1] - [3] GA 146: The Occult Foundations of the Bhagavad Gita (1913)

Luciferic powers at the bottom of the human soul

An older student of the Mysteries should be particularly aware of the following: If you dig down into the human being as it is on earth, you will ultimately find at the bottom of your own soul that from which you must tremble and shrink back: the Luciferic powers. Therefore, look up to the moment of death; you will only become a true human being when you have passed through the gate of death. There you will be saved from what you find at the bottom of your soul here on earth: the Luciferic powers. That was the death experience of the ancient Mysteries. That was why they had to look to the realization, to the illustration of the moment of death in the Mysteries, these old Mystery students. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 221: Earth Knowledge and Celestial Knowledge (1923)

Luciferic people

The Luciferic power counts on people who are organized according to the sphere of will, but who powerfully shape the sensual view into fantasy images out of inner love for the ideal world view. It would like to keep the development of mankind through such people entirely in the impulses of the past. It could then protect humanity from submerging into the sphere in which the Ahrimanic power must be overcome. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 26: Anthroposophical Guiding Principles. The Path of Knowledge of Anthroposophy - The Michael Mystery (1924/1925)

Luciferian religion

Such a religious form, which has not yet penetrated to the realization of the general victory of the Christ (as sun spirit) over Lucifer, cannot contrast the figure of Lucifer with the Christ in the way that is possible at the present time. Thus, in a certain way, Lucifer appears to such a religion as an independent, unconquered figure, as an equal figure next to Christ. Lucifer is presented as a kind of brother. This is what you have when Vishnu is contrasted with Shiva. All the cultus, the whole religion of the Shivaites with their 60 million followers (the external characteristic is the red dot on the forehead of Indians), can actually be described in the most eminent sense as a kind of Luciferian religion from the point of view just described. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 137: Man in the Light of Occultism, Theosophy and Philosophy (1912)

Luciferic thrones, spirits of will

The formation of the planetary system with the old Saturn, which is brought about by them, begins immediately with the outpouring of the spirits of will. Just as they built up the first embodiment of our earth from the universe at that time, they are still at work today. We can actually only see these spirits of will in that, when they become Luciferic, they show themselves in a certain way in those phenomena which we find as meteors in the region of the earth and which come in as if from the universe. [1] Everywhere there are Luciferic entities; so also inside the comets, which are on the level of the thrones. This gives the comet a mineral nature. [2]

Sources:

[1] & [2] GA 136: The Spiritual Beings in the Celestial Bodies and Kingdoms of Nature (1912)

Luciferic warmth beings

Just as it is with light in relation to thinking, so it is with warmth in relation to feeling. Just as the Luciferic light beings want to fly away with us from the earth, as it were, to the light, so the Luciferic warmth beings want to absorb our feeling into the general warmth of the world. It becomes warmth itself, it flows over into the warmth - that is a huge pleasure, that is the tempting thing. And the enemies of these Luciferic warmth beings are the Ahrimanic cold beings. Man experiences the cold as taking up his whole being, as if tearing it apart in immense pain. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 270/1: Esoteric Instructions for the First Class of the School of Spiritual Science at the Goetheanum. Volume I (1924)

Luciferic wisdom and the Mystery of Golgotha

It was through Luciferic wisdom that Christianity was first understood in Europe. It is significant that in the Greek wisdom, which developed as Gnosis in order to understand the Mystery of Golgotha, the old Luciferian wisdom was involved, (which) gave the old Gnosis its form. It is the greatest victory of Christianity at that time that the fact of the Mystery of Golgotha was clothed in what Lucifer gave to earthly evolution. But while the Lucifer culture, which was thus given to humanity through the real incarnation of Lucifer (in prehistoric China), is flowing away, what prepares the future incarnation of Ahriman on the Western Earth is gradually flooding in. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 195: World New Year's Eve and New Year's Thoughts (1919/1920)

Luciferic world in the religious instincts

With that which the human soul experiences in the direction of freedom, it touches the Ahrimanic in the world. With that which it experiences in the religious direction, even if it goes towards the Mystery of Golgotha, it comes very close to the Luciferic. And there it can very easily, if it develops the mere religious egoistic instincts, as is also very easily the case in the religious world today, also fall into the Luciferic drives and instincts. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 212: Human Soul Life and Spiritual Striving in Connection with World and Earth Development (1922)

Luciferic beings

We can therefore say that Lucifer has a hand in everything that is traditionally theological, in everything that is artistic and degenerates into the mannered and stiff, in everything that is Renaissance-like; while Ahriman has a hand in everything that is only external, spiritless natural science, which cannot discover the spirit in nature, and in everything that is external mechanism in human activity. The Luciferic angelic beings, who have saved themselves from traditional life right up to the present day, have every interest in actually preventing man from doing anything. They want to keep man at least in his inner soul life. Man has become a personality. But these angelic beings do not want to let man flow out in his deeds into the experience, into the revelation of his will impulses. They want to keep him in inner contemplation. They seduce him into mysticism, they seduce him into false theosophy. They tempt him to lead a merely inward, contemplative life, to observe instead of acting. They turn him into a contemplative who would like to sit all day and ponder all kinds of worldly riddles, but who does not want to transfer what lives in his spirit into external reality. They want to create what is external science through purely external observation. In the same way these Luciferic entities want art to be as lifeless as possible, spiritless in the sense that spirit does not enter into form. They only ever want to have renaissance, that which lived in ancient times. They instill in people a hatred of every new stylistic form that can really emerge from modern humanity. They want to propagate the old stylistic forms because these old stylistic forms are still borrowed from the unearthly, the supernatural. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 208: Anthroposophy as Cosmosophy - Part Two:. The Formation of Man as the Result of Cosmic Effects (1921)

Luciferic beings of the different hierarchies

For each category of the different hierarchies, there are now also the Luciferic spirits in our cycle of time. [1] In a certain sense, the luciferic beings' remaining behind was a sacrifice. We must get into the habit of using quite different terms from those that are usually used, because in the usual terms one could perhaps say that the Luciferic spirits had to "sit in detention", and their laxity will not be forgiven. But it was not a case of laxity on the part of the Luciferic beings. In a certain sense, their remaining behind was a sacrifice in order to be able to have an effect on our earthly humanity through what they acquired through this sacrifice. [2]

Imagine that we would not think thoughts, but with every thought we would bring forth an entity. Then we have grasped what happens within the divine-spiritual world. The gods who lived in the most beautiful harmony, in the most beautiful unity, who were there before the old Saturn, imagined themselves: they thought, they thought other beings, other gods. So that we have generations of gods who are originally by themselves in their reality, and others who are simply the real conceptions of the gods directly connected with Saturn, Sun and Moon. These gods, who are only the thoughts of the others, we have hitherto called the Luciferic entities on account of certain qualities, and we must, in the wider scope, reckon everything among the Luciferic entities of which we can say: the original gods had the need to imagine themselves self-recognizing. And just as man basically only recognizes himself in his thoughts, so the original gods learned to recognize themselves through Lucifer and his hosts. The advancing gods left something of themselves behind, so to speak, so that they could look back on it and see themselves in this mirror thrown out of their substance, just as one can only recognize oneself in a mirror in real life. Thus, in fact, the Luciferic entities are entities thrown out of the original gods, which were there so that a mirror of self-knowledge would be available for the advancing forms of the gods. In a certain sense, what goes on microcosmically in our souls is a reflection of this macrocosm. Our whole extensive self with all that is unconsciously within us, from which our bodily organism has also emerged, comes from the original generation of the gods. But that which we experience with our consciousness, that which we can survey with our ordinary everyday consciousness, comes from the generation of the gods, which is only the idea of the original one. [3] (See also: Gods upper and lower).

Above the beings of the exusiai order there are only beings who belong to the realm of duration. But there are those among them who masquerade as time beings, who enter into time. These are luciferic beings, beings who actually belong to the order of hierarchy to the spirits of wisdom, Kyriotetes, but who work as spirits of form, Exusiai, because they work in time, actually being forces in the cosmic order of a very high nature. These Luciferic forces have within themselves the ability to translate into time, so to speak, that which would otherwise appear purely spiritually permanent to our human perception, to give it the appearance of temporal progression. And this alone gives rise to man's assertion that his spiritual activity is connected with material processes. This illusion that the spiritual can originate from the material is essentially a Luciferian illusion. [4]

The beings of the next higher hierarchies led man much, much less independently before the Mystery of Golgotha than after it. And the progress of these beings of the higher hierarchies - Angeloi, Archangeloi, Archai - consists in the fact that they, for their part, have learned to accomplish more and more the guidance of man in a way that respects man's independence. People on earth should live more and more independently and autonomously. The leading spiritual beings of the higher hierarchies have learned this for their part, and this is their progress. But even these spirits are such that they can lag behind. Not all the spirits who were involved in the guidance of man have really attained through the Mystery of Golgotha the ability to become free guides and leaders of men. Some of these beings of the higher hierarchies have remained behind and have taken on a Luciferian character. And what some of them live out includes, for example, what we today call public opinion. Public opinion is not only formed by human beings, but also by a certain type of Luciferic spirits at the lowest level, retarded Angeloi, Archangeloi. These are only just beginning their Luciferic career and have not yet risen very high in the hierarchy of Luciferic spirits, but they are Luciferic spirits. One can observe with vision how certain spirits of the higher hierarchies do not take part in the development after the Mystery of Golgotha, how they harden themselves in the old way of guidance and therefore cannot approach people directly. Those who have participated in the development can approach people in a regular way; those who have not participated in it cannot, and they work in a blurred, confused power of thought of public opinion. One can only understand the function of public opinion if one knows that it enters humanity in this way.

Thus we have directly among us the phenomenon that entities leave a regular development and take on a Luciferic character. It is important to know this. For those Luciferic beings whom we have already met, and who have greater power, have also begun "on a small scale". However, there was no public opinion on the moon, but there was something that can be compared to it, a kind of leadership of the people. And when we consider this army of Luciferic spirits - what we have otherwise referred to as Luciferic spirits are powerful, important entities, for example those who are spirits of form and who buzz up to man in such a way that they stop his growth - but when we speak of the others now, of the army of Luciferic spirits, these are, as it were, only the recruits; but something is beginning with the career of the Luciferic spirits which will only later take on quite different dimensions, because the spirits who intervene there will become more and more powerful. [5] Those spirits who have remained behind and who make public opinion have no significance, no power at all for the life that man goes through between death and rebirth. They have completely given up this power to work there, because they are already working here on the physical plane, working in a spiritual way, in a way that is only possible as public opinion. Man can take nothing of public opinion with him into the spiritual world. These entities, which are behind public opinion, wanted to lag behind the progress that has taken place through the Mystery of Golgotha. For the development of the earth, however, this mystery will gain ever greater and greater significance. And we must be quite clear that the future of the earth's development cannot happen in such a way that these things - public opinion and the like - which are a necessity in development, can be improved. People can become better within themselves. Therefore development must intervene more and more in the inner being, so that in the future man will be confronted much more with public opinion, but his inner being will have become stronger. For much more oppressive things will come in the future. [6] (For further information see: Public opinion).

The Beings of the third Hierarchy, that Hierarchy which directly adjoins man upwards, so to speak, towards the spiritual world, can be characterized by the fact that that which is perception in man is revelation with them, and that which is inner life in man is spirit-fulfilment with them. Already in those beings which we have placed one step higher in the hierarchy of the world than human beings themselves, in the Angeloi, we find this peculiarity that they actually perceive that which they reveal out of themselves, and that when they enter into their inner being they do not perceive something so independent, in their inner life, They do not have something as independent and self-contained as the human being, but that they then feel the powers and entities of the higher hierarchies light up and sprout within them, from the entities that are above them, in short, that they feel filled and inspired by the spirit of the higher hierarchies. Thus what we call an independent inner life in human beings is not actually present in these beings. These beings can therefore hide nothing within themselves that would be the product of their own thinking or feeling, for everything they work out within themselves would show itself on the outside. But let us assume that these beings would nevertheless get the desire to experience something within themselves which they do not immediately reveal to the outside - then they would just have to take on a different nature. What I have now described to you, the denial of the nature of these beings of the Third Hierarchy, the assumption of a different nature, this has really happened, it has happened in the course of time. [7] Among the beings of the third Hierarchy (Angeloi, Archangeloi, Archai) there have been those who have had the desire to have experiences within themselves which they did not need to show outwardly, that is, they have had the desire to deny their nature. What moved a number of them to deny their nature was a sense of power, a sense of independence, a sense of freedom.

At a certain time a number of beings of the third hierarchy developed the urge, the urge not merely to be dependent on the beings of the higher hierarchies, but to develop a life of their own within themselves. This was an extraordinary achievement for the entire evolution of the planetary system to which we initially belonged. For these Beings, whom we may call the rebels of the third Hierarchy, have done nothing less than prepare the way for man's own independence, for the possibility that man may now develop an independent life for himself, which does not reveal itself directly to the outside, but which can be an inner life independent of external revelation. Everything else was only a consequence, was only a consequence of this drive (of these beings). The consequence was basically something terrible: the denial of one's own being, the untruth, the lie. The spirits of the Third Hierarchy who had attained this instinct did not do what they then did in order to lie, but for the sake of developing their own life, but in so doing they had to take upon themselves the consequence of becoming spirits of untruth, spirits of denial of their own being, spirits of lies in other words. [8]

The concept of Luciferic spirits essentially consists in the fact that these spirits want to develop an independent inner life. They wanted to overcome the filling of the spirit with the substance of the higher hierarchies. They could not do this in any other way than by cutting themselves off, splitting themselves off from the beings of the higher hierarchies, instead of filling themselves with the spirit of the higher hierarchies and, as it were, leaving themselves a free view towards the higher hierarchies, in order in this way to obtain their own substance from the substance of the higher hierarchies. They steal this for themselves (and) fill their inner selves with it.

This is an idea that can provide us with information about processes in the cosmos, without which we would not be able to comprehend a star system, or even the existence of the stars as we know them as human beings with our physical consciousness. What happens to the beings of the third Hierarchy cannot, however, happen in the same way to the beings of the other Hierarchies, but something similar does happen to them.

What is going on, especially if we apply it to the contemplation of the spirits of form, Exusiai, will give us an idea of how a planetary system is actually formed. [9]

Saturn is that which fills the entire space bounded by the apparent elliptical orbit (----) of Saturn. You must imagine that what lies within this orbit is filled with etheric substance, not spherical, however, but in such a way that we are dealing with a kind of strongly flattened sphere, with a lens. [10] The spiritual entities, which we call the spirits of form, exusiai, act as forces within the etheric substance, but they all have a common center, the sun. That is to say, these spirits of form, which correspond to our planets, are as it were a college that has its seat in the sun. At the outermost point of this etheric sphere, the rebel, who is a kind of Luciferian spirit of form, works against this spirit of form, which works from the center of the sun. He works against it from the outside. [11] And through the interaction of that which works in from outer space and that which works out from the sun, an invagination arises which finally becomes a real constriction, and that is the physical planet Saturn. The ether is invaginated (enclosed or sheathed, to fold in so that an outer becomes an inner surface), and this invagination is seen by the physical eye as the physical Saturn. For all physical matter comes into being through the meeting of forces which derive from the spirits of form. [12] Above the Spirits of Form are the Spirits of Motion, Dynamis, above these the Spirits of Wisdom, the Kyriotetes, above these the Spirits of Will, the Thrones, above them the Cherubim and Seraphim. For all these spiritual entities there are also those which can be compared with what we have described as the Luciferic spirits. So that at the outermost edge, where a planet is formed, we do not merely have the spirits of form working together, but that something always takes place there in such a way that the activity of the normal hierarchies proceeds from the sun and from the outside inwards that of the abnormal, the rebellious hierarchies.

As the entities of the higher hierarchies, cherubim and seraphim, become carriers of the light, they now have the same relationship to the light as the forces of the spirits of form have to the ether substance. The forces that carry the light fill the whole etheric space, but the abnormal ones work against them, so that the planet stops the light. That is why the planets have no light of their own, because they claim for themselves the power of light that would come to them as entities if they were to open themselves to the normal cherubim and seraphim, because they envelop themselves, cut themselves off from the whole. [13]

What we are now experiencing during the earth evolution, that we are, so to speak, permeating ourselves with a human ego-nature, and during the past earth time up to the present have formed the finer elaboration of the lower basic parts and will elaborate the higher basic parts during the future, what we as human beings thus experience on earth, has been exemplified to us by preceding beings in earlier planetary embodiments. For Angeloi, Archangeloi and Archai there was (in each case) also a kind of fourth limb which they brought to development. And then in the second half of the corresponding planetary embodiment they anticipated that which was actually to come to full development in them on earth, as with us humans the spirit self on Jupiter. At that time they did not fully assimilate it as their own, but in such a way that they looked up to it.

When we speak of the luciferic entities, we are speaking of those who remained in the same position during the old lunar evolution as a human being who, during the earth evolution, would not bring his 5th (Manas), 6th (Buddhi), 7th basic part (Atma) to full development, but would reject it, who would perhaps already stop at the fourth or the fifth and so on. So they have not fully developed, these beings who stand on the most varied levels of the Luciferic beings. On the old moon they were already supposed to develop what corresponds to the human ego. But they could only have brought this ego of the moon to full development in themselves if they had anticipated everything that would now be the fifth, sixth and seventh basic part for them, which they should then have fully developed on earth as the fifth, sixth and seventh. They should have reached their 7th basic part. [14]

There were beings who were eagerly waiting to form their sixth basic part during the earth evolution, beings of a Luciferic nature who had only reached the formation of their fifth basic part on the moon and wanted to form their sixth basic part on earth. And there were beings of the second class who had already formed their sixth basic part on the moon and wanted to form their seventh basic part on earth. So we can distinguish (at the beginning of the earth's development) between the human being waiting to form his ego, then the Luciferic beings who were waiting to form their sixth basic part, and the Luciferic beings who were waiting to form their seventh basic part. We will leave aside those who want to form their fifth; there were also such beings. Only those beings on earth who wanted to develop their fourth basic part as the ego were able to acquire a physical body.

What did these entities have to do? They had to resort to a kind of surrogate physical body, they had to seek out people who were among the most developed, who had, let us say, developed their fourth basic part. The consequence of this was that among the ordinary people of ancient times there appeared those who could be possessed by higher beings of a Luciferic nature, they were the leaders of the people of earth, they knew, understood and could do much more than the other people. Great founders of cities, great leaders of nations and the like were not just normal people on earth, they were people who were possessed by such higher beings of a Luciferic nature. Luciferic entities always had the longing to continue their development in the manner described by making other people obsessed with themselves - they still do this today. And that is precisely the temptation of human beings, that the Luciferic spirits work in them. [15] But in the meantime these Luciferic spirits have advanced just as men have advanced. So that many of these spirits, who, let us say, when man entered the Atlantean period, stood on the threshold of developing his sixth basic part, are now already so far advanced as to develop his seventh basic part.

He does this in such a way that he now again makes a human being possessed by himself in order to perhaps only use what this human being can experience for several years in order to come to development again for his part. This is nothing evil in human nature. What does one become by being possessed by a high Luciferic spirit? A genius, which - because it is possessed as a human being and the actual human nature is outshone by this higher being - is impractical for ordinary activities, but which in some field or other has a pioneering, leading effect. Lucifer is essentially involved in the great cultural progress of the earth. So we do look up to the Luciferian spirits in a certain way as a kind of guide for human beings. We must free ourselves from constriction, free from all orthodox Christianity, which calls Lucifer only a devil who is hateful to it. We must recognize as such the liberating nature of the Luciferic principle, which has also been introduced by good gods, for it drives us beyond ourselves during the earth's evolution, so that we prophetically anticipate what will come to us as our own only during Jupiter and so on. [16]

The fact that man acquired certain abilities at a low level, which were otherwise only intended for him in the middle of the Atlantean period, meant that he confronted these abilities in a completely different, self-confident, free way. Man would have been led by the reins until the middle of the Atlantean period if these retarded beings had not intervened. Those spirits did not remain behind because of their sluggishness, but the reason for their remaining behind was their willingness to make sacrifices. In order to give man the opportunity to receive the gift of the spirits of form in a higher, freer way, they sacrificed themselves. We have a long period of human development in which man received the beginnings of language, of thinking, especially of intellectual memory through these Luciferic beings, in which he received the seed of art and science. All this he would not have acquired before, since otherwise he would only have had an instinctive activity. However, something else, which would otherwise have been independent of man through the guidance of the spirits of form, was now given into his power, into his control: man was exposed to good and evil. We all carry within us the seeds of the activity of these Luciferian spirits. [17]

Thus we see that it is these beings who have made man what he is today, who have prepared him for the great moment of the descent of the Christ principle. They have said to themselves, as it were: If we leave man so that he lives into the Atlantean period only instinctively, then he also receives the Christ principle instinctively, then he is not free, not mature in freedom. Therefore we sacrifice ourselves and develop certain abilities in him, certain qualities, and delay the time when he can become aware of the Christ. - The Luciferic entities began their work just as long before the middle of the Atlantean period as the Christ appeared after that time. [18]

Outwardly they had a certain human form, for even the highest spirits must embody themselves in the forms that exist on earth. Thus certain beings also took on the outward appearance of the human form of that time. Their true home, however, is on the two intermediate planets of Venus and Mercury. Their souls were there - the best of them - and their outer form was basically a kind of illusion. It is they whom we have to designate as the first teachers and initiates in humanity, outwardly like the people of that time, but inwardly endowed with highly significant abilities, so that they could have an effect on the whole of humanity and in part also, in specially segregated schools, in the first mystery schools, on the individual advanced human beings. And there were always such advanced individualities who had their home in the stars and who, although they were connected with the stars, had their form on earth and wandered among men. [19]

Sources:

[1], [7] - [13] GA 136: The Spiritual Beings in the Celestial Bodies and Kingdoms of Nature (1912)

[2] GA 120: The Revelations of Karma (1910)

[3] GA 129: World Wonders, Soul Tests and Spiritual Revelations (1911)

[4] GA 184: The Polarity of Duration and Development in Human Life. The Cosmic Prehistory of Humanity (1918)

[5], [6] GA 141: Life between Death and the New Birth in Relation to Cosmic Facts (1912/1913)

[14] - [16] GA 130: Esoteric Christianity and the Spiritual Guidance of Humanity (1911/1912)

[17] - [19] GA 105: World, Earth and Man, their Nature and Development and their Reflection in the Connection between Egyptian Myth and Contemporary Culture (1908)

Experiencing Luciferian beings - experiencing the Luciferian being

The feeling of timelessness, of the cyclical, thus occurs at the corresponding level of clairvoyance or when consciously living through the life of sleep. But this is mixed with a certain longing. The longing arises because one is never actually at rest in this experience in the higher world, one feels oneself everywhere in the circular movement, feels oneself always moving, never stops anywhere. And the longing one has is to be able to stop somewhere, to be able to step into time somewhere! Exactly, I would like to say, the reverse of what you experience in being sensual. In this one always feels in time and has a longing for eternity. In the world of which I have spoken, one feels in eternity and has the only longing: If only somewhere the world stood still and somewhere moved into being in time! That is what you get to know as a basic feeling: the perpetual mobility in space and the longing for time, the experience in the perpetual becoming that guarantees itself forever - and the longing: Oh, if only one could somehow pass away somewhere. When one has understood such a wish - to secure this point, to be concentrated in temporality - as an impulse given by a being in the world - it can only be so - then one has grasped the influence of the Luciferic being in the world. Now we are at the concept where one can say: How can one speak of being confronted by a Luciferic being? When such an influence occurs in the worlds of the higher hierarchies: being drawn from eternity to an independent concentrated being in the world, then one experiences the luciferic activity. And when one has experienced it, then one knows how the forces that are Luciferic can be described. [1] How is it that eternity once appears as a moment, that the eternal once appears temporally, and that a being in the world takes on the form of the temporal? This is due to nothing other than the fact that our sensuality is interspersed with Luciferic entities wherever it appears. And as far as the Luciferic being plays a part, eternity is turned into temporality. You must therefore say: A being that appears somewhere in time is as much an eternal being as it is able to free itself from the Luciferic existence, and it is just as much a temporal being as it is subject to the Luciferic existence. [2]

Sources:

[1] & [2] GA 138: On Initiation. Of Eternity and the Moment. Of Spiritual Light and the Darkness of Life (1912)

Luciferic beings and carbonic acid in the atmosphere

These Luciferic beings are actually purely astral in nature. They now have the hope of being able to intersperse their astral nature with etheric nature through everything that begins to ascend (in nature) in the spring and to bring forth an etheric shell of the earth, which could then be inhabited by themselves; they strive to absorb the etheric into their being from above. If we direct our gaze upwards to where the elemental beings of the earth ascend, where they then unite with the cloud formations, where they assume an inner activity that is subject to planetary life, then the elemental beings come upwards, especially when it comes to March; what is otherwise purely spiritual within the earth, non-material, but which lives itself out in the material, is transferred upwards into the region where there is vapor, air, warmth. And everything that happens in the elemental beings that are coming to life is permeated up there by the Luciferic beings. When the plants begin to sprout in spring, they draw in carbonic acid. And this carbonic acid is something that, because the plant cover is there, works in a higher region in spring than in winter. The Luciferic entities strive for a kind of carbonic acid evaporation from the earth upwards. If they could accomplish this, then breathing on earth would have to cease, and they would draw up all that man has in himself without the physical breath, his etheric, and through their connection with the etheric of man they would be able to become etheric beings, while they are thus only astral beings. So that - with the destruction of what is human and animal below - there would be a shell of etheric angelic beings above. This again is something that the Luciferic spirits strive for and hope for when March comes, at the end of March. They hope to actually transform the whole earth into such a fine earth shell in which they, condensed by the etheric nature of human beings, can do their work. [1]

These are hopes, these are illusions of the Luciferian entities. Whoever clairvoyantly looks out into the vastness of the world will see, when March comes, in the drifting clouds, the dynamically striving forces of the Luciferic angels, who want to create a Luciferic shell of the earthly, who want to remove the human race from the earth. That which the Luciferic beings hope for is destroyed anew every year for external nature, but it works in man. [2]

Sources:

[1] & [2] GA 229: The co-experience of the course of the year in four cosmic imaginations (1923)

Luciferic beings and natural phenomena

The Luciferic spirits live in the flooding light of the atmosphere above the clouds, just as the Ahrimanic spirits live in the rising mist. And basically it is so for him who can now consciously look at something like this in the right way with imagination, that if he succeeds in letting his ordinary thinking go along with the clouds transforming the shapes and colors, if he gives his thoughts the possibility, so to speak, instead of having sharp outlines, to metamorphose, to change, if the thoughts themselves become so broad and narrow again, if they go along with the cloud formations, if they take part in the shape and color of the cloud formation: then it is so that man really begins to look at this play of colors above the clouds, especially the evening and morning sky, like a sea of colors in which luciferic figures move. There he can actually rise to the feeling that his thinking is like breathing in the light. Thus we find how the Ahrimanic and Luciferic is also incorporated into the phenomena of external nature. [1]

That which we have around us as nature has behind it, as it were, a second nature, but a spiritual, a supersensible nature. He does not perceive this with his senses, but it still has a great influence on his earthly existence. In everything that expresses itself in wind and weather live beings that are not seen only because they have no body that is visible to the senses, which are characteristic of earth beings. [2] They have a body that consists only of air and heat. This body forms, dissolves and undergoes rapid transformations. What you see in cloud formations, what you feel in wind formations, is only an external expression of this, these are more the (external) actions of these beings. The body is more behind it; but it is a body of air and heat. So that, when we look out into our atmosphere, into the circumference of the earth in which we are as human beings, we have a world of Luciferic beings around us. These luciferic beings have a very special aspiration in relation to human beings. Although they live in weather that is often unpleasant for us, they are beings who are extremely concerned with the moral element in the human social order. They have the intention that man should not have a real physical body at all; at least man should not have a body in which the earthly and the watery nature are found. They would like to have man shaped in their way because they would then, without him having any freedom in it, turn him entirely into moral beings. These entities are particularly dangerous to all enthusiastic people who are inclined to a misty mysticism. Such people very easily fall prey to these entities, which would like to lead man away from the earth, to give him a kind of angelic being, so that he will not succumb to any temptations towards the immoral. [3]

Sources:

[1] GA 232: Mystery Formations (1923)

[2], [3] GA 218: Spiritual Connections in the Formation of the Human Organism (1922)

Luciferic beings and warmth

The Luciferic beings had to perform within the warmth what man performs in the air today. Thus the givers of knowledge and freedom are connected with something that tries to incarnate itself in the warmth of man in the same way as it used to do on the moon. This is also the origin of fever. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 93a: Basic Elements of Esotericism (1905)

Luciferic entities as heroes in ancient times

The ancient Greeks also spoke of such individualities when they spoke of their heroes, for example Kekrops and Kadmos. All the great cultural leaders who not only inspired, but who actually walked among the other human beings as human beings in the physical body, but who were not actually human beings, but in their human form Maya, who were in truth retarded lunar beings, these individualities were the heroes, the superhuman figures who stood, so to speak, on the lowest level of the Luciferic beings. What is the actual task of these beings? Oh, it is wisely arranged in the overall development of the world that not only those beings have their proper tasks who lead evolution directly forward in a straight line. One would like to say that if man were only subject to that spiritual guidance which is led by these normally developed beings, then he would, as it were, rush forward in development too quickly and with too little gravity. Development needs obstacles so that the right pace can be maintained. Development needs a certain gravity, a weight. The forces that rush forward can only make themselves strong by strengthening themselves against resistance. The task of giving weight to evolution, gravity, is the task of those beings who have been left behind by the wise guidance of the world during the planetary development of the moon. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 129: World Miracles, Soul Tests and Spiritual Revelations (1911)

Luciferian influence on the earth's development

In the Old Testament there is only a certain awareness of the Luciferian influence. The serpent is nothing other than an image of Lucifer. From this you can see that there is a clear awareness that Lucifer took part in the development. This awareness is clearly present in all traditions that are related to the Bible. But the awareness of the ahrimanic influence is not there in the same way. It is only present where spiritual science has been taught. That is why those who wrote the Gospels also took this into account. Because the word "demon" was taken from the Greek at the time of the Gospel writers, they found that in Mark's Gospel, where there is no mention of the temptation of Jesus, the word "demon" is used. But where Ahriman is mentioned, the word "Satan" is used. [1]

You can approach the most diverse mythologies and world views, and nowhere will you find such a clear and profound view of the fact that two kinds of influences approach man as in Germanic-Nordic mythology. Since the Germanic-Nordic man could still see clairvoyantly, he really saw these two powers and placed himself between them. This Luciferic influence was perceived by the Germanic-Nordic man as a beneficent influence. But now he realizes that other things also come from this influence. Lucifer hides behind the Loki figure, which has a strangely iridescent form. Because we saw reality, we saw that the ideas of human freedom and independence could be traced back to Loki. But it was also known through the ancient clairvoyance that that which always leads man in his desires and actions to be lower in his whole being than if he were only devoted to Odin and the Aesir was due to the influence of Loki. [2]

Loki has three offspring: the first is the one that causes selfishness. This is the Midgard serpent, that which expresses the influence of the Luciferic spirit on the astral body. The second is that which interferes with human cognition as that which is incorrect. In man on the physical plane it is the things that live in his spirit and do not agree with the outer world. That is what is not true. With the Nordic people, who lived even more on the astral plane, that which is abstract lie with us lived out immediately as an astral entity and lived as such on the astral plane. The expression for all that is eclipse, not right seeing, is some animal being, in the north mainly the Fenris wolf, the influence of Loki on the etheric body. [3] The third offspring is that which causes illness and death. This is Hel. But we must always be clear that what the clairvoyant sees is not an allegorical-symbolic designation, but that these are entities. Now the Germanic-Nordic man has not only known of his Loki, of the Luciferic influence, but also of the influence of Ahriman, as a consequence of the Loki influence. [4] (For further information see: Baldur).

Just at the time of the splitting of the moon, certain spiritual entities intervened in the development of man, which had retained so much of their lunar nature that they could not participate in the outgoing of the sun from the earth (see: earth development). And that they were also excluded from the effects of the beings, which proved to be active from the earth-moon towards the earth. These beings with the old moon nature were, so to speak, banished to earth with irregular development. In their lunar nature lay precisely that which had rebelled against the sun spirits during the old lunar development, which was a blessing to man at that time in so far as through it man had been led to an independent, free state of consciousness. The consequences of the peculiar development of these beings during the time on earth were that they became opponents of those beings who, from the moon, wanted to make human consciousness a necessary mirror of knowledge of the world. [5]

The effect meant in primeval times was not a natural effect, but a spiritual influence, but one that was transmitted as a spiritual influence from the higher spiritual beings to man according to the state of consciousness of this man at that time. If one thinks of the matter as an effect of nature, one does not grasp its true nature at all. If, on the other hand, we say that the beings with the old lunar nature approached man in order to "seduce" him for their purposes, we are using a symbolic expression, which is good as long as we remain aware of its symbolic nature and at the same time realize that behind the symbol there is a spiritual fact. The effect on man of the spiritual beings who remained behind in the lunar state had a twofold effect on him. His consciousness was thereby stripped of the character of a mere mirror of the universe, because the possibility was aroused in the human astral body to regulate and control the images of consciousness from it. Man became the master of his knowledge. On the other hand, the starting point of this dominion became the astral body, and the ego, which was superior to it, became constantly dependent on it. Thus in the future man was exposed to the continuing influences of a lower element in his nature. [6]

Thus man comes under a twofold guidance. According to his lower part he is under the power of the Moon gods, but according to his developed personality he comes under the guidance of the Luciferic beings. These complete their own development by making use of the awakened human powers of understanding. They were not able to reach this stage before. At the same time, however, they give man the capacity for freedom, for distinguishing between "good" and "evil". Under the mere guidance of the moon gods, the human intellectual organ is indeed formed, but these gods would have left the structure dormant; they had no interest in making use of it. They had their own intellectual powers. For their own sake, the Luciferian beings were interested in training the human intellect, in directing it towards the things of the earth. They thus became the teachers of all that can be accomplished by the human mind. But they could also be nothing more than instigators. They could not develop the intellect in themselves, but only in man. This gave rise to a twofold direction of activity on earth. One emanated directly from the moon deities and was from the beginning a law-governed, rational one. The moon gods had already completed their apprenticeship earlier; they were now beyond the possibility of error. The Luciferic beings, however, who dealt with human beings, first had to work their way through to such clarification. Under their guidance man had to learn to find the laws of his being. Under Lucifer's guidance he had to become himself, like "one of the gods. [7]

The Luciferic entities were spirits who should actually have completed their stint on the (old) moon. If they had exerted their influence on the human being there, then they could only have worked on the astral body, for it was the highest member of the human entity on the moon. But they could not do this on the moon because they were retarded entities. And they could not work on the ego because they had not learned to do so on the moon. Now the Luciferic entities were so far advanced that they were able to work on the astral body of the human being. But man had advanced in the meantime and had received his ego. The luciferic entities could not yet work on the ego; higher entities worked on the ego, also on the astral body, but only through the ego. They would not have allowed themselves to work directly on the astral body, so to speak; that was a task that these higher beings had already fulfilled during the moon's development. If the Luciferic entities had had no influence on the human being, then the higher entities alone would have worked on the astral body through the ego and thus purified the astral body. Instead, during the Lemurian period, the Luciferic entities worked directly on the astral body from all sides, and as a result the human astral body was exposed to all the influences that should have finished working on the moon. Thus the Luciferic entities crept into the human astral body and are basically still in it today. As a result, man was brought down to earth too early from the atmosphere above the earth. The Luciferic entities are essentially to blame for this. The astral body of man was deteriorated by them and thereby condensed too soon, otherwise he would have remained in this atmosphere, which is called paradise in the Bible, for a long time. [8]

Because man had absorbed the Luciferic influence in his astral body, the whole external world into which he entered appeared quite different from how it would have appeared to him (in the middle of the Atlantean period). Lucifer penetrated into man's inner being. With Lucifer inside, man saw the world around him. This clouded his view of the earthly world, and the Ahrimanic influence now mingled with the outer impressions. This was the only way that Ahriman could interfere and turn the outer world into an illusion, because we had already created the disposition to illusion, to Maya, from within. [9]

All luciferic influence came from the fact that luciferic power was added to the ego, that this ego mixed impurely with thinking, feeling and willing and then received the luciferic predominance over the astral body. As a result, the astral body in turn gained its supremacy over the etheric body. And now the balance in the human being was disturbed. [10] Through the intervention of the Luciferic entities, man diverted his powers of thought and other soul forces, which he would otherwise have used only for the acquisition of occult ideas and concepts, to the study of such things that belong only to the physical world. [11] In his lower nature man has become more spiritual through the Luciferic influence; he would not be as spiritual as he is today without the Luciferic influence. [12] As a result, man has reached a stage of development earlier than was actually predestined for him, than was intended for him, so to speak, in the wise guidance of the world. [13] Man would have been quite different if this descent into matter had only been granted to him in the middle of the Atlantean period, for then his soul would have been more maturely affected by this descent. He would have arrived in matter as a better, a more mature human being. He would have become quite differently able to decide between good and evil. The Christ-impulse would have been given to him in the middle of the Atlantean period. [14]

Ultimately, death is connected with the Luciferic principle, but Lucifer did not bring death. If all that he brought had been effective in humanity alone, if nothing had been set against him, then this Luciferic principle would have led to humanity falling out of the ongoing divine evolution, breaking out of it. Mankind would indeed have spiritualized itself, but in a completely different direction than that of the ongoing divine evolution. In order to preserve humanity within this divine evolution, in order not to let it be lost to divine evolution, a special arrangement had to be made so that man is constantly reminded of the consequences of abusing the possibility of error and freedom. Thus illness, infirmity and death are gifts of the good, wise divine powers, which have thus placed a dam in front of the influences of Lucifer. So we must say: Everything that confronts us in the world as continuing human evil coming from outside, as illness and death, is there so that we humans remain bound to earthly existence until we have the opportunity to make amends, so that we have an education to adapt to our organization. We suffer so that out of our suffering we can gain the experience to find the balance between our ego, which is permeated by Lucifer, and our divinely permeated organization. Our organization is often no longer ours until we have become completely imbued in our ego with the laws of evolution progressing in the divine sense. [15]

Death is not just a one-off phenomenon, for man actually begins to die when he is born. All the force impulses that lead to death are at the same time the forces that establish a balance with the Luciferic forces. For through death man is led out of the temporal into the realm of duration. Now we know that the Luciferic forces have their essence precisely in this, that they actually belong to the realm of duration and carry into the realm of temporality what they should do in the realm of duration. This would have no balance if death were not inserted into the realm of temporality, which in turn leads man out of the realm of temporality into the realm of duration. The Luciferian carries duration into time; death carries time out into duration. [16]

Sources:

[1] - [4] GA 121: The Mission of Individual Folk-Souls in Connection with Germanic-Nordic Mythology (1910)

[5], [6] GA 13: The Secret Science in Outline (1910)

[7] GA 11: From the Akashic Chronicle (1904/1908)

[8] GA 109: The Principle of Spiritual Economy in Connection with Questions of Re-embodiment. An Aspect of the Spiritual Guidance of Humanity (1909)

[9] GA 120: The Revelations of Karma (1910)

[10] GA 134: The World of the Senses and the World of the Spirit (1911/1912)

[11] GA 152: Preliminary Stages to the Mystery of Golgotha (1913/1914)

[12] GA 150: The World of the Spirit and its Entry into Physical Existence. The Influence of the Dead on the World of the Living (1913)

[13], [14] GA 116: The Christ Impulse and the Development of the I-Consciousness (1909/1910)

[15] GA 143: Experiences of the Supersensible. The Three Paths of the Soul to Christ. (1912)

[16] GA 184: The Polarity of Duration and Development in Human Life. The Cosmic Prehistory of Humanity (1918)

Luciferian East

In the East, in Asia and in European Russia, Lucifer rules through culture. The Luciferian principle is that good spirits remain behind. In the Greek Orthodox Church there was a good spirit until the 6th, 7th century, but what is a good spirit at one time turns into a Luciferian spirit if it is maintained beyond that time. Holding on to orthodox religion is "being in the clutches of Lucifer".

And this is even more intensely the case with the spiritual forms that develop in the Orient, which had their justification from time immemorial. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 159: The Mystery of Death. The Nature and Meaning of Central Europe and the European Folk Spirits (1915)

Luciferic existence - its nourishment

Just as the formative forces of the entire earth cosmos once separated the lunar forces from themselves, so the bird separates this lime shell (from the egg). Everything that is outside an eggshell belongs to the earth, in what is inside an eggshell we have everything that does not belong to the earth. What kind of world is it in which this being protected by the calcareous shell lives? This world is the one we have gone through through Saturn, sun and moon evolution and which has ceased, which is no longer there as earth evolution. The past is still present in the present.

What happens to everything that develops from (an) egg content without it becoming a mature chicken or mature bird or mature fish on earth? Those substances of being that are inside the egg shell in one way or another do not become ripe for earthly existence, but they are ripe in their powers for the pre-earthly existence, for the existence that we ourselves, the earthly beings, have gone through during the Saturn, sun and moon periods. And that is the Luciferic existence. They become substances from which the Luciferic existence continues to nourish itself. [1] .

Sources:

[1] GA 205: Becoming Human, World Soul and World Spirit - Part One:. Man as a bodily-soul entity in his relationship to the world (1921)

Luciferian thinking

The moment you generalize, the moment you standardize, you are already approaching Luciferian thinking. If you were to consider each individual human being, each individual animal, each individual plant, each individual stone on its own, if you were to focus your thinking only on the individual object, if you were not to form genera and species, if you were not to generalize, if you were not to unify your thinking, then you would, however, absorb little of Luciferian thinking. Goethe is one of those people who thought the least Luciferian, who in a certain respect set out to look the Luciferian powers boldly in the face. But this makes it necessary to stick as closely as possible to the concrete individual. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 191: Social Understanding from Spiritual Scientific Knowledge (1919)

Luciferic in the human being

In the blood, in that it is made alive, while it is destined by its own nature to death, that is, to mere chemical and physical processes, we carry the Luciferic within us. [1]

You can get a pretty good idea of how much Luciferian there is in a person by asking: Is the person interested in other people objectively, tolerantly, or is he really only interested in himself? Luciferic natures have little interest in their fellow human beings, are stubborn, obdurate, consider only what they themselves think, what they themselves feel to be right, are not open to the judgments of others. [2]

Sources:

[1] GA 169: World Being and I-ness (1916)

[2] GA 184: The Polarity of Duration and Development in Human Life. The Cosmic Prehistory of Humanity (1918)

Luciferic activity

Michael has pushed the Luciferian hosts down into the realm of humanity. They thus received the human head as their abode, but the human head in a dying character. Here they, these luciferic hosts, began to fight continuously against the death of the human head. If one considers his divine development, man bears in his head a dying development, a continual dying away. But this continual dying away is paralleled by a kindling of life on the part of Lucifer. Lucifer constantly wants to make our head as alive as the rest of our organism is alive. Thus, looking at the organic, Lucifer would make the development of mankind renegade from its divine direction if he succeeded in actually enlivening the human head in the same way as the rest of the human organism is enlivened. But the divine direction of human development must turn against this. For man must remain connected with the earth evolution so that he can continue with the following earth evolution through the Jupiter, Venus and Vulcan evolution. Man would not go this way, which is marked out for him, but he would be incorporated into a cosmos that would be intelligent through and through if Lucifer were to reach his goal.

I would like to say that, physiologically speaking, Lucifer is constantly active in us in such a way that he sends up the life forces that want to permeate the human head from the rest of our organism. Speaking in terms of the soul, Lucifer constantly wants to give a substantial content to our intellectual content, which only encompasses thoughts, encompasses images. Lucifer has a constant tendency, when we form an image in the spirit, to give it a real substantial content, that is, to permeate the content of our thoughts, the content of our imagination, with ordinary earthly reality. In this way he would achieve that we as human beings would leave the other reality and fly over into a reality of thought, which would then be a reality, not mere thoughts. This tendency is constantly connected with our human nature, that our fantasies should become realities, and the greatest conceivable efforts are made so that human fantasies can become realities. [1]

To see through the work of Lucifer in this respect, the pressing of vital forces into the dying forces of the human head, means in truth ultimately the diagnosis of all inner diseases. [2]

The appropriate field of action of the Luciferic beings is not the physical-sensual, but in a certain respect the elementary world. When that which rises within this world as images from its floods penetrates into the human soul, and these images have a vitalizing effect in the etheric body of man without assuming an illusory existence in the soul, then the Luciferic being can be present in these images without its actions violating the order of the world. This luciferic being then has a liberating effect on the human soul; it raises it above being merely interwoven with the world of the senses. But when the human soul draws into the physical-sensual world the life which it should only unfold in the elementary world, when it allows the feeling within the physical body to be influenced by antipathies and sympathies which should only prevail in the etheric body, then the Luciferic being gains an influence through this soul which rebels against the general world order. This influence is present wherever something else is at work in the sympathies and antipathies of the sense world than that love which is based on compassion for the life of another being present in the sense world. Love that has its reason not in this way in the loved being, but in the one who loves, tends towards the Luciferic influence. The human soul must love processes and beings of the supersensible worlds in the sense of the Luciferic element. The world order is only violated when the kind of love with which one should feel attracted to the supersensible is directed towards the sensual. Love for the supersensible rightly evokes a heightened sense of self in the lover; love that is sought in the world of the senses for the sake of such a heightened sense of self corresponds to a Luciferic enticement. Love of the spiritual, when it is sought for the sake of the self, has a liberating effect; love of the sensual, when it is sought for the sake of the self, does not have a liberating effect; rather, through the gratification it brings about, it creates fetters for the self. [3] Lucifer strives to use his will to make man act not out of reasoned, spiritualized impulses, but out of impulses that spring from mere temperament, mere inclinations. This is where Lucifer intervenes and makes us his prey. If we allow temperamental impulses and other dark inclinations to be present in us, which bring us into connection with groups of people, which are characterized by the fact that we feel that we belong to a group of people, then we immediately enter into a vortex in which our individual judgment of will is snatched away from us. [4]

One could say that the Luciferic beings are beings of wrath that animate man, but in order to prevent him from actually being happy on earth and always pull him away from the earth, in order to constantly pull him up into the superhuman, so to speak. They would like to have him much more as an angel who does not fall into the lower functions of the physical organism. These beings would like to strip the human being of everything animalistic, and they would not, for example, like to let him down again to physical embodiment in the (post-mortal) epoch of his existence; they would like to keep him up in the life that passes between death and new birth. [5] In the same way these Luciferic entities would like to keep art as lifeless as possible, spiritless in the sense that spirit does not enter into the form. They only ever want the Renaissance, that which lived in ancient times; these old stylistic forms are still borrowed from the unearthly, the supernatural. [6]

Sources:

[1], [2] GA 194: The Mission of Michael. The Revelation of the Real Secrets of the Human Being (1919)

[3] GA 17: The Threshold of the Spiritual World (1913)

[4] GA 254: The Occult Movement in the Nineteenth Century and its Relation to World Culture. Significant events from the outer spiritual life around the middle of the nineteenth century (1915)

[5], [6] GA 208: Anthroposophy as Cosmosophy - Part Two:. The Formation of the Human Being as the Result of Cosmic Effects (1921)

Lucifer religion

There you find, for example, a religion which is not able to rise up to the Christ, who is the sun-spirit, but which has the special disposition to rise up to that comprehensive soul which lived there in the spirit which was then often embodied as the Bodhisattva, and which thereby points especially to him who is now again the great initiator, the inspirer of the Buddha, and it is very understandable that the Buddha is called the planetary spirit. Such a religion, which pointed preferentially to this spirit, which now guides the Buddha's own development, could only take such a form as that of Vishnu in the Indian Trimurti (Trinity). And because such a religious form has not yet penetrated to the realization of the general victory of the Christ (as the Sun-Spirit of the Earth) over Lucifer, it cannot contrast the form of Lucifer with the Christ in the way that is possible in the present time (after the Mystery of Golgotha). Thus, in such a religion, Lucifer appears alongside Christ as a figure of equal value. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 137: Man in the Light of Occultism, Theosophy and Philosophy (1912)

Lucifer's incarnation in ancient China

Just as there was the incarnation of the Christ in the man Jesus of Nazareth, there was also a real incarnation of Lucifer in Asia in the 3rd millennium BC. And a large part of ancient culture was inspired by what can only be described as an earthly incarnation of Lucifer in a man who lived in flesh and blood. Even Christianity, the Mystery of Golgotha, when it took place among men, was first grasped in the way that men could grasp it through what they could obtain from the old Luciferian wisdom. The one-sidedness of the otherwise extraordinarily profound Gnosis also stems from the fact that this Lucifer incarnation passed through the old world. [1] Within the culture from which today's Chinese culture emerged. [2]

The incarnation of Lucifer was the origin of the widespread primordial wisdom lying at the foundation of the third post-Atlantean human culture. That which spread among mankind from this cultural impulse of the Asiatic-Luciferian man continued to have an effect right up to the time of the Greeks: Luciferian wisdom, as it was certainly useful to mankind in that epoch of development, brilliant in a certain way, graduated according to the various peoples and races among whom it spread, clearly recognizable throughout Asia, then still in the Egyptian culture, in the Babylonian culture, even still at the bottom of the Greek culture. Everything that people could think, write and want at that time was in a certain way conditioned by this Luciferian influence on human culture. Beautiful and great things emerged for mankind from this Luciferian current, and Greek beauty is also something that emerged from this current of development. [3]

But something very significant happened around the beginning of the 3rd millennium. At that time, the spiritual-spiritual being of human beings could not yet make use of the actual human intellectual organs. These intellectual organs were already there, they were developed in the physical being of men, but the soul-spiritual being could not make use of these intellectual organs. So that people were not yet able to gain any knowledge through their thinking, through their powers of judgment. They could only gain that which was given to them from the Mysteries. At the beginning of the 3rd millennium a significant event took place in the East of Asia. A child from one of the noble Asian families of that time grew up in the vicinity of the ceremonial services of the Mysteries, without being resisted. The circumstances were such that this child was allowed to take part in the ceremonies, probably because the leading mystery priests felt inspired to allow such a child to participate. And when the person who lived in this child had reached the age of about forty, something strange happened. It turned out - and it must be said that the Mystery priests foresaw the event prophetically, so to speak - that this person, who had been allowed to grow up in one of the East Asian Mysteries, suddenly began to grasp through human judgment the meaning of what had previously entered the Mysteries only through revelation, towards his fortieth year. He was, so to speak, the first to be allowed to make use of the organs of the human mind, but only on the basis of the Mysteries. If we translate what the priests of the Mysteries said about this matter into our language today, then we must say: In this human being was incarnated nothing more, nothing less than Lucifer himself. And from this carnal incarnation of Lucifer - for this personality then taught - proceeded that which is actually called the pre-Christian, pagan culture, that which still lived in the Gnosis of the first Christian centuries. Through this incarnation of Lucifer, man was given the ability to use the organs of his intellect, his power of judgment. It was Lucifer himself in a human body who first grasped through the power of judgment that which previously could only enter man through revelation: the meaning of the Mysteries. [4]

Sources:

[1] GA 191: Social Understanding from Spiritual Scientific Knowledge (1919)

[2] GA 195: World New Year's Eve and New Year's Thoughts (1919/1920)

[3], [4] GA 193: The Inner Aspect of the Social Enigma. Luciferic Past and Ahrimanic Future (1919)

Lucifer's aims with human development

It was Lucifer's intention to pass on wisdom to humanity in order to persuade them not to take the path of earthly development but to go through the path of development in a supernatural sphere, in a sphere removed from earth. The Luciferic beings inoculate man with their wisdom, but they want him to branch off from earth and not go through earthly development. Lucifer wants to abandon the earth to its fate, to leave it unpopulated by human beings; he wants to win humanity for a special kingdom that is alien to the kingdom of Christ. The wise men of ancient times, who received the primal wisdom from Lucifer's hands, therefore had to accept the obligation not to yield to Lucifer, but to receive his wisdom, but to use it in the service of earthly development. This is what was essentially accomplished through the Mysteries of pre-Christian times. And if you ask what mankind has actually received through these mysteries of pre-Christian times, through the influence of the Luciferic beings, who first, that is, still in the post-Atlantean period, inspired certain personalities, the Rishis of the Indians, and then themselves sent their messengers to earth, as I have indicated to you, it is all that mankind has acquired since its development in the ability to speak and the ability to think. For speaking and thinking are originally quite Luciferic in nature, except that these arts were, so to speak, taken from Lucifer by the wise men of primeval times. If you want to flee Lucifer, then you must decide to be mute in the future and not to think. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 191: Social Understanding from Spiritual Scientific Knowledge (1919)

20
Maya

Maya is the great non-being. For (the Sanskrit word) Maya is composed of mahat aya - mahat = great, ya = to be, a = not, thus aya the non-being - means the great non-being. On the path of occult development man comes to compare himself with something like the rainbow. The human being is only an illusion. And illusory formations are everything that approaches the physical senses. Even the sun as a physical world body is an illusory image. What physical science describes as a ball of gas in outer space is quite good for practical purposes. But he who takes it as reality gives himself over to maya, to illusion, to the great non-being. What is true is that there is a gathering place for spiritual hierarchies whose deeds are expressed in warmth and light, and which flow to us in warmth and light from the sun. What we perceive as warmth and light is illusion. But everything is appearance. Man believes he has a heart in his chest. But the heart is only an illusion, nothing more. It's like when we walk along the streets in the autumn fog in the evening and see certain rings around the lanterns; but these rings are also nothing real, they are caused by very specific forces. In the same way, the human heart is caused by very specific forces. You can imagine it in the following way.

Suppose the circle represents the vault of heaven; then one kind of force streams into us from one side, and other forces come in from the other side: these forces intersect. In truth, there is nothing in man where he believes his heart to be, but forces that flow in from heaven and intersect. Imagine everything else outside, and only forces that come together as it is with the rainbow: and the result is the human heart. It is the same with the other organs: they are intersecting forces that arise through the intersection of the relevant world forces.

If you go from one place to another, and you say: "There are impulses in me to go from here to there" - then you are saying something that belongs to Maya in this way. Why? Because forces come from the macrocosm that intersect down here and through the intersection create an illusion (also) with regard to the direction and the forces of walking. What has followed one another down here is (also) only an intersection of cosmic forces. And if we want to know what is true, we must ask: What is happening in the macrocosm? [1]

Modern man, in his delusion of consciousness, believes that his soul is bound to his body; ancient man (in antiquity) believed that the entities of the third hierarchy were bound to the external nature which he perceived with his senses. At that time he mixed divine beings, the beings of the third hierarchy, with natural phenomena, and he saw them expressed through natural phenomena. He had no natural science, as we do today, but regarded the natural phenomena as being caused by this or that demon, more or less spiritual-divine entities, over which he indulged in a life illusion. Today's man transposes his soul into flesh and blood, the ancient man the entities of the third hierarchy into external nature. [2] Before the Mystery of Golgotha, what can be called human illusion was illusion of life; after the Mystery of Golgotha it is illusion of consciousness. The gods of the old mythologies are all demons. This was based on the fact that the illusion of life was there, that man had to think of a kind of false order of nature as a divine order, just as he has to think of a false order of the body as an order of humanity today. [3]

It is not the world as such, which affects our senses, which we grasp with our intellect, that is maya; this world is true reality in its innermost essence. But the way man looks at it, the way it appears to man, that is what makes the world maya, that is what makes it a great deception. And when, through our inner soul work, we come to find the actual deeper foundations of what our senses show us, of what our intellect tells us, then we will soon realize to what extent the outer world can be seen as an illusion. For then it will appear to us in its true light, it will appear to us in truth, if we know how to supplement it everywhere, to penetrate it with what must be hidden from the first contemplation we turn to the world. [4]

Being together with people (growing up) is the reason why we naively do not perceive the spiritual world that is behind plants and minerals. People place themselves in front of this world. Think about it: at the price of not perceiving the hierarchical world of the gods, we conquer that which becomes us through our coexistence with other people on the physical earth. [5] The old gods have disappeared behind the surface of external sensory things. The world has become empty of the gods, and because it appears as a world empty of gods, it is Maya, it is a great illusion. It was not from the beginning that the world was said to be this great illusion, but because the world has become empty of gods. [6]

So we have spiritual entities, so to speak, which are behind the red and blue, behind the sound, behind the outer smell and so on, which live outside in the world, which surround us, and which are veiled as if by a veil by what we see and hear and comprehend through the mind. But we also have such entities that lie behind what we call the life of the soul and mind. So the question is justified: how do these two spiritual realms relate to each other? [7]

Where does the ability come from that we perceive something external, that we look or see something, that man is stimulated to look? From what is physically or spiritually present in the sun. But ask: Where do the reasons for inner experience, the reasons for thinking, the reasons for feeling, the reasons for conscience, for example, and so on, come from? Then you must look up gratefully to the moon and say to yourself: Thanks to the beings who have taken away its substances from the earth's substance. The substances of the moon in the earth would have prevented the inner activity of the life of the soul. [8]

The entities behind our mental phenomena belong to a realm that is superior to the spiritual realm, which is behind the outer Maya. We have a twofold maya: the outer maya of the world of the senses and the inner maya of the life of the soul. Behind the first maya are those spiritual entities that have their center in the sun; behind the maya of our inner life are the others that belong to a more powerful, a more comprehensive realm. [9]

If the development of mankind had gone on until the middle of the Atlantean period without the influence of Lucifer, man would by then have developed a highly clairvoyant consciousness of images. There would have been something in his soul which, through his power, would have revealed the outer world to him in inner pictures; he would not have perceived the outer objects through his eyes. Through the Luciferic influence, man saw the physical world earlier, but not correctly; he saw the outer world as if through a veil. The divine-spiritual beings had intended for him to develop in such a way that instead of the inner world perceived in the image of the dull clairvoyant consciousness, the outer world would have been perceived, but in such a way that behind every sensuality there is a spiritual being. He would have seen the real spirit behind the physical world. Thus, without Lucifer, the outer world would have appeared to man at a certain time; he would have awakened. The inner world would have suddenly disappeared, but the consciousness of the spirit from which it originated would have remained. Because the Luciferic beings pulled man down to earth too early, the outer world has become such to man that the world of the spirit behind it is covered to him, and he sees the physical opaquely, otherwise he would see the spiritual source of the world through the outer world. Because man descended into matter too early, this matter became too dense for him. He could no longer penetrate it. But from the middle of the Atlantean period onwards, other spiritual entities that had remained behind were able to mingle with this matter, so that it became clouded, as if permeated by smoke, and man could no longer see the spiritual. Ahriman is the spirit that spreads matter like a veil over the spiritual and makes it impossible to recognize the spiritual world. And these two spirits (i.e. Lucifer and Ahriman) hold man back in his development towards spirituality. [10] Within man, Lucifer leads to illusion and Ahriman interferes with external perceptions and leads to Maya. [11]

The sight of a stone colossus on which there are oceans of water and which is surrounded by air is not the earth, and what surrounds us as the Milky Way and the suns is not the universe. The universe is made up of ahrimanic beings below and luciferic beings above, which appear through the outer semblance of the senses, and beings of the normal hierarchies, to which man rises when he comes to the truth through both semblances; for the actual beings do not appear in the outer semblance of the senses, they only reveal themselves through this outer semblance. If I am able to interpret to myself what appears to me on earth below as the emanation of spiritual entities, then I perceive that which lives in cherubs, seraphim and thrones. But if I am not able to spiritually imagine that which lives on earth, if I give myself over to the illusion of that which appears to me sensually from the earth, then I remain a geologist, then my being is verahrimanized. And if I look up to the starry worlds and only form ideas about that which I see sensually, then I am luciferizing. If I am able to interpret the spiritual through what appears to me in outer appearances, if I am able to say to myself: Yes, stars appear to me, a milky way appears to me, suns appear to me, they announce to me kyriotetes, dynamis, exusiai, then I find the equilibrium. It is not a question of our speaking of cosmic entities as something better than the earthly entities are, but of our penetrating everywhere through the appearance of the senses to the true beingness with which we as human beings are actually connected. Appearance as such does not deceive us. If we interpret the sensory appearance in the right way, then the spiritual entities are there, then we have them. Sense as such is not deceptive, only our view of sense can be deceptive - through our too strong relationship with the earthly between birth and death on the one hand, through our too strong relationship on the other hand with the extraterrestrial as we pass through it between death and a new birth. [12]

The external world of the senses appears in Maya, for people do not see that wherever they are aroused to pleasure by external things and entities, Ahriman peeps out and evokes pleasure in the soul. Thus, when one has undergone a certain development in one's astral body and self, Ahriman accompanies one at every turn. When one begins to see him, then one can protect oneself from him, then one sees that he emerges from the temptations of pleasure and from the impressions of fear. Because of man's immaturity, this Ahriman had to be concealed, that is, a veil was spread over his being - the outside world was immersed in Maya, by making him believe that instead of Ahriman, who peeps out everywhere, there is matter outside in the world. Wherever man dreams of matter, there is in truth Ahriman. [13]

(Also) this is part of maya, the illusion that things are passing; in reality they are permanent, in reality they exist. And already, if one understands existence correctly, one finds the permanent behind the actually past. [14] (See: Region of Duration). It is always a huge misunderstanding to reinterpret mere mysticism as esotericism. The esoteric is always a recognition of facts that take place in the spiritual world as such, which stand behind the veil of the sensual. And behind the veil of sensuality is the reconciliation between the world of the gods and the ahrimanic world, as it takes place through the death of Christ Jesus on the cross. [15]

Sources:

[1] GA 124: Excursions into the Gospel of Mark (1910/1911)

[2], [3] GA 184: The Polarity of Duration and Development in Human Life. The Cosmic Prehistory of Humanity (1918)

[4] GA 161: Paths of Spiritual Knowledge and the Renewal of the Artistic World View (1915)

[5] GA 186: The Basic Social Requirement of Our Time - In a Changed Time Situation (1918)

[6] GA 209: Nordic and Central European Spiritual Impulses. The Feast of the Apparition of Christ (1921)

[7] - [9] GA 113: The Orient in the Light of the Occident. The Children of Lucifer and the Brothers of Christ (1909))

[10] GA 109: The Principle of Spiritual Economy in Connection with Reembodiment Questions. An Aspect of the Spiritual Guidance of Humanity (1909)

[11] GA 110: Spiritual Hierarchies and their Reflection in the Physical World. Zodiac, Planets, Cosmos (1909)

[12] GA 203: Man's Responsibility for World Development through his Spiritual Connection with the Earth Planet and the Star World (1921)

[13] GA 145: What significance does the occult development of man have for his sheaths (physical body, etheric body, astral body) and his self? (1913)

[14] GA 162: Questions of Art and Life in the Light of Spiritual Science (1915)

[15] GA 211: The Solar Mystery and the Mystery of Death and Resurrection. Exoteric and Esoteric Christianity (1922)

Maya - Differentiated Appearance

In many respects, in order to enter the spiritual world, we must acquire the ability to come to other conceptions and other ideas than those which must fill us in order to understand the world we experience between birth and death. Much more, we have to rise up to break through the Maya not only in such a way that we find this Maya everywhere and believe that if we get through somewhere, then we are already in the spiritual world. In different parts of life the maya is differently dense. When we come face to face with different areas of life, we find that maya is of different densities; it is woven from different materials. Even though it is maya, it is woven from different fabrics in different parts of life. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 161: Paths of Spiritual Knowledge and the Renewal of Artistic World View (1915)

Maya - Brain and senses

The brain is the most insignificant thing for the spiritual world. Therefore you have to switch off the brain again if you only want to enter the first world, which borders on ours. The brain must be switched off. It is a terribly disturbing organ for the higher view. And now, with the brain switched off, one must again live in the senses, but now have pressed into the senses the awakened spiritual; then one gets the imagination. Otherwise the senses perceive sensory images in the outer physical world and the brain converts them into abstract thoughts, into these dead, abstract thoughts. If you switch off the brain, you live again in the senses, then you perceive everything again in imaginations. Then we also know that immersion in deeper states of life is connected with the development of higher spiritual states of consciousness than we have in ordinary life. Our senses, which are on our surface, see this elementary world (and) they also see the dead in it, years after they have died. The fact that all this is extinguished stems from the fact that behind the senses is the brain. My brain erases everything, erases earth, water, fire, air; and I look at what is there in sharp contours as the physical world, which is only there for the world I live through between birth and death. There is a world of a completely different kind, I erase it through my brain and look at this world, which is known to man as the world of ordinary consciousness. Thus the transfer to the next state of consciousness consists first of all in switching off the consciousness of the brain and immersing the spirit in the consciousness that our eyes and ears have. Animals also have this, for they have not physically developed the brain behind the senses. But they do not have the I-gifted soul within them, so that they cannot immerse themselves in their senses with the spirit. They immerse themselves only with the gross soul and therefore do not see that which man, when he immerses his spirit in his senses, can see in his surroundings. But animals see in the same way; animals see low, not individually high. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 243: The Initiate-Consciousness. The true and the false paths of spiritual research (1924)

Maya - state of equilibrium of currents

For when you speak of reality, you cannot speak of that which you have before you, for that which you have before you is a confluence of currents working through the world, and is only the state of equilibrium. And everywhere you look, you see only states of equilibrium. You must first penetrate the realities. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 184: The Polarity of Duration and Development in Human Life. The Cosmic Prehistory of Humanity (1918)

Maya - longing of the embodied for non-being

As man develops between death and a new birth, he passes through an absolute saturation with the feeling of being. Towards the end of the time between death and a new birth, I would like to say, a true over-saturation with the feeling of being occurs; a true hunger for non-being arises in the being of man. Because man is hungry for non-being, he plunges into maya in this state. This is the strongest impulse that lives in the spiritually soulful human being when he approaches earthly existence: this longing to live in the soft, penetrating phenomenon, not in the saturated intense being. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 205: Becoming Human, World Soul and World Spirit - Part One:. Man as a bodily-soul entity in his relationship to the world (1921)

Maya of the sensory world is fourfold

First, an outer Maya is the sense world itself, for it is that which drives forth from itself the etheric body of the earth, the substance of the spirits of nature. A second Maya is that which appears to man from the spirits of nature in the forces of nature; a third Maya is that which appears as the laws of nature from the spirits of the orbital periods, and a fourth Maya is something which, despite its Maya nature, speaks to the soul of man, because in the perception of the sense of nature man at least feels connected with the spirit of the whole planet, which guides the planet through the world space and gives meaning to the whole planet. In this Maya lies the direct imprint of the planetary spirit itself. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 136: The Spiritual Beings in the Celestial Bodies and Kingdoms of Nature (1912)

Maya and Ahriman and Lucifer

As soon as we are in day consciousness, Ahriman ensures that the spiritual world is covered up for us. He paints the picture of the world of the senses, and by giving ourselves over to her, the great deceiver, Maya, the souls, the entities that work on the spiritual organization of man, become invisible to our gaze. That which we recognize as the physical body is all the product of Ahriman; on the other hand, we must recognize the work of Lucifer in what we experience as soul life merely in the physical body. He fills our soul with pride and delusion in such a way that it acquires false ideas and feelings about the spiritual world. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 266/3: From the Contents of the Esoteric Lessons. Volume III (1913-1923)

Maya and the astral body

Formerly, man did not have sense perception, but through the physical, behind which the spirit stands, the emanation of the gods passed through into the astral body of man, and he saw an image rise up; it was an inner experience, he felt there: this and this is what the gods want in me. Now the astral body of man is so strengthened that, since the I has entered, man can now say: I want. - He closes himself off from the influence of the gods. The price of sense perception is the turning away from the influence of the gods. We have our sense perception because our astral body has become so strong that it closes itself off from the influence of the gods. We kill these at the periphery of our astral body, and thus, through the inhibition of the current, color and sound arise. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 266/1: From the contents of the esoteric lessons. Volume I (1904-1909)

Maya and aura

People live in their eggshell - their aura. The Elohim have given us our aura, and through the Fall it has become like a shell around us, and we are inside it like the chicken in the egg. The sky and the stars are our limitation, and we must break through them with our soul power, just as the chick must break through the shell by its own power. Then we enter a new world, just as the chick has a new world before it when it crawls out of the egg. And since people actually all have the same eggshell around them, astronomy could also arise, as we have it, which allows the heavenly bodies to move in the celestial vault. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 266/3: From the Contents of the Esoteric Lessons. Volume III (1913, 1914; 1920 - 1923) (1913-1923)

Maya and memory

Imagine looking at the world from the other side: the sensual things spread out like a carpet, and now look at the carpet from the other side. You only see a small piece, a very, very small piece of this other side. (The other piece) contains, firstly, everything that can be experienced between death and a new birth, secondly, everything that is described as the evolution of Saturn, the sun, the moon, the earth and so on. That which is hidden from the sensory perception is stored up there. It is there on the other side of the sphere (from the center of which we perceive). But you can see a small piece of it. And this small piece, which intersects with the other, is what you constantly see in your ordinary consciousness. These are your stored memories. Everything that arises as a memory does not arise according to the laws of this outer world of perception, but arises according to the laws that correspond to this world behind. And if you could now slip through your memories as they are written down and look at them from the other side, you would see the memories as your aura. You would see the person as a spiritual-soul auric being, just as you normally see the outer world in the senses in your perceptions. But it would not be very pleasant because the human being is not yet beautiful from this other side. This intersection lies in the middle man, in the breast man. So that this tripartite human being here in his middle part has this reversal of the human being, where the inner becomes outer and the outer becomes inner, where you now see a tableau, which you would otherwise see as a world tableau, as the great world memory, as your own small microcosmic memory. You see in your ordinary consciousness that which has taken place from your third year until now: this is an inner record, a small piece for that which is similar to that which is otherwise a record for the whole world evolution, which lies on the other side. [1]

We must think of the 12 senses that man has in such a way that a number of them are directed towards the senses, but another number of these 12 senses are directed backwards. They are directed towards the external senses: Sense of self, sense of thinking, sense of speech, sense of hearing, sense of sight, sense of taste, sense of smell. The other senses do not actually come to man's consciousness because they are first directed towards his own inner being and then towards the reverse of the world. These are preferably: Sense of warmth, sense of life, sense of balance, sense of movement, sense of touch. [2]

Sources:

[1] & [2] GA 183: The Science of the Becoming of Man (1918)

Maya and knowledge

All the processes in the natural realms around us, everything that takes place in the air and water, is nothing other than processes in the spiritual world that reveal themselves through what happens in the physical. The spiritual processes are the true reality, the reality. Everything in the physical world has only the value of a parable for that which stands behind it, the spiritual world. [1]

The physical world exists because the spirits of the higher hierarchies intertwine their thoughts. Their bodies also appear as shadow-formations, because the thoughts of the spirits of form, Exusiai, penetrate into the thoughts of the spirits of wisdom, Kyriotetes, the thoughts of form enter into the thoughts of matter. The whole world dissolves into the spiritual before this contemplation. [2] Not as if these external phenomena were themselves maya or delusion, which an orientalizing view of the world could easily bring to the souls as misunderstanding, but it is so that our senses and our intellect err in the interpretation, in the comprehension of external events, if we do not illuminate these external events with the light that comes to us through the knowledge of the spiritual world. [3]

But after we have been able to obtain enlightenment about Lucifer and Ahriman, we can gain a different relationship to these powers, we can reap the fruits of what has been done, we can, so to speak, relieve Lucifer and Ahriman of their work. If we take away more and more of the darkness that we weave into outer matter as it fades away, and we come to completely overcome the Ahrimanic influence in this way, then we will be able to recognize the world as it really is as an earth world. Then we will gradually approach such knowledge as can only be the property of spiritual science today: We will penetrate to what matter really is, to the nature of light. With physical eyes one does not see light, but only illuminated bodies. We do not see light, we see through light. All such illusions will be cleared away. This will transform the image of the world which, under the influence of Ahriman, was necessarily interwoven with error, and it will become imbued with the content of wisdom. By penetrating to the light, man himself will develop the spiritual counter-image of the light. And the spiritual counter-image of light is wisdom. [4]

We open our senses, our cognitive faculty towards an immensity. By having such eyes, such ears, such a sense of warmth and so on, we place a certain section of reality in front of us; we reject the other, defend ourselves against it, as it were, exclude it from us. So what does our conscious activity consist of? It consists in defending ourselves, in excluding something else. And by straining our sensory organs, we are holding back something that is not perceived. What we perceive is the rest that remains of what spreads around us and which we largely reject. In this way, we actively place ourselves in the world and feel connected to it. Through our sensory activity we defend ourselves, as it were, against the multitude of impressions by - metaphorically speaking - not being able to bear the whole immeasurable infinity and only taking in a section of it. If we think in this way, we must think of quite different relationships between our whole organism, between our whole corporeality and between the outside world than those which we can perceive or comprehend with our intellect. Then it is no longer so far-fetched for us to think that these relationships we have with the outer world live within us, that the invisible, the supersensible or the extrasensible is also active within us, that it uses the senses to fabricate a section of the entire immeasurable of reality. But then our relationship to reality is quite different from what we can perceive through our senses. Then there is something in our soul in relation to the outside world which is not exhausted by sensory perception, which eludes the waking consciousness of the day. [5]

By perceiving through the senses, the human soul creates what it must first call its world. It really creates it. It creates it for the reason that the human soul, that which is the human soul, is not connected with the human being in such a way that one can say: the immortal soul lives inside the human body, just as any human being lives in his apartment and looks at the outside world through the window. The connection of the human soul with the human body must be imagined quite differently. It must be imagined in such a way that the body itself, so to speak, holds the soul within itself through a process of cognition. In the same sense that colors and light and sounds are outside us, in the same sense the human soul itself is outside the body, and in the same sense that reality brings us colors and sounds through the senses, in the same sense the contents of the soul live, as it were, on the wings of sensory perceptions. The soul must not be imagined as a finer bodily being that dwells in the outer, coarser body, but as a being that is itself so connected with the body that the body performs the same activity that we otherwise perform in cognition in holding the soul. Only when we understand how, in a certain sense, what we call our ego, what we call the carrier of our self-consciousness, is outside the body in the same sense as sound or color, then we understand the relationship of the human soul to the human body. By pronouncing "I", the human being, as a body-man, perceives this "I" from the same side of reality from which he perceives colors and sounds. And the essence of the body consists in being able to perceive this very "I", that is, the soul's own essence. [6] By meditating, one enters into the outside world itself. In other words, you make your experience free of the body. This bodily freedom of experience must be experienced inwardly, must be experienced. [7]

Our ordinary perception of the sensory world, as it initially exists for our cognitive faculty, this sensory world is Maya or illusion. (But) also, so to speak, the lower regions of clairvoyance, all that which we call the etheric and astral world, belongs in a higher sense to this region of illusion, this too is something that cannot remain hidden to anyone who has occupied himself for any length of time with spiritual-scientific views. We only come across the true reason for existence, as far as it is accessible to us, when we penetrate beyond these areas to the deeper sources of existence. We must always keep this in mind. And we must not stop at telling ourselves this merely theoretically, but the feeling must become flesh and blood, so to speak, that we are indulging in illusions if we remain attached to external existence. [8]

In the world of true existence, in this world of the real, lives that which we can basically only compare in terms of its characteristics with characteristics that we initially perceive in our own soul. Does everything that we have within the world of Maya or the great illusion really evaporate into a kind of nothingness? Is there really nothing in this world of the senses that surrounds us and in the world of our outer perception that presents itself, so to speak, as the true or as something true? Is there not also something in the vast realm of our maya or illusion that is "real"? [9]

A healthy path to knowledge always finds its starting point in wonder, in astonishment about something. True, healthy knowledge is framed by amazement and bliss over the solved riddle. All other knowledge can be acquired from outside, can be brought in by a person for this or that reason. But knowledge that is not framed by these two emotions has not really arisen in earnest from the human soul. But what is the origin of wonder itself? Amazement, wonder, arises for the reason that we initially feel strange towards some being or thing or fact that appears before us. But we do not feel astonishment, wonder, towards all strangers, but only towards such a stranger with whom we feel related in a certain way, so related that we say to ourselves: There is something in the thing or being that is not yet in me, but which can pass over into me. [10]

Think of the idea that entities must keep something within themselves which they would like to offer as a sacrifice, and of which they have the feeling and the sensation that it would only then find its right meaning when it could be offered as a sacrifice (compare also: Evil - Origin and Strife in Heaven). If you visualize the sensations of such entities, you will have what can be called: Seclusion of a certain part of the world entity from its actual great world purpose. It is something on which the character of the strangeness of its own origin is imprinted. But this is, if one paints this idea emotionally before the soul, something that has the strangeness of its origin inherent in it, that is death. And death in the universe is nothing other than that which necessarily occurs with the rejected sacrificial substance in the beings who must retain this very sacrificial substance. And death in its true meaning is nothing other than the qualities of the contents of beings that are not in their true place, that are excluded from their true place. Even when death occurs in the concrete life of man, the same thing underlies it. For when we look at a corpse that remains in the world of Maya, it contains nothing other than a substantiality that is excluded from the ego, astral body and etheric body at the moment of death, that is alienated from that within which it has only one actual sense. With this, however, we have entered into a spiritual characteristic of that which we call the fourth element in the universe. If fire was for us the purest sense of sacrifice - and wherever fire or warmth confronts us, there is spiritual sacrifice behind it - if we found behind everything that is spread out as air around our earth, giving or donating virtue, flowing virtue in truth, if we could characterize the flowing water, thus liquid as an element, as spiritual resignation or renunciation, we must characterize the element of earth, which alone can become the bearer of death - for death would not be there if the element of earth were not there - as that which has been split off from its meaning through renunciation. Let us imagine that ice is incorporated into the mass of water in a pond, so that the water becomes solid. In truth, there is nothing more to it than that which turns the water into ice cuts it off from the meaning of water. There you have the spiritual aspect of becoming solid, the spiritual aspect of becoming earth. A cutting off from its meaning is what we can call death, and that in which death presents itself, lives itself out, is the element of earth. Let us now take this concept of death, or that of the earthy; it shows us a very strange face. Whereas with all other concepts we could say to ourselves: With regard to what is around us in the world of Maya, there is actually nothing truthful at all, but what is truthful is a spiritual underlying it - we have now discovered something where what we have within Maya is actually characterized as the dead precisely because it is separated from its meaning, because it should be in the spiritual. Something is thus cut off in Maya that should not actually be in Maya. [11]

Within the world of Maya, the only thing that shows itself in its reality is death! Only death is the true within Maya, for it consists in the fact that something is cut off from the true and taken into Maya. [12]

Go through the whole order of nature: at first, as it appears to the senses, it is a maya, a mirror, a reflected thing. Reality lies below the boundary that lies between the imaginative life and the emotional life. Even your own reality is not even contained in what the waking consciousness contains. But this own reality is contained in the spiritual reality into which the dreaming and sleeping emotional and volitional power dives. [13] Our freedom is based on the fact that our world of perception is Maya. Our being marries with Maya and is thus a free being. If the world we perceive were reality, then this reality would compel us, then we would not be free beings. We are free beings precisely because the world we perceive is not a reality and therefore cannot compel us. Therein lies the secret of the free human being, that one recognizes the connection between the world of perception as a Maya, the mere reflection of a reality, and the impulse of the human being through himself. Man must impulse himself if he is not determined by that under whose impression he acts. The secret of our freedom is intimately connected with the taming of our centaur nature (see: centaur). Our centaur nature behaves towards us in such a way that it is chained, shackled, so that we do not perceive the reality of the centaur, but a mere Maya. When we impulse ourselves through maya, we are free. [14]

We owe our progress in consciousness to this illusion. If all things, even if they only appeared to the eye, appeared in their true weight, if I always felt the weight of all the objects I looked at by looking around with my eye, I could not develop a consciousness of the outside world. We owe our consciousness to illusion. Deception lies at the bottom of the things that make up our consciousness. We must be deceived in order to progress, in order to advance consciousness, for consciousness is a child of deception. Only at first deception must not penetrate the human being, otherwise he will be misled. Deception remains beyond the threshold of consciousness. The guardian of the threshold prevents us from seeing at every step that the environment is deceiving us. We struggle upwards by not letting the world show us its weight and thereby allowing us to rise above it, to be conscious. Consciousness depends on many other things, but it depends above all on the fact that the world that surrounds us is permeated with deception. [15]

But as necessary as it is for delusion to prevail for a certain time in order to generate consciousness, it is also necessary that, when consciousness is generated, one also transcends delusion. [16]

If we could penetrate that which has been stored up as memory, if we could really create out of ourselves all that we have experienced since the time of our childhood, up to which we remember back, we would penetrate something like a skin of life. But behind this skin of life is the spiritual world. There it is, right behind it! And by beginning in earliest childhood to build up a picture of his own life, to retain from all experiences that which constitutes the content of his memory, he spins a veil throughout his life, and this veil covers the spiritual world. We could not be in the physical world if we did not spin this web, for we are, in so far as we remember, this web ourselves. But we come into being as human beings in the physical world only by forming ourselves out of the veil which we hold up before the spiritual world at the same time. If we did not float the curtain spiritually in front of us, we would not even be there in the physical world. We immediately penetrate all illusion by taking ourselves for a curtain and not for a reality, the moment we say to ourselves: You are actually only that which stands before the true world, and your own form, that which you yourself are, stands behind the form which you yourself weave throughout life. If you keep this fact in mind, you are standing in the truth. [17] (See also: Memory Mirror).

Sources:

[1] GA 143: Experiences of the Supersensible. The Three Paths of the Soul to Christ. (1912)

[2] GA 183: The Science of the Becoming of Man (1918)

[3] GA 157: Human Fates and the Fates of Nations (1914/1915)

[4] GA 120: The Revelations of Karma (1910)

[5] GA 60: Answers of Spiritual Science to the Great Questions of Existence (1910/1911)

[6], [7] GA 65: From the Central European Spiritual Life (1915/1916)

[8] GA 122: The Secrets of the Biblical Story of Creation. The Six-Day Work in the 1st Book of Moses (1910)

[9] - [12] GA 132: Evolution from the Point of View of the Truthful (1911)

[13], [14] GA 179: Historical Necessity and Freedom. Influences of Fate from the World of the Dead (1917)

[15], [16] GA 177: The Spiritual Backgrounds of the Outer World. The Fall of the Spirits of Darkness (1917)

[17] GA 162: Questions of Art and Life in the Light of Spiritual Science (1915)

Maya and esotericism

The most fundamental principle of spiritual wisdom is that often the outer events contradict the inner truth of the processes in an almost paradoxical way. (Therefore) it does not matter at all whether here or there in the world the outer events contradict the inner truth of the processes; what matters is that one also recognizes which are the inner processes, the actual spiritual realities. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 185: Historical Symptomatology (1918)

Maya and hierarchies

This physical world is only apparently what it appears to be. For this physical world would not offer us the variety of its nuances of color, its nuances of warmth and all that flows in upon man from all sides of the world environment, if we were to think only of the physical content of all that the world appears to us in this present age and thereby overlook the fact that that which appears to us physically is actually spiritual. Thus I would like to give you such parts of the inner soul language of an initiate which he does not always use exoterically outwardly, but which is actually his means of forming his ideas, his particular co-experience of the spiritual world inwardly. There is this, for example: Dampen the lightning and you will understand the color. - That is initiate language. What does that mean?

The initiate sees the lightning in its appearance, he sees this flaring up coming out of the universe, he regards it as the glowing up of the spirit within the world space, and he thinks of this lightning as dimmed and ever more dimmed, thus ever milder and milder, and receives the dimming, the mild shaping of the colored; the lightning spreads, as it were, and becomes a colored surface. This is the idea of an initiate. Behind this carpet the initiate sees the incident lightning. They are behind it, and that which one sees from time to time as real lightning simply breaks through this sensory carpet from behind from the spiritual world. In every appearance of lightning there is a radiance of the spiritual world. And if we look at this lightning, how it is softened and muted to the uniformly colored lightning on earth, we have the earth in its coloring before us. [1]

If we look up to the sky and the stars, we see points in the stars which also appear to us as coming out of the spiritual, only in a constantly living revelation of the lightning. But in all this the initiate sees the outer revelation of that which is behind it, and he says to himself: Actually you must see - and he also sees it when his soul becomes more and more active - the red rose. It begins to spray its red upwards and downwards as if in soft flashes, and while the front dulls, the red reaches backwards into the sphere of the seraphim, just as everything tonal reaches into the sphere of the cherubim, and just as everything we touch reaches into the sphere of the thrones. And when you see nature around you, you actually have everything in the physical world before you as an illusion, because in truth it is the muted works of the seraphim, cherubim and thrones. If we look into the colored world as it appears, it is only the evenly tinted lightning effect of the seraphim. This is actually what in ancient times was called the Maya character of the sensual-physical world, that one does not know that in reality there are seraphim, cherubim and thrones everywhere. [2]

Sources:

[1] & [2] GA 346: Lectures and Courses on Christian Religious Work, V. Apocalypse and Priestly Work (1924)

Maya and ideology

But if one were to translate Maya according to its meaning, one would have to translate it as ideology, and if one wanted to translate into the language of the ancient world view of the Orient that which the modern proletarian means by ideology, then one would have to translate it as Maya, except that the application is the opposite. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 297a: Education for Life. Self-education and pedagogical practice (1921-1924)

Maya and natural kingdoms

For the lower kingdoms of nature - the mineral and plant kingdoms, up to the cold-blooded animals (of the animal kingdom) - the world of Maya does not exist. It only exists for the warm-blooded animals. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 266/2: From the Contents of the Esoteric Lessons. Volume II (1910-1912)

Maya and space and time

Spirits of duration, who masquerade as spirits of time, are the Luciferic forces; actually beings of a very high nature. These luciferic forces (see: Lucifer) have within themselves the ability to translate into time, so to speak, that which would otherwise appear purely spiritually permanent to our human perception, to give it the appearance of temporal progression. And through this appearance of the temporal course of certain phenomena in ourselves comes solely the assertion of man that his spiritual activity is connected with material processes. This illusion that the spiritual could originate from the material is essentially a Luciferic illusion. 184.211f

If it were not for the Ahrimanic illusion, which arises from forces that enter the three-dimensional from the spaceless, man would see through how the forces that are anchored in the material can never gain influence on his being. The assertion that forces are anchored in the material, that energies are anchored which can continue to work in man, this assertion is a purely Ahrimanian one, and he who makes it declares Ahriman to be his god, even if he does not say so. Nevertheless, man hovers between these two illusions. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 184: The Polarity of Duration and Development in Human Life. The Cosmic Prehistory of Humanity (1918)

Maya and the seventh day of creation

At the end of the sixth day of creation it says: "And God rested on the seventh day." God had been active in the development of Saturn, the sun and the moon; he rested on the seventh day after the world was created; then God was no longer to be found until the horizon of our earthly development. He was invisible then; and that has a deep meaning. The true divine lies hidden behind the visible creation - that is the great truth that we as esoterics must seek behind the illusion. And since the world is illusion, it gives us the very opportunity to develop our ego through all false appearances. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 266/2: From the Contents of the Esoteric Lessons. Volume II (1910-1912)

Maya and perceptions

It is precisely through what we perceive that an outer spiritual world reveals itself to us, and the most we can feel is that in color and light, in sounds, in warmth and cold, and so on, we have outer revelations of an underlying world. But in a given moment we cannot perceive through the colors, through the lights, through the sounds, experience through them that which is behind them. We must perceive the entire spiritual outer world precisely through these revelations. This outer sensory world spreads out like a carpet, and we then have the sensation that behind this carpet of the outer sensory world there is something into which we cannot at first penetrate with our outer perception. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 119: Macrocosm and Microcosm. The big and the small world. Questions of the Soul, Questions of Life, Questions of the Spirit (1910)

Maya and the word of man

But there is one thing in man that is not a mere semblance of sense, that is not maya. This is the word that sounds out of man, the living word, the logos. The Word does not come to us from outside, it is something living within us, it is our very essence. It flows out of our soul life, it is we ourselves with all our feelings who let the word flow outwards through our lips. And if we think deeply about how the Word is the Logos, how everything that is spoken in the world is spoken from this source, then we will deeply feel our responsibility towards the Word. - Only that which people have spoken in their words will survive the earth and pass into the next planetary state. What we hear from the left comes, as I said, from the right, but the sound we utter is the only thing that is not different from what it seems to be. It sounds from within us, and it really does come from within us. Out of it the divine beings, the Logos, speak to us. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 266/2: From the Contents of the Esoteric Lessons. Volume II (1910-1912)

21
Memory

Corporeality would allow all impressions to sink back again and again into nothingness if something did not take place in the relationship between the external world and the soul at the same time as the present conception is formed through the act of perception, which has such a consequence in man that he can later, through processes within himself, again have a conception of that which previously acted from outside. The idea evoked by the memory is a new one and not the preserved old one. Memory consists in being able to imagine again, not in being able to revive an idea. The soul impresses the process by which something becomes memory upon the body as by a sign; but the soul must make this impression and then perceive its own impression, just as it perceives something external. [1]

The spirit undertakes a transformation with the treasures of memory. It leaves what can lead to images of individual experiences to its fate and takes from it only the power to increase its abilities. [2] We must seek the memory and everything that we carry within us, but which we do not always really have present in our consciousness, but must bring up from the hidden depths of the soul life, in the sense of spiritual science in an etheric body underlying our physical body. [3] Memory can only develop under the influence of our earthly life, and it is one of the tasks of our earthly life that we develop our memory. Memory can only develop when the earth organism with its forces from the mineral kingdom has been incorporated into our being. In the spiritual world we only need memory in the way we now develop it in our physical life on earth from the time we are on earth. It was not needed until the time on earth for the reason that, for example, in the power of that dreamlike clairvoyance which was peculiar to man in the old lunar time, something else existed which could to a certain extent take the place of today's memory. Think about it: if every time you experience something, the experience were written down somewhere in a place that remains accessible to you, the next experience again and so on, you could simply always look at the place where the experience is written down. You would be able to look outwards because the experience would be written down in the outside world. And so it is indeed for the kind of experience that man went through during the old moon period. What was experienced through that old dreamlike clairvoyant consciousness was, so to speak, engraved in a certain fine etheric substantiality. As one sees objects of the outer world today, so as a lunar man one saw one's own experiences, which had left their traces behind. This state had to end for the reason that man had to become individual. But he can only do this if what he lives through in his soul remains his spiritual property, if it is not directly engraved in the world substance, but only in his own fine ether individuality, in his ether substantiality. As long as man lives on earth, his etheric body is always in co-movement when he develops his consciousness in the waking state. And this co-movement finds its limits in the form of the physical body. In a sense, it cannot go beyond the boundary of the skin. And so throughout life, between birth and death, the subtle ether-substantiality, in which the thoughts, the ideas, the emotional and volitional experiences move along, remains rolled up, so to speak, within the physical body. And when the physical body is discarded at death, then the whole rolls up and is now communicated to the world substantiality, so that now, after death, we begin to look back at what has been engraved in our ether individuality (see: life tableau). [4]

What does the physical body do when it works through the power of memory? Every time a person has an experience and stores this experience in his memory through a thought, an imprint, a kind of cliché, so to speak, of the experience is formed in our etheric body. But not in such a way that this imprint would photographically depict this experience. Just as the letter of a script has nothing to do with the sound, this image has nothing to do with the experience itself. The print is only a sign. And this sign is strangely similar to the human form itself, and indeed, if you take the upper parts of the human form, the head and at most a little of the upper body and the hands, you have what can be observed in the etheric body every time a person forms memories of an experience. Think of how many things you remember in your life! You have just as many thousands and thousands of such etheric images of people within you. If you look at a person occultly, you will find thousands of such human images in him. However, they are not only created in the etheric body, but a fine imprint of each such human image is also created in the physical body, and these imprints are all preserved insofar as the person has memories. But thousands of such homunculi are present in the human being. In dreams, the homunculus arises in the etheric body, but it does not imprint itself on the physical body. It expresses itself weakly, sometimes not at all. Then the person knows that he has dreamed, but he cannot remember what he has dreamed. [5]

The strength of the memory therefore depends entirely on how strong the impression is that the homunculus of the etheric body makes on the physical body. But that which the spiritual researcher finds, that which he experiences in the spiritual world, is initially of such a nature that it can make no impression at all on the physical body. Therefore, one cannot have a memory for the experiences of spiritual research. The moment they arise, they also pass away. [6]

Let's take the following case: today we meet a person we saw for the first time five days ago. What happens in us when we remember a person in this way and our encounter with them some time later? While we met the person five days ago, our etheric body made certain movements. We are now focusing on the light part of the etheric body. Of course, the other limbs, the warmth part, the chemical part, the life part also vibrate, but today we are focusing on the light part of our etheric body. I will therefore call it the light body for the time being. The thoughts that are aroused by the person with whom we have met manifest themselves in our light body as inner movements of light. When we see this person again days later, the new sight stimulates our soul, and this stimulation causes the etheric body to carry out the movements it carried out five days ago, purely out of its inertia. During the waking state one is always in the outer light ether with a part of one's ego and astral body. Sleep happens because that part of the astral body and ego that is in the physical and etheric body during daytime waking withdraws into the outer ether. To perceive inner ether movements from the outer ether, to perceive the movements of the inner light body from the outer light ether, that is what it means to remember. [7] But they are not seen as light movements, because this light ether body is inside the physical body. As a result, the movements of the etheric body strike the physical body everywhere. And through this impact, the light movements of the etheric body are transformed into memories. When the physical body is gone, the inner light body is no longer stimulated by the impact on the physical body to such ideas that are only possible in the physical body. Therefore the dead person sees everything that he has experienced and everything that the etheric body now lets vibrate away. For the etheric body has a continual tendency to bring forth again from itself everything that it has ever carried out as movements in the experiences of the physical body. [8]

Why does this not happen in ordinary life? Why do we first perceive the result of the etheric body's movements striking the physical body? - It is because Ahriman has chained the physical body so closely to the whole being of man that the etheric body cannot easily get free. Demons continually keep the light body of man in darkness. This is the arrangement that Ahriman has made with the physical body and, incidentally, also with the etheric body.

If the human soul is able to observe the processes in its own light body out of light, then this soul has freed itself from the ahrimanic forces that otherwise obscure the processes in the light body. [9] In everyday waking life man does not experience himself in his astral body, just as little as he experiences himself in the etheric body. Man experiences himself in his ego. This astral body is actually infinitely wiser than the ego-man. This astral body can read the occult scriptures. Besides many other ideas through which one can evoke an understanding of the astral body, one can also have the idea that it is a reader of occult writing, and the etheric body, on the other hand - again among many other qualities it has - is something like a writing tablet in which the occult writing is continually inscribed through the processes of the world. The etheric body of man is in fact a true image of the entire cosmos. There is nothing in the cosmos that is not pictorially and imaginatively reflected in the etheric body of the human being. And the astral human body constantly reads what the world inscribes into the etheric human body. This does indeed take place in the human subconscious. Now when, even in our conscious, waking day-life, we confront an event or even just an object that makes an impression on us, then we form an idea of this object, and at first the astral body is busy. It is in a vehement movement while we form an idea of an object, or form the idea of the impression of an external event (see details on this: aura of the human being); this also inscribes itself into the etheric body of the human being, remains inscribed in the etheric body of the human being. Just as the world with its events continually inscribes itself into our etheric body, we also inscribe what we ourselves experience psychically into our etheric body. It remains inscribed in it, and when we remember something, a complicated process actually takes place: our astral body reads what has been inscribed in our etheric body, and the result of this reading is the emergence of an idea for which perhaps the memory was initially lacking. [10]

Thus memory would be reduced to a kind of reading of our astral body in the etheric body. And in fact, as soon as we know this, we will no longer come to the simple-minded idea that the soul is such a storage cupboard for what we have experienced, but will realize that there are in fact few habits into which the astral body repeatedly transfers itself when it has experienced something, and which it then presses into the etheric body. Just as our writing has few letters, so our astral body has few, very few habits. And just as we communicate with our letters, through groupings in writing, the whole infinite abundance of what people have to say to each other about themselves and the world, so out of a few habits, through their combinations, is formed that which the memory retains. If we know that it is a matter of reading, then we will no longer believe that each individual must be inscribed, but the other is combined with the few habits, and this is then fixed in the etheric body. If we take the 12 constellations of the whole zodiac, we can say that our astral body is indeed in living connection with these 12 constellations. For him, these really meant 12 specific habits, 12 specific ways of moving. And then our astral body is also in connection with the 7 planets. These in turn determine certain habits in him. Through these habits, which are ignited in our astral body by the planets of our solar system, something similar to the self-sounds (the vowels) arises in the astral body. And through the habits that are aroused in it by the influence of the zodiac, something similar to the consonants arises. [11]

Because our astral body is in connection with or under the special influence of that which radiates from the constellation of Aries, for example, the possibility develops in this astral body of closing itself off in a special form, of giving itself a beautiful boundary; while when the astral body is more under the influence of Libra, a movement develops in it which allows it to be more open to the whole of the rest of the world. Thus a certain tendency of movement develops under the influence of each constellation. Under the influence of this or that constellation the astral body stretches its upper part especially upwards, under the influence of one of the other constellations it stretches its lower part especially. But there are twelve special kinds of movement, and again seven special habits under the influence of the planets. These are more inner movements under the influence of the planets, where the inner parts move more or bring themselves into a relationship with each other. So basically our astral body has 12 + 7 = 19 habits implanted by the cosmos. Just as we express everything that we bring to light with our wisdom through combinations of our characters, our astral body forms everything that it has to form through the combinations of these 19 habits. When we face a person with a certain face that looks good or bad at us, our astral body makes certain movements that are a combination of these 19 movements. This is then inscribed in the etheric body, and in a subsequent time the astral body can read again what has been inscribed in the etheric body. And this is what memory is based on! As soon as one goes beyond what the senses and the mind bound to the senses reveal, one immediately comes to the relationship of the human being to the cosmos. The physical body only conceals this relationship between man and the cosmos. In the oldest pictorial writings, people imitated this inner reading of man. Outer reading was nothing other than a reproduction in the outer world of what man had as inner reading. [12]

Only by the fact that our memory for the ordinary conditions of life does not reach back into states which we have passed through between the last death and the present birth, can it be brought about that certain forces condense and through this condensation become the forces of memory. Other beings of other world orders have developed these same powers, which lie in our memory, in a completely different way. [13] All memory is a Luciferic force. [14] Ordinary memory does not enter the sphere where we encounter the dead. [15]

Memory is nothing other than the dream-forming power embodied in the physical and etheric body. (Thus) the dream submerges into the physical body, is thereby incorporated into the order of the physical world and now forms the content of the memory, which is no longer chaotic but is incorporated into the physical world. If you were to perceive the same power that in your waking state forms the memory power, the memory, unfolded outside the physical and etheric body while asleep, you would not have the chaotic images of the dream, which only form in the moment of immersion in the physical and etheric body, but you would be immersed in the outer world, freed from the physical and etheric body, experiencing yourself asleep in a majestic world of images. [16] During sleep, the ego is already together with that which the human being will only form later, which the human being will only develop in the future. [Once you have understood this sacredness of sleep, then we also attribute all those thoughts and ideas that occur to us in waking life, which do not bind us to matter, to the influence of the spirit that takes place during sleep. If we had no memory, then all sleep would be of no help to us. This memory works not only in the conscious mind, but also in the subconscious. As man is now on earth, he only comes into contact with the spirit during sleep. [18]

Sources:

[1], [2] GA 9: Theosophy. Introduction to Supersensible Knowledge of the World and the Destiny of Man (1904)

[3] GA 61: The History of Man in the Light of Spiritual Research (1911/1912)

[4] GA 170: The Riddle of Man. The Spiritual Background of Human History (1916)

[5], [6], [13] GA 162: Questions of Art and Life in the Light of Spiritual Science (1915)

[7] - [9] GA 165: The Spiritual Unification of Humanity through the Christ Impulse (1915/1916)

[10] - [12] GA 156: Occult Reading and Occult Hearing (1914)

[14] GA 150: The World of the Spirit and its Entry into Physical Existence. The Influence of the Dead on the World of the Living (1913)

[15], [17], [18] GA 175: Building Blocks to an Understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha. Cosmic and Human Metamorphosis (1917)

[16] GA 225: Three Perspectives of Anthroposophy. Cultural Phenomena, Viewed from a Spiritual Science Perspective (1923)

Memory - developable through interest

Memory can only be developed by stimulating attention and interest. Interest, attention and memory belong together. If you try to take an intense interest in some sum of experiences, in some area of life, to be really involved with your whole self, your memory will also become better and better for these experiences. So if someone wants to form his memory for something, he can do it best by trying to sharpen his interest in the area in question. We remember nothing for which we do not develop an intense interest. Thus attention, interest, is something that can correct a deficient memory in the physical world. Loving attention, loving interest in the spiritual in general, is of the greatest importance for the correct introduction to occult experiences, so that these occult experiences do not continually flit past us like dreams and we know nothing about them. Without this spiritual interest, without this loving attention, we cannot have the spiritual experiences that we once had again and again. It is quite possible to have an occult experience. It flits by. Only in this way will one be able to create the conditions, though not memories, whereby one can have the experience again and again anew, that one intensifies one's interest in the events in the spiritual world. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 162: Questions of Art and Life in the Light of Spiritual Science (1915)

Memory – pineal gland and pituitary gland

In the brain, when an idea of memory wants to form, we have two ether currents - one from below, one from above - with the greatest possible tension. And when a balance has been achieved between these two currents, then an idea has become a memory idea and has become incorporated into the etheric body. We have two organs in the brain which are the physical-sensory expression of these two currents in the human etheric body: one is the pineal gland or epiphysis, the other is the so-called cerebral appendix or hypophysis cerebri (pituitary gland). [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 128: An Occult Physiology (1911)

Memory - Memorizing

When the natural acquisition of memory material is aided by memorization, Lucifer is invoked to help the memory. In a way that humanity is no longer aware of today, memory had a completely different strength in ancient, but not at all distant, times of human development than it does today. It takes us a relatively long time to assimilate a longer piece of poetry. The ancient Greeks did not need that long. A large number of the ancient Greeks knew the Homeric songs from beginning to end. But they did not memorize in the way we memorize today. The power of memory at that time was developed differently. In a sense, what happened (at that time) was a repetition of what happened to an even greater extent in the Atlantean period itself. That which had come over from the (old) moon (into Atlantis) as a force capable of tracing the dreamlike imaginative experiences like a comet's tail, this force passed, so to speak, from such an outer force, which takes place in the intercommunication with the world, into the inner. Through this transition into the inner self, memory developed in Atlantean man like a first illumination of something that the world then gave him as if by itself. And during the Atlantean period man really did not need to make much effort to develop his memory, for it was like a flowing into the inner being of that which was a force in outer contact with the world. And this was repeated for the fourth post-Atlantean period. In the inner being there was, as it were, a repetition of that which had previously taken place in the interchange with the world without man doing anything about it.

Now that man has entered the fifth post-Atlantean period, he must use more and more effort to make the power of memory his own. By artificially bringing into our time what was natural in Greek times, the natural appropriation of memory, it becomes Luciferic. But the moment a Luciferic activity occurs, the other side of the scales also becomes active, so to speak: the Ahrimanic. And while we memorize on the one side, i.e. call upon Lucifer to help us with our memory, humanity has increasingly developed the other, the Ahrimanic support of memory, i.e. writing things down. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 170: The Riddle of Man. The Spiritual Background of Human History (1916)

Memory of the spiritual researcher

In those moments of one's life when one is in inspiration as a spiritual researcher, one does not have the ordinary memory at one's disposal. This ordinary memory is only at one's disposal in healthy life in the body; in life outside the body this memory is not at one's disposal. The power of memory has been transformed. One has only retained the power to produce the same (spiritual perception) again and again. And so it is basically no different from the way it is with ordinary physical-sensory perception. If you really want to perceive in the physical-sensory world, you cannot go away from the perceived things and have the same perception in another place. You must return to the things. Thus the spiritual researcher must return to the same spiritual content of consciousness in the spiritual world. And just as in physical perception one must learn to move in space so that one can alternately perceive the one or the other, so the spiritual researcher who comes to inspiration must arrive at moving freely in the element of time. He must learn to move with time itself. And when he then learns this, he finds that the power of memory has transformed itself into another, that a metamorphosis has occurred with the power of memory. What memory has accomplished in the ordinary physical-sensual world must now be replaced by spiritual perception. But that into which the memory has transformed itself gives him the perception of a more comprehensive ego. Now the fact of repeated earth-lives becomes a fact of knowledge. [1]

If one actively grasps inwardly what spiritual science has to give man, and if one acquires quite different habits of thought and modes of conception from the ordinary ones, one will notice that the powers which were formerly the powers of memory do indeed diminish as one grows older, but that they are replaced by something which is a much better memory. Gradually there emerges from the spiritual depths of the soul what can be called a looking back at events. As we otherwise look at things in space, so we gradually learn to look at things in time. [2]

One can say that with regard to the soul ability of memory, time is transformed into a kind of space as soon as one enters the spiritual world. Thus memory has become an essentially new faculty for the spiritual disciple. For example, he sees a past event as if it were still there in the present; he judges the time that has passed according to the distance at which it is separate from him. And when this form of memory has been acquired, researching the past is actually like reading the events that have come to a standstill; this is called reading the Akashic Chronicle, because just as our world is called the physical world, the world in which we then move must be called the Akashic world - the world in which time has become space. [3]

But on the spiritual plane we do not have such convenient corrections of errors (as on the physical plane); there one must already have the corresponding certainty for this higher world within oneself. There one must take the care of preparation to obtain this certainty. If one does not have it, then an error in the spiritual world would be much more costly, for it could lead one into the bottomless pit. So there must be a certain harmony between the logic of the heart (thinking outside the everyday personality) and this type of memory just described, just as there is a harmony between the logic of the head and the memory of the ordinary consciousness.

While a person with an ordinary memory believes that he is stuck in the present and looks back to the past, the spiritual researcher has the inner experience that he is actually walking back in time, as one would otherwise only walk in space, that he is walking through time. And this consciousness expresses itself externally in the experience of our blood system, which must also be in constant motion if we want to live at all. It is indeed an extraordinarily interesting fact that in our blood system we have an image of certain abilities of the spiritual researcher and also of those worlds in which the spiritual researcher moves with his own being. [4]

Ordinary memory initially suffers some loss under spiritual development. The spiritual researcher will indeed have a very difficult time when he has to remember something he has experienced, but he will receive the substitute that an image appears before his soul. In this picture the events he has experienced stand vividly before his mind's eye; these past facts force themselves upon his consciousness in pictures. And this is, of course, a much more faithful memory than that which one usually has in life. Ordinary memory has a great deficiency, it shows things very shadowy and faded, and the details are lost. But for memory, which presents them as if in spatial images, the details reappear. [5] Memory gradually disappears in the initiate and the direct vision of what one wants to remember takes its place. [6]

In earlier times man had a kind of logic of the heart, in the present he goes through the logic of the intellect and in the future he will again have a logic of the heart, into which the logic of the intellect will be incorporated like a fruit. Then, however, something similar to that which is regained when the logic of the heart arises must have corresponded in the other faculties of the soul to that earlier state of man which we can divine. A kind of memory that sees in images will be linked to the original state of thinking, just as a memory that sees in images must be linked to the future state of humanity. Man has not needed to investigate his origin, but has been able to see it. He has been able to look more or less far back into the past, depending on the degree to which he was developed. [7]

Objectifying ourselves, detaching ourselves in the present from our past, peeling ourselves out of our experiences, is something we must strive for in the present in particular, because the present has a tendency to link the ego more and more with our experiences. Today, people instinctively want to be what their experiences give them. That is why it is so difficult to attain the activity that spiritual science provides. You have to strain your mind anew every time, you can't rely on retention. - You will really notice that nothing can be done in true spiritual science with retention, with comfortable retention. One forgets things and has to cultivate them again and again. Those who are quite advanced, especially in the field of spiritual science, try every day to visualize the most elementary things; others are ashamed to do so. [8]

Sources:

[1] GA 322: Limits of the Knowledge of Nature (1920)

[2] GA 63: Spiritual Science as the Good of Life (1913/1914)

[3] - [5], [7] GA 119: Macrocosm and Microcosm. The big and the small world. Questions of the Soul, Questions of Life, Questions of the Spirit (1910)

[6] GA 266/1: From the Contents of the Esoteric Lessons. Volume I (1904-1909)

[8] GA 186: The basic social demand of our time - In a changed time (1918)

Good memory and attention

The more man endeavors to develop the powers of attention, that is, to concentrate his interest again and again on individual facts of life, the more he concentrates on attention in an inner effort of the soul, the stronger his memory and his power of recollection become. Not merely that we remember more easily what we have paid attention to, but the more we are educated or educate ourselves to develop again and again the activity of being attentive, the stronger the power of remembrance, the power of memory becomes. He who wants to become a spiritual researcher must increase the activity of attention in an unlimited way. [1] (8.5.1914)

Sources:

[1] GA 70: ??(Public lectures in various cities). ?? (0)

Correct memory as a basic requirement of esoteric training

For if the human being were to remain asleep while his astral body is already awake, he would lose his inner cohesion and would appear to be split up like Dionysus in the whole astral world of the earth, which consists of the spirits of the periods of circulation. (This fragmentation is a typical experience of all shaman initiations). [1]

It is extremely important that in every esoteric development everything is arranged in such a way that two things are not lost which man has in ordinary life, but which he can easily lose in esoteric development if it is not properly directed. The first is that man does not lose the memory of all the experiences of the present incarnation. The cohesion of the memory must not be destroyed. By this cohesion of memory we mean much more in the field of occultism than in ordinary life. In ordinary life, this memory only means that one can look back and has not exactly lost consciousness of important events in one's life.

In occultism, correct memory is also understood to mean that a person's feelings and emotions only reflect what he has already achieved in the past (the present incarnation), so that a person does not attribute any other value to himself than the value that the deeds of his past give him; an important principle in occult development is not to attribute any other value to himself than that which comes from his achievements in the physical world within the present incarnation. What karma still makes of us, we must first allow to be made, we must not include that in our value. The second thing that must not be lost to us as a present human being is the degree of conscience we possess in the outer physical world. [2] If we retain these two elements in our consciousness, then our ego can never fall asleep when our astral body has awakened. Then we carry the cohesion of our ego into the world in which we wake up with our astral body when we are asleep, as it were, awake. [3]

Sources:

[1] - [3] GA 136: The Spiritual Beings in the Celestial Bodies and Kingdoms of Nature (1912)

Memory and Akashic Records

(During his time on earth) man does not continue to live in such a way that he, as it were, thinks once again what has already been thought before and that it then remains visible to him. Rather, he thinks, and what he has thought is only stored in himself through the resistance of his physical body. It is buried in his own ether-substantiality and only after his death is it handed over to the general world-substantiality. Then one can look back in the same way as one can look back in the past on everything that has been consciously experienced, that is, experienced in consciousness. This is something that forms the evolution through the various lives on earth: that the human being comes into the position to really improve what he buries in the general world substantiality (Akasha) at every death. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 170: The Riddle of Man. The spiritual background of human history (1916)

Memory and Archangeloi

We do indeed owe this power of memory to what happens during our sleep. From the time we fall asleep until we wake up we are in the world of the Archangeloi, and together with the beings of the Hierarchy of the Archangeloi we form this power of our memory. Just as we form the power of sensory perception and of combining sensory perceptions with the beings of the Hierarchy of the Angeloi, so we form this more internalized, more center-related power of memory in the world of the Archangeloi. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 219: The Relation of the Star World to Man and of Man to the Star World. The Spiritual Communion of Humanity (1922)

Memory and the etheric body

The etheric body is also the carrier of memory, and during life only the physical body prevents it from having all this before it. After death the physical body is discarded; then everything that the person has experienced in his last life can come into consciousness. Now I have already mentioned that such a review of life also occurs when a person is in some kind of mortal danger or some other tremendous fright, a shock, is exerted on him. You already know from stories that when a person is close to drowning or (in the case of) a fall in the mountains (to death) and he does not lose consciousness, he experiences his entire previous life as if in a large tableau. What a person experiences through danger, for example when he is close to drowning, was experienced by almost everyone at St. John's baptism. The baptism consisted in the fact that the person remained in the water for so long that he experienced his previous life. [1] (See also: tableau of life).

Sources:

[1] GA 112: The Gospel of John in relation to the other three Gospels, especially the Gospel of Luke (1909)

Memory and comprehension

There are two very different things: committing something to memory and visualizing something in the present. There are people who grasp something quickly, but have a terribly poor memory; and conversely, there are people who are stupid as lightning when it comes to grasping something quickly, but have a good memory, namely a good capacity for imagination and judgment. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 181: Earth death and world life. Anthroposophical gifts of life. Necessities of Consciousness for the Present and the Future (1918)

Memory and esoterics

The esoteric must endeavor to habitually acquire a good memory. The keeper of the memory is the etheric body, but without the physical body it would not be able to keep it well. The nerves are impressed, and it must be written into the physical body. It is, so to speak, the recording apparatus for what the human being wants to keep. And when a person wants to remember something, he penetrates the physical body with the etheric body to the place where the thing to be remembered is inscribed, and then the memory image comes to life and the person reads it from the physical body. This is what students do when they have to memorize something, that they repeat it to themselves until it is inscribed. Such inscribing and reading must become habitual in that it becomes an inner habit for us to penetrate all activities with attention and reflection. The physical body cannot be used as an organ of memory for spiritual experiences; the habitual must take its place. We must call to mind the corresponding sensory nuance. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 266/3: From the Contents of the Esoteric Lessons. Volume III (1913, 1914; 1920 - 1923) (1913-1923)

Memory and esoteric development

What one usually has as memory almost always suffers a downgrading through esoteric development. First of all, you get a worse memory. Whoever does not want to have a worse memory cannot undergo an esoteric development. In particular, the memory that can be described as mechanical memory, which is best developed in people during their childhood and adolescence and which is usually meant when we talk about memory, ceases to be very active. And many an esoteric will have to complain about the downgrading of their memory, because you can notice this quite quickly. The memory that is there for the outer life is already lost; but we need not suffer any damage at all if we take care to develop more interest, deeper interest, more participation in everything that concerns us in life than we were used to before. We must begin to take an emotional interest in the things that are important to us. That sticks all the better with which one grows together emotionally. We must therefore try to bring about this emotional coalescence in an almost systematic way. [1]

If, for instance, one takes a book which one has dictated to oneself, or has been dictated to oneself, that it should be valuable to one, one does the thing in such a way that one reads it through once, then immediately afterwards tries to repeat it in one's mind, and not only repeats it, but from back to front, the last things first and the first things last, if you take the trouble to go through particular details a second time, if you grow together with the whole thing in this way, if you even take another piece of paper and write down short thoughts from it, and if you try to ask yourself the question: From which side can you be particularly interested in this subject? - then you will see that you are developing a different kind of memory in this way. You will notice the difference when you make use of it, it is as if the things you have lived through in this way had stood still in time. One learns to look back in time, as it were, and it is really as if one were to look at what one has looked at; indeed, one will notice that things become more and more pictorial, that the memory becomes more and more imaginative and imaginative. If one has done it in the way that has just been described with the book, then, if it is necessary to place the thing again before the soul, one need only somehow turn to something that is connected with it, then one will, as it were, look back to the time when one was occupied with the book, one will look at oneself reading it. It's not the memory that comes up: the whole picture comes up. Memory becomes a contemplation of images that stand at a distance in time. [2]

This is the very first beginning, the elementary beginning, of the gradual learning to read in the Akashic Records: the memory is replaced by a learning to read in the elapsed time. And sometimes a person who has undergone a certain esoteric development may have almost completely lost his memory, but it does him no harm because he sees things in reverse. In so far as he has been connected with them himself, he sees them with particular clarity. And, as another experience, a kind of self-assessment is very necessarily associated with this retrospective. One cannot help but take a stand on one's past. So that one in fact becomes a sharper judge of oneself, namely of one's past life. One feels, so to speak, the etheric body stirring - which has the whole past in it, including the retrospect after death - one feels this etheric body like an inclusion in oneself, like something that lives in one and that constitutes the value of one. Indeed, such a change takes place in the etheric body that one often feels the urge to look back on oneself. One's own life will gradually give one trouble if one undergoes an esoteric development, so that one is compelled to take a closer look at one's merits and faults, one's errors and imperfections. [3]

Sources:

[1] - [3] GA 145: What significance does the occult development of man have for his sheaths (physical body, etheric body, astral body) and his self? (1913)

Memory and a sense of freedom as reminiscences of a pre-earthly existence

It is connected with memory that man lives above all on earth with himself. But this memory is also very strongly connected with what is human egoism on the one hand and human freedom on the other. Freedom will arise in a person who lives up to what must be experienced as a kind of rhythm in pre-earthly existence: Feeling with the beings of the higher hierarchies, coming out of this feeling, then coming in again and so on. Here it lives itself out side by side, not as a rhythm, but as two coexisting human abilities: the ability to love and the ability to remember. But man can retain a certain inheritance of this rhythm of pre-earthly existence; then memory and love will also have the right relationship to each other in earthly life. On the one hand, man will be able to develop a loving understanding for other people, and he will also take into his reminiscent thinking what can become his own perfection, his own consolidation of his being from experiencing the world with other people. By being only interested in himself, man closes himself off in a certain respect to living together with the beings of the higher hierarchies (see: Life between death and new birth). But the one who has the right relationship between love and memory develops the human feeling of freedom instead of the merely egoistic introspection. This is the healthy after-experience of this stepping out of coexistence with the beings of the higher hierarchies between death and a new birth; egoism is the sick after-experience of this stepping out. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 219: The Relationship of the Star World to Man and of Man to the Star World. The Spiritual Communion of Humanity (1922)

Memory and spiritual research

Once you have seen something spiritual, you cannot simply commit it to memory so that you remember this spiritual experience. You have to recall it again and again. You must understand this well: If the spiritual researcher succeeds in transforming his experiences into ideas, into concepts, he has the concepts as they are in the ordinary sense; of course he can remember them. But that is not the spiritual experience, that is the conceptual image. One can remember that. But one cannot remember the spiritual experience. Spiritual experiences are facts that exist in the spiritual world. You can look at them, but they do not stick in your memory. If the spiritual researcher wants to have such a spiritual experience again or to repeat it, then it is not sufficient that he simply summons up the strength that he would otherwise use for a memory; that leads him nowhere. Rather, he must bring about the same inner soul events within himself again, he must do exactly the same thing that he did in order to arrive at the experience. Then he can approach the same experience. The fact that a spiritual experience does not impress itself on the memory, that one can only experience it again through those inner soul events, is proof that what really lives in the spirit has duration and cannot be destroyed by death. It has duration. For even those powers which are bound to memory are attached to the mortal body. One only meets the immortal when one is beyond that which is memory. [1]

True spiritual research takes the whole inner soul apparatus of logic and self-consciousness with it when it seeks to transfer consciousness from the sensual to a supersensible sphere. However, it cannot process its content in terms of concepts after perception, because it always takes the rational element with it when it leaves the world of the senses and, like a skeleton of supersensible experience, always retains it as an integrating component in all supersensible perception. [2]

Sources:

[1] GA 72: Freedom - Immortality - Social Life. On the connection between the soul-spiritual and the body of man (1917-1918)

[2] GA 35: Philosophy and Anthroposophy (1904-1923)

Memory and life tableau

The physical body is not a tool of memory, but the tool of memory for the earthly human being is the etheric body (see above: memory deficiencies). While we have this life tableau in our soul after our death (for 3 days), this entire life tableau is entered, engraved as it were in the general, space-permeating life ether in which we live, in which we always are. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 133: The Earthly and the Cosmic Man (1911/1912)

Memory and over-memory (Imagination)

The treasure of memory is like a veil that covers something that always lives in the soul, only unconsciously, something that is always in it; but which is covered, veiled by memory and remembrance. As the spiritual researcher rises into the spiritual-soul realm, he does, one might say, have his memories clinging to him like the comet's tail of his spiritual-soul being, but through these memories he can see through to something that could be called: Forces of a higher kind than the forces that retain our memories. One could use the expression: One ascends to a super-memory from the memory. One gradually enters the imaginative imagination. Whereas with memory you always have the feeling: The images of memory rise up, they place themselves before the soul, in that you passively surrender to them -, one now dives into that which is behind the memory and knows that one must actively bring forth that which then rises up as imagination, as the content of a super-memory. But one also knows, through the soul prepared for these things, that that which reveals itself as lying behind the memory was always there, that it was only covered by the memory, and one knows, by recognizing it in its essence, that that which pushes itself down into the reasons, which lie beneath the treasure of memory, is itself something that now works on our physical organism. The deeper soul, of which the ordinary consciousness knows nothing at all, which is only discovered through spiritual research, first works on, let us say, a certain part of the brain, first sends its working forces into the senses and the brain; and through the fact that this "back-conscious" soul works on the nervous system, the latter becomes a mirror to reflect what occurs in ordinary life. [1] And this is what spiritual research will lead mankind to: to recognize that it is we ourselves who live within our imaginations, and that it is we ourselves who prepare the body with our deeper being, so that it becomes the mirroring apparatus for what the soul then experiences. Our memories only remain ideas because they are held back by the etheric body and are not allowed to enter the physical body. If they were to trickle into the physical body, if they were to become active in it, these ideas would pass over into the formative forces, into the living forces of the physical body, would organize it. [2] But the soul also develops much stronger forces in life than those that develop the memories, and these stronger forces are now also initially preserved in the soul. But they lie like a super-memory behind the ordinary treasure of memory; they are within us. By diving down, the spiritual researcher immerses himself in something that is a soul core, a soul seed, of which he knows that it is formed in this life between birth and death, but it does not develop its powers in this life; it is ready for a subsequent life. It is only important that the spiritual researcher never loses sight of this: What you have to experience there can only be one in which you become aware of your own activity again and again; for if you are not, if you do not realize how it came about, then it becomes an illusion, a hallucination or a mere fantasy. [3]

Sources:

[1] - [3] GA 153: Inner Being of Man and Life between Death and New Birth (1914)

Memory embodied in the world - the human being

That which is within the human being is in fact the whole spiritual cosmos condensed together - in the human inner organization we have an image of the whole cosmos. If, just as you look at your memories, you look at your brain, the inside of your eye - the inside of the eye alone is a whole world - if you also look at your lungs, your other organs, these are images of the whole spiritual cosmos, they only appear in a material way. If man can unravel, just as he can unravel his memories in the life of the soul, because he has lived through them in earthly life, if he can unravel in the same way: What is contained in my brain, in the inside of my eyes, in the inside of my lungs? - then the whole spiritual cosmos will open up to him, just as the individual memories open up to him some series of experiences that he has gone through. One is the embodied world memory as a human being. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 226: Human nature, human destiny and world development (1923)

Memory training

You have to realize that you have to do something at school age to make your memory stronger and stronger. You have to develop it in a planned way. If you develop the memory in such a way that it is overloaded, or is supposed to be strengthened by overloading, then it will become weaker and weaker. Then you educate a stiff person who acquires certain prejudices for life and cannot go beyond them. If you educate a person in such a way that you take no account at all of the development of his memory, then you are not giving him something which in a certain sense has a strengthening effect on his body. In the case of a person in whom no attention is paid to the development of his memory at school age, the tendency to all kinds of inflammatory conditions will be brought up in later youth and maidenhood. One will then create the tendency for such a person to be easily exposed to inflammations and colds in general. It is of particular importance that the correct position be adopted for the development of memory at a child's age. We must not forget that up to the change of teeth the memory, the ability to remember, is most closely bound up with organic development. What the child then remembers in an easy way during this period is the result of forces that are at work at the same time in growth and nutrition. The child is a unit in terms of the spiritual-mental forces and the physical-bodily forces until the change of teeth. We can therefore make the biggest mistakes if we try to do all sorts of things for the child before the change of teeth in order to artificially strengthen the memory. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 303: The Healthy Development of the Human Being. An introduction to anthroposophical education and didactics (1921/1922)

Formation of memory

The older Ephesian pupils did not need history books. Writing down what happened would have seemed ridiculous to them. For one had to think, think deeply enough, then what had happened came up from the depths of consciousness. And there was no modern medicus who presented this as psychoanalysis, but it was precisely the delight of the human soul to bring up in this way from a living memory what had once been there. Then came the time when humanity as such had forgotten and had to make a makeshift record of what had happened. But while mankind had to let that atrophy which was formerly cosmic power of memory in the human soul, while mankind had to begin bunglingly to write down world events, to write history and so on, during that time the personal memory, the personal remembrance, developed within the human being. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 233: World History in Anthroposophical Illumination and as the Basis of the Knowledge of the Human Spirit (1923/1924)

Historical development of memory

In the ancient Orient we have to record an ancient time when actually all memory was linked to the fact that memory signs were placed on the earth. That was the localized memory, the localized remembrance.

A second stage is the other, where man passes from localized memory to rhythmized memory. That is, he piled up what he perceived in such a way that a rhythm emerged, for example in the word cuckoo. [1]

And it was from this rhythmicized memory that the entire older art of verse actually developed, versified poetry in general.

And it was only as a third stage that what we still know today was formed: temporal memory. If you take this point in time of the transition from rhythmic memory to temporal memory, then you have the point in time when the ancient Orient colonizes Greece. What the Greeks tell of those heroes who came from Asia or Egypt and settled on Greek soil is actually the story that should be told: The great heroes once departed from the land where rhythmic memory existed and sought out a climate where rhythmic memory could merge into temporal memory, into temporal remembrance. And actually, the ancient Orient is only properly understood by man when he imagines it as the land of rhythm. [2] We have recorded a point in time when localized memory merges into rhythmic memory. This is the point in time when, during the demise of the ancient Atlantis, the ancient post-Atlantean peoples migrate from westward to eastward, across to Asia. [3]

Sources:

[1] - [4] GA 233: World History in Anthroposophical Illumination and as the Basis of the Knowledge of the Human Spirit (1923/1924)

22
Michael

The ancient Hebrew word Michael should actually be translated as God-shower; God-proclaimer would mean exactly the same as Gabriel; God-willer would mean exactly the same as Raphael. While we work in the physical world through our three soul forces (thinking, feeling and willing), the beings of the higher hierarchies work through entities themselves. As we work through imagination, feeling and volition, a god works through Michael, Gabriel and Raphael. And that means the same for a god: I work through Michael, Gabriel, Raphael, - which means for our soul: I work through thinking, feeling and willing. [1]

The ancient Hebrew people worshipped Yahweh God as the highest God. But for them, this Yahweh belonged to the order of "revelations". This was an exalted being whom they recognized as their God. But they said: The one who guides and directs us on behalf of Yahweh as the actual archangel (Greek: archangelos) of Yahweh is "Michael", one of the archangels - he is called "the one who stands before God". In ancient Hebrew he was also called the "face of God", because when a member of the old covenant looked up to God, he felt that Michael stood before God and expressed his nature, just as the human face expresses the human nature. He was therefore literally called the face of God. [2] Those of the Jewish priesthood who looked to Yahweh with full consciousness were aware that they could not approach Yahweh directly with their human knowledge. But this priesthood was aware that man could approach Yahweh through Michael; they called Michael the face of Yahweh. Just as we get to know a person when we look into his face, just as we draw a conclusion about the mildness of the soul from the mildness of his face, about his character from the way he looks at us, so the Old Testament priesthood wanted to draw conclusions about Yahweh from the face of Yahweh, from Michael, from the atavistic clairvoyances that crept into the soul in dreams, which it was not possible for mankind to reach. What would have become of the Jewish people of the Old Testament if, instead of approaching Yahweh through Michael, they had wanted to approach Yahweh directly? They would have become an intolerant, egotistical people, a people who could only think of themselves. For Yahweh is the God who is connected with everything natural, and in the external historical becoming of man he expresses his nature in the generational connection of men, as he expresses himself in the people. Only by wanting to approach Yahweh through Michael did the ancient Hebrew people save themselves from becoming so egoistic that not even the Christ Jesus could have emerged from the midst of this people. [3]

Not only is the blood constantly being sent up from the rest of the organism into the head, but those soul-spiritual thought-formations, from which the world is woven, from which our organism is also woven, are also constantly rising into the blood. These soul-spiritual thought-formations are not yet perceived by man today in his normal state, but the age has arrived in which man must begin to perceive those thought-formations that arise from his own being. And the great, tremendous mystery is that man has developed his head in a long series of development, that then that which is the rest of his organism has been added, that the head has already begun a regressive development, but that that which man can perceive as his divine must speak to him through the rest of his organism, not through the head; at first only the Luciferic entities spoke to man through the head. And we can say that the rest of the organism was added to man's head so that his gods could speak to him. God breathed the living breath into man and he became a living soul. - Here (in the Old Testament) it is correctly recognized that the divine impulse came to man through a non-main activity. Among the teachers of the ancient Hebrew people we find everywhere the awareness that their God spoke to them not through direct sensory perceptions, not through ordinary thinking, not through everything for which the head is the mediator, but that their God spoke to them through dreams - by which they did not understand ordinary dreams, but dreams imbued with reality - what God spoke to them through such clairvoyant moments as to Moses from the thorn bush and the like. And when the initiates of those ancient times were asked how they imagined that the divine calls came to them, they said: "The Lord, whose name is unspeakable, speaks to us, but he speaks to us through his face. - And they called the face of their God Michael. They perceived their God as remaining unknown behind the apparitions of even the clairvoyant. But this Michael only spoke when people were able to place themselves in a different state than the usual state of consciousness, when people were able to place themselves in a state of a certain clairvoyance, through which that which otherwise only creates and lives in man either from falling asleep until waking up, or through the subconscious will, which actually also sleeps, even when we are awake during the day. And so, in the ancient Hebrew secret teachings, the revelation of Yahweh was called the revelation of the night. [4]

The further one penetrates (as a spiritual researcher) into the supersensible worlds, the more the entities there interpenetrate, they are no longer delimited from each other, so that it is difficult to distinguish them from each other. Above all, one must not disregard evolution when considering the name Yahweh, especially when associating it with the name of Christ, (for) Christ revealed himself through Yahweh as far as he could before the Mystery of Golgotha. If one wants to draw a comparison between Yahweh and Christ, it is good to use the sunlight and the moonlight as an image. Christ is like the sunlight, Yahweh is like the reflected light of Christ. [5]

There are many beings (like Michael) who belong to the same rank. But this particular entity, esoterically known as Michael, is as exalted above his fellows as the sun is exalted above the planets, above Venus, Mercury, Jupiter and so on. And so we can say that Yahweh revealed himself through Michael, one of the Archangeloi. The realization of what we have described as Yahweh was not just limited to the ancient Hebrews, it was much more widespread. And if one examines the last 5 centuries before the Christian era, one finds that revelation through Michael took place throughout that time. We can discover this revelation in a different form in Plato, Socrates, Aristotle, in Greek philosophy, even in the ancient Greek tragedies during the 5 centuries before the Golgotha event. If, with the help of occult knowledge, we endeavor to shed light on what actually happened, we can say that Christ-Yahweh is the Being who has accompanied humanity throughout its evolution. But during the epochs that follow one another, Christ-Yahweh always reveals himself through different beings of the same rank as Michael. He always chooses, so to speak, a different face with which to address humanity. And depending on which one or the other of the Hierarchy of the Archangeloi is chosen to be the mediator between Christ-Yahweh and humanity, very different ideas and perceptions, impulses of feeling, impulses of will and so on are revealed to man. We can describe the whole time surrounding the Mystery of Golgotha, so to speak, as the time of Michael, and we can regard Michael as the messenger of Yahweh. The leading culture of mankind bore the stamp of Michael, so to speak. Through his qualities, his power, he poured into humanity that which was to be given to it at that time. And then came other beings who were likewise the inspirers of humanity from the spiritual worlds, other beings of the rank of the Archangeloi. As has already been mentioned, Michael was the greatest, the most powerful, the most significant, so that such an epoch as that of Michael is always the most significant or one of the most significant that can occur in the evolution of mankind. For the epochs of the various Archangeloi repeat themselves. And the fact is of the greatest importance that each such entity of the Hierarchy of the Archangeloi gives the basic character to the age. They are mainly the leaders of the various nations, but because they become the leaders of certain epochs, and because they have been the leaders of past ages, they have in a certain sense also become the leaders of all mankind. [6]

Michael inspired humanity for several centuries, about 500 years before the Mystery of Golgotha, as indicated in the ancient mysteries of Plato and so on. Soon, however, after the Mystery of Golgotha had taken place and Christ had united with the evolution of the Earth, the direct influence of Michael ceased. The other Archangeloi, the companions of Michael, could not inspire humanity in such a way as to make the Mystery of Golgotha comprehensible. This explains the divergent interpretations of the various Christian teachings. In these teachings much was inspired by the companions of Michael. These teachings were not inspired by Michael himself, but stand in the same relationship to his inspirations as the planets to the mighty sun. [7] Michael himself has gone through a development. Since the end of the 19th century we may again regard Michael as a leader. [8] Only now in our time is there again such an influence, a direct inspiration from Michael; it has been prepared since the 16th century. At that time it was the Archangelos, who was closest to Michael, who gave mankind the inspiration that led to the perfection of natural science in our modern age. The natural science of today does not come from the inspiration of Michael, but from one of his companions, Gabriel. This scientific inspiration tends to create a science, a view, that gives understanding only to the material world and is related to the physical brain. Within the last few decades Michael has taken the place of this inspirer of science again, and in the next few centuries Michael will give the world something that is just as important in a spiritual sense - indeed more important, because even more spiritual - immeasurably more important than the material science that has progressed from stage to stage since the 16th century. Just as his Archangeloi companion once gave science to the world, so Michael will give us spiritual knowledge in the future, at the first beginning of which we now find ourselves. Just as Michael was sent as the messenger of Yahweh, the reflection of the Christ, 500 years before the Mystery of Golgotha, to make his mark on that era, so now for our time Michael has become the messenger of the Christ himself. Just as in ancient Hebrew times the ancient Hebrew initiates could turn to Michael as the external revelation of Yahweh or Jehovah, so now we are able to turn to Michael to receive increasing spiritual revelation from him over the next few centuries, which will reveal to us more and more of the Mystery of Golgotha. That which took place 2000 years ago, but which could only be made known to the world through the various Christian sects, and whose depths can only be revealed in the 20th century, when spiritual knowledge, the gift of Michael, will assert itself instead of science, is what should fill our hearts with immeasurably deep feelings towards the spiritual in our time. We shall be able to experience that in the last few decades (said 1913) a gate has opened through which understanding can come to us. [9]

Until 1879, Gabriel worked from the spiritual worlds. Since 1879 it has been the spirit we call Michael. In a certain way, he is the strongest of the leading spirits of the times who have always replaced each other. The others were primarily spiritually active in the spiritual realm. Michael has the strength to push the spirit through into the physical world. One might say comparatively: What gold is among the metals, Michael is among the spirits belonging to the hierarchy of the Archangeloi. Just as all other metals have a preferential effect on the etheric body, but gold also has an effect on our physical body as a medicine, so all other leading spirits have an effect on the soul. Michael, on the other hand, is the one who can simultaneously work on the physical mind, on physical reason. (For example) because he was not the actual guiding spirit in the 15th century, he had to seek his way (as inspirer) with the Virgin of Orleans without the human intellect, without human understanding, without human imagination, a completely inner path, so to speak, through the most intimate human soul forces. The Christ worked on the Virgin of Orleans through his Michaelic spirit; but through everything else he could work rather than through the powers of understanding and reason. [10]

All beings are in an increasing development, and we live in the age when Michael, the supreme of the nature of the Archangeloi, passes over into the nature of the Archai. He will gradually pass over into a leading position, become a leading entity, become the spirit of the age, the leading entity for the whole of humanity. That is the significant, that is the tremendously important thing of our age, that we realize that what was not yet there in all previous epochs, was not there for all mankind, can now be, must become a good for all mankind. What has hitherto occurred among individual peoples - spiritual deepening - can now be something for the whole of humanity. [11]

In November 1879, beyond the sphere of the sensual world, in the supersensible, that which can be expressed in this way took place: Michael has conquered the power, when people come to meet him with all that lives in their souls, to penetrate them with his power in such a way that they can transform the old materialistic intellectual power, which until then had grown up in humanity, into spiritual intellectual power, into spiritual intellectual power. Since November 1879 Michael has reappeared, and he can be made active in human soul life if one seeks the paths to him. And today these paths are the paths of spiritual-scientific knowledge. But precisely since that time, when Michael entered into a relationship with human souls in this way, in order to become their direct inspirer for three centuries, the demonic counterforce has also set in most strongly, after it had previously prepared itself. [12]

The power that has led the human head out of animality to its present form is a Luciferic power. And the power which man is to perceive as divine must flow up into the human head from the nocturnal state of the rest of the organism. Thus lay that which man could know in pre-Christian times. The fact that the Christ-being dwelt in a human body that had passed through death caused something like a jolt to take place within the earth's development. The possibility first arose that man would gradually become capable of recognizing his creative divine powers during the day, during ordinary waking hours, that is, in the ordinary state of consciousness. The only reason why there is still error about this today is that the time that has elapsed since the Mystery of Golgotha has not yet sufficed to lead man, even during the waking hours of the day, to look into that world into which the prophets of the Old Testament were able to look in the times which they felt to be permeated by revelations of their ruler of the night, Yahweh, and his face of Michael. A period of transition was needed. But with the passing of the 19th century - all Oriental wisdom points out, but from a completely different point of view, the importance of this passing of the 19th century (see: Kali Yuga) - the time has come when men must recognize: Now the ability is latent in them, now the ability to awaken is ripe in them, to see through the day revelation that which was previously only conveyed in the night revelation through Michael. Michael is to turn a night spirit into a day spirit. For him, the Mystery of Golgotha means the transformation from a night spirit into a day spirit. [13] Just as Michael was to a certain extent the governor of Yahweh in earlier times, he will be the governor of the Christ, the Christ-impulse, through those functions which he received in 1879, which amount to creating spiritual bonds among men in place of the merely natural blood bonds. For only through spiritual bonds of togetherness will progress come into that which is in decline, which is entirely natural. [14]

Michael has undergone an elevation to a higher level, from the spirit of the people to the spirit of the times, in that he has become the messenger of the Christ from the messenger of Yahweh. He is the same being who set the tone for the preparation of the Mystery of Golgotha, and now in our time sets the tone for the understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha. Michael ascends from the rank of the Archangeloi to the rank of the Archai. The place is filled by another being who follows. [15] At the beginning of the forties of the 19th century, the Archangelos Michael gradually began to develop from a mere Archangelos into a spirit of the times (i.e. one of the Archai), to attain such a development that he could intervene in the lives of men not only from the standpoint of the Supermundane, but directly from the standpoint of the Earthly. The Archangelos Michael had to prepare himself to descend to earth itself, to live, so to speak, the great process of Christ Jesus himself, to live this great process: to take his starting point here on earth and to continue to work from the point of view of the earth. For this it was necessary that from the forties of the 19th century until the end of the seventies a preparation was made on the part of this spiritual being. And so one can then observe that these years represent a significant battle in the supernatural, but in that supernatural area which directly adjoins the earthly area. The spiritual entities that had to be fought by this Archangelos Michael, who became the spirit of the age, have always intervened in life, in the evolution of humanity. In the last millennia before the middle of the 19th century they had the task of differentiating people from the spiritual world. Those spiritual beings who are direct followers of the Archangeloi strive to bring people back to the group soul of humanity in a certain sense, to pour out unity over the whole of humanity. This would not have been possible if they had acted alone on humanity, which would have become blurred, as it were, into something indistinguishable, would present only one species, just as the animal species is basically only one, only on a somewhat higher level. These spiritual entities, which the Michaelic principle had to combat, are those who had the task of bringing differentiation into humanity, of dividing the uniform human race into races, into peoples, into all those differences which are connected with the blood, with the nerves, with the temperament. They can be called ahrimanic entities, but one must be clear about the fact that this ahrimanic principle was necessary in the entire course of human development. [16]

That which is always represented by a meaningful symbol has taken place, albeit on a different level. The symbol also refers to other stages of development, for things repeat themselves again and again on the various stages, and what I am telling you now is only a repetition on a certain stage of an event that has taken place on other stages. It is what is represented by the symbolism of the defeat of the dragon by the archangel Michael (see: Michael and the dragon). This defeat of the dragon by the archangel Michael, which means that the opposing powers have been expelled from the realm in which the archangel Michael rules, took place in a certain area from the beginning of the forties (of the 18th century). Certain spiritual entities, which until then had had their task in the spiritual world to differentiate mankind into races and peoples, were - if I may use this expression - thrust from heaven to earth. These same spiritual entities no longer have any power in the area bordering on the earthly world. They have been thrust among men, have been thrust among men on earth with everything they could bring with them. And so, since the end of the seventies, we have had a twofold problem. On the one hand, for those of whom one could say that they are of good will - if one understands the expression in the conditional sense - we have, since the year 1879, the rule of the spirit of the age Michael on earth, which enables one to acquire spiritualized concepts, a spiritualized spiritual life. And on earth we have the opposing spirits who tempt us to deny the spirituality of the present. If one fights against the materialism of the present, one should always be aware that one should not fight against the good of our age, but that one is fighting against the lies of our age. For they are essentially lying spirits which have been thrust from heaven to earth, those spirits which, for the time being, also as spirits of obstacles, prevent the spiritual from being sought precisely in the comprehension of natural existence. [17]

Everything that happens in the world order also has its good side. By driving the ahrimanic powers into us through the victory of Michael, we again conquer a piece of human freedom. Everything is connected with this, for these hosts of Ahriman have entered us all. We conquer a piece of human freedom, but we must be aware of it. In a sense, we must not allow the Ahrimanic powers to gain the upper hand over us, we must not fall in love with these Ahrimanic powers. [18]

Sources:

[1] GA 272: Spiritual Scientific Explanations of Goethe's "Faust" Volume I: Faust, the Striving Man (1910-1915)

[2] GA 102: The Influence of Spiritual Beings on Man (1908)

[3], [12] GA 195: World New Year's Eve and New Year's Thoughts (1919/1920)

[4], [13] GA 194: The Mission of Michael. The Revelation of the Real Secrets of the Human Being (1919)

[5] - [9], [11], [15] GA 152: Preliminary Stages to the Mystery of Golgotha (1913/1914)

[10] GA 157: Human Fates and the Fates of Nations (1914/1915)

[14], [18] GA 177: The Spiritual Backgrounds of the Outer World. The Fall of the Spirits of Darkness (1917)

[16], [17] GA 174a: Central Europe between East and West (1914-1918)

Michael - Task

It is Michael's task to lead man back along the paths of the will to where he has come from, since he has descended along the paths of thinking from the experience of the supersensible (in the old clairvoyance) to that of the sensible with his earthly consciousness. [1] Michael goes upwards again on the paths that humanity has gone downwards on the stages of spiritual development up to intelligence activity. Only Michael will lead the will upwards along the paths which wisdom has followed downwards to its last stage, intelligence. [2] Michael foresees how man, by advancing more and more to the self-use of intelligence, must meet with the ahrimanic beings and how he can then fall prey to them by entering into a union with them. Therefore Michael brings the ahrimanic powers under his feet, he continually pushes them into a deeper realm than that in which man unfolds himself. Michael, the dragon at his feet, pushing him into the abyss: this is the powerful image of the supersensible facts described here, living in human consciousness. [3] Michael does not enter the physical world as an apparition. With all his activity he remains within a supersensible region which, however, borders directly on the physical world of the present phase of world development. Thus the possibility can never arise that through the impressions which men receive from the Michael-being, they would like to lead the view of nature into the fantastic or to form the moral-practical life in a God-formed, but God-unliving world, as if impulses could be there which would not have to be carried ethically-spiritually by man himself. One will always have to approach Michael, whether thinking or willing, by placing oneself in the spiritual. If it were otherwise: if Michael worked in such a way that he carried his deeds into the world, which man must presently recognize and experience as physical, then man would experience in the present from the world that which in reality is not in it, but was. If this happens, then this illusory grasp of the world leads the human soul from its appropriate reality into another, namely into a Luciferian one. [4] It is uplifting to see how through Michael man's being is lifted up into the spiritual sphere, while the unconscious, the subconscious, which unfolds under the sphere of freedom, grows ever deeper together with the material. Man's position in relation to the world being will furthermore become more and more incomprehensible to him if he does not allow himself to recognize not only his relationship to natural beings and natural processes but also such relationships as that to the Michael mission.

One gets to know the relationship to nature like something one looks at from the outside; that to the spiritual world proceeds from something that is, so to speak, an inner conversation with a being to which one has opened access by entering into a spiritual view of the world. In order to be able to live out the impulses of freedom, man must therefore be able to keep away from this being certain effects of nature which have an effect on his being from within the cosmos. This keeping away takes place in the subconscious mind when the forces are at work in the conscious mind which represent the life of the ego in freedom. For the human inner perception the consciousness of working in freedom is there; for the spiritual beings who are in contact with man from other spheres of the world it is different. The being from the Hierarchy of the Angeloi, which has to do with the continuation of the human being from earth-life to earth-life, immediately becomes aware of this in relation to human action in freedom: man pushes away from himself cosmic forces which want to train him further, which want to give his ego-organization the necessary physical supports, as they gave it before the Michael-age. Michael, as a being from the Hierarchy of the Archangeloi, receives his impressions with the help of the beings from the Angeloi Hierarchy. He devotes himself to the task of supplying man with forces from the spiritual part of the cosmos in the manner described here, which can replace those suppressed from the natural existence. He achieves this by bringing his activity into the most perfect harmony with the Mystery of Golgotha. In the activity of the Christ within the development of the earth lie the forces which man needs in working through freedom to balance suppressed natural impulses. - Only then must man really bring his soul into inner coexistence with Christ. [5] In his work,

Michael stands between the Luciferic world view and the Ahrimanic world view. With him, the world view becomes wisdom-filled world revelation, which reveals the world mind as divine world activity. In this world work lives the Christ's care for humanity, which can thus reveal itself to the human heart from Michael's world revelation. [6]

Sources:

[1] - [6] GA 26: Anthroposophical Guiding Principles. The Path of Knowledge of Anthroposophy - The Michael Mystery (1924/1925)

Michael - Battle in the astral world

If, in the course of this 20th century, the spiritual eyes of certain souls were opened clairvoyantly - and this will happen - to what lives in the etheric world, they would be disturbed by those etheric bodies (of the deceased) that are spreading from Western Europe. The spiritual gaze would fall on them first, and the form of the Christ would be seen in an incorrect way. Therefore Michael must fight a battle in Europe. He must contribute something so that these Western European rigid etheric bodies are dissolved in the etheric world. For this he must take those etheric bodies that like to dissolve, the etheric bodies in the East, and must fight with them against the West. The effect of this is that since 1879 a mighty struggle has been going on in the astral world between Russian and Western European etheric bodies, and this struggle is raging through the whole astral world. [1] And so we see the spirit Michael and in his wake a number of Russian souls fighting for the purity of the spiritual horizon and in fierce battle with the souls who have come from the West, bringing up sharply defined fantasy images. They must be dispersed, dissolved. We have seen this struggle between East and West prepared since the last third of the 19th century, a fierce struggle which is intended to serve the progress of mankind, and which consists in the fact that spiritually the European East is fighting against the European West, that spiritual Russia is waging a fierce spiritual struggle against spiritual France. [2]

The event of the appearance of the Christ (in the etheric world) can only be brought about when the reign of Michael spreads more and more. This is still a process in the spiritual world. As it were, Michael is fighting for the approach of the Christ on the plane adjacent to our world. He needs his hosts, his fighters for this. Now important fighters are supplied to him from those souls who have passed through a Russian body in the present incarnation, because they are predisposed within themselves to identify with their Angelos. This makes them particularly suitable to bring about the powers to give the image in purity through which the Christ is to appear. So that he does not appear in a false form, in a subjective imagination of humanity, so that he appears in the right image, Michael must fight the battle. He can fight it especially through those souls who naturally carry this Angelic consciousness within them. Thus they are especially prepared. Also because their etheric body dissolves particularly easily, they have nothing in their etheric body that would allow the Christ to appear in a false form, in false imaginations. In order for all that is to happen in the world to happen correctly, various members of the world order must work together. Now, in order that this may happen, a peculiarity must be combated which is more prevalent in the West, especially in the souls who have passed through a French incarnation. These souls receive from their nationality the peculiarity of strongly holding on to their etheric body, of holding on to a very definite imaginary form in the etheric body for a long time. This cannot be combated by the Western souls (after death) alone, but these Western souls, one might say, must be helped, work must be done to disperse these etheric bodies in the general world ether, so that a false image of the Christ-appearance is not evoked. Where there is a high culture, a culture that is as pronounced and has reached its peak as in France, the soul has adopted certain imaginations. These imaginations remain after death, but they prevent something completely new from coming, which must come through the Christ. [3]

Sources:

[1] GA 159: The secret of death. The Nature and Meaning of Central Europe and the European Folk Spirits (1915)

[2] GA 174a: Central Europe between East and West (1914-1918)

[3] GA 158: The connection of the human being with the elementary world. Kalewala - Olaf Åsteson - The Russian people - The world as the result of equilibrium effects (1912-1914)

Michael - future face of Christ

Michael, the spirit who lived in the sun, who was the most important servant of the Christ-spirit in the sun, experienced the Mystery of Golgotha from the other side. Mankind on earth experienced the Mystery of Golgotha in such a way that they saw the Christ arrive. Michael and his own, who were still in the sun at that time, experienced it in such a way that they had to say farewell to the Christ. You have to let the two poles of this all-encompassing cosmic event affect your soul: the hosanna on earth, the arrival of the Christ on earth, and the farewell to the multitudes of Michael up on the sun. They belong together.

But Michael experienced a great metamorphosis precisely in our age. The beginning of his reign means a following of Christ down to earth and in the future will mean an advancement before the deeds of Christ on earth. We will again learn to understand what it means: Michael goes before the Lord. As in the Old Testament - before Oriphiel there was also a Michael time - the initiates of Asia over there spoke of Michael going before Yahweh, as the face as the foremost part of a man goes before him, so they spoke of Michael as the face of Yahweh, and so we must learn to speak of Michael as the face of Christ. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 346: Lectures and Courses on Christian Religious Work, V. Apocalypse and Priestly Work (1924)

Michael - School

At the beginning of the 15th century something came into being under the guidance of Michael - we must use earthly expressions - which could be called a supersensible school. That which had once been Michael-mystery, that which had been proclaimed to the initiates in the old Michael-mysteries, that which now had to be changed because the intelligence from the cosmos had found its way to earth, was summarized in tremendously significant features by Michael himself for those whom he now gathered in this supersensible Michael-school. Everything that had once lived in the solar mysteries as Michael-wisdom came to life again in the supersensible worlds. There was then summarized in a grandiose way what had been Platonism in its Aristotelian continuation and had been brought over to Asia and down to Egypt by Alexander the Great. It was explained how the old spirituality still lived in there. All the souls who were always connected with that current, those souls who were predestined to belong to the anthroposophical movement, to shape their karma for the anthroposophical movement, took part in that supersensible school of teaching. For everything that was taught there was taught from the point of view that the Michael-like must now be formed in a different way in the development of humanity below, through the human soul's own intelligence. It was pointed out how, at the end of the 19th century, Michael himself would take up his reign again on earth, how a new Michael age, which would have to be different from the others, would begin. For these other Michael ages were just such that the cosmic intelligence always lived itself out in the general human. But now - as Michael then said to his disciples in the supersensible - the Michael Age will be something quite different. That which Michael has administered for mankind through the eons, that which he inspired into earthly existence, has disappeared from him. He will find it again when he takes up his reign on earth at the end of the seventies of the 19th century. He will find it again in that an intelligence initially stripped of spirituality will have taken hold among the people below; but he will find it again in such a way that it is exposed to the strongest degree to the ahrimanic forces. In the last third of the 19th century the earlier cosmic intelligence had become earthly, there was Ahriman, who wanted to make this intelligence completely earthly, so that it would become continuous in the way it had been introduced in the Gabrielic Age. This intelligence was to become entirely earthly, only a matter of generational succession, a matter of reproductive powers. Ahriman wanted all this. Michael descended to earth. He could only find again on earth that which once had to take its course in the meantime, so that men might come to intelligence and freedom, so that he must now seize it on earth, so that within the earth he again becomes ruler over the intelligence, but which now works within mankind. Ahriman against Michael, Michael put into the necessity to defend against Ahriman what he administered through eons in favor of mankind - in this struggle mankind stands within. [1]

Now, in the last third of the 19th century, especially in the last decade, only a thin veil concealed the dominion, the whole struggle, the whole factual context of Michael. Since then it has been the case that Michael is, so to speak, fighting in the outer world. There it is a question of needing a much stronger power to see what is there supersensibly than before the end of the Kali Yuga, than in the previous century, when, as I said, the next world was hidden by a thin veil, when Michael fought even more behind the scene. In this supersensible school of teaching of the 15th, 16th, 17th centuries, in that supersensible cult at the beginning of the 19th century, numerous hosts of necessary Luciferic figures, necessary for the whole context, continually play in among the spirits who are involved in it. Michael has necessary Luciferic figures who work together to overcome the polar opposition, to overcome Ahriman. So that the Michael-men are already placed in - one cannot perhaps say a struggle, but in a turmoil of interaction between Luciferic impulses and Ahrimanic impulses. These things became apparent with great certainty towards the end of the last century. There it was not so rare that one could see through this veil, as I have called it. Then one saw how strongly Michael had to fight against Ahriman, and how easy it was to have one's consciousness diverted by all kinds of Luciferic influences. [2]

In the 8th century after Christ, those who were around Michael saw how the substance that Michael had preserved until then was now down on earth. But now a special time occurs, a time which shows us Michael, the most outstanding Archangelos of the Sun, within this Sun in such a way that he knows his administration of the cosmic intelligence has departed from the Sun; that he knows: the affairs are also ordered which can continue the further development of this intelligence on Earth. This time occurs approximately in the 16th, 17th century after Christ. There Michael is, so to speak, free from his earlier duties in the cosmos. But now that Gabriel was exercising his rule, Michael was in the special position of not being able to participate in earthly affairs from the sun. This is a very special situation for a leading Archangelos: to see that his activity, which had been carried out over long periods of time, had, so to speak, ceased. And so it came about that Michael said to his own: "It is necessary that we look for a special task, a task within the solar region, for the time in which we cannot send impulses to earth. This was something that stood out, so to speak, from all the other regular activities among gods and humans. The souls connected with Michael - the leading human souls of Alexander's time, those of the great Dominican period and those who had gathered around them as less leading ones, and a large number of striving, developing human beings in association with leading spirits - they felt as if they had been torn out of the traditional connection with the spiritual world. [3]

A supersensible training now took place directly under the guidance of Michael from the 15th to the 18th century, and the world order chose Michael himself as its great teacher. The supersensible cult, which flowed into powerful imaginations in the first half of the 19th century, was preceded by a supersensible training for numerous human souls, a training whose results these human souls now carry within themselves, unconsciously. The result of this training comes out only because these human souls feel the urge to anthroposophy. And one can say: Once, at the end of the 15th century, Michael gathered his hosts of gods and men in the region of the sun and spoke to them in a speech that was extended over a long period of time, approximately as follows: Ever since the human race populated the earth in human form, there have been mysteries on earth: solar mysteries, Mercury mysteries, Venus mysteries, Mars mysteries, Jupiter mysteries, Saturn mysteries. Into these mysteries the gods have sent their secrets; there the suitable people have been initiated. So that people on earth could know what was going on on Saturn, Jupiter, Mars and so on, and how what was going on there affected the development of mankind on earth. In an instinctive old clairvoyant way, the initiates have absorbed what has come to them through impulses in the Mysteries. This has disappeared on earth - as Michael said to his own - except for a few traditions, it is no longer there. The impulses can no longer flow into the earth. Only in the most subordinate region, in the reproductive region, does Gabriel still have the power to allow the lunar influences to enter into the development of humanity. The old traditions have more or less disappeared from the earth and with them the possibility of cultivating the impulses that enter the subconscious and thus the various physicalities of human beings. But now we look back at everything that was once brought to people in the Mysteries like a gift from heaven, we survey this wonderful tableau, we look down into the course of time: We find there the Mystery Places, we see how the heavenly wisdom has flowed into these Mysteries, how men have been initiated by it, how just from our consecrated solar place the cosmic intelligence has descended upon men in such a way that the great teachers of mankind have had ideas, thoughts, concepts which were spiritual, but which were inspired into them from our consecrated solar place. We see this by looking back to ancient epochs of the earth, we see it gradually disappearing from the earth's development in the time of Alexander and its aftermath, and below we see the intelligence that has become earthly gradually spreading among human beings. But we have this sight which has remained with us: we look at the secrets into which the initiates of the Mysteries were once initiated. Let us bring them to our consciousness! Let us bring it to the consciousness of those spiritual beings who never appear around me in an earthly body, but only live in an etheric way. But let us also bring it to the consciousness of those souls who have often been on earth in earthly bodies, but who are here now and belong to the Michael community. Let us outline the great initiatic teaching which once streamed down to earth in the old way through the Mysteries, let us outline it before the souls of those who were intelligently connected with Michael. And there they "went through" - if I may use an earthly expression that sounds almost trivial in such a context - they went through the old initiatory wisdom. There was a large, comprehensive heavenly school. In it Michael taught what he could no longer administer himself. It was something monstrous, something that deeply disturbed the Ahrimanic demons on earth, especially from the 15th to the 18th century, something that caused them to become terribly agitated. [4]

While Michael was training his flocks above, a kind of subterranean Ahrimanic school was founded just below the surface of the earth. And if no impulses flowed down from Michael just at this time to inspire the intelligence celestially, if the intelligence on earth was initially left to itself, then the Ahrimanic hosts endeavored all the more to send impulses from below into the intelligent development of mankind. [5]

If the Michael thought becomes fully alive in 4 x 12 people, at least in the near future, who can be recognized as such not through themselves but through the guidance of the Goetheanum in Dornach, if in such 4 x 12 people leaders arise for the Michael festive mood, then we can look forward to the light that will spread in the future through the Michael current and Michael activity in humanity. [6]

"Pay attention to what comes to you as a question and how a question is formulated, more of the essence of a personality is revealed in this than in all other outer gestures and deeds and words. It all depends on the question. That is an ancient mystery. This is also the crucial significance of Dr. Wegman's question when she asked me about the new esotericism. She didn't just want to tie in with the old, she asked me the crucial Parzival question about the new esotericism. This question alone made it possible to establish the Michael School on earth. In this school lies the core of the future as a possibility." And with the following sentence you can still hear Steiner pleading softly today: "If only this could be understood by the members: as a possibility." [7]

Sources:

[1], [2] GA 237: Esoteric Observations on Karmic Connections - Third Volume. The karmic connections of the anthroposophical movement (1924)

[3] - [5] GA 240: Esoteric considerations of karmic connections - Sixth volume (1924)

[6] GA 238: Esoteric Observations on Karmic Connections - Volume Four. The spiritual life of the present in connection with the anthroposophical movement (1924)

[7] Po2: Thomas Meyer: Ludwig Polzer-Hoditz. A European (1994)

Michael in the course of the year

We have Michael as a cosmic spirit in autumn. Then he is at his highest, then he is in his cosmic culmination. Then his descent begins, and his forces permeate the earth in springtime, rise up, and they live in everything that becomes movement in man, that is the expression of the will in man, that makes man walk and grasp and work. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 229: The co-experience of the course of the year in four cosmic imaginations (1923)

Michael and the dragon

I want to describe the ideas that lived among enlightened spirits right up to the 18th century. Only by placing them before our souls in their historical form will we arrive at a new view of the extent to which these ideas could be renewed in another form. But then - so these people said to themselves - among these spirits, whose cosmic destiny it was actually to be decided in the will of the divine spirits, a number of such beings arose who wanted to cut off their will from the divine will, so to speak, who wanted to emancipate their will from the divine will. In a superhuman arrogance, beings arose who wanted to achieve this freedom of their will before the time had come for it to mature. And the most important, the leader of these beings was thought to be the being that then took shape in the dragon that Michael fought, the Michael who remained at the top in the realm of those spirits who wanted to continue to orient their will in the sense of the divine-spiritual will that stands above them. From this remaining in the divine-spiritual will arose in Michael the impulse to do the right thing with the being that had prematurely, if I may say so, reached for freedom. For the forms which the beings of the Hierarchy of the Archangeloi, Angeloi, Archai had were simply not appropriate to a being which was to have a free will emancipated from the Divine in the manner indicated. In addition, in the course of the development of the world, the form was only to emerge later, namely the human form. But all this is placed in a time when the human form was not yet possible in the context of the cosmos; even the higher animal forms were not yet possible, only those lower animal forms - (which are found today in their descendants in the gelatinous animals of the seas [1] ) - The opposing spirit had to be poured into it, so to speak. It could only be an animal form which differed from the animal forms possible in the physical world, but which, because it was supposed to represent a cosmic contradiction, became animal-like, the form of the dragon. Of course, it was then understood in this way by some and differently by others when it was to be painted or otherwise depicted; it will be depicted more or less accurately or even inaccurately, depending on whether the person depicting it has an inner imaginative insight into what was possible at that time for an entity that had developed an opposing will.

But this form is not among the forms that have become possible in the physical world in the animal kingdom up to man. It had to remain a supersensible one. But such a supersensible form could not be in that realm in which the beings of the higher hierarchies, Archangeloi, Angeloi and so on are, it had to be placed, so to speak, among those forms which could arise in the course of physical development. This is the fall of the dragon from heaven to earth. And so this form was transferred into the world, which is the physical world, but as a superphysical, supersensible one. When the soul's eye focuses on what is in the physical nature, it sees this contradictory figure of the adversary, the dragon. [2] Man absorbs external nature in three ways: by feeding himself, by breathing the air, by perceiving. This makes man a dual being. With his spiritual-soul being he is related to the beings of the higher hierarchies, and he must form a part of his being from what is present outside as nature. He takes this into himself. And by taking it in as nourishment, as respiratory stimulation, indeed even in that subtle etheric way in which it lives in the process of perception, it continues in man the processes that are seen outside in nature. This comes to life in the human being as instinct, as drive, as animal lust, as everything that rises from the depths of human nature as animalistic in the human being.

If man observes what lives outside in nature in the salts, what lives in the plants and in the animal components that then enter his own body, and observes what sprouts in the innocent green of the plants, and what is still present in a naive animalistic way in the animal body. Man now observes this, looking at it inwardly, as it wells up in him as the drives, as the animal, animalistic lusts, as animal instincts; he sees what nature becomes in him. This was the feeling that many of the most enlightened people in the 18th century still had. They still vividly felt the difference between nature outside and nature as it becomes when man consumes it, inhales it, perceives it. What lived there as a difference still stood in a wonderfully sharp vividness before many people who in the 18th century described to themselves and their students nature and man and the entanglement of nature and man in the conflict between Michael and the dragon. [3]

Outside in the world of minerals, in the world of plants, even in the world of animals, that dragon, which in its form contradicts nature, has not taken on any of the forms that natural beings have taken on. This dragon form cannot enter into a mineral, it cannot enter into a plant, it cannot enter into an animal, and it cannot enter into a physical human body. But it can enter into what has now become the outer innocent nature in the form of guilt in the surging life of instinct in the physical human body. And so many people in the 18th century still said to themselves: And the dragon, the old serpent, was thrown down from heaven to earth. But there he had no place at first. But then it erected its stronghold in the being of man, and so it is now entrenched in human nature. It must therefore be said that in man, in so far as he takes external nature into himself through nourishment, breathing and perception, the place for the dragon is created. The dragon dwells in human nature. In pre-human times Michael's dragon fight had to be transferred, so to speak, to the objective-external. So if Michael now wanted to continue his mission, which he had in pre-human times in the objective nature, where he had to defeat the dragon externally as the world beast, he now had to carry out his battle within the human nature. Michael's battle - for a long time, since ancient times, but until the 18th century - was transferred to the interior of man. But those who spoke in this way knew that they had now transferred into the inner being of man an event that was formerly a cosmic event. [4]

As I have now described it, it happened that the outer cosmic conflict of Michael with the dragon was transferred into the inner human being, because the dragon could only find its place in the human nature. Thus, however, it was precisely in the Michael problem that the germination of human freedom was laid, for man would have become a mere automaton if the struggle had continued within him just as it had previously been outside. By transferring the struggle into the interior of man, it became, to a certain extent taken externally in the abstract, a struggle of the higher against the lower nature in man. But for human consciousness it could only take on the form that led people to look up to the form of Michael in the supersensible worlds. And basically, even in the 18th century there were still numerous instructions for people, all of which amounted to how they could enter the sphere of Michael in order to fight the dragon existing in their own animal nature with the help of the Michael power within them. Such a person, who would have looked into the deeper spiritual life of the 18th century, would have had to be depicted like this: Outwardly the human form, in the lower animalistic part the dragon, writhing and even writhing around the heart. But then, behind the human being, so to speak - because the human being sees the higher with the back of his head - the outer cosmic form of Michael, towering, glorious, retaining his cosmic nature, but reflecting this nature within the human higher nature, so that the human being offers an etheric reflection in his own etheric body of the cosmic form of Michael. And then the power of Michael would have become visible in this human head, but working down to the heart, crushing the dragon so that his blood flows down from the heart into the limbs of the human being. This was the image that many people of the 18th century still carried around in their minds of Michael's inner human conflict with the dragon.

At the same time, this was the image that suggested to many people at that time how man had to defeat the lower, as it was called, with the help of the higher, how man needed the Michael-power for his own life. [5] An etheric image of Michael lives in man, which carries out the actual battle in man, whereby man can gradually become free in the Michael battle, because it is not Michael who carries out the battle, but human devotion and the image of Michael produced by it. In the cosmic Michael there still remains that being to whom man can look up and who initiated the original cosmic battle with the dragon. Truly, events do not just happen on earth. These events that happen on earth are basically incomprehensible to man if he cannot see them as images of events that happen in the supersensible world, if he cannot see the causes of them in the supersensible world. And so in the realm of the supersensible, shortly before our time, a Michael deed happened, that Michael deed which I would like to characterize in the following way. I must speak in a way that is frowned upon today as anthropomorphic, but how else could I relate it but by using human words for that which takes place in the supersensible world.

That time was thought to be far in the past, the pre-human time when Michael threw the dragon down to earth. But then man appeared on earth, and that is when what I have described occurred: Michael's inner human struggle with the dragon came more and more. It was just towards the end of the 19th century that Michael could say: Now the image has condensed in man in such a way that man can become inwardly aware of it, that he can now feel the dragon conqueror in his mind, at least feel something in the image. - In the development of mankind the last third of the 19th century truly means something extraordinarily important. In the earliest times there was at first only something like a thin image of Michael in man; it became more and more concentrated. In earlier times the invisible supersensible dragon was strong, working in the drives and instincts, in the desires and in the animalistic human lust; it remains sub-sensible to the ordinary consciousness, it lives in the animalistic part of man. There he lives inciting man to gradually make him subhuman, there he lives in everything that wants to pull man down. It was the case that Michael himself always intervened in human nature so that people would not become too degraded. But in the last third of the 19th century it was so that the image of Michael became so strong in man that it only depended, so to speak, on the good will of man to consciously raise himself upwards to the image of Michael, so that on the one side, as in the unenlightened emotional experience, the dragon image could present itself to him, and then on the other side, in spiritual vision and yet already for the ordinary consciousness, the luminous figure of Michael could stand before the soul's eye.

The content of the mind can then stand before the human being: There is a dragon power at work in me that wants to pull me down; I do not see it (but compare: centaur), I feel it as that which wants to bring me under myself. But in my mind I see the shining angel whose cosmic task it has always been to defeat the dragon. I concentrate my mind on this luminous figure, I let its light shine into my mind. - Then the mind thus enlightened and warmed will carry the power of Michael within it, and by free decision man will be able to defeat the dragon power in his sub-human through his alliance with Michael. If the good will were mustered in the widest circles to raise such an idea to a religious power and to inscribe it into every mind, then we would not have vague ideas in our present life, as we can find them everywhere today, as they appear as reform thoughts and the like, but then we would have something that can again inwardly grasp the whole human being, because such an idea can inscribe itself into the living mind, which at the moment when it now really becomes alive will also come into a living relationship with the whole cosmos. And those luminous thoughts of Michael would then be the first heralds of man's re-entry into the supersensible world. [6]

If we look back in our earthly development, we find the Michael deed, and the enlightenment of man with his reason is bound to this Michael deed (the fall of the Luciferian spirits). What occurs now, the sub-human entities (see: man of the future), which have in their main character an impulse that corresponds very strongly with the human will, with the human will-power, they come up, as it were, from below, while those hosts or powers overthrown by Michael came from above. And while these took possession of the human imagination, those take possession of the human willpower, unite with it and are beings generated from the realm of Ahriman. The human race will not be understood without taking these beings into consideration. And these beings, who, I would like to say, are pushed from behind - for behind them actually stands the Ahrimanic, which gives them their strong will-power, have thereby something in them which goes far beyond their own nature and being. Thus they show something in their appearance which, even when it captivates man, has a stronger effect, much stronger than that over which the weak man, if he does not strengthen himself through the spirit, can be master today. What is this multitude after? You see, just as the hosts that Michael cast down, these Luciferian hosts, set out for human enlightenment, for human reasoning, so these hosts set out for a certain penetration of the human will. And what do they want? They rummage, so to speak, in the deepest layer of consciousness, where man still sleeps awake today. Man does not realize how they enter his soul being, as well as his body being. But there they pull with their powers of attraction on everything that has remained Luciferic, that has not been christened through. They can reach that, they can seize it. [7]

Sources:

[1] - [6] GA 223: The Cycle of the Year as the Breathing Process of the Earth and the Four Great Festival Seasons. Anthroposophy and the Human Mind (1923)

[7] GA 194: The Mission of Michael. The Revelation of the Real Mysteries of the Human Being (1919)

Michael and the experience of Christ

Through Michael, man will find the right way into the supersensible in relation to external nature. The view of nature will, without being distorted in itself, be able to stand alongside a spiritual view of the world and of man, insofar as he is a world being. Through the right attitude towards Christ, man will experience that which he could otherwise only receive as a traditional revelation of faith in the living communication of the soul with Christ. The inner world of the soul's experience can be experienced as spiritually illuminated, just as the outer world of nature can be experienced as spirit-bearing. If the human being would want to gain insight into his own supersensible being without living together with the Christ-being, this would lead him out of his own reality - and into the ahrimanic one. Christ carries within himself the future impulses of humanity in a cosmically justified way. For the human soul, to connect with it means to take into itself its own future germs that are cosmically justified. Other beings that already have forms in the present that are cosmically justified for human beings only in the future belong to the ahrimanic sphere. Connecting with Christ in the right way also means protecting oneself from the ahrimanic in the right way. Thus in the future the Michael-experience and the Christ-experience can stand side by side; in this way man will find his right path of freedom between the Luciferic aberration in illusions of thought and life and the Ahrimanic allurement in future forms which satisfy his pride but which cannot yet be his present ones. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 26: Anthroposophical Guiding Principles. The Path of Knowledge of Anthroposophy - The Michael Mystery (1924/1925)

Michael and the dragon - St. George

We are all familiar with this symbol, which represents a supernatural being - be it the archangel Michael or St. George - kicking the dragon to death and overcoming it. This is the figurative representation of the third Christ-event: the archangel Michael or St. George, the later Nathanian boy Jesus, being infused with the Christ-entity. And the overcoming of the dragon means the suppression of that in human thinking, feeling and willing - that is, in the passionate nature of man - which would throw thinking, feeling and willing into confusion, into disorder. A good memory of this third Christ event, which took place towards the end of the Atlantean period, has remained in the mythical imagination. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 148: From Akashic Research. The Fifth Gospel (1913/1914)

Michael and the dragon in the Apocalypse

The spiritual experience of the Greco-Latin period was a spiritual repetition of the denser physical experience and events of the Atlantean period. And now we are in the age of the consciousness soul. The immediate soul experience in the aeriform-fluid has been extinguished. But, one might say, as if through a kind of catastrophe, with which the fifth, the post-Atlantean period has begun, the further development of the consciousness soul of humanity is being prepared. We are still somewhat stuck in the chaos of this development of the consciousness soul in relation to outer civilization. But it is precisely the dawn of the Michael Age that is to bring order into this chaos. This vision will consist in the fact that, just as memories come up in man, images will appear quite spiritually - no longer physically as in the Atlantean age, in the Greco-Latin age spiritually, but quite spiritually - something like mental mirage formations, especially after the appearance of the etheric Christ. A kind of inner mirage images will appear in people's thoughts, which will have a visionary character, but which will be fully conscious in the age of the consciousness soul. And just as in the desert, caused by the warmth (stratification) of the air, one sees the mirage (i.e. the mirrored sky as a lake) - it is caused by the (increased) warmth of the air (above the ground) - so the human thought will be carried to the understanding of that which is airy-fiery, airy-warmth-like.

In the Atlantean period, man perceives the divine in the solid-liquid, that is, more in the outer physical matter; in the fourth post-Atlantean, in the Greco-Latin period, man perceives the spiritual in the marvelous formations of the liquid-air form, and now - that is, in the fifth post-Atlantean period, where the consciousness soul will perceive it - we will experience how more and more that which is airy-fiery, that which is airy-warmth, will emerge in consciousness; This will allow that which the Greeks experienced psychically and which the inhabitants of Atlantis experienced physically to rise up before man in powerful spiritual images. A period is therefore imminent in the development of mankind in which, with the clarity of thought, visions will emerge about the earthly past and about the origin of man and all that is connected with it. This vision is the one where we, because it is so close to us, see the apocalyptic in our hearts.

For the vision that is imminent is what he hints at in the image: The woman clothed with the sun, the dragon under her feet, bearing a child Acts 12:1.

The priests who saw the birth of the Christ as a male being in the sun in the middle of the Atlantean period had previously seen a female being in the sun. This is the significant change that took place in the middle of the Atlantean period, that before the middle of the Atlantean period the cosmic woman was seen within the spiritual sun aura, "the woman clothed with the sun". This is really that which at that time corresponded to events in the Supermundane, in heaven: "the woman clothed with the sun, who then gives birth to a child". This image (then) took on the most diverse forms: Isis with the Horus child, the Christ-bearing woman with the Christ-child; these things lived wonderfully deeply just in the Greco-Latin age (whose end was only 1412) in many metamorphoses that are still traditionally preserved.

Today, when we have become such tenderlings with regard to spiritual experience, we cannot even fathom how turbulent and stormy people's spiritual experiences were in earlier times. For in comparison with the fact that the I was given to man from the cosmos, man at that time on earth felt in such a way that everything that had been his former nature now became a different one. Formerly he was essentially dependent on his astral body, on that which lay in the astral, and this worked in the soul-spiritual in such a way that during this old time man had the idea: Here stands man, up there is the sun, the I is not yet there, but from the sun the astral works down. Man carries the astral body within him from the sun, the astral body which is not yet dominated by the ego, which inwardly still carries refined but animal-like emotions - now he has become a completely different man, the one who has become an ego, who previously was only permeated by the astral body. It all came from the sun. In the solar being man felt the origin of that which seethed as emotions in his own astral body, but also everything that gave man his soul and spiritual being in general. The next phase, as the sun was later seen: Clearly emerging, the countenance becoming clearer, assuming the figure of a woman, still indistinctly that which is to bring man mastery through the ego. The space becomes smaller and smaller, that which winds itself animalistically down there; finally the time comes when the woman is there in the sun, gives birth to the child, and under the woman's feet is now that which was there earlier (as a whole), that is, where the woman giving birth to the ego shows from the sun the image of dominating the dragon: the astral world of the earlier epoch, which is now under her feet. At that time Michael's conflict with the dragon began in the sun, and this led to the fact - as could certainly be seen in physical manifestation - that everything that was there in the sun slowly moved towards the earth and became earth-ingredient earth-content, thereby dominating man in his unconscious, while the ego moved more and more into his consciousness. [1]

This picture becomes weaker and weaker the more the Atlantean development advances. And at the end of the Atlantean development the new continents arise out of the sea, the continents which contain the forces through which the people of the post-Atlantean time came into their various aberrations. Out of the sea rises the beast with the seven heads (Acts 13:1) and sevenfold land rises out of the sea, drawing man down through that which spiritually emanates from his emotions from the earth. In the form of this seven-headed beast rising out of the sea, the Atlantean catastrophe also appears to the apocalypticist, and it will appear again in the future when that which the apocalypticist points to occurs again in the Michaelic Age. The events of which the apocalypticist speaks are quite real and concern us greatly with regard to the spiritual life of mankind. [2]

Sources:

[1] & [2] GA 346: Lectures and Courses on Christian Religious Work, V. Apocalypse and Priestly Work (1924)

Michael and the cosmic intelligence - sunspots

In the year 869 at the 8th General Ecumenical Council in Constantinople, it was dogmatically stated that the old view of the trichotomy - that man consisted of body, soul and spirit - was heretical, that man had only body and soul, except that the soul had some spiritual qualities. While this was taking place in the objective, that intelligence was being transferred to individual human beings, it was decreed on earth - in such a sealing manner that no one who stood in European civilization could dare to contradict it - that the trichotomy was wrong, was heretical. Thus something had happened on earth of which one could only say in the Michael realms: Now the conviction will enter the souls of men that the spiritual is a property of the soul, that the spiritual is not the divine that rules in the progress of the development of mankind. I said that the cosmic intelligence had descended to the individual human being. But that is only an abstraction.

What is intelligence? Of course, one must not imagine, when one ascends to the higher realms, that one grasps intelligence there in the same way as one grasps trees and bushes here in the physical world. Such generalities do not exist in reality, of course. Intelligence is the mutual rules of behavior of the higher hierarchies. What they do, how they behave towards each other, how they are towards each other, that is cosmic intelligence. And since we as human beings naturally have to consider the realm closest to us, cosmic intelligence becomes concrete for us: the sum of entities from the Angeloi hierarchy. When we speak in concrete terms, we cannot speak of a sum of intelligence, but of a sum of Angeloi: that is the reality. The fact that in the year 869 the Church Fathers (or rather the Council Fathers) discussed whether one should speak of spirit was the result of a number of Angeloi beings separating themselves from the Michael realm with which they had formerly been, and placing themselves under the view that they now have to deal only with the earth forces, that they have to carry out the guidance of men only from earth forces. The Angeloi are those beings who guide human beings from earth life to earth life, who make the individual earth lives into a coherent chain of the total life of human beings. The fate of human beings could not possibly remain unaffected by such behavior.

How is it that it suddenly occurs to a number of Michael-Angeloi to leave the Michael realm? You see, there is indeed an underlying cosmic fact: everything that is addressed as a physical planet is a collection of spiritual entities. Now there is a certain opposition - which has always existed since there has been an earth evolution - between the intelligences of all the planets and the solar intelligence. And it has always been the case that the solar intelligence was preferably under the rule of Michael, whereas the other planetary intelligences were under other Archangeloi: Mercury - Raphael, Venus - Anael, Mars - Samael, Jupiter - Zachariel, Moon - Gabriel, Saturn - Oriphiel. The cosmic intelligence is co-administered by the individual beings of the Archangeloi Hierarchy, but above all of them together Michael always reigns, so that the entire cosmic intelligence is administered by Michael. All human intelligence derives from Michael in the Sun. Now when these centuries came up, the 8th, 10th century, it just happened that the planetary intelligences took account of the fact that the earth had changed, that the sun had also changed.

What is going on out there, what the astronomers describe, is only the outside. You know: Every 11 years or so we have a sunspot period; the sun shines on the Earth in such a way that certain places are dark, that certain places are spotty. It wasn't always like this. In very ancient times the sun shone down as a uniform disk, there were no sunspots. And after thousands and thousands of years the sun will have many more spots than it does today - it will become more and more spotted. This is always the outward manifestation of the fact that the Michael force, the cosmic force of intelligence, is diminishing more and more. In the increase of the sunspots through the cosmic development the decay of the sun shows itself; more and more the becoming dull, the aging of the sun in the cosmos shows itself. And when a sufficient number of sunspots appeared, the other planetary intelligences recognized that they no longer wanted to be ruled by the sun. They decided that the earth would no longer be dependent on the sun, but directly on the entire cosmos. This happens through the planetary councils of the Archangeloi. Especially under the leadership of Oriphiel this emancipation of the planetary intelligence from the solar intelligence takes place. It was a complete separation of world forces that had previously belonged together. The solar intelligence of Michael and the planetary intelligences gradually came into cosmic opposition to each other. [1]

Yes, even if we ascribe to the Beings of the Hierarchy of the Angeloi a quite different kind of soul-power, the constitution of the inner being - we must also ascribe to them decisions, considerations about what happens. We human beings do not decide otherwise than to look at the things that happen externally, to let the facts speak for themselves, and to do this or that under the influence of the facts. It is only that between birth and death the facts of the earth are decisive for us. For the Beings of the Hierarchy of the Angeloi such facts are decisive as these, that there is a division going on in planetary life. One group turned to the earth-intelligence and thus at the same time to the planetary intelligence; the other group remained faithful to the Michael-sphere in order to carry into all the future that which Michael administers as the eternal. Now this is something decisive, whether Michael is able to carry into all the future that which is eternal in his work, now that all power is among men, when that which appears in the physical sun becomes darker and gradually disappears. Thus we see, caused by cosmic events, a division among the Angeloi who were formerly united with Michael. But these beings form the karmic development. And now consider the whole thing as it takes place in the life between death and new birth. It is not the case that every human soul can walk alone, nor that every Angelos who leads the human beings can walk alone, but that the hierarchy of the Angeloi works together. Karma is lived out in the interaction. [2] And the chaos of recent history, which brings more and more social and other chaos, cultural chaos into recent history, which does not allow a goal to be reached, is the disorder into which karma has been brought because a split has occurred in the hierarchy of the Angeloi belonging to Michael. [3]

Sources:

[1] - [3] GA 237: Esoteric Observations on Karmic Connections - Third Volume. The karmic connections of the anthroposophical movement (1924)

Michael and the experience of ideas

When man is once again able to experience ideas within himself, even if he does not lean on the sensory world with them, then brightness will once again flow towards the view into the extraterrestrial cosmos. But this means getting to know Michael in his realm. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 26: Anthroposophical Guiding Principles. The Path of Knowledge of Anthroposophy - The Michael Mystery (1924/1925)

Michael and intellectuality

However, Michael has never appropriated intellectuality. He administers it as a divine-spiritual power by feeling connected to the divine-spiritual powers. In this way, by penetrating intellectuality, he also reveals the possibility of being an expression of the heart, of the soul, just as well as of the head, of the spirit. For Michael carries within him all the original powers of his gods and those of man. As a result, he does not transfer anything cold and soulless to intellectuality, but stands with it in a warm, soulful way. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 26: Anthroposophical Guiding Principles. The Path of Knowledge of Anthroposophy - The Michael Mystery (1924/1925)

Michael and intelligence

The Luciferic power is actually intimately connected with the special kind of intelligence which man today still regards essentially as his actual intelligence, which he prefers to use as his intelligence. And yet, this intelligence has only been assigned to man by the fact that that higher being, of whom I have spoken as the Michael being, has cast Luciferic spirits down into the sphere of man and thereby the intelligent impulse has actually come in. You can feel what this intelligent impulse means in humanity if you consider the impersonal element of human intelligence that is still present. Not true, we humans have many personal interests. We meet each other with our personal interests, and with regard to our personal interests we are individualized. But this individualization stops at intelligence. In terms of intelligence, in terms of logic, we, all human beings, have the same thing and reckon with this same thing. We would not have this same thing if the Luciferic influence, mediated by Michael, had not been exerted on humanity. We understand each other in this simple way only by the fact that we have a common intelligence, only by the fact that the common intelligence comes from the Luciferic spirituality. Now, this Luciferic spirituality has arisen because Michael has, so to speak, permeated and influenced people with the Luciferic entity. Today, this Luciferic spirituality, which we call our intelligence, is still perceived in the widest circles as what actually characterizes human beings. [1]

Today, a person is called clever if he can produce thoughts on his own, if he can think logically, if he can relate one thought to another and so on. Independently generated thoughts did not exist in ancient times. Thoughts were sent down to earth at the same time as the revelations that came to us from the spiritual world. One did not think, but received the spiritual content through revelation, but one received it in such a way that the thoughts were there. Today we think about things; in those days the spiritual impressions brought the thoughts with them. The thoughts were inspired thoughts, not self-conceived thoughts. And the one who ordered the cosmic intelligence, which came to mankind in this way with the spiritual revelations, who in particular had, so to speak, dominion over this cosmic intelligence, that was Michael, he had the administration of the cosmic intelligence in the cosmos.

You just have to realize what that means. For even if in a somewhat different context of ideas, people like Alexander the Great, for example, had a clear awareness that his thoughts came to him in the way of Michael. Certainly, the corresponding spiritual entity was called something else. We are using Christian terminology here (as Michael). Such a man as Alexander the Great saw himself as nothing other than a missionary of Michael, as an instrument of Michael. He could not think otherwise than that: Michael actually acts on earth, and I am the one through whom he acts. That was the view. That also gave him the power of will to act. And a thinker at that time could not think any differently than this: Michael works in him and gives him the thoughts.

Connected with the descent of the Christ to earth was the fact that Michael and his followers not only saw the Christ's departure from the sun, but above all saw how his dominion over the cosmic intelligence was gradually slipping away. At that time one could see quite clearly from the sun that things would no longer come to man from the spiritual world with their intelligent content, but that man himself would one day have to attain his intelligence on earth. Michael sensed how the dominion over cosmic intelligence was slipping away from him. If you looked at the earth, you could see how this intelligent age began from the 8th, 9th century and how people began to form their own thoughts. [2]

The whole scholasticism is a struggle of people for clarity about the incoming intelligence. No wonder that the main interest of those who were around Michael turned precisely to what was unfolding on earth as scholasticism. We see in what Thomas Aquinas and his disciples, what other scholastics assert, the earthly manifestation of what was then the Michael current: the administration of the luminous, the spiritual intelligence. [3]

Behind what took place historically in human souls at the beginning of the 15th century, there is something powerful. This became apparent just as the Michael disciples (see: Michael School) were receiving their teachings in the supersensible. Finally, during the Atlantean period, when the cosmic intelligence had remained cosmic but had taken possession of the human heart, something similar happened, which for the present region, the earthly region, was again discharged in spiritual lightning and thunder. In the age that now experienced the earthly upheavals, in which the Rosicrucians spread, in which all kinds of strange things happened, which you could follow in history, in this age the earth appeared to the spirits in the supersensible to be ravaged by mighty thunderbolts and lightnings. That was when the seraphim, cherubim and thrones transferred the cosmic intelligence into that part of the human organization which is the nerve-sense organization, the head organization. Again an event took place which is not yet clearly visible today, which will only become apparent in the course of centuries and millennia, and which consists in the complete transformation of the human being.

Man was previously a man of the heart. Afterwards, man has become a man of the head. Intelligence becomes his own intelligence. Seen from the supernatural, this is something tremendously significant. The reign of Michael begins again at the end of the seventies. Michael prepares to receive again down on earth the intelligence that has disappeared from him in the meantime. This intelligence must become Michaelic. And the meaning of the new Michael age must be understood. Those who come today with the urge to such spirituality, which already contains the intelligence in itself, as is the case in the anthroposophical movement, they are today, so to speak, souls who are there according to their karma in the present age, who have to observe on earth what is happening on this earth in the beginning Michael age. Only by uniting such a spirituality, as it wants to flow through the anthroposophical movement, with other spiritual currents, will Michael find those impulses which will reunite him with the intelligence which has become earthly and which actually belongs to him. [4]

Sources:

[1] GA 194: The Mission of Michael. The Revelation of the Real Mysteries of the Human Being (1919)

[2] - [4] GA 237: Esoteric Observations on Karmic Connections - Third Volume. The karmic connections of the anthroposophical movement (1924)

Michael and Logoi

The first force, the unmanifest deity, is also called the Father; the second force is the Son, who is both life and creative substance, and the third force is the Spirit. Together, these three elemental forces thus appear as Father, Son and Spirit, as consciousness, life and form. The power of life is under the direction of Michael, who belongs to the sun, the power of form is under the direction of Samael, who belongs to the volcano, where all life will be transformed into living forms. The power of consciousness is under the direction of Anael, who encompasses all that there is. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 89: Consciousness - Life - Form. Basic Principles of Spiritual Scientific Cosmology (1903-1906)

Michael and reason

The spiritual power which - after the human development had gone through Saturn, sun and moon development and the earth development had begun - organized the Luciferic being into the human main formation, that is the Michael power. "And he cast down his opposing spirits to the earth", that is, through this casting down of the Luciferic spirits opposing Michael, man was first imbued with his reason, with that which springs from the human head. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 194: The Mission of Michael. The Revelation of the Real Mysteries of the Human Being (1919)

Michael community on earth and the separation of the world of the Angeloi

Let us take the case that the karma is such that some personality is now seized by the anthroposophical impulses in the most eternal sense, seized with heart and mind, I would like to say, with spirit and soul. Then, yes, then something is necessary which sounds decidedly strange, paradoxical; but it is necessary: then his Angelos must learn something. The fate that takes place between anthroposophists and non-anthroposophists throws its waves into the worlds of the Angeloi. This leads to a separation of spirits in the world of the Angeloi. The Angelos who accompanies the anthroposophist to the next incarnations learns to find his way deeper into the spiritual realms than he could before. And the Angelos who belongs to the other, who cannot enter at all, sinks down. While the formation of the Michael community is taking place here on earth, we can see above what is taking place here as the Michael community, ascending Angeloi, descending Angeloi. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 237: Esoteric Observations on Karmic Connections - Third Volume. The karmic connections of the anthroposophical movement (1924)

Michael's reign and preparation for incarnation

From ancient times of the earth's development it has been the case that the human being (in the life between death and a new birth) prepares his physical body as a spirit germ and then takes it over when he enters earthly existence. But since the reign of Christ Michael, man is increasingly being put in a position - at present there are few people, but more and more are to come - to make a decision before he descends to earth. For the light of spiritual knowledge shines in such a way that it illuminates this earth and the superphysical kingdom at the same time, so that man learns to make a decision through the Michael rule, when he has indeed already taken over his karma in his etheric body, but now starts the way to his physical body. If more and more spiritual knowledge is now spread on earth, and if the human being experiences more and more of this general love of mankind within himself, the following possibility will arise for future humanity before the descent into earthly life. Man will be able to say to himself: I have prepared this body; but by sending it down to earth and taking my karma into my etheric body, which I have contracted, I see that this karma lies in such a way that I have seriously harmed this or that other person through what I have accomplished in previous earthly lives. The judgment of what we have done to another person will shine particularly brightly at this moment when we are still in the etheric body, when we have not yet occupied the physical body. But that is also where the light of Michael and the love of Christ will work in the future. And we are put in a position to bring about a change in our decision to hand over the body we have prepared to another and to take over ourselves the body that has been prepared by the one we have particularly damaged. As a result, what we will be able to accomplish on earth will be able to balance itself out karmically in a completely different way than usual.

We will (therefore) be able to exchange our physical bodies as human beings. The earth could never reach its goal if this did not happen; otherwise humanity would never be able to become a whole on earth. There must come a time for earth evolution to prepare for future planetary states of the earth in which it is impossible for the individual to enjoy anything on earth at the expense of the other. A future must come over the earth in which the individual does not want to have happiness at the expense of the whole, in which he feels himself to be a member of the whole of humanity. But this has its spiritual equivalent in that we learn to prepare the physical body for others. So we emerge as human beings from a time in which everyone had a kind of continuity in relation to the physical body; we enter a time which is brought about by the Michael reign, where we also work on the physical spirit-germs of the human bodies in such a way that we can work one for the other. And in the course of the earth incarnations this will come about in such a way that through this mutual work in the spiritual we will prepare a still later, coming time - if one expresses its essence, it will be a complete paradox, but it is nevertheless so - where men can also on earth enter with their souls into those bodies which they have particularly damaged, and can take over the soul into their body. This will happen when the earth itself has passed into other states. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 218: Spiritual Connections in the Formation of the Human Organism (1922)

Michael's reigns

As already mentioned, Michael was the greatest, the most powerful, the most significant (leader), so that such an epoch as that of Michael is always the most significant or one of the most significant that can occur in the evolution of mankind. [1] If we now go back in the development of mankind and ask ourselves: What is the next Michael age, the one that lies behind ours? - we come to that age which found its conclusion with those cosmopolitan deeds which took place on the basis of the then most valuable Greek spiritual life through the Alexander campaigns to Asia. We see there how from the basis of the ancient development of civilization the urge arises to carry over to the Oriental peoples, to carry over to Egypt, to spread in a cosmopolitan way among all the peoples who were accessible to it, that which had been achieved in Greece - in little Greece - in terms of spiritual culture. And when the city of Alexandria blossomed in the north of Africa, this blossoming was in a certain sense the culmination of that Michael Age. That was the preceding Michael age. Then the other six Archangeloi come to rule. [2] Michael has reigned in the narrower sense since 1879, and in the broader sense since the middle of the 15th century. [3] Until 1879, the spirit we call Gabriel worked out of the spiritual worlds. [4]

Sources:

[1] GA 152: Precursors to the Mystery of Golgotha (1913/1914)

[2] GA 240: Esoteric Observations on Karmic Connections - Sixth Volume (1924)

[3] GA 179: Historical necessity and freedom. Influences of Fate from the World of the Dead (1917)

[4] GA 157: Fates of people and nations (1914/1915)

Michael impulse has a race-forming effect

Let us assume that an anthroposophist is close to a non-anthroposophist. Then it may be that he first has to make old karmic connections with the non-anthroposophist, or it may be the other case, that the non-anthroposophist has to make karmic connections with the anthroposophist for the future. These two cases are the only ones - of different kinds, of course - that I have been able to observe; there is nothing in between. But it is clear from this that it really is a time of great decisions: that either non-anthroposophists are worked upon in the sense that they come to the Michael Community, or that those who do not belong to the Michael Community are avoided by it. This is the time of the great decisions, that great crisis of which the holy books of all times speak and which is basically meant for our age. For that is precisely the peculiarity of Michael's impulses, that they become decisive. The people who in the present incarnation absorb the Michael impulses through anthroposophy, they prepare their whole being in such a way that it goes far into those forces which are otherwise determined merely by racial and ethnic connections. You see, when the last Michael rule was in Alexander's time, it was a question of spreading Greekness cosmopolitically, of carrying it everywhere. A tremendous amount happened through the Alexander campaign to equalize people, to spread something in common. But this could not yet reach so deeply because Michael was still administering the cosmic intelligence. Now intelligence is on earth. Now it is becoming profound, now it is intervening in the earthly aspects of human beings. The spiritual is preparing to become race-forming for the first time. And the time will come when one will no longer be able to say: man looks as if he belongs there, he is a Turk or an Arab or an Englishman or a Russian or a German; but one will have to say that in a previous life on earth man was urged to turn towards the spiritual in the Michaelic sense. So that what is influenced by Michael appears directly in a physical-creative, physical-forming way. [1]

Let us now imagine that these people meet again in a future incarnation - what happens to us in future incarnations is already being prepared in this incarnation -: then this meeting with people to whom we relate as I have characterized it above becomes such that it essentially increases the otherwise existing strangeness between people. For Michael also affects physical sympathies and antipathies. [2]

Sources:

[1] & [2] GA 237: Esoteric Observations on Karmic Connections - Third Volume. The karmic connections of the anthroposophical movement (1924)

Michaelmas time

In certain ancient times and among certain ancient peoples, the science of initiation consisted in the fact that those to be initiated learned to read in the world what is not given by dead letters written on paper, but what is given by the beings of the world themselves. Whoever understands the mysteries of the cosmos knows that what grows and flourishes on earth is definitely an image of what shines down from the stars from the cosmic expanses of the world. The ancient initiates of certain mysteries read to their disciples in such a way that they told them what they had learned under the inspiration of the so-called Year-God about the secrets of the course of the year and its significance for human life. The Year-God belonged to the order of primordial powers, Archai. He was a being to whom certain possessors of the science of initiation elevated themselves and in this elevation received from him the strength and inner light to read another from the plants sprouting in spring, to read another in the ripening of the summer fruits, to read another when the leaves turn red in autumn. This reading went on for a year, through spring, summer, fall and winter. [1] In all that one read there - a reading which at the same time was transformed into sensing - through all that one pondered there, one penetrated oneself with the secrets of the human astral body. And it was in the autumn time that the Inspired and Initiated of the Year-God read out of the essence of nature and together with him conceived the secrets of the human astral body. And it was in this autumn time that the initiates spoke to their disciples: Keep in mind that being who stands before the face of the sun - whom the name Michael still recalls - remember this being who stands before the face of the sun. You will need this strength when you have to pass through all that you retain in your astral being from your earthly existence, when you will have passed through the gate of death into the supersensible worlds. [2]

Sources:

[1] & [2] GA 219: The Relationship of the Star World to Man and of Man to the Star World. The Spiritual Communion of Humanity (1922)

Michaelmas time in man

The power that falls down to earth in the meteor stones, in the meteor iron, is that as world power with which the upper gods strive to defeat the ahrimanic powers when autumn approaches. And that which takes place spatially in majestic grandeur outside in the universe, when the August swarms of meteorites radiate into the human radiations in the astral light, that which takes place grandiosely outside, has its gentle, seemingly small, just spatially small counterpart in that which takes place in the human blood. [1] This is the connection between the inner human being and the universe. And then we see how, especially at this time of year, when autumn is approaching, a powerful emanation of sulphur, of sulphur, takes place from the nervous organization that permeates the human body towards the brain. One can, so to speak, see the whole human being glowing with sulphur like a phantom as autumn approaches. But into this bluish-yellow sulphur atmosphere radiate the swarms of meteors that are present in the life of the blood. This is the other phantom. While the phantom of sulphur goes like drifting clouds from the lower part of the human being up to the head, the iron formation radiates straight from the head, like swarms of meteors pouring over into the living existence of the blood. This is how man is when Michaelmas approaches. And he must learn to use the meteoric power of his blood in his consciousness. He must learn to celebrate the Michael festival by shaping the Michael festival into a festival of fearlessness, into a festival of inner initiative and inner strength, by shaping the Michael festival into a festival of the memory of selfless self-consciousness.

Therefore, before mankind can think of celebrating Michaelmas, a renewal of the whole constitution of the soul is truly necessary. Not a festival to be celebrated externally or in a similar way to conventional festivals, but a festival that renews the whole inner man, that is what the Michael festival must become if it is to be worthy. Then the once so majestic image of Michael with the dragon emerges anew from all this. Then the dragon paints itself to us, forming its body in bluish-yellowish streams of sulphur. We see the cloud-like figure of the dragon shimmering, shining out of the sulphur vapors, above which Michael rises, above which Michael shows his sword. But we only paint correctly if we paint the atmosphere in which Michael unfolds his glory, his power in relation to the dragon, if we allow the space to be filled with passing swarms of meteorites consisting of iron, which are formed by the force emanating from the heart of Michael, melting together into the iron sword of Michael, who defeats the dragon with this meteor-shaped iron sword. [2]

Sources:

[1] & [2] GA 229: The co-experience of the course of the year in four cosmic imaginations (1923)

Michael Forces

Through the preparation of mankind in the 16th century by Gabriel to develop a new organ in the forebrain, it has become possible that in the last third of the 19th century, after Gabriel had again ceded the government to Michael, that which we call Theosophy could flow in from the great masters of wisdom and the harmony of sensations, in order to gradually bring the meaning of the Mystery of Golgotha in its full effect closer to mankind. [1]

If we want to look up to that spirit which, in the age of civilization, is concerned with the development of the sciences, the unfolding of the arts and so on, then we look up to the Archangeloi being who, according to Christian usage, is designated by the name Michael. [2]

The ability to rise up so that one can be seized by thoughts about the spiritual in the same way as by anything physical in the world: that is Michael-power! To have confidence in the thoughts of the spiritual, if one has the disposition to receive them at all, so that one knows: You have this or that impulse from the spiritual. You surrender to it, you make yourself the instrument of its execution. A first failure comes - it doesn't matter! A second failure comes - it doesn't matter! And if a hundred failures come - it doesn't matter! For no failure is ever decisive for the truth of a spiritual impulse whose effect has been seen through and grasped inwardly. If you think of this as the great trust formed in the mind of man for something spiritual, if you think that man can hold on so firmly to something that he has seen through as spiritually victorious that he will not let it go, no matter how much the outer world speaks against it, if you imagine this, then you will have an idea of what the Michael-power, the Michael-entity actually wants from man, for only then will you have an idea of what the great trust in the spirit is. You can postpone any spiritual impulse, even for the whole incarnation, but once you have grasped it, you must never waver in cherishing and nurturing it within yourself, then alone can you save it for the following incarnation. And if in this way confidence in the spiritual establishes such a state of soul that one is able to feel this spiritual as real as the ground beneath our feet, which we know that if it were not there we could not tread with our feet, then we have a feeling in our minds of what Michael actually wants from us. You will no doubt admit that this trust, this active trust in the spirit, has vanished infinitely in the course of the last centuries, indeed of the last millennium of mankind, that it is actually the case for most people today that they are not even confronted by life's demands to develop such trust. Basically, man has broken off the bridge to the Michael force behind him.

But a lot has happened in the world in the meantime. To a certain extent, man has fallen away from the Michael force; the rigid and strict materialism of the 19th century is a fall away from the Michael force. But in the objective, in the outer spiritual, the Michael-power has triumphed. That which the dragon wanted to achieve through human development will not be achieved. But the other great thing stands before the human soul today, that man will have to participate in Michael's victory over the dragon of his own free will. But this requires that man really finds the possibility to step out of the passivity of the relationship to the spiritual, in which he is so often today, and to come into an active relationship to the spiritual. The Michael forces cannot be attained - not even through passive prayer through any kind of passivity. The Michael forces can only be attained by the human being using his loving will to make himself a tool for the divine-spiritual forces. For the Michael-forces do not want man to plead with them, they want man to ally himself with them. Man can do this if he absorbs the teachings of the spiritual world with inner energy. Man must really be able to have the experience of the spiritual. He must be able to gain this experience of the spiritual from mere thought, not from any clairvoyance. [3]

Michael cannot force people to do anything. For compulsion has ceased precisely because intelligence has completely entered the realm of human individuality. - But as a majestic exemplary action, in the supersensible world which is initially adjacent to the visible world, Michael can unfold what he wants to unfold. With an aura of light, with a gesture of a spirit being, Michael can show himself in which all the splendor and glory of the past intelligence of the gods is revealed. He can make manifest how the effect of this past intelligence in the present is even truer, more beautiful and more virtuous than everything in immediate present intelligence, which streams from Ahriman in a seductive glow. He can realize how for him Ahriman will always be the low spirit beneath his feet. Those people who see the next supersensible world adjacent to the visible world perceive, as described here, Michael and his kind doing what they want to do for people. Such people see how man in freedom is to be led away from Ahriman to Christ through the image of Michael in the Ahriman sphere. [4]

We must gain an insight into Michael, who shows us that what is materially present on earth does not merely pass through heat death, but is once really destroyed, and that we are able to plant life with our moral impulses through connection with the spiritual world. And then the transformation of what is in the earth into the new life, into the moral, takes place. For the reality of the moral world order is that which Michael, who approaches us, can give us. The old religions cannot do this, because they have allowed themselves to be defeated by the dragon. They simply accept the dragon that slays man and establish some special, abstract-moral, divine order alongside the dragon. But the dragon will not tolerate such a thing; the dragon must be defeated. For what man needs is the strength he can gain from defeating the dragon. Modern civilization has given us that every science was a metamorphosis of the dragon, that all external culture was also a result of the dragon. Certainly, the external world mechanism, which lives not only in the machine but also in our entire social organism, is rightly a dragon. But the dragon also confronts us everywhere else where today's science speaks of the origin of life, of the transformation of living beings, of the human soul. Michael's battle with the dragon has only become real to the most intense degree in our age. And if one penetrates into the spiritual structure of the world, one finds that at the same time as the culmination of the dragon's power, the intervention of Michael, with whom we can connect, occurred at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. Man can, if he wishes, have spiritual knowledge, that is, Michael really penetrates from the spiritual realms into our earthly realm, but he does not impose himself on us, for today everything must spring from the freedom of man. The dragon, however, pushes himself forward, he demands the highest authority. There has never been such a powerful authority in the world as the one exercised by science today. There is no more overwhelming authority in the entire development of mankind than that of science today. Everywhere the dragon leaps out at you. [5]

Michael is a being who does not actually reveal anything unless something is brought to him through diligent spiritual work from earth. Michael is a taciturn spirit, a thoroughly secretive spirit, a spirit who speaks little and at most gives only sparse directives. For what one learns from Michael is actually not the word, but - if I may put it this way - the gaze, the power of the gaze. And this is based on the fact that Michael is actually most concerned with what people create out of the spiritual. He lives in the consequences of what men have created. The other spirits live more with the causes, Michael lives more with the consequences. The other spirits stimulate in man what man should do. Michael will be the actual spiritual hero of freedom. He lets people do, but then takes up what becomes of human deeds in order to carry it further in the cosmos, in order to continue to work in the cosmos what people cannot yet work with it. But when man, out of his freedom, stimulated by the reading of the astral light, consciously or unconsciously does this or that, Michael carries that which is a human earthly deed out into the cosmos so that it becomes a cosmic deed. He is more concerned with the consequences, other spirits more with the causes. But Michael is not only a closed, silent spirit, Michael approaches man with a clear rejection of many things in which man still lives on earth today. For example, all the knowledge that is formed in human or animal life or in plant life, which is based on inherited qualities, which is based on what is perpetuated in physical nature, is such that it appears to one: Michael rejects it. He wants to show that such knowledge can be of no use to man in the spiritual world. And so it is with Michael that he has a strict rejection for all that which, for example, is the separating factor of human languages. As long as one merely envelops one's knowledge in language, does not carry it up into the thoughts, one does not come close to Michael. [6] You only come to Michael when you get through the words to true inner spiritual experiences, when you are not attached to the words but come to true inner spiritual experiences. That is indeed the secret of modern initiation: to go beyond words to the experience of the spiritual. This is not something that violates the perception of the beauty of language. For it is precisely when one no longer thinks in language that one begins to feel language and to have it flow within and from oneself as an element of sensation. [7]

The Michael-forces work in such a way that they not only have a cosmopolitan effect, but that they tear man out of the narrower earthly contexts and carry him up to a spiritual height in which he feels the earthly contexts less strongly than other people; at least he is predestined to do so by his karma. [8]

Man is there to make the Spirit, who is not in this world without him, the content of this world. Christ himself came into the world. He did not take man into heaven for an earthly life, but man must permeate his earthly life with a spirituality which is communicable and which in turn gives man the opportunity to conquer the dragon. You have to understand something like this thoroughly so that you can answer for yourself the question of why people tore themselves apart in the 20th century; because they took the fight to an area where it did not belong, because they did not see the real enemy, the dragon. Defeating it involves the forces that will bring peace to the earth only when they are developed in the right way. [9]

Sources:

[1] GA 264: On the History and Contents of the First Section of the Esoteric School 1904 to 1914: Letters, Circular Letters, Documents and Lectures (1904-1914)

[2] GA 240: Esoteric Observations on Karmic Connections - Sixth Volume (1924)

[3] GA 223: The Cycle of the Year as the Breathing Process of the Earth and the Four Great Festival Seasons. Anthroposophy and the Human Mind (1923)

[4] GA 26: Anthroposophical Guiding Principles. The Path of Knowledge of Anthroposophy - The Michael Mystery (1924/1925)

[5], [9] GA 217: Spiritual Forces in the Coexistence of the Old and Young Generations. Pedagogical Youth Course (1922)

[6], [7] GA 233a: Mystery Places of the Middle Ages. Rosicrucianism and the Modern Principle of Initiation - Easter as a Part of the Mystery History of Humanity (1924)

[8] GA 237: Esoteric Observations on Karmic Connections - Third Volume. The Karmic Connections of the Anthroposophical Movement (1924)

Michael's kingdom and Christ

The cosmopolitan movement, which had the ambition to give the spiritual forces that had gathered in Greece to the whole civilized world at that time, took place under the impulse of Michael. And those beings who were involved in these earthly deeds, which took place in the service of Michael, were not on earth during the time of the Mystery of Golgotha. All those beings who belonged to the realm of Michael, regardless of whether they were human souls who were now raptured into the spiritual world through death after the end of the Michael age, whether they were disembodied human souls or those who never embodied themselves on earth, they were all connected with each other in common life in the supersensible world during the time in which the Mystery of Golgotha took place on earth.

The inhabitants of earth have the experience that Christ, the high sun spirit, arrives with them. They do not know much that could cause them to appreciate this event in the appropriate way. All the more did the disembodied souls who are around Michael and who live in the orbit, in the realm of the sun's existence in supernatural worlds, appreciate what happened for them from the other aspect, from the sun. And they experienced how the Christ, who until then had worked within the solar realm, so that he could only be reached from the Mysteries by rising into the solar realm, took leave of the sun in order to unite with earthly humanity on earth. This was a tremendous, tremendous event precisely for those beings who belong to the Michael community, because this Michael community has a special connection with all the cosmic destinies emanating from the sun. They had to bid farewell to the Christ, who until then had his place in the sun, and who from then on was to take his place on earth. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 237: Esoteric Considerations of Karmic Connections - Third Volume. The karmic connections of the anthroposophical movement (1924)

Michael's age

Living today in the Michael Age, we have every reason to remember the last Michael Age, which once existed in the leadership of mankind, concluding approximately in antiquity with the deeds of Alexander, with the foundation of Aristotle's philosophy. Such a Michael age is characterized by the most diverse conditions, but especially by the fact that in such a Michael age the spiritual interests of mankind become dominant according to the particular disposition that such an age has. In particular, it will be the case that in such an age a cosmopolitan trend will run through the world. National distinctions will cease to exist. It was precisely in the age of Gabriel that national impulses were established within European civilization and its American appendage. In our Michael age they will be completely overcome in the course of three centuries. [1] Every time there was a Michael time, this also happened on earth, that intelligence as a means of knowledge not only became cosmopolitan, but became such that people penetrated themselves with consciousness: We can go up to the Godhead after all. This consciousness played a tremendously important role at the end of the last Michael Age. Starting from Greece, the sites of the ancient Mysteries were everywhere in an atmosphere of discouragement. Discouraged were those who were the successors of the old Pythagorean school in Lower Italy, in Sicily, because the magic glow that had once reigned over the Pythagorean school in the 6th century had faded. Once again - even those initiated into the Pythagorean mysteries - saw how the illusionary, the materialistically illusionary spread across the world.

The daughters and sons of the ancient Egyptian mysteries were discouraged. Oh, these Egyptian Mysteries, they were already so discouraged in Alexander's time that they, I would like to say, only continued to propagate such deep teachings like the dross of old miraculous metal flows, as they expressed themselves in the Osiris legend or in looking up to the Serapis (All-God). Over in Asia, where were those courageous, powerful uplifts into the spiritual world, such as those that emanated from the Diana (Greek: Artemis) Mysteries in Ephesus? Even the Samothracian Mysteries, the wisdom of the Kabirs, could only be deciphered by those who carried within themselves the impulse for upward movement, for greatness; only those who were so inclined in their souls could still decipher the clouds of smoke that rose from Axieros and the other Kabirs (see: Mysteries). Discouragement was everywhere a feeling, I would like to say, of that which one tried to overcome in the old Mysteries by turning to the secret of the Sun Mystery, which is actually the secret of Michael - everywhere a feeling: man cannot. This Michael age was a time of great testing. Plato was basically just a kind of watery extract of the old mystery being. Aristotelianism then extracted the most intellectual aspects from this extract, and Alexander took them on his shoulders.

That was Michael's word at that time: Man must come to pan-intelligence, to the comprehension of the divine on earth in sinless form. The best that has been gained must be spread everywhere, beyond the discouraged mystery places, with the center in Alexandria. That was Michael's impulse. And this is precisely the relationship of Michael to the other Archangeloi: that he protested in the strongest way against the fall of men. But this is also that which is the most important content of his teaching, as he taught it to his own in that supersensible school of teaching (see: Michael-School). This is the most important content: When the intelligence will now be among men, when the intelligence, from the bosom of the Michaelites, will now be down on earth, then men in this Michaelic age must feel, must sense that they have to save themselves there, because the intelligence must not be afflicted by sinfulness, because this age of intelligence must be used to ascend to spiritual life in pure intelligence, free from illusion. Ahriman is already making the most strenuous efforts to appropriate this intelligence which has come among men, to make men obsessed with himself, so that Ahriman would possess the intelligence in the minds of men. [2]

In Ahriman there stands before us a world entity of conceivably highest intelligence, a world entity that has already taken intelligence completely into the individual. Ahriman is highly over-intelligent in every direction; he commands a dazzling intelligence that comes from the whole human being - only not from that part of the human being that forms itself humanly in the human forehead. If we were to reproduce Ahriman in human imagination, we would have to give him a receding forehead and a frivolous, cynical expression, because everything in him comes from these lower forces, but it is from them that the highest intelligence comes. Every Ahriman being is personally over-intelligent; critical in its rejection of everything illogical, mocking, thinking contemptuously. For man there is always the temptation to make the intelligence personal according to the model of Ahriman. [3]

Until the 9th century, man had a different attitude to his thoughts than later. He did not have the feeling that he himself produced the thoughts living in his soul. He regarded them as inspirations from a spiritual world. Even if he had thoughts about what he perceived with his senses, the thoughts were revelations of the divine that spoke to him from the sensory things. Anyone who has spiritual perceptions understands this sensation. For, when a spiritually real thing communicates itself to the soul, one never has the feeling that the spiritual perception is there, and one forms the thought oneself in order to comprehend the perception; rather, one sees the thought that is contained in the perception and given with it, as objectively as it is itself. With the 9th century - of course such data are to be taken as forming an average time; the transition takes place very gradually - the personal-individual intelligence shone forth in the human souls. Man got the feeling: I form the thoughts. And this forming of the thoughts became the outstanding thing in the life of the soul, so that the thinkers saw the essence of the human soul in intelligent behavior.

Previously, people had an imaginative concept of the soul. Its essence was not seen in the formation of thoughts, but in its participation in the spiritual content of the world. The supersensible spiritual beings were thought of as thinking; and they work into man; they also think into him. What thus lives in man from the supersensible spiritual world was perceived as a soul. The life of thought was now developed within humanity. At first we were uncertain about what we had in our thoughts. This uncertainty lived on in the scholastic teachings. The scholastics were divided into realists and nominalists. The realists - whose leaders were Thomas Aquinas and those close to him - still felt the old connection between thought and thing. They therefore saw in thought a real thing that lives in things. They saw human thoughts as something that flows from things into the soul as reality. - The nominalists strongly felt that the soul forms its thoughts. They perceived thoughts only as something subjective that lives in the soul and has nothing to do with things (for further information see: Universalism controversy). [4] It can be said that the realists wanted to remain faithful to Michael; also because the thoughts had fallen from his realm into that of men, they as thinkers wanted to serve Michael as the prince of the intelligence of the cosmos. - In the unconscious part of their souls, the Nominalists fell away from Michael. They did not regard Michael but man as the owner of thought.

Nominalism became more widespread and influential. This continued until the last third of the 19th century. In this age, those people who understand the perception of spiritual events within the universe felt that Michael had followed the stream of intellectual life. He was searching for a new metamorphosis of his cosmic task. He had previously allowed thoughts to flow from the spiritual outer world into the souls of men; from the last third of the 19th century he wants to live in the human souls in which the thoughts are formed. Before, people related to Michael saw Michael unfold his activity in the spiritual realm; now they recognize that they should let Michael dwell in their hearts; now they consecrate their thought-born spiritual life to him; now they let Michael teach them in their free, individual thought life about the right paths of the soul. People who had been in inspired thought life in their previous life on earth, i.e. who were Michael servants, felt themselves urged towards such a voluntary Michael community when they returned to earth life at the end of the 19th century. They now regarded their old thought inspirer as the sage in the higher thought being. Before, man could only feel how thoughts were formed out of his being; since the new Michael age he can rise above his being; he can direct his mind into the spiritual; there Michael confronts him, and he proves to be related to all thought-weaving. He frees the thoughts from the realm of the head; he clears the way for them to the heart, releases the enthusiasm from the mind so that man can live in spiritual devotion to everything that can be experienced in the light of thought. The Michael age has dawned. Hearts begin to have thoughts; enthusiasm no longer flows from mere mystical darkness, but from thought-born clarity of soul. To understand this means to take Michael into one's mind. Thoughts that strive today to grasp the spiritual must come from hearts that beat for Michael as the fiery prince of thought in the universe. [5]

In the age into which we have entered as human beings, it is preferably the spiritual forces coming from the sun that must become dominant in everything, in the physical life of human beings, in the spiritual life of human beings, in the scientific life of human beings, in the artistic life, in the religious life. What the sun has to say to the world, what the sun has to do in the world, must spread further and further in our age. For those who truly realize, the sun is not the physical ball of gas that physics today describes it as, but a sum of spiritual beings. And the main spiritual beings that radiate from the sun, so to speak, the spiritual, the spiritual, just as sunlight radiates physically or sunlight radiates etherically, are all grouped around a certain being that we can also call the Michael being according to an old Christian-pagan, Christian-Jewish name. Michael works from the sun. And that which the sun has to give to the world spiritually can also be called that which Michael has to give to the world with his own. [6]

While the Gabriel-being (predecessor of Michael) is more a being that is oriented towards the passive qualities of human beings, Michael is the active being, the being that pulsates through our breath, our veins, our nerves, so that we work out, actively acquire our humanity in the cosmic context. This is what stands before us, so to speak, as an invitation from Michael, that we become active right down to our thoughts, so that we acquire our world view through inner activity as human beings. Only in this way do we belong to the Michael Age, that we do not sit down idly and allow the outer and inner enlightenments to come over us, but that we actively cooperate in what is presented to us in observations and experiences from the world. [7]

When someone puts together an experiment, it is basically not an activity, not an activity of his mind, but it is an event like another natural event, except that it is oriented by the human mind. But all natural events are also oriented by the intellect. But how does man today use the experiment for his imagination? Not with activity, for he looks and wants to be as little active as possible, he wants to let the experiment tell him everything, he finds everything immediately fantastic that emerges from inner activity. He is as little as possible inside his scientific ideas in the Michael age.

If we ask ourselves the question: What sense does it actually have in the whole cosmic context that, if I may say so, Gabriel has handed over the sceptre to Michael? - we must say to ourselves: It has this sense that Michael is the spirit who, of all the beings who can be spiritually leading in humanity, can come closest to what people have been doing here on earth in this emancipation of knowledge since the first third of the 15th century. Gabriel stands quite affected before that which a modern, educated person somehow has in his imagination. Michael, who is extraordinarily related to the forces of the sun, can at least transfer his activity into that which man works out in thoughts that exist as impulses for his free action. That which I have called free, pure thinking, which must be the actual impulse for man's individual volition in freedom in modern times, Michael can work into all this. And Michael has a special affinity for that action which springs from the impulse of love. That is why he is the messenger sent down by the gods to receive, so to speak, what is now being transferred from emancipated knowledge into spiritualized knowledge. If people were merely to develop spatial knowledge, if they did not spiritualize it, if they remained with anthropology and did not want to come to anthroposophy, then the age of Michael would pass. Michael would step down from his reign and would bring the message to the gods: 'Mankind wants to separate itself from the gods, men have become accustomed to gazing at everything only spatially, they have learned to despise that which lives only in time.' [8]

Sources:

[1] - [3] GA 237: Esoteric Observations on Karmic Connections - Third Volume. The Karmic Connections of the Anthroposophical Movement (1924)

[4], [5] GA 26: Anthroposophical Guiding Principles. The Path of Knowledge of Anthroposophy - The Michael Mystery (1924/1925)

[6] GA 243: The Initiate-Consciousness. The True and False Paths of Spiritual Research (1924)

[7], [8] GA 219: The Relationship of the Star World to Man and of Man to the Star World. The Spiritual Communion of Humanity (1922)

The Michael Age and Spiritual Science

This (Michael) age, which has only just begun (1879), must not pass without those who are called educated men really recognizing in a purely spiritual way the most important spiritual facts to be attained, i.e. not the earthly, not the physical-sensual facts, but these spiritual facts. From now on, therefore, an energetic advocacy of spiritual knowledge that shines directly into the spiritual world must not be able to accomplish its task in the sense in which it is intended. We must enter a spiritual age more and more. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 243: The Initiate-Consciousness. The True and False Paths of Spiritual Research (1924)

23
Monad

Monad - spiritual-scientific

From the middle of the 6th solar cycle (see: old sun), man himself is so far advanced that he can work unconsciously on his physical body. In this respect he now replaces the sons of twilight (the Angeloi). Through this activity he creates in dullness the first seed of the living spiritual being, which is called the spirit of life, Buddhi. Only at later stages of his development will he bring this life-spirit to consciousness. Just as from the 7th Saturnian cycle onwards the thrones voluntarily poured their power into the spiritual human being (Atma) formed there, so now the cherubim pour their wisdom, which from then on remains preserved in the life spirit of man through all subsequent stages of development.

From the middle of the 7th solar cycle, the germ of the spirit man, Atma, which was already predisposed on Saturn, emerges again. It combines with the spirit of life, Buddhi, and the animated monad (Atma-Buddhi) comes into being. [1]

While on the one hand only the lower entity of man, the physical, etheric and astral body, developed on the moon, on the other hand the upper trinity (Atma, Buddhi, Manas) was nurtured and cultivated. This had also matured after Atma, Buddhi on the old Saturn, and Manas on the old moon had been predisposed. These were then able to develop further on earth. What came over from the physical, etheric and astral bodies from the old moon to the earth are the grotesque animals into which the Atma-Buddhi-Manas could gradually envelop itself.

The process before the Lemurian period is a preparatory one. The human body is worked out in such a way that the Atma-Buddhi-Manas can sink into it. This has surrounded itself with kama-mass. Let us now imagine a slimy, gelatinous entity that wrings itself out of what has come from the moon. This is a physical foundation. There is also Atma-Buddhi-Manas and an astral body which they have organized around themselves. These principles now work on the gelatinous mass from the outside until they can take possession of this mass from within. The spiritual finally penetrates the physical. Now two different entities have actually united. The moment the brain is formed, they merge into one another. This is how birth and death came into the earth's development. In the past, people had built up the physical body themselves; later it will be the same again. But because two entities have united, which now (only) approximately fit together, we have birth and death, and every period between birth and death is a continual attempt to bring these two different entities more into line with each other. This will continue until the middle of the 6th root race, until this rhythmic state is reached and one being is completely adapted to the other. And karma is nothing other than the degree of balance to which the human being has already achieved. In each incarnation one reaches a certain degree of adaptation. After each incarnation you have to ascend to Devachan again in order to see what you still have to do. Only when the balance is reached is karma overcome and man can take up something new, the true wisdom, buddhi, which must be nurtured until then. [2]

We know that we initially live in three worlds, in the physical, astral and mental worlds, and that our existence alternates between these three worlds. We have a core of being within us which we call the monad. We maintain this core of being through the three worlds. It lives in us in the physical world, but it also lives in us in the astral world (see: astral plan) and the devachanic world. The inner core of our being is always clothed in a different garment. Without senses and perception man would not live consciously in the physical world either. If man today were equally conscious in all three worlds, then there would be no death, there would only be transformation. Then man would pass from one world into the other consciously. Now it is the case that man only gradually acquires the continuity of consciousness in these three worlds. He experiences it as a darkening of his consciousness when he passes from the physical into the other worlds (for example, in sleep). He only becomes clearly conscious again when he returns to the physical world.

We must recognize the human being as a duality, as composed of two beings: the monad and the envelope of the monad. Both have gone through different stages of development, both have only gradually come to be able to unite. When we look at the physical-astral human being, we are taken back to very distant times when he existed only as an astral archetype, as an astral form. He was a much more comprehensive entity. This former astral body can be imagined in such a way that the earth at that time was like a large astral ball, composed of astral human beings. All the forces of nature and beings that surround us today were then still within man; man lived dissolved in astral existence. All plants, animals and so on, the animal instincts and passions still lived in the astral human being at that time. What the lion and all mammals have in them today was then thoroughly mixed with the astral body of man. The astral earth was composed of astral human bodies like a large blackberry ball and enclosed in a spiritual atmosphere in which devachanic beings lived. This atmosphere - one could call it astral air - that surrounded the astral earth at that time was made of a somewhat thinner substance than the human astral body. In this astral air lived spiritual entities, lower and higher, including the human monads, completely separated from the human astral body. The monads could not connect with the astral body because the astral bodies of humans were still too wild at that time. The instincts and passions first had to be removed from it. Thus the human astral body gradually developed in a purer form through the elimination of certain substances and forces that the astral body had. The excretions, however, remained separate astral entities, beings with an even denser astral body, with wilder individual instincts, drives and passions. So now there were two (kinds of) astral bodies: a less wild human astral body and a very dense wild astral body. Let us keep these two strictly separate: the human astral body and everything that lived around it. From this, when they reached physical density, arose the other kingdoms: the animal, plant and mineral kingdoms. Certain excreted instincts and forces emerged through this process of condensation as the various animal classes. [3]

As the astral body has become finer and finer, it has approached the fine astral matter around it. In the upper region, meanwhile, the opposite processes of development have taken place. The monad has descended from above, from the highest devachanic regions to the astral region, and has condensed during this descent. Here the two parts meet. From one side the human being ascends into the astral body, from the other side the monad meets him on its descent into the astral world. That was in Lemurian times. Both were able to fertilize each other. The monad clothed itself with devachanic matter, then with the astral air matter. From below we have physical matter, then etheric matter, then astral matter again. In this way the two astral matters fertilize each other and merge. The monad contains what comes from above. It embeds itself in the astral matter as if in a bed. This is how the descent of the soul takes place. But for this to happen, the monad must develop a thirst for knowledge of the lower regions. The lower regions can only be known as a monad if one incarnates in the human body and looks out through it into the surroundings. The human being now has four limbs: firstly a physical body, secondly an etheric body, thirdly an astral body and inside the ego, the monad. [4] From the nirvana plan, the being that is in us, in man, is the monad. [5]

Sources:

[1] GA 11: From the Akashic Chronicle (1904/1908)

[2] - [5] GA 93a: Basic Elements of Esotericism (1905)

Monad - philosophical

The idea (of the lawful connection between the human soul and the spiritual-soul of the world), which Aristotle had found in himself, which had proved its momentum and its fruitfulness in relation to the external world, shrank with Giordano Bruno and later with Leibniz to what Giordano Bruno and then Leibniz called a monad. A monad was something that was thought to be born out of the spiritual world. For Leibniz, even a monad contained something like a reflection of the whole universe. But more recent culture has not achieved anything more than a dry abstraction: the monad, a reflection of the universe, something that contracts and expands again in order to pass through the universe again. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 61: History of Man in the Light of Spiritual Research (1911/1912)

Monad and immortality

To be immortal means to have the power to preserve in memory the departed, the past existence. This is the actual definition of human immortality. Through initiation the proof is provided, the proof of experience, that powers live in man which (enable him to) remember everything he has experienced in the senses and in general after the sensual body has been laid aside. The human being is of such a nature that he carries his own being through future times by the powers of supersensible memory. If you feel this thought, feel it into the emptiness of the universe in such a way that you imagine the soul carrying itself through the eternities, then you have a much better definition of what is called a monad than could be given by any philosophical concepts. For then you will feel what a monad is, a self-contained, self-sustaining being. After all, ideas about these things can only be gained through the experiences of initiation. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 138: On Initiation. Of Eternity and the Moment. Of spiritual light and the darkness of life (1912)

Monadology

Mysticism leads to unity because the I works within us as a unified entity. Thus the path through the outer world necessarily leads to multiplicity, to monadology, to the view, so to speak, that many spiritual beings must work together in order to bring about our world view, because from the outset, as human observers of the world, when we look outwards, we gain knowledge of the outer world through a multiplicity of organs and a multiplicity of individual observations. [1]

There are two spiritual currents in humanity. The one spiritual current must be called, if it is to be described correctly, that which proceeds from pluralism, one could also say from monadology, which therefore sees the origin and source of existence preferably in a multiplicity of entities and forces. You can now look around the world and you will see in some way that the peoples of the post-Atlantean period have proceeded from multiplicities of the divine. You will see this peculiarity not only in the myths and doctrines of the gods, but also in the philosophies where we encounter it as monadology. This service of multiplicity had to be countered by a synthetic, a synthesizing movement, a movement that emanated strictly from the monon, from monism. The Semitic peoples are the real inspirers, the impulse-givers of all monotheism and monism, of all unified divinity. [2]

Sources:

[1] GA 59: Metamorphoses of the Soul Life - Paths of Soul Experiences. Part Two (1910)

[2] GA 121: The Mission of Individual Folk-Souls in Connection with Germanic-Nordic Mythology (1910)

24
Oriphiel

"Oriphiel is the one who must come to shake humankind, to jolt it through terrifying suffering, awakening it to its true vocation."

The current Michael age is timed approx. between the years 1881 and 2235. It is followed by the Oriphiel age between approx. 2235 and 2589.

Initiates like Rudolf Steiner and Beinsa Douno made very explicit warnings to humanity regarding this 'dark age' period of the 23th to 25th century, see below.

The coming age of the Archangel Oriphiel

After the Michaelic age comes the age of Oriphiel. This will be an evil, terrible age in which all the terrible forces of egoism, hardness, cruelty and unkindness will be unleashed. The little group of spiritualized souls has the task of letting pure truth, love and goodness flow into this evil age and thus purifying it and moving the world forward towards the sixth day of creation, in the dawn of which we are now standing. [1] When Oriphiel comes, he brings the wrath of God. In the age of Oriphiel, the Christ Jesus will walk the earth again, but in a very, very different form. [2]

Around the year 2400, Oriphiel, the terrible angel of wrath, will once again take over. And as in the past, the spiritual light will then shine brightly and radiantly into the darkness: Christ will once again appear on earth, albeit in a different form than then. We are called to receive Him, to serve Him. When that dark age approaches, fratricidal strife and fratricidal war will rage in a horrible way, and the poor human bodies will languish in a terrible way, afflicted by diseases and epidemics. The stigma of sin will be stamped on human bodies for all to see. Oriphiel must come to shake people up, to awaken them to their true destiny through cruel torments. Oriphiel has already reigned once. That was at the time when the Christ appeared on earth. At that time, terrible powers of decay and decadence ruled everywhere on earth. And only by cruel means could the human race be shaken up. Oriphiel is called the angel of wrath, who purifies humanity with a strong hand. [3]

Sources:

[1] - [3] GA 266/1: From the contents of the esoteric lessons. Volume I (1904-1909)

Age of Oriphiel (continued)

Something quite similar to a birth took place on the astral plane in 1879. What had slowly ripened since the 14^th century could now be carried into the world in a freer way, even though only for a few people. For Gabriel's rule was followed by that of the archangel Michael. He's the radiant sun that lets esoteric wisdom shine out into a small host of people. Materialism is included in the divine plan of creation and it has a purpose in the whole world. But the time has now come for the esoteric sun to shine brightly under Michael's radiant direction. For materialism's dark forces are increasing.

Michael's radiant rule will be followed by a dark, terrible age that starts about 2300.

Together with Michael, a dark God has begun his rule — the God Mammon. For occultism Mammon isn't just the God of money. He's the leader of all base, black forces. And his hosts attack men's bodies and souls to corrode and ruin them. There's a lot of talk about bacterial today, and they influence a lot of things. In future they'll increase in a terrifying way, and many human bodies will waste away from terrible diseases and plagues. The brand of sin will be stamped on men's bodies for all to see. Another archangel — Oriphiel — will rule then. He must come to shake men up to their true vocation through terrible tortures. So that this can happen in the right way a small group of people must be prepared today to spread esoteric life in the black age 400–600 years from now. [DL editor: 2307-2507]

One under Michael's rule who feels the urge to participate in spiritual life is called upon to serve archangel Michael and to learn under him so that someday he'll be mature enough to also serve the terrible Oriphiel in the right way. A sacrifice is demanded from those who want to dedicate themselves to a higher life. One should only want to receive spiritual life and experience an awakening if one later wants to use this to put oneself, one's will and everything one has in the service of mankind only.

In four to six centuries the small group of men who are being prepared today will serve the God Oriphiel so that mankind can be saved. If in that age men wanted to be spiritual leaders who hadn't been prepared to stand fast in all storms and to resist Mammon's hosts, they wouldn't be able to serve the God Oriphiel in the right way, and mankind would not be lifted out of their misery. So in order to do it we must work very earnestly now to fulfill our tasks then.

But when dark powers rage most terribly, the brightest light also shines. Oriphiel has ruled before. That was the time when Christ appeared on earth. Bad powers of degeneration and decadence were ruling everywhere on earth then. And the human race could only be shaken higher by terrible means. Oriphiel is called the archangel of wrath, who purifies mankind with a strong hand.

The story in the Bible where Christ swings a scourge to chase the money changers out of the temple has a deep meaning. Back when things were darkest on earth, Christ appeared as the savior of mankind. Oriphiel's reign ended 109 years after Christ's appearance, and he was replaced by Anael. Then came Zachariel, then Raphael; Samael ruled during the Renaissance and Gabriel from the 16^th century until 1879. Then Michael began to rule, and circa 2300 Oriphiel, the terrible archangel of wrath, will be ruling things. And as once before, spiritual light will shine into darkness brightly and radiantly. Christ will appear again on earth, although in a different form than before. We're called upon to receive him and to serve him.

1908-08-09-GA266

And it's very necessary that we be instructed in this way. For since 1879 we've entered a new stage of human evolution. Gabriel worked on the development of a new organ in man's brain by regulating human births (1525–1879). A 16^th century man would not have understood our present theosophy.

It's up to archangel Michael to stimulate men to use their newly acquired organ, that degenerates if a man doesn't use it.

Such a man comes under the influence of Michael's opponent, Mammon or Beelzebub. This is the God of hindrances, who wants to prevent men from making progress. The bacteria that arise under his influence can give rise to terrible epidemics and strange nervous diseases; children could be born with a ruined nervous system. After Michael's reign comes Oriphiel who gives the divine wrath that should only be used by highly developed people. Jesus drives the merchants out of the temple.

1911-02-12-GA266

Since November, 1879, a few men have become mature enough to take in [spiritual science] teachings, but it's only a small host, whereas other moderns are till unable to acquire the teachings, consider them to be fantastic ideas and dreams or even get angry about them.

When people who prove to be receptive for [spiritual science] teachings let the latter work upon them, their etheric body begins to oscillate slightly.

Whereas someone who loses himself in external things gets an expanded and rarified etheric body.

When such a person hears some spiritual teachings it's as if the wind were blowing through a cleft in the etheric body, which announced itself in him as fear, but appears outwardly as doubt. Such a man only notices the doubts, but they're the expression of fear and anxiety that have moved into his rarified etheric body as into a vacuum and have become noticeable there as doubt. We can't help a man who behaves in a rejective manner. It's better not to bother him with theosophy

But wherever an opportunity rises we should quietly let [spiritual science] ideas flow in according to the principle "steady dripping hollows the stone."

For we only have another 400 years or so to give these teachings in a [spiritual science] form to all men. So that everyone will have an opportunity those who resisted them now will be born again in the next four centuries. A suitable number of men must be present then who represent theosophy in the right way.

Source: https://anthroposophy.eu/Q00.006_-_spiritual_events_at_various_points_in_life

25
Planes: Astral & Devachan

Astral plan[e]

If we start from the physical plan, we have seven subdivisions of the physical plan; then there would be seven subdivisions of the astral plan. Of these, the three lowest coincide with the three highest of the physical plan. We have to consider the astral plan as being pushed together with the physical plan in such a way that the three highest parts of the physical plan are at the same time the three lowest parts of the astral plan. We can speak of a peripheral zone, that is the one which our souls cannot leave after death if they are still bound to the earth by desires. It is called Kamaloka. [1]

This self-consciousness is bound to the activity of the outer senses; if these are silent, it sinks into an abyss. This fact is described in so-called secret science by saying that the soul of man has withdrawn from the physical world. Whoever does not want to claim that man ceases to exist when he falls asleep and arises anew when he wakes up, will not find it difficult to recognize that man is present in a world other than the physical world during sleep. This world is called the astral. [2] We cannot speak a word or form a thought without feelings working out into space. Just as our actions work out into space, so do our feelings; they permeate space and influence men and the whole astral world. [3] No one is able to describe the astral world in its entirety; it is richer and more extensive than our physical world. [4]

Of course, we can only give a very general sketch, because the world we encounter here is so overwhelmingly large that anyone who enters this world will be overwhelmed by the abundance of phenomena, so that no one could describe the whole astral world from their own experience. Just as no one has seen the whole physical earth, no one has seen the whole astral world. The astral space is, so to speak, a place where beings from different worlds can meet. It is just as people can meet in their earthly careers, just as one person can meet another who lives in a completely different place, perhaps travel a short distance with him, lose him again and then never meet him again. Just as this happens on a small scale, it can also happen on a large scale, and this is how we can explain many things from the astral world. As human beings we have not from the beginning been such that we have embodied ourselves in the world in a physical body between birth and death, but in a kind of cosmic development we have come to pass through three stages: through the physical life between birth and death, through the life in Kamaloka and through the life in Devachan. Not all beings pass through these stages, and we humans also had a time that preceded ours, in which we were much closer to the astral world with our essence. Before we had acquired the ability to embody ourselves physically, we were beings who lived purely in the astral world and who had astral senses. Over millions of years, our eyes and ears developed from our astral senses into the physical form they have today. We were astral beings, and we will be astral beings again in the course of our development. We were once purely passive beings, devoted to the impressions of the outside world, before our physical body had condensed into the physical core that made it possible to set physical muscles in motion in order to carry out earthly actions. We will transform ourselves again, from passive to active beings. Because we still carry something of our former astral form with us, because something of it belongs to our astral body, and because past and future interpenetrate in us, that is why we live in the astral world today. And we can develop our spiritual eye in such a way that we can see in the astral world just as the average person sees in the physical world. People are not aware of this because their spiritual eye is not open. But the disciple's eye is gradually opened (begins in sleep). We are citizens of the physical world and the astral world. [5]

In the background of the Sistine Madonna (picture by Raphael in Dresden) the whole atmosphere is filled with angels' heads and genii heads, - and as otherwise air and cloud formations, so genii figures grow out of them. This is not mere fantasy; it is something that is a full reality for those who can see the astral world. Thus the astral world is filled with entities that sprout forth from every point in space in an infinite vitality, as it were. This is how the astral plan looks in every respect; there is moving spiritual life in it. In Raphael's fresco (called "Disputa" in the Vatican) you have at the bottom the disputing men - as is believed: Fathers of the Church, Popes, Doctors of the Church - then the region of the Apostles and Prophets begins, and then the region that is represented in Raphael's work in the heads of the genii, that is the region that we can call the lower astral plan. Above, in the same picture, you have correctly reproduced the region of the higher astral plan glowing with gold. [6]

Every physical process out there is permeated by a finer elementary process, by something that goes parallel to it and that runs in the supersensible. Not only the beings are permeated by a supersensible, but all existence is permeated by a supersensible. Often the opposite of what exists here in the physical exists in the spiritual. If anyone has attained atavistic clairvoyance, he could perceive the parallel event of the supersensible world going in exactly the opposite direction. [7]

As soon as one enters the next supersensible world, one is no longer dealing with causes and effects, but with entities. At every moment another entity intervenes or drops an action. Here we are not dealing at all with what we can follow in the ordinary sense through concepts. A completely different kind of interaction takes place in this spiritual world, in this sequence or flow of spiritual events that parallels the physical events. [8]

The beings that are only embodied on the astral plan have a constantly changing form, a form that is different for many beings at every moment; for the form that is perceived on the astral plan is an exact imprint of the inner soul experiences and soul activities of these beings. Life on the astral plane is much richer than in the physical world. You only have to imagine that in the astral world light images, which do not cling to an external object, flit about, that they have a certain form, which are either light, less luminous or clouded, that they change at every moment, and that they are nothing other than an expression of souls, let us say, who live there on the astral plane. But these luminous bodies not only show light and various color formations, but also all other sensory impressions similar to the physical; only these are not perceived with external, but with the spiritual organs of the soul. [9]

Man belongs to the astral plan with his etheric body. [10] Our intellectual faculties have a supersensible relationship to the astral plan. [11] We may have thoughts, however witty they may be: Thoughts that are not carried by movements of the mind go no further than the astral plan and have no meaning for other worlds. [12] Whatever wrong thoughts we have, we do away with in the Kamaloka [13]

Just as spatial expansion and spatial movement are peculiar to physical entities, irritability and instinctive desire are peculiar to spiritual things and beings. The world of the soul is therefore also called the world of desires or wishes or the world of "desire". These expressions are borrowed from the human soul world. It must therefore be noted that the things in those parts of the soul world which lie outside the human soul are as different from the soul forces within it as the physical substances and forces of the physical outer world are from the parts which make up the physical human body. Drive, wish, desire are designations for the material of the soul world. This material is referred to as "astral". [14] The realization that man attains when he first makes acquaintance with the higher worlds can make a very confusing and disturbing impression on him. First one passes through the regions of the animal group souls - a cold region, a true ice region - and then into the regions of the plant group souls, where it becomes warm again. [15]

With imaginative cognition, a person sees something like a cold flame rising from a plant, a color image that introduces him to the astral plan. [16] (For more details see: Initiation - Path to Initiation)

When a person has developed his spiritual organs through meditation and concentration and consciously enters the astral plan, he sees a completely different world. He sees a world of images, a world of symbols around him. Usually the astral world is viewed too sensually, that is, it is felt and described too much like a material, sensually perceptible world by the clairvoyant who is still a novice in this field. In addition, he often mistakes mirror images of the etheric realm for astral images. On the astral plan everything is seen in colors: if a hostile being approaches us, the clairvoyant sees an orange-yellow color image; if it is a sympathetic being, the color image is indigo blue. You see everything there as in a mirror image - in reverse, also in relation to time. For example, we first see the chicken and then the egg from which it has crawled out; or first the flower and then the root of a plant. The same happens with our soul life: the passions and desires that emanate from man come streaming towards him on the astral plane as animal beings from space, as snakes, wolves and so on, depending on the nature of the feelings and desires. Every noble desire and feeling, which are held back on earth by circumstances, come to meet him there in glorious images of color. [17]

At first man cannot experience the astral world in any other way than in deprivation (see: Kamaloka). He who comes up into the higher worlds and knows: I lack this or that, and there is no prospect of obtaining it - he experiences the content of consciousness of the astral world. Even if someone could be given occult means as a human being so that he could enter the astral plan from his body, he would always have to suffer deprivation in the astral world. Now how can one train oneself in such a way that one not only gets to know that part of the astral world which is expressed in deprivation, the deprivation phase (or Kamaloka), but that one experiences the astral world in the best sense, that one experiences that part which really expresses this world in the good and best sense? Through the training of that which is the opposite of austerity, man can enter the other part of the astral world. Therefore, the methods that awaken in man the forces that are the opposite of deprivation will be those that bring man into the other part of the astral world. These are the forces of renunciation. Just like renunciation, renunciation is also conceivable in manifold nuances. With the smallest renunciation that we impose on ourselves, we take a step forward in the sense that we develop upwards to the good side of the astral world. If one denies oneself the most insignificant thing, this is an acquisition of something that contributes something essential to the experience of the good side of the astral world. That is why so much emphasis is placed in occult traditions on the fact that the disciple deprives himself of this or that on a trial basis, that he practises renunciation. What is the effect of this? Let us first think of the experiences in the Kamaloka. Renunciation occurs immediately, and this appears as an imaginative image in the astral world. For example, a red pentagon or a red circle appears. This is nothing other than the image of what enters the visual field of the human being and corresponds to deprivation in the same way as an object in the physical world corresponds to what one experiences in the soul as an image of it. If a person has very low desires, very deep desires, then horrible animals confront him when he is out of the body. These terrible animals are the symbol of these lowest desires. But if one has learned renunciation, then the moment one is out of the body through death or initiation, the red circle turns into nothing, because one penetrates the red with the feeling of renunciation, and a green circle arises. In the same way, the animal will disappear through the powers of renunciation, and a noble entity of the astral world will appear. Thus man must first transform that which is objectively given to him, the red circle or the hideous animal, into its opposite through the trained powers of renunciation. Renunciation conjures up the true forms of the astral world from unknown depths. Thus no man may believe, if he wants to swing himself up into the astral world in the true sense, that the cooperation of his soul forces is not necessary. Without this he would only reach a part of the astral world. He must renounce all imagination. He who renounces, renounces, and that is what conjures up the true form of the astral world. [18]

In the elemental world (astral plan) the sympathies and antipathies are not only to be distinguished by their strength, but in the same way as, for example, the colors are to be distinguished in the sensory world. Just as one has a multi-colored sensory world, one can experience a multi-colored - sympathetic or antipathetic elemental world. This also comes into consideration, that "antipathic" for the realm of the elementary does not have the connotation that one inwardly turns away from it; one must simply designate by antipathic a property of the elementary being or process that relates to a sympathetic property of another process or being in a similar way as, for example, the blue color relates to the red color in the sense world. One could speak of a "sense" which man is able to awaken for the elementary world in his etheric body. This sense is capable of perceiving sympathies and antipathies in the elemental world. [19]

Through the etheric body, the human being is connected a hundredfold with entities and processes of the elemental world. [20]

The elemental world (astral plan) is completely different from the sensory world. You know (in the sensory world) at every moment that you are the same as you were in relation to another process, another entity, when you come face to face with something new, and you can never lose yourself in this process, in this entity. This immediately changes when you enter the elemental world. There it is necessary that one adapts oneself with the whole inner life of one's soul to a being, a process, to such an extent that one transforms oneself with one's soul life into this being, into this process itself. There is no other way to recognize anything in the elementary world than to face the beings in such a way that one becomes a different person within each being, and indeed becomes highly similar to the being and the process itself. [21]

When the awakening in the supersensible world occurs in the correctly developed human spiritual vision, the memory of the soul's experiences in the sensory world remains present. This memory must remain present, otherwise the other entities and processes would be present in the clairvoyant consciousness, but not one's own entity. One would have no knowledge of oneself; one would not live spiritually. [22] The soul takes from its experience in the physical world an echo of the ability to remember, and through this it is able to know in the supersensible experience: I am here in the spiritual the same as I am there in the sensible. This ability to remember is necessary for it, because otherwise it would lose the connection in self-consciousness. In addition, however, the self-consciousness that has been lifted up into the supersensible world also acquires the ability to transform the impressions experienced in this world in such a way that they make impressions in the body of the same kind as the sensory impressions of the physical world. And this makes it possible for the soul to retain a kind of memory of what it has experienced in the supersensible. Otherwise these experiences would always be forgotten. But while the impressions of the physical world have such an effect on man that he can later remember them through what they themselves have brought about in him, in the realm of the supersensible he must carry out such an act with the experiences themselves which makes it possible for him to know of them later in ordinary consciousness. [23]

Devotion, this natural instinct of the elementary world, is not to be regarded in the same way as what is called love in human experience. Elementary devotion is based on an experience of oneself in the other being or process; love is an experience of the other in one's own soul. In order for this experience to unfold, a veil must be drawn in the soul over the sense of self - ego-experience that exists in its depths. [24] A basic ability for the soul to experience itself, to feel itself in the elementary world, is the ability to transform. Just as it is not appropriate for the physical world to be constantly awake, just as life in the physical world must swing, as it were, between waking and sleeping, something similar is also necessary for the life of the etheric body in the elementary world. That which makes one capable of transformation for the spiritual world is the imaginative life of man, that is the ability to make the imagination, the thinking mobile, so that one can immerse oneself in the beings and processes through thinking that has become mobile. For the other state, which can be compared with sleep in the sense world, the human will must be trained and strengthened. One cannot develop a sense of self in the elementary world if one does not exert one's will, if one does not will oneself. This, however, requires an overcoming of human comfort, which is immensely deeply rooted. Just as sleeping and waking alternate in the physical-sensual world, so the one state of transforming oneself into the being in the elementary world must alternate with this self-feeling that is strengthened in the will. Just as in the physical-sensual world the overtaxing occurs through sleep, so there are moments in the elementary world for the etheric body when it feels: I cannot now continually transform myself, I must now exclude all other beings and processes and will myself, my self, to live completely in myself for once. That would correspond to sleep in the physical world. Thus, in a much more arbitrary way than waking and sleeping in the physical-sensual world, the ability to transform and to live in oneself alternate with a strengthened sense of self in the elementary world. Indeed, consciousness can bring it about that, as it were, through the elasticity of this consciousness, both states exist simultaneously under certain conditions, that one transforms oneself, as it were, on the one side and yet holds certain parts of one's soul together and rests within oneself. One can be awake and asleep at the same time in the elementary world. [25] When one transforms oneself into one or the other being, one experiences something that could be called: Sympathies and antipathies, which flood up as if from the depths of the soul and appear as experiences in the clairvoyant soul. As one progresses from transformation to transformation, one continually experiences other sympathies and antipathies. [26]

That mood of mind, that emotional state which corresponds to the sympathies and antipathies in the physical-sensual world, must be replaced in relation to the elementary world by what one could call peace of mind, peace of spirit. Only then, when the soul can behave in this way towards sympathies and antipathies, is this soul able to let the experience of sympathy or antipathy, of feeling itself in the things of the elementary world, appear before it in a pictorially correct way. Only then is one able to feel not merely that which is the feeling in sympathy and antipathy, but to really see the experience of oneself, transformed into another being, shooting up as this or that colored picture or this or that sound picture of the elementary world. [27] The will must become stronger, because in the elementary world one does not have it as comfortable as in the physical-sensual world, where the sense of self is given to one by the forces of the physical body. You have to want this sense of self yourself. If one does not keep oneself in the elementary world, one falls into a kind of powerlessness in this world. That which we call the will in the physical-sensual world is a shadow of that strong essential will which unfolds in such a way that it maintains the self out of arbitrariness, not supported by external forces, [28]

It must also be borne in mind that when thinking develops the ability to transform, i.e. when it settles into the elementary world, this thinking itself, as it is healthy and correct in the physical-sensual world, is not needed for the elementary world. One feels inwardly master of these thoughts in the soul. They behave passively, as it were, can be connected and separated, can be created and removed again. If one really lives into the elemental world with the clairvoyant soul, then it is as if the thoughts were not things that one controls, but the thoughts become like living beings. A grotesque image can make us a little aware of how different thinking must become in the elemental world: Imagine you put your head in an anthill and thinking stops. You would have ants in your head instead of your thoughts. This is how thoughts become when you immerse your soul in the elemental world, that they connect and separate themselves, that they lead a life of their own. You need a stronger power of the soul to face living thought beings with your consciousness. You have to maintain and assert yourself with your soul life. It is quite possible to think something quite stupid in the physical-sensual world; as a rule it does not hurt. In the elementary world it can very well happen, if one does stupid things there with one's thinking, that what crawls around there as independent beings hurts one quite a lot, causes one quite a lot of pain. [29]

If one were to come over into the physical-sensual world with the habits one has towards the living thought-beings of the elementary world, cross the threshold and go back, and then not develop healthy thinking with passive thoughts, but want to hold on to the behavior for the elementary world, then one's thoughts would continually run through one, then one would run after thoughts; then one would become the slave of one's thoughts. [30]

You cannot pass by certain experiences of the astral and devachanic plan coldly or soberly, but certain experiences demand from you a devotion, a full involvement; others, on the other hand, repel you. Deprivation is something that is on one side of our emotional world when we are in the astral world. There, when one has developed consciousness, one does not get to know the tormenting deprivation that a deceased person has, but the feeling of searching for something, the feeling of deprivation, will also overcome the clairvoyant if there were not another to maintain the balance. If he enters the astral plan unprepared, then this will assert itself. The soul has neither rest nor tranquillity; restlessness, restlessness will push the soul from one to the other. To avoid this, there is only one thing to do: the opposite emotional nuance must be developed, and in all secret schools this is prepared: renunciation. While the feeling of desire turns the astral world into a world of pain and displeasure, what one obtains through renunciation makes it possible to observe the formations and entities of the astral plan more and more clearly and distinctly. [31] He who comes up into the higher worlds and knows: I lack this or that, and there is no prospect of obtaining it, experiences the content of consciousness in the astral world. Even if someone could be given occult means as a human being so that he could enter the astral plan from his body, he would always have to suffer deprivation in the astral world. Renunciation conjures up the true forms of the astral world from unknown depths. [32]

The astral world is mainly composed of forms and colors. Color floats freely in the air like a flaming image. The astral color images move freely in space, they vibrate like a flood of colors, a sea of colors in ever-changing, diverse lines and forms. At first, this glow, this sea of color, appears to the student of the spirit as being masterless, so to speak; it does not adhere to objects. But then the flakes of color come together and attach themselves, not to objects, but to entities. A world of entities that speaks to us through colors is the astral world. [33]

If a person is able to switch off all memories of the external sensory world and other experiences during meditation, and if he still has a soul content, then his dream world begins to take on a great regularity. When he wakes up, it is as if he is rising from a flooding sea of worlds. He knows that he has now experienced something new, that he has emerged from such a sea of light and color as he has never known in the physical world. His dream experiences become clearer and clearer. He remembers that in this world of light and color there were things and entities that differed from the other objects in that one could pass through them, that they offered no resistance. He gets to know a sum of entities whose element, whose body is the colors. Gradually man expands his consciousness over this world and on awakening remembers that he has acted in it. The next step is then to take this world over into the world of day. Then man gradually learns to see what is called the astral body of man. In this way man then has two stages of consciousness: the everyday waking consciousness and the dream consciousness. [34]

For the observer of the astral world, the most important thing that comes to mind is that the ability to transform, the metamorphosis, is just as outstanding for this astral world as the coming into being and passing away is for the physical world. We are dealing with mobile entities that transform into each other in such a way that they can be one thing or another. Such is the power of transformation of that which does not descend to the physical plane for vision, but remains in the regions of the higher worlds and only descends to the astral plane, can transform itself from good into evil, from light into darkness. [35] When man has extinguished the bad deed, transformed it into a good one, then the Erinyes of mythology turn into the benevolent Eumenides. Here you have (an example of) the ability to transform. [36]

The astral plan contains everything that is similar in nature to human drives, feelings, desires and passions. For all the sensory things that surround man also include forces that are related to these human ones. A crystal, for example, is molded into its form by forces which, when viewed from a higher perspective, are like an instinct at work in man. By similar forces the sap is conducted through the vessels of the plant, the blossoms are made to unfold, the seed capsules to burst open. The secret disciple sees (as a clairvoyant) not only the crystal, the plant, but also the marked spiritual forces. And he sees the animal and human instincts not only through the physical life expressions of their bearers, but also directly as objects. The whole world of instinct, drive, desire and passion of an animal or human being becomes the astral cloud in which the being is enveloped, the aura. The highest achievement of the clairvoyant (at this level) is that in which the astral counter-effects of animal and human instincts and passions are revealed to him. These counter-images can only be seen weakly during a person's physical life. This is because their strength is impaired by life in the physical world. They only come into their own after the death of the human being (see: Kamaloka). They accompany the living human being as his desire system, just as the comet is accompanied by its tail. [37]

The etheric body of a being can be influenced from the astral world. [38] There may be some astral entity in one part of space, and in a completely different part of space there may be another astral entity, which in turn is spatially self-contained. However, it is possible that these two astral entities, which are not connected by the slightest spatial line, make up a single being. Indeed, it can happen that a hundred widely separated astral formations are so interdependent that no process can take place without it also taking place in the other formations in the corresponding way. When the beings then find their embodiment in the physical, you can still discover echoes of this astral peculiarity in the physical. You will have heard that twins exhibit a strange parallelism. This comes from the fact that, while they are spatially separated in their embodiments, they have remained related in their astral bodies. And while something is happening in the astral body of the one, this cannot be happening alone, but is also expressed in the astral part of the other. The astral shows this peculiarity of dependence even where it appears as plant astrality in things that are spatially quite separate from each other. The wine in the barrels shows a very strange process when the wine time comes again. That which causes the ripening of the new grapes becomes noticeable again, even in the wine barrels. [39]

On the astral plan there is room for all, because there the beings interpenetrate each other; for the law of impenetrability applies only to the physical plan. Only there do they feel the influences when they are penetrated, both good and evil; in their inner experience they feel the passage. [40] The law of permeability of the astral plan has the consequence that the logic of living together there is quite different from the logic of action in the physical plan. [41]

On the physical plane the thought can remain soul property; it can stay in there. On the astral plane it is not so simple. There it is like this: when a thought is conceived it is already there in a certain relationship. So that when an astral entity has a thought, this entity immediately stretches out the corresponding sensory filaments, which have the form of this thought, and another being stretches out the sensory filaments from itself; both now penetrate each other and are inside the same space as a newly formed entity. In this way, the most diverse opinions, thoughts and sensations continually interpenetrate each other. The most opposite things can penetrate each other in the astral world. If there is contradiction in the physical world, there is immediate conflict in the astral world. For as a being of the astral world one cannot hold back the thoughts within oneself, these immediately become action, the objects are immediately there. Suppose a being of the astral world wanted to realize something and another being wanted to thwart it. You can't argue about it, but the principle applies: a thing must prove itself! If the two sensory horns are really in the same room, then they begin to fight each other, and then the idea which is the more fruitful, which is therefore right - that is the one which can stand - will destroy the other and will assert itself. So that we constantly have the conflict of the most diverse opinions, thoughts and feelings. The astral world is, so to speak, the much more dangerous one, and much of what is said about the danger of the astral world is connected with this. So everything becomes an action there. And the opinions there have to fight with each other, not argue. It is one of the characteristics of the physical world that when the discussion starts, everyone wants to destroy the other person who disagrees with them, or considers them a fool. This is not the case in the astral world. There a being will say: I don't care about other opinions! - There is absolute tolerance. If one opinion is the more fruitful, it will beat the others out of the field. The other opinions are allowed to exist just as much as one's own, because things will have to be straightened out through the struggle. Whoever gradually settles into the spiritual world must learn to conform to the habits of the spiritual world; and the first part of the spiritual world is, after all, the astral world, where such customs prevail. So that in a person who settles into the spiritual world, the habits of the beings of the spiritual world must also take hold in a certain respect. And that is also correct. Our physical world should become more and more a reflection of the spiritual world, and we will bring more and more harmony into our world by making one thing our aim: life in the physical world should take place like life in the astral world. The opinions which are the most fruitful will win the day. [42] This will be a great field of education which the spiritual-scientific movement will have to cultivate: to create more and more on the physical plan an image of the astral world, so that an absolute inner tolerance of opinions prevails. No being of the astral world will develop such a concept of truth as we know it in the physical world. The beings of the astral world find what is discussed and so on in the physical world quite unfruitful. Goethe's saying also applies to them: "What is fruitful is the only thing that is true!" [43]

Sources:

[1], [6] GA 101: Myths and Legends. Occult Signs and Symbols (1907)

[2] GA 89: Consciousness - Life - Form. Basic Principles of Spiritual Scientific Cosmology (1903-1906)

[3] - [5] GA 88: On the Astral World and the Devachan (1903-1904)

[7], [8] GA 166: Necessity and Freedom in World Events and in Human Action (1916)

[9], [31], [40] GA 108: The Answering of World and Life Questions through Anthroposophy (1908/1909)

[10] GA 143: Experiences of the Supersensible. The Three Paths of the Soul to Christ. (1912)

[11] - [13] GA 130: Esoteric Christianity and the Spiritual Guidance of Humanity (1911/1912)

[14] GA 9: Theosophy. Introduction to Supersensible World Knowledge and Human Destiny (1904)

[15], [17] Bei 60: Contributions to the Rudolf Steiner Complete Edition. Booklet 60 (1977)

[16] GA 96: Original Impulses of Spiritual Science. Christian Esotericism in the Light of New Spiritual Knowledge (1906/1907)

[18], [32], [39], [41] - [43] GA 107: Spiritual Scientific Study of Man (1908/1909)

[19], [20] GA 17: The Threshold of the Spiritual World (1913)

[21], [25] - [30] GA 147: The Mysteries of the Threshold (1913)

[22] - [24] GA 17, page 57 (1956 edition, 102 pages)

[33] GA 95: At the Gates of Theosophy (1906)

[34] GA 283: The Essence of Music and the Experience of Sound in Man (1906/1920)

[35], [36] GA 113: The Orient in the Light of the Occident. The Children of Lucifer and the Brothers of Christ (1909)

[37] GA 10: How does one attain knowledge of the higher worlds? (1904/1905)

[38] GA 11: From the Akashic Chronicle (1904/1908)

Devachan: General Aspects

'Deva' is God and 'Chan': territory, dwelling place; devachan therefore means God's territory. Insofar as man is a spiritual being, he has a share in this spiritual world. [1] Then our world is also permeated by an even higher world (than the astral plan), the actual spiritual world, which in Theosophy we call the devachanic or mental world and which, if we have opened our eyes to it, makes it possible for us to see thoughts that are not permeated by feelings and desires, i.e. that are pure thoughts, as things. [2]

We are not dealing with a world that lies in some other place in the cosmos, but with a world that surrounds us everywhere, that is present everywhere around us. This spiritual world is present at every point in our world. It is not a wandering into another world when we speak of the spiritual world or of devachan, but it is an opening up of the organs, an attainment of another state. [3] Just as one liquid mixes with another, finer liquid, so that the one liquid permeates the other in all parts, so the astral world permeates our world of the physical; and this astral world is in turn permeated by a still higher world, which we call the mental world (Devachan), that is the actual spiritual world. Thus three worlds are intertwined, one always interpenetrating the other, of which man with his present organs only perceives the physical world. It is the task of Theosophy to gradually open the mind to the invisible and, under normal circumstances, inaudible worlds. [4] Just as we pass through the sensual air, we pass through the spiritual worlds. Relationships to the spiritual worlds arise when one looks into the subtleties of human soul life. [5] Incorporated into the astral and physical world is the world of spiritual sound, the harmonies of the spheres, the world of devachan, which can be recognized through clairaudience. [6] Just as you now receive musical impressions here in the physical from the movements of the strings, so he who has reached the level of clairaudience (see: clairaudience) in Devachan hears the movement of the heavenly bodies as music of the spheres. [7] All the worlds we can pass through from our physical world through the higher worlds on and on, they always have something in common. It is true that when we enter a higher world, we always find something new and new, but nevertheless always something in common with the previous world. [8]

Parables must be used to describe the Devachan. For our language, which for the most part only serves sensual reality, is not exactly richly blessed with expressions that can be directly applied to the "spirit land". Here in particular, therefore, we must ask that some of what is said be understood only as an allusion. Everything described here is so dissimilar to the physical world that it can only be described in this way. The writer of this account is always aware of how little his information can really resemble experience in this field because of the imperfection of our linguistic means of expression calculated for the physical world.

This world is woven from the material - the word "material" is of course also used here in a very unreal sense - woven from which human thought consists. But just as thought lives in man, it is only a shadow image, a shadow of his real essence. Just as the shadow of an object on a wall relates to the real object that casts this shadow, so the thought that appears through the human head relates to the entity in the devachan that corresponds to this thought. When the spiritual sense of man is awakened, he really perceives this thought-entity, just as the sensual eye perceives a table or a chair. Just as his surroundings suddenly appear to the blind man who has undergone an operation with the new qualities of colors and lights, so to him who learns to use his spiritual eye the surroundings appear filled with a new world, with the world of living thoughts or spiritual beings. [9]

The thought images you have are the shadow images cast from the devachanic or mental world. The thought that lives in you is what the seer sees in connection with an entity. If a man knows nothing of these higher worlds, he is given over to them like a slave who is powerless against the one who pulls the chains. [10]

However, the first insight into this "spirit land" is even more confusing than that into the spiritual world (into the astral plan). [11] And when we now enter the spiritual worlds ourselves and experience a little of this life in the devachan, then we are confronted with completely different conditions than here in the physical life of the earth. That is why it is so extraordinarily difficult to bring these conditions of the spiritual worlds into human words and human thoughts. And it sometimes sounds so paradoxical when one tries to speak concretely about the conditions of the spiritual worlds. [12] Where are the elementary beings, the beings of the higher hierarchies? They are everywhere around us. But at first they are so thin and so fleeting in relation to the relationships of things and processes of the outer world that one can say that they escape the attention of human beings. People always pass through the whole spiritual world and do not see it, because their organization, which is still unprepared for the spiritual world, necessarily makes them inattentive to it. And if they had the opportunity to penetrate into the spiritual world, as is the case at night during sleep, the consciousness proves to be so weak that, although the human being is always in the spiritual world from falling asleep to waking up, he is too dull to perceive the spiritual beings that are around him. He is in the spiritual world all night, in this subtle fluctuating world, but he does not perceive it because his consciousness is too dull to do so. [13] Just as physically the air surrounds us everywhere, so spiritually the spiritual world surrounds us. Thus, even in the waking state, we are always in the spiritual world. [14]

It is a misconception to believe that only imaginative, inspired and intuitive cognition leads man into the spiritual world. No, man already lives in the spiritual world when he has sensory perceptions and when he forms ideas. The sensory perceptions are linked to the fact that dead matter, purely physical apparatuses are already embedded in our organism, which are only permeated by the etheric body, but they are embedded. The physical apparatus is not experienced; the spiritual that takes place within it is experienced. By its very nature, the content of sense perception is entirely spiritual. This is the peculiarity that we first become aware of the spiritual in the sense perceptions and in the ideas, but only in images. [15]

On the Devachan plan the light ether (see: ether types - light ether) has its life, hence the inner relationship between wisdom and light. [16] In ordinary science today we speak of light as being contained in the illuminated. Spiritual science speaks of light in this way: it also calls light that which underlies other sense perceptions, such as the light of sound perception. In short, all perceptions are based on something much more general than light than what is called light in physics today. It is certainly misleading, I admit, to speak of light in this way. [17]

When man has passed through the gate of death, when he has left the Kamaloka behind him and entered the spiritual world proper, he lives in a world which is quite as if he were surrounded on all sides by visions; only these visions are images of realities. And one can very well say that while we perceive the physical world through colors that the eye conjures up for us, through sounds that the ear conveys to us, we also perceive the spiritual world when we have passed through the gate of death in visions into which we are interwoven. [18] The first experience is therefore the perception of one's own body; from this experience all others take their origin. The human being has a strong feeling of liberation from the bodily shells, for it is the blissful moment when he has also cast off the last of the corpses, the astral corpse. Just as a plant trapped in a crevice would experience it as bliss if it were freed, so this feeling of bliss becomes a basic sensation of the human being. This bliss then also permeates and transfigures the feelings previously experienced in a more earthly way, for example those of friendship, which were perhaps subject to certain changes here and which are deepened and purified over there. Through love, man works his way up from the narrowness of selfishness into the fullness of worldly experience. There, however, nothing is closed off from one another, separated, one works for the other, for there too work is the element that supports and promotes and unites souls, while love is the inexhaustible source of all life. [19]

The moment we pass beyond the moon (see: life between death and a new birth), something occurs that we can now also describe spiritually inwardly - we are surrounded by visions. When we meet a deceased friend after death, it is a vision, but it is he himself, he lives inside this reality; but they are visions that are based on the memory of what we have done here. [20]

Everything a person has thought in the past, his feelings and passions, everything he has experienced here, confronts him in devachan in the form of the things around him. First you see your own physical body in its original form. Just as we walk over rocks, mountains and stones here on earth, so there we walk over all the forms that exist here in the physical world; in other words, we walk over our own physical body. This is actually a characteristic of man after death, that he has his own physical body (in the archetype) as a thing outside himself. By this he recognizes that he has come up from Kamaloka into Devachan. Here he says to his body: "This is me!" There he sees it and says: "This is you!" The Vedanta philosophy has its students meditatively practice this "This is you!", so that through exercises of this kind they have an understanding of saying to their body: "This is you!" (Tat tvam asi). (Tat tvam asi).

In addition, you see around you everything that you have experienced here on earth. If a person here harbors revenge, unlove, all kinds of bad feelings against his fellow human beings, then these bad feelings confront him like a cloud outside himself, and that is a lesson for the person. He can learn what significance and effect all this has here in the world. [21]

The devachan is always around us. So all the souls of people who are disembodied are also around us. They are working around us. If we as seers seek them out, we can find the dead people within the light, if we do not merely perceive the light sensually. The light that surrounds us forms the body of the dead. The light that washes over the earth is material for the beings who live in the devachan. Let us see outside a plant that feeds on sunlight; it receives not only the physical light, but in truth the activity of spiritual beings, and among them are also these (disembodied) human souls. They themselves shine down on the plants as light, they hover around the plants as spiritual beings. When the seer's eye develops, he often has a peculiar perception. When he stands in the sun, his body stops the light. It casts a shadow. When he now looks into this shadow, this is often the first moment when he discovers the spirit. The body catches the light, but not the spirit, and the spirit can be discovered in the shadow cast by the body. That is why primitive peoples, who have always had clairvoyance, also call the shadow the soul. [22]

All the processes in the natural kingdoms around us, everything that takes place in the air and water, is nothing other than processes in the spiritual world that reveal themselves through what happens in the physical. They are revelations of spiritual processes. These are the true reality, the reality. Nothing is more real than the spiritual world, and only when we can recognize the spiritual in all things and processes have we truly recognized reality. Everything in the physical world has only the value of a parable for that which stands behind it, the spiritual world. We must learn to view all processes in the animal and plant world in this way and also everything we see in the human kingdom that makes an impression on the mind, the intellect. All these are nothing but parables, and only he who learns to interpret them arrives at reality. [23] A completely different kind of interaction takes place in this spiritual world, in this sequence or flow of spiritual events that parallels the physical events. [24] Thus something very significant is said by this, that in the next world, which penetrates ours as a supersensible one, there is not at all that order which we can penetrate with concepts and their power of proof, but that there a seeing takes place in which a quite different order to the events prevails. [25] (See also: Causality).

At the moment when one looks into the spiritual world, when one looks into the past, it is as if the past has come to a standstill. It is still there. Time becomes space. The past ceases to be directly past. Then the concept of necessity also ceases to have meaning. One does not have a past, a present, a future, but one has a permanent. If one looks into the spiritual world, all concepts of the necessary and the accidental change; providence reigns there. [26]

In the spiritual world we find the dead, but in this world there are many other things. And among what is in it is precisely the activity of such forces as live in the emanations of human beings. In a certain sense, this is a highly dangerous area of the world to enter. All forces, all impulses of the present epoch must rush towards using the vital radiation on earth (see: Human Radiations). But it is tremendously obvious that one enters into that which lies between this vital radiation and all other radiations which one would so much like to have: black magic. [27]

(Through spiritual training) the world becomes more and more spiritual to the outside, the further we advance in knowledge. So that one really ceases to take seriously all those constructions which are drawn from chemical or other ideas. All atomism is thoroughly driven out of us when we extend our knowledge outwards. Behind sense phenomena is the spiritual world. [28]

Again and again we must realize that the human being's stay in Devachan is not somewhere other than where we are otherwise. Devachan, the astral plan and the physical world are three worlds that are intertwined. You can get the most accurate idea of devachan if you think of the world of electrical forces before people discovered electricity. Before that, everything was already contained in the physical world, only then it was an occult world. Everything that is occult will be discovered one day. The difference between life in the devachan and that in the physical world is that man in his present cycle is equipped with organs that enable him to see the physical world, but not with organs that enable him to see the phenomena of the devachan. [29]

The devachan - or the seat of the gods - corresponds to the Christian heaven in the spiritual world of occultists. It goes without saying that these regions - which are only apparently extraterrestrial, since they are in a living relationship with our world, but are beyond the reach of our physical senses - can only be described in symbols and similes, for our language is only suitable for the world of the senses. The Devachan comprises seven degrees or seven different regions, which are staggered in ascending order. These are not floors or exact locations, but states of the soul and spirit. [30] The continental region contains all the physical, the marine region all life, the aerial circle all sensations and the etheric circle all thoughts. At the boundary of the etheric circle is the Akashic Records. It contains everything that has ever been thought. Beyond the Akashic Records lies everything that has not yet been thought, Arupa. Everything newly thought, all inventions and so on come from the Arupa region (upper Devachan). [31]

That which, like warmth, permeates earthly things and beings, everything in the devachan, is the world of thought itself. Only the thoughts there are to be imagined as living, independent beings. [32] This world is woven from the material of which human thought is made. But just as thought lives in man, it is only a shadow image, a shadow of his real being. Just as the shadow of an object on a wall relates to the real object that casts this shadow, so the thought that appears through the human head relates to the entity in the devachan that corresponds to this thought. In this world we first see the spiritual archetypes of all things and beings that exist in the physical and spiritual world. Imagine the picture of a painter in the mind before it is painted. Then you have a parable of what is meant by the expression "archetype". Such archetypes are present for all things, and the physical things and entities are afterimages of these archetypes. [33] However, the first insight into this "spirit land" is even more confusing than that into the spiritual world. For the archetypes in their true form are very dissimilar to their sensual afterimages. But they are just as dissimilar to their shadows, the abstract thoughts.

In the devachan, everything is in perpetual motion, in ceaseless creation. There is no rest, no dwelling in one place, as there is in the physical world. For the archetypes are creating beings. They are the masters of everything that is created in the physical and spiritual world. Their forms are rapidly changing; and in every archetype lies the possibility of taking on innumerable special forms. They allow the special forms to sprout from themselves, as it were; and no sooner is one produced than the archetype prepares to allow another to spring forth from itself. And the archetypes are more or less related to each other. They do not work in isolation. One needs the help of the other to create it. Countless archetypes often work together to create this or that entity in the spiritual or physical world. As soon as the "clairvoyant" ascends from the astral plan into the devachan, the perceived archetypes also become sounding. This "sounding" is a purely spiritual process. It must be imagined without any thought of a physical sound. The observer feels as if he is in a sea of sounds. The beings of the spiritual world express themselves in this spiritual sounding. In their sounding together, their harmonies, rhythms and melodies, the primal laws of their existence, their mutual relationships and affinities are expressed. What the mind perceives in the physical world as a law, as an idea, presents itself to the "spiritual ear" as something spiritual and musical - the music of the spheres of the Pythagoreans. If one wants to obtain a concept of this "spiritual music", one must eliminate all ideas of sensual music as it is perceived by the "material ear". In the following descriptions of the Devachan, the references to this "spiritual music" will be omitted for the sake of simplicity. One only has to imagine that everything that is described as an "image", as a "luminous thing", is at the same time a sounding thing. Wherever archetypal images are spoken of in the following, the primordial sounds must therefore be added. Other perceptions are also added, which can be described similarly as "spiritual tasting" and so on. [34] It is particularly characteristic of the Devachanic that it is a sounding world, at least in essence. Of course, one must not think that the Devachanic world is not also a world that shines with colors. It is of course also illuminated by the astral world, for it is not separate from it; the astral also permeates the devachanic. On an even higher plan of the devachan, the sound becomes something similar to a word. From there comes all real inspiration, and it is in this region that the authors who were inspired move. [35]

Now it is first necessary to distinguish between the different kinds of archetypes. Even in the "spirit land" one has to distinguish a number of levels or regions in order to orient oneself. The individual regions are not to be thought of as being layered on top of each other, but as interpenetrating and interspersing each other. [36]

Sources:

[1], [30] GA 94: Cosmogony. Popular Occultism. The Gospel of John. Theosophy on the basis of the Gospel of John (1906)

[2] - [4] GA 88: On the Astral World and the Devachan (1903-1904)

[5] GA 194: The Mission of Michael. The Revelation of the Real Secrets of the Human Being (1919)

[6], [7] GA 101: Myths and Legends. Occult Signs and Symbols (1907)

[8] GA 158: The Connection of Man with the Elemental World. Kalewala - Olaf Åsteson - The Russian Folklore - The World as the Result of Equilibrium Effects (1912-1914)

[9], [11], [33], [34] GA 9: Theosophy. Introduction to Supersensible Knowledge of the World and the Destiny of Man (1904)

[10] GA 96: Original Impulses of Spiritual Science. Christian Esotericism in the Light of New Spiritual Knowledge (1906/1907)

[12], [18], [20] GA 140: Occult Investigations into Life between Death and New Birth. The Living Interaction between the Living and the Dead (1912/1913)

[13] GA 156: Occult Reading and Occult Hearing (1914)

[14] GA 154: How to Acquire an Understanding of the Spiritual World. The Influx of Spiritual Impulses from the World of the Departed (1914)

[15] GA 208: Anthroposophy as Cosmosophy - Part Two:. The Formation of Man as the Result of Cosmic Effects (1921)

[16], [29] GA 93a: Basic Elements of Esotericism (1905)

[17] GA 317: Curative Education Course (1924)

[19] GA 100: Human Development and the Knowledge of Christ. Theosophy and Rosicrucianism - The Gospel of John (1907)

[21], [22] GA 99: The Theosophy of the Rosicrucian (1907)

[23] GA 143: Experiences of the Supersensible. The three paths of the soul to Christ. (1912)

[24], [25] GA 166: Necessity and Freedom in World Events and in Human Action (1916)

[26] GA 163: Chance, Necessity and Providence. Imaginative cognition and processes after death (1915)

[27] GA 243: The Initiate-Consciousness. The True and False Paths of Spiritual Research (1924)

[28] GA 205: Becoming Human, World Soul and World Spirit - Part One:. The Human Being as a Bodily-Soul Entity in His Relation to the World (1921)

[31] GA 95: At the Gates of Theosophy (1906)

[32], [36] GA 13: The Secret Science in Outline (1910)

[35] GA 283: The Essence of Music and the Experience of Sound in the Human Being (1906/1920)

26
Reincarnation

Just as Francesco Redi (see above) has argued: Living things can only come from living things! - so spiritual science has (to) represent the sentence: The spiritual-mental can only arise from the spiritual-mental! And nothing other than a consequence of this proposition is that which is often ridiculed today as the outgrowth of a great fantasy: the law of re-embodiment. [1] As a rule, the souls that are now incarnated are found around 300 to 400 AD. In addition, there are others who were incarnated at different times, some before, some later. [2]

The objection is usually made that man does not remember these repeated earth lives. This only concerns the ordinary consciousness. At the moment when intuition enters, that which takes place through the repeated earth lives becomes just as much inner soul perception as otherwise the memory within the one earth life. Thus it is also the case here that anthroposophy does not arrive at its results through abstract proofs like ordinary philosophy, but by first preparing the soul for higher knowledge and then recognizing these things through contemplation. [3] In sleep man forgets every emotion of his own body, so man must forget every emotion of his own body in meditation, not only in a mental sense, but in such a way that he is also able to separate all emotions and volitional impulses. But this state must be brought about consciously. But then something becomes a fact for man: man gets to know his soul-spiritual essence, in other words, one gets to know the immortal soul already in this life between birth and death. As surely as the plant germ has the disposition to become a new plant, so surely that which is concealed in everyday life as soul-spiritual, but which reveals itself to spiritual science, has the disposition to become a new human being. And through such an observation one arrives at the repeated earth lives in full agreement with the scientific way of thinking. [4]

In pre-Christian times, reincarnation existed as a feeling, for it was only a realization before the year 1860 BC. After the year 1860 it was only an instinctive feeling throughout Egypt, in Near Eastern and Roman times. But now comes the time when the view of man as a spiritual being, who undergoes a development between death and a new birth, becomes a living feeling, a living sensation, when one must live in the idea of the supernatural significance of human souls. For without this conception the culture of the earth will be killed. It will not be possible to develop any practical activity in the future without being able to look up to the spiritual significance of the fact that every human being is a spiritual being. [5]

There was a particular reason why the doctrine of reincarnation was completely suppressed for around two millennia. Man should learn to know and appreciate the importance of one life. Every slave in ancient Egypt was still convinced that he would come back, that he would one day be a ruler instead of a slave, but that he had karma to pay off. That is why one life was not so important to him. However, people should now learn to gain solid ground under their feet, which is why reincarnation should remain unknown during an incarnation. Christ therefore virtually forbade anything to be taught about reincarnation.

Within monastic esotericism, however, reincarnation was still occasionally taught. The Trappists must remain silent through one incarnation in order to become good speakers in the next. They are deliberately educated in this way to become good speakers, because the Church can use them. [6] Giordano Bruno, in his contemplation of the human being, declared the reincarnation of the soul to be his creed. And if we go further, we find this doctrine of reincarnation presented in Lessing's "Education of the Human Race". We also find it touched upon in Herder. Finally, we find it hinted at in various forms in Goethe, even if Goethe, in his cautious manner, did not express himself very clearly. Jean Paul and countless others could be cited. [7]

Because man brings with him certain characteristics (which individualize him) that determine him just as the lion is determined by the species, they must also be derived from the individual himself. [8] But the repeated earth-lives once had a beginning, namely from a time before which the ego was still so little different from its surroundings in ancient forms of existence that there was no such alternation between earth-life and spiritual-soul life, - that the ego has gone through repeated earth-lives and will continue to go through them until a time when it will then again be so similar in its whole inner organization to the spiritual world that it will no longer need earth-lives. [9] The forces that come into consideration when speaking of the laws of reincarnation are those that do not enter at all, not only not into the ego-consciousness, but not even into the realm of the ordinary physical world. [10] With what we take with us through death we are able to build up our next life, because it contains within it the same forces that built up our spiritual-soul growth when we were fresh and joyful in our youth. It is similar to these forces. We have absorbed it from our life experience and are building a future living being, a future bodily shell, which will carry within itself as a flowering in the plant what we have gained in the one life. [11] If someone were to raise the objection: I have later lives on earth before me, so I need only become a proper human being in the later lives; now I still have time, now I can still be a disorderly human being - that would be an objection that can also be refuted theoretically. But in order to face it correctly, it is necessary to know the practical circumstances. One must know that someone who believes that he does not yet need to be a proper human being in his present life, that he only wants to become one in the next life, has worked into his next earthly life through such a resolution. If he does not decide now to become a proper human being, he will not have the necessary foundations for the next life either. He thus deprives himself now of the ability to be a proper human being later on; he creates for himself the powers to do so. [12]

How difficult it is to talk about certain spiritual things, you will see from the fact that many things, because they have to be clothed in physical ideas, appear in the opposite way, and are therefore very easily misunderstood. It is not true that, because the matter is first viewed from the physical world, it is rightly said that man goes through repeated earth lives. That is correct. But why does he go through repeated earth lives? By living here between birth and death, he lives through a certain amount of time. Then he enters the spiritual world through the gate of death, goes through a circuit, but returns to the same part of time in the circuit. And again and again, when we live through a life, we are actually in the same place in the world. That is very interesting! In the realm of the spirit, it is not actually time that rules, but duration. We return to the same place. We actually repeat life in the same circumstances with what we have gone through in the meantime, at the same place in the world. We always return to the starting point. We perform real circles. [13]

All those who can look into the conditions of the spiritual worlds will discover the majority of all human souls now living in the first period after the birth of Christ up to the 8th and 9th centuries. However, these are all average ratios; the time between two embodiments can also be shorter or longer. [14]

That which originates from physical causes will pass away with our personality, with death; that for which we are unable to find physical causes, we will have to regard as the effect of an earlier past. [15] (For more see: Karma).

Sources:

[1] GA 58: Metamorphoses of the Life of the Soul - Paths of Soul Experiences. Part One (1909/1910)

[2], [6] GA 93a: Basic Elements of Esotericism (1905)

[3], [9] GA 82: So that the human being may become fully human. The Significance of Anthroposophy in the Spiritual Life of the Present (1922)

[4] GA 155: Christ and the Human Soul. On the meaning of life. Theosophical morality. Anthroposophy and Christianity (1912/1914)

[5] GA 196: Spiritual and Social Changes in the Development of Humanity (1920)

[7], [15] GA 52: Spiritual Soul Theory and World View (1903/1904)

[8] GA 53: Origin and Goal of Man. Basic Concepts of Spiritual Science (1904/1905)

[10] GA 73: Anthroposophy as a Supplement to Today's Sciences (1917/1918)

[11] GA 60: Answers of Spiritual Science to the Great Questions of Existence (1910/1911)

[12] GA 62: Results of Spiritual Research (1912/1913)

[13] GA 168: The Connection between the Living and the Dead (1916)

[14] GA 100: Human Development and the Knowledge of Christ. Theosophy and Rosicrucianism - The Gospel of John (1907)

Reincarnation - beginning and end

It is a misconception when theosophists believe that reincarnation has no beginning and no end. Reincarnation began in Lemurian times and will also end again at the beginning of the 6th race. It is only a certain period of time in the earthly development within which the human being reincarnates. This was preceded by an extremely spiritual state that did not require re-embodiment, and will be followed by a spiritual state that also does not require re-embodiment. [1]

The repeated earth lives (have) once taken a beginning from a time before which the I was still so little different from its surroundings in an ancient form of existence that such an alternation between earth life and spiritual-soul life was not given. The repeated earth lives will continue to be experienced until a point in time when it will again be so similar to the spiritual world in its entire inner form that it will no longer need earth life. [2]

Sources:

[1] GA 93: The Temple Legend and the Golden Legend as a Symbolic Expression of Past and Future Secrets of Human Development (1904/1906)

[2] GA 82: So that the human being may become fully human. The Significance of Anthroposophy in the Spiritual Life of the Present (1922)

Wisdom is always and forever one. But just as the individual man lives and evolves to further and further stages, so too does humanity as a whole. For this reason the forms of the wisdom revealed to men must change in order to be in keeping with the course of their evolution. The great teachers of humanity are working among us today, as always. We, too, who are present here as souls, were incarnated in earlier times, have lived through all the periods of evolution, the Greco-Latin, the Egypto-Chaldean and epochs still further back in time, in order to benefit from constantly new achievements and acquire constantly new knowledge. Think of a soul in an Egyptian incarnation, surrounded by the gigantic pyramids and mysterious sphinxes. What a different effect all this had upon the soul from what surrounds it today! For as long as the earth has something new to display—and the earth is forever making progress—for so long does the soul undergo constantly new experiences.

The soul does not incarnate on the earth in order to please the gods, but in order to learn! The face of the earth was quite different when the soul incarnated for the first time and will again be different when the final incarnation is reached. We return to this earth when, and not until, there is something new to be learned here. That is why the interval between two incarnations is lengthy. Only think how greatly Northern Europe, merely as landscape, differed from what it is today at the time when Christ was on the earth. We do not come to the earth twice without being able to learn something new. Everything in the world is in process of evolution, but evo‐ lution means the elaboration and later manifestation of the new. Not only men but all beings evolve.

Sources:

GA 109 - Rosicrucian Esotericism, Budapest, June 3, 1909

Reincarnation - Reversal of experience after death

In ordinary consciousness one does not experience the inside of the human being, but in waking consciousness one experiences the outside world. To a certain extent, one sees the outer world for one's own center in the spatial orbit, in the spatial sphere. Man is within himself, the outside world outside him. In the time between death and a new birth, the view is reversed: man is absorbed in that which was his outer world here. He feels that which was his outer world here as an inner world. And that which is closed to him here, the inner world of human nature, he now perceives as the outer world. The human being with his inner being becomes the world for the life between death and new birth, and the world becomes I. And by experiencing that which is now higher than what we have here in the world around us - for man is the crown of creation, he carries within him a higher realm than the environment is - he therefore has within himself a more valuable world between death and a new birth. And what he experiences as his world, but which is actually the mysterious world of man's inner being, he experiences creatively. In the spiritual world he creatively experiences the forces in communion with higher spiritual beings, by whom we are surrounded as spiritual-soul human beings, just as we are surrounded here as physical human beings by the three kingdoms of nature, by animals, plants and minerals. In communion with these spiritual beings one experiences the forces from which one gradually not only builds one's destiny, the germ of one's destiny, but from which one forms the model in the spiritual-soul world, but the real model, the spiritual-soul being, which then after a certain time gets the longing to embody again what it has initially formed as a model, but alive, in a living way in terms of the power of thought. Because it must now be connected with a physical body and can only receive its perfection again in a physical body, this spiritual-soul being gets the urge, the longing, to embody itself again here on earth. Out of the spirit comes that which, as our pre-natal or pre-conceptual existence, connects with the fleshly body. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 79: The Reality of the Higher Worlds. Introduction to Anthroposophy (1921)

Reincarnation - logical explanation

As a physical human being, I am descended from other physical human beings, because I have the same form as the entire human species. As a spiritual human being, I have my own form, just as I have my own biography. I can therefore have this form from no one other than myself. And since I did not enter the world with indeterminate, but with definite spiritual dispositions, since my path through life, as expressed in my biography, is determined by these dispositions, my work on myself cannot have begun at birth. I must have existed as a spiritual human being before my birth. I certainly did not exist in my ancestors, because they are different from me as spiritual people. My biography cannot be explained by theirs. Rather, as a spiritual being I must be the repetition of one whose biography can explain mine.

The other initially conceivable case would be that I owe the shaping of what is the content of my biography only to a spiritual life before conception. However, this idea would only be justified if one wanted to assume that what affects the human soul from the physical environment is the same as what the soul has from a purely spiritual world. Such an assumption contradicts truly accurate observation. For what is determining for the human soul from this physical environment is such that it has the same effect as something experienced later in physical life on something experienced earlier in the same way. In order to observe these relationships correctly, one must acquire an eye for how there are effective impressions in human life that affect the soul's dispositions in the same way as standing before a deed to be performed compared to what one has already practiced in physical life; only that such impressions do not impinge on what has already been practiced in this immediate life, but on soul dispositions that can be impressed in the same way as the abilities acquired through practice. He who sees through these things arrives at the idea of earth lives which must have preceded the present one. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 9: Theosophy. Introduction to Supersensible Knowledge of the World and the Destiny of Man (1904)

Reincarnation - seed of the life to come

We carry the experiences processed during the day over to the spiritual home in the evening and from there, transformed into spiritual powers, we bring them back to the physical world in the morning. We now understand more clearly the purpose and necessity of alternating between the two planes of existence and the importance of sleep, without which life here would not be possible. However, there is a limit to this transformation of forces, and every morning when we enter the body it becomes more and more apparent. It is the limit that our physical body places on the abilities we have acquired. We can transform some things into the physical body, but not everything. The following example illustrates the limit that the body places on the absorption of abilities: someone was born with an unmusical ear. - In order to be a performing musician, a fine structure of this organ is necessary, so fine that it escapes scientific observation. - If such a person studies much in the field of music, what he absorbs during the day is transformed into spiritual musical power at night, but cannot be expressed when it enters the imperfect physical organ. This example shows one of the cases in which the inability to transform the physical organ sets an insurmountable barrier to the utilization of spiritual powers. In such cases, man must resign himself and calmly tolerate the disharmony between his body and the bound forces. He who is able to look deeper knows that everyone has many experiences which would transform him completely if he could incorporate them into the physical man.

All these abilities that cannot manifest themselves, all these longings that bounce off the inflexible body, now accumulate in the course of life and form a whole that is clearly visible to the clairvoyant eye. The seer sees three things: the abilities that the human being brought with him at birth, then the new abilities that he has acquired and assimilated in life and finally the sum of those forces that have not been able to penetrate the body and are waiting to unfold. The latter form something like an opposition to the outer physicality and act as a counterforce to it. This is the most important force that is not in harmony with our life in the physical body. It gradually dissolves it and lets it wither away, seeking to cast it off like a burdensome fetter; it seeks to put it away like a tool that is no longer suitable to fulfill the increasing demands. It is the cause that our body withers away like the flower, which loses leaf after leaf and in which nothing remains alive but a new seed. The clairvoyant sees something similar in man: to his eyes it is as if, towards the second half of life, everything that has been acquired within the human being contracts, unable to unfold, like a seed that contains a small sprout for the next spring. In each of us, deeply hidden, the seed is forming into new life. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 118: The Event of the Appearance of Christ in the Ethereal World (1910)

Reincarnation biblical mention

(The Bible says) Furthermore, says the Lord: "Elijah has reappeared, but they did not recognize him. But tell no one until I come again." He is talking about reincarnation here, (because) John the Baptist is Elijah. The return refers to the return of ChristJesus (in the ether). [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 97: The Christian Mystery (1906/1907)

Reincarnation and karma - the significance of this knowledge

In so far as spiritual science will really spread and be a reproduction of occult knowledge, it will first endeavor to spread the great truths of reincarnation and karma over the whole earth. For these truths will first have the fate that the religious prejudices which are spread over the earth will, so to speak, strike sail before them. [1] When man now passes over to the realization of reincarnation and karma, we must be clear that what lives for such a man in his soul not only has a meaning for a sphere removed from the earth when he has passed through the gate of death, but that the future of the earth's formation depends on what he experiences between birth and death. The earth will, so to speak, have the outer configuration given to it by the people who were there before. The whole planet in its future configuration, the coexistence of people in the future, depends on how people lived in their earlier incarnations. This is the emotional and moral aspect that is linked to these ideas, so that a person who has accepted this knows: As I was in life, so will I have an effect on everything that happens in the future, on the whole culture of the future! - With the knowledge of reincarnation and karma, something expands beyond the boundaries of birth and death that man has hitherto only known within the narrowest limits: the sense of responsibility. We see a heightened sense of responsibility growing out of this. This is the expression of what emerges as a deeply significant moral consequence of ideas such as reincarnation and karma. [2]

Sources:

[1] GA 137: Man in the Light of Occultism, Theosophy and Philosophy (1912)

[2] GA 135: Re-embodiment and Karma and their Significance for the Culture of the Present (1912)

Reincarnation and karma - Knowledge is an obligation!

What would this human life be through these many embodiments if we could not say to ourselves: The further we develop into the future, the higher the level we will have reached that which is now within us as our ego. We can only guess what we can still become, otherwise we would already be it. We must ascribe to ourselves the ability to rise higher and higher. - But we must look timidly and reverently into the future; we must say to ourselves, even if we can already recognize this or that today, are already in a position to experience this or that in the world today: with the greater abilities that we can attain, we will be able to experience and recognize many other things. How impossible it is for the person who writes such a thought, as it has now been expressed, into his soul, how impossible it is for him to say to himself: I can decide today what is true or false, I can ultimately judge what is true or false. - It only behoves him to say: If I could already decide today, then it would be impossible for still higher faculties to appear in me in the future. - But putting this into practice gives us, at every moment of our development, the great modesty, the true, dignified humility that we need in order to be truly human. Thus the knowledge of reincarnation is transformed into a feeling, a character trait: into dignified humility, into true modesty. Knowledge is transformed into a real character trait. And when viewed correctly, every spiritual-scientific insight is transformed into a character trait. But we can realize this: If we are unable to use our powers at any stage of our existence, then these powers would not have been given to us from spiritual worlds. If we want to wait until the world has reached its stage of perfection, in the opinion that we must first be so perfect that we can finally recognize and experience, then we would not have to go through various incarnations. This means that we must realize that we have to use our powers of cognition in every incarnation. We must not say: We only want to recognize in the next incarnation, or at the end of our existence. - We should use the power we have in spite of humility and modesty. Thus, alongside humility and modesty, there is a justified human sense of self that flows directly from our interpenetration with the divine-spiritual and that tells us: Although our knowledge will only be perfect when we have reached a high level, we can make it perfect precisely by becoming aware of our human dignity today and applying our strength today. - This will give our character something that can be compared to a pair of scales. We can place humility and modesty on one side of the scales, and on the other a justified sense of self and boldness of judgment, and we can say that we have attained a level of knowledge and self-awareness. - In short, we shall find that whenever you only try to introduce into your feelings what spiritual science teaches, the doctrines or theories of spiritual science are transformed in our souls, because they contain thoughts of the divine spirits, are transformed in our souls into our character, our will, our feeling. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 125: Paths and Goals of the Spiritual Man. Questions of life in the light of spiritual science (1910)

Reincarnation - seed of the life to come

We carry the experiences processed during the day over to the spiritual home in the evening and from there, transformed into spiritual powers, we bring them back to the physical world in the morning. We now understand more clearly the purpose and necessity of alternating between the two planes of existence and the importance of sleep, without which life here would not be possible. However, there is a limit to this transformation of forces, and every morning when we enter the body it becomes more and more apparent. It is the limit that our physical body places on the abilities we have acquired. We can transform some things into the physical body, but not everything. The following example illustrates the limit that the body places on the absorption of abilities: someone was born with an unmusical ear. - In order to be a performing musician, a fine structure of this organ is necessary, so fine that it escapes scientific observation. - If such a person studies much in the field of music, what he absorbs during the day is transformed into spiritual musical power at night, but cannot be expressed when it enters the imperfect physical organ. This example shows one of the cases in which the inability to transform the physical organ sets an insurmountable barrier to the utilization of spiritual powers. In such cases, man must resign himself and calmly tolerate the disharmony between his body and the bound forces. He who is able to look deeper knows that everyone has many experiences which would transform him completely if he could incorporate them into the physical man.

All these abilities that cannot manifest themselves, all these longings that bounce off the inflexible body, now accumulate in the course of life and form a whole that is clearly visible to the clairvoyant eye. The seer sees three things: the abilities that the human being brought with him at birth, then the new abilities that he has acquired and assimilated in life and finally the sum of those forces that have not been able to penetrate the body and are waiting to unfold. The latter form something like an opposition to the outer physicality and act as a counterforce to it. This is the most important force that is not in harmony with our life in the physical body. It gradually dissolves it and lets it wither away, seeking to cast it off like a burdensome fetter; it seeks to put it away like a tool that is no longer suitable to fulfill the increasing demands. It is the cause that our body withers away like the flower, which loses leaf after leaf and in which nothing remains alive but a new seed. The clairvoyant sees something similar in man: to his eyes it is as if, towards the second half of life, everything that has been acquired within the human being contracts, unable to unfold, like a seed that contains a small sprout for the next spring. In each of us, deeply hidden, the seed is forming into new life. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 118: The Event of the Appearance of Christ in the Ethereal World (1910)

Reincarnation - logical explanation

As a physical human being, I am descended from other physical human beings, because I have the same form as the entire human species. As a spiritual human being, I have my own form, just as I have my own biography. I can therefore have this form from no one other than myself. And since I did not enter the world with indeterminate, but with definite spiritual dispositions, since my path through life, as expressed in my biography, is determined by these dispositions, my work on myself cannot have begun at birth. I must have existed as a spiritual human being before my birth. I certainly did not exist in my ancestors, because they are different from me as spiritual people. My biography cannot be explained by theirs. Rather, as a spiritual being I must be the repetition of one whose biography can explain mine.

The other initially conceivable case would be that I owe the shaping of what is the content of my biography only to a spiritual life before conception. However, this idea would only be justified if one wanted to assume that what affects the human soul from the physical environment is the same as what the soul has from a purely spiritual world. Such an assumption contradicts truly accurate observation. For what is determining for the human soul from this physical environment is such that it has the same effect as something experienced later in physical life on something experienced earlier in the same way. In order to observe these relationships correctly, one must acquire an eye for how there are effective impressions in human life that affect the soul's dispositions in the same way as standing before a deed to be performed in relation to what one has already practiced in physical life; only that such impressions do not impinge on what has already been practiced in this immediate life, but on soul dispositions that can be impressed in the same way as the abilities acquired through practice. He who sees through these things arrives at the idea of earth lives which must have preceded the present one. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 9: Theosophy. Introduction to Supersensible Knowledge of the World and the Destiny of Man (1904)

Reincarnation and karma for Western culture

Thus we see that we have indeed lost something in the Christian world view which the Orient already had and which we are only now beginning to conquer again. The course of human development is generally such that certain old pieces have to be discarded, that new ones are added and that the old is conquered again by the new. Thus the whole of mankind once had a primal clairvoyance in primeval times. This had to be discarded. It was then replaced by the purely external perception. And later that which is future clairvoyance will again be added to the perceptual view. In general and in detail. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 133: The Earthly and the Cosmic Man (1911/1912)

Reincarnation research - problems and errors

Many a simple person who walks around has remnants of important individualities in his astral and etheric body. - People who can investigate reincarnation by certain means and who do so honestly must know, if they do not know this fact, that it is not the ego that they find by somnambulistic means (through mediums). Reincarnation takes place not only of the individual egos, but also of the individual limbs. It is important that we point out such things, because it has been found that erroneous views have fatal effects not only on those who are beginners, but also those who are more advanced are fatally influenced when they believe that this or that individuality is embodied in this or that personality. It will be possible to put a stop to this if one knows that individual members can also re-embody themselves. Today there is (also) no human being who does not have a piece of the past etheric or astral body in him.

An error in questions of reincarnation has great harm in its wake. It does less harm to beginners than to the more advanced. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 109: The Principle of Spiritual Economy in Connection with Reembodiment Questions. An Aspect of the Spiritual Guidance of Humanity (1909)

Reincarnation and genius

If we now see how genius appears with far-reaching dispositions that can be gradually attained through practice, we should not regard genius as a miracle. We must regard it as an effect. And since genius is already born with the qualities, we will have to look for the cause in a previous stage of the soul's development, in a previous life. This is the only way to explain genius. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 52: Spiritual Soul Theory and World View (1903/1904)

Reincarnation and intuition

The objection is usually made that man does not remember these repeated earth lives. This only concerns the ordinary consciousness. At the moment when intuition occurs, that which takes place through the repeated earth lives becomes just as much inner soul perception as otherwise the memory within the one earth life. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 82: So that the human being may become fully human. The Significance of Anthroposophy in the Spiritual Life of the Present (1922)

Reincarnation and abilities

Mozart is still a very young boy when he hears a long piece of music in St. Peter's Church in Rome which, according to an old tradition, was never allowed to be written down before, and he wrote it down afterwards entirely from memory. What a memory it took! And he could do that as a young boy! What does the materialist say to that? The materialist simply accepts such a fact as the one just described from Mozart's life and places it on the account of heredity without deeper consideration. Spiritual science responds that here, too, memory has gradually developed naturally. The abilities that appear in this way prove that they were already there in a previous life and have taken the entirely natural course of development. Re-embodiment is therefore nothing other than a logical conclusion from such trains of thought. And that which occurs, as for example with Mozart, gives us the irrefutable logical proof that the human being has gradually acquired these abilities in earlier earthly lives. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 100: Human Development and the Knowledge of Christ. Theosophy and Rosicrucianism - The Gospel of John (1907)

Reincarnation of spiritual-scientific knowledge

You can only absorb something (for which you have just become mature) during an embodiment. If you do not absorb it, you have missed something that you will then lack for the next embodiments. What we learn in spiritual science today unites with our soul and we bring it back with us when we descend again in the next embodiment. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 118: The Event of the Appearance of Christ in the Ethereal World (1910)

Reincarnation of the initiates

The successive incarnations take place with completely new etheric bodies each time, and this is the reason why the physiognomy and the body form change so much from one incarnation to the next. They do not depend on the will of the individual, but on his karma, his emotional life and his unconscious will instincts. The situation is quite different for a spiritual disciple who undergoes an initiation. He develops his etheric body already here below in such a way that it gives him duration and enables him to enter the Devachan after death. He is sufficiently advanced to awaken the spirit of life in the womb of his etheric powers already here on earth, which forms one of his three imperishable members of being. This etheric body transformed into the spirit of life is called Buddhi in Sanskrit. Once the disciple has attained this life spirit, he no longer needs to completely transform his etheric body between two incarnations. He then spends a much shorter time in devachan. Therefore, he shows the same basic disposition, the same temperament, the same basic character from one incarnation to the next. When the occult master has succeeded in consciously directing not only his etheric body but also his physical body, a spiritual being also arises, which in Sanskrit is called Atma, meaning spirit man. Having reached this degree, the initiate retains the features of his physical appearance in every incarnation on earth. He retains his total consciousness during the transition from earthly life to heavenly life and from one incarnation to another. Hence the legend of the initiates who live for 1000 or 2000 years. This means that for them there is neither a Kamaloka nor a Devachan, but a continuous consciousness beyond deaths and births. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 94: Cosmogony. Popular Occultism. The Gospel of John. Theosophy on the basis of the Gospel of John (1906)

27
Rosenkreuz

Christian Rosenkreuz is not his real name, but it is the name by which he became known. [1] In the middle of the 13th century there was suddenly no more clairvoyance, a spiritual darkness set in for all people. Even the most enlightened spirits, the most highly developed personalities, even the initiates, no longer had access to the spiritual worlds at that time and had to limit themselves to what they remembered when they said something about the spiritual worlds. After this time, man's clairvoyance slowly began to develop again, and the clairvoyance of the future could develop. The origin of the Rosicrucian current dates back to the 13th century. At that time, in the 13th century, particularly suitable personalities had to be selected for initiation. The initiation itself could only take place after that brief period of eclipse.

The individuality that was reincarnated as Hiram Abiff and Lazarus-John was re-initiated in its incarnations in the 13th and 14th centuries and has borne the name Christian Rosenkreutz ever since. [2] In 1459, Christian Rosenkreutz was elevated to the rank of Eques lapidis aurei, Knight of the Golden Stone, within a strictly self-contained spiritual brotherhood, the Fraternitas Roseae crucis. This high spiritual individuality, which entered the physical plan in the outer personality of Christian Rosenkreutz, repeatedly acted as leader and teacher of the Rosicrucian current in "the same body", as they say in occultism. [3] As early as 1459, a higher spiritual individuality, called Christian Rosenkreutz in the outside world, founded a secret school for the cultivation of wisdom, not a new wisdom, but the old wisdom in a form that people now needed. This is the wisdom of the Rosicrucians, which was first cultivated at that time. It is, as I said, nothing new; it is the ancient wisdom, but in the form in which present-day humanity needs it. [4]

A current of occult wisdom came to Europe in the 14th century. When Christian Rosenkreutz brought the wisdom of the Orient to Europe, he founded schools in Europe in which students were brought up to the levels where seeing in the Devachan, seeing the higher mysteries, became possible. [5] Christian Rosenkreutz and his seven disciples laid the foundation for the knowledge of the law of morality, so that it would not resonate in people as given by the religions, but so that the law, recognized as such, would awaken to individual life in each person. Truth in the areas of morality, morality and goodness should arise in man as something recognized and felt. [6] In one place a highly spiritual lodge was formed, a college of 12 men who had absorbed the whole sum of the spiritual wisdom of ancient times and of their own time. It was a matter of 12 men living in that darkened time, 12 outstanding spirits who united to promote the progress of mankind. None of them could see directly into the spiritual world, but they were able to awaken in themselves the memory of what they had experienced through earlier initiations. And human karma had arranged it so that in 7 of these 12 people was embodied that which remained to humanity of the remnants of the old Atlantean epoch. (Above) it has already been said that in the 7 old holy Rishis, the teachers of the primeval Indian cultural period, what was left over from the Atlantean epoch was carried over. The 7 men who incarnated again in the 13th century, who were part of the College of the Twelve, were precisely those who could look back on the 7 currents of the old Atlantean epochs of human development and on what lived on as these 7 currents. Of these 7 individualities, each could only ever make one current fruitful for the time then and now. In addition to these 7, there were 4 others who could not look back to long-gone primeval times, but could look back to what mankind had acquired of occult wisdom in the four post-Atlantean cultural periods. Finally, a 12th had, so to speak, the least memory, but he was the most intellectual of them, who had to cultivate the outer sciences in particular. The twelfth was a man who had the highest degree of intellectual wisdom of his time. He possessed all the intellectual knowledge of his time. These 12 men came together who represented the sum of all the spiritual knowledge of their time and represented the 12 schools of thought. [7]

Now it was known at that time that an individuality had to be reborn that had experienced the time of the Mystery of Golgotha. In the meantime, this individuality had developed the deepest fervor, devotion and love in various incarnations. [8] But the starting point of a new culture was only possible because a Thirteenth entered the midst of the Twelve. This one had been incarnated at the time of the Mystery of Golgotha. In subsequent incarnations he had prepared himself for his mission through a humble mind, through a fervent, God-filled life. He was a great soul, a pious, inwardly deeply mystical man who was born with these qualities and had not merely acquired them. This Thirteenth grew up completely in the care and education of the Twelve, and he received as much wisdom from each of them as each could give him. This thirteenth was brought up with the greatest care, and all arrangements were made so that none but these twelve could exert any influence on him. He was isolated from the rest of the world. He was a very weak child, so the education he received from the Twelve had an effect on his physical body. While the spiritual powers of this Thirteenth increased to infinity, his physical powers declined completely. It came to such a pass that almost all connection with external life ceased, all interest in the physical world disappeared. He lived only for spiritual development, for which he received the stimulus from the Twelve. In him was a reflection of the wisdom of the Twelve. It came to the point that the Thirteenth refused all nourishment and wasted away. Then an event occurred that could only happen once in history; it was one of the events that can occur when the macrocosmic forces work together for the sake of the fruits that such an event is supposed to produce. After a few days the body of this thirteenth became completely transparent, and he was as if dead for days. The twelve now gathered around him at certain intervals. All knowledge and wisdom flowed from their mouths at that moment. In short formulas, which were like devotional prayers, they let their wisdom flow to the thirteenth, while he lay there as if dead. This state ended with the Thirteenth's soul awakening like a new soul. He had experienced a great transformation of his soul. There was something in him like a completely new birth of the twelve wisdoms, so that the twelve wise men could also learn something completely new from the youth. The youth could now speak of completely new experiences. The twelve could recognize that he had the experience of Damascus behind him: it was a repetition of Paul's vision before Damascus. In the course of a few weeks, the Thirteenth now gave back all the wisdom he had received from the Twelve, but in a new form. This new form was as if given by Christ himself. What he revealed to them was what the Twelve called true Christianity, the synthesis of all religions. This Thirteenth died relatively young, and the Twelve then devoted themselves to the task of recording in imagination - for this was the only way it could be done - what the Thirteenth had revealed to them. This is how the symbolic figures and images of the Rosicrucians came into being. The occult process must be imagined in such a way that the fruit of the Thirteenth's initiation was preserved as the remnants of his etheric body within the spirit-atmosphere of the earth. This remnant had an inspiring effect on the Twelve as well as on their subsequent disciples, so that the Rosicrucian occult current could emerge from them. But this etheric body continued to work and then permeated the etheric body of the reincarnating Thirteenth. [9]

The individuality of the Thirteenth was reincarnated as early as the 14th century. In this incarnation, this individuality lived for more than 100 years. He was brought up in a similar way among the disciples and followers of the Twelve, but not as unworldly as in his previous incarnation. When he was 28 years old, he was given a strange ideal. He had to travel and leave Europe. First he went to Damascus, and there the event that Paul had experienced there was repeated for him. This experience can be described as the fruit of a seed of the previous incarnation. All the powers of the wonderful etheric body of the individuality of the 13th century had remained intact, and nothing passed over into the general world ether after death. This was a permanent etheric body that has remained intact in the ether spheres ever since. This same subtle etheric body illuminated and radiated again from the spiritual world through the new embodiment, the individuality in the 14th century. He was therefore driven to experience the event of Damascus once again. This is the individuality of Christian Rosenkreuz. From this incarnation onwards he was called so. He traveled throughout the known world at that time. After he had received all the wisdom of the Twelve, fertilized by the great being of Christ, it became easy for him to absorb all the wisdom of that time in the course of seven years. When he returned to Europe after seven years, he accepted the most developed disciples and successors of the Twelve as disciples and then began the actual work of the Rosicrucians. [10]

Christian Rosenkreuz went to the Orient in the first half of the 15th century in order to find a balance between the initiation of the East and that of the West. [11] Before the then incarnation of Christian Rosenkreuz had come to an end, he had also initiated a number of personalities - barely exceeding the number 10 - into the subject into which he had been initiated, as far as this was possible with European people at that time. This small brotherhood, which called itself the Brotherhood of Rosicrucians - Fraternitas rosae crucis - carried a certain myth into the world through a larger, more external brotherhood (see: Cain and Abel).

At that time, Christian Rosenkreuz himself had presented certain secrets in the deepest interior of the Rosicrucian mysteries, as they could only be perceived by people who had experienced the necessary preparation. But as I said, there were no more than ten in the small Brotherhood; these were the actual initiated Rosicrucians. [12]

The 16th century marked the beginning of the period in which the images of the Christ ego were ready to be woven into the ego of individual personalities. One of these was Christian Rosenkreuz. [13] In the year 1459 the actual founder of the Rosicrucian current himself attained that stage by which he had the power to act upon the world in such a way that from him that initiation of the world (which bears his name) could be brought. Since that time this individuality of Christian Rosenkreuz has been present again and again as the leader of the current in question. Throughout the centuries he led a life "in the same body". We have to understand this expression "in the same body" in this way: If we look at the physical body, we find that what composed it 10 years ago is no longer in the physical body, but the consciousness has remained the same. What we go through in this way between birth and death, the initiate goes through in such a way that, when he dies, he is reborn soon afterwards in a new body as a child. But he goes through this path fully consciously. Consciousness remains present from one incarnation to another. Even the physical resemblance remains with the initiate, because the soul consciously builds up the new body from the experiences of the previous incarnation. The highest leader of the Rosicrucian school lived in this way for centuries. [14]

The initiation of Manes, who also initiated Christian Rosenkreuz in 1459, is regarded as a "higher degree" within this whole current: it consists in the true realization of the function of evil. This initiation and its background must remain completely hidden from the masses for a long time to come. For wherever even a very small ray of light has flowed from it into literature, it has wreaked havoc, as through the noble Guyau, whose disciple Friedrich Nietzsche became. [15]

Christian Rosenkreuz felt it his mission to offer the possibility for every human soul, who stands here or there on any plan in the newer life, that every soul can ascend to spiritual heights. That the ascent into the spiritual worlds would be compatible with every other position in life, that it could come about in such a way that humanity would not fall apart into two divergent categories, one of which would be devoted only to external industrial, commercial, material culture and thereby become ever more spiritual, The one would have become more and more spiritual, but nevertheless more and more animalistic (the group ego of the animals surpasses man in wisdom) and materialistic, while the other would have separated itself more and more and led a life in the sense of Francis of Assisi, that this would not happen, that was to become the concern of Christian Rosenkreuz. This possibility had to be created! And it was created by Christian Rosenkreuz, who gathered his followers from all over the world around him towards the end of the 16th century in order to allow them to participate in that which, although it takes place outwardly in space from star to star, is nevertheless prepared in the holy Mystery Places, where work is done within the world bodies beyond these world bodies to world culture, not merely to planetary culture. Christian Rosenkreuz gathered around him those who were also gathered at his initiation in the 13th century. [16]

Christian Rosenkreuz was faced with the fact of a world view that was itself Maya, and he had to take a stand on it. He had to save occultism at a time when all scientific concepts were themselves Maya. In the middle of the 16th century, Copernicus' fundamental work on the "revolution of the world's bodies" was published. Anyone who, as an occultist, raises the question of how one can understand the world with the modern ideas of Copernicus must say to himself: with the ideas of Copernicus one can create much that leads to great scientific triumphs in external life, but nothing can be understood of the spiritual basis of the world and of things. This is due to the fact that all these concepts and ideas of Copernicus are inspired by Lucifer. For Copernicanism is one of the last attacks, the last great attacks that Lucifer made on human development. In the older, pre-Copernican world view, people had the Maya on the outside; but in many cases they had the truth of things and of the world in what they understood, which was traditional wisdom. Since Copernicus, however, man not only has Maya in his sensory perception, but the concepts and ideas themselves are Maya. The Copernican-Keplerian world view is a very convenient world view, but it is not the truth for explaining what the macrocosm is. At the end of the 16th century, the Rosicrucians were faced with the necessity of understanding the world system from the occult. Therefore, one of those conferences took place, as we have already seen, when Christian Rosicrucian himself was initiated in the 13th century. This occult conference of the leading individualities united Christian Rosenkreuz with those 12 individualities of that time and some other important individualities of humanity's leadership. There were present not only personalities who had incarnated on the physical plan, but also those who were in the spiritual worlds. Thus the same individuality who was incarnated in the 6th century BC as the Gautama Buddha was also present at that conference. [17]

We need only look a little at the peculiarities of those who strive for the spiritual, such as St. Francis of Assisi, and those who, through present-day culture, are involved in industry, technology and the more recent discoveries of the present. There were many people, including occult personalities, who experienced much suffering in their souls when they had to think that there would have to be two kinds of people in the future. They believed that one class would be entirely devoted to practical life, that they would see their salvation in the production of food, in the construction of machines and so on, that they would be completely absorbed in practical life. And the other class will be the one to which people like Francis of Assisi belong, who turn away from practical life because of the spiritual life. It was therefore a significant moment when, in preparation for the conference mentioned above, Christian Rosenkreuz called together a number of occultists, a larger circle of people, to whom he presented the two types of people who would have to exist in the future. First he called a larger circle, later a smaller one. He made it clear to his listeners at that time that there was no means on earth to prevent the formation of these two classes of people. Help could only come if a kind of education was created that did not take place between birth and death, but between death and a new birth. Between death and a new birth, man has a certain connection with the other planets. Man's stay in the world of the soul is a time during which he becomes an inhabitant of the moon. Then he becomes a Mercury dweller, then a Venus dweller, then a Sun, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn dweller and then a dweller of the wide celestial or world space. It is not wrong to say that between two incarnations on earth there are "embodiments" on other planets, spiritual incarnations. Today man is not yet so far in his development that he can remember in his incarnation what he has experienced between death and a new birth, but in the future this will be possible. Even if he cannot now remember what he experienced on Mars, for example, he still has the powers of Mars within him, even if he knows nothing about them. You can certainly say: I am now an inhabitant of Earth, but the powers within me include something that I acquired on Mars. Where did Copernicus, Galileo, Giordano Bruno and others get the abilities in this incarnation? Consider that the individuality of Copernicus was embodied shortly before, 1401-1464, in Nicolaus Cusanus, who was a profound mystic. How did the forces come into this individuality that made Copernicus so completely different from Nicholas Cusanus? It was the forces of Mars that made him the astronomer Copernicus. It was the same with Galileo, who also absorbed the forces from Mars that gave him the special configuration of the modern natural thinker. Giordano Bruno also brought his powers from Mars, and so it is with the whole of humanity. The fact that people think like Copernicus or Giordano Bruno comes from the forces of Mars, which they acquire between death and rebirth.

But the fact that you get such powers stems from the fact that Mars had a different effect than before. The Martian culture, which people live through between death and a new birth, went through a crisis in the 15th and 16th centuries on Earth. It was as drastic, as catastrophic on Mars in the 15th and 16th centuries as it was on Earth at the time of the Mystery of Golgotha. [18] So we are looking at a decadence, a decline in Martian culture. So you can see that in the 15th century it was possible to say that the salvation of Mars and thus of the Earth depended on the declining culture on Mars receiving an upward impulse again. The great task facing Rosicrucianism was to answer the question: What has to happen so that the Martian culture achieves an ascent for the salvation of the Earth? The Martian beings could not have known what could serve their salvation, for only on Earth could one know how things stood on Mars. On Mars, the decline was not felt at all.

This conference of Christian Rosenkreuz was well prepared by the fact that the most intimate disciple and friend of Christian Rosenkreuz was Gautama Buddha living in the spiritual body. And at this conference it was announced that the being who had once incarnated on earth as Gautama Buddha would now, as a spiritual being, as he had been since he became "Buddha", transfer the scene of his activity to Mars. And in 1604 he accomplished a similar deed for Mars as the Mystery of Golgotha was for the Earth. Christian Rosenkreuz had recognized what it would mean for the whole universe if Buddha worked there, and what Buddha's teaching of Nirvana, the teaching that man should detach himself from the earth, would mean there on Mars. The doctrine of nirvana was unsuitable for promoting the earthly culture, which was geared towards the practical. This was shown by the disciple of the Buddha, Francis of Assisi, that this teaching turned its adepts into people who were unworldly. But what was not suitable in Buddhism to promote the practical life of man between birth and death was of great importance for the promotion of his soul between death and a new birth. Christian Rosenkreuz realized that the teachings of the Buddha were the most suitable for the purification that had to take place on Mars. Just as the divine being of love, Christ, once dwelt on Earth at a time and among a people who were not exactly close to this being of love, so the Prince of Peace Buddha ascended to Mars in the 17th century, where war and fighting prevailed, in order to fulfill his mission there. The souls there were primarily warlike. It was a cosmic sacrifice to be Buddha on Mars, and it can be described as a kind of crucifixion for the Buddha that he allowed himself to be placed in this warlike environment. Since the time when the Mystery of Mars was accomplished by Gautama Buddha, man has absorbed different forces from Mars in the time between death and rebirth than before, at the time of the decline of the Martian culture. And not only does man bring completely different forces with him from Mars into the new birth, but through the influence exerted by the spiritual deed of the Buddha, forces also flow to man from Mars when he meditates here in order to enter the spiritual world. When the modern spiritual disciple meditates in the sense indicated by Christian Rosenkreuz, forces also flow in, which the Buddha sends into the earth as a Martian redeemer. [19]

Christian Rosenkreuz is an individuality that works both when it is incarnated and when it is not embodied in the physical body; it works not only as a physical entity and through physical forces, but above all spiritually through higher forces. When the ordinary human being passes through death, his etheric body dissolves into the universe. But a part of the dissolving etheric body always remains, and so we are always surrounded by remnants of the etheric bodies of the deceased, to our benefit or also to our detriment. They affect us in a good or bad way, depending on whether we ourselves are good or bad. Comprehensive effects emanate from the etheric bodies of great individualities in this sense. Thus a great power emanates from the etheric body of Christian Rosenkreuz, which can have an effect on our soul and our spirit. It is our task to get to know these forces. And as Rosicrucians we appeal to these forces. In a narrower sense, the Rosicrucian movement began in the 13th century. At that time these forces were extremely strong, and since that time there has been a Christian Rosicrucian current that has continued to have an effect on spiritual life. There is a law that every hundred years or so this spiritual current of power must find particularly effective expression. This can now be seen in the theosophical movement. [20]

It was laid down that all discoveries made by the Rosicrucians had to remain a secret for 100 years and that only then, after 100 years, could these Rosicrucian revelations be brought to the world. Now it is also of great importance to know that in every century the Rosicrucian inspiration is given in such a way that the bearer of the inspiration was never outwardly designated. Only the highest initiates knew it. Today, for example, we can only speak externally of events that happened 100 years ago. The temptation is too great for people to show fanatical devotion to such a personalized authority - which is the worst thing there is.

As a result of the Rosicrucian work, the etheric body of Christian Rosenkreuz became stronger and more powerful from century to century. It worked not only through Christian Rosenkreuz, but also through all those who became his disciples. Christian Rosenkreuz has been incarnated again and again since the 14th century.

In the 18th century, the Count of Saint-Germain was the exoteric reincarnation of Christian Rosenkreuz. However, this name was also given to other people, so that not everything that is said here or there in the outer world about the Count of Saint-Germain can also apply to the real Christian Rosenkreuz. Today (1911) he is reincarnated. [21] Through his personality he continues to work into the present day, even in the brief intervals in which he is not incarnated; indeed, spiritually he works into people through his higher bodies in such a way that he does not need to be connected with them in space. [22] Christian Rosenkreuz has endured more through his way of working and will have to endure more in the future than any human being ever has. This is connected with the great dangers which the truth will have to undergo in the future. [23]

The one whom we recognize as Christian Rosenkreuz, as the leader of the occult movement into the future, and who will certainly not ever develop his authority in the world through an external cult, will be the most misunderstood. And those who know how things stand with this individuality also know that Christian Rosenkreuz will be the greatest martyr among men, apart from the Christ who suffered as God. And the sufferings that will make him a great martyr will come from the fact that people make so little decision to look into their own souls and to seek more and more the developing individuality and to subject themselves to the discomfort of not being presented with the ready-made truth as if on a platter, but that it must be won in ardent striving, in ardent struggle and searching, and that no other demands can be made in the name of the one who is called Christian Rosenkreuz. [24]

Christian Rosenkreuz lived for 106 years from 1378, i.e. until 1484. He, the highly enlightened father and head of the Rosicrucian Brotherhood, a German by nationality, endeavored for a long time to bring about a "general reformation" of spiritual life or world conditions in general. In his youth he traveled to the Orient. He came to Damascus via Cyprus and wanted to go from there to Jerusalem; but it so happened that in Damascus he heard talk of the wise men in Damcar in Arabia, and so he went there. In Damascus, as he himself testified, the wise men did not receive him as a stranger, but as if they had been waiting for him for a long time, and they called him by name.

We also hear from Paul, which is perhaps significant, that after his experience of Damascus he (did not come to Jerusalem but) went to Arabia (Gal. 1, 16/17). Now as far as Damcar is concerned, this city, which today is called Damar, lies in southern Arabia, which in ancient times was called Arabia felix, in what is now Yemen, south of Sana, i.e. on the eastern side of the Red Sea opposite the northern part of Abyssinia. R. Kienast, in "Johann Valentin Andreae und die vier echten Rosenkreuzerschriften", Leipzig 1926, p. 114, draws attention to the fact that Arabia felix is known from the Bible as the land of the Queen of Sheba and that the legend has the three kings traveling from there to Bethlehem. Saba or Arabia felix was also famous for its wealth of gold, frankincense and myrrh, which the three kings are known to have offered to the infant Jesus in Matthew's Gospel. The land of Sheba was a place of ancient star wisdom and star worship. The symbol of the recumbent crescent moon, in which the disk of the sun rests, can be found repeatedly on stone carvings from ancient times - in other words, the symbol of the Holy Grail!

In view of all this, it is highly significant that Christian Rosenkreuz came to Damcar in the sense of the "Fama", and under the peculiar circumstances mentioned in the text. He evidently sought out those regions where ancient starry wisdom was still alive, even if only in its last echoes, and from where the three kings had once come, who knew of the imminent birth of the world redeemer from their spiritual astrology and received the cultic gifts from Sheba the Child: Gold, frankincense and myrrh.

"This is the place," continues the ‘Fama’, "where he had his physics and mathematics, which the world could have enjoyed cheaply if love had been greater and envy less".

After three years, he turned back and traveled from Damcar via Egypt to Fez (in Morocco, a place of flourishing culture in the Middle Ages). The Arabs had directed him to Fez. He then describes how the scholars, Arabs and Africans, worked together to keep up to date with their scientific progress. Christian Rosenkreuz also absorbs a great deal of wisdom in Fez. He then came to Europe, initially to Spain, but the scholars there rejected him as they did not want anything new. They feared that their great name would be diminished if they first had to learn and confess their many years of error; they were accustomed to their own and would have earned them enough.

Now Christian Rosenkreuz conceived the idea that Europe should also have a "society" (a learned society): one that had enough of gold and precious stones and could communicate it to the kings in due propositis, in which the rulers would be educated, who knew everything that God permitted man to know and could be asked in emergencies. Here, then, we are confronted with the Rosicrucian idea of a "society" that unites all knowledge and wisdom within itself and that should have a fruitful effect on social life. This is a highly important point: like a seed of a spiritual life, not of a church character, but also not as a state institution, but freely human: the idea of a spiritually deepened wisdom and spiritual life, which should have had a fertilizing effect in the sense of Rosicrucianism...

The "Fama" then goes on to tell how Christian Rosenkreuz moved back to Germany. There, after a few years, he founded the Brotherhood of the Rosy Cross. First there are 4, later 8 brothers (i.e. himself and first 3, then 7). All but one are German. (This is also a characteristic trait, as Rosicrucianism in the deepest sense has to do with the mission of Central Europe in particular).

The brothers travel to different countries, but come together once a year; no one is to practise any other profession than healing the sick, and for free. No one should wear a particular religious costume, "but use the national costume (this is also a characteristic feature of the work in the fifth post-Atlantean age). Every brother has a suitable successor. [25]

Everything that Zarathustra could teach and bring to the world was aimed at the outer world in order to bring order and harmony to the outer world. Therefore, the art of forming and organizing kingdoms in accordance with the progress of humanity and what makes social order possible was also the mission of Zarathustra. Therefore, those who belong to the disciples of Zarathustra can rightly be called not only great "magicians", great initiates, but they can also always be called "kings", i.e. those who know the art of establishing external social organization and order. [26]

In this sphere of the "royal" current of humanity, Christian Rosenkreuz has evidently, as we may understand the language of the "Fama", absorbed a socio-educational impulse. But what can this impulse be? Of course, for the fifth post-Atlantean age, which the Rosicrucians wanted to bring about in a spiritually appropriate sense, it cannot be a question of falling back on any old theocratic social structures and imitating them in Europe. It can only be a question of bringing about a contemporary metamorphosis of these old social orders in the fifth age. After all, they all go back to the third period, which wants to "repeat" itself in the fifth in an analogous transformation. The decisive point is that a socially guiding, impulsive role must fall to the spiritual life: as in the old time of theocracies, but not to the old, but to a thoroughly renewed spiritual life, which does not flow from the old impersonal sources, but from the human individuality freely taking hold of itself in the soul of consciousness. By drawing its impulses from a new spirituality, a new connection with the spiritual worlds, this will also be productive and constructive for social life. We should think of a spiritual life which, because it flows from real spiritual sources, becomes socially responsible and creative. Such a spiritual life must necessarily have a corporate character, i.e. it must emerge from the free union of individuals in spiritual life.

This brings us back to the deeply meaningful idea of the "society" (cf. above) as a place of spiritual life that should have a fertilizing effect on social life. (It should even, for example, as we have heard, educate the regents, i.e. prepare them for their office). Thus this "societal" idea appears like a first germ of the metamorphosis of the social function of spiritual life from the third age (the sentient soul) into the fifth (the consciousness soul). Only along this line is the social institution to be sought which the Rosicrucians wanted to establish in Europe in the sense of the "Confessio" following the example of Damcar. -

These contexts also open up an understanding of another phenomenon that this significant period around 1600 presents. We would like to briefly refer here to the social utopia of Campanella (1568-1639), his "solar state". This "solar state" is also a pronounced theocracy, it is under a hierarchical leadership and has individual elements that can only be understood as reminders of old times. Here, too, old cultural impulses, which were still alive in many ways in the third post-Atlantean age, emerge in a strange way at the beginning of the fifth. It is as if this time, in the inner context of the great Rosicrucian central inspiration, were struggling for the metamorphosis of the old. In this respect, such utopias are more than just memories of times long past and old initiatic experiences. At the beginning of the fifth post-Atlantean age, it becomes acute, so to speak, to "remember" this theocratic past. Remembering it in the right sense would mean finding the path to the right metamorphosis. That is what it is all about. Ultimately, it is about the search for a modern, fruitful, socially creative spiritual life similar to the old one. And now we even hear that there were also external relations between the circle of Johann Valentin Andreae and Campanella. R. Kienast provides the external historical evidence for this: he even believes that it is extremely likely that the publication of the Rosicrucian writings (after ten years of handwritten distribution in some cases) was influenced by Campanella's ideas. He also states that a friend of Johann Valentin Andreae, Wilhelm von Wense, who met Campanella there on a trip to Italy around 1615, sought to unite similarly minded spirits after his return to Germany and even founded an association "Civitas Solis" (Solar State), for which Andreae wrote the program! This is how strangely things interplay, and one can sense ever more clearly the central inspirational impulse shining through the external facts, whose light is reflected in very different colors depending on the nature, perhaps also the "cloudiness" of the various personalities through whom it works.

During this same period, however, a not utopian but real state of a highly peculiar shape and nature emerged: from 1609 onwards, the Jesuits established their strange theocratic state structure among the Indians of South America in Paraguay. [27]

Sources:

[1] GA 55: The Knowledge of the Supersensible in Our Time and Its Significance for Today's Life (1906/1907)

[2] GA 265: On the history and contents of the epistemological department of the Esoteric School from 1904 to 1914 (1906-1924)

[3] GA 99: The Theosophy of the Rosicrucian (1907)

[4] GA 100: Human Development and the Knowledge of Christ. Theosophy and Rosicrucianism - The Gospel of John (1907)

[5] GA 88: On the Astral World and the Devachan (1903-1904)

[6] GA 266/1: From the contents of the esoteric lessons. Volume I (1904-1909)

[7] - [10], [17] - [23] GA 130: Esoteric Christianity and the Spiritual Guidance of Humanity (1911/1912)

[11], [15] GA 262: Rudolf Steiner / Marie Steiner-von Sivers: Correspondence and documents 1901-1925 (1901-1925)

[12] GA 93: The Temple Legend and the Golden Legend as Symbolic Expression of Past and Future Secrets of Human Development (1904/1906)

[13] GA 109: The Principle of Spiritual Economy in Connection with Questions of Re-embodiment. An Aspect of the Spiritual Guidance of Humanity (1909)

[14] GA 98: Natural and Spiritual Beings - Their Work in Our Visible World (1907/1908)

[16] GA 141: Life between Death and the New Birth in Relation to Cosmic Facts (1912/1913)

[24] GA 133: The Earthly and the Cosmic Man (1911/1912)

[25], [27] Hey: Karl Heyer: Historical Impulses of Rosicrucianism (1938)

[26] GA 114: The Gospel of St. Luke (1909)

Rosicrucians

The Rosicrucian movement was originally based on Oriental knowledge, and this knowledge was passed on to European followers in various degrees. At the end of the 18th and especially at the beginning of the 19th century, these occult schools disappeared from European culture and the last Rosicrucians withdrew to the Orient. [1]

Up to the present day, it has not been possible to get to know even the most elementary aspects of this school of thought, which has really existed since the 14th century and still exists today. Everything that has passed into literature, that has been written and printed, are individual fragments, individual lost things that have come to the public through betrayal, which have been inaccurately and in many ways distorted through charlatanry, fraud, ignorance and stupidity. True, genuine Rosicrucianism has, ever since it came into existence, only ever been the subject of oral communication to those who were sworn to secrecy. For this reason, nothing significant has passed into public literature. [2] The Order, which consisted of only 7 members when it was founded, has operated in complete secrecy right up to the present day. No one has ever been able to find out anything about the secrets of the Rosicrucians. [3] At present no one knows anything at all about the true Rosicrucians who has not approached them through the means of secret science. [4]

The inner training of the Rosicrucian current was strictly occult. In such an occult training, very little consideration is given to language, to the way in which one expresses oneself. Within the world of the 15th, 16th and 17th centuries there lived a kind of simple people who were not known as special scholars, nor did they occupy a special social position, but who passed on the occult current of the Rosicrucians. There were never very many of them. There were never more than seven real initiates at any one time; the others were secret disciples of various degrees. The Rosicrucians were the emissaries of the White Lodge. In truth, the world-significant events emanated from them. Everything important that happened during this time led in the final threads to the Lodge of the Rosicrucians. Outwardly, quite others made the history of Europe, but inwardly, they were the instruments of occult individualities. Even Rousseau and Voltaire were such tools of the occult individualities behind them. They themselves could not appear with their names. The stimulus they gave to other people in carrying out their mission could be outwardly very simple and inconspicuous. Sometimes a brief encounter with such a simple man was the occasion on which the right impulse was given to the tools of occult individuals. Occult powers were also behind the important statesmen until the French Revolution. Then they gradually withdrew, because the people themselves were to become masters of their own destinies. For the first time, people spoke as people in the speeches of the French Revolution. The occult brotherhoods gave rise to every important discovery; only then did events take place outside in the world. Voltaire was a spirit driven in the most eminent sense by forward-looking brotherhoods, for he was essentially there to put men on their own feet. Others were in the service of retarding brotherhoods, such as Robespierre in later life. [5]

It was towards the end of the 18th century and the beginning of the 19th century that certain secrets of Rosicrucianism came into the public domain through a kind of betrayal (see: Philosopher's Stone). At that time various things were printed about it; one could infer from them that the people concerned had heard something ringing, but had not understood it. [6]

In this form, Rosicrucianism was to be the strictly secret school for the preparation of what esotericism would have to publicly undertake at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries (see: Kali Yuga), when external natural science would have come to the provisional solution of certain problems. Christian Rosenkreuz described these problems as: 1. the discovery of spectral analysis, which brought to light the material constitution of the cosmos. 2. the introduction of material evolution into the science of the organic. 3. the realization of the fact of a state of consciousness other than the ordinary one through the recognition of hypnotism and suggestion. Only when these material realizations had matured within science were certain Rosicrucian principles to emerge from the realm of secret science into public opinion. Until then, Christian mystical initiation was given to the Occident in the form in which it flowed through the initiator, the "Unknown from the Oberland" (see: God's friend from the Oberland) in St. Victor, Meister Eckhart, Tauler and so on. [7]

Sources:

[1] GA 89: Consciousness - Life - Form. Basic Principles of Spiritual Scientific Cosmology (1903-1906)

[2] GA 55: The Knowledge of the Supersensible in Our Time and Its Significance for Today's Life (1906/1907)

[3], [4] GA 284: Images of occult seals and pillars. The Munich Congress Whitsun 1907 and its effects (1907)

[5] GA 93a: Basic Elements of Esotericism (1905)

[6] GA 100: Human Development and the Knowledge of Christ. Theosophy and Rosicrucianism - The Gospel of John (1907)

[7] GA 262: Rudolf Steiner / Marie Steiner-von Sivers: Correspondence and Documents 1901-1925 (1901-1925)

Rosy cross and planets and suns

Man himself has had to contribute to all progress in development through his thinking, through living on earth as an intelligent being. But these forces do not come from man himself. They come from regions which reach beyond the orbit of the moon, and we must represent them in our sign by a second circle, and this too we find placed in our cosmos by the gods. This second circle is the apparent orbit of Mercury (today's Venus). In the spiritual forces, which find their physical expression in Mercury, we must see that which gives man his intellect. Man should look up to the planets with a feeling of reverence and gratitude. If the powers of Mercury were to cease, people would have consciousness on earth, but they would be without understanding. But even this is not all. Other forces must be added to bring about life and the development of man. If only the intellect had been at work in all the past epochs of mankind, no progress would have taken place. Venus is the physical expression for the spiritual forces through which the mind in man is fertilized by new ideas that go beyond ordinary cerebral thinking. But there are other forces that do not have a direct effect on the earth and on man, but indirectly by radiating onto Venus: these are the forces of Mars. So that the Martian forces, when they radiate onto Venus and indirectly through it onto the Earth, do not have a warlike effect, a sublime divine power flows onto Mars from the even wider spiritual sphere of Jupiter. This can be described even less in words; it can be described as spiritual light, which is not perceptible physically, but which man can experience inwardly as a power of love when he looks to this world being in reverence and gratitude and becomes aware of the grace that flows down to us from there. The fact that these forces of love and light have an effect on Mars prevents the Martian forces from having a warlike effect on Venus and Earth. And finally, forces come from a still higher sphere, from the sphere of Saturn, of which we can form an idea when we think of the warmth of enthusiasm.

These thermal forces flow onto Jupiter and combine with its light. And now we have to draw the orbit of the sun between Venus and Mars. We then have the three orbits of the Moon, Mercury and Venus between the Sun and the Earth; these are the forces acting directly, and the three forces acting from outside, those of Mars, Jupiter and Saturn, which only act on the Earth indirectly through Venus. From the spiritual solar forces, however, man receives the ego-power, the self-consciousness, which combines with the lunar forces (the hereditary forces) and so on to bring about the whole being of man. But first we have two suns, the spiritual one, which gives the I, and the physical one, which enlivens the physical earth through its rays of light and heat. But then we must grasp a third sun, namely the mediator of the highest spiritual powers, which connects the extra-sensual powers with the intra-sensual powers, which has been sending its powers of grace to the earth since the Mystery of Golgotha. This spiritual sun is the Christ principle, that which man can experience within himself when he grasps the Pauline sentence: "Not I, but the Christ in me." This third sun has always been revealed to initiates in Christian initiation centers. 266/121ff

Thus we have the sphere of this threefold sun, outside it the three circles which represent the high indirect forces and within the sun circle the three which have a direct effect on the earth. In each of these seven circles stands one of the seven heavenly bodies, and so we can also regard the rose cross with the seven roses as a symbol for this sevenfold celestial rose. From the three inner spheres flows into the earth that from which man's being is born: Ex Deo nascimur. The three outer circles denote the high, spiritual powers by which his higher nature is founded: Per Spiritum Sanctum reviviscimus. The connection between the two is formed by the middle radius of the circle, the solar orbit of the physical, spiritual and Christ sun: In Christo morimur. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 266/3: From the contents of the esoteric lessons. Volume III (1913, 1914; 1920 - 1923) (1913-1923)

Rosicrucian schools

The same teachings were taught in the Rosicrucian schools as are now taught by Theosophy (and spiritual science). In the actual secret schools, emphasis is only placed on language when one wants to teach the world. The secret disciple himself must learn to use the symbols, the signs. However, in order to make themselves understood to the world, the initiates also only have the language that the environment uses. When knowledge was still kept completely secret, there was a certain system of symbols, and everyone who wanted to be initiated had to learn the language of the symbols. No importance was attached to linguistic expression. At that time, too, all the teachings were available, but sometimes the significant expressions were missing. Such expressions are, however, available for the occult teaching in the Oriental method of teaching, which still originate from the very oldest Indians who had the teaching of the ancient Rishis. These Indian expressions are not yet influenced by the materialistic age. The words which the Indians have coined are still full of the magic of the sacred of the original language. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 93a: Basic Elements of Esotericism (1905)

Rosicrucian teaching

This teaching used to be more scientific, but today it is more of a spiritual science. For example, people used to talk more about natural processes and called this science alchemy, and insofar as these processes took place outside the earth, this science was called astrology. Today we take a more spiritual approach. If, for example, we look at the successive post-Atlantean cultural epochs, we learn from this observation the nature of human soul development. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 130: Esoteric Christianity and the Spiritual Guidance of Humanity (1911/1912)

Rosicrucians and "Wisdom - Beauty - Strength"

In order to develop higher, we have to step out of ourselves from a certain point and work selflessly in the environment. We have to make it possible to go out in order to selflessly bring harmony to our surroundings. This requires us to harmonize the mirror images within us. Our task is to make the world around us a harmonious one. If we are destroyers in the world, the devastation is reflected in us; if we work harmony in the world, the harmony is reflected in us. The last degree of perfection which we have set forth, which we have created around us, we will take with us. That is why the Rosicrucians said: Shape the world in such a way that it contains wisdom, beauty and strength, then wisdom, beauty and strength will be reflected in us. If you have used the time to do this, then you yourself move out of this earth with the reflection of wisdom, beauty and strength. Wisdom is the reflection of mana; beauty, piety, goodness is the reflection of buddhi; strength is the reflection of atma. Man does not progress on earth through idle contemplation, but by incorporating wisdom, beauty and strength into the earth. Through the work of our higher self, we transform the transient bodies given to us by the gods and create eternal bodies for ourselves. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 93a: Basic Elements of Esotericism (1905)

Rosicrucians and alchemy

Real alchemy is not based on researching, experimenting and thinking like today's chemists, but on being able to perceive the nature spirits in natural processes so that you can communicate with them; that the nature spirits tell you how the process is going, what is actually happening. In ancient times, alchemy was not observational research, but communication with the spirits of nature. And if we now look into what was a truly Rosicrucian alchemical laboratory in the Middle Ages, let's say in the 14th century, but even as late as the 15th century, we find instruments in it that sometimes even look relatively similar to today's instruments, at least one can already imagine what these instruments of that time were based on today's instruments. But if we then look spiritually into these Rosicrucian mysteries, we actually find everywhere in them, I would like to say, the older, even more serious and even more deeply tragic personality, which then became Faust, namely Goethe's Faust. Basically, when you look into these alchemical laboratories of the 8th to 13th centuries, you see a deep tragedy. All these real researchers, who in this way search for man and the universe as nature in the retort, all these people are heightened Faustian natures in the older Middle Ages, because they feel one thing deeply: when we experiment, the spirits of nature speak to us, the spirits of the earth, the spirits of water, the spirits of fire, the spirits of air. We hear them in their murmurs, in their lisping, in their peculiar, humming sounds, which then turn into harmonies and melodies to return to themselves. And if one lives oneself into this transition of the colorful into the sounding, then one also lives oneself into what the laboratory process can tell one about the great nature and about man. Then one already has the feeling that the things and processes of nature still reveal something that the gods speak, that they are images of the divine. And you apply it inwardly to man in a beneficial way. In all these times, medicine, for example, was still closely linked to the knowledge of the general world view. [1]

The nature spirits with whom those people still communicated were just enough to awaken the longing for the cosmic intelligences to which the ancient people had come. But the path to the cosmic intelligences could no longer be found with the means of knowledge that were available at that time. [2]

The medieval Rosicrucian studied the processes of nature, which he regarded as the earth processes of nature. For example, he distinguished between three different natural processes, which he regarded as the three great processes of nature. The first important process is the following: Salt formation. The medieval Rosicrucian called everything in nature that precipitates, settles and falls out of a dissolution as a solid substance: salt. But when he saw this salt formation, his conception of it was quite different from that of modern man. For the sight of such a process had to work like a prayer in the soul of the person who looked at it, if he wanted to feel that he understood it. He therefore tried to make clear to himself what would have to happen in his own soul if this salt formation were also to take place in it. He thought: "Human nature is constantly destroying itself through instincts and passions." Our life would be a constant decomposition, a rotting process, if we only gave in to our desires and passions. And if man really wants to protect himself against this process of putrefaction, he must continually give himself over to pure thoughts that are directed towards the spiritual. It is a question of the higher development of his thoughts. The medieval Rosicrucian knew that if he did not fight his passions in one incarnation, he would be born into the next incarnation with disease dispositions, but that if he purified his passions, he would enter the next incarnation with healthy dispositions. The process of overcoming the forces leading to decay through spirituality is microcosmic salt formation. When contemplating the formation of salt, the medieval Rosicrucians said to themselves with a feeling of the purest piety: "Divine-spiritual forces have been at work here for thousands of years, just as pure thoughts have been at work in me. Behind the Maya of nature, I worship the thoughts of the gods, the divine-spiritual beings. And he said to himself: "If I allow myself to be inspired by nature to harbor such feelings, then I am making myself similar to the macrocosm. If I consider this process only externally, I separate myself from the God, I fall away from the macrocosm."

Another experience was the process of dissolution: another natural process that could also lead the medieval Rosicrucian to prayer. He called everything that can dissolve something else: mercury or Mercury. What property of the soul acts like mercury or Mercury outside in nature? He knew that what corresponds to this Mercury in the soul signifies all forms of love in the soul. He distinguished between lower and higher processes of dissolution, just as there are lower and higher forms of love. And so the sight of the process of dissolution again became a pious prayer, and the medieval theosophist said to himself: "For thousands of years the love of the God outside has worked in the same way as love works within me.

The third important natural process for the medieval theosophist was combustion, that which occurs when an external substance is consumed in flames. He saw this inner soul process in fervent devotion to the deity. And he called everything that can go up in flames sulphur or sulphur. He saw in the developmental stages of the earth the process of a gradual purification, similar to a combustion process or sulphur process. In the earth processes he saw the work of the gods who look up to still higher gods. And thus imbued with great piety and deeply religious feelings, he said to himself at the sight of the burning process: Now the gods are sacrificing to the higher gods. - And when the medieval theosophist himself produced the combustion process in his laboratory, he felt: I am doing what the gods do when they sacrifice themselves to higher gods. - He only considered himself worthy of such a combustion process in his laboratory when he felt himself imbued with such a spirit of sacrifice, when he felt within himself the desire to sacrifice himself to the gods. The power of the flame filled the medieval Theosophist with great, deeply religious feelings, and he said to himself: "When I see the flame outside in the macrocosm, I see the thoughts, the love, the sacrificial spirit of the gods. The medieval Rosicrucian carried out these processes himself in his laboratory. And then he discovered that when he carried out a salt formation process, such pure, purifying thoughts arose within himself. In a dissolution process he felt inspired to love, he was permeated by divine love, in the combustion process he felt kindled to sacrificial service, urged to sacrifice himself on the altar of the world. [3]

That was what the experimenter experienced. And if you had witnessed such an experiment yourself as a clairvoyant, you would have perceived a change in the aura of the person carrying out the experiment. The aura, which had been very mixed before the experiment, perhaps filled with desires and urges to which the person had given himself over, became more monochrome as a result of the experiment. First, in the experiment of salt formation: copper - pure divine thoughts -, then, in the experiment of dissolution: silver - love of the gods -, and finally shining gold - love of the gods or sacrificial service to the gods - during combustion. And the alchemists then said that they had made the subjective copper, the subjective silver and the subjective gold from the aura. And the consequence of this was that the person who had gone through something like this, who had really experienced such an experiment inwardly, was completely imbued with divine love. The result was a person imbued with purity, love and the will to sacrifice, and through this sacrificial service the medieval theosophists prepared a certain clairvoyance. In this way, the medieval theosophist was able to see into the way in which spiritual beings behind the Maya caused things to come into being and pass away again. And as a result, he also realized which forces of aspiration in the soul are beneficial to us and which are not. He got to know our own powers of creation and decay. The medieval theosophist Heinrich Khunrath, in a moment of enlightenment, called this process the law of creation and decay. From his view of nature, the medieval theosophist realized the law of upward development and descent. The science that he acquired through this was expressed in certain signs, imaginative images and figures. This is how the best alchemists worked from the 14th to the 18th century and right up to the beginning of the 19th century. Nothing has been printed about this truly moral, ethical, intellectual work. What is printed about alchemy deals only with purely external experiments, is written only by those who practiced alchemy as an end in itself. The false alchemist set out to form substances. He only saw the gain of the material result in the experiments when burning the substances. The true alchemist, however, paid no attention at all to the substance he finally obtained. He was only interested in the inner experiences of the soul during the formation of the substance, in the thoughts that were within him, the experiences that he had within himself. It was therefore a strict law that the medieval theosophist who produced gold and silver in his experiments was never allowed to make a profit for himself. He was only allowed to give away the metals he produced. [4]

The materialist does not admit that the thoughts which we form in nature are previously contained in it. He believes that we put them into it. The Rosicrucians of the Middle Ages placed a glass of water in front of the neophyte and said to him: "For this water to be in the glass, someone must have put it in. It is the same with the ideas that we find in nature. They must have been put there by the divine spirits, the assistants of the Logos. The thoughts that we draw from the world are found in truth, in it. Everything we create is necessarily included in it. [5]

The entire macrocosm is based on an ether-macrocosm, an etheric body, just as the human being has an etheric body. There is a certain boundary transition from the coarser to the finer substance. Nothing else in the world is similar to what lies between the physical and the etheric substance. There we have something that cannot be compared with any other substance, but it is the essence of everything. We have a substance which is contained in all other physical substances, so that the other physical substances can be regarded as modifications of this one substance. The Rosicrucians endeavored to see this substance clairvoyantly. They saw the preparation, the formation of such a vision in an increased effectiveness of the moral powers of the soul, which then made this substance visible. They saw the power for this vision in the moral forces of the soul. This substance was really seen and discovered by the Rosicrucians. They found that this substance lives in a certain form in the world, in the macrocosm, as well as in man. Out in the world, outside of man, they revered it as the great garment, as the dress of the macrocosm. They saw it arising in man when there was a harmonious interaction between thinking and willing. They saw the forces of volition not only in man, but also in the macrocosm, for example in thunder and lightning. In the same way, they saw the forces of thinking on the one hand in man and then outside in the world, in the rainbow, in the dawn. The Rosicrucians sought the power to achieve such harmony between will and thought in their own souls in the emanations of Christian Rosicrucian's etheric body. As a result of the Rosicrucian work, the etheric body of Christian Rosenkreuz became stronger and more powerful from century to century. He worked not only through Christian Rosenkreuz, but also through all those who became his disciples. Everything that is proclaimed as Theosophy is strengthened by the etheric body of Christian Rosenkreuz, and those who proclaim Theosophy allow themselves to be overshadowed by this etheric body, which can have an effect on them both when Christian Rosenkreuz is incarnated and when he is not incarnated. Devotion to the etheric body of Christian Rosenkreuz, which has become powerful, will be able to bring the new clairvoyance to people and will bring high spiritual powers to light. But this will only be possible for those people who follow the training of Christian Rosenkreuz correctly. Up to now, esoteric Rosicrucian preparation has been necessary for this, but the 20th century has the mission of making this etheric body so powerful that it will also have an exoteric effect. Those who are seized by it may experience the event that Paul experienced before Damascus. [6]

Sources:

[1], [2] GA 232: Mystery Formations (1923)

[3], [4], [6] GA 130: Esoteric Christianity and the Spiritual Guidance of Mankind (1911/1912)

[5] GA 94: Cosmogony. Popular Occultism. The Gospel of John. Theosophy on the basis of the Gospel of John (1906)

Rosicrucians and astronomy

The pupil was first taught the so-called Ptolemaic world system in its real form, as it had been handed down from ancient times. He was shown how the earth actually carries within itself the power to determine its own course through the world. So that the world system had to be presented in the right way, it had to be drawn in the old Ptolemaic sense: the earth for man at the center of the universe, the other celestial bodies directed by the earth in a corresponding orbit. Then the pupil was told: "If one really studies that which is the best power of the earth, one arrives at no other world system than this. But that is not the case. It is not through the fault of man. Through the fault of man, the earth has unjustifiably passed into the solar realm, and the sun has become the regent of earthly activity. A world error brought about by human guilt. Men have now overcome the old world system and put another in its place, and do not even know that this other, which they regard as right, is the result of their own human guilt - science has become a science of the demonic. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 233a: Mystery Sites of the Middle Ages. Rosicrucianism and the Modern Principle of Initiation - Easter as a Piece of the Mystery History of Humanity (1924)

Rosicrucians and Hierarchies

And so, striking the disciple to the heart, the Master said: "According to your physical body, in so far as you absorb the human kingdom into yourself and process it, you belong to the Seraphim, Cherubim, Thrones. Insofar as you are an etheric body, you are animal-like in the etheric, but you belong to the spirits who are described as belonging to the second hierarchy: Kyriotetes, Dynamis, Exusiai, and insofar as you live in the fluid element, you do not belong to the earth, but to this hierarchy. And inasmuch as you work in the aerial element, you do not belong to the earth, but to the hierarchy of the Angeloi, Archangeloi, Archai. And it was clear to him: he lives on earth only through that which he carries within him as a warmth element. Thus, however, the Rosicrucian disciple perceived the warmth that he carries within himself, the physical warmth that he carries within himself, as the actual earthly-human. And more and more he learned to feel related to this physical warmth the warmth of the soul and the warmth of the spirit. At the moment when the disciple of the Rosicrucian Master realized this secret of the connection between the warmth element and the human-earthly, at that moment he knew how to link his human to the spiritual. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 233: World History in Anthroposophical Illumination and as the Basis of Knowledge of the Human Spirit (1923/1924)

Rosicrucians and reincarnation

Ancient Rosicrucianism did not have the opportunity to see the truths of reincarnation and karma. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 133: The Earthly and the Cosmic Man (1911/1912)

Rosicrucian letters

With regard to the Scriptures, it is also the case that people do not have the Scriptures, but the Scriptures have the people. What does that mean, the writing has the people? It means that you have a certain typeface in your wrist, in your hand. You write mechanically out of your hand. That captivates people. Man becomes unfettered when he writes as he paints or draws, when each letter becomes something he draws alongside the others: where there is not what is usually called handwriting, but where one draws the form of the letter, where one relates objectively to the letter, so that the essential thing is to look at it. It was for this reason - paradoxical as it may seem today - that in certain Rosicrucian schools learning to write was forbidden until the age of fourteen or fifteen, so that this form, this mechanism which discharges itself in writing, did not enter the human organism, but that only when the contemplation was formed did the human being approach the letter form; and then, as soon as he had learned the conventional letters needed for human intercourse, he should also learn others, the specific Rosicrucian letters, which are regarded as a secret writing, which is said to be a secret writing. It was not meant as a secret writing, it was meant in such a way that one should get to know another sign for an A at the same time: O , so that one did not cling to the one sign, but got rid of the signs, and in a way the A as a sound became something higher than this A and this O sign, while otherwise the letter of the A identifies itself with that which, floating, weaving as A, escapes from us as a sound. And Rosicrucianism also brought a lot into the people. For it was a main principle of Rosicrucianism that from the small circles in which the people were united, these people went out into the world, as I have already said, mostly practicing the activity of the doctor, but while they were doctors, spreading knowledge in wide circles where they went. It so happened that with this knowledge certain attitudes also spread, attitudes that one encounters wherever there are traces of Rosicrucianism. These attitudes sometimes take on grotesque forms. But in fact, one of these attitudes was expressed in the fact that this whole modern way of approaching writing and printing was regarded as a black art. For indeed, nothing hinders one more from reading in the astral light than ordinary writing. This fixation in an artificial way is a great hindrance to reading in the astral light. You always have to overcome this writing first if you want to read in the astral light. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 233a: Mystery Sites of the Middle Ages. Rosicrucianism and the Modern Principle of Initiation - Easter as a Piece of the Mystery History of Mankind (1924)

Rosicrucian initiation

The mystery system in the world declined more and more. The outer homes, which were meeting places between gods and humans, lost more and more of their significance. They had lost them almost completely in the 13th and 14th centuries. Whoever wanted to find the way to the Holy Grail had to know how to walk spiritual paths. Physical paths had been taken in ancient times, before the burning of Ephesus (see: Ephesian Mysteries). Spiritual paths had to be taken in the Middle Ages. In particular, however, one had to follow spiritual paths when it was a matter of obtaining a real Rosicrucian teaching from the 13th and 14th centuries onwards, but especially from the 15th century onwards. For the Rosicrucian temples were deeply hidden from external physical experience. Many real Rosicrucians were visitors to the temples, but no physical human eye could find the temples. The Rosicrucian master was found when one had first acquired the ability to hear the heavenly language in the physical, mild glow of the eyes. Then, in the most undemanding environment, in the most undemanding human conditions, especially in the 14th and 15th centuries in Central Europe, one found these strange personalities who were filled with God in their inner being, who were connected with the spiritual temples that existed, but to which access was really as difficult as the access to the Holy Grail described in the well-known legend.

Then, if one looks at what took place between such a Rosicrucian master and his disciple, one can overhear many a conversation which, even in the form of more recent times, represents the wisdom of the gods walking on earth. The teachings were very concrete. A Rosicrucian master was found in his solitude by a disciple who had made it his business to seek and find him. One of the disciples looked into the mildly gazing eyes, which spoke the language of the gods, and received the following unpretentious instruction: "Look, my son, at your own being. You carry within you the body that your outer physical eyes see. The center of the earth sends this body the forces that make it visible. This is your physical body. Look at the crystal: it carries its form within itself, it retains this form of its own essence through the earth. Your physical body cannot do that. If your soul leaves it, then the earth destroys it, then it dissolves it into dust. Your physical body is not of the earth, your physical body is of high spirituality. Seraphim, cherubim, thrones, to them belongs that which is the form and shape of your physical body. And within this physical body dwells your etheric body. The day will come when your physical body will be accepted by the earth for destruction. Then your etheric body will dissolve in the vastness of the cosmos. Only those divine-spiritual beings who belong to the Hierarchy of the Kyriotetes, Dynamis, Exusiai can build it up. You owe your etheric body to them. [1] You are only human as a physical body. In your etheric body you are still an animal, but an animal that is spiritualized by the 2nd Hierarchy.

What I am summarizing for you here, albeit in a few words, was the subject of a long lesson by that master, in whose gentle gaze the disciple heard the language of heaven. Then the disciple was pointed to the third limb. It was made clear to the pupil that this astral body contains the impulses for breathing, for all that is air in the human organism, for all that pulsates as air in the human organism. But although the earthly strives, for a long time after the human being has passed through the gate of death, to rumble, so to speak, in the air-like and for a clairvoyant view in the atmospheric phenomena of the earth for years the rumbling of the astral bodies of the deceased can be perceived, the earth with its surroundings can nevertheless do nothing else towards the impulses of the astral body than to dissolve them. For they can only be formed by the entities of the 3rd hierarchy: Archai, Archangeloi, Angeloi. [2]

And after the disciple had received this instruction in a sufficient way, he no longer felt himself to be a member of the earth. Starting from his physical, etheric and astral body, he felt, as it were, the forces that connect him through the mineral world with the 1st Hierarchy, through the watery earth with the 2nd Hierarchy, through the air circle with the 3rd Hierarchy. And it was clear to him: he lives on earth only through that which he carries within him as a warmth element. And more and more he learned to feel related to this physical warmth the warmth of the soul and the warmth of the spirit. At the moment when the disciple of the Rosicrucian master realized this secret of the connection between the warmth element and the human-earthly, at that moment he knew how to connect his human to the spiritual. And it was a tremendous calmness with which those thus instructed departed from their masters in those times. And so a deeply spiritual instruction was basically present until the first third of the 15th century. [3]

Sources:

[1] - [3] GA 233: World History in Anthroposophical Illumination and as the Basis of the Knowledge of the Human Spirit (1923/1924)

Rosicrucian spirit

This spirit, which now works as the Rosicrucian spirit, goes back to ancient human times. It already had its mysteries in ancient Atlantean times. And that which unfolds its effectiveness in more recent times flowed unconsciously into the hearts and souls of men in older times, becoming more and more conscious. [1] Just as you today were born into a world with (spiritual) longings, so our ancestors in Europe, that is, a large number of the souls present here today, were born into a different environment, into a different world, through the centuries that have passed. From the 6th to the 13th century, there were rhapsodes who traveled from village to village, from town to town, to proclaim the spirit (through stories). [2] And many souls are alive now who heard such things back then and absorbed them with pleasure and joy. This bears fruit, it gives strength to the souls, and this strength is transformed, becomes something else. They have become what is now in the souls as a longing for a higher interpretation of the same mysteries, as a longing for spiritual science. [3] The rhapsodes were disciples of the Rosicrucians, and the teachers told them: "Today you cannot yet go out and speak to people in ideas, as will be the case later; today you must tell of the King's Son, of the Queen of Flowers and of the threefold mantle, so that the thought-forms may be formed which are to live in the souls. And when the souls return, they will understand what they need for further progress. From the same temples the rhapsodists were sent to tell meaningful fairy tales, and from the same temples come the (spiritual) knowledge teachings of today. Thus the spirit that underlies humanity progresses from epoch to epoch. Those Beings who in pre-Christian times instructed the individualities who sat in the holy temples and taught what they had brought with them from earlier planetary states, placed themselves under the guidance of the Christ, this unique individuality, in order to continue to work in his spirit. The great teacher, the leader of humanity, has become the Christ. And if I could still tell you today that the fairy tales that have lived for centuries have come into being in the same way, and that they have inspired forms of thought within the whole of Western culture that express the same thing, only in image, as what we speak today of the Christ to the world, then you would see how, in the time after the Mystery of Golgotha, the spiritual leadership of humanity at its central place has indeed submitted itself to the leadership of the Christ. [4]

Sources:

[1] - [4] GA 124: Excursions into the field of the Gospel of Mark (1910/1911)

Rosicrucian verse

"Ex Deo nascimur, in Christo morimur, per Spiritum sanctum reviviscimus." In his own translation into German, which he described as the language of today's mysteries, they read: "From the divine, humanity is born... In Christ, death becomes life... In the spirit of the world, the soul awakens." [1]

The ancient wisdom that the seer gained through revelation is expressed in the sublime words from the original prayer of mankind: Ex Deo nascimur, "From God we are born". This is ancient wisdom. Christ, who has emerged from the spiritual worlds, has united wisdom with love; it will overcome egoism, that is its goal. But it must be offered independently, freely, from being to being: that is why the era of love began at the same time as that of egoism. The starting point of the cosmos is love; egoism grew out of it all by itself. But the impulse of the Christ, the impulse of love, will in time overcome the divisiveness that has come into the world and man can gradually become partaker of this power of love. In peculiarly monumental words, we feel love pouring into the hearts of people in the words of Christ: "Where two are together in my name, there am I in the midst of them." This is how the old Rosicrucian saying resounds in the love associated with wisdom: In Christo morimur, "In the Christ we die". Man was predestined by Yahweh to be a group soul, to be gradually imbued with love through consanguinity; as a personality he lives through Lucifer. So there was originally a union of people, then a separation through the Luciferian principle, which promotes the selfishness and independence of man. Evil came into the world with selfishness. This had to happen because good could not be grasped without evil. Through man's victories over himself, it provides the possibility for the unfolding of love. Christ gave man, who was sinking into selfishness, the drive to overcome himself and the strength to conquer evil. And now, through the deeds of Christ, those who were separated by selfishness are brought together. The words of Christ, who speaks of deeds of love, thus become true in the deepest sense when he tells us: "Inasmuch as you did it to one of the least of these, you did it to me!" - This divine deed of love has flowed back to the earthly world, it will gradually flow through the development of humanity and, despite the dying physical forces, will revive it in spirit, because it was not done out of egoism, only out of the spirit of love: Per Spiritum Sanctum reviviscimus, "Through the Holy Spirit we shall rise again." [2]

The esoteric should not study for himself, out of curiosity or the like, but he must make the most devoted study his duty for his own sake and for the sake of the development of man and the world. And when we have thus recognized our own essence through intensive study, when we know how and by what means it came into being, then we get a sacred feeling about it. We then express this feeling in the sentence: We are born of God - Ex Deo nascimur. If we penetrate ourselves with deep intimacy with this feeling and let the etheric currents, which were already mentioned in the exoteric lecture, the etherization of the blood, whereby etheric currents flow up from the heart to the head, glow around and illuminate the brain and set the pineal gland into activity, When we feel how we must be completely absorbed in the feeling of wanting to sacrifice our own self completely, like the spirits, like Christ sacrificed himself for the development of the world, then we learn to express this feeling in the sentence: In Christ we die - In Christo morimur. And then the certainty lights up within us that we are rising to the Spirit, rising in the Spirit. Per Spiritum Sanctum reviviscimus. [3]

Sources:

[1] Stra: Alexander Strakosch: Life Paths with Rudolf Steiner (1947)

[2] GA 143: Experiences of the Supersensible. The three paths of the soul to Christ. (1912)

[3] GA 266/2: From the Contents of the Esoteric Lessons. Volume II (1910-1912)

Rosicrucian saying and celestial bodies

Ex Deo nascimur. When we look at the moon, we can remember that we are born from the forces that are connected with the moon. And the sun reminds us of the sun spirit, the Christ, who was connected with it and who gave us the powers of the I: In Christo morimur. And when we pronounce the Per Spiritum Sanctum reviviscimus, we think of those entities that are connected with the five other planets and which we address in their entirety as the Holy Spirit. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 266/3: From the Contents of the Esoteric Hours. Volume III (1913-1923)

Rosicrucianism

The disciples of the medieval initiates made a very intensive effort to first immerse themselves in the human being and then, by immersing themselves in the human being, to reach beyond the human being into the secrets of the cosmos. In this way, these sages attempted to connect revelation with nature. They believed that in this way they could get behind the revelation of religion and the revelation of nature. For they were aware that man, as he lived on earth in their time, was actually destined to become the Fourth Hierarchy, but that he had made a fall through which he had descended below his actual nature and was deeper in the physical existence than he actually should be, but that he nevertheless did not have the strength to develop his spiritual-soul accordingly. And it was out of such aspirations that the Rosicrucian endeavor arose.

At a teaching place of the first original Rosicrucians it happened that once the scene high up on the mountain between the teacher and the pupil, and deep down in the earthly chasms (the early medieval acts of initiation) appeared as if in a kind of temporal mirage, one might say, came back as a ghost, mirrored as a vision within a Rosicrucian teaching place. And from this it was recognized that man had to achieve two things through inner striving in order to come to real self-knowledge, in order to find his adaptation to the earth, in order to reach the point of really becoming a member of the 4th Hierarchy. For from all that was now possible within the Rosicrucian School, one recognized what had happened to the disciple when he had seen the spirit of his own youth bodily before him (on the mountain). What had happened to him was a detachment of the astral body that was stronger than anything else in human life. And in this detachment of the astral body he recognized the meaning of the revelation. And again in this Rosicrucian school it became clear what had happened to the disciple in the depths of the earth. Then the astral body was completely withdrawn into the interior. There it was completely contracted, so that the disciple perceived the secrets of his own inner being. And now, within Rosicrucianism, spiritual exercises were found which were relatively simple, which consisted of symbolic figures to which the mind was devoted and on which one meditated. And through the power that came into the human soul's possession through the devotion to such figures, one achieved that on the one hand one released the astral body and became like the pupil on mountain heights, in etheric heights, that on the other hand, by contracting the astral body, one became like the pupil in the earthly gulfs. And then, by not having the outer environment, but by doing a strong inner exercise, one could enter the human interior. [1]

Mysteries in the old sense of the word were no longer possible, but people who yearned for knowledge in the sense of these old mysteries and who experienced severe soul struggles when they heard about the guidance up the mountain, about the guidance into earthly crevices, these people developed all kinds of inner methods and efforts in their souls to call upon the soul to find the way. And those who can see such things, as I said, do not see into mystery places, but into places of assembly of people seeking knowledge, warmed by an atmosphere of piety. And in such a meeting, which really took place in quite unpretentious surroundings, in the simple living room of a castle-like house, in such a meeting of a few people, it once happened that these people developed a kind of mystical mood in common through common retreats, which were half thought-meditative, half prayer-like, that mystical mood, which was then much cultivated by the so-called "Brothers of the Common Life", was later cultivated by the followers of Comenius and many other brotherhoods. And while these few people were together with a real devotion of the ordinary consciousness, with a devotion of the whole intellect in an intensely mystical mood, it happened that a being came to them, but now a being that did not have flesh and blood like that teacher whom the disciple met for the guidance to the mountain, to the gulfs of the earth, but a being that could actually only appear in the etheric body in this small community. And this being revealed itself as the same being that had led that disciple around the year 1200, but it was in a post-mortem state. It had descended from the spiritual world to these people, who had attracted it through their pious-mystical, meditative-thinking mood. No mediumistic powers of any kind were involved, because the small community that had gathered there would have regarded any use of mediumistic powers, even any suggestion of mediumistic powers, as something deeply sinful, based on certain assumptions that belong to time-honored tradition. [2]

And this being said in a very solemn way: "You are not prepared for my appearance, but I am among you, disembodied, without a physical body, because the time has come when initiates of the old kind cannot appear in the physical body for a short period of earthly existence. This time will return to you when the Michael period dawns. I have come to you to reveal to you that the human inner being has remained untransformed, that the human inner being, if it behaves in the right way, can find the way to divine-spiritual existence. But for a time the human intellect will be so constituted that it will have to be suppressed so that the spiritual can speak to the human soul. Therefore remain in your mystical-pious mood. By receiving from me the common image, the common imagination, I could only point you to that which will take place with you, but you will continue to experience the continuation of that which you have experienced. And lo and behold, three of the circle that was gathered there were really destined to establish a special connection with the spiritual world, again never through any mediumistic powers, but through the continuation of that mystical-meditative-pious mood. And in the case of these three, who were then especially protected by the others in this circle, who were really cared for intimately, it turned out that they experienced a kind of spiritual absence from time to time. They became beautiful in their outward physicality, acquired something like a shining countenance, sunlit eyes, and during this time they wrote down symbolic revelations which they received from the spiritual world. These symbolic revelations were the first pictures in which it was revealed to the Rosicrucians what they should know about the spiritual world. These symbolic revelations contained a kind of philosophy, a kind of theology, a kind of medicine.

And this strange thing turned out: the others - it seems to me as if the others had been four, so that the whole had been a community of seven - the others, they were able, through what they had experienced in the sunlit eyes, in the radiant countenance of their three brothers, to express in ordinary language that which lay in the symbols. Die zum Herausholen dieser Symbole aus der geistigen Welt bestimmten Brüder, sie konnten nur diese Symbole hinschreiben und sie konnten nur sagen, als sie wiederum in ihren gewöhnlichen Bewußtseinszustand zurückkehrten: Wir sind gewandelt unter Sternen und Sternengeistern und haben da die alten Lehrer des Geheimwissens gefunden. – Sie konnten selbst nicht in gewöhnliche Menschensprache diese symbolischen Bilder umsetzen, die sie aufzeichneten. Die anderen konnten es und taten es. Und vieles von dem, was dann übergegangen ist zum Teil in die philosophisch-theologische – aber nicht mehr in die kirchlich-theologische, sondern die profan-theologische – und in die medizinische Literatur, ist ursprünglich diesem eben gekennzeichneten Quell entsprossen. Und in kleinen Kreisen, die durch die ersten Rosenkreuzer organisiert worden sind, ist dann dasjenige verbreitet worden, was an solchen Symbolen aus der geistigen Welt erhalten worden ist. And again and again there were opportunities to experience this in the smallest circles between the 13th and 15th centuries. Those who were to translate what was then revealed in images were not always able to render it truly faithfully. That is why some of what you can still find handed down today from the philosophy of this period is not entirely clear in itself, and you have to look for what it actually means from the world of the spirit. But at least it was possible for those who knew about this kind of revelation from the spiritual world to tie in with such revelations. [3]

In no time of human development have charlatanism and the highest in revelation been so close together as in this period. And it is difficult for this time to distinguish the genuine from the false, which is why the whole of Rosicrucianism is regarded by many as charlatanism. It is understandable that this is the case, for the true Rosicrucians are extremely difficult to find among the charlatans, and the whole thing becomes particularly questionable because the assumption always had to be made that the spiritual revelation came from sources that initially remained hidden according to their actual nature. And it was so that those who were gradually gathered, so to speak, by the first Rosicrucians into a larger brotherhood, always actually appeared as unknowns in such a way that they appeared here and there in the world, mostly in the medical profession at that time, healed the sick, and on this occasion, by practicing the medical profession, at the same time spread knowledge. [4]

Pico de Mirandola said in the 15th century: That which is here on earth is brought about by cosmic causes, but man should refrain from recognizing these cosmic causes. Man should confine himself to the earth. - And so in the 15th century we encounter the voluntary renunciation of higher knowledge in such a characteristic personality as Pico de Mirandola. That which takes place externally in such a personality as Pico has its counterpart in the spiritual. Again, it was in one of those unpretentious meeting houses of the Rosicrucians where the sacrifice of the knowledge of the stars was offered in the most solemn form during a ritual act that was set up especially for this purpose in the 15th century, in the second half of the 15th century. People stood before a kind of altar and said: "We now want to feel responsible not only for ourselves or our community or our people or the humanity of the present, we want to feel responsible for all people who have ever lived on earth. We want to feel that we belong to the whole of humanity. And we feel that humanity has gone through something which is a departure from the rank of the 4th Hierarchy, a too deep descent into matter - this is how the Fall of Man was understood. Therefore, in order that mankind may again return to its rank of the 4th Hierarchy and find in free will that which the gods formerly attempted for it and with it, the higher knowledge was sacrificed for a certain time. - And certain beings of the spiritual world, who are not of a human nature, who did not descend to earth in human incarnation, accepted the sacrifice in order to achieve certain goals in the spiritual world. In return, however, the impulse to freedom from the spiritual world became possible for people.

What followed in terms of spirituality, what was produced that was truly spiritual, was an echo of such work from unknown spiritual worlds. And right up to the 19th century, alongside the development of external materialism, it was always possible to get to know individual spirits who lived under the after-effects of this renunciation of higher knowledge. [5]

Sources:

[1] - [5] GA 233a: Mystery sites of the Middle Ages. Rosicrucianism and the Modern Principle of Initiation - Easter as a Piece of the Mystery History of Humanity (1924)

Rosicrucianism - Aims

To do something truly universalistic in the face of this differentiation (into nations) - for (Pope) Innocent III, who founded the Italian nation, had just shown that Romanism is not capable of being universalistic - i.e. the Church is no longer universalistic - to find a spiritual impulse so strong that it helps to transcend all these differentiations, to really make humanity into a whole, that was essentially what Rosicrucianism was based on. Of course, humanity was not mature enough to adopt the means and ways to achieve this. But it has always remained an ideal. [1]

It was a main principle of Rosicrucianism that from the small circles in which the people were united, these people went out into the world, as I have already said, mostly practicing the activity of the doctor, but while they were doctors, spreading knowledge in wide circles where they went. It so happened that with this knowledge certain attitudes also spread, attitudes which are to be found wherever there are traces of Rosicrucianism. [2]

Sources:

[1] GA 180: Mystery truths and Christmas impulses. Old myths and their meaning. Ancient Myths and their Meaning (1917/1918)

[2] GA 233a: Mystery sites of the Middle Ages. Rosicrucianism and the Modern Principle of Initiation - Easter as a Piece of the Mystery History of Humanity (1924)

Rosicrucianism and Goethe

That Goethe's essence and the fundamental trait of his entire work is in the deepest sense borne by the best progressive forces of the newer age need not be further explained here. It is also clear that the spiritual natural science he meant and inaugurated, especially in its contrast to Newton, for example, is in line with the Rosicrucian impulses. We shall therefore only refer here to effects which, in a more specific sense, can be traced back to direct Rosicrucian inspiration in Goethe. Rudolf Steiner speaks of a kind of initiation that Goethe received at a relatively young age when he came close to a Rosicrucian source; it was during his last time in Leipzig (before he went to Strasbourg) when he came close to death in serious illness. Rudolf Steiner says of this experience that Goethe was not initially aware of this initiation; it acted as a kind of "poetic current". We find a flash of light from this in Goethe's fragmentary, wonderful, profound poem "The Secrets" of a Rosicrucian inspiration, where the symbol of the Rosicrucian cross appears, where we are also confronted by the Twelve and the Thirteenth (the Thirteenth has already departed from the Twelve at the time in which the action of the poem takes place; he is represented by Brother Mark). But then, says Rudolf Steiner, this initiation worked itself out more and more, and Goethe was finally able, after he had become more and more aware of it, to write his "Fairy Tale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily", one of the most profound writings in world literature. [1]

Sources:

[1] Hey: Karl Heyer: Historical Impulses of Rosicrucianism (1938)

Christian Rosenkreutz' calling

Christian Rosenkreutz selects those whom he wants to have as his pupils in a remarkable way. The one chosen has to pay attention to a certain kind of event, or several events in his life of the following kind

...

When such an event awakens in a person the inner disposition to look at his life from that time onwards as a gift, nowadays this makes him a follower of Christian Rosenkreutz. For that is his way of calling these souls to him. And whoever can recall having had such an experience can tell himself: Christian Rosenkreutz has given me a sign from the spiritual world that I belong to his stream. Christian Rosenkreutz has added the possibility of such an experience to my karma. That is the way in which Christian Rosenkreutz makes his choice of pupils. He chooses his community like this. Whoever experiences this consciously, knows: a path has been shown me, and I must follow it and see how far I can use my forces to serve rosicrucianism. Those who have not understood the sign, however, will do so at a later time, for whoever has received the sign will not be free of it again.

That a man can have an experience of the kind described is due to his having met Christian Rosenkreutz in the spiritual world between his last death and his last birth. Christian Rosenkreutz chose us then, and he put an impulse of will into us that now leads us to such experiences. This is the way in which spiritual connections are brought about.

1911-09-28-GA130

Many a person of whom we do not expect it, is a pupil chosen by Christian Rosenkreutz. Even today it is possible to speak of a sign by means of which Christian Rosenkreutz calls to one whom he has chosen. Many people can apprehend this sign in their life; it may express itself in a thousand ways, but these different manifestations all lead back to a typical form which may be described as follows.

...

And when the man in question realises this he will be led to the resolve to work in a spiritual movement.

If the resolve is taken, this means that he has actually been chosen. This is how Christian Rosenkreutz begins to gather his pupils around him, and many human beings, if they were sufficiently alert, would be conscious of such an event in their inner life.

The human beings of whom it can be said that they were, or will now be, united in this way with Christian Rosenkreutz, are those who should be the pioneers of a deeper understanding of esoteric Christianity. This stream of spiritual life connected with Christian Rosenkreutz provides the highest means for enabling the Christ Impulse to be understood in our present time.

1911-11-18-GA130

Sources:

https://anthroposophy.eu/Q00.006_-_spiritual_events_at_various_points_in_life

28
Sorat

Sorat[h], the animal 666

If we imagine this totality of beings that rule in connection with the individual planets, including the sun, then we get what was regarded as the spirituality of each of these planets until the 14th century, even by the Catholic Doctors of the Church, as the intelligence of the planets. We can certainly speak of the intelligence of the planets as a reality, just as we can speak of earthly humanity as the intelligence of the earth. And each such planet has not only its intelligence, but also its demon; and this, as I said, was known to the Doctors of the Church until the 14th and 15th centuries. All the opponents of the intelligences on a planet are demons. And it is the same on the sun. If we now prefer to see Christianity as an evolution in the sense of the solar genius, the solar intelligence, then we must see the solar demon in that which opposes the evolution of Christianity. And this is what the apocalypticist saw. He saw behind the scenes of what happened when Christianity fled from Rome to the East, and he saw Christianity take on other forms of recognition. He saw the powerful counter-principle of Arabism breaking into this Christianity, which was threatened on two sides by appearances. And by looking behind the scenes of the external Arab and Mohammedan deeds, it was clear to him that the sun demon was working against the sun genius, against the sun intelligence - he therefore had to portray the sun demon as that which works and lives against the Christian principle in man in such a way that man, if he surrenders to this sun demon, does not want to achieve the connection to the divinity of Christ, but wants to remain in the sub-human. If the apocalypticist had been asked, he would have called the representatives of Arabism in Europe "men devoted to the sun demon" according to the nature of their souls. And it was clear to him that from this Arabism everything rises that brings man closer to animality, in his views, but gradually also in his impulses of will. Who could fail to recognize that this also lives in the impulses of the will?

We may therefore ask ourselves: What would happen if Arabism, the doctrine of the sun demon, were to triumph completely? - Then humanity would be thrown out of the experience of such states as must be experienced by human beings if the workings of karma from previous incarnations or transubstantiation are to be grasped. Ultimately, what flowed out of Arabism was directed against the understanding of transubstantiation. Certainly, the outward facts do not look like this, but the sun-demon, by letting go only the old Father-principle, the natural connections, intends to sweep away from the human view that kind of connection which is active to the highest degree in a sacrament like transubstantiation. [1]

The good spirit of the sun is opposed by an evil spirit, the demonium of the sun. Both forces not only work in the sun, but also send their effects down to the earth. It is the force that opposes the unification of the earth with the sun, it works in the evil forces of man. [2] The apocalypticist calls that power, that being, which leads men to spiritualize themselves in such a way that they can unite with the sun, the Christ in the right sense, and the Lamb. But there is also an opposing principle of this Lamb, the so-called demonium of the sun. And it works in such a way that a certain part of the human race is expelled from the development that leads to the sun. At the same time, these are the forces which, when the 666 states of development have passed, are destined to be thrown out of our development altogether. Now these 666 have always been written down in a very mysterious way. In the Mysteries, from which the Apocalyptic received his initiation, they wrote 400 200 6 60. Now there is a certain principle in the writing of the initiates which consists in expressing letters by corresponding numbers (and vice versa, for the Jews and the Greeks have no extra numerals). Then one must write 400 as ת (Tau), 200 as ר (Resh), 6 as ו (Vau), and 60 as ס (Samech). What man has received in the physical body, etheric body, astral body and lower ego before he rises to the higher, these four principles are expressed at the same time by these four (Hebrew) letters; by the Samech the physical body, by the Vau the etheric body, by the Resh the astral body and by the Tau the lower ego. One reads (Hebrew) from right to left and has to add the vowels, and it is called "Sorat". [3]

We have then to supply the vowels and it reads: Sorath, Sorath is the name of the Sun-Demon, the adversary of the Lamb. Every such spiritual being was described not only by name but also by a certain symbolical sign. For Sorath, the sun-demon, there was this sign:

The apocalyptic describes it like this: "And I saw another beast coming up out of the earth, having two horns like a lamb. These are nothing other than the two lines at the top of the drawing. Thus we see that the apocalyptic points to the adversary of the lamb.

Below, where the earth passes over into the spiritual, the figures of men appear in such a way that they receive their old animal form. The beast with the 7 heads and 10 horns appears, but their seducer also appears, who has the strong power not to let them come back to the sun, the opponent of Christ. So at the moment when the earth passes into the astral state, that which was present in man when the earth was still clothed in a watery shell appears. The human animal arises. The fact that this animal left the earth unused means that Sorat, the adversary of the sun, the seducer, can now rise from the earth, thereby approaching man and dragging him down into the abyss with all his might. Thus we see a being nestling up to people from this point onwards, which has a terrible power. What does this being do to lead people into such horrible things as we can foresee? To seduce people into mere immorality, into what they already know as normal human beings, this monster, which appears as a sun demon, was not needed. Only when that which in a good sense characterizes the beings who bring salvation to the human race is transformed into its opposite, when spiritual power is placed at the service of the lower ego principle, can it bring humanity to the point where the beast, which is represented with two horns, gains power over it. The abuse of spiritual powers is connected with the seductive power of the beast with two horns. Thus the division of humanity in the distant future enters our horizon: the elect of Christ, who will ultimately be the white magicians, and the opponents, the wild sorcerers, the black magicians, who cannot free themselves from matter and whom the apocalypticist depicts as those who fornicate with matter. The great Babylon (see: Babylonian corruption). [4] When the sun will have reunited with the earth, man will have purified his instincts, desires and passions and thus redeemed the Luciferic beings. The Luciferic beings who do not go with him to the sun remain in the state in which they were; they then appear as cast out into the evil lower astral world (arising from the Kamaloka). This is then the old serpent and the first of the dragons emerges. So when the earth enters the sun, a dragon appears. But there are other retarded people: those who cannot really help having remained in the animal world, who remain slaves to their animal instincts. While the other people go to the sun, they form an evil power over the others. They form the second monster, and the apocalypticist says in his exact way: the Luciferian dragon appears in the sky because he comes from higher worlds; the second beast rises from the sea - these are the animal men who have remained behind. Now we have a third apparition: these are the black magicians. They do not remain in the animal world, they develop spiritual abilities within themselves. They have turned away in full consciousness and give up the carnal incarnation for the sorat; this will be the incarnation of the sun-demon. [5]

This being itself, which we have characterized as the two-horned beast, we need only imagine that it is a seductive being of quite a different kind from man. It comes from other world periods, has adopted the inclinations of other world periods and it will feel deeply satisfied when it encounters beings like these evil beings who have refused to accept inwardly what can flow out of the earth as good. This being could have nothing of the earth. It saw the development of the earth coming, but it said to itself: I am not so advanced with the earth that I can have anything from earthly existence. This being could only have had something of the earth if it had been able to attain dominion at a certain moment, namely when the Christ principle descended to earth. If this Christ-principle had been nipped in the bud at that time, if the Christ could have been overcome by the adversary, then it would have been possible that the earth in its entirety would have fallen prey to this Sorat-principle. This was not the case, and so this being must be content with the waste, with the people who have remained stuck in matter. [6]

I have referred in various ways to the normal development, and then also to the two side currents: the Luciferic, which flowed into earth life in the Lemurian period, and the Ahrimanic, which flowed in during the Atlantean period. Thus these three currents are present in the development of mankind, and everything that happens in the development of mankind is under the influence of these three currents. Everything that lies within these currents brought about an important junction in the whole of human development. At that time, 666 years after the birth of Christ, something should have happened and could have happened that did not happen. In the year 666 there could have come - visibly for outer mankind, namely for occidental mankind - a significant being, which would not have appeared on the physical plane, but would have made itself very clearly audible to mankind also externally, so that men would have fallen for it. The procedure that was to be carried out with the development of man through this being, the sorat, the animal, was to consist of this being, which had already fully developed the consciousness soul, while man had only arrived at the intellectual or emotional soul, wanting to give man all the soul-spiritual achievements that man did not have at that time by virtue of his intellectual soul, but which he can only receive with the consciousness soul. It was to come to man prematurely, the culture of the consciousness soul. [7] With a large number of people it could have succeeded, a number of geniuses would have arisen in the educated world of the Occident. That which people who could not have gone along completely, who still lagged behind in development, would normally only know in the year 2493, could have bubbled over and revealed itself to unsuspecting occidental humanity through the genius of the imaginative powers of the imagination. [8]

It could be prevented by holding the scales. Just think, 333 was the time of the middle of the 4th post-Atlantean age; 333 later was 666; then the Ahrimanic powers would have powerfully brought up all arrogance of a materialistic kind, but with ingenious powers. The balance could only be maintained by the fact that 333 years earlier, i.e. at the beginning of the calendar, the being had arisen which placed its own substance into the development of mankind for balance and prevented this being from appearing. What would actually have happened from 666 onwards if the Beast had been able to intervene in human evolution without the Mystery of Golgotha having occurred first? If the beast had been up to its mischief with mankind from 666 until the 15th century, then it would have taken complete control of what was approaching: the ghostly scientific understanding of the world, and thus the emancipation of human instincts. Because the soul of consciousness was only supposed to grasp the ghost of man, the real man remained behind; he did not grasp himself. Now in the age of the consciousness soul man can only become man by becoming conscious, otherwise he remains an animal, he remains behind his human development. That was the intention of this being who wanted to appear in 666: to cut off, to ensure that the future development of the earth would be cut off, so that man would not continue on the path which those beings of the higher Hierarchies want to take with him, who from the beginning have taken his normal development into their hands. [9] Think, we are all in the midst of that which has only been brought about by the fact that - as a certain letter in the Gospels expresses it - the beast has been beaten into fetters by Christ Jesus. [10] (See also: Academy of Gondishapur).

But the number 666 is there once at the time when Arabism shoots into Christianity in order to impose the seal of materialism on Western culture; it is there a second time after another 666 years have passed: 1332, in the 14th century And there we have a new rising of the beast out of the floods of world events. To those who look like the apocalypticist, world events appear like a continuous flood of an epoch of 666. The beast rises up, threatening Christianity with its search for true humanity, asserting animalism against humanity; Sorat stirs. In the 14th century we see Sorat, the adversary, rise up again. It is the time when the Order of the Knights Templar wanted to establish a solar view of Christianity in Europe, a view of Christianity that looked up to Christ as a solar being, as a cosmic being, that knew something of the spirituality of the planets and the stars, who knew how the intelligences of widely separated worlds work together in world events, not just the entities of one planet, and who also knew something of the powerful oppositions that take place through such unruly entities as the sun demon Sorat, who is one of the most powerful demons within our system. Basically, it is solar demonia that works in the materialism of human beings. From a certain point of view, of course, it is difficult today to talk about what would have become of European civilization if the Order of the Templars, which was so powerful, even outwardly powerful - its treasures were taken from it - had been able to carry out its intentions. But in the hearts and souls of those who could not rest until this order had perished in 1312 and Jacob of Molay had died in 1314, in the hearts of those who were the adversaries of the cosmic Christ, who looked out into the cosmos, Sorat revived, and not in the least in such a way that he made use of the attitude of the Roman Church at that time in order to kill the Templars. At that time, the emergence of this Sorat was already more vivid, for a grandiose mystery shrouds the downfall of this Templar order. If you look into what was going on in these people who were executed as Templars at that time during their torture, then you get an idea of how this was instigated by Sorat, what lived in the visions of the tortured Templars, so that they slandered themselves and they had a cheap accusation against them that came from their own mouths. The terrible spectacle was before men, that those who represented something quite different could not speak of it during their torture, but that the various spirits from the hosts of Sorat spoke from them, and spoke the most shameful things about the Order itself from its own members. [11]

At the end of the first 666, Sorat was still hidden in the evolutionary course of events; he was not seen in outward form, he lived inside the deeds of Arabism and the initiate could see him. When the second 666 years had elapsed, it was already evident in the thoughts and feelings of the tortured Templars. And even before the end of this century it will show itself by appearing in many people as the entity they are possessed by. People will emerge who cannot be believed to be real people. They will also develop outwardly in a peculiar way. Outwardly, they will be intensely strong natures, with angry features, destructive rage in their emotions. They will have a face in which one will see a kind of animal face on the outside. The Sorat people will also be outwardly recognizable, they will not only mock everything in the most terrible way, but will want to fight everything and push everything of a spiritual nature into the pool. [12]

Sources:

[1], [11], [12] GA 346: Lectures and Courses on Christian Religious Work, V. Apocalypse and Priestly Work (1924)

[2] GA 96: Original Impulses of Spiritual Science. Christian Esotericism in the Light of New Spiritual Knowledge (1906/1907)

[3], [4], [6] GA 104: The Apocalypse of John (1908)
(https://rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA104/English/APC1958/19080629p01.html)

[5] GA 104a: From the illuminated manuscript of the Apocalypse of John (1907/1909)

[7] - [10] GA 184: The Polarity of Duration and Development in Human Life. The Cosmic Prehistory of Humanity (1918)

Academy of Gondishapur

(Gondishapur is a city near today's Dezful in Persia, which has not yet been excavated, in which captured Roman soldiers of Emperor Valerian were settled, located in the neighborhood of the former capital Susa). Just as many years as the Mystery of Golgotha preceded the middle of the Greek-Latin cultural period, the year 333, 333 years, just as many years after this time, it was intended by certain spiritual powers to lead the earth's development in completely different ways than they were then led, because the Mystery of Golgotha was there. 333 years after the year 333 is the year 666; that is the year of which the writer of the Apocalypse speaks with a great temperament. According to the intentions of certain spiritual powers, something was to happen to mankind, and it would have happened if the Mystery of Golgotha had not occurred. The descending path, which from 333 onwards would have been granted to mankind as the culmination of the culture of the intellectual or emotional soul, this descending path would have been used to bring mankind into a completely different channel than it was to enter according to the intention of those divine beings who have been connected with it from the beginning, from the time of Saturn. This was to happen by giving something that was to come to humanity later, the consciousness soul with its contents, through a kind of revelation to humanity as early as 666. If this had been carried out, if the intentions of certain beings opposed to the development of mankind, but wanting to take over this development of mankind, had really been fulfilled, then mankind would have been surprised in 666, gifted with the consciousness soul in a way that it will only be a long time after our time. That which is only to happen in the year 2493 - when man is only to be ready to consciously grasp his own personality - would have been instilled into man as early as 666 by ahrimanic-luciferic forces. [1] The Academy of Gondishapur wanted to spare man the striving for truth, wanted to spare man the trouble of further development, thus wanted to reveal to him that which it itself had received revealed by ahrimanic means. The Academy of Gondishapur, which has its last shadow, its ghost in the scientific illusion of the present, this Academy of Gondishapur wanted to make man a pure earthling. [2]

The Christian emperor Justinian carried out the final act by dissolving [the Athenian school of philosophy and] expelling the seven most important Athenian philosophers, who were really a kind of international society. There was a Damaskios, there was a Simplikios, there were philosophers from all regions, and there really was a kind of international society in these seven, and they took with them the last remnants of Aristotelian knowledge, which was already in a kind of decadence even in relation to Gnosticism. This Aristotelian knowledge was implanted in the spiritual wave that then spread across Arabia to Spain, and we see how in the 11th, 12th and 13th centuries a spiritual wave rolled over from there [to the West]. There comes over that which then had a strong influence on such spirits as Roger Bacon, and - what is still clearly perceptible - in the philosophy of Spinoza, which had such a great influence on Goethe. [3]

And so the Emperor Justinian was also a henchman of certain entities when he, who was an enemy of everything that had survived from the high wisdom of Greekism, closed the school of philosophy in Athens in 529, so that the last remnants of Greek scholarship with the high Aristotelian-Platonic knowledge were banished and fled over to Persia. The Syrian sages had already fled to Nisibis earlier, when Zeno Isauricus had expelled the same Greek sages from Edessa in the 5th century.

And so, around the year 666, the Persian academy of Gondishapur really was a gathering of the most exquisite scholars who had come over from ancient Greece and who had taken no account of the Mystery of Golgotha. And within the academy of Gondishapur taught those who were inspired by Luciferic-Aahrimanic forces. And instead of a wisdom having emerged against which all that we know today in the outer world would be a mere trifle, instead of a wisdom having emerged through inspiration in a spiritual way above all that which will gradually be conquered through experimentation and natural science by the year 2493 and which would have emerged through brilliant, magnificent scholarship, only the remnants of it then remained in what Arab scholars brought to Spain. But it was also already blunted. It didn't come out in the way it was intended, it was blunted.

And in its place Mohammedanism remained, Mohammed with his teachings, and only Islam came in place of that which should have emanated from the Academy of Gondishapur. The world was led away from this pernicious direction by the Mystery of Golgotha. [4] Inspiration from the dead took place, as we see in Tertullian and many others. Thus the minds of men were directed to the Mystery of Golgotha and thus to something quite different from that which should have emanated from the Academy of Gondishapur. But such events as that which was intended by this academy take place, so to speak, behind the scenes of outer world development. They take place in the supersensible. Something has already happened to humanity. It has happened that at that time humanity, on which the impulse of Gondishapur had an effect, this New Persian impulse, which brought the Zarathustra impulse again at the wrong time, that the whole of humanity, if I may say so, if I may express myself trivially, has received an inner crack right into the body.

That disease has been inoculated into humanity which, when it lives itself out, leads to the denial of God the Father. Every person who belongs to modern civilization actually has a predisposition to this atheism; it is only a question of whether he gives in to this predisposition. Man carries within him that disease which incites him to deny the divine, whereas it would in fact follow from his nature to recognize it. This nature has been somewhat mineralized, as it were, scaled back in development, so that we all carry the God-denying disease within us, thereby creating a stronger bond of attraction between the soul of man and his body than was formerly there. The soul is, as it were, forged more closely to the body. The wise men of Gondishapur wanted nothing less - which in a more amateurish form certain secret societies also want in our time - than to make man very great for this earth, to make him very wise, but to let his soul participate in death with the implantation of this wisdom, so that he would not have the inclination, when he has passed through the gate of death, to participate in the spiritual life and in the following incarnations. They wanted to win him for themselves for a completely different world, to preserve him from earthly life, in order to dissuade him from what man is there for on earth, what he should first learn in slow, gradual development and through which he will come to the spirit self, Manas, the life spirit, Buddhi and the spirit man, Atma. [5]

The Academy of Gondishapur was primarily concerned with permeating the old oriental spiritual culture, which had already fallen into decadence, with Aristotelianism and shaping it in a completely new form. Aristotelianism only emerged again in its own form. The Christians had not propagated it. [6] Aristotle - otherwise he would probably have been completely lost - was first translated into Syriac in Edessa by the scholars who were later expelled by Isauricus. In Gondishapur, the Syriac Aristotle was translated into Persian. And there, through the translation of Aristotle, a basis was created in which the Aristotelian concepts appeared in the light of the Arab soul as it was then, this strange soul of the Arabs as it was then, where the sharpest thinking was combined with a certain fantasy, but which ran in logical paths and rose to the level of vision. [7]

And the intention was to flood the entire civilized world known at that time with this erudition. But that which was to emanate from Gondishapur was blunted, held back, as it were, by retarding spiritual forces, which were nevertheless connected, even if they again formed a kind of opposition, with that which was influenced by the Christ-impulse, by the appearance of Mohammed. That which came from Gondishapur sailed after that which Mohammed had done. Mohammedanism was destined to blunt the gnostic wisdom of Gondishapur, to deprive it of the actual, strongly ahrimanic, tempting power it would otherwise have exerted on mankind. [8]

The Catholic Church, which was very strongly influenced by the remnants of the impulse of Gondishapur, dogmatically determined at the general ecumenical council in Constantinople in 869 that one should not believe in the Spirit, because it did not want to enlighten everyone about the mystery of Golgotha, but wanted to spread darkness about it. (See: Council of Constantinople) [9] But this wisdom of Gondishapur has not completely disappeared. That which the great teacher, whose name remains unknown but who was the greatest opponent of Christ Jesus, taught his students has not been achieved, but something else has been achieved. The current scientific way of thinking really has nothing to do with Christianity as such. One can follow step by step, from decade to decade, how the gnostic Gondishapur wisdom, albeit blunted, has spread via southern Europe and Africa to Spain, France and England and then across the continent, especially via the monasteries; one can follow how the supernatural is driven out and only the sensual is retained; and Western scientific thinking emerges. It is particularly interesting to study Roger Bacon (opponent of scholasticism) along these lines. [10]

Who actually understands, when he reads those foolish notes without context, which one finds today about Averroes in the textbooks, why Averroes, the Spanish-Arabic scholar, said: When man dies, only the substance of his soul flows out into the general spirituality; man has no personal individuality, but everything that is soul in the individual man is only a reflection of the one All-Soul? - Why did he say this? Because this is a branch of the wisdom of Gondishapur, which made it clear to the people, not that each individual should develop the consciousness-soul, but that the consciousness-soul-wisdom should come to them as a revelation from above. Then it would have been an ahrimanic revelation; but it would actually have become so with mankind that the content of the consciousness-soul would have become a monistic one, and the individual consciousnesses would basically have become mere appearances. [11] What is still there today of the impulse of Gondishapur, this method leads to very precise knowledge of Lucifer and Ahriman; but not to the guidance of humanity through the Christ Jesus. [12] This is something that was felt by the scholastics of the Middle Ages, who wanted to trample the Arab scholars underfoot and always saw themselves in this situation. [13]

Sources:

[1], [4], [5], [9] GA 182: Death as a Transformation of Life (1917/1918)

[2], [7], [8], [10] - [13] GA 184: The Polarity of Duration and Development in Human Life. The Cosmic Prehistory of Humanity (1918)

[3] GA 342: Lectures and Courses on Christian Religious Work, I. Anthroposophical Foundations for a Renewed Christian Religious Work (1921)

[6] GA 325: Natural Science and the World-Historical Development of Mankind since Antiquity (1921)

29
Spiritland — Life Between Death & New Birth

(One must) realize that this life between death and a new birth can only be represented by us in a certain sense with images taken from the sensual, from physical life on earth, from the ideas we form within this physical life on earth, but that life in the realm of the dead is precisely such that it is very difficult to grasp with the concepts and ideas we form in becoming earthly. We must therefore try to approach this life from different angles. [1]

Death differs from sleep in that the etheric body also departs with the astral body and the ego. A peculiar phenomenon occurs, something that could be described as a sensation, but which is connected with a certain idea. The human being feels as if he were growing, as if he were expanding in all directions; he takes on dimensions in all directions. This enlargement of the etheric body, which he assumes immediately after death, this seeing of the etheric body in large dimensions, is a very important idea. [2] The impression immediately after death is as if our being pours out over everything that is outside us. We immerse ourselves in things, as it were, we feel one with them. A feeling of the soul spreading and expanding and widening occurs, a merging with the things that are in the external environment as images. [3]

The dead person leaves the physical world and is still connected with the physical world, especially in the first few days. And here it is very significant that the dead person who leaves the physical world is very much adapted to the constellation that results for his life from the position of the planets. For as long as the dead person is still connected with his etheric body, the planetary forces, the constellation of planetary forces, resonate and vibrate wonderfully through this etheric body. Just as the earth-territorial forces resonate extraordinarily strongly in the embryonic water when the physical human being comes into being, so in a dead person who is still in his etheric body the forces connected with the constellations of the stars resonate in a quite striking way at the moment when - the whole thing is of course karmically conditioned - the dead person has left the physical world. So that we can say: First stage of development: direction in the star constellation. This is significant just as long as the human being remains connected with his etheric body.

The second thing that comes into consideration in the relationship of man to the cosmos is that man really leaves the physical world in a certain direction, one could say, when he himself becomes spiritual after discarding the etheric body. It is there that one can finally apply concepts taken from the physical world to what the dead person does in the right sense, not merely in a figurative sense; for after this stage the concepts become more or less images. Now one can say: In the second stage - and now the direction is still physical, although it goes out of the physical - the direction is taken towards the respective East. And through the respective East the dead person enters the purely spiritual world at a certain point in time. But by leaving the physical world through the East and entering the spiritual world, the dead person already enters the sphere, that is, he gains the possibility of participating in the forces of the sphere, which do not work centrifugally, as is the case here with man, but centripetally towards the center of the earth; he enters the sphere, the possibility of working towards the earth. [4]

When we as human beings leave our physical body, where do we go, where do we actually go under? As if in a flash, with our death we submerge into that which forms our physical body from all the supersensible forces. You can easily imagine that all the building forces that have been at work on your physical body since the Saturnian period expand into infinity and prepare the place for you in which you live between death and a new birth. All this, I would like to say, is only drawn together in the space enclosed by our skin between birth and death. [5]

The dead person leaves the physical body through the region of space. The moment one has left the physical body, one merges into that which is outside the physical body. When I stand here and leave my body, the first thing I am in is the table (for example), and then everything that surrounds me. I am always inside that which fills the world, and always further inside that, only just not inside my skin. That which was previously my physical inner world becomes my outer world, and everything that used to be the outer world becomes my inner world. Thus the moral also becomes my outer world. [6]

When the human being passes through the gate of death, he hears for a very short time, which is only dated by days - about as long as the human being can endure, due to his organization, to remain without sleep for several days - a kind of tableau (see: life tableau), which allows him to survey his last life on earth as if in a web of thoughts, but which is pictorial. Without any emotional or volitional part, purely in a kind of passive overview, one has this earthly life before him. [7] That is the characteristic feature of modern man, that he likes to reinterpret what he himself experiences. He does not like to give a truthful account of himself. He wants to color that which is connected with his attitude to the world to one side or the other. Just examine yourself in this direction once and ask yourself how often you actually admit to yourself that you are wrong about something. Where one should admit to oneself that one is wrong, one will in most cases imagine something else that numbs one to what one would otherwise have to say to oneself: that one is wrong about something. But this is only one of the phenomena which could already outwardly indicate to man that he is experiencing many things subconsciously today about which he is deluding himself in his consciousness. When you get a little older and then die, you have a large sum of such subconscious experiences within you. And it is these subconscious experiences that confront the person after death, as if transformed into something essential. If one finds out this connection between the subconscious experiences and the surprising things the dead person experiences after he has passed through the gate of death, then one can come to terms with this phenomenon, then one can understand why so many people who today do not like to think about how they experience the one and the other, but leave it in the subconscious, how they are surprised when this whole subconscious thing really confronts them after they have passed through the gate of death. They are surprised by it, even though they have experienced it, and at the same time they must feel that they themselves have had a great deal to do with what they are experiencing. It is actually a part of their own life, a part of their own experience that they have either not noticed at all or only very indistinctly. [8]

As long as we have the etheric body on us after we have shed the physical body, we can still think everything that we were able to think during our physical existence. We look at the thoughts and survey the life we have gone through as if in a panorama. Then we discard the etheric body. But this etheric body, which we discard there, remains visible to us throughout our entire life after death. It is outside, but it remains visible. It unites with the universe, but what happens to it remains visible to us, we see it. That which we had in us in thoughts when we were alive, we see as it were interwoven with the world, so that it belongs to our world, not to our ego after death. One can (as a living person) experience the dead in a certain way in a twofold manner. One can experience that of him which he has handed over to the etheric world, one can experience that of him in which his consciousness sits after death. [9] As truly as we live in the air that surrounds us everywhere, so truly does the world surround us, in which remains what the dead person leaves behind as his etheric world. We are separated from the spiritual worlds only by states of consciousness; we are not separated by spatial relations, by states of consciousness. [10]

Suppose you lived here on earth with your ego from the year 1850 to the year 1920. Now you look back, with the spirit self, Manas through the hierarchies (mediated) you look back at your ego; there you always see your ego as having stood still from the year 1850 to 1920. The ego remains there, remains standing still. This means that your experiences do not go with you soon after your death, but you look back on them, you only look back on them from a temporally distant perspective, and you see into the length of time, just as you see into the length of space here in the physical world. You look back at the stretch of time in which you lived here on earth with your ego. And the stretch of time remains there, and you always see it by continuing to live in perspective at the point in time where it was. [11] After death we are inside things and beings, we expand over the space that is relevant to us. During the Kamaloka period we are continually expanding, and when the Kamaloka period (time of dissolution of a part of the astral body) is over, we are as large as the space within the moon's orbit. [12]

A large number of people who pass through the gates of death today are extraordinarily surprised by what they experience after death, by the unknown that stands before them. The consciousness lives in the dead person that he would never have thought that experiences of this kind would come before his soul. So it is something unknown that the deceased encounters, but at the same time something that he clearly knows originates from himself, especially if he belongs to the older deceased. If you notice this fact, it is really quite difficult to find an explanation for it. Only then can one find it if one takes it quite seriously in connection with something else which must be considered in connection with it, namely with the fact that today's man, who is placed in today's order of life, experiences a great sum of things of which he either knows nothing at all, or about which he makes all kinds of illusions. It is a whole wide range of experiences that can be counted among the subconscious experiences that come to a person, just like what he experiences consciously, but which he either pays no attention to at all, while they are still going on in him, or to which he gives a completely wrong interpretation. That is the characteristic of modern man, that he likes to reinterpret what he himself experiences. When you get a little older and then die, you have a large sum of such subconscious experiences within you. And it is these experiences that confront the person after death, as if transformed into essence. It is actually a part of their own life, the part of their own experience that is either not noticed at all or only very indistinctly. [13]

It is actually one of the necessary preconditions for a right life after death that people increasingly acquire certain ideas about life after death here before death, because only if they remember these ideas that they have acquired here can they orient themselves in the time between death and a new birth. It is factually incorrect to claim that one can wait until death with such ideas, because this body-free life would become a dark one for them, an unoriented one. [14]

We awaken too strongly after death, immediately after death, and we must first reduce this too strong awakening, dampen it down to the degree that corresponds to the abilities we have prepared for ourselves through the experiences we have gone through in the various incarnations on earth. So it is a struggle to assert ourselves in the consciousness that is breaking in on us from all sides. And now comes something in which we all, both after death and if we want to enter initiation properly, must first recover, so to speak, from the habits of physical-sensual life. Here in the sensory world it is so obvious to us to say: We must seek unity everywhere, we must seek unity out of multiplicity, out of diversity. - But this is something that only has meaning for the sensory-physical world. For when we pass through the gate of death, we do not have multiplicity, but that which comes before our soul as an overflowing consciousness: when we have passed through the gate of death, we have nothing but unity around us, unity again and again. The important thing then is to find the multiplicity, the diversity correctly. We must strive for nothing other than to come out of unity and into multiplicity. Now I would like to give you a really accurate idea of how to enter multiplicity from unity. Suppose you pass through the gate of death and enter this world of flooding spiritual wisdom. It is this world that we first enter, which at first stuns us when we wake up in it. We want to characterize this world in such a way that we have the light flooding around us as a unity filling the world; this is how it appears to us. We do not even distinguish ourselves in it. So much is this a unity that we do not even distinguish ourselves in it, that we ourselves do not have this distinction between ourselves and the world; but we belong fully to the world. Everything is a unity. But now let us answer a question - and I ask you to think about this answer I am going to give, not just a little, but quite a lot - now let us answer a question, the question: What is it actually, the unity into which we are taken? Think of all the entities of the higher hierarchies, of which you are familiar with nine, or ten if we include the human being. There are a large number of beings in each hierarchy. They all think, it is not just the human being who thinks, the beings of all these higher hierarchies think. So think of this whole sum of beings into which we are taken when we have passed through the gate of death. They are all around us. Passing through the gate of death, we are taken into the whole fullness of spiritual beings. We do not perceive it at first, but we are in it. What first floods around us is precisely this unity. And what is this unity? It is the thoughts of all hierarchies blurring into one another. What all hierarchies think together, this world of thoughts of the hierarchies, undifferentiated, what one hierarch thinks, what the other hierarch thinks: it all blurs into a unity. We grow into these thoughts of the hierarchies. That is the thought-light being that floods around us. That is this unity. So we live in the thoughts of the hierarchies that flow together into a unity. We live within it. And what does our life after death continue to be about? It is that we gain a relationship to the individual beings, which we lift out of the sea of thoughts in which the thoughts of all hierarchies flow together, and gain a relationship to the individual beings, to the multiplicity. After death we must not only gain a relationship to the unity of the flowing thought-beings of the hierarchies, for that is given to us; but we must work our way through in such a way that we gain a relationship to the individual entities of the hierarchies. How do we achieve this? First of all, we are flooded by this sea of thoughts of the hierarchies that swim and flow together. Through that which we have now acquired in the physical body, our own inner being remains at the gate of death, towards which we look, rising out of the sensual envelope. This gives us strength of will, emotional impulses of will, emotional impulses of will. We become inwardly aware of these when we look at the being that emerges from the body, the being that we are after death. This enables us to draw our rays of will, as it were. And if we now radiate such a ray of will, which we draw from the power of death, which is born with death, into the environment, then we extinguish something in the world of thoughts at a certain point. And if we execute it elsewhere, we extinguish something in another place; thus we extinguish something in a third, in a fourth place, in short, we extinguish the world of thoughts that floods around us in the most diverse places through our will impulse forces. And by extinguishing it, in the hollow spaces of the flooding sea of thoughts of the hierarchies, we are confronted - if I may say so - by the thought hierarchy, the being that lives within it, in the spiritual world. [15]

While here in the physical world we endeavor to find a thought for the thing we see, in the spiritual world, because thought is available to us in abundance, we have to eradicate the thought, get rid of it; then the beings confront us. We must become masters of the thought, then the beings will confront us. And this power to become master of the thought, to throw the thought out of our field of vision, so to speak, so that the being confronts us in the sea of the flooding world of thoughts, we receive this power through the fact that, as the glorious starting point of our spiritual life after death, we are confronted by the sight of dying, of death itself, which becomes our teacher in eradication. For after death, death becomes for us the teacher of extinguishing, the stimulator of those forces of will through which we must extinguish thoughts in the flooding sea of light. So what is it that we are actually doing? It is an activity through which we create space for the hierarchies to approach us. We create space for ourselves. Our being is then spread out over the whole world - we have already alluded to these things repeatedly. - We create space for ourselves by creating these hollow places, so that what is objective can appear to us post mortem, that is, after death. Nothing can ever appear to us objectively in the spiritual world if we carry our own being into the spiritual world. Only then can we recognize the other in the spiritual world if we extinguish our own being, our own essence, for the place where the other wants to appear, and that happens in this way.

This is, inwardly characterized, the process that is now also necessary if one wants to approach the dead in the way that I described to you yesterday at the end of the lecture, where the need was present to gain the possibility of letting the dead speak for themselves, to let the dead speak for themselves. Then one must try to get rid of oneself where the dead person is, to get rid of one's own thinking and feeling, and once this has been done away with, the impulses emerge from the depths of being which, without our will, put the words into our mouths which must then come if we want to express the objective being of a person who is not embodied in the physical body. [16]

So here too, human life is structured in its course between birth and death, not just in its physical structure. Life between death and rebirth is likewise regulated. [17] Here on earth we accomplish what we do in such a way that it detaches itself from us, that it ceases to belong to us when we have done it. In the existence between death and a new birth it is different. In this existence everything that man accomplishes there returns to him in a certain sense. [18] From this spiritual world, the (dead) person begins to build up his spiritual organs with what he has learned in his last life, with what he has experienced. Bit by bit he now builds up his spiritual organism with the experiences he had in his last life. And in addition to many other things in the spiritual world, he is busy creating a kind of archetype, a spiritual model for his spiritual organs. 68(14.3.1909)15

Just as our world is now by day: mountains and rivers, trees, animals, minerals, just as this world is now around us and we live in this world, so we are then (after death) in our world, and this world is our organism. These are our individual organs. And our world is ourselves. We look at ourselves from the environment. This begins immediately after death in the etheric body. There we have the tableau of life before us. If man did not establish relationships here with other beings, above all with other human beings, and, as is now happening more and more through spiritual science, with the beings of the higher hierarchies, he would have nothing to do between death and rebirth but to look at himself continually. But what expands this self of ours into a wider world are the relationships we have established here on earth. Earthly life is there for us to develop relationships and connections that will continue beyond death. For everything that makes us a sociable being in the spiritual world must be established here. In the spiritual world, man experiences the fear of loneliness as torment. And in a certain sense this fear can always afflict us again, for between death and a new birth we go through different stages, as it were, within which, even if we have acquired a certain sociability for the previous state, we can again fall into loneliness in the next state.

The next time after death is indeed such that we can actually only have good relationships with those who have remained here on earth or who have died at a time not far from our time of death. The very closest relationships have an effect beyond death. [19] In the case of many people in the present, you can see how they live with those who died immediately, those who died ten years before or after. We then see how many live together with a number of ancestors with whom they were related by blood. This is a sight that often presents itself to the seer. Ancestors who have been dead for centuries are connected to the deceased. [20]

Now the desire for the body lives in the ego and astral body throughout life, (therefore) the soul always wants to wake up into the body after death. It must first break itself of this habit. This weaning takes a third of the whole (former lifetime). One third of life is taken up by sleep. On the first day after one has died, one wants to go back. One wants to carry out what was carried out on the last day of life; on the second day one wants to carry out what was carried out on the day before last, and so it goes on. So one has to give up the craving for this third of life. [21]

After death, the soul has a natural tendency to focus mainly on the destiny of its own etheric body. The transformations that the etheric body undergoes in the elemental world are, so to speak, the environment, the outer world of the soul throughout the entire Kamaloka period. During this time we see how the elemental world absorbs our etheric body. If one has been a good fellow here on the physical plane, one sees how "goodness" is compatible with the laws of the elemental world. If one has been a bad fellow, one sees how little one's own etheric body, which has taken part in the "badness", is compatible with the laws of the elementary world, how this etheric body, which one has indeed discarded, but on which one directs one's whole attention, is rejected everywhere. The Kamaloka experiences consist in seeing what one has been in the transforming destiny of the etheric body. Aristotle and others have taught that this looking back on one's own destiny lasts an eternity. The truth is that this review of the etheric body and its destiny, which one has brought about through what one has been, lasts one or two or three decades. The environment in the elemental world is formed by the transformations of mainly those entities which are similar to the human being's own etheric body, mainly the etheric body of the human being itself. If you want to describe this vividly, the result is quite the same as what I have described as the passage of the soul through the soul world. If one wants to describe the spiritual worlds properly at all, one must not hold the concepts rigidly in such a pedantic way as can be useful for the physical, but one must be clear that the whole environment during the Kamaloka time depends on the mood of the soul, that what one must describe as the elementary world is modified to the soul world (all worlds or planes are in each other) by the fact that one sees mainly dissolving etherity in this elementary world. [22]

Then comes the time when something occurs, as it were, between death and a new birth, which to a certain extent has to be artificially brought about by clairvoyant consciousness. The human being thus lives in his astral body after he has shed his etheric body, but the time also begins when this astral body detaches itself from the true ego, in which one then continues to live. This astral body detaches itself on all sides, becomes larger and larger and integrates itself into the whole sphere. It becomes thinner and thinner, but is absorbed, as it were, by the whole environment. So you see your own astral body moving away. With this astral body, that which is always present when one has passed through the gate of death, that which one can call one's being, the connection with what one has experienced on the physical earth within the physical body and the etheric body, is lost. One sees, as it were, one's own being disappearing into the spiritual world. This is similar to what one must seek artificially to discover one's true self in the spiritual world. This shattering, significant impression, which one can have when walking on the path of clairvoyant consciousness, occurs naturally (after death), and a true forgetting occurs all the sooner, the less the soul proves to be strengthened and fortified after death. Selfless, non-egoistic souls, who are often scolded as weak in sensual life, are precisely the strong souls after death; they can look back for a long time on what has driven them from physical existence into the spiritual world according to memory. The so-called strong-egoists are the weaklings of the spiritual world. Their own astrality very soon disappears when it gradually dissolves like a sphere outside in the spiritual world.

And then the moment really comes when everything you can remember disappears. Then it comes back again, but now in a different way. Everything that has disappeared is brought back to you; it gathers again, but in such a way that it shows how it must become as a result of what has gone away, so that the right new life can build itself up according to karma in the sense of the old earth lives. There again from infinity that which must arise in our consciousness moves in towards a central point so that we can build the new life according to karma. A kind of forgetting, a mere experiencing of oneself in the true self is present approximately in the middle between death and a new birth. Most human souls today are still only prepared in such a way that they experience this forgetting as if in a kind of spiritual sleep of the soul. But those who are prepared for it experience precisely in this moment of forgetting, of the transition from the memory of the previous earth lives to the preparation of the coming ones, that which is called the midnight of the world in (the mystery drama) "The Awakening of Souls". [23]

The more man leaves his spiritual-soul in unconsciousness, the more miserable is his fate between death and a new birth. That the body withers has nothing to do with life after death; but if man has developed nothing of the spiritual-soul, then he has nothing to carry into the spiritual world. The more he has engaged in permeating himself with spiritual content, the better off he will be after death. [24]

It is man's bliss after death to have the certainty of the Christ impulse in the sight of his etheric body. It is man's unhappiness after death to notice in the etheric body only that which must, so to speak, succumb to earthly death. For the person who, through his Western culture, has a clear I-consciousness, it means something quite unhappy to look at his etheric body and see there only the forces that are destructive for earthly development, but not to be able to see that the Christ impulse is there as a substance. It is as if one had to live continually under the impression of an earthquake or a volcanic eruption after death, if one cannot see the young germinal forces of the Christ impulse in the etheric body. The part of the blood of the Christ-Jesus that flowed from the wounds on Golgotha to the earth became etherized, was really absorbed by the etheric forces of the earth, so that it became etheric substance. And this etheric substance shines, brightens, flickers in the etheric body and - one feels it so after death - shows itself in such a way that man knows: There is freshly germinating life, which leads man viably towards the future. [25]

The soul (of the living) is already in the main that which connects from the pre-natal existence with the physical, descends into the physical. But the spiritual in the present human being - in the human being of a more distant future it will be different - is actually only present in terms of its disposition. [26] When the human being dies and lives into the spiritual world again, these three limbs develop very clearly, as it were foreshadowing a future human existence (see: Manas, Buddhi, Atma). Thus, just as man develops spiritually and mentally in his present life between birth and death, so he also has a clear development after death, only that he is then attached, as it were by an umbilical cord, to the spiritual entities of the higher hierarchies. [27]

Even more varied than the external experiences (i.e. the experiences of the living) are the experiences between death and a new birth. At the time of the Egyptian period, the soul experienced something quite different from the Greek world, from the time of Charlemagne and from our own time. In the other, in the spiritual world, a development also takes place, and what man experiences today between death and a new birth is something quite different from what the ancient Egyptians experienced. [28]

The stay in the spiritual world, in devachan, is necessary in order to make the organization of the etheric body possible again and again. The small piece of the etheric body (the piece of the etheric body transformed by the human being), which the human being initially carries into Devachan, can grow into a complete etheric body by creating the conditions for this in Devachan. As the human being develops further, he stays longer and longer in the devachan, then the duration of his stay there increases. The time he spends there thus grows in proportion to his own education. However, more advanced people are sometimes reincarnated earlier for other reasons, for example because they are needed in the world. [29]

Here in his physical life on earth man has an organization which represses the spiritual consequences of his moral conduct into his soul and does not allow them to emerge in an earthly life. In this earthly life man is powerless to realize that which he carries morally in his soul; his outer-physical corporeality, his etheric substantiality makes him powerless. We must wait until we receive the help of the beings of the higher hierarchies in the life between death and rebirth. [30] After death we are not always in a position to see what powers we have to acquire in order to make up for wrongs committed. And there are many forces involved, so that it can happen that we believe we can make up for what we committed out of egoism in the life before death with even greater egoism, and what we did as foolishness we want to make up for with even greater foolishness. Thus it can happen that the following earthly embodiment presents itself as an even more imperfect one, as an even harsher training than the last one was. On the whole, however, man's passage through repeated earth lives is an ascent. It is quite possible that man, when he looks back on past earth lives, may be mistaken about the way in which something can be balanced out, and that apparent or real descents may occur as a result. But on the whole, deep "falls" of man are often followed by strong ascents. [31]

So when we go through life here on earth, we experience a great deal every day, and all these experiences appear before the soul's eye in the life tableau described earlier, directly after death; but the abilities that we have acquired from these experiences remain with us as essence, and this essence, which remains with us for all subsequent times, we then take with us into the spiritual world. When man now enters this devachan, he perceives the (different) realms: the continental realm, which consists of the archetypes of all earthly forms; the marine realm, which consists of all life; the aerial realm, which consists of all souls, pleasure, suffering, joy, pain and so on. From the continental realm man first perceives the archetype of his own physical body, and from the aerial realm he first perceives what has taken place in his own soul in the past life in terms of joy, suffering, pleasure, pain and passions. This means that he again perceives all the experiences of the previous life, but now in a completely different way to the passage through the Kamaloka period described earlier. Then it was an inner experience for the human being for the purpose of weaning. Now, however, all these experiences are spread out before his soul as an outer world for a long, long time. There he experiences the peculiarity of his bodily life in the flow area of the Devachan, and he experiences all soul experiences as in the air area of the heavenly world. It is important and of great interest to realize how everything one has experienced in the course of a lifetime - sensations about the world, pleasure, pain and so on - is present in the spiritual world as an external world. It is not sad that the pain spreads around us there. It is not sad at all, because all suffering is there around us like thunderstorms here in the physical world, and all joyful experiences are there like wonderful cloud phenomena. It is around us as if it were in images, sounds or atmospheric phenomena; it is objectified as a heavenly entity. [32] Just as here on earth man is constantly under the influence of the outer atmosphere, so also in Devachan, and there the atmosphere is formed from all soul life, our own and that of our fellow human beings. All this soul life has a constant effect on the human being and this is precisely where the talents are formed, so that they attract the soul-related astral forces of their surroundings and allow them to have an effect on them. What we are now able to do, we have hatched in the Devachan. And the feeling in this whole interim period of devachanic life is accordingly. The feeling that clings to that generation is bliss. Here (in physical life) we often feel pain, but in devachan even pain is bliss, because there we realize that through pain we acquire wisdom. From the pains of the previous life, man does indeed produce talents and wisdom for the next life on earth through his experiences in devachan. And the feeling of production is the feeling of infinite bliss. Thus we have seen that the one source of bliss in devachan is that all the bonds that are made here in life are experienced again there in devachan, and that even all these relationships are experienced in their spiritual part with tremendous intensification. And the other source of bliss is the production just described, this creation for the next life. [33]

This activity of producing is not only important for the individual human being himself, for his own future organization, but the human being has important things to create and to contribute to the progress of the whole further development of the earth. When man is born again, he experiences something quite different from his previous life. In the various lives on earth we participate in the development of the earth itself. And then there is the change brought about by the respective culture. Now we ask ourselves: Who changes the face of the earth? - In fact, it is the dead themselves, who live in the devachan, who themselves work on this transformation of the earth (in the good and bad sense) through the power they have there. However, there are leaders and higher beings who take the lead. And in this realm, which is in our midst, the dead are working to reshape the face of our earth. If you only know how to interpret the phenomena correctly, you can even tell how this work is done. People here breathe in the air; without air they could not breathe. Similarly with the dead, only that, as here the air works, there the light works. In the spread light the initiate sees the beings of the dead. For the seer, for example, the plants are surrounded by the spirits of the dead, and as the light transforms the plant and makes it grow, it is the spirits of the dead that accomplish this. [34] When we as seers visit the dead, we can find, if we do not merely perceive the light sensually, the dead people within the light. They have a "body" woven from light. The light that washes over the earth is material for the beings who live in the devachan. When man has reached the point where he has transformed the activities he carried out in his last life into spiritual powers, then he is ready to descend from Devachan to a new physical birth. Then the earth-circle attracts him again. [35]

Sources:

[1] GA 182: Death as a Transformation of Life (1917/1918)

[2] GA 101: Myths and Legends. Occult Signs and Symbols (1907)GA 119, page 12 (1962 edition, 279 pages)

[4] GA 174: Contemporary historical reflections. The Karma of Untruthfulness - Second Part (1917)

[5] GA 119: Macrocosm and Microcosm. The Great and the Small World. Questions of the soul, questions of life, questions of the spirit (1910)

[6], [30] GA 239: Esoteric Considerations of Karmic Connections - Fifth Volume (1924)

[7] GA 79: The Reality of the Higher Worlds. Introduction to Anthroposophy (1921)

[8], [13] GA 190: Past and Future Impulses in Social Events (1919)

[9], [10] GA 168: The connection between the living and the dead (1916)

[11], [14] GA 183: The Science of Human Development (1918)

[12], [19], [20], [24] GA 140: Occult investigations into life between death and new birth. The living interaction between the living and the dead (1912/1913)

[15], [16] GA 161: Paths of spiritual knowledge and the renewal of artistic worldviews (1915)

[17] GA 157a: Destiny formation and life after death (1915)

[18] GA 227: Initiation Knowledge. The Spiritual and Physical Development of the World and Humanity in the Past, Present and Future, from the Point of View of Anthroposophy (1923)

[21] GA 349: On the Life of Man and the Earth. On the Essence of Christianity (1923)

[22], [23] GA 147: The secrets of the threshold (1913)

[25] GA 148: From Akasha research. The Fifth Gospel (1913/1914)

[26], [27] GA 293: General Anthropology as the Basis of Pedagogy (1919)

[28] GA 106: Egyptian Myths and Mysteries in Relation to the Active Spiritual Forces of the Present (1908)

[29] GA 93a: Basic Elements of Esotericism (1905)

[31] GA 63: Spiritual Science as a Good of Life (1913/1914)

[32] - [34] GA 100: Human Development and Christ-Knowledge. Theosophy and Rosicrucianism – The Gospel of John (1907)

[35] GA 99: The Theosophy of the Rosicrucian (1907)

Structure of Man between death and a new birth

At death the human being leaves behind the physical body, then shortly after his etheric body and then finally over a longer period also the unworked part of the astral body.

Then continues the journey between death and a new birth as a spiritual being, see also Man's higher triad.

Man grows into connection through his own Individuality and 'guiding' angel, with the angel and archangel organism of the third hierarchy H3.

Causal body

• The causal body is a term used by Rudolf Steiner in early lectures in the period 1905-1907 (also the period of the theosophical society).
• It is the term for spirit-self or manas, a higher bodily principle or structure, see Man's bodily principles, part of Man's higher triad. After each incarnation, the part of the astral body that has been transformed by the human 'I' combines with the causal body; and what has not been so transformed falls away like a shade, a phantom; this is the astral corpse of the human being.
• The causal body can thus be regarded as the 'Book of Life' or 'Book of Lives' into which a new page is added with every fruitful incarnation. It influences the next life and can be seen as a repository of developed qualities, talents, faculties. (1907-05-26-GA099, see more lecture references below, such as 1906-08-25-GA095, and 1904-12-16-GA093)

When a person dies, he leaves behind his physical body, and the part of the physical body he has already transformed is lifted out—powers, not matter. It is very little indeed which he takes with him, but it is the element which will serve to shape the new physical body when the individual incarnates again. Materialism calls this the 'permanent atom'.'23 First of all the part of the physical body which the individual has transformed departs, the ether body departs, the conscious awareness body departs and the I. After some time the part of the ether on which the individual has not yet been working separates off. The human being then goes into kama-loka, the place of purification. After some time the part of the astral body on which the I has not yet been working also separates off.

A time comes when the human being only retains the parts of the three bodies which the I itself has worked through. This goes through the realm of the spirit. It is the core of man's eternal essence, which will grow all the more the I has been working on the bodies.

• The holy spirit is the eternal spirit in man.
• The Christ is the eternal part of the life body,
• the father the eternal aspect of the physical body.

These three go with the human being through all time, being the part of him that is eternal. [1907-03-17-GA097]

When people die today, the ether body separates from the physical body together with the astral body and the I. The ether body still stays with the higher members for a time, and during this first period after leaving the physical body a person's whole last life lies spread before him like a vast tableau. This is because the ether body supports not only the vital functions but also memory. In life it was limited by the physical brain and unable to function fully. As soon as the physical barriers have gone, the complete memory spreads before the human soul. This continues until the ether body separates from the astral body and I after a few days. It is only the ether substance which separates, however. The memory picture is taken along. The individual keeps this essence of the ether body, and the sum of such essences from all lives on earth is the causal body. [1906-02-03-GA097 - Q&A]

After the lapse of the time during which the etheric body together with the astral body is emerging from the physical body after death, there comes the moment when the astral body, with the higher members, leaves the etheric body. The latter separates off and the memory-tableau fades away; but something of it remains; it is not wholly lost. What may be called ether- or life-substance dissipates in the cosmic ether, but a kind of essence remains and this can never be lost to the human being through his further journeyings. He bears this with him into all his future incarnations as a kind of extract from the life-tableau, even though he has no remembrance of it. Out of this extract is formed what is called, with concrete reality, the "Causal Body." After every incarnation a new page is added to the Book of Life. This augments the life-essence and, if the past lives were fruitful, causes the next life to develop in the proper way. This is what causes a life to be rich or poor in talents, qualities and the like. [1907-05-26-GA099]

Sources:

https://anthroposophy.eu/Structure_of_Man_between_death_and_a_new_birth#Causal_body

30
Spirits of Darkness

The processes of destruction in our body take place precisely during the day, during the influence of the light; but the light was not yet present during the old Saturnian existence. So Saturn's activity was a constructive one. But now this constructive activity had to be maintained at least for a certain time, even when later, during the old solar existence, the light was added. This could only be achieved by the fact that Saturn beings remained behind to do the building up. It was necessary that the Saturnian beings were held back for our sleeping time so that, when there was no light, they would take care of the construction of the destroyed physical body. Thus the remaining Saturnian beings must be interwoven into our existence. Without them we would only be destroyed. We must have an alternating state, an interaction of solar beings and Saturnian beings, of light beings and darkness beings. So if the activity of the beings of light were to be directed in the right way by the Elohim, then they would have to literally interweave the work of the dark beings, the beings of darkness, into their work.

In cosmic activity there is no possibility of continuance unless the dark power is woven into the light power everywhere. The Elohim had to weave together the entire work of the universe from the properly advanced and the retarded Archai. And, it is therefore said (in Genesis) with a wonderfully realistic description of the facts: And the Elohim, they called that which wove as spirits in the light, yom (Hebrew day); but that which wove in the darkness, that they called laj'lah. - And this is not our abstract night, these are the Saturnian archai, those who are still active in us today during our night sleep, working on our physical and etheric bodies as constructive forces. This mysterious expression, lai'lah, has given rise to all sorts of mythological images (see: Lilith). We see existence interwoven from spirits of form and personality, from advanced and retarded entities of these two stages. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 122: The Secrets of the Biblical History of Creation. The Six-Day Work in the 1st Book of Moses (1910)

See: Michael - Battle in the astral world and Ahriman and the spirits of darkness

31
Suffering

Suffering is a side effect of higher development. It is what one cannot do without in order to gain knowledge. One day a person will say to himself: I am grateful for the joy the world gives me. But if I am faced with the choice of whether I want to keep my joys or my sufferings, I will want to keep the sufferings; I cannot do without them for knowledge. After a certain time, every suffering presents itself in such a way that it cannot be dispensed with, for we have to understand it as something contained in development. There is no development without suffering. By overcoming egoity, man overcomes the mood of being oppressed and paralyzed. In this phenomenon one can see something that is good: strength from inadequacy. Thank God that I am encouraged by an inadequate deed, i.e. its failure, to continue acting! Human striving is not an indefinite lot of happiness. Only those whose free will turns away from the destiny of the human being remain unredeemed. Suffering is a factor in the synthesis of the world process. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 110: Spiritual Hierarchies and their Reflection in the Physical World. Zodiac, Planets, Cosmos (1909)

Many people deplore pain and suffering, but from a higher point of view this is quite unjustified, for if they are overcome and the person is ready for a new incarnation, suffering and pain are the sources of wisdom, prudence and comprehensiveness of vision.

Illnesses calmly borne often appear in the next life as great physical beauty; great physical beauty in a human being is acquired at the cost of illnesses in the preceding life. Such is the connection between impairment of the body through illness, particularly also through external circumstances, and beauty.

GA 99, The Law of Destiny, May 30, 1907

The Origin of Suffering

If the living could not suffer, never could consciousness arise.

When one observes the higher animals they show to those who look more deeply an expression full of suffering. And who would not admit that many an animal physiognomy looks like the manifestation of a deeply hidden pain?

At the beginning of the Biblical story of Creation the knowledge of good and evil and suffering are intimately bound up with one another.

The figure of Job shows us, or is meant to show us, how suffering and unspeakable pain can be connected with a completely guiltless life, how there can be unearned pain and suffering. We see dawning in the consciousness of this unique tragic personality, Job, yet another connection of pain and suffering, a connection with the ennobling of man. Suffering appears to us then as a testing, as the root of a climbing upwards, of a higher development. Suffering in the sense of this Job-tragedy need in no way have its origin in evil, it can itself be first cause, so that what proceeds from it represents a more perfect phase of human life.

When we look up to the Event which divides our chronology into two parts — to the Redemption through Christ Jesus —,then it can strike us that one of the greatest upliftings, one of the greatest upbuildings and hopes of victory which has ever taken root in the heart of man has sprung from the world historic sight of suffering. The greatly significant feelings, cutting deep into the human heart, of the Christian world-conception, these feelings which for so many are the hope and strength of life, give the assurance that there is an eternity, a victory over death. All these supporting and uplifting feelings spring from the sight of a universal suffering, a suffering that befalls innocence, a suffering occasioned through no personal sin.

One understands the life of another through nothing so much as by taking upon one's own soul the burden of his pain.

When do you feel certain interior organs of your organism? You go through life and do not feel your stomach or liver or lungs. You feel none of your organs as long as they are sound. You feel them only when they give you pain, and you really know that you have this or that organ only when it hurts you, when you feel that something is out of order there and that a destruction-process is beginning.

Take something that expresses suffering on a lower level, the feeling of hunger, for instance, which can destroy life. You meet this with nourishment, and the food taken in becomes enjoyment because it is the means of enhancing, producing life. So you see that higher creation, pleasure, arises on the basis of pain.

Pain makes us aware that we have to take precautions against the destruction of life. Out of pain we create new life. In the notes of a modern natural scientist on the expression of the thinker, we read that on the countenance of the thinker something lies like a repressed pain.

Fabre d'Olivet, made a right comparison when he wished to show how the highest, noblest, purest in human nature arises out of pain. He said that the arising of wisdom and beauty out of suffering is comparable to a process in nature, to the birth of the valuable and beautiful pearl. For the pearl is born from the sickness of the oyster, from the destruction inside the pearl-oyster. As the beauty of the pearl is born out of disease and suffering, so are knowledge, noble human nature and purified human feeling born out of suffering and pain.

Sources:

GA 55 – Origen of Suffering, Origin of Evil, Illness and Death – I. The Origin of Suffering – Berlin, 8 November 1906

32
(Life) Tableau

The whole of life is inscribed in the etheric body; it is the carrier of memory and is only prevented from showing it by the physical body. But it shows it immediately when it is freed for a moment from the physical body, this memory of the past life. [1] (14.3.1909)

We are used to standing here on the physical plane as human beings in a kind of center of our world horizon and seeing the world around us, which makes an impression on our senses. We look out over the horizon, which can make an impression on us. We do not look into ourselves in this normal life on the physical plane, but we look out of ourselves. Now it is important that, if we want to acquire a concept of the life immediately following death, we should immediately become aware that this view of the panorama of life is immediately different from that which we are accustomed to perceiving on the physical plane. On the physical plane we see out of ourselves; we see the world as our surroundings. There we are, we look out of ourselves, we do not look into ourselves. Immediately after death we have a few days in which our field of vision is filled with what we have experienced between birth and death. There we look from the circumference to the center.

We look at our own life, at the temporal course of our own life. Whereas otherwise we say: Here we are, and here is everything else, immediately after death we have consciousness: This difference between us and the world does not exist, but we look from the periphery to our life, and that is our world for these few days. Just as in ordinary perception we see mountains, houses, rivers, trees and so on on the physical plane, so we see what we have lived through in life from a certain personal point of view as our immediate world. And the fact that one sees this provides the starting point for the preservation of the ego through the whole life between death and new birth. This strengthens and invigorates the soul so that it always knows between death and new birth: I am an I! [2]

Sources:

[1] GA 68: ??(Public lectures in various cities). ?? (0)

[2] GA 157a: Formation of destiny and life after death (1915)

Life tableau - beginning of the perception of fragments of it

If one stands with one's experience in the present moment or in the present day, one cannot at all approach that in the soul which belongs to the eternal. What the spiritual researcher first notices, if he really strengthens his soul so that it can perceive independently of the body, is that man in his ordinary everyday life is immensely dependent on a certain widespread presence. As strange and paradoxical as it may sound, man sleeps through the soul, the actual eternal in human nature, through the experience that the present offers him through his senses and through his ordinary will. Man sleeps through his soul. Sleep extends thoroughly into daily life. He who develops the gift of self-observation - it must first be developed, it is not readily available in ordinary consciousness - realizes that he cannot bring into the soul what he has experienced today, what he also experienced yesterday, in such a way that he is able to comprehend it in the light of the eternal.

Our physical body always plays a part in what we are currently experiencing. Only when, as the inner experience of self-observation shows, we are two or three days beyond some experience, when an experience, an observation, something that we have gone through in ordinary daily life, has been over for two or three days, only then has it come to such a state in the soul that one recognizes it in its actual soul nature. Before that, before two or three days have passed, that which we grasp in the soul is still so permeated in our experience by the impulses of the senses, by the impulses coming from the inner body, that we are incapable of separating out some things, incapable of grasping any experience as it lives in the soul, and only in the soul as soul. As a rule, we must therefore refrain from examining the spiritual content of what we experience in the present. But the peculiar thing turns out to be that when everything physical, everything that resonates from the senses, everything that still works from within the body in the bodily sensations, when that is gone and the thing is only a memory - of course we can remember some experience in an indeterminate way - when the thing is only a memory, then we can no longer recall the actual active part that the soul took in the experience so directly. We can remember the experience, but we cannot have this experience before us in the same way as we process a present experience. But without being able to do this, without being able to live into something that has detached itself from us for two or three days in such a way that we experience it as vividly as a present event, without this we cannot approach the spiritual, the eternal at all. However, one is very much mistaken if one believes that something that lies two to three or more days or years in the past and is remembered could be experienced in the same way as a present event.

It is not only that it is blunted, but above all that immediate inner activity which the soul develops in a present event, which it cannot develop when it is confronted with a past event. The soul sleeps through its own activity in relation to the past experience. The past experience comes up as an image. [1] Therefore the spiritual researcher will be compelled to carry out what are called exercises of thought and feeling. Through these exercises of thought and feeling, for example, by concentrating on thoughts much longer than one normally does in ordinary experience, one is able to experience the inner soul at the very beginning, earlier than people normally experience it. And then, as I said, if we consider the shortest period of time - after two to three days this can be the case - we find ourselves in the position of really looking back over these two to three days through ordinary memory. So let us understand ourselves well: after some time the spiritual researcher comes to look at what the last two or three days have brought him in terms of experiences, as if in a tableau. That is necessary. It is necessary to really make present what one has experienced over the last two or three days. Admittedly, if one has become accustomed to living in the soul, the memories of these two to three days can run as if in an instant, so that one has a picture of these two to three days before one. But in these two to three days it is not the case that one has the soul before one, detached from the bodily, but that one has the soul before one for what one remembers from these two to three days, but infected everywhere, influenced everywhere by the bodily experience. It is only like a memory spread out over these two or three days and acting quickly. Of course, this can be sought for experiences further back in time; but then one is faced with the significant necessity of really looking through everything that has happened up to this experience, perhaps years ago, in terms of memory as in a tableau. [2]

One knows by grasping this soul: That which is seized with the quality of duration is that which grasps this duration in itself in such a way that man carries it through death. That is what is eternal in man's nature. And now we know why this eternal eludes the ordinary everyday consciousness, because this everyday consciousness only develops with the help of the body, because that which does not develop with the help of the body is only experienced by this ordinary everyday consciousness in the same way as deep sleep is experienced. One can say that something like this is the first stage of the life of the soul, which already gives something directly, not merely conceptually, but there is a direct perception of the soul. One has that before the seeing consciousness which passes through the gate of death. And by having this, one knows that the human being, by living directly within a soul, is not dependent on the present with this soul; one knows that this soul has duration through itself and that it calls forth that which the human being now co-experiences. Now when the spiritual researcher describes to you what happens at death, he does not describe it out of fantasy, but by continuing what I have just explained. He knows that the soul, by freeing itself from the body, needs two to three days of retrospection before it enters into itself, into its own essence. He thus gets to know in his own soul what the soul experiences when it passes through the gate of death. He learns to recognize how this soul, as it passes through the gate of death, still has a two to three day review, a life tableau; how this review then descends; how the soul then, two to three days after death, after it has become completely free from the bodily experience, when it enters the actual soul realm, lives in the same element in which the spiritual researcher lives in the two to three days when he carries out that inner experiment of which I have spoken to you. The spiritual researcher himself, strange as it may sound, does not gain anything from what he achieves through his exercises, from what the actual spiritual research gives him, from this looking into the spiritual world, he does not gain anything from it for his eternal, but only through the fact that he is able to transform what he thus sees as soul-spiritual into the usual practicable concepts of common sense. Common sense can understand what the spiritual researcher has to say when he transforms what he sees in the spiritual world into concepts, into ideas. [3]

Sources:

[1] - [3] GA 72: Freedom - Immortality - Social Life. On the connection between the soul-spiritual and the body of man (1917-1918)

Life tableau as proof of success for mind training

When initiation approaches, one applies the rules of meditation, concentration or other training of the soul to oneself, usually under guidance or free learning according to literary instructions. And by meditatively immersing oneself again and again in a thought content, one first acquires the ability to look back into one's earthly life. One's earthly life is placed before the soul as if in a uniform tableau. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 243: The Initiate-Consciousness. The True and False Paths of Spiritual Research (1924)

Life tableau achieved through meditation

The ability to remember preserves for the time of our life between birth and death that which we experience in this existence. What we experience in the moment gains duration through the ability to remember. This is where one of the methodical endeavors of spiritual science comes in, in that it takes up, so to speak, that power of the soul which leads to memory, but now develops this power of the soul differently than it develops by itself, as it were, when the soul is left to itself. That which spiritual research applies there is what I call meditation in my writings - an intimate process of the human soul. But one must make oneself familiar with the fact that the paths into the supersensible worlds are intimate paths of the soul. He who believes in the Schrenck-Notzing way (mediumistic materialization experiments) that one can see the supersensible by imitating the external scientific method of experimentation (in parapsychology), who believes that one can see the supersensible in the sensible as the sensible, can of course find no taste for the spiritual science meant here, for this spiritual science must assume from the outset that it is an absurdity to want to bring the supersensible into the sensible, that it is an absurdity to want to make the supersensible sensible.

It cannot be a question of using the usual scientific method of experimentation to experiment with spirits in the same way as one experiments with substances and forces in the laboratory, but it can only be a question of moving towards the supersensible in intimate paths of the soul. Meditation is such an intimate path of the soul. Whereas otherwise one only thinks a thought as long as one's own perception lasts or as long as it is lifted up into the present life of the soul through our inner organization in memory, while one thus to a certain extent surrenders oneself to the involuntary in the ordinary course of thought, in meditation something thoughtful is placed into the soul through volition, through a real unfolding of the will, and one then dwells on this thoughtfulness. One holds on to this thought in the soul. What I mean here cannot be experienced quickly; it requires years of practice in such retention of thought if one wants to achieve something. It must be emphasized, however, that those methods which are recommended solely by anthroposophy in this direction keep the soul's processes within a certain sphere.

And one must actually be well prepared for this sphere before one can develop any useful methods in the humanities, and that in which one must be well prepared can be achieved precisely through conscientious training within modern scientific research. Firstly, one learns to stick to the objective, not to interfere with the objective with arbitrary sympathies and antipathies. But one also learns to adhere to the pure intellectual context, to a certain logical sequence of thoughts, in that these thoughts simultaneously follow external observations. What one can gain from this ability to follow a thought logically must be preparation, for nothing must be brought up from the subconscious or unconscious, but the whole process must proceed as consciously and arbitrarily as anything arbitrary that one accomplishes by experimentation in the laboratory. [1]

When one has made up one's mind to think in this way, that is, when one can dwell purely in the element of thinking, then one can place such thoughts before oneself in order now - without the aid of memory, without the aid of external observation, without anything involuntary - to hold on to these thoughts through inner arbitrariness. What does one then do when one continues such exercises further and further? Then one continues within the soul-spiritual that process which one has allowed to proceed involuntarily within oneself by developing the ability to remember. The child grows up, and as it grows physically, it develops the ability to remember at the same time. The spiritual researcher, to a certain extent, reproduces this permanentization of the imagination in the pure soul by retaining such thought elements. In this way he continues this process in reality, this process which has, so to speak, developed into the ability to remember. And by continuing this process more and more, one comes to feel inwardly how something stirs that was not there before. One grasps inwardly, in inner activity, the spiritual-soul, and the result is that the ordinary ability to remember develops into a special power, the development of which I will now describe.

There comes a time for the spiritual researcher when something quite different is added to the ordinary memory through such exercises, something is added which then no longer requires memory, in relation to which memory is basically no longer possible. By thus grasping oneself inwardly, there is added that from a certain point in one's life to the point in time to which one otherwise remembers back, one has before one like a whole running in pictures. The life tableau stands before the spiritual researcher as if the flow of time were, as it were, running simultaneously. That from which the ideas of memory have emerged like, I would like to say, individual waves from a sea surface, stands there like a closed current. As a result, however, one's ego is outside the entity that one otherwise is. Consider what significant things are actually happening in the human soul. The human soul is otherwise this being from which the memories emerge. Now the consciousness remains completely intact, but one's own entity appears objectively, appears separate from one. At first one surveys that which pervades us as a continuing entity from birth to death. But the one who now really wants to devote himself completely to spiritual research must continue on this path, which I have now described here as meditation. Above all, he must now develop another ability, which is already inherent in the soul, he must develop the ability to love, to love the world and the beings of the world, in order to progress. [2]

We can say that love is increased development of attention. What is the beginning of love? It lies in the fact that, as the world passes me by, I turn my special attention to one object. I single out one object; I concentrate on this one object. By concentrating, as it were, on one object, I allow my soul to flow over into the essence of this object, so that selfishness recedes. By becoming absorbed in the other entity, love then follows from attention. This love must be elevated from a quality of ordinary everyday life to a real quality of knowledge. This can happen by increasing the ability to concentrate even more, by becoming more and more aware of the will, just as one has previously brought duration into the life of imagination. Before, one used the will in meditation, now one does not merely look at the fact that one meditates arbitrarily, but now one watches oneself how one develops this will. One looks at the will in particular. One sees how this will concentrates on this or that which one has brought into consciousness. And by increasing this inner activity of the soul - again, it is an intimate, inner activity of the soul - one now arrives at a new inner experience. This is achieved by bringing to consciousness that which is otherwise submerged in the twilight of the unconscious or subconscious, namely the relationship between waking and sleeping. This undifferentiated, at first still quite unorganized spirit-soul - which in ordinary life is only organized by the fact that it is in the body and receives its forms, its inner forces, from the body - this spirit-soul is organized inwardly through that enlightenment which I have described, through this own human activity, through meditation and concentration, in a way that otherwise only the body is organized. Just as the body can see with its senses within the sensory world in which it is, so the spiritual-soul, when it has organized itself through inner strength, will come to be able to consciously leave the body in the same way as it otherwise unconsciously leaves it when falling asleep; it will come to be able to consciously put itself back into the body again, as it only puts itself back when waking up. And now you get an idea of where you actually are between falling asleep and waking up, because you have awakened the soul to inner activity, you get an idea of this soul. Now, however, you are confronted in a different way with what previously appeared to you like a pictorial panorama of life since birth.

By developing the spiritual-soul life through meditation, one first gets a retrospective view of life since birth, but one is not yet familiar with the retrospective view. It has become objective, but you are not yet consciously confronted with it. If one concentrates on the work of the will, as I have described, one becomes so capable that one can now hold outside the body that which can otherwise only be outside the body in sleep. Then one sees a process in its true reality, which one cannot otherwise see, because the powers through which one can see it are not yet developed. Then one sees the process of the incorporation of the spiritual-soul into the physical body and the other process of the rejection of the spiritual-soul from the physical body. If one comes to understand, to consciously understand what falling asleep and waking up means, then with this knowledge one also comes to see and understand what being born and dying means. For just as the spiritual-soul, which begins to unfold in the morning, is not reborn when we wake up, neither does it perish when we fall asleep. [3] If one learns to recognize in inner activity that which really underlies the human being, then one learns to recognize it as that which rises above birth and death. Then one learns to recognize it as that which connects itself with the physical body through birth or conception, by organizing it at the same time and connecting itself with it in the same way as otherwise - though now not reorganizing, but only partially, I would like to say improving the organization - the spiritual-mental enters the physical body on waking to an existence which in turn continues in the morning with its experiences. This shows you how spiritual science actually understands the real further development of the cognitive faculty. It is not a question of our standing still and continuing only logically or experimentally, at most becoming more skillful, but of our really, as it is with the growth of the body itself, bringing our spiritual-soul to grow, to unfold itself anew, so that it grows into the supersensible world and experiences the eternal.

By experiencing this supersensible, by surveying life as one would otherwise survey a day, and recognizing what precedes this life and follows this life, one comes more and more to it - especially if one now still tries to drive the last remnant of egoistic feeling out of the concentration; one can drive the concentration so far that one is completely absorbed, but retains the strength to withdraw again and again; the consciousness must not be lost - one comes more and more to the fact that one is completely absorbed in that on which one concentrates. Then one also gets to know the human being according to his essence in that state in which he is outside the body. One only becomes clear about what this bodily organization actually is for the human being when one gets to know the significance of the outer, bodily organization for the spiritual-soul. Only then does one learn to recognize that in order to be able to form ideas in the ordinary world, man must return to his body. But he takes the power of thinking, he takes the power of the faculty of ideas with him into the spiritual-soul, and by developing a new imagination for a higher, super-sensible consciousness, he takes only a part, I say, only a part of feeling and volition with him from what is in his body; he does not take the ordinary imagination with him.

He must develop a completely new conception of existence outside the body. But from his ordinary existence, which fills him between birth and death, he takes a part of the feeling with him. And the volition in its true form, this volition, is something extraordinarily dark, something that can be experienced as if asleep. It becomes light when the human being rises to see in the appropriate way, but at the same time it is recognized that it is connected with the eternal. And if one brings it to this, through a loving concentration, now also to take away this last remainder of the egoistic individual feeling - that is, to take away that which still holds one to the body - and so, as one has developed a new conception in the purely spiritual-soul, now also to develop a pure feeling outside the body, one still remains the will as it is in the body. One learns to know volition as a desire, as a faculty of desire, as a power of desire. But now, outside the body, it looks like a force of desire, through which what is desired? What is desired is existence in the body itself. So now one learns to recognize the power through which one actually penetrates from a prenatal life into this life in the body. One gets to know this life between death and birth; one gets to know the eternal in it. One learns to know the desire to live a life again, and one learns to know the will that one has discovered as that which has brought one from the human life of the past, which one has accomplished oneself, into this (present) life; one learns to know the will in its spiritual form. [4]

That which we develop here in life between birth and death as desire, through which we desire external things, is recognized through supersensible vision as a faint reflection of those desires which live in us and which carry us over from one life on earth into another. But that which is present in the spiritual researcher is not linked to the suppression of the ordinary consciousness. This ordinary consciousness remains fully preserved, it remains fully intact. Therefore, the spiritual researcher can think with this ordinary consciousness at any time, just as the one who fights him, if he wants to be scientific, thinks with this ordinary consciousness. [5]

Sources:

[1] - [5] GA 255b: Anthroposophy and its Opponents (1919-1921)

Life tableau after death

When we pass through the gates of death, our earthly existence is followed by days in which the images of the earthly life that has just passed appear as if in a powerful perspective. They are suddenly there. What passed many years ago is there at the same time as what passed a few days ago. Just as the spatial is side by side and only has a spatial perspective, so now the temporal of our experience is side by side and has an inner time perspective; but it is there all at once. But in the short time that it is there, it becomes more and more shadowy and shadowy, more and more attenuated and attenuated. While we look and feel within ourselves in our physical life on earth, we have the images of our experiences as memory images rolled up within us; now these images become larger, more powerful. We feel as if the images of our memory are being absorbed by the world. That which after death, as it were, first encloses a narrowly defined area in this tableau of memory, it becomes ever larger, but thus also ever more shadowy, until we find it expanded as if into a universe, but faint, so that we can hardly guess at what we first saw clearly. And then it disappears into the vastness; it is no longer there. And then the spiritual counter-images of all the deeds we have gone through up to birth become visible. All the spiritual counter-images we have gone through become visible, but in such a way that we now immediately receive the impulse to really go back on the path, to go through all these experiences once again. [1]

The most important moment for a person after death is the moment immediately after dying. This moment can last hours, sometimes days. In this state, the life of the last incarnation passes by as a memory image. The peculiarity of this panorama of memories is that all subjective feelings of joy and pain have disappeared from him as he looks at these memories of life from the cradle to the grave. It is as if one were looking at the life picture of another, so impersonal is one's view of him. As soon as the etheric body lets go of the astral body, the memory panorama disappears. [2]

The very first time after death passes in such a way that one has before one as in a large tableau the life that has just passed. Throughout the days, but always in such a way that the whole thing is there, one's previous life is, so to speak, all at once. One has it before one as in a great panorama. One sees, as it were, the life of these days from the point of view of the ego, one sees especially all that in which our ego was involved. One sees the relationships one has had with a person, but one sees this relationship with the person in such a context that one becomes aware of what fruits this relationship with the person has borne for oneself. So one does not see the matter completely objectively, but one sees everything that has borne fruit for oneself. You see yourself at the center of everything. And that is infinitely necessary, because from these days, when you see everything that has become fruitful for you, emanates the inner strength and power that you need throughout life between death and a new birth in order to be able to hold on to the ego thought. For one owes the strength to be able to hold on to the ego between death and a new birth to this contemplation of the last life; this strength actually emanates from it. [3]

This memory tableau remains for two to three days; this varies slightly from person to person. As a rule, it remains for approximately as long as the person in question has been able to endure their life without sleeping. [4] This state lasts approximately as long as the day's experiences stimulate dream formation for the individual person - it varies from person to person. [5]

If a child dies, then the life tableau is extraordinarily short, but behind this tableau, shading it in, much of what was experienced in the spiritual world before birth emerges from behind. This vision of certain remnants of the spiritual world that one lived through before birth is only lost in retrospect after death, when one has passed the 35th year of life. The life tableau before the age of 35 has much more the character that it comes to you as if from outside, as if from a spiritual world, and you only push towards it that which you have experienced yourself. The tableau of life after 35 years is such that one is first confronted from outside by something empty, something darkened, and that one brings to this darkness what one has acquired in life. But this does not make it any less vivid. [6]

The person himself, who has died and has had ordinary (non-initiated) consciousness during his life on earth, sees, so to speak, what he has before him as his life on earth in a powerful panorama; he sees it from the front, so to speak. With the initiatory view one can also look at it from the other side, from behind, and then the network of karmic connections sprouts out, which are initially still gained from thoughts that have lived in the will during earth life. The thoughts that you consciously live through during your life on earth are dead; but those thoughts that are woven into karma and come out of it are alive. So that after the reverse of the life-survey living thoughts sprout forth. The beings of the third hierarchy approach and receive what sprouts up, breathe it in (as it were). This happens during the time in which man lives up to the end of the lunar sphere. [7]

The incarnate of man is the physical expression in this world of that which continues to have an effect as a remnant of memory after death. Even more than through anything else, man is a microcosm in relation to the macrocosm through something like his incarnate. And the basic intonation is of great significance, for it is, so to speak, the color of the carpet on which the memory of the dead appears: greenish-bluish for the white human race, violet-reddish for the Japanese, and flesh-colored for the blacks after death. [8]

(In the process of death) the earth goes away, so to speak, with what it has given you, and immediately the feeling arises through this abandonment that the power of enlivenment is now bubbling up from within. The first, then, is the perception of being alive. It is the transition to a certain activity, whereas up to now you have remained in passivity: You animate that which you now are. You are in yourself. What you previously called the world has departed from you. That in which you now live, by filling it completely, generates in itself the power of animation, it animates itself. And in concrete terms, this results in what I have often called the panorama of life, the life that floods into everything you have experienced between birth and death. The images of this life appear before the soul. The whole of the last life between birth and death rises, as it were, from the point in which one is oneself, like a mighty, self-generating dream. But this image needs strength so that it is not a dream. One is oneself the source of life for that which emerges as a dream. All this is so while man has hardly yet the consciousness that he is out of his former consciousness, but as if something had only stirred in him as from the center of his being, which spreads out and from which that life escapes to which he has hitherto only passively devoted himself. What one did not know between birth and death: that thoughts, which otherwise were merely like an ego-dream, live, one now knows. And one now lives oneself out of the formerly alien life into this life of one's own. One experiences what it means that what was previously not life, but the image of life, takes hold of the imagination, of thinking.

First the innermost dream of life comes to life, so to speak, and becomes itself a living universe, a living cosmos. Then it fills itself, as it were, with what can be called: The music of the spheres of the universe resounds through this dream of life. One experiences how that which one was oneself between birth and death as a section of the cosmos is now absorbed by the cosmos. These processes all take place as long as the human being is connected with the etheric body. [9]

A memory of the physical body is such that we bring it up temporally from the memory. Such a memory is a power that is bound to the physical body, a thought, where one thus brings up the memory in time. This recollection after death is such that, as in a panorama, everything that has taken place in life is simultaneously around us in imaginations. We live through days within our, one can only say, experience. In powerful images there is simultaneously the event that we have just experienced in the last times before our death, and at the same time there is what we experienced in childhood. A panorama of life, a picture of life, which shows us what has otherwise followed one after the other in time in a fabric woven from ether. Everything we see there lives in the ether. Above all, we perceive that which is around us as alive. Everything lives and weaves within it. Then we experience it as spiritually resonant, spiritually luminous and also spiritually warming. Everything that we have experienced in life by thinking is woven into it. In other words, everything that we have experienced by thinking, by imagining, that is in there. [10] Our consciousness then has before it, in a comprehensive tableau of images, the content of life that could be brought into our memory during our life on earth in the form of imageless thoughts, or what has remained unnoticed by our earthly consciousness but has nevertheless made a subconscious impression on the soul. [11] (It is) a retrospect which is not permeated by feelings and sensations, but which presents to man, as it were in successive pictures, the sum of the experience of his last earthly existence.

In ordinary life this is experienced, for example, when a person is close to drowning and gets a shock, but does not lose consciousness; if consciousness is lost, the phenomenon does not occur. The criminal anthropologist Moriz Benedikt describes how, when he was close to drowning, he had such a review of his past life. - So what happens when a person goes through such a horror caused by mortal danger? What happens for a moment is that he does not use his external bodily instruments and yet retains consciousness. Through such an experience man loses the ability to see through his eyes, to hear through his ears and so on. Through his inner being he is, as it were, torn out of his physical body, which contains all the tools of his physical life. He is torn out of ordinary life, but still retains ordinary consciousness. From the fact that he can gain a retrospective view of his previous life, it can also be concluded that when man looks at his inner being - and that consciously - everything that can appear in his memory must be added to his inner being. [12] When a person has shed their physical body, their thoughts become an external reality in a peculiar way. This is the first experience the deceased has in the spiritual world. But the mental experience of life does not stand around in such a way that it seems like fleeting thoughts, but it seems as if the thoughts, at the moment when they break away from the soul and gain independent life, become denser, more alive, more moving in themselves and form a world of entities.

After days the person who has passed through the gate of death then experiences how this whole world, which has become his world as it were, moves away from him, as if in a spiritual perspective, as if it were moving far, far away from him in the spiritual sphere. After days it takes until the time of this departure, this becoming thinner and thinner, this becoming foggier and foggier, more and more dim and dim of the world of thought, which is receding into the distance, arrives. [13] Then, when this tableau of memory has come to an end, when it has gradually faded away, he feels something as if certain forces were withdrawing within him and something that was previously in his nature were being expelled, a second, invisible corpse of man; it is that in man which he cannot take with him from his etheric body through the following experiences in the spiritual world. [14]

We belong to the elemental world in such a way that we really have our own etheric body from this world, which is the instrument for communication with this elemental world. But not only do we establish relationships through our etheric body with other etheric bodies belonging to physical beings, but through our etheric body we are related to spiritual beings of an elemental nature, and these are the very beings that can evoke imaginations, unconscious or conscious, for us humans. We are always in relationship with a multiplicity of elemental entities. We have a particularly strong relationship with an elemental entity that is, so to speak, the counter-image of our own etheric body. One can say that our own etheric body has intimate relationships with a particular etheric being. And just as our etheric body - what we call our etheric body from birth to death - develops its special relationships with the physical world through being incorporated into the physical body, so this etheric being, which is in a sense the counter-image, the opposite pole to our own etheric body, mediates our relationships with the entire elemental world, with the surrounding, cosmic-elemental world.

Just as we walk here between physical human beings, so we also walk continually between such elemental entities. Others are further away from us, but again have their relations with other human beings; but a certain number are particularly close to us, and one of them has the most intimate relations with us and mediates our intercourse with the cosmic elemental world. We ourselves are such a being as these elemental entities in the very first time after we have passed through the gate of death, when we still have our etheric body on us. The fact that our etheric body is taken from us a few days after death is essentially due to the fact that our etheric body is, so to speak, attracted, absorbed by its etheric counter-image and now becomes one with it, so that we do indeed lay down our etheric body a few days after death, handing it over, so to speak, but to our etheric counter-image. Because our etheric body is taken from us by our cosmic image, very special relationships now emerge between that which is thus taken from us and the other elemental entities with which we have been in relationship during life. It is a kind of reciprocal relationship that could be compared to that between the sun and a planetary system that belongs to a sun. And through the fact that this interaction takes place, those forces are generated which, in the right way, slowly insert what our etheric body can carry into the elemental world. This, which is usually called dissolution with an abstract word, is, I would like to say, essentially an effect of the forces that take place through this solar-planetary system that we have left behind. Gradually that which we have appropriated to this etheric body becomes a member of the spiritual world; it weaves itself into the forces of the spiritual world. [15]

Initially, the sum of these experiences appeared immediately after death, as long as the etheric body was still connected to the ego, as a comprehensive memory painting. The etheric body itself is then discarded, but something of the memory painting remains as an imperishable possession of the ego. As if one were to make an extract, an excerpt, from all the experiences that have come to the human being between birth and death, so that which remains behind stands out. This is the spiritual endurance of life, the fruit of it. This experience is of a spiritual nature. It contains everything that reveals itself spiritually through the senses. But without life in the sense world it could not have come about. After death, the ego perceives this spiritual fruit of the sense world as that which is now its own, its inner world and with which it enters the world that consists of beings that reveal themselves, as only its ego can reveal itself in its deepest inner being. Just as a plant seed, which is an extract of the whole plant, only unfolds when it is sunk into another world, into the earth, so now that which the ego brings with it from the sense world unfolds like a seed which is acted upon by the spiritual environment that has now received it. [16]

Glass window: If someone looks at one of our glass windows (in the Goetheanum) and he sees a kind of coffin with a dead person in it at the bottom and further up he sees, for example, an old man, a young man, a virgin and a child standing on a winding path, on what he recognizes as a winding path. When he has absorbed our spiritual current, he will see that this is the review of life. [17] (For further information see: Life between death and a new birth).

Sources:

[1] GA 234: Anthroposophy - A Summary after Twenty-One Years. At the same time a guide to its representation before the world (1924)

[2] Bei 60: Contributions to the Rudolf Steiner Complete Edition. Booklet 60 (1977)

[3] GA 157a: The Formation of Destiny and Life after Death (1915)

[4] GA 102: The Influence of Spiritual Beings on Man (1908)

[5] GA 215: Philosophy, Cosmology and Religion in Anthroposophy (1922)

[6], [9] GA 174b: The Spiritual Background of the First World War (1914-1921)

[7] GA 237: Esoteric Observations on Karmic Connections - Third Volume. The Karmic Connections of the Anthroposophical Movement (1924)

[8] GA 181: Earth Death and World Life. Anthroposophical Gifts of Life. Necessities of Consciousness for the Present and the Future (1918)

[10], [15] GA 168: The Connection between the Living and the Dead (1916)

[11] GA 26: Anthroposophical Guiding Principles. The Path of Knowledge of Anthroposophy - The Michael Mystery (1924/1925)

[12] GA 61: The History of Man in the Light of Spiritual Research (1911/1912)

[13] GA 63: Spiritual Science as the Good of Life (1913/1914)

[14] GA 119: Macrocosm and Microcosm. The great and the small world. Questions of the Soul, Questions of Life, Questions of the Spirit (1910)

[16] GA 13: The Secret Science in Outline (1910)

[17] GA 165: The Spiritual Unification of Humanity through the Christ Impulse (1915/1916)

Life tableau and decomposition and construction

What is material in us is something that flows past. And by getting to know our own life through condensed thinking, we come to that which remains, that which remains throughout our entire life on earth, but which is at the same time that which builds up our organism from the external substances and that which breaks it down again. And this last is at the same time what we overlook as a tableau of life. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 319: Anthroposophical Knowledge of Man and Medicine (1923/1924)

Life tableau and etheric body

We have sensory perceptions through our eyes, ears and so on. In these sensory perceptions we live with a certain inner intensity. Then we form ideas about what we perceive through our senses. We move away from the things we perceive through our senses. In our imagination we are left with an afterimage of what has lived in our sensory perception. But consider how dull, how shadowy the thought, the imagination is of that which we have experienced with full vitality in sense perception. These ideas, which are linked to sense perceptions, are dull and shadowy. [1]

So whereas otherwise one gets thoughts by passively surrendering to perceptions or by allowing the echoes of experiences to reappear out of memories, in order to become an anthroposophical spiritual researcher one tries, through inner arbitrariness, as one has come to know it in mathematizing, in solving mathematical problems, in such a way that one carries out everything fully consciously, not in a dreamy, hallucinatory state - that would be the opposite of what I am going to describe today - to devote oneself fully consciously to thinking and imagining, so that one learns to rest on ideas that one has arbitrarily placed in one's consciousness. It is a good thing to place at the center of your consciousness ideas that are as clear as possible, not those in which you can experience all kinds of nebulous, mystical things, but those that you can easily grasp. It is not a question of what kind of idea you have, but of the mental activity that you now develop in this meditation. Notice that if you constantly tense a muscle when you need it for work, the muscle becomes strong. The same thing happens to your mental thinking power when you concentrate again and again - the exercises sometimes last for years, it can also take a shorter time, depending on the person's disposition - on ideas that you bring to the center of your consciousness. The power of thought becomes stronger and stronger, and it finally reaches a point where you can say: Now I am able to have my ideas as vividly as I usually only have external sensory impressions. Mind you, I don't have hallucinations or illusions. They come unconsciously. I now live in such vivid inner ideas as the outer sensory perceptions usually are, but I live in them with full consciousness, not with that dreamy mood of the soul, that mystical, nebulous mood of the soul that is present in hallucinations or visions. It must certainly be a mathematical state of soul through which one lives into such an inner experience of mere imagination as one otherwise only has when one is devoted to external sensory perception.

Once you have mastered thinking, you have reached the first level of supersensible knowledge. In my books, I have called this the imaginative level of cognition. You have reached the stage of imagination. Now, after my practice, I am able to have intensified thoughts in my consciousness, which I call imaginative thoughts because they occur with the vividness, with the intensity of images, because they are really like sensual images, even though they are initially only thoughts. But just as otherwise, by thinking about an external experience - if I only stare at it, no memory comes to me later, only if I have thought about it - a memory can come out of my own being, so by now having a thought, and an intensified one at that, in my soul, something comes to me out of my own being which at first looks like a memory, but which is not a memory. Something is now rising up which is not a reminiscence of an external sensory experience, but is something which I have never before perceived rising up out of my inner being. If I may put it this way: just as memories of ordinary experiences usually rise up, so now, through the power of intensified thinking, that which I have never yet seen inwardly rises up from within. And I will very soon recognize what it is that is rising up.

I try, by progressing further and further in this meditation, to bring it to ever greater and greater clarity in this inner ascending, and I finally arrive at what this inner ascending actually is. I come to the conclusion that this inner ascension is me, as I have developed in the time since my birth here on earth. It is something that leads me down into deeper layers of my inner being than the thoughts of memory lead me down. It is something that shows me how, as a small child, I used abilities that I had in my soul to shape my organism from my brain. This is what shows me how, as a somewhat older child, I further developed my inner human being with the help of the ability to speak. In short, my innermost life appears before my soul in a large, powerful tableau, the likes of which I have never seen before. And that which now appears before my soul is not just an image. I would ask you to bear that in mind. It is not merely an image, but something of which I recognize, by grasping it, that it is connected with my powers of growth, with that which grows within me, which also lives within me in the powers of nourishment, in the powers of circulation, in the powers of respiration, which is generally an inner, supersensible body in relation to the physical body. I am now getting to know a second human being within me. [2] And the most significant thing about this etheric body is that at the moment when we are ready to survey our previous life on earth as if with a spiritual gaze in this life tableau, which is the formative forces body, we also cease to distinguish between subjective and objective. The etheric body or formative forces body that we carry within us, which is a flowing temporal body, we could draw it schematically. But we must realize that we are then painting something in a moment that is constantly flowing. Just as we cannot paint lightning, we cannot paint this etheric body. We only ever paint a moment that is captured. You have to realize that how you are formed as a human being depends on this body of pictorial forces.

And the moment one becomes aware of how this etheric body in one is a body of forces, without knowing its inner structure one cannot understand the human being, one realizes that the same forces that work in one as such an etheric body also permeate the world as etheric forces; that subjective and objective cease to have a meaning; that this formative body of forces is connected with the great course of time of the universe; that we stand within it as a member of this great universe. We begin to speak of the etheric processes of the universe, for these become clear to us at the moment when we come to such a vivid imagination as we otherwise only have vivid outer sense perceptions. And we can achieve this through meditation. In short, we settle into an etheric world. At the same time, however, we learn to recognize the first thing that is supersensible in ourselves. We do not yet come out of earthly life, but we learn to recognize that which is supersensible in us within earthly life. [3]

Sources:

[1] - [3] GA 82: So that the human being may become fully human. The Significance of Anthroposophy in the Spiritual Life of the Present (1922)

Life tableau and etheric body and memory

The etheric body is also the carrier of memory, and during life only the physical body prevents it from having all this before it. After death the physical body is discarded; then everything that the person experienced in his last life can come into consciousness. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 112: The Gospel of John in Relation to the Three Other Gospels, Especially to the Gospel of Luke (1909)

Life tableau and the third hierarchy

The life tableau clearly shows how, in one moment, what we have lived through since our birth, at this moment also lives within this current of our own life events, that of which one can say: The third hierarchy now lives within the world of colors, sounds and so on that has been released from matter. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 84: What did the Goetheanum want and what is Anthroposophy for? (1923/1924)

Life tableau and spiritual researcher

The spiritual researcher must not shy away from going through inwardly difficult and often painful experiences. (For example) in relation to this life tableau, one first experiences that one feels one's own being in a kind of inner oppression. One does not feel it with the ease with which one usually harbors thoughts, ideas, feelings, will impulses, desires and the like; one feels it like something that oppresses one. In short, you feel reality in this oppression. If you don't have this oppression, then you only have a mental image, you don't yet have reality. But by carrying into this oppression everything that one used to have in the way of freely unfolding thought-fabrics, one is thereby protected from developing something like illusions, visions, hallucinations with one's imaginative cognition. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 79: The Reality of the Higher Worlds. Introduction to Anthroposophy (1921)

Life tableau and survivors

Immediately after death, directly afterwards, the person experiences a flowing memory of life here, which does not proceed like an ordinary memory because it is much more mobile, as I said, flowing, but there is everything concrete in this memory. If we then say something inwardly to the deceased that is in this image of memory, it is an element, a force that can in turn contribute to his particular well-being, that will give him particular satisfaction. All this shows you that we as human beings on earth can do something to enter into a special relationship with the dead. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 343: Lectures and Courses on Christian Religious Work, II Spiritual Recognition - Religious Feeling - Cultic Action (1921)

Life tableau and imagination and sleep experiences

When a person, as a spiritual researcher, comes to imagination and thus has his life tableau before him, then something else always becomes visible at the same time. You cannot have one without the other. One cannot have the imagination, the real spirit-knowledge of the previous life on earth, without those experiences that we have always had during sleep, from falling asleep to waking up, appearing in a strange way like a memory. I have told you what these experiences are like.

If, on the one hand, we receive the imagination, on the other hand we receive, especially strongly, when the inner silence of the soul occurs, a view of what the human being experiences in the state of sleep. If we shine down into the sleeping that lies in the volition during waking, then we come to the karma that works in from earlier earth lives. When we begin to see through the experiences between falling asleep and waking up, then we see how karma is woven together from the free actions we are currently performing, which will only be realized in the next life on earth. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 226: Human nature, human destiny and world development (1923)

Life tableau and imaginative cognition

If one receives (as exercise content) ideas which must be easily comprehensible so that no reminiscences are involved - it is easiest for mathematicians who are used to placing comprehensible consciousness content at the center of the soul's life from the outset - and does not become tired, but from this point of view, one develops those soul abilities which express themselves in the memory in a more passive behavior of the soul, then one comes to realize that one can extract from the depths of the soul life a potentiated power of memory which preserves the real organically working forces of earth life, so that one can actually survey in a time tableau - in that one can even speak of time perspectives, of an inner lawfulness and structure - that which has worked in one temporally since one entered earth life. First of all there is the view of one's own self. There arises the perception that in the physical body an etheric body rules, which in its inner lawfulness has nothing physical but temporal, but which can appear there in image form, so that one can call this realization the imaginative. And one arrives at the fact that, while one otherwise lives only in the present, one can transport oneself back to any given moment, so that one experiences it as if it were directly present. One actually enters into the possibility of speaking of time perspective, just as one can go from one place here to another, so as to be able to make one's way inwardly to a place in time that one has lived through. So that this finer bodily existence, continuously unfolding in time, results in the first stage of supersensible knowledge. I need only briefly indicate that there is a further stage in the development of the soul which is attained by the fact that the image of one's own inner power is conjured away, so that not merely an empty consciousness arises which is equal to zero, but which corresponds to the negativity of the present degree of consciousness. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 319: Anthroposophical Knowledge of Man and Medicine (1923/1924)

Life tableau and inspiration

Sources:

When empty consciousness has now arisen through the suppression of the life tableau, the etheric body, then through inspiration that arises in the soul which the soul itself was as a purely spiritual-soul being before the conception in a spiritual-soul world. And now the great moment of research occurs, where one becomes acquainted with the eternal in human nature through direct contemplation.

80(24.1.1922)18

Life tableau and meditation and concentration

This meditation, this concentration with the whole power of the soul - on certain ideas that one constantly makes and on which one rests - must be continued for years. Forces of knowledge resting deep down in the soul, of which man otherwise has no idea, must be brought up. If they are brought up, then one comes to perceive that which surrounds us in the same way as the physical-sensual world surrounds us, through these higher powers of cognition. At first we perceive our own experience, but not as the indeterminate stream that runs until close to our birth, where the fragments of memory emerge, but we first perceive the whole overview of what we have lived through in this life since our birth, like a unified, suddenly present panorama of life. - And if you get to know this, then you experience what it means to live in your soul outside your body. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 297a: Education for Life. Self-education and pedagogical practice (1921-1924)

Life tableau and shock

People who have been subjected to a shock sometimes say that for a few moments their whole life stood before them like a tableau, so that the vanished experiences from their earliest life suddenly reappeared from oblivion with full clarity. At the moment of the crash or other shock that gave rise to the shock, something occurs that the clairvoyant can see. Not always, but sometimes, the part of the etheric body that fills the head region emerges completely or partially from the head, and even if this only happens for a moment, the memory is released, because at such a moment the etheric body is freed from physical matter, the obstacle to uninhibited memory. In death this memory tableau immediately enters with full strength, because the whole physical body is abandoned. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 108: The Answering of World and Life Questions through Anthroposophy (1908/1909)

Life tableau and day consciousness

At birth or conception, the spiritual stream pours into the physical, builds up, flows through and gradually pulsates the whole organism. In the course of life the new core of the soul is formed, the germ for the next life, that which lasts beyond death. But we know nothing of the original spiritual that flows out of the previous life and into physical existence with birth or conception, nor of the soul core that then forms, which forms the germ for the next life. Yes, what do we know about then? - Our life is divided into two parts, one that extends from birth to the earliest moment we can remember, and the second from that moment until death. If you are in your thirtieth year and remember back to the time just mentioned, then you come to a boundary, the boundary of the influx of the spiritual. And one perceives this boundary; one becomes aware of it by pushing against it. Such nudges in the course of life remain in our memory and form our memories. That is where our memories accumulate. And that is our consciousness in physical life. Just as the seed in the plant develops into a new plant, so we work on the forces that will later shape our new life. Blessed is he who has stored up good and beautiful memories! The spiritual from the previous life, which flows through and permeates the new body from birth, gradually fades away during life. When leaving the physical body, we first reach this boundary where all the memories are stored; thus we only become aware of the boundary between the new soul core and the old spiritual. Where they meet we become aware of something. And that is what constitutes our consciousness of the day. Consciousness arises through contact between the past and the future. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 266/3: From the Contents of the Esoteric Lessons. Volume III (1913, 1914; 1920 - 1923) (1913-1923)

Life tableau and supersensible cognition

At the moment when a person ascends to imaginative, supersensible cognition, he perceives everything that he can perceive through his etheric body. And I have often indicated to you (see above) how man then looks back on the tableau of his life on earth since his birth and how at the same time all the events and forces which he has experienced and which have intervened in his growth, in his whole physical, mental and spiritual organization, stand before the human soul in a mighty panorama, in a mighty tableau, as if time had become space. One learns to survey life in this way when one is initiated into imaginative cognition.

But now, when inspired cognition occurs, then one can look at these real memories of life on earth, which are a tableau of memories, and one then sees, because one has suppressed the imaginative in inspired cognition, because the events of life on earth, even insofar as they are perceptible through the etheric body, are no longer there, so to speak, one then sees a semblance of something higher.

When that part is extinguished which corresponds to the time from birth to the 7th year, then the effects occur which represent the interaction of the lunar entities with the human entity after death. This can be seen most easily by every initiate. A second is revealed when we then make that part of the retrospective visible in the inspired initiation which corresponds to the years of life from 7 to 14, the age of sexual maturity. There everything becomes visible that the human being experiences after death by ascending from the lunar region into the Mercury region. If the next human period (14th-21st year) is extinguished through inspired knowledge and that which can then appear when this part is extinguished is allowed to appear, then it is the experiences and facts that the human being goes through in the region of Venus' existence after death. Then there is a period that lasts from the 21st to the 42nd year of life. If one looks into this period with inspired initiation, then one experiences - one can at least experience - that which a dead person goes through in by far the greatest time of his life between death and a new birth, that which he goes through through being in a relationship with the solar beings. The existence of the sun between death and a new birth becomes clear through this time. You will realize that initiates can only look back on the whole connection of the human being with the solar life between death and a new birth when they have passed the age of 42. This connection is not really comprehensible earlier. And getting older also means a lot for the spiritual view. Certain things are only visible not only at a certain initiation, but simply at a certain maturity. [1] If we look back to the period of life from the 42nd to the 49th year, then we see everything that can be experienced by man after death, from the beings that inhabit Mars. [2] If man then sees through his life from the 49th to the 56th year of life with inspired initiation, he comes to the realization of all that can be brought about in man by the beings of the Jupiter region, who pass through life between death and a new birth. [3] And if one can survey the course of life from the 56th to the 63rd year of life, then one looks into those effects which emanate on man from Saturn, from the Saturnian beings. [4]

Sources:

[1] - [4] GA 236: Esoteric Observations on Karmic Connections - Second Volume (1924)

Life tableau and oblivion potion of the old initiation

The effect that this oblivion potion was supposed to have was obtained by the fact that it was dipped in a certain ceremonial, that it was prepared in a certain way, that certain preparations were made before the potion was given. It was, however, a physical drink which, through the way in which it was served, brought about what can be called: man forgot his life since birth. This is something that is also achieved again today through soul-spiritual development, in that a clear consciousness of a great life tableau is evoked, which encompasses everything since birth. Then this is suppressed, and thereby the human being is introduced into the spiritual way of his life before conception. This was achieved in a more physical way in the old oblivion potion. The positive thing that was achieved was that thinking became more agile and more intense. But it also became duller. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 210: Old and New Methods of Initiation. Drama and Poetry in the Change of Consciousness in Modern Times (1922)

Life tableau and world ether

Everything that we otherwise remember in time is simultaneously placed around us in a powerful life tableau, as if in a mighty panorama. But then our etheric being is detached from us, it is pulled out of us, as it were. This is done by the beings of the third Hierarchy, and they gradually weave it into the world ether, so that after our death this fabric of the world ether consists of what we have added during our life between birth and death and what has been processed by the beings of the three next higher Hierarchies. That which has lived within us during our physical life has now become a piece of the outer world, so that it can be looked at by us, can be contemplated by us. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 167: Present and Past in the Human Spirit (1916)

33
Thoughts

In contrast to the content of perception, which is given to us from the outside, the content of thought appears on the inside. The form in which it first appears is what we want to call intuition. It is to thinking what observation is to perception. Intuition and observation are the sources of our knowledge. We are strangers to an observed thing in the world as long as we do not have the corresponding intuition within us to fill in the missing piece of reality in our perception. If you do not have the ability to find the intuitions that correspond to things, the full reality remains closed to you. Just as the color-blind person only sees differences in brightness without color qualities, the person without intuition can only observe incoherent fragments of perception. The details that confront us in observation are connected link by link through the coherent, unified world of our intuitions; and through thinking we reunite everything that we have separated through perception. [1]

The ordinary physical thoughts on earth are abstract thoughts, they don't actually do anything in the human being. They are only images, these thoughts. If you look in the mirror at the same time as a person and get a slap in the face, you will not attribute the fact that you got the slap to any of the mirror images, but to a real person standing next to you. Thoughts are just like the mirror images: they do nothing, they do not impulse in reality. Only the moral intuitions in the thoughts are the impulses. [2] And these thoughts do not enter the brain, but are mirrored by the activity of the brain and in turn reflected back into the etheric body, astral body and the ego. The mirror in which we see ourselves out there is simple, but the brain is a tremendously complicated mirror. [3] That which is involved in the construction of the brain from the earth, i.e. macrocosmically, is what the ancient Greeks called the Dionysian principle when they applied their feeling to the microcosm, to man, so that Dionysus works in us to make our bodily organization the mirror of our spiritual life. [4]

An impartial observation of thought shows that the thoughts of ordinary consciousness have no existence of their own, that they appear only as mirror images of something. But man feels himself to be alive in his thoughts. The thoughts do not live; but he lives in the thoughts. [5] Thoughts are shadow images of entities of the astral plan. [6] Thoughts have their actual seat in the etheric body of man. But there they are living, essential forces. They imprint themselves on the physical body. And as such "imprinted thoughts" they have the shadowy nature in which ordinary consciousness knows them. What lives in the thoughts as feeling comes from the astral body, what lives as volition comes from the ego. In sleep the etheric body of man shines forth in his world of thoughts; only man does not take part in it, because he has drawn the feeling of the thoughts out of the etheric and physical body with the astral body, and the willing of them with the ego. At the moment when, during sleep, the astral body and the ego dissolve the relationship to the thoughts of the etheric body, they enter into such a relationship to karma, to the contemplation of events through repeated earth lives. [7]

The human etheric body is taken from the general world ether, which is present everywhere. Now, this world ether is in reality the carrier of thoughts. This world ether, which everyone has in common, is the carrier of thoughts, the thoughts are in there, those living thoughts are in there. Man shares in these thoughts in his pre-earthly life before he descends to earth. All that is present of such thoughts at all is in the living state in the world ether and is never taken from the world ether in the life between birth and death, never, but all that the human being contains in himself as a living store of thoughts, he then receives at the moment when he descends from the spiritual world, thus leaves his own living thought element, when he descends and forms his etheric body. Within it are still the living thoughts, in that which forms and organizes man. [8] This spiritual power, which dies in the thoughts and becomes a corpse when the human being descends into physical earthly existence, is the same power that forms our organs out of the cosmos.

When we now enter earthly life, this power of thought enters our limited organism. What does the earth and its environment want from us? Yes, the earth with its environment actually wants us to reproduce it in ourselves. If we were to imitate the earthly, then gradually in the course of our lives our inner organs, such as the lungs, above all the various convolutions of the brain and so on, would be transformed into crystal-like forms. The human organism resists this. And this resistance is the reason why, instead of reproducing this earthly environment with our organs, we merely reproduce it in shadow images in our thoughts. Everything that stands before our eyes actually wants to continually cause a real formation in us. But we resist this, we keep our brain. As a result, it is reflected back and becomes the mental image. A table wants to turn your brain into the table itself; you do not allow this to happen. This creates the image of the table in you. With our feelings, we already emulate the outer form in our inner being more than with our thoughts. [9]

Just as the corpse of our physical remains when we pass through death on earth, so a corpse also remains of the spiritual-soul entity that we are in the spiritual world before we descend into the physical world. But this has only been the case since the time when man was endowed with the consciousness of his ego. And the abstract thoughts represent this corpse. But the fact that we grasp the corpse of our spiritual-soul is conditional on something of the dying, paralyzing principle entering our physical body. The development of man is already such that his nature has changed in the course of his development on earth. The old bodies were different from the new bodies. They were such that the human being was indeed unfree in them, but that he moved in his body in a fresh nature of his own, in a nature of his own that took place through his own physical-etheric-astral activity. So that one can say: Within the civilized world we are already living in a period of human development in which the body is beginning to disintegrate. And it is precisely through this disintegrating body, which is the basis for intellectualistic, that is, abstract thoughts, that we gain our freedom. [10] Our earthly thoughts are the corpses of our pre-earthly soul life. [11]

When people have progressed a little further through meditation, through concentration, in short, through a strengthening of their soul-spiritual experience, it passes over into a soul experience, which is an awake sleep, into an inner life in the spiritual world. If the human being did not lose his consciousness during sleep, he would be in this spiritual world during the whole time, from falling asleep to waking up. Whoever carefully follows the instructions of spiritual training will soon come to the conclusion that when he wakes up he knows: You emerge as if you had been swimming under the sea and were now emerging into the air; you emerge as if you had been weaving with your spiritual experience in a world of pure thoughts. It is as if you were still catching the last shreds of this experience when you wake up. This can make a great impression, even though it is immediately lost and is usually difficult to retain in your memory. But it is important for those who want to make progress to catch such moments of awakening, because that is when consciousness arises: Before you woke up, you were in your astral body in a weaving world of objective thoughts, and as you are submerged in your physical body, you rise up, your soul sparkles, you bump into your physical body, which reflects back to you what you have lived through the whole night. - This consciousness can arise and should be heeded, and it is important that it arises. [12]

Before you have woken up, you are in the world of the Angeloi, Archangeloi, Archai and so on with your soul-spiritual experience. Now, this being inside, this work of the higher hierarchies on your soul being, happens with the powers of thought that are at work there. And now you submerge into the physical body. By immersing yourself in the physical body, you concentrate your thoughts by the fact that you are spellbound to the small part of space that surrounds your head. There you must draw together what is spread out outside with complete concentration. What arises in this way is that the thought life, the system of thoughts, is drawn into, submerged in the nervous system. It pushes its way in through the senses. What happens there? Through the experience of thought, first the substance of the etheric body is seized, then also the physical substance. By taking hold of a thought in your physical life, you actually kill something in your nervous system. There are now as many nervous corpses as we have cherished thoughts. When we go to sleep in the evening, we have to leave our physical body to its own devices so that it can take away the corpses of thoughts that we have created during the day. These corpses of thought are actually the imprints of thought, and if we could not form these corpses of thought, we would be just as unable to consciously form a thought during the day as we are at night. At night we are in the spiritual world in the weaving of thoughts. There is no physical body available to us into which we could press thought corpses. The thought goes away immediately and dissolves in the all-thought life. That is the difference, that during the day we can hold the thought in the physical body: there the thought life hardens, and this hardening causes that we can have the thought life consciously. Materialism believes that it must seek the cause of thought in what goes on inside it as a corpse-process. Physical physiology investigates what thinking leaves behind, what it cannot use, what it expels. [13]

When we come out of the world of thoughts in this way, it flickers back inside the nervous system; the corpses of thoughts flicker back. We do not perceive this flickering in our ordinary life. The thoughts that live in us are not spiritual beings, but what we perceive is a kind of reading of the corpses of thought. But the fact that these thoughts are reflected as a living being has its great significance in the world order. What happens to this spiritual light that enters him? The cherubim come, collect this light and use it for the further order of the world. When we think, thought light radiates out of us, and this illuminates the world in which the cherubim live

If we want to be dull and stupid and not think, then we increase the darkness, and the consequence of this is that the cherubim have no light. [14] This is the secret of our corpses of thought: that we can revive them again and again for a certain time. When a memory emerges, what is only a corpse of thought will shine alive again for a while within us. [15]

Nowhere do we discover thoughts for themselves in the environment of earthly life. They are only present in people and emerge from them. If we step out of the earthly sphere of death into the space sphere of thoughts, then beings do not live there at first; we do not meet beings - neither gods nor men - in the vastness of space at first, but we meet world thoughts everywhere. It is the same when we have passed through death and enter the expanses of the world as if we did not first see man here in the physical world, but when we encounter man we would first perceive his thoughts without seeing man himself. We would see a cloud of thoughts. We do not encounter beings, we encounter the world thoughts, the general world intelligence. Man lives in this sphere of cosmic intelligence a few days after his death. And in the world thoughts that weave there, one's own last life on earth, which one has experienced, appears like a detail, I would like to say, like a special cloud that one looks at. [16]

The last great memory that we have after death in the form of the (life) tableau must first flow away, it must gradually fade away, then that which we were not consciously allowed to have before death develops out of the fading away. For if we had had it consciously before death, the powers of memory could never have formed in us. This power of memory, transformed as it were into the spiritual, awakens in us as a first spiritual power of the soul, which emerges from the human soul after death in the same way as the powers of the soul emerge from the growing child in the first weeks of life. We see, as it were, our memories glimmering away and instead see a whole number of elemental beings awakening out of the general cosmos of wisdom. Once we are out of the physical body, we see this entire treasure trove of memories as a living presence. Every thought lives as an elemental being. We now know: You have thought during your physical life, your thoughts have appeared to you. But while you were under the delusion that you were forming thoughts, you created nothing but elemental beings. That is the new thing you have added to the whole cosmos. One first learns to recognize directly what elemental beings are, because one first learns to recognize those elemental beings that one has created oneself. We learn the nature of the elemental world in general from our own elemental beings, which we were already surrounded by in life and which we see in death. Through our own elemental creation we get to know the other. [17] Thoughts are realities on the astral plane. Every thought that we bring into the world takes on astral matter, just as the child takes on physical matter in the womb, and condenses into certain forms. There are beings for whom human thoughts are a welcome opportunity to embody themselves, to acquire an astral body. These entities have a greed to materialize astrally. [18] Our ordinary thought life only extends as far as the astral world. However witty our thoughts may be: Thoughts that are not carried by emotions do not go further than the astral world (see: astral plan) and have no meaning for other worlds. No human being can say anything about worlds other than the astral world with thoughts that are not permeated by emotions. If the geometer, for example, grasps the relationships of the triangle, this only helps him into the astral. But if he grasps the triangle as a symbol and brings out what lies within it about man's part in the three worlds, about his threefoldness and so on, this helps him higher up. Whoever feels in the symbols the expression of the soul power, whoever inscribes it in his mind, whoever feels in all this what he otherwise only knows, connects his thoughts with the Devachan. Therefore, when meditating, one must feel through what is given to us, for only in this way can we bring ourselves into relationship with the devachanic world. [19]

Sources:

[1] GA 4: The Philosophy of Freedom. Fundamentals of a Modern World View - Results of Observation of the Soul According to the Scientific Method (1894)

[2] GA 224: The Human Soul in its Connection with Divine-Spiritual Individualities. The Internalization of the Annual Festivals (1923)

[3], [4] GA 129: World Miracles, Soul Tests and Spiritual Revelations (1911)

[5], [7] GA 26: Anthroposophical Guiding Principles. The Path of Knowledge of Anthroposophy - The Michael Mystery (1924/1925)

[6], [19] GA 130: Esoteric Christianity and the Spiritual Guidance of Humanity (1911/1912)

[8] GA 317: Curative Education Course (1924)

[9] GA 210: Old and New Methods of Initiation. Drama and Poetry in the Change of Consciousness in Modern Times (1922)

[10] GA 214: The Mystery of the Trinity. Man and his Relationship to the Spirit World in the Course of Time (1922)

[11] GA 276: The Artistic in its World Mission. The Genius of Language. The World of Revealing Radiant Appearance - Anthroposophy and Art. Anthroposophy and Poetry (1923)

[12] - [15] GA 156: Occult Reading and Occult Hearing (1914)

[16] GA 239: Esoteric Observations on Karmic Connections - Fifth Volume (1924)

[17] GA 153: The Inner Being of Man and Life between Death and New Birth (1914)

[18] GA 94: Cosmogony. Popular Occultism. The Gospel of John. Theosophy on the basis of the Gospel of John (1906)

Thoughts - Experience

The Rosicrucians of the Middle Ages placed a glass of water in front of the neophyte (new spiritual disciple) and said to him: "For this water to be in the glass, someone must have put it in. It is the same with the ideas that we find in nature. They must have been put into it by the divine spirits, the assistants of the Logos. The thoughts that we draw from the world are actually found in it. Everything we create is necessarily included in it. [1]

Of course, man could not have the experience of thought if the world were not permeated by thought. For how could man, by sensually perceiving the world, gain thought from his sensory perception if thought were not present in the world as such? [2]

Between birth and death we have, so to speak, no other thoughts than those that life brings us. If our experience is rich, we also have a rich thought content; if our experience is poor, we have a poor thought content. The content of thought is, so to speak, our inner destiny; but within this thought-experience one thing is entirely our own: The way in which we connect and disconnect thoughts, the way in which we inwardly process thoughts, how we judge, how we draw conclusions, how we orient ourselves in the life of thought in general, that is ours, is our own. Thoughts come to us from outside according to their content, the processing of thoughts comes from us. [3]

This physical world is a script, nothing other than a script. If you look at this world as the writing of the spirit, if you look at everything external - minerals, plants, animals and people - as the writing of the spirit, then by reading the physical world you automatically enter the spiritual world. However, this reading is not easy. The following is an example of this reading. The chemist takes blood, analyzes it and says that it consists of these and those components. Then he is done, and he knows what blood is. Reading in the spiritual-scientific-occult sense, however, shows you that blood in the form in which we have it could not have come into being if the phenomena which we call the astral were not behind it. The spirit of the world acts on matter through the astral phenomena. There could never be blood in the physical world if the astral world were not behind the physical world. This is the right way to enter the spiritual world in general: to immerse ourselves in the world around us in a meaningful way. It is more comfortable to enter the spiritual world in many other ways, but it is safer to study the phenomena that surround us. Therefore, in the Rosicrucian instructions for occult training, you will find the study of our world mentioned first and foremost. Here in the world of the senses it looks as the outer physical senses can perceive it. In the astral world it looks different again, quite different. And in the devachanic world it looks quite different again. So it is with regard to perception. Now there is thinking, with which one comprehends the perceptions of the physical world, the astral world and the devachanic world. The thoughts and laws of logic are the same for all three worlds. If you learn to think correctly on the physical plane, you will have a safe guide through all worlds in this correct thinking. But it is a matter of learning to think meaningfully, sensibly and deeply. Therefore, no one should refrain from penetrating this sensual world with their thoughts and viewing them as characters that bring news of a higher spiritual world. [4]

Two things work together in us when we allow thoughts to pass through our soul: our astral body and our ego. The physical expression of our ego is the blood; the physical expression of our astral body is our nervous system, that which we call life in our nervous system. And our thoughts would never be able to penetrate our soul if there were not an interaction between the ego and the astral body, which finds its expression in the interaction between the blood and the nervous system. If our blood, our inner fire, and our nervous system, our inner air, work together in this way, then the thought will flash through the soul. And the emergence of thought within the soul corresponds to the rolling thunder in the cosmos. When the lightning fire ignites in the air masses, when fire and air interact and produce the thunder, then this is the same macrocosmic event in the great world, which corresponds to the process when the fire of the blood and the play of the nervous system are discharged in the inner thunder, which, however, sounds softly and quietly and imperceptibly to the outside world in the thought. [5] The same elements of fire and air that are in the macrocosm are in man, in the microcosm, blood and nerves; and as thunder and lightning are in the macrocosm, so are thoughts in man. And the God whom Moses saw and heard in the burning bush, who spoke to him in the lightning fire on Sinai, appears as Christ in the blood of Jesus of Nazareth. [6]

Sources:

[1] GA 94: Cosmogony. Popular occultism. The Gospel of John. Theosophy on the basis of the Gospel of John (1906)

[2], [3] GA 202: The Bridge between the World-Spirituality and the Physical of Man. The Search for the New Isis, the Divine Sophia (1920)

[4] GA 96: Original Impulses of Spiritual Science. Christian Esotericism in the Light of New Spiritual Knowledge (1906/1907)

[5], [6] GA 109: The Principle of Spiritual Economy in Connection with Questions of Re-embodiment. An Aspect of the Spiritual Guidance of Humanity (1909)

Thoughts and Ahriman and Lucifer

If nothing of Ahrimanic and Luciferic forces had been added to the progressive world evolution, then man would be a completely different being, then man would be able to have perceptions in his physical body, but he would not be able to have actual thoughts. He has thoughts through the fact that Ahriman can gain influence over his etheric body. He has impulses of will through the fact that Luciferic forces can gain influence over his etheric body. [1]

The thought grasped by the individual human being is always permeated, for the most part grasped and permeated by the Luciferic element. It is always the case with the individual that the sentient element of the soul works its way up into the thoughts, into the ideas. Thus the temptation, the allurement of the Luciferic element always approaches man. [2]

Sources:

[1] GA 158: The Connection of Man with the Elemental World. Kalewala - Olaf Åsteson - The Russian Folklore - The World as the Result of Equilibrium Effects (1912-1914)

[2] GA 147: The Secrets of the Threshold (1913)

Thoughts and Akasha

When we make a thought of occult science alive in our soul, it is immediately inscribed in the Akashic substance, and it is of importance for the general development of the world that such impressions are made in the Akashic substance, for these impressions, which can be made by mankind, and which we describe as occult science, cannot be inscribed in the Akashic substance by any other entity in the whole world than man alone. [1]

Akasha is the finest form of matter. [2] The Akashic substance stands between physical and astral matter. It is the finest matter in which thought can be directly expressed. [3] (See also: Akashic Chronicle).

Sources:

[1] GA 152: Preliminary Stages to the Mystery of Golgotha (1913/1914)

[2], [3] GA 53: Origin and Goal of Man. Basic Concepts of Spiritual Science (1904/1905)

Thoughts and Angeloi

Why is it in the world that we do not perceive what is spiritually floating around in the world in which we are in it? If one were to go back into the physical body identically, identified with the series of images (the out-of-body perception), if one were not to remain outside and wait until the etheric body reflects the essence of the images, if one were to carry everything with which one has become one into one's physical body, that is, into the space enclosed by the skin, one would immediately destroy the physical body to the point of death. When death really occurs in earthly existence, then the soul is so far that it can identify itself with what lives outside as imagination in the natural course of life. But then death also occurs. Out there we are always surrounded by imaginations, we are, as it were, inside a sphere of imaginations; they are not allowed to enter us. What comes into us from these imaginations? Shadow images, reflections, mirror images: as our thoughts, our ideas. We are not allowed to experience them in their original form, only in the shadowed form in which they are in us as thoughts. This can only be in us if someone takes this experience of the imaginations that belong to our thoughts away from us in our ordinary experience. They must be experienced. If you have any thought, anything that you experience in your soul, then this experience corresponds to a world of imaginations outside. And a being must rule over you that protects, guards and watches over you, as it were, that takes from you what you cannot do yourself. The Angeloi are, as it were, spiritually clear within your grasp. [1]

Here on earth we communicate as human beings to human beings through the thinking that we put into language. This way in which we communicate here through thinking, this way we have from the pre-earthly communication with the angels. We can, however, maintain the same kind of communication as with the angels with other people who are in pre-earthly existence; it is like a direct language of thought. But superior to this is intercourse with the Hierarchy of Angels, for it not only gives satisfaction to the soul, but also strength, which reappears in the thinking which the child acquires on the third stage of its earthly life. [2]

Sources:

[1] GA 156: Occult Reading and Occult Hearing (1914)

[2] GA 224: The human soul in its connection with divine-spiritual individualities. The Internalization of the Annual Festivals (1923)

Thoughts and the astral plan[e]

The astral plan is inhabited by the most diverse beings, it is teeming with ideas and actions that cast their shadow image into the human being, and these processes are reflected in the human head as thinking. Currents continually flow from your head into the astral plan and these are the shadows that mediate the life of thought in your head. [Basically, our physical world is only the outer expression of what happens on the astral plane. Impenetrability is a law of the physical world. This is not the case in the astral world, where the law of permeability exists. And it is quite possible, it is even the rule, that the beings penetrate each other and that another being penetrates into the space where there is already a being. There can be two, four, a hundred beings in one and the same place in the astral world. As a result, the logic of living together is quite different from that on the physical plane. [2]

On the physical plane the thought can remain soul property; on the astral plane it is not so easy. When the thought is conceived, it is already there in a certain relationship. Thus the most diverse opinions, thoughts and sensations continually interpenetrate. The most opposite things can interpenetrate in the astral world. And we must say: If there is contradiction in the physical world, there is immediate conflict in the astral world. For as a being of the astral world one cannot hold back thoughts within oneself, the thoughts immediately become action, the objects are immediately there. One cannot discuss there, but the principle applies: a thing must prove itself. So that we constantly have the conflict of the most diverse opinions, thoughts and feelings. On the astral plane every opinion must become a deed. There one does not argue, one lets the opinions fight, and the one that is the more fruitful beats the other out of the field. The astral world is, so to speak, the much more dangerous one, and much of what is said about the dangerousness of the astral world is connected with this. And the opinions that are there have to fight with each other, not argue. In the physical world, when the discussion starts, everyone wants to destroy the other person who disagrees with them or considers them a fool. It is not like that in the astral world. There, a being will say: I don't care about other opinions! - There is absolute tolerance. Other opinions are allowed to exist just as much as one's own, because things have to be put right through the struggle. [3]

Sources:

[1] GA 130: Esoteric Christianity and the Spiritual Guidance of Humanity (1911/1912)

[2], [3] GA 107: Spiritual science of human nature (1908/1909)

Thoughts and ether

The etheric body is full of thoughts. It is a kind of excerpt, a kind of extract from the ether of the world, and the ether of the world is an effective world of thoughts. And therefore it is true that the etheric body of man is something extraordinarily clever, full of light-filled and consistent thoughts. So world thoughts as forces work in this etheric body of man, and we are only ever able to use something - it is always very little - of what is spread out in our etheric body, according to what we have in our astral body. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 224: The human soul in its connection with divine-spiritual individualities. The internalization of the annual festivals (1923)

Thoughts and the etheric body

As truth lives in man in the form of thoughts, it lives with the thoughts in the etheric body. Truth directly grasps the etheric part of the head and is naturally transferred there as truth to the physical part of the head. [1] The etheric body is the carrier of thoughts. [2] When we draw conclusions (i.e. think), we work in the astral body; but if we fix the impressions in us in such a way that they can be remembered again after some time - yes, or even only after minutes - we imprint the impressions that we have gained through our ego and processed through our astral body into our etheric body. [3]

Sources:

[1] GA 170: The Riddle of Man. The Spiritual Background of Human History (1916)

[2] GA 154: How to Acquire Understanding of the Spiritual World. The Influx of Spiritual Impulses from the World of the Departed (1914)

[3] GA 128: An Occult Physiology (1911)

Thoughts and hierarchies

Just as the sensory world conceals realities, namely the realities of the spirits of form, so too does the world of thought. The Archai have to do with the mineralization process that takes place within us while we are thinking. If we live in our thoughts, the Archai are with us within our thought-life, just as the Elohim, the spirits of form, are within our sense-perception. [1] Thoughts are indeed spread out in the world. They are the forces that rule in things. And our thinking organ is only something that draws from the cosmic reservoir of thought forces, that takes thoughts into itself. We must therefore not speak of thoughts as if they were something that belongs only to man, (but) in such a way that we are aware of them: Thoughts are the world-dominating forces that are spread everywhere in the cosmos. But these thoughts do not fly around freely, they are always carried, worked by some entities. When we turn to the supersensible world, we find through supersensible research that the thoughts through which men make the world comprehensible to themselves were carried outside in the cosmos - I could also say: streamed forth; earthly expressions are little suited to these sublime processes and beings -, that these thoughts were thus carried, streamed forth up to the 4th century after Christ by the beings of that hierarchy which we call Exusiai or Form Beings. Whoever, through a special initiation, had lived in the supersensible world in those ancient times of Greek life and had come to experience these form beings, saw these form beings, and in order to form the right picture of them, the right imagination, he had to add to them as an attribute, the luminous thoughts streaming through the world. As an ancient Greek, he saw these form beings as luminous powers of thought emanating from their limbs, which then enter into the world processes and continue to work there as the world-creating powers of intelligence. [2]

The 4th century after Christ brought the extraordinarily significant event for this supersensible world that the Exusiai handed over their powers of thought to the Archai. It was then that the Archai, the original beginnings, entered the profession that the Exusiai had previously practiced. From that time on, they retained only the task of regulating the external sensory perceptions, that is, to control with special cosmic powers everything that is present in the world of colors, sounds and so on. And this fact of the supersensible world was reflected down here in the sensory world in such a way that in those older times in which the Greeks lived, thoughts were perceived objectively in things. [3] This transfer has been going on for a long time. It was already prepared in pre-Christian times and was only completed in the 12th to 14th centuries after Christ. The 4th century is, so to speak, only the middle point in time. As the world of thought passes from the Exusiai to the Archai, man feels the thoughts of his own being more, because the Archai live one step closer to man than the Exusiai. The supersensible consciousness certainly has the sensation of Angeloi, Archangeloi and Archai are actually on this side of the sensual world. You just don't see them with your ordinary eyes, but they actually lie between the human being and the whole sensory carpet. And the Exusiai, Dynamis, Kyriotetes are actually only beyond; they are covered by the sensory carpet. So that the human being, who has a supersensible consciousness, feels the thoughts, after they have been handed over to the Archai, as approaching him. Since this transfer he feels himself to be in freer communication with the world of thoughts. This also creates the illusion as if man himself created the thoughts. [4]

While we are thinking, while we are forming thoughts from our experiences and retaining them as memories, the whole world of the 3rd Hierarchy is occupied with our thoughts. We do not merely think for ourselves, we think and store our thoughts within ourselves, thus creating a field of activity for Angeloi, Archangeloi and Archai. [5]

Sources:

[1] GA 208: Anthroposophy as Cosmosophy - Part Two: The Formation of Man as the Result of Cosmic Effects (1921)

[2] - [4] GA 222: The Impulsing of World-Historical Events by Spiritual Powers (1923)

[5] GA 167: Present and past in the human spirit (1916)

Thoughts and meditation

Meditation consists of placing a thought or a series of thoughts intensively in the center of consciousness and then being so strongly soul-spiritually active in this series of thoughts that one does not merely develop the abstract, intellectualistic thought activity that one has in ordinary science or in ordinary life, but that intensive thought activity which, if we were still children under the age of seven, would intervene in our organism, would seethe and boil inside the organism. But in this way, after we have practiced it as a soul-spiritual activity, it carries us to the point where we learn to live with thoughts as with realities. We learn to move in thought through meditation, just as we move in everyday life. It is quite true that ordinary thinking is entirely bound to the brain. And one learns to recognize this precisely when one gets to know this body-free thinking, to which one can only rise through meditative development. This thinking, which is just as arbitrary as the movements of the hands and legs, which one can accomplish through effort, under which one tires, which one must refrain from after a certain time, just as one must refrain from the exertion of the outer body, when one gets to know this thinking in this way, gets to know it from within, then one has an experience of creative thinking, of creative imagination. Then one grasps in the human being a being that is etheric-thinking and that is at the same time the being that has descended from supersensible worlds through conception and has worked on the human body as a sculptor, as an architect. [1] (See also: formative forces).

Sources:

[1] GA 334: From the Unitary State to the Tripartite Social Organism (1919)

Thoughts and reincarnation

Because thoughts are so closely bound to the outer organization, it can be concluded that they are not a very suitable tool for penetrating into the secrets of reincarnation and karma. [1] The thoughts we cherish do not pass over into the next life in a heightened form, but transformed as forces they appear in the next life. No matter how great a thought may be, when a person passes through the gate of death, the thought is gone as a thought. But the enthusiasm and the feeling and the emotion that has come to life under the influence of the thought passes through the gate of death. From anthroposophy itself man does not take the thoughts with him, but what he has experienced in the thoughts - down to the details, not only the general basic feeling. [2]

The central being of the human being is grasped through that which we absorb in anthroposophical thoughts. This crystallizes a spiritual substance in man, which he takes with him after death and through which he perceives in the spiritual world. With it he sees and hears in the spiritual world, with it he penetrates that darkness which is otherwise for man in the spiritual world. And through this it is brought about that when man today, through these anthroposophical concepts and anthroposophical ideas, forms this ego in himself, which is now in connection with all the worldly wisdoms that we can receive - if he forms it - he also carries it over into the next incarnation. Then he is reborn with this now formed ego, and he remembers this formed ego. And that is the deeper task of the anthroposophical world movement today: to send a number of people over to the next incarnation with an ego that they remember as their individual ego. And these will be the people who form the core of the next cultural period. [3] One does not need to have a preference for anthroposophically oriented spiritual science in order to want to represent it, but one need only have compassion for the people who need these thoughts, because these thoughts are creative thoughts for the life of the soul, because man is called in the future to become what he sees himself as. The dead man will already be able to proclaim it today as a legitimate mature truth: The soul is what it is able to think of itself. [4]

That which is thought in man becomes reality, and materialistic thoughts gradually become materialistic realities. [5]

Sources:

[1], [2] GA 135: Re-embodiment and Karma and their Significance for the Culture of the Present (1912)

[3] GA 117: The Deeper Mysteries of Becoming Human in the Light of the Gospels (1909)

[4] GA 178: Individual Spirit Beings and their Work in the Soul of Man (1917)

[5] GA 198: Healing Factors for the Social Organism (1920)

Thoughts and Darwinism

In their souls, human beings, more and more, come to resemble the thought, to resemble that which they regard as knowledge.

To see certain things in their true light, with clarity of thought, is vitally important.

To believe in line of Darwinism that man descends from the animals—and reiterating the thought: I descend from the animals, I descend entirely from forces which also produce the animals …such thoughts, in our age, tend to make the soul resembles its own conceptions of itself. This is really an important matter!

When the body is discarded, the soul is then confronted with the sorry fate of having to perceive its resemblance with its own thought! A man who lives in the physical body believing that animal forces alone were at work in his evolution, fashions for himself a kind of consciousness in which he will perceive his own likeness to animal nature.

For since the event of 1879, the character of the Fifth Post-Atlantean epoch has been such that the souls of men are transformed into the ideas they form of themselves.

It is not necessary to be particularly advocate spiritual science; all that is necessary is compassion for men who need these thoughts and ideas because they are creative powers in the life of soul, because it is ordained that in times to come, what the human being considers himself to be, that he will become.

This development is part of the wise guidance of worlds. The Gods were bound to make it possible for man to become what he makes of himself.

In order that he may attain full and free consciousness of the Self. In order that man might imbue this self-created being with super-sensible meaning, and find in it, something that gives him an eternal aim, Christ Jesus fulfilled the Mystery of Golgotha.

And when man understands Christ Jesus in the light of Spiritual Science, in the light of true thought, he finds the way to Him: the way which leads out from the animal into the Divine.

Source: GA 178 – Behind the Scenes of External Happenings – Lecture II – 13 November 1917, Zürich

Sources:

Note: This text is abridged. The full text is in this entire lecture of RS Archive: https://rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA178/English/RSPC1947/19171113p01.html

Thoughts and Darwinism

As long as the spirit works in the physical body, it cannot as spirit live in its true form. It can, as it were, only shine through the veil of physical existence because as a matter of fact, the thought life of man really belongs to the spiritual world. As it appears in physical existence its true form is veiled. It can also be said that the thought life of the physical man is a shadow, a reflection of the true, spiritual being to whom it belongs.

Sources:

GA 9 – Theosophy – Chapter III: The Three Worlds: 4. The Spirit in Spiritland after Death

34
War

It is a complicated world of demons and spirits that works through people when nations fight with each other. [1] First, people were there with the spirit without the mind; then the spirit gradually descended, the mind became great. Now one must come out of the mind back to the spirit. Culture must take this course. If culture does not want to take this course - yes, it has always been said: the (First) World War, there has never been anything like it. - It's true: people have never torn each other apart like that. But if people don't take this course, if they don't want to turn their minds back to the spirit, then even greater wars will come. Wilder and wilder wars will come, and people will actually exterminate each other. Actually, humanity is working towards the fact that eventually there will be nothing left of humanity at all. [2] The great conflicts that have caused the terrible catastrophes of recent years have already turned a large part of the earth into a cultural wasteland. Further conflicts will follow. People are preparing (25.12.1920) for the next great world war. In a further way, culture will be shattered. [3]

Sources:

[1] GA 174b: The Spiritual Background of the First World War (1914-1921)

[2] GA 354: The Creation of the World and of Man. Earth Life and Star Work (1924)

[3] GA 202: The Bridge between the World-Spirituality and the Physicality of Man. The Search for the New Isis, the Divine Sophia (1920)

War of All Against All

If one has had this imaginative experience (of the Cain and Abel story), then one knows what a human soul can be capable of, and then one knows one thing above all: that when they are turned into their opposite, the noblest things of the spiritual worlds can become the most terrible things of the physical world. It is known that the desire to kill one's fellow man can arise at the bottom of the human soul through a reversal of the noblest willingness to sacrifice. [1]

Basically, only in our time is it possible for people to know what the story of Cain and Abel is the reflection of: that it is the reflection of a high sacrifice. Everything that was above, that was pre-paradisiac, was covered up by the Guardian of the Threshold covering it up himself, in other words by driving people out of paradise. And this could only happen because the physical and etheric body of man was now so permeated with forces that man does not carry out that which results as a mirror image; for man would certainly carry it out if he felt everything that is in his astral body. The physical body and the etheric body anaesthetize man to such an extent that the desire in him to kill the other does not become a fact, thereby at the same time something like a kind of anaesthesia is poured out over the desire of the war of all against all. You see, if one really wants to describe the astral body in an interaction with the self, then one must describe things that not only actually remain hidden from the human nature, but that must remain hidden. But what has happened in that this desire and similar desires, which are directed towards the destruction of human and other interactions on the physical plane, have been anaesthetized? They are weakened. And this quiet feeling of those desires, which would be something so terrible if man were to live them out as they actually are, that is the real human earth realization. This human cognition of the earth is the destructive instincts made dull: Shiva in his most terrible form has been blunted to such an extent that he does not live himself out, but that he has become, as it were, threadbare, squeezed out to the point of human imagination, that is the Maya of the inner being, that is the cognition of man. Thus the knowledge had to be weakened, so that the originally fearful, in which Ahriman reigns within - for originally it is Ahriman who arouses this desire here - so that Ahriman's power would be weakened to such an extent that man would not live out Ahriman and thereby constantly make himself the servant of Shiva. That which is the sum of these powers had to be weakened to such an extent that they now rule in man in such a way that he can put himself in the place of other beings with his concepts and ideas. If one tries to penetrate another being with a concept, if one tries to immerse the idea in the being of another, then this idea immersed in the being of another is the blunted weapon of Cain that was thrust into Abel. [2]

If you first consider this origin of knowledge, then you will understand how everywhere there is the possibility of misusing this knowledge. [3] If you do not realize that this ego is a double-edged sword, you will hardly understand the whole meaning of the development of mankind and the world. On the one hand, this ego is the cause of people's hardening within themselves, of their wanting to include everything that is available to them in terms of external things and inner goods in the service of this ego. It is this ego that causes all human desires to be directed towards satisfying this ego as such. How this ego strives to bring a part of the common earthly possessions to itself as its property, how this ego strives to drive all other egos out of its territory, to fight them, to combat them: that is one side of the ego. But on the other hand we must not forget that this ego is at the same time that which gives man his independence, his inner freedom, that which elevates man in the truest sense of the word. His dignity is founded in this ego. It is the disposition to the divine in man. Thus the ego will be the pledge of man's highest goal. At the same time, however, if it does not find love, if it hardens within itself, it is the seducer that plunges him into the abyss. Then it is that which separates men from one another, that which calls them to the great war of all against all, not only to the war of peoples against peoples - for the concept of the people will then no longer have the meaning it has today - but to the war of the individual against the individual in the most varied areas of life, to the war of classes against classes, of castes against castes, of sexes against sexes. In all spheres of life, therefore, the ego will become the apple of discord, and hence we may say that the ego can lead to the highest on the one side and to the lowest on the other. That is why it is a sharp, double-edged sword. And the one who brought full ego-consciousness to mankind, Christ Jesus, is, as we have seen, rightly symbolized in our Apocalypse as the one who has the sharp, two-edged sword in his mouth. [4]

Ancient Lemuria was destroyed by mighty masses of fire, ancient Atlantia by mighty floods of water. Our culture will also perish, through the war of all against all: that is what lies ahead of us. Thus our fifth root race will perish through egoism taken to the extreme. At the same time, however, a small group of people will form who will develop the power of buddhi from the power of thought, in order to take it with them into the new culture. [5]

If things go on like this, we will be facing a war of all against all at the end of the 20th century! No matter how fine speeches people make, no matter how much scientific progress is made, we would be facing this war of all against all. We would see a humanity approaching that no longer has any social instincts, but would talk all the more about social things. [6]

If people become more and more isolated from one another, if each one becomes more and more hardened in his own self, if the dividing lines that separate soul from soul become stronger and stronger, so that soul and soul can understand each other less and less, then people in the outer world will come more and more to strife and quarrel, the strife of all against all on earth will take the place of love. This would have been the result if the development of human blood had taken place without the Christ event. All people would have been hopelessly exposed to the strife of all against all, which is indeed what will happen, but only for those who have not imbued themselves with the Christ principle in the right way. [7]

That is why it is important that, when one understands the full sharpness and strength of the Christ impulse, one comes to the realization of a great truth. One must realize it: Without the Christ-impulse something like a struggle for existence would be brought about outside through the isolation and segregation of men, through the opposition of men - which today is also imposed on man by a materialistic-Darwinian theory.

People can only get away from being externally opposed to each other in the sensual outer world through their different opinions, feelings and actions if they fight within themselves, if they make up within themselves what would otherwise flow out into the outer world. He will not fight the other opinion in the other soul who first of all fights that which is to be fought within him, who establishes harmony within himself between the different members of his being. He will face the outside world in such a way that he is not a fighter but a lover. It is a matter of diverting the quarrel from the outside into the inside of man. The forces that rule in human nature must fight each other internally. Let us assume that I take the opinion of the other person into myself and try to create harmony within myself, then I will relate to the other person in a completely different way. Only then will I begin to understand him. Deriving the conflict in the outer world into a harmonization of the inner forces of man, this is how we could also express the progress in the development of mankind. Through the Christ man had to be given the opportunity to become harmonious within himself, to find within himself the possibility of harmonizing the opposing forces within himself. The Christ gives man the power to eradicate the conflict within himself first. Without the Christ this is never possible. [8]

Those who have resisted (this) development will be the combatants who will all fight against each other. Even those who develop the highest intelligence today, if they do not develop further in mind and morals in the following epochs, will not benefit from their wisdom. The highest intelligence will be developed in our age. But those who have developed intelligence now and miss out on the following opportunities for development will destroy themselves through their intelligence. It will then act like an inner fire that burns him, consumes him, makes him small and so weak that he becomes stupid and can do nothing, a fire that will destroy him in the epoch when the moral impulses will have reached their peak. [9] It is impossible to imagine what would happen in such a case, when the occult truth that thought and atom consist of the same substance would be realized in practical life, and mankind would not have reached selflessness. Only by attaining selflessness will it be possible to keep humanity back from the brink of destruction. The downfall of our present root race will be brought about by the lack of morality. People will destroy themselves in mutual struggle. And it will be the most dismal thing - more dismal than other kinds of downfall - that men themselves will be to blame. A small group will save itself into the sixth root race. This small group will then have developed into complete selflessness. The others will apply every refinement in working through and harnessing the physical forces of nature, but without having attained the necessary degree of selflessness. They will initiate the struggle of all against all, and this will be the downfall of our root race. In the seventh sub-race in particular, this battle of all against all will unfold in the most terrible manner. Strong, powerful forces will emanate from discoveries that will transform the entire globe into a kind of self-functioning electrical apparatus. In a way that cannot be talked about, the small group will be protected. [10] But the great war of all against all will be something much worse than today's war with weapons. It will be the war of souls, of souls that no longer understand each other, the war of classes, of estates. This future catastrophe is difficult to understand for today's consciousness. The Atlanteans were magicians. Just as man today uses the forces that lie dormant in coal, so the Atlanteans used the forces in the seeds; they put the seed forces of the organisms at the service of their technology, their industry. There is now a mysterious connection between these forces. As long as the Atlanteans used the seed forces correctly, they were in harmony with the workings of the air and water forces.

From the middle of the Atlantean period, however, the magic of the Atlanteans went more and more towards its moral decay, and in the mysteries of the black occult schools terrible abuse was made of these magical powers. They were put at the service of the most terrible egoism. Thus the forces of air and water were excited more and more, until the tremendous Atlantic water catastrophe had to occur. Those who today know the secret of the use of these forces are well aware that if such seed-powers were still used today, it would be black-magical forces that would bring this about. Magic must never be used for selfish purposes. Today, for example, the seed powers of plants must not be used in the service of white magic. In Lemurian times, however, the seed powers of animals were used. But wherever these animal growth forces are abused, the most terrible forces of fire, the volcanic element of the earth, are awakened. Today these things are not so openly apparent; today the element of self-feeling, of the overflowing egoism in the human being, causes the desiccation, the desolation of those areas of the earth which have driven this egoism to the highest level. It is quite true that on the surface of the earth this war of all against all is being prepared, in that there is a connection between the egoistic drying up of the soul forces and the solidification of the productive earth forces. This is told to us in the Nordic myth of the Twilight of the Gods. But first we must learn to understand the difference between soul development and bodily development. From epoch to epoch the human souls find themselves again and again in other bodies, and through the fact that these souls will one day see the strife that will prevail between the human souls who will be born into the last post-Atlantean time, this will be a lesson for them to free themselves from egoism. Thus they will grow over into a time when they will have the fruits of egoism, but without its damage. And then a time will come which will be similar to the old clairvoyant states of Atlantis, but with free self-consciousness. Man will then have learned in these seven cultures of the post-Atlantean period what he can conquer in the physical world; only in the physical body can this sense of self awaken, but man must again force down the physical body. After the war of all against all, man will have arrived at a stage and in such a corporeality where he will no longer be a slave, but where he will be master of his physical body. [11] The catastrophe that separates us from the next great period that will come - after the fifth, the sixth and seventh period - will then not merely be such an external natural event as the Ice Age was and as everything that is indicated by the stories of the Flood was, but the separation of the fifth from the sixth period will become more evident in the moral field. A war of all against all, to which I have often alluded, will separate the fifth from the sixth great earth period as a moral catastrophe, albeit connected with natural events, but the natural events will recede more. The fifth cultural period was initiated by what comes from Mars through Samael, the spirit of strife, by bringing down elements of strife from the spiritual world. And in the beginning of the Consciousness Soul Age we also see in our smaller cycle how our fifth age contains within it something of the foreshadowing, the prophetic foreshadowing of that with which the great age will conclude, after the fifth will have been followed by the sixth and seventh cultural periods. [12]

Sources:

[1] - [3] GA 145: What significance does the occult development of man have for his sheaths (physical body, etheric body, astral body) and his self? (1913)

[4] GA 104: The Apocalypse of John (1908)

[5] GA 97: The Christian Mystery (1906/1907)

[6] GA 206: Becoming Human, World Soul and World Spirit - Part Two:. Man as a spiritual being in his historical development (1921)

[7], [8] GA 112: The Gospel of John in Relation to the Three Other Gospels, Especially to the Gospel of Luke (1909)

[9] GA 130: Esoteric Christianity and the Spiritual Guidance of Humanity (1911/1912)

[10] GA 93: The Temple Legend and the Golden Legend as a Symbolic Expression of Past and Future Secrets of Human Development (1904/1906)

[11] GA 104a: From the Pictorial Scripture of the Apocalypse of John (1907/1909)

[12] GA 346: Lectures and Courses on Christian Religious Work, V. Apocalypse and Priestly Work (1924)

War of All Against All – Antidote

He who is educated in spiritual science can also carry into external social life what he experiences with the most intense part of his personality in spiritual science - regardless of whether he is in a leading or a non-leading position. For that which is experienced with the whole personality, when it passes over into action, also becomes experience. The outer experience, however, in which the personality must be fully present, is the experience of love. A cognition that strives for experienced worlds of ideas in the spirit engages the whole person in such a way that this person places himself in love in social life, that he allows love to permeate social ideas. Just as in spiritual research the immediate experience of the spirit lives inwardly, so spiritual science carries love into social life, into the community, through the threefold organization of the social organism. It places the ideas as such into reality, so that love can be the bearer of these ideas in reality. Love in social life can only be connected with experienced, not merely with recognizing science. Therefore, if one stands on the ground of spiritual science, as it is meant here, one must first and foremost look at the connection between these spiritual scientific insights, this spiritual scientific life, and social love, with social loving practice, which is not merely routine, but which is borne in love, by luminous ideas. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is what we need if we do not want to sink into barbarism, but if we want to move towards a new civilization. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 255b: Anthroposophy and its Opponents (1919-1921)

War in Myth

The real evil only began when Manas united with Kama, so that man was directed by Kama, and this led to men fighting each other with consciousness. This is indicated in the (Greek) legend by the fact that all the gods are present at the marriage of Peleus to the sea goddess Thetis, but one goddess is missing. Eris, the goddess of discord, is missing because mankind was still before the stage when Kama united with Manas and the separation arose, through which people placed themselves in opposition to one another. But now the goddess Eris appears; she throws an apple among the guests, which bears the inscription "the most beautiful", in order to cause discord. This gives rise to the war, which only occurs within the fifth root race and is under full human responsibility. Only from this point on can we speak of a conscious raging of men against each other. Everything else in the myth is an elaboration of what began here. The most beautiful of the goddesses is to receive the apple of Eris. The three goddesses Hera, Pallas Athena and Aphrodite fight over the apple. The three goddesses represent different levels of soul life on the higher, spiritual planes. Now, however, the decision is no longer to be made on the spiritual plan, but on the physical plan. That is why Paris is called upon to decide from the physical plan. This is the real crux of the matter, where we can clearly see what is important. What must we encounter when decisions are made from the physical plan? When Manas first appeared on the physical plane, it mingled with Kama. Before that, people were also kamic, but that did not yet have the meaning of good and evil. Now, however, Manas merges with Kama, and therefore people become conscious of deeds. Manas enters into what man is according to his lower nature. He had already acquired the kamic development on the old moon. The most coarse kamic fell away from the earth with the exit of the moon and now accompanies the earth as a satellite in the moon. In esotericism the moon is the leitmotif, the symbol of the lower nature, of that which drags us down, of that to which we can come if we ourselves fall prey to the lower nature. So the fatal thing in the connection of Manas with Kama during the fourth sub-race must be that the human being who has to make decisions connects himself with the Kamic, with the moon principle, with Selene. The name Helena arose from Selene. In the union of Paris with Helena we have symbolically expressed the marriage of Manas with Kama in the fourth sub-race. The human being on the physical plane has usurped the lunar principle. You can find this everywhere when the "moon" is spoken of in esotericism. War arises from the fact that the whole connection between the manas principle and the kama principle is created in a conscious way directly on the physical plane. The Trojan War is both symbol and fact. It really took place; the most important events of the Trojan War took place on the physical plan. But they also have symbolic significance. The legend of the Trojan War has a mystical content, but the facts also took place externally on the physical plan. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 92: The occult truths of ancient myths and legends. Greek and Germanic mythology. On Richard Wagner's music dramas (1904-1907)

War and Imagination

The imaginative, which wants to enter the human mind and cannot yet be absorbed as imagination in any age, casts something like a mirage-like image down below the physical plane just as far as it is itself above the physical plane. Imaginations evoke passions, feelings, drives, instincts in human beings, which act out in antagonism. Basically, we can say that everything we are experiencing in the present in terms of the discharge of instincts and passions is the expression of the fact that renewed imaginations want to break into the world of human cultural development. Everything that war brings to the surface, often in such sad manifestations, is the transformed imagination that humanity cannot grasp. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 174a: Central Europe between East and West (1914-1918)

Wars of all against all and Desertification

Today these things (the abuse of the forces of growth) are not so openly apparent (as in Atlantis); today the element of self-feeling, of the overflowing egoism in man, causes the desiccation, the desolation of those areas of the earth which have driven this egoism to the highest level. It is quite true that on the surface of the earth this war of all against all is being prepared, in that there is a connection between the egoistic drying up of the soul forces and the solidification of the productive earth forces. [1]

Sources:

[1] GA 104a: From the Illustrated Scripture of the Apocalypse of John (1907/1909)

Notes

Subject Index