Lecture 1 ... Spiritual
connections between the culture-streams of ancient and modern
times
If we askourselves what spiritual
science should be for men, then presumably, out of all sorts of
reactions and feelings that we have developed in the course of our
work in this field, we will place the following answer before our
souls: Spiritual science should befor us a path to the higher
development of our humanity, of all that is human in us.
Thus we set up a life-aim, which in
a certain way is self-understood for every thinking and feeling
person, a life-aim that includes the achieving of the highest
idealsand also includes the unfolding of the deepest and most
significant forces in our souls. The best men in all ages have
asked themselves how man can rightly bring to expression what lies
within him, and to this question the most diverse answers have been
given. Perhaps none can be found that is terser or more telling
than the answer Goethe gave out of a deep conviction in
hisGeheimnisse:
"From the power that binds all
beingsThat man frees himself who overcomes himself."
Deep meaning lies in these
words,for they show us clearly and pregnantly what lies at the
heart of all evolution. This is that man develops his inner feeling
through rising above himself. Thereby we lift ourselves, so to
speak, above ourselves. The soul that overcomes itself finds the
path that leads beyond itself to the highest treasures of humanity.
This lofty goal of spiritual research should be borne in mind when
we undertake to treat such a theme as the one that is to occupy us
here. It will lead us beyond the ordinary horizons of life to
sublime things. We will have to survey wide reaches of time if we
take as our subject an epoch stretching from ancient Egypt down to
our own day. We will have to pass millennia in review, and what we
gain therefrom will really be something connectedwith the deepest
concerns of our souls, something that grips our innermost
soul-life. Only apparently does the man who strives toward the
heights of life remove himself from his immediate surroundings;
just through this he comes to an understanding of hisdaily
concerns. Man must get away from the troubles of the day, from what
his routine brings to him, and look up to the great events of the
history of the world and its peoples. Then for the first time he
finds what is most sacred for his soul. It may seemstrange to
suggest that connections, intimate connections, should be sought
for between our own time and ancient Egypt, when the mighty
pyramids and the Sphinx appeared. It can at first seem remarkable
that one should understand his own time better by directing his
gaze so far back. But just for this purpose we are going to look
backward over much wider and more comprehensive epochs. This will
bring the result we seek: The possibility of transcending
ourselves.
To one who has already carefully
studied theideas of spiritual science, it will not seem strange
that one should look for a connection between widely separated
periods of time. It is one of our basic convictions that the human
soul continually returns, that the experiences between birth and
death occur repeatedly for us. The doctrine of reincarnation has
become ever more familiar to us. When we reflect on this we may
ask: Since these souls that dwell in us today have often been here
before, is it possible that they were also present in ancient
Egyptduring Egyptian cultural epoch, that the same souls are in us
which at that time looked up at the gigantic pyramids and the
enigmatic Sphinxes?
The answer to this question is,
Yes. Our souls have beheld the old cultural monuments that they see
again today. The same souls that lived then have gone through later
periods and have appeared again in our own time. We know that no
life remains without fruit; we know that what the soul has gone
through in the way of experiences remains within it and appears in
later incarnations as powers, temperament, capacities, and
dispositions. Thus the way we look on nature today, the way we take
up what our times bring forth, the way we view the world, all this
was prepared in ancient Egypt, in the land of the pyramids. We were
then prepared in such a way that we now look at the physical world
as we do. Just how these widely separated periods link themselves
together is what we will now explore.
If we want to grasp the deeper
meaning of these lectures, we must go a long wayback in earthly
evolution, We know that our earth has often changed. Before ancient
Egypt there were still other cultures. By means of occult research
we can see much further back into the gray primeval times of human
evolution, and we come to times when the earth appeared quite other
than it is today. Things were entirely different in ancient Asia
and Africa. If we look back clairvoyantly into primeval times, we
come to a point where a tremendous catastrophe, caused by
water-forces, took place on our earthand fundamentally altered its
face. If we go still further back, we reach a time when the earth
had an entirely different physiognomy, when what now forms the
floor of the Atlantic Ocean, between Europe and America, was above
water, was land. We come to atime when our souls lived in entirely
different bodies than today; we reach ancient Atlantis, of which
our external science can as yet say little.
The regions of Atlantis were
destroyed through colossal deluges. Human bodies had different
forms at thattime, but the souls that live in us today lived also
in the ancient Atlanteans. Those were our souls. Then the
water-catastrophe caused a movement of the Atlantean peoples, a
great migration from west to east. We ourselves were these peoples.
Toward the end of Atlantis all was in movement. We wandered from
the west toward the east, through Ireland, Scotland, Holland,
France, and Spain. Thus the peoples moved eastward and populated
Europe, Asia, and the northern parts of Africa.
It must not be imagined thatthose
who, in the last great migration, wandered out of the west into the
regions that have gradually developed into Asia, Europe, and
Africa, did not encounter other peoples. Almost all of Europe, the
northern parts of Africa, and large parts of Asia were already
inhabited at that time. These areas were not peopled from the west
only; they had already been settled earlier, so that this migration
found a strange population already established. We may assume that
when quieter times set in, special culturalrelations arose. There
was, for instance, in the neighborhood of Ireland, a region where,
before the catastrophe that now lies thousands of years behind us,
there lived the most advanced portions of the entire population of
the earth. These portions then migrated, under the special guidance
of great individualities, through Europe to a region of central
Asia, and from that point cultural colonies were sent out to the
most diverse places. One such colony of the post-Atlantean time was
sent from this group ofpeople into India, finding a population that
had been seated there from primeval times and had its own culture.
Paying due heed to what was already present, these colonists
founded the first post-Atlantean culture. This was many thousand
years ago, and external documents tell us scarcely anything about
it. What appears in these documents is much later. In those great
compendiums of Wisdom called the Vedas, we have only the final
echoes of a very early Indian culture that was directed by
super-earthly beings and was founded by the Holy Rishis. It was a
culture of a unique kind, and we today can form only a feeble idea
of it because the Vedas are only a reflection of that primeval holy
Indian culture.
After this culture there followed
another, the second cultural epoch of the post-Atlantean time. Out
of this the wisdom of Zarathustra flowed and the Persian culture
arose. Long did the Indian culture endure, long also the Persian,
reaching a culmination in Zarathustra.
Then arose, under the influence of
colonists who were sent into the land of the Nile, the culture that
is comprised under the four names,
Chaldean-Egyptian-Assyrian-Babylonian. This third post-Atlantean
culture arose in Asia Minor and northern Africa, and reached its
summit, on the one side, in the wonderful Chaldean star-lore and,
on the other, in the Egyptian culture.
Then comes a fourth age, developing
in the south of Europe, the age of the Greco-Roman culture, which
dawns with the songs of Homer and goes on to produce the Greek
sculptures andthe art of poetry that appears in the tragedies of
Aeschylus and Sophocles. Rome also belonged to this period. The
epoch begins in the eighth pre-Christian century, approximately in
747 B. C., and lasts until the fourteenth or fifteenth century A.
D. After that we have the fifth period, in which we ourselves live,
and this in turn will be followed by the sixth and seventh
periods.
In the seventh period, ancient
India will appear in a new form. We shall see that there is a
remarkable law that enables us tounderstand the working of
wonderful forces through the various epochs and the relationships
of the epochs to each other. If we begin by looking at the first
period, that of the Indian culture, we will find that this first
culture later recrudesces in a new form in the seventh period.
Ancient India will then appear in a new form. Mysterious forces are
at work here. And the second period, which we have called the
Persian, will appear again in the sixth period. After our own
culture perishes, we will see theZarathustra religion revive in the
culture of the sixth period. And in the course of these lectures we
will see how, in our own fifth period, there takes place a sort of
reawakening of the third period, the Egyptian. The fourth period
stands in the middle;it is peculiar to itself, and neither earlier
nor later does it have a parallel.
To make this mysterious law
somewhat clearer, we should add the following. We know that India
has something that strikes our humanitarian consciousness as
strange. This is the division into definite castes, into priests,
warriors, merchants, and laborer. This strict segregation is
foreign to our modern views. In the first post-Atlantean culture it
was not strange, it was entirely natural; in those times it could
not be otherwise than that the souls of men should be divided into
four grades according to their capacities. No harshness was felt in
it for men were distributed by their leaders, who had such
authority that what they prescribed was accepted without question.
It was felt that the leaders, the seven Holy Rishis who had
received their instruction from divine beings in Atlantis, could
see where each man should be placed. Thus such a classification of
men was something altogether natural. An entirely different
grouping will appear in the seventh period. The division in the
first period was effected by authority, but in the seventh period
men will group themselves according to objective points of view.
Something similar is seen among the ants; they form a state which,
in itswonderful structure as well as in its capacity to perform a
relatively prodigious amount of work, is not rivaled by any human
state. Yet there we have just what seems to be alien to us, the
caste system; for each ant has its particular task.
Whatever wemay think of this today,
men will see that the salvation of humanity lies in division into
objective groups, and they will even be able to combine division of
labor with equality of rights. Human society will appear as a
wonderful harmony. This is something we can see in the annals of
the future. Thus ancient India will appear again; and in a similar
way certain traits of the third period will appear again in the
fifth.
Glancing at the immediate
implications of our theme, we see a large domain. We see
thegigantic pyramids, the enigmatic Sphinx. The souls that belonged
to the ancient Indians were also incarnated in Egypt and are again
incarnated today. If we follow our general line of thought into
detail, we will discover two phenomena that show us how,
insuperearthly connections, there are mysterious threads between
the Egyptian culture and that of today. We have observed the law of
repetition in the different periods of time, but it will seem far
more significant if we follow it in spiritual regions. We are all
familiar with a painting of great importance that has surely passed
before all our souls at least once. I mean Raphael's famous
painting of the Sistine Madonna, which by a chain of circumstances
has come to be located among us in central Germany. Inthis picture,
which is available in countless reproductions, we have learned to
admire the wonderful purity poured out over the whole form. We have
all felt something in the countenance of the mother, in the
singular way the form floats in the air, perhaps also in the deep
expression of the child's eyes. Then, if we see the cloud-forms
round about from which numerous little angel-heads appear, we have
a still deeper feeling, a feeling that makes the whole picture more
comprehensible to us. I know it seemsdaring when I say that if one
gazes deeply and earnestly on this child in the arms of the mother
and on the clouds in the background forming themselves into a
number of little angel-heads, then he has the feeling that this
child was not born in the naturalway, but that it is one of those
that float round about in the clouds. This Jesus child itself is
such a cloud-form, only become a little denser, as though one of
the little angels had flown out of the clouds onto the arm of the
Madonna. That would be a healthy feeling. If we make this feeling
live within us, then our view will expand and free itself from
certain narrow conceptions about the natural connections of life.
Just out of such a picture our narrow vision can be expanded to see
that what must happen in a certain way according to modern laws
could at one time have been different. We will discern that there
was once a form of reproduction other than the sexual one. In
short, we will perceive deep connections between what is human and
the spiritual forces in this picture. This is what lies in it.
If we allow our gaze to wander back
from this Madonna into the Egyptian time, we are met by something
similar, by an equally sublime picture. The Egyptian had Isis, the
figure connected with the words:I am what was, what is, and what
will be. No mortal has yet raised my veil.
A deep mystery, heavily veiled,
manifests itself in the figure of Isis, the lovable goddess who, in
the spiritual consciousness of the ancient Egyptian, was present
with the Horus childas our Madonna is present today with the Jesus
child. In the fact that this Isis is presented to us as something
bearing the eternal within it, we are again reminded of our feeling
in contemplating the Madonna. We must see deep mysteries in Isis,
mysteries that are grounded in the spiritual. The Madonna is a
remembrance of Isis: the Isis appears again in the Madonna. This is
one of the connections that I spoke of. We must learn to recognize
with our feelings the deep mysteries that show a superearthly
connection between ancient Egypt and our modern culture.
Still another connection can be
brought before you today. We recall how the Egyptian handled the
dead; we remember the mummies, and how the Egyptian concerned
himself that the outer physical form shouldbe preserved for a long
time. We know that he filled his tombs with such mummies, in which
he had preserved the outer form, and that as mementos of the past
physical life he gave to the deceased certain utensils and
possessions suited to the needs of physical life. Thus what the
person had had in the physical was to be retained. In this way the
Egyptian bound the dead to the physical plane. This custom
developed more and more and is a special earmark of the old
Egyptian culture. Such a thing is not withoutconsequences for the
soul. Let us remember that our souls were in Egyptian bodies. This
is quite correct; our souls were incorporated in these bodies that
became mummies. We know that when man, after death, is freed from
his physical and etheric bodies, he has a different consciousness;
he is by no means unconscious in the astral world. He can look down
from the spiritual world, even though today he cannot look up; he
can then look down on the physical earth. It is not then
indifferent to him whether his body has been preserved as a mummy,
has been burned, or has decayed. A definite kind of connection
arises through this. We shall see this mysterious connection.
Through the fact that in ancient Egypt the bodies were preserved
for a long time, the souls experienced something very definite in
the period after death. When they looked down they knew â
that is my body. They were bound to this physical body. They had
the form of their body before them. This body became important to
the souls, for the soul is susceptible to impressions after death.
The impression made by the mummified body imprinted itself deeply,
and the soul was formed in accordance with this impression.
These souls went through
incarnations in the Greco-Latin period, and in our own time they
areliving in us. It was not without effect that they saw their
mummified bodies after death, that they were repeatedly led back to
these bodies; this is by no means unimportant. They attached their
sympathies to these bodies, and the fruit of their looking down
upon them appears now, in the fifth period, in the inclination that
souls have today to lay great weight upon the outer physical life.
All that we describe today as the attachment to matter stems from
the fact that the souls at that time, out of the spiritual world,
could look upon their own embodiment. Through this man learned to
love the physical world; through this it is so often said today
that the only important thing is the physical body between birth
and death. Such views do not arise out of nothing.
This is not a criticism of the
practice of mummifying. We only want to point to certain
necessities that are connected with the repeated incarnating of the
soul. Without this pondering on the mummies men would not have been
equal to developing further. We would by now have lost all interest
in the physical world had the Egyptians not had the mummy-cult. It
had to be thus if a proper interest in the physical world was to be
awakened. That we see the world as we do today is a consequence of
the fact that the Egyptians mummified the physical body after
death.
This cultural stream was under the
influence of initiates, who could see into the future. Not through
any whim did men make mummies. Particularly in those days mankind
was led by highindividualities who prescribed What was right. This
was done under authority. In the schools of the initiates it was
known that our fifth epoch was connected with the third epoch.
These mysterious connections stood at that time before the eyes of
the priests, who instituted mummification so that the souls might
acquire the disposition to seek spiritual experience in the
external physical world.
The world is guided through wisdom;
this is a second example of such connections. That men think as
they do todayis a result of what they experienced in ancient Egypt.
Here we glimpse deep mysteries that reveal themselves in the
cultural streams. We have barely touched these mysteries, for what
has been shown of the Madonna as a remembrance of Isis, together
with what we have seen of mummification, gives only a feeble hint
of the real spiritual connections. But we will throw more light
upon these relationships; we will consider not only what appears
outwardly, but also what lies behind the external.
External life runs its course
between birth and death. Man lives a much longer life after death,
in what we know as kamaloca and the experiences of the spiritual
world. The experiences in the supersensible worlds are no more
uniform than the experiences here in the physical world. What did
we experience as ancient Egyptians in the other world?
When our eyes looked on the
pyramids and the Sphinx, how completely different was the course of
our lives, how differently did our souls live between birth and
death! That life cannot be compared to the life of the present day;
such a comparison would have no meaning, and the experiences
between death and a new birth have been far more dissimilar than
the experiences of outer life. During the Egyptian epoch the soul
experienced something quite different than in the Greek world, or
in the time of Charlemagne, or in our own time. Also in the other
world, in the spiritual world, evolution takes place, and what the
soul experiences today between death and a new birth is something
quite different from what the ancient Egyptian experienced when he
laid aside his outer form at death. Just as mummification worked on
in its peculiar way, causing the mood of the present day, just as
this external life repeats itself from the third into the
fifthperiod, so does evolution continue in those mysterious worlds
between death and birth. This also we will have to study and here
again we will find a mysterious connection. Then we will be able to
grasp what lives in us as the fruit of that ancient time. We will
be led into deep recesses of the labyrinth of the earth's
evolution. But just through this we will recognize the full
connection between what the Egyptian built, what the Chaldean
thought, and what we today live. We will see what was then achieved
flaring up again in what surrounds us, in what interests us in our
environment. Physically and spiritually we will obtain clues to
this connection. It will also be shown how evolution proceeds, how
the fourth period forms a wonderful link between the thirdand the
fifth. Thus our souls will lift themselves to the significant
connections of the world, and the fruit will be a deep
understanding of what lives in us.