Myths and Legends, Occult Signs and Symbols

GA 101 — 27 December 1907, Cologne

VII. Group Ego and Individual Ego

After yesterday's introduction, we want to move on to discussing some very characteristic signs and symbols today.

We emphasized yesterday that only humans, as they live here on the physical plane, have an individual soul, an ego, and that the animals that surround us have a group ego, a group soul, which lives on the astral plane and can be found there as a closed entity. Thus, when we look at them spiritually, the animal kingdom and the human kingdom are on opposite sides, the animal kingdom as group soul or group ego and the human kingdom as individual ego. We must not imagine that there are no transitions between the individual entities in the universe. Although the saying that nature does not make leaps is not at all correct for the occultist, transitions can be found everywhere. And so you will also find a transition between the group souls of the animal kingdom and the individual soul of the human being. It would be wrong to imagine that a person, upon entering earthly existence, had a fully developed individual soul, and that this soul would then incarnate again and again in the same form here on earth. It is much more the case that the human being today is in a gradual transition from a group soul, which he had in ancient times, to the fully developed individual soul, which he still does not have today. He is only on the way to the complete integration of his individual soul into his physical body. He will only have this completed individual soul when the earthly existence is more or less complete. For the vast majority of people today, their ego is an intermediate product between a group ego and an individual ego. The further back we go in the past, the more the human ego is still a group ego. At the beginning of their existence on earth, when the souls first descended from the divine worlds into our physical plane, human souls were still group selves. Several people belonged together to a group that had a communal soul, a group self.

On the one hand, we want to hold on to that. On the other hand, we now want to take a closer look at the members of human nature itself. You are well aware, since it has been said over and over again, that man initially has four members of his being: the physical body, the etheric or life body, the astral body and the I. And this I, when we look at it more closely, appears to us again divided into three parts, which we know under the names: sentient soul, mind or emotional soul and consciousness soul. In the sentient soul and in the mind or emotional soul, the independent I first dawns, and only in the consciousness soul do we have the first announcement of the self-conscious I. Only then does that which is called the fifth part of his being, the spirit self or manas, gradually shine into the human being. So, in today's human being, we have the following structure: the physical body, the etheric or life body, the astral body; then, intimately connected with the astral body, the sentient soul, which is embedded in him; then the mind soul and the consciousness soul; and again in the consciousness soul, which is the actual I-soul, the spirit self or Manas is incorporated. This is roughly how we would have to imagine today's human being.

Now we must realize which of these human limbs is the most developed, the most perfect. Some of you have already heard me say that, as man is developed today, the physical body is the most developed, the most perfectly developed limb. One must not confuse “most developed and most perfectly developed” with “higher natured”. Certainly the etheric body and the astral body are of a higher nature than the physical body, but the etheric body and the astral body will only achieve the perfection of their development in the future. In its way, the physical body is the most perfect part of the human being today. Anyone who studies the physical body, not just anatomically and physically, but penetrating its mind and heart, will stand in awe of the tremendous wisdom built into the physical body. Our physical body shows us the perfect, wise structure in every smallest of its limbs. If you take just a piece of the thigh bone from this physical body, the uppermost part of the thigh bone, it is not a solid mass, it is a wise construction, wonderfully put together from small beams. If you study how the fine beams are joined together, you will find that everything is built to produce the greatest amount of force with the least amount of substance, so that the upper body can be supported by these two pillars of the thigh bone. Even the most accomplished engineering skill today cannot build a bridge or any kind of scaffolding with such wisdom, where such a small amount of material is used to develop such a large amount of strength. Human wisdom lags far, far behind the wisdom with which the human physical body is built. It is the same with all parts of the physical body. If you look at the brain with the nervous system, it is a miracle. And if you look at the human heart, which is only on the way to its perfection and which will reach much, much higher degrees of perfection – it is something wonderful! If you compare the perfection of the physical body with the astral body, with its drives, instincts and passions, we have to say: Although it will one day be higher than the physical body, it is still at a relatively low level today. In everything that man develops today in the way of desires for pleasures, he delivers hundreds and hundreds of attacks on the physical body. Everything that man desires and satisfies in pleasures that he procures for himself, such as alcohol and all kinds of other things, are basically heart poisons, with which he continually attacks the wisdom and wonder of his physical body. It will take a long time of development before the astral body has reached the level of perfection that the physical body has today.

From the doctrine of development, as given by our theosophical cosmology, you know that the physical body was already present on the old Saturn and underwent further degrees of perfection through the evolution of the sun, moon and earth. You know that in the second stage, on the old sun, the etheric body was added, which is therefore one degree lower in development than the physical body today. You know that on the old moon the astral body was added; it has only the moon evolution behind it and that part of the earth evolution that we have gone through so far. The I is only added on earth; it is the “baby” among the four members of human nature. Actually, the wisdom we spoke of yesterday, which permeates the group souls of animality, is imprinted in the physical body of the human being; it has passed over into the individual physical body of the human being, which is built full of wisdom. The etheric body of the human being is only on the way to its completion; in the course of its earthly development, it will absorb everything it needs to fulfill itself.

When the Earth has reached its goal, it will pass into the astral state and then into even higher states, and later transform into a planet that will replace the Earth and which we call Jupiter. Then the etheric body of man will be completed in its kind, as on Earth the physical body of man is completed in its kind. In the next incarnation of the Earth, which we are accustomed to calling the future Venus, the astral body of man will have reached its completion; it will then stand at the stage at which the physical body stands today and at which the ether body will stand in the next planetary state. And finally, when the Earth has reached the volcanic state, then our I will have reached its completion. So that we can actually say: On earth, only the physical body of man is human; in the next planetary state of our earth, the etheric body of man will become human; then it will be impregnated with what the earth can give to man: with love.

What the physical body of man carries today as its characteristic properties, it owes to the old moon. In occultism, the old moon is called the Cosmos of Wisdom. Back then on the old moon, what you now find in the physical body of man was gradually prepared. And just as what our physical body is was imbued with wisdom on the moon, so what you will find in the later Jupiter state of the earth is being prepared through the Cosmos of Love: the etheric body is completely permeated by the element of love. And just as we today admire a piece of bone in the physical body in its wisdom, so will the people of Jupiter admire the etheric body, because it is permeated with love in the same way as the physical body on earth is shaped by wisdom.

If you hold on to this, you will come to the realization that only man's physical body is truly human, only truly at the human level. The human etheric body is not yet at the human level, it is still at the level of animality, and the human astral body is still at the level of plant-like existence. When you are sleeping at night and your astral body is raised out, then the physical and ether bodies sink into a dreamless sleep; this is the state that plants are in all the time. In relation to its state of consciousness, the human being's astral body is at the level of plant-ness. The I is only at the level of the mineral kingdom. The state of consciousness of the human being is definitely on the level of the mineral kingdom. Try to examine yourself according to this truth, to see what insights you can have; try to recognize them correctly. What can a person understand? He can understand the physical laws of the mineral kingdom, according to which he can build machines and factories, erect buildings and so on. All this happens according to the physical laws of the mineral kingdom. With plants, man rightly says that he cannot grasp life itself with the intellect. The time will come when man will understand plants just as he understands minerals today; then he will also be able to build plants as he builds his cathedrals and houses and machines according to the laws of the mineral kingdom. All the laws of the mineral kingdom are imbued with the I.

Science is waiting for its ideal to be fulfilled, to produce living beings in the laboratory. It will not be able to do so unless humanity has reached a certain necessary stage of moral development. It would be a bad thing if humanity were already able to do so today. Just as one makes a clock according to mineral laws, or builds a house, so in the future man will produce living beings according to the laws of the living. But then he must be able to impress life itself upon the living thing. Whoever stands at the laboratory bench must be able to transfer from himself those vibrations, let us call them, that are in his own etheric body, to that which is to be animated. If he is a good man, he transmits good; if he is a bad man, he transmits evil. But there is a law in occultism: the knowledge of the White Lodge, which is called the secret of generation, will not be delivered to humanity until man has learned the secret of sacramentalism.

“Sacramentality” is an expression of the fact that human action must be imbued with moral perfection, with holiness. Only when the laboratory bench where he does his work becomes an altar for him and his actions become sacred, only then will he be mature enough to receive this knowledge. Consider people today with all their materialism – how far removed their laboratory bench is from an altar!

You see how man's consciousness is raised from mineral consciousness to plant consciousness. Again it is an occult sentence: Man will only attain the state of plant consciousness when he is no longer able to separate his own good from the good of all other people. As long as the individual seeks his own good at the expense of other people, the condition has not yet been reached that consciousness could be raised one step higher.

Thus, with the physical body, we are only at the stage of the actual human being, with the ether body still at the stage of animality, with the astral body at the stage of plant-like existence and with the I at the stage of the mineral. Of these truths, we want to hold on to one: we stand with our ether body on the level of the animal. The ether body transforms itself more and more during our earthly existence to the level of the human being. More and more, it permeates itself with that love that can no longer separate the good of the individual from the good of others. Just as we first developed the physical body and brought it to the level of the human being, so now the ether body, and later also the astral body and the ego, will rise to the level of the human being. The ego is still at the mineral level; it has only been incorporated into the human being on earth.

Let us now consider the relationship between our soul, that is, our sentient soul, our mind or emotional soul, our consciousness soul and the spirit self or manas enclosed in the consciousness soul, and our etheric body. Our etheric body itself is at the level of the animal. Below (written on the board - see diagram: from bottom to top) at the level of the human being, we have the physical body. We will leave out the etheric body for the time being (see points in the diagram). Our astral body, in which the sentient soul is enclosed - this is the first link in our soul -, we have at the level of the plant; then we have the mind or emotional soul. All this is on the level of the plant. Further up we then have the I or consciousness soul, in which the spirit self or manas is included, insofar as it can already be found in humans today.

We have initially left out the etheric body at the level of the animal. Now we must be clear about the fact that in every limb of the human being, the other limbs are expressed in a certain way. Thus, the human physical body has expressed within itself the revelation of the physical body itself. We find the physical principle expressed in the physical body when we look at the sense organs. In the eye we have a kind of photographic camera, in the ear a kind of piano. In short, the physical principle expresses itself in the sense organs. When we look at the human glands, we find the etheric body expressed in them; in the nervous system we have the expression of the astral body, and in the blood we have the expression of the ego. “Blood is a very special juice!” Whoever has the blood has the human ego. If the devil has human blood, he has the ego.

In the same way, every other limb expresses itself in the physical body of the human being to the extent that it protrudes into it. The blood pulsates unconsciously because the I, to the extent that it is active in it, is unconscious of its physical processes. Just as the nature of the other limbs is expressed in the physical body, so too is it expressed in the etheric body, only there it is expressed not “humanly” but “animal-like,” and in the form of certain animals, in a form that bears a certain similarity to our outer animal forms. Thus, what lies beneath the etheric body, the physical body, expresses itself like a silhouette; this part of the etheric body, in which the physical limb of the human being expresses itself, is called the “human being” (it is written on the board). The astral body, the sentient soul, which expresses itself in the etheric body, is called the “lion” because of the similarity of its etheric form; the mind soul, which expresses itself in the etheric body is called the “bull” or the cow, and the consciousness soul with the spirit self is called the “eagle” because of the similarity that its etheric form has for the clairvoyant eye.

So here you have (in diagram form) the four signs of the apocalypse: man, lion, bull and eagle – as the four expressions of the human being in the etheric body. You can see from this that those of our ancestors who conceived these profound symbols, these animal images for the human being, did not create them out of their imagination, philosophy or speculation, or out of any kind of ingenuity, but out of the world of facts, out of the occult world of facts.

Now we must realize that these four expressions do not emerge in the same way in every person; one of the expressions predominates in one person and the other in another. However, we must consider the development of all humanity. If you look at where the physical body expresses itself most strongly, we find the strongest expression in the declining, red race, in the Indians, in the particular development of the bone system that prevails here. If you want to see where the etheric body physically expresses itself particularly, you have to look for it in another human race: in the black race, in the glandular system. In the secretion of carbon you find an expression of the plant nature. The people in whom the nervous system is particularly strongly expressed on the physical level and with it the sensitive, are to be found in the malatic race, and the race in which the blood system is particularly expressed is the Mongolian race. The part of man that begins to develop the principle of manas is found in the Caucasian race. Thus you see that the classification of the human races is based on occult truths. What is found in the present-day human being is distributed throughout humanity, with one or the other predominating or receding in one human species or another.

You also find such differences in the etheric body of humans. When the clairvoyant gaze looks at the etheric body, as the physical gaze looks at the physical body, it finds humans divided into human-humans, lion-humans, bull-humans, and eagle-humans. Their group ego is astral in nature. On the astral plane, the clairvoyant finds the human group ego standing between the animal group ego and the human individual ego. The further back in time we go, the more we find that people take on one of these four forms in relation to their etheric body, and we assign one human group soul to each of these four soul groups: a human group soul to one, a lion group soul to the other, a bull group soul to the third, and an eagle group soul to the fourth. You would only get a wrong idea of these if you were to press these names, which are taken from physical animal forms, too hard. This etheric body of the lion people is much more similar to the group soul of the lions than to the individual lion here on the physical plane. Christianity has been presented by the evangelists as not being like ordinary human souls, but as comprising whole groups of people. This is due to the similarity that Christian esotericism attributed to the souls of the individual evangelists. We shall understand this more clearly when we see that the human being is on the one hand in a descent and on the other hand in an ascent. Here on earth, at the lowest point of materialism, the human being acquires the disposition of the individual soul. Man has descended from the ancient times when the individual group souls were more distinctly distinguished: man-man, lion-man, bull-man, eagle-man. When people ascend again in the future, they will retain their individual soul and develop it to a higher level with a higher consciousness of what they previously only had in a dim consciousness, the four group souls. That is why in Christianity the evangelists are given these qualities.

Let us hold on to this concept of the group souls of people for a while longer. These group souls lived much more in space than in time. When we look at animal group souls, we say that when we take a group of lions or a group of whales, they have their common group soul on the astral plane. But when we look at human group souls, we have to consider time more. A human group soul is born in the etheric, so to speak, at the boundary between the physical and the astral planes at a certain time and in turn transforms itself in a certain time. These four types of group soul that we have discussed are only the four main types, but there are countless intermediate stages. We have only indicated the most characteristic forms of man, lion, bull, eagle, which can occur in all possible mixtures.

Let us consider a group of people, say, for example, a tribe; let us take any of the old Central European tribes, for example the tribe of the Cheruscians. Such a tribe comes into being once, and then it passes away. The materialistic world observer sees in what the tribe of the Cheruscans is actually only something abstract, a concept that holds them together. But that is something unreal. The occultist sees in the tribe of the Cherusci a group soul, which comes into being, is born, at the time when the tribe of the Cherusci enters history; it grows as the power of the Cherusci grows, and it dies when the Cherusci disappear from history. Behind the developing tribe of the Cherusci, the occultist sees an evolving etheric being. Now there is a difference between an etheric being and a physical being here on earth. A physical being is born on the physical plane, grows, reaches a peak in life and dies again. Birth and death is the characteristic of the beings on the physical plane. This is not the case with the beings that live on the higher planes. If we follow animal group souls on the astral plane through thousands of years, their arising and passing away cannot be expressed by the words 'birth' and 'death'. Something quite different underlies it. It is based on transformation, metamorphosis. If you, with clairvoyant powers, were to encounter an animal group soul on the astral plane today and remember one of its previous embodiments, how it was with this animal group soul 1500 years ago, it will not appear to you as it would if you were to look at a younger person. You will, however, see the group soul passing through youth, middle age, and old age, but it does not give up consciousness in old age; it does not die. It is constantly transforming itself without passing through death. You can trace the animal group soul back to times immemorial – you will only encounter metamorphosis, not birth and death.

Something similar is the case with group souls such as that of the Cherusci tribe. When the Cherusci tribe appears on the physical plane as a number of physical people, the Cherusci soul has just formed; but it has not been born, but has transformed itself from another time, transformed. It grows with the power of the Cherusci, reaches its peak when the Cherusci tribe reaches its peak in history, and when the Cherusci tribe degenerates and disappears on the physical plane, the Cherusci soul rises anew in youth to become the soul of another tribe; it metamorphoses. Physical birth and physical death do not exist when we consider souls on higher planes. Birth and death, as we know them, only exist on the physical plane, not on the higher planes. Occult wisdom has expressed this well and has paid great attention to numbers. They have tried to determine an average number of times that a group soul, as it belongs to a particular human community, arises, metamorphoses out of another, grows and reaches its peak, only to undergo a descending development and then transform into another group soul. If we assume an average human lifespan of 75 years – calculated in lunar years – and multiply it by seven, we get the lifespan of a human group soul in its four types until its next transformation. Seven here refers to generations. Taking into account that we are dealing with lunar years, we arrive at a figure of approximately 500 years. And so it was said in occultism: The life of a group soul lasts 500 years; after 500 years it becomes another, it gives birth to itself anew without losing its consciousness.

If we look at the ego of such a group soul and look for a means of expression for the ego externally in the physical, it is indeed the blood. For the occultist, blood is the expression of fire: a substance glowing with fire. Just as the human physical body is the expression of the earth, the etheric body the expression of water, and the astral body the expression of air, so the I, not yet chained to selfishness, is the expression of fire. We therefore say – we will discuss this further tomorrow – that through selfishness, blood has found death. The human ego “consumes itself in its own fire,” through itself. This is an occult expression. Only when man overcomes egoism does he attain immortality. The human group ego is consumed by its own fire. When 500 years have passed, it burns and creates a new form out of itself. In occultism, this was represented in such a way that the group ego generally lives for 500 years, then it burns and is reanimated from its own fire, and this was called the “bird Phoenix”. The beautiful saga of the bird Phoenix has its factual background here. The Phoenix is the group ego with the characteristics of the four types, which burns itself after seven generations and is restored - one generation calculated at 75 lunar years of age.

This is the real background of the Phoenix legend. Here you have new proof that such ancient legends as that of the Phoenix are created from the deepest occult facts. It is not intended to speculate here, but to show what has been taught in the occult schools throughout the centuries, and what is a real actual experience, for which the occult signs and seals are the expression.

Again and again, when we hear such expressions of occult truths and compare them with what humanity has preserved for us in its signs and symbols, we are reminded of how much human consciousness had already created before it became mind-consciousness. Man likes to believe that we have come a long way today. But his intellect lags behind the creative consciousness of the pre-world, which, however, only the initiates had, and they hid it in the legends. The symbols of the four animals are not invented; not the thought is the starting point, the origin of it, but the vision.

When I say that the group soul is in the etheric at the boundary between the physical and astral planes, you must not imagine a boundary line. If we start from the physical plane, we have (as shown here) seven subdivisions of the physical plane; then there are seven subdivisions of the astral plane. Of these, the three lowest correspond to the three highest of the physical plane. We must consider the astral plane and the physical plane pushed together in such a way that the three uppermost parts of the physical plane are at the same time the three lowest parts of the astral plane. We can speak of a fringe zone, which is the one that our souls cannot leave after death if they are still tied to the earth by desires. It is called Kamaloka.

So we have definitely seen in the occult signs, symbols and seals, which we have chosen here as the first examples, something gained from the depths of the occult facts, and you would be quite mistaken if you were to ignore the deep wisdom of the past in the occult schools or to consider it in any way superseded by our modern wisdom. Where the wisdom of occult teaching comes to you in signs or symbols, it will always present itself in such a way as to be confirmed by immediate occult observation. An example of how the teaching of occultism has worked in comparatively recent times is that symbolic meanings have been read into names and words, but in such a way that there was a real meaning underlying them: facts of the higher world. We will not go back to the origin of word formation in the sense of philology; what I am about to say is not something that you could verify with philology. Even if philology were to find it wrong, the word symbolism would still be right.

The further you ascend from the physical plane through the astral world to the devachan world, the more everything presents itself to you as a mirror image of the physical plane, which you first have to learn to read. The easiest way for the student to learn this is by numbers. Suppose you have the number 543 here on the physical plane, this number can be read as a mirror image on the astral plane, i.e. 345. Likewise, all other things and events are to be read as mirror images. I will give you a blatant example: Here on the physical plane, you can see how the old chicken lays the egg and how the young chicken develops from the egg. If you look at the same event on the astral plane, you have to go backwards: first you see the young chicken, then the chicken gets smaller and smaller and finally merges with the egg. Time also runs backwards. You can see how extremely confusing this must be for the student at first glance. The passions that emanate from the person are seen as in a tableau; they radiate from the center. The reflected passions appear as if you were being stormed by animals. The lower passions man sees as all kinds of wild animals, as mice, rats and so on around him. If the student has not learned this, and the first experience of it comes to him when he sees his own passions rushing at him as mice and rats, then pathological conditions such as persecution mania and so on can easily occur.

What I have now expressed as a fact about the relationship between the higher and lower worlds was symbolically expressed in the theory of evolution in a play on words. When human beings entered into their existence on earth, they entered from a spiritual state into a sensual state - through Eve. In Eve, people saw the state where spiritual humanity became physical, and therefore sinful. If humanity is now to be led back up to the spiritual, and if the opposite is to be expressed to the woman who brought mortality into the world, then that which is to bring the immortal back into humanity must be expressed in reverse; the name must be reversed. Therefore the Angel of God addresses Mary with the words “Hail Mary!” Eve becomes Ave; this reversal has a symbolic character. Whatever a more or less incorrect philology may say about it, it does not matter. What matters is to show how the symbolic in the wording can work in occultism. The aim of this wording was to make the person, by pronouncing the words, aware of the occult fact that the physical and spiritual worlds have opposite directions in their currents.

This has a very deep meaning. Do not see anything arbitrary behind it. The best you can see behind it is that people were taught to recognize occult laws in their language. By letting people do such exercises to recognize the occult laws in language, they are consciously or unconsciously working on their occult training. The principle of symbolism is at the same time a principle of training.