Esoteric Christianity and the Guiding Spirits of Humanity

GA 130 — 29 January 1911, Cologne

II. The Significance of the Year 1250

Why do we need Theosophy? As living beings on the physical plane, we are on a descent. Our body is not the same as in ancient times, our bodies are less ensouled, less sustained by the spirit. Just as the plant is permeated by water, so too was the etheric body active in us in ancient times. It permeated the physical body with its constructive powers. Today it has lost its power over the body. Salvation is only possible if we strengthen the spiritual in us. When the astral body permeates with the spiritual, then the human race will also become healthier. It is fate that the human physical body crumbles, but the etheric body can become stronger and have an effect on it. Now, however, people are heading straight for decadence. Theosophy works to revitalize and heal body and soul. What is particularly effective in healing is that which cannot be perceived by the senses or the brain alone. It seems nonsense to the world when we say that we should focus our thoughts on things that cannot be proven externally. But it is childish to want to prove theosophy by means of today's science.

In our thinking about the external world there is an element that is necessarily destructive and has a destructive effect on the physical body. Sleep improves this. Many phenomena of today's cultural life have a destructive effect, for example, in particular, the light images, which certainly damage the etheric body. Light images also excite sensuality. Real art can sensualize what comes from the higher worlds for the benefit of people. In the theosophical world view, we work in union with supersensible powers. Nothing gives a firm inner foothold like Theosophy. Some slave with a firm spiritual foothold in the time of the pharaohs and the Egyptian priesthood was safer in life than many a person in the present time. Today people strive for the stereotypical, for authority. But only through their own inner activity in the awakened inner being can the soul find a firm foothold. The theosophical mood gives people a hold and makes them content, because they have a firm support in their own inner being through what theosophy gives them, which is as necessary for the soul as daily bread is for the body.

We live on a planet that is heading towards disintegration. Gradually, lakes and rivers will dry up. Such changes are altering the face of the earth. Geology already indicates that we are already in a disintegrating epoch. The renowned geologist Sucß confirms that instead of rising, invigorating processes in the earth, decomposition processes are taking place. This is already happening throughout the great last developmental epoch of the earth. It is particularly intense in the small one since 1250. Some researchers and people who are ingenious in their field show some glimmer of insight. For example, Burdach. He notes a change since the Renaissance, but he knows nothing of the change in direction of the earth's axis at the time when the spirits of personality withdrew.

Different spiritual entities intervene in different ways at different times. This gives each age its own character, just as each age of life has its own special task. It would have a destructive, undermining effect if one were to introduce something that is not appropriate to the times, for example old Egyptian teachings that were anchored in the atavistic view of the people and have been preserved in a transformed form as a belief in a supersensible world. It is not what the mind sees, not the external world, that is the object of belief; this has its strong roots in earlier experiences of the soul. The spirits of personality, the archai, are not visible, and yet they are there and intervene. There was a particularly strong intervention of the archai in the Egyptian-Babylonian period. At that time, the spirits of personality were particularly attracted by the earth sphere. Now it is different. Now they are least attracted or sympathetically touched by what is happening on earth. They no longer intervene, not even in the character of people. Since the year 1250, things have changed. In the thirteenth century, an important and significant transformation of the earth's conditions took place. Since then, the archai have ceased to intervene so strongly. They withdrew to acts in the higher worlds. Before that, their activity had been more on the earth itself. Such events are to be appreciated accordingly, for since then other laws prevail.

All progressive spirits in the universe face opponents, in this case those who are retarded spirits of personality. These opponents, the evil spirits of personality, now gain the field. This is connected with the change in the position of the earth's axis around 1250. After all, the earth describes a conical movement in the course of millennia, a dancing movement. Since the fifth or sixth millennium BC, the Earth's axis has turned more and more. Scientifically, this is called the advance of the vernal point, the equinox. The distribution of spring, summer, autumn and winter was also different in the past, more even.

The love of personality, everything connected with it, has its good and bad sides. This also brought about the Renaissance, when it produced people who lived entirely in their personalities. It was all vehement towards the thirteenth century and long afterwards, well into the Renaissance, both in artistic natures and in Cesare Borgia and Pope Alexander VI. It had also been the same with the leaders of the Crusades. During that time, everything took place under the sign of the spirits of personality. The whole of history at that time is permeated by the evil spirits of personality. Man was, as it were, possessed by the spirits of personality.

The souls incarnated in the thirteenth century knew that people could not free themselves from their personality, and the opposing forces gradually made people as materialistic as possible. The people, who were permeated by the evil spirits of personality, could no longer look up to the spiritual worlds. In those days, the connection with the spiritual world was established through faith, and the scholastic church scholars also emphasized this. Faith and knowledge were now strictly separated. This continued to have an effect over the centuries. Kant was one of the last stragglers of that time, his followers were only parrot-like repeaters. Luther, however, still felt the vague influence of the evil spirits of the personality. He threw the inkwell against the materialistic spirit of the time.

This epoch is over. We live in the time of the archangels, with thoughts that can reach up into the region where the archangels and the opponents of the archangels are. The opponents of the archangels no longer assert themselves over great personalities as the archai used to. There are no longer personalities who, like Leonardo da Vinci, are in contact with the good spirits of the personality or, like Pope Alexander VI, with the bad ones. Today people are more stereotyped. Now they are chasing abstract ideals. More and more, these are ideas, opinions, feelings, through which people are obsessed by the opponents of the archangels. As a result, people become enthusiastic about abstract ideals, become fantasists, no longer love their own eternal self, but are driven by all kinds of lusts and passions. They merely cling to the earthly personality, they rave about some unreal fantasy. But only the striving for the spiritual world can truly fill the souls with content.

A secondary effect of the evil spirits of personality arises from wine. Wine becomes an opponent in the human body itself. Abstinence from wine is a consequence for anyone who wants to penetrate into the spiritual worlds. But enthusiastic anti-alcoholism and vegetarianism belong to the partial ideals. The same applies, for example, to enthusiasm for Greek physical culture, for the Olympic Games and so on. Today's fad for cold ablutions is also part of this, all enthusiasm for the physically tangible and the physically less tangible. This increases from the reverie of drunken people to the wild propensity for crime, because the opponents of the archai work in this way in the sensual world.

Each person must feel their place in the world, must experience something of what is surging into humanity in the characterized way. Otherwise, instability, insecurity, and loss of balance will become general. People who fluctuate between enthusiasm and materialism find no orientation. There was, for example, a Wagner admirer – you can be a fan of Wagner and understand nothing about it – who went barefoot to Bayreuth, then he became an ascetic, he slept on a wooden board with pebbles, and finally he became an opponent of Wagner together with Nietzsche. Instability of the soul expresses itself in neurasthenia; in contrast to this, a firm support is needed within the soul.

But we need something different from what people in the Middle Ages needed, for whom faith was enough. A seven-year-old child needs something different from a person who is seven times seven years old. Theosophy can tear us out of the passive mold that supports us without making us lose our footing. With stormy strides, the outward splendor of our civilization will crumble. The arts, sciences, everything will fall apart. The forms cannot remain, they scatter: time and the spirit are stronger than man with his desires and passions. Theosophy is a necessity, and the theosophist should realize within himself that it is a necessity.