The Human Soul's Tripartite Structure and Spiritual Destiny

GA 158 — 9 November 1914, Dornach

First Lecture

I would like to contribute to a deeper understanding of what has already been said, more or less in connection with the development of our building, so that we can add more in the future, which will be better understood through such an episodic consideration, as today's is intended to be.

We know that the human soul appears to us as divided into the sentient soul, the mind or emotional soul, and the consciousness soul. We know that the human I works in these three soul members, as described in “Theosophy”. Now, there is really a lot going on in human nature that does not penetrate into consciousness as it happens. It is precisely spiritual-scientific knowledge that can gradually lead to much of what lies in the depths of the human soul being illuminated by the light of consciousness. But when the human soul lives in this way, it illuminates, as it were, only a small part of the entire horizon of the soul, and below this horizon lies much that has deep, deep significance for the soul, but is not conscious in ordinary life. Above all, let us now turn our gaze to something that does not usually come to consciousness. For modern man it is actually quite salutary that it does not come to consciousness. But we shall see later that this was not always the case for all human beings. If only the ordinary everyday consciousness of man were to deepen a little and were able to bring up what, I might say, is only one degree more unconscious than ordinary consciousness, then the human soul would very soon discover that it is the trinity of which has been spoken, that it is really not a unity without further ado, but a trinity. I have indicated in the writing 'How to Attain Knowledge of Higher Worlds' that when a person begins to advance towards the spiritual worlds, he, as it were, falls apart into a trinity. And as soon as one, as I said, peers a little into this, as it were, covered part of consciousness, one very soon notices that this threefoldness of sentient soul, mind or emotional soul and consciousness soul is there. Below the threshold of consciousness – and not very deep at that for the present human being – there really is a kind of soul realm that is permeated not by a unity, but by a kind of three-ness, by the radiance of this three-ness, so that in the moment when the human being pushes back represses what he has basically only attained so completely since the second half of the fourth post-Atlantic period and so clearly only after the beginning of the fifth post-Atlantic period, as soon as he represses this, he can distinguish exactly between three worlds or realms in his soul. One area is one that is more inspired, into which dream-like, dreamy inspirations come. The second area is that through which the human being, as it were, ensouls himself, is built up in the physical parts. And the third area is where he receives consciousness of the world.

The first area is that into which inspirations penetrate, dream-like inspirations that fill the soul, which is connected to the sentient soul. A second area, where the soul, as it were, builds up its body through its own inner formations and creations, is connected to the mind or emotional soul. This is the inner workmaster, the master builder, we could also say the blacksmith of the physical body. And the third, the mediation of external knowledge, which comes into contact with the world, which is connected to the senses, is connected to the consciousness soul. We can therefore say: connected to physical forces.

A soul trinity, as it were, reigns at the bottom of the human soul, and this trinity is contrasted with the reign and work of that which strives towards unity. I will indicate this by contrasting one particular soul realm with another here (see the following drawing). This realm of the soul works in a certain relation entirely in itself. But it works naturally in a unified way, so to speak, in the sense that the soul is its temperament, its character, which rests deep down in the soul, but as a unified soul. I would like to describe this with this: unified soul, in contrast to the trinity.

The way our soul is now, this unity soul cannot escape a certain dull life if it is not, as it were, illuminated and illuminated. And in our time, the illumination always emanates from some form of the Mystery of Golgotha, so that I can symbolize for you what radiates in some way into the unity soul: some form in which the Mystery of Golgotha radiates into the unity soul. Over the years, we have really done a great deal to gradually gain an idea of how infinitely vast everything connected with the Mystery of Golgotha is. You can therefore imagine that when the Mystery of Golgotha radiates into the human soul in any form, it is always only a certain level, a certain degree of the Mystery of Golgotha. But we imagine that because the soul of unity is something that broods over things, as it were, but contains something particularly valuable for our time, this unity must be permeated in some form by the Mystery of Golgotha.

Now that which emanates from the various centers of inspiration and initiation in the world extends into every soul, and that also belongs to the subconscious influences in the human soul. You see, the effect of the Mystery of Golgotha is all-embracing, universal, but the human being, the human soul, can only absorb this Mystery of Golgotha in a certain way. I have often spoken in the past about the initiation center, which works particularly in the depths of the soul so that the depths of the soul are properly prepared to be permeated by the Mystery of Golgotha. I have often said that the initiate Scythianos always stands before this initiation center. Let us assume, then, that the soul has been prepared in the unified soul for what comes from the Mystery of Golgotha, ready to receive it through what works unconsciously in each soul from Scythianos.

In this way we have, as it were, split the human soul into two realms: one tripartite, and the other unitary; I would say, into a realm that is more soul-oriented and one that is more , I might say, a realm that takes up the forces of the Mystery of Golgotha into its natural foundation on the one hand and the influences of the Scythian on the other.

Now this unity cannot easily unite with the trinity, that would not work, and that is why this trinity remains below the threshold of consciousness in present-day people. This trinity is, as it were, drowned out; the consciousness of it must be extinguished. If the soul could really descend to the triad, it would immediately feel itself as a triad, not as one. It would say: There is something in me, inspiring me, something that builds me up, that forges me together, and something that connects me to the outside world. But this trinity must be, as it were, extinguished, overshadowed by something that brings the human being to say: I do not distinguish the three. — So something must radiate into the three that makes the soul not feel the three within itself, extinguishing this three, allowing it to be, as it were, like a foggy formation.

You see, then there can be a connection between what should live in the soul as a unity and what is in the soul as a trinity, when there is a communication, a kind of exchange, a kind of soul trunk, as it were, that leads to the extinguished trinity and that emanates from what is unity but is irradiated from two sides, so to speak, is illuminated in such a way that it is not just a dull, even, character- and temperament-related unity of nature, but that it is uniformly illuminated by what the human being should be: by the consciousness of the human soul in its connection with the divine-spiritual being. Actually, I have recorded something that lies at the bottom of every human soul. Not a single human soul in our time can exist without all these things being present in it.

But now imagine the following. I have repeatedly emphasized here, in order to show what our building should be, that what lives in the human soul is also expressed outwardly, so to speak, in the outer evolution of the earth. If there is such an area in the human soul that really represents a kind of trinity, which in today's people is already, so to speak, covered by the ordinary consciousness, then we must once find a stage of evolution where we encounter it externally, that the soul really feels itself as a trinity, as it were, divided into three soul members. In other words, there must once have been a people who felt these three soul-members as separate and felt that basically the unity was felt much less in the soul than the trinity, since the trinity was still thought of in connection with the cosmos. These people were in Europe and left behind an important cultural monument, which I have spoken about before. These people, who once, in the place in Europe where they had to be, felt this trinity in the soul, are the Finnish people. And the expression of this cultural level is laid down in Kalewala. In what is presented in Kalewala, there is a clear awareness of the triad of the soul, so that the ancient seers, on whom Kalewala is based, felt: There is something inspiring in the world, a link of my soul is connected to it, my sentient soul. It tends towards it, its powers go towards it, it receives impulses from there. This people or these ancient seers sensed something human-divine or human-heroic in what inspires the sentient soul. And they called it Wäinämöinen. This is nothing other than what inspires the sentient soul in the cosmos. All the destinies described in Kalewala as the destinies of Wäinämöinen express that this consciousness was once present in a people who had a large spread in the northeast of the European area and who felt the three soul members separately and the sentient soul inspired by Wäinämöinen.

Likewise, these people, these ancient seers, felt that the mind or emotional soul is, as it were, an extra link in the soul that receives its impulses for forging, felt that what forges in the human soul, what builds it up, receives from another elementary, heroic being, from Ilmarinen. Just as Wäinämöinen corresponds to the sentient soul, so Ilmarinen corresponds to the mind or mind soul in Kalewala. If you read the lecture about Kalewala, you can find all this in it.

And it is equally important to note that these people felt that while the consciousness soul was felt in those days as that which makes man a conqueror on the physical plane in the first place, these ancient seers in Lemminkäinen felt a being that is connected to the forces of the physical plane, an elemental, heroic being in the inspirer of the consciousness soul. Thus these three heroic figures, one might say, come from the ancient Finnish people, speaking by analogy with other epics, inspiring the threefold nature of the soul.

The wonderful thing is the connection between Ilmarinen and what is forged there. I have already hinted at it. Man himself is forged out of the elements of nature. This being, forged out of all the atoms of nature, pulverized and forged together, is depicted in a magnificent tableau in the forging of the Sampo in Kalewala. And that this formation of the human being out of these three soul-members has once happened, then must go into a pralaya, as it were, and then comes forth again, is also depicted in Kalewala: how the Sampo is lost and found again, as it were, like that which is first covered by darkness of consciousness.

And now let us imagine that to the south, to the southeast, we can say, there is another people who first developed those soul qualities in ancient times of which I have spoken, the unity in the soul, that which expresses the unity in the character, the emotional qualities, in the temperament. This people is a Slavic people, while the people facing them are the Finnish people. This Slavic people receives its influences from Skythianos, who also lived for a time in ancient times, surrounded by the ancient Scythian people. It is not at all necessary that a highly developed people also live around an initiation center, but rather, in the course of development, what is necessary must happen. And the penetration of a certain form of the Mystery of Golgotha is the penetration of the Greek-Byzantine culture into Slavdom. What I have drawn for you here as a center of Greek-Byzantine culture, you can safely take as Constantinople on the map of Europe, because that is basically Constantinople.

So now we have souls that find themselves impregnated with a Slavic basic type. These are souls that, on the one hand, are connected with that which can lead to a unified being through the Mystery of Golgotha, which can prepare for Christianity in unified souls, and on the other hand, receive the Mystery of Golgotha in a very specific form, something like the inspiration, the influence of the Mystery of Golgotha, as it emanated from the Byzantine-Greek culture.

But now something else must come, from a certain point, as it were. What was there in the Finnish people as the division, the separation into the three elements, the sediment of which is so magnificently contained in Kalevala, that must be wiped out. It can only be eradicated if an external influence comes, can only be eradicated by the advance of a people or a part of a people that is predisposed from the outset to feel not the trinity but the unity in the soul, not the unity that one receives from the mystery of Golgotha but the unity that one has by nature, as it were. If you look at the Finnish people, you find that they are particularly predisposed to develop an awareness of the trinity. And this trinity cannot be expressed more meaningfully in its relationship to the cosmos than it has been in Kalewala. But then in the north it had to be whitewashed, overcast by what, as it were, extinguishes the awareness of this trinity. A tribe was pressing down there that carried in a natural way in its soul what was there at that time as the striving for unity, which was expressed in a completely different way, at a completely different stage in Goethe's “Faust”, but also in Faust in general, something that is unaware of the threefold nature of the soul, that strives for the unity of the ego. Here, at a primitive stage, it has a destructive effect on the three soul members.

Now the Finnish people were one such people, who still felt naturally, otherwise they would not have felt the three soul members. That which flows along, extinguishing the trinity, this flowing in, pushing in, was felt as a r r r, and because it was felt as something that, one might say, is best expressed in occult language in the letters, in the sound u u o, so that one would like to say: It comes close, one must actually be afraid of it, so it breathes in the rruuo and settles, which is always felt by the Tau, t, when it penetrates into the human soul. Just as the penetration into the human soul of the ancient Jehovah is expressed by the s, by the Hebrew “Shin”, so this penetration into the soul is generally expressed by the s-sound. All this is connected with what penetrates into the soul and takes hold in the soul; all this pushes towards i, the meaning of which is well known. In the Finnish people, it is connected with rruu. That is why they felt this rutsi, ruotsi, and that is why they called the peoples who were pushing down there, the Rutsi, Ruotsi. And gradually the Slavs adopted this name, and because they associated themselves with what was pushing down from above, what the Finns called, they called themselves Rutsi, which later became the name Russians.

So you see, all that is told externally in history had to be that these peoples sitting down here called the Varangian tribes, which were actually Norman-Germanic tribes that had to join with the Slavic tribes. This is based on something that had to be, that was necessary due to the nature of the human soul. And so it came about that later in the east of Europe the element of the Russian entered into the European folk-tale. In the element of the Russian all that I have spoken of really lives. Above all, the Norman-Germanic element lives in it, even living in the name from which the name Russian has come, because it has come by the route I have indicated.

In a profound way, Kalewala expresses that the greatness of the Finnish people is based on the fact that they actually prepare unity in the trinity, prepare for the acceptance of that unity by extinguishing the trinity, and that unity is no longer only human, but is divine, and the divine hero of the Mystery of Golgotha lives in it.

In order for a group of people to be able to absorb what comes to them, they must first be prepared. In this way we get an impression of what must happen inwardly so that what happens outwardly can be fulfilled in evolution. I said that Kalevala expresses in a magnificent way that the Finnish people had to provide this preparation, in that the mystery of Golgotha is introduced into Kalevala in a peculiar way at the end. Christ appears at the end of Kalevala, but by throwing his impulse into Finnish life, Wäinämöinen goes out of the country, which expresses that the originally great, the meaningful, that has come into Europe through the Finnish element, is a preparatory stage for Christianity and receives Christianity like a message from outside.

Just as we see in the individual human being that he or she must be prepared in an extraordinarily complicated way, so to speak, so that his soul can then find what it needs from the most diverse sides in order to live in a particular incarnation, so it is with nations. A nation is not something quite so simple and homogeneous, but a nation is something in which many things converge. The people who live over there in the east, all of this has come together in them. And all that is inwardly spiritual in them, one could say, is outwardly hinted at, even if only in a slight way. I have said that there must be a soul strain in this nation that leads from below to above, or from above to below, if it is a connecting soul strain. This was present in a mighty road that went from the Black Sea to the Gulf of Finland, and on which an exchange took place between the Greek-Byzantine cultural element and the natural element of the Rutsi.

Man has to go through different things in the course of his various incarnations. One incarnation must always build upon the other. The human being can only do this by drawing upon the substance, the material, of which the individual peoples and their members are formed, and by truly drawing upon the forces that will later enable human evolution to take place. There comes a time when a human soul must find in its incarnations a physical body that has been formed from the forces I have described here. And what is so easily said, that a person is born a Russian, has a profound, a colossal significance. That a person is born a Russian means that, through the various incarnations, he has arrived at a point in his earthly career where he can only experience what he can by passing through a life between birth and death in a physical body that is composed in such a way. If one did not live through it in such a body, then one would lack something in what one acquires from incarnation to incarnation. Foolish people – I say this without any nuance of feeling, but as a technical term – have repeatedly spoken of the saying: 'The world is best understood in its truth when it appears in its simplicity'. That is not true, it is just convenient. Deep minds have always said, most recently and most forcefully Ralph Waldo Emerson, that one only penetrates to the truth of the facts when one recognizes them in all their complexity. It is not so simple to understand what is alive in the world and what is connected with the whole evolution of the world.

And just as it is on the eastern half of the European peninsula that souls are prepared to experience something special, so it is for all other cases on the earth's surface, so the individual national characters are prepared in a complicated way. Now, above all, remember one thing that we have become sufficiently familiar with in the course of our spiritual studies.

To a certain extent, when a person has passed through the gate of death, by looking back on his last life on earth, he is dependent on what he has experienced in his last life on earth. We know that the connections with earlier lives on earth play a role in the afterlife for many years. But that has to be the case. The human being must pass through a physical incarnation so that during the time between death and a new birth, certain memories of this previous incarnation are present and certain impulses from this previous incarnation reach into the present. Because he was a very specific human being with a specific organism, which was subject to certain influences due to the conditions on earth, the impressions after death, which go back in terms of memory, also continue to have an effect to a certain extent. These are influenced and affected by this, they take on a certain shade. This is the shade that a soul receives from having passed through a particular nationality, which it gets from a particular nationality. This is increasingly being shed as the national gives way to the international. But today this is still present to a great extent, otherwise today's events could not have occurred. To a certain extent, people still look back on what they experienced through their organism – insofar as it is nationally determined – in the previous life between birth and death. Now the souls that pass through bodies in the way described today, that have just been prepared in this particular way, are prepared in a very specific way for the life they enter after they have passed through the gate of death. Of course, individuality is not affected, only what is, as it were, like the clothes, the covers of the actual individuality. But these clothes or covers, with which nationality is connected, still give something that the soul also has after death, of which it knows that it has belonged to your passage through earthly life.

If the soul has now passed through a body that has been prepared in this way – exoterically one would say that it has passed through a Russian body in an incarnation – then it naturally has the nuance of the outer shell, which after death becomes an idea that one has of oneself, as one otherwise has ideas of oneself. Into this, it has incorporated everything that is expressed here (see drawing $. 49) in this way, and if one wants to express what the soul undergoes inwardly from having a body that is so composed, one can say the following. We know from our previous considerations that 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. Having gone through what was meant before, the soul prepares to enter into a particularly intimate relationship after death with those beings who, like special guardian spirits, live above the actual human individualities and belong to the next higher hierarchy, the hierarchy of the Angeloi. In the life after death, which follows a Russian incarnation of a soul, it is predisposed, as it were, to identify with its angelos, to view the spiritual world, so to speak, with the eyes of the angelos, to use a rough expression.

The human being strives upwards to the higher self. This higher self expresses itself in the most diverse ways. Read the last Munich cycle on “The Secrets of the Threshold”. There you dealt with how consciousness becomes something else, how the soul, as it were, permeates the angelos. It must permeate itself with it and prepares itself for the permeation with the angelos by living itself through the gate of death into the spiritual world after life in a Russian body that has been prepared as we have described. So that we can say: The one who has gone through a Russian body actually feels everything more subtly after death because he is particularly imbued in his entire being with an angelos, with the protective genius of the next higher hierarchy.

But for people of Western culture, it is the case that one is less strongly impregnated, less strongly imbued after death with the essence of the angelos. If you go through a Western incarnation, you are more likely to experience the following after death: I still feel the way I used to feel, I still look at the world the way I used to look at it. - It feels like a special art to grow together with one's Angelos. For the Russian people, it is something natural to always be with one's Angelos. The soul passes through all possible nationalities on its way through the incarnations and must also pass through this incarnation, where it receives the impulse to merge more fully with its angelos, to grow together with its angelos, to see with its spiritual eye into the spiritual world.

Of course, more than in other periods between death and a new birth, this refers to the period immediately after death, the next few years or one and a half to two decades, because in the main period before and after the “midnight” of which I have already spoken, the soul discards such things. So this refers to the time when a person is still influenced by what they have experienced in their physical body, when that is still having an effect.

And now, after we have dealt with this, let us turn our gaze to the spiritual world, so to speak to the inner world in which we live, by adding to our consideration that it only corresponds to the limited human mind when it believes that it is only surrounded by physical people. He is always surrounded by the deceased, by those who live in the spiritual world. So we have deceased souls in our environment who have gone through physical, Russian bodies that have a great tendency to live more than Angelos, I would say, in their present state of mind than as humans.

After such an incarnation, the etheric body dissolves particularly quickly into the surrounding etheric world, while in the case of Western nations the etheric body is more compact, holds together more, and dissolves more slowly into the surrounding etheric world. Now, however, we are already living in a time, namely since the last third of the 19th century, as I have often indicated, when Michael has taken power in the spiritual world, after Gabriel ruled before. We are now living in a time when these conditions are emerging particularly strongly in the spiritual world, and what has been described is having a particularly strong effect in the spiritual world. For it is incumbent upon our time to prepare the great event that I already hinted at in the first mystery drama, 'The Portal of Initiation': the appearance of the Christ in a spiritual form before man. This event of the appearance of the Christ, as Theodora has indicated, can only be brought about if the rule of Michael spreads more and more. This is still a process in the spiritual world. Michael is fighting for the approach of the Christ on the plane that borders on our world. He needs his hosts, his fighters, to do this. Now important fighters are being delivered to him, important hosts from those souls that have gone through a Russian body in the present incarnation. So that we can almost see in the spiritual world a kind of conquest by Michael for the approach of the Christ. For this he recruits a host, a series of important fighters from the souls that have gone through Russian bodies, because they are predisposed to identify with their Angelos. This makes them particularly suitable for summoning the forces to create the image through which the Christ is to appear in purity. To prevent him from appearing in the wrong form, in subjective human imagination, so that he appears in the right image, Michael must fight the battle I have indicated. He can fight it particularly through those souls who naturally carry this consciousness of Angelos within them. This makes them particularly prepared. Also, because their etheric body dissolves very easily, they have nothing in their etheric body that could cause the Christ to appear in a false form, in false imaginations.

In order for everything that should happen in the world to happen correctly, various links in the world order must work together. In order for what I have described to happen, an idiosyncrasy must be combated that is more prevalent in the West, especially in souls that have gone through a French incarnation. These souls, because of their nationality, have the peculiar tendency to hold on to their etheric body, to hold on to a very specific imaginative form in the etheric body for a long time. This cannot be combated by the Western souls alone, but these Western souls must be helped, one might say, to disperse these etheric bodies in the general world ether, so that a false image of the Christ-appearance is not created. So the hosts who fight under Michael must work together to combat those souls who have passed through French bodies.

This is what clairvoyant consciousness was able to see as the basis of our present evolution, especially in the last third of the 19th century and into our time. More and more, a spiritual battle developed in the spiritual world, in the astral world, between Russia and France - naturally in that which is spiritually fundamental - and this battle grew ever stronger. A battle in the spiritual world actually means cooperation in the physical world, but it is already a picture of the battle, of the opposing forces, and those who look into the spiritual world have seen an intensification of the spiritual battle between West and East since the last third of the 19th century and into our time , through Central Europe, the battle in heaven, one could already call it that, which consists in the fact that more and more crowds in the East have been gathered under the rule of Michael, in order to prevent all that which could prevent the appearance of Christ in the West, in the West that is growing more and more into materialism.

Yes, my dear friends, where there is a high culture, a culture as distinct and mature as in France, the soul has adopted certain imaginations. These imaginations remain after death, but they prevent something completely new from coming, something that must come through the Christ. Therefore, especially in the spiritual world, what passes from a fully mature culture into the souls must be fought against. Michael cannot choose his hosts from a fully mature culture; they must first be cleansed of a particular imagination. Hence the grandiose picture behind the scene of the spiritual world: the struggle of the East against the West, the host of Michael against the souls of the West that have become independent.

And you see, the outer physical expression of a spiritual battle is a physical alliance. What allies itself on the physical plane expresses by doing so that it is in a battle on the spiritual plane. People become allies on the physical plane when they have to fight each other on the spiritual plane. From this you can see once again how seriously we must take the words of Maya and truth. The word of Maya and the truth is often spoken, but it remains theory, because anyone who looks into the spiritual world and sees what underlies the physical world is overcome by the feeling of the most tremendous shock when he seriously penetrates from Maya to truth and finds the truth behind what lives in Maya. Truth must often be expressed in quite different words than on the physical plane.

What is called an alliance on the physical plane is often called war on the spiritual plane. Of course, one must not make false constructions by seeking what one finds on the physical plane in its opposite in the spiritual, because it is not so for all things. One must seek things in their reality in the spiritual. In some cases it is absolutely true that what happens on the physical plane can be a direct reflection of what happens in the spiritual world. In other cases there is such a colossal contrast as here between the East and the West, where on the physical plane there is an alliance in Maya and in the spiritual world there is a struggle of infinitely greater significance. For through this struggle it must gradually be brought about that a true image emerges from the etheric world, an image of the Being that in our time, in the course of the twentieth century, is to approach humanity, in whom Christ is.

We will continue with such reflections at the next opportunity. But I ask you to take such things as today's in all seriousness, because I assure you that when they are first found, they are sufficiently shocking.