Cultural Phenomena — Three Perspectives of Anthroposophy

GA 225 — 15 July 1923, Dornach

VII. The Gnostic Foundations of Pre-Christian Imagination of Europe

In the present time, when many things are being decided and very big questions are being asked of humanity, it is necessary to also raise oneself to the spiritual when considering contemporary phenomena. The spiritual is, after all, not an abstraction, but something that rises above the physical and sends its effects into the physical. And the person who sees only the physical, or even the physical permeated by the spiritual, is after all observing only a part of the world in which man, with his thinking and doing, is involved. For centuries this had a certain justification. But this is no longer the case for the present and the near future. And so you will see that today we are beginning to point out events of our present time in their direct connection with events that are taking place in the spiritual world and with the physical that is happening on earth.

Before this is possible, however, we must recall some of what was present spiritually in the development of mankind and led to the present historical moment. For a long time, in fact, only one part of world evolution was decisive for Western civilization and for everything that grew out of it. And this was justifiable. It was perfectly right that in the times when the Bible, with its Old Testament, was a necessity, the starting-point was taken from that moment in the development of the world when the creation of man was brought to mind through the intervention of Yahweh or Jehovah.

In an earlier period of human thought and world view, this moment in the development of the world, in which Yahweh or Jehovah intervened in it, was just one of many moments, not the one that was looked back on as the one that was actually decisive. In the Olden Days, what may be called the creation of the world by Jahve or Jehovah, according to the Old Testament, was preceded by a different development, one whose content was conceived much more spiritually than anything that was then presented in connection with the Bible, as it was usually understood. The moment that was grasped in the Bible, the creation of man by Jahve or Jehovah, was in fact a later moment in older times, and it was preceded by a different development that presented Jahve or Jehovah as the being that intervened in world evolution only later than other beings.

In Greece, when reflecting on the first stages of world evolution, one still pointed back to an older entity, to grasp which required something much more spiritual in cognition than is present in the Old Testament; one pointed back to the being that was understood in Greece as the actual creator of the world, as the Demiurgos. The Demiurge was imagined as a being existing in spheres of the highest spirituality, in which there was no need to think of any material existence, which can be linked to the kind of humanity that, according to the Bible, Yahweh or Jehovah is seen as the creator of.

We are therefore dealing with a very exalted being in the Demiurge, with a being as creator of the world, whose creative power essentially consists in expelling spiritual beings, if I may express it in this way, from itself. Gradually, as it were, lower and lower – the expression is certainly not quite accurate, but we have no other – gradually lower and lower were the entities that the demiurge allowed to emerge from himself; but entities that were far from being subject to earthly birth or earthly death.

In Greece, it was pointed out that they were called eons, and I would say that one distinguished between eons of the first kind, eons of the second kind, and so on (see diagram). These eons were the beings that had emerged from the Demiurge. Then, in the series of these eons, there was a relatively subordinate eon being, that is, an eon of a subordinate kind, Yahweh or Jehovah. And Jahve or Jehova united with matter – and now comes that which, for example, was presented in the first Christian centuries by the so-called Gnostics, but where there was always a gap in their understanding of what had been presented as a kind of renewal of the biblical content, but, as I said, there was always a gap in their understanding – Jahve or Jehova united with matter. And from this connection, man emerged.

So that the creation of Yahweh or Jehovah consisted - always in the sense of these thoughts, which extended into the first Christian centuries - in that He Himself, as a descendant of a lower species from the more exalted eons up to the Demiurge, united with matter and thereby brought man into being. All that now arises, so to speak, is understandable for the older humanity, but no longer for the later humanity. All this arises on the basis of that which surrounds us in earthly life, and is sensually perceived. All this was summarized under the expression Pleroma (see diagram). The pleroma is therefore a world populated by individualized beings that rises above the physical world. In a sense, man, called into existence by Jahve or Jehovah, appears on the lowest level of this pleroma world. On the lowest level of this pleroma, an entity arises that actually does not live in the individual human being, nor in a group of peoples, but in all of humanity. It is the entity Achamoth, with which the striving of humanity towards the spiritual was indicated in Greece. So that through Achamoth there is a return to the spiritual (red arrow).

Now this world of ideas was joined by the other, that the Demiurge met the striving of Achamoth and sent down a very early aeon, who united with the man Jesus so that the striving of Achamoth could be fulfilled. So that in the man Jesus there is a being from the evolution of the eons, which was conceived by a much higher spiritual being, of a higher spiritual nature than Yahweh or Jehovah (green arrow).

And in the case of those who had this idea in the first centuries of Christianity – and many people who looked up to the Mystery of Golgotha with deep fervor and sincerity had it – the idea developed in connection with this idea that a great secret surrounds the man Jesus with his indwelling of an ancient and thus primeval aeon.

The investigation of this mystery was cultivated in the most diverse ways. Today it is no longer very important to reflect in depth on the individual forms in which, in the first Christian centuries, through Greece, but especially in Asia Minor and the neighboring regions, it was imagined how this aeon being dwelled in the man Jesus. For the conceptions by which they sought to approach such a mystery in those days have long since vanished from the realm of human thought. What surrounds man sensually, what is connected with man between birth and death, lies in the realm of what man thinks today, and at most man infers from what he has around him between birth and death to what could spiritually underlie this physical-natural world. That direct relationship, that intimate relationship between the human soul and the pleroma, which once existed and was expressed in the same way as the relationship between man and the spiritual world, as the relationship between man and tree and bush, between cloud and wave, everything that was present in human conceptions in order to form an overview, a picture of the connection between man and that spiritual world, which interested man much more at that time than the physical world, all that has disappeared. The direct relationship is no longer there. And we can say: the last centuries in which such ideas could still be found in the civilization on which European, Western civilization then became dependent are the first, second, third and still a large part of the fourth century AD. Then the possibility of rising to the pleroma world disappears from what is human knowledge, and a different time begins.

The time begins that had thinkers such as Augustine, who was one of the first among them, or Scotus Erigena; the time begins that then had the scholastics, the time in which European mysticism flourished, a time in which one spoke quite differently on the basis of knowledge than in those ancient times. On the basis of knowledge, one spoke in such a way that one simply turned to the sensual-physical world and tried to extract the concepts and ideas from this physical-sensual world through a supersensible one.

But what humanity had in earlier times, the direct sense of the spiritual world, of the pleroma, was no longer there. For man was to enter a completely different stage of his development. It is not at all a matter of somehow defining the older time or the time of medieval human development according to values, but rather of recognizing what tasks humanity, insofar as it was civilized humanity, had in the different ages. One can say that the older time had indeed developed the direct relationship to the Pleroma. They had the task of developing those spiritual powers of knowledge that reside in the depths of the human soul, those powers of knowledge that go to the spirit, again.

Then, from the depths of humanity, there had to come a time - we have often spoken of it - when the pleromatic world was obscured, when man began to exercise those abilities that he did not have before, when man began to develop his own ratio, his rationalism, his thinking. In those older times, when the direct relationship to the pleroma was, one did not develop one's own thinking. Everything had been attained by way of illumination, inspiration, the instinctive supersensible attitude; the thoughts that men held were revealed thoughts. That welling up and springing forth of thought, that forming of one's own thoughts and logical connections, that only came about in later times. Aristotle had a presentiment of it, but it was only developed from the second half of the fourth century A.D. Then, during the Middle Ages, every effort was made to develop thinking as such, so to speak, and to develop everything that is connected with thinking.

In this respect, the Middle Ages, and in particular medieval scholasticism, made an enormous contribution to the overall development of humanity. It developed the practice of thinking in the formation of ideas and in the context of ideas. It developed a pure technique of thinking, a technique that has now been lost again.

What was contained in scholasticism as a thinking technique should be appropriated by people again. But in the present, people do not like to do it because in the present, everything is geared towards passively receiving knowledge, not actively acquiring it, actively conquering it. The inner activity and the urge for inner activity are missing in the present; scholasticism had this in the most magnificent way. That is why anyone who understands scholasticism is still able to think much better, much more vividly, and much more cohesively than, say, in the natural sciences today. This thinking in the natural sciences is schematic, short of breath, this thinking is incoherent.

And actually, people of the present should learn from scholasticism in this technique and practice of thinking. But it would have to be a different learning from what is loved today; it would have to be a learning by doing, by being active, and not merely consist of acquiring what has already been formed or read from the experiment. And so the Middle Ages were the time in which man was to develop inwardly, in soul and thought. One might say that the gods postponed the Pleroma, postponed their own revelation, because if they had continued to influence European humanity, this European humanity would not have developed that magnificent inner activity of thinking practice that was brought forth during the Middle Ages. And again, from this thinking practice emerged what is newer mathematics and such things, which are of direct scholastic descent.

So that one should imagine the matter thus: Through long centuries, the spiritual world, as if through a grace from above, gave humanity the revelation of the pleroma. Humanity saw this world full of light, this world revealing itself in and through light in ideas. A curtain was drawn in front of this world. In Asia, the decadent remnants of what was behind the curtain remained in human knowledge. Europe had a curtain, so to speak, that rose vertically from the earth towards the sky, which had its basis, I would say, in the Urals and the Volga, across the Black Sea to the Mediterranean. Imagine that a huge wall of wallpaper had been erected for Europe through the course I have just indicated, a wall through which one cannot see where in Asia the last decadent remnants of the pleroma developed, but in Europe nothing of it was seen and therefore the inner thinking practice was developed without any prospect of the spiritual world. Then you have an idea of the development of medieval civilization, which developed so great things out of man, but which did not see all that was behind the wall that ran along the Urals, along the Volga, along the Black Sea to the Mediterranean, which could not see through this wall and for which the East was at most a yearning, but not a reality.

They not only hinted symbolically, but quite literally, at what the European world actually was, how, as it were under the influence of a Giordano Bruno, Copernicus, Galilei, people said to themselves that they now wanted to get to know the earth, they wanted to get to know the ground, the lower regions. And then they found a science of heaven that was modeled on the science of the earth, while the old science of the earth was modeled on the science of the heavens with its pleromatic content. And so, as it were, in the darkness - for the light was blocked by the wall of the world described - the newer knowledge and the newer life of humanity arose.

It is a fact of human development that in certain epochs, when something specific is to emerge from humanity, other parts of what connects man are veiled, hidden. And basically, on the ground of the earth, behind the 'wallpaper for the earthly, only decadent Eastern culture developed. In Europe, Western culture remained stuck in its initial beginnings.

And this is basically the state of the European world still today, except that it is trying to inform itself about what, with the exclusion of all insight into the pleroma, has been acquired in the world of dark existence like a science, like a knowledge that is not, through all kinds of external, historical means. One has the opportunity to see through these things in their significance for the present when one realizes how, to a certain extent, behind the wallpaper, the earlier insight into the pleroma has become more and more decadent and regressive in the East, that a high, but instinctive, spiritual culture acquired by humanity has taken on decadent forms in Asia; that in Europe, the weaving and living of the human soul in the spirit has been pushed down into the sphere of the physical-sensual, which, for the time being, was only accessible to people in the medieval centuries. And so, beyond the wall-papered wall in the East, a culture arose that is not really a culture at all, that seeks to magically reproduce in earthly-physical forms what was to be experienced pleromatically in the weaving of the spirit. The rule and weaving of the spiritual beings in the Pleroma was to be carried down to earth in stone and wood, and their interaction was to resemble the weaving and nature of spiritual beings in the Pleroma. What gods actually do among themselves was thought to be the actions of physical, sensual idols. Idolatry took the place of divine service. And what can now be called oriental, North Asian-oriental magic, which has a bad effect, is the world of facts of the Pleroma, to which the soul's gaze was once directed, but which has been unlawfully transferred into the sensual. The magical sorcery of the shamans and its resonance in Central and North Asia (South Asia was also infected but has remained relatively freer) is the decadent form of the ancient pleroma view. Physical-sensory magic took the place of the human soul's participation in the divine realms of the pleroma. What the soul should do and had done in the past was attempted with the help of sensual-physical magic. A completely Ahrimanized pleroma activity became, so to speak, that which was practiced on earth and especially by the nearest spiritual beings bordering on the earth, but from which human beings were infected.

If we go east from the Urals and the Volga to Asia, we find, especially in the astral world adjoining the human earthly world, in the centuries of the second Middle Ages, in the centuries of the modern age, we have, to this day, an Ahrimanized magic, which is practiced by certain spiritual entities who, in their etheric-astral education, are indeed above man, but in their soul and spiritual education have remained below man. Throughout Siberia and Central Asia, and across the Caucasus, terrible ahrimanic, etheric-astral beings roam everywhere in the world immediately adjacent to the earthly, practising ahrimanic sorcery that has been lowered into the astral and earthly realms. And this has a contagious effect on people, who, after all, cannot do everything themselves, who are clumsy in these matters, but who, as I said, are infected, influenced by it and thus stand under the influence of the world bordering on the earth, immediately adjoining the astral. When something like this is described, it must be clear that what was called a myth or the like in ancient times is always based on a magnificent spiritual view of nature. And when people in Greece spoke of the fauns and satyrs, who, through their activity, interwove themselves into earthly events, they did not, as fanciful scholars of today imagine, construct beings in their fantasy, but in his spiritual nature he knew of those real beings, which populated the astral territory immediately adjacent to the earthly world everywhere as fauns and satyrs. At about the turn of the third or fourth century after Christ, all those fauns and satyrs moved over to the regions east of the Urals and the Volga, to the Caucasus. That became their homeland. There they underwent their further development. Before the carpet, before this cosmic carpet, what has emerged is that which developed out of the human soul as thinking and so on, as a certain dialectic. When people held fast to the inwardly strict and pure forms of thinking, to that which one must really develop within oneself, when one wants to develop the pure forms of scholastic thinking, then they have indeed cultivated that which was to be cultivated according to the counsel of the spirituality guiding the earthly, then they have worked in preparation for that which must come in our present time and in the near future. But this purity was not everywhere to be found. While in the East, beyond the wallpaper, if I may put it that way, the urge arose to draw down from the Pleroma the deeds of the Pleroma, to transform the happenings of the Pleroma into earthly magic and Ahrimanic magic, west of the wallpaper wall, the striving for reason, for dialectics, for logic, for the ideal understanding of the world of the earthly, all that which human feelings of pleasure signify, what human feelings of well-being signify in sensual existence. Human, earthly, luciferic drives mixed in with the pure use of reason that had been developed.

But as a result, alongside what developed as the pursuit of reason and ideal practice, directly adjacent to the earthly world, another astral world developed: an astral world developed that was, so to speak, in the midst of those who, as purely as Giordano Bruno or Galileo or even those who came later, strove for the development of earthly thinking, for an earthly maxim and technique of thinking. In the meantime, so to speak, the entities of an astral world arose, which now absorb all this into themselves, namely also into religious life, what sensual feelings are, to which rationalistic striving should be made subservient. And so, gradually, pure thinking acquired a sensual-physical character.

And much of what developed as such a thinking technique in the second half of the 18th century, but especially in the 19th century, is permeated and interwoven with what is present in the astral world, which now permeates this rationalistic world. The earthly desires of people, which were to be cleverly interpreted, cleverly recognized by a degenerate technique of thinking, developed in people an element that was nourishment for certain astral entities, which were out to use the thinking that was so highly developed to merely penetrate the earthly world.

Theories such as Marxism arose that limited thinking, instead of elevating it into the spiritual, to the mere weaving of sensual-physical entities and sensual-physical impulses.

This was something that made it increasingly possible for certain Luciferic entities weaving in this astral realm to intervene in human thought. Human thought was completely permeated by what certain astral entities then thought, and the Western world became just as obsessed by them as the descendants of the shamans in the East.

And so finally arose beings who were possessed by such astral beings, who introduced human desires into astutely earthly thinking. And beings arose such as those who then, from the astral plane, possessed the Lenins and their comrades.

And so we have set two worlds against each other: one east of the Urals and Volga and Caucasus, the other west of them, which, I might say, form a self-contained astral area. We have the Ural area, the adjoining Volga area, the Black Sea, where the former wallpaper wall used to be. East and west of the Urals and Volga, we have an astral territory of the earth in which, in an intensive way, beings are striving together as if in a cosmic marriage. Those beings have the luciferic thinking of the West as their life air, while those beings, east of the Urals and Volga in the adjoining astral territory, have the earthy magic of the former pleroma acts as their life element. These beings of an Ahrimanic and Luciferic nature are gathering together. And we have a very special astral territory on earth, in which people now live with the task of seeing through this. And when they fulfill this task, they fulfill something that is imposed on them in the overall development of humanity in a magnificent way. But if they turn their eyes away from it, then they will be inwardly permeated and possessed by all this in their feelings — possessed by that ardent marriage that is to be concluded in the cosmic sense by the Asian Ahrimanized entities and the European Luciferized entities, which strive towards each other with all cosmic voluptuousness and create a terribly sultry astral atmosphere and in turn make people possessed by themselves. And so, gradually, an astral region has come into being to the east and west of the Urals and Volga, rising up directly from the earth's surface, which represents the earthly astral region for entities that are the metamorphosed fauns and metamorphosed satyrs.

When we look towards this part of Eastern Europe today, we see not only people when we see the whole of reality, but we also see, so to speak, what has become a kind of paradise for fauns and satyrs in the course of the Middle Ages and modern times, who have undergone their metamorphosis, their development. And if we understand in the right way what the Greeks saw in fauns and satyrs, then we can also look at this development, at this metamorphosis that the fauns and satyrs have undergone. These beings, who, I might say, always go about among human beings and carry on their voluptuous work in the astral plane, driven by magic from Asia, which they have corrupted with Ahriman, and by European rationalism, which they have corrupted with Lucifer. But they infect human beings with it. These transformed, metamorphosed satyrs and fauns are seen in such a way that, towards the lower the lower physical form, the goat-like form has become particularly wild in them, so that they have a goat-like form that shines outwardly through the lust, while upwardly they have an extraordinarily intelligent head, a head that has a kind of radiance but that is the image of all possible Luciferian, rationalistic sophistication. Shapes between bears and rams, with a human physiognomy that is cunningly drawn into the voluptuous, but at the same time into the incredibly clever, these entities inhabit the paradise of satyrs and fauns. For this region in the astral has become a paradise for satyrs and fauns in the last centuries of the Middle Ages and the first centuries of the modern era – a paradise of transformed satyrs and fauns that inhabit it today.

I would say that, beneath all that is happening, humanity, which has been left behind, dances around with its dulled concepts and describes only the earthly, while those things that truly belong to reality no less than those that can be seen with the sensual eyes and comprehended with the sensual mind play into the earthly.

What is now developing between Asia and Europe can only be understood when it is understood in its astral-spiritual aspect, it can only be understood when one can see what has remained over there from a reality as decadent shaman ism in Central and North Asia has remained over there from a reality, what is voluptuously striving there as today's decadent magism, in order to connect, so to speak, in a cosmic marriage with what has been given the name Bolshevism for external reasons. There, east and west of the Ural and Volga region, a marriage is sought between magism and Bolshevism. What is taking place there appears so incomprehensible to humanity because it is taking place in a strange mythical form, because the Luciferic-spiritual of Bolshevism is combining with the completely decadent forms of shamanism that are approaching the Urals and Volga and crossing this area. From west to east, from east to west, events interact in this way, which are precisely the events of the paradise of satyrs and fauns. And what plays into it from the spiritual into the human world is the result of this lustful interaction of the satyrs and fauns who have migrated here from ancient times and of what the Western spirits, who only develop the intellectual, the things belonging to the head, have formed in themselves, and who then want to connect with the satyrs and fauns who have come over from Asia.

I would like to say that, outwardly, it looks as if those cloud-like spiritual forms are clumping together the further they penetrate eastward toward the Urals and the Volga, whereby the other body remains unclear remains unclear – as if these formations were clumping together into, one might say, voluptuous-looking, sophisticated-looking heads; as if they were constantly becoming heads and losing the rest of their physicality. Then, from the east, towards the Ural and Volga region, come the metamorphosed satyrs and fauns, whose nature as goats has almost become nature as bears, and the more they come from the west, the more they lose their heads. And in a kind of marriage, a cosmic marriage, such a being that loses its head meets a being coming from Europe that offers its head. And so these metamorphosed organizations, endowed with the superhuman head, come into being; so these metamorphosed satyrs and fauns arise in the astral realm. They are the inhabitants of the earth just like physical humanity. They move within the world within which physical people also move. They are the seducers and tempters of physical people because they can make people obsessed with themselves, because they not only need to convince them by talking but can make them obsessed with themselves. Then it happens that people believe that what they do is done by themselves, by their own nature, whereas in truth what people do in such a field is often only done because they are inwardly imbued with such a being, which from the East has attained the body of a goat transformed into something bear-like and the European human head metamorphosed in the West into something superhuman.

It is our task today to grasp these things with the same strength with which myths were once formed. Only by consciously entering the realm of the imagination can we understand today what we must understand if we are to and want to consciously place ourselves in the development of humanity.