Mystery Knowledge & Mystery Centres

GA 232 — 15 December 1923, Dornach

11. The Secret Of Plants, Metals And Human Beings

After what I told you yesterday, you will perhaps understand me when I say of Aristotle—who in the fourth century b.c. collected together the whole knowledge of ancient times—that although we find what was spread over Europe by his influence to be no more than a kind of system of logic, he nevertheless stood upon the ground of the Greek Mysteries, and indeed of all the Mysteries of his time. I can go further and say that anyone who is in a position to receive a world-conception not merely with his intellect, but with his heart and understanding, will be able to feel even in the logical and philosophical writings of Aristotle that they have implicit within them a close and intimate connection with the secrets of Nature.

To spread over Europe a system of logic was the destiny of Aristotle rather than, if I may so express it, his proper path of development. For after all—to give an illustration of this fact—it would be almost unthinkable that Plato should have been Alexander’s teacher, whereas Aristotle could be. Plato, it is true, continued the teachings of the old Mysteries. But he did so in his own way, in the form of ‘ideas’; and for this very reason he was the one who led man away from the secrets of Nature, whilst Aristotle led back to them—as you will have gathered from the short account of him given in my book, Riddles of Philosophy. We can come to realise this in more detail and completeness when we are able to form an idea of the content of the seven years’ instruction given by Aristotle to Alexander. Let me now summarise for you in brief the content of this teaching which was drawn from the ancient Mysteries.

In those times it was so that whenever one spoke in an authentic way about Nature, one did not understand by the word what the Natural Science of today understands— namely, the purely earthly phenomena, from which one then goes on to infer in an external manner the phenomena of the Heavens beyond the Earth. No, Man was thought of always as a member and part of Nature in the widest sense; and this necessitated looking also for the Spirit in Nature—for to regard man as devoid of soul or devoid of spirit was quite impossible in those olden times.

And so in the Mystery teaching about Nature, we find that Nature was thought of as extending far out into the Cosmos, as far indeed as the Cosmos was in any way accessible to man through his relationship with it.

Now you must understand that all teaching that was seriously undertaken in those olden times did not make appeal primarily to the intellect or to the faculty of observation. What we think of today as ‘knowledge’ was really of very little account in those ancient times, even as late as the days of Aristotle. And if a modern historian of some particular science wants to give an account of the progress of thought in that domain of knowledge, he should really begin with Copernicus or Galileo, for anything he may add to his account by going further back, is beside the point. And if he goes back as far as to the knowledge of Greek times, then what he tells is mere phantasy. It is a continuation of the present back into earlier times which is utterly unreal. For even in the time of Aristotle any education that was taken seriously involved a complete change in the very nature of the pupil, for it made appeal not merely to thought and observation but to the whole life of the human being. The essential thing in the Mysteries was that the human being should become through his education an altogether different being from what he was before. And in Aristotle’s time the endeavour was made to bring about this change by subjecting the soul to two diametrically opposite impressions.

In the first place the pupil who was to attain to knowledge step by step, was exhorted to feel his way as Man right into the Nature that was all around him. ‘Behold now,’ it was said to him, ‘you breathe the air. And in summer the air you breathe is warm, while in winter it is cold. In winter you can perceive your own breath in the form of vapour. Your breath is invisible when you breathe the warm air in summertime.’

A phenomenon like this was taken as a starting-point. The teacher of those olden times did not try to make the connection with Nature by saying: ‘Here is a body that has such and such a temperature. I warm it in a retort and it undergoes such and such a change.’ No, he brought Nature into direct contact with the human being himself, by making him attentive to the feeling he experienced in connection with the breathing process. And the pupil learned to develop a true feeling, on the one hand, of the warmed air. ‘Picture yourself,’ said the teacher, ‘what it really means—warmed air. It wants to rise; and you must feel, when the warmed air comes toward you, that something is trying to carry you out into the far spaces. And now feel, on the other hand, as a contrast, cold water in some form or other. You do not feel at home in the cold water. In the warm air you feel at home, you feel how it is trying to carry you out into the far spaces. In the cold water you feel strange. And you feel that if you go away from the cold water and let it do what it will away from you, then it will make the snow crystals that fall down upon the Earth. You feel yourself in your right place outside the snow crystals, watching them from without. The warm air you can only feel in you, and you would gladly let yourself be carried out into the far spaces of the worlds by the ascending warm air. The cold water you can only really feel outside you, and in order to have a relationship with it, you would rather observe it in its results by means of your senses.’

These were the two opposite experiences to which the pupil was brought. If we describe it as ‘learning to feel the difference between what is within man and what is outside him’— that is an empty expression! It really does not say very much. But ‘warm air’ and ‘cold water’ mean a great deal! Through these opposite experiences man is placed into the world with his whole inner being. ‘Outside’ begins to have meaning and reality when we think of it as damp and cold, and ‘inside’ when we think of it as warm and gaseous. The contrast was experienced as having a qualitative character; man learned to feel how he is placed qualitatively into the world. And then the teacher ceased speaking of things, and spoke of the human being himself. He told how the ‘warm air’ leads to the Gods in the Heights, while the ‘cold damp’ leads to the demons under the Earth.

With the journey to the sub-earthly demons is connected the knowledge of Nature. Only the pupil must bring with him into the lower regions the knowledge and experience he has gained through the warm air in the heights, lest the lower regions have evil designs upon him.

And when with this inner experience of the contrast between the warm air and the damp cold, the pupil afterwards approached Nature, he was able, through further experience of the things and processes of Nature, to look far into the real being of the whole world. Today, the chemist examines hydrogen and attributes to it certain properties. Then he observes the spaces of the worlds, finds there something which reveals the same properties as hydrogen does in the laboratory and draws the conclusion that hydrogen is present also out there in the far spaces. Such a method of instruction would have seemed sheer nonsense in Aristotle’s time. One went to work then in quite a different way.

When the inner experience of the pupil had been deepened in the way I have indicated, the teacher led him to observe what is living in the flower as it raises itself upwards and opens out into the far spaces; he had now to pass on to knowledge of the plants. ‘Look into the opening petals of the flower,’ he was told, ‘and observe the impression it makes upon you as it rays out into the World.’

And when the pupil, whose feelings had been deepened in the way I have explained, gazed out over the opening blossoms of the plants, an inward knowledge, an inward illumination, dawned within him. The flowers became for him the proclaimers upon Earth of the secrets of the Cosmos: they spoke to him of the far spaces of the Worlds. And with deep earnestness, though always only in the way of gentle hints and intimations, the teacher then led the pupil to find for himself the secret that streams from the wide spaces of the World into the being of the flower. The teacher put the question: ‘What do you really perceive when you look at the opening flower, when you gaze at the opening petals and see how the stamens push forth and out to meet you? What do you then really perceive?’ And by-and-by the pupil became able to say in answer: ‘The plants tell me that the heavy, cold Earth has compelled them to take up their abode on the Earth; they say that they really do not come from the Earth at all, but have only been placed there and made fast in the Earth. In truth they are water-born, and in a previous condition of Earth existence’—it is the condition I have described in Occult Science as the Old Moon condition of the Earth—‘they enjoyed their true and genuine existence as water-born beings in all their livingness.’

The pupil was led to perceive that in the flowers he can see a reflection of the secrets and Mysteries of the Moon, which has gone out of the Earth and still preserves something of the old, pre-Earthly Moon condition. For the flowers did not tell him the same thing every night! What the flowers said when the Moon stood before Leo was different from what they said when the Moon stood before Virgo or before Scorpio. The flowers on the Earth told what the Moon experienced as she passed round the whole circle of the Zodiac. The secrets and mysteries of the World-All— it was of these that the flowers on Earth told. It was really so that through what came to the pupil in this way he was able to say out of the depth of his heart:

I look into the flowers.
They reveal to me their kinship with the Moon.
Captives on Earth are they,
For they are Water-born.

The pupil was able to have this feeling, because he had previously experienced the impression made on him by the cold, chilling water. That experience enabled him now to come to this knowledge about the flowers.

And when the pupil was sufficiently familiar with the secret of the Moon as it was disclosed to him in this way by the plants that grow up out of the Earth, he was led a step further, and had to contemplate the metals of the Earth— the principal metals, lead, tin, iron, gold, copper, quicksilver, silver.¹ We spoke of them in another connection yesterday. And when he approached the metals, with his feeling and understanding deepened in the way I have indicated, then he gradually made himself familiar with the secrets that they spoke to him; and from the metals he learned the secrets of the whole planetary system. For the lead explained to him about Saturn, the tin about Jupiter, the iron about Mars, the gold about the Sun, the copper about Venus, the quicksilver about Mercury, and the silver again about the Moon—that is to say, the Moon not now in her relationship with the Earth but as a member of the WorldAll. Just as the pupil had discovered the secret of the flowers, so now he discovered for himself the secret of the metals. First he learned the flower secret, and then the metal secret.

This secret or mystery of the metals which was given expression in the male statue of the Eleusinian Mysteries by means of the great Planisphere that I described to you yesterday, still formed part of the education given in Aristotle’s time, and in this secret of the metals was revealed the secret of the planets. Man’s feeling and perception were not so coarse as they are today. When the pupil directed his eyes to a piece of lead, the lead did not merely show itself blue-grey in colour to his eye, but this blue-grey had a very remarkable effect upon his inner eye. In a sense this blue-grey of the fresh lead extinguished all other colours, and the pupil felt as if he were one with this blue-grey metallic nature, is if he were moving with it. He came into a state of consciousness where he had experience of something utterly and entirely different from the present. He came really into a condition of soul when it was as though the whole past of the Earth rose up before him, as though the present were blotted out by the blue-grey. Saturn stood revealed!

In the case of gold, people point to external analogies to account for the fact that the ancients saw in gold a representative of the Sun. It was by no means due to some mere external analogy, such as that the Sun is regarded as something precious and valuable on Earth. Really nothing is too stupid for modern man to ascribe to the ancients! When the man of olden times looked upon the gold with its brilliant yellow colour—a colour that is, so to say, complete in itself—and saw how plain and unpretending and at the same time how proud it is in its outward appearance, then he felt in very truth that here was something that was allied to the blood-circulation in himself. Of the very quality of gold man had the feeling that he himself was within it. And through this perception he was able to come to an understanding of the nature of the Sun and of all that belongs to the Sun. For he felt how the quality of gold is allied to something of the Sun that works in man’s blood.

And so, taking the metals one by one, the pupil of the ancient Mysteries came to a perception of the whole planetary system. And as he learned to apply his thought to these things—we arc not, of course, to imagine his thinking to be abstract as is the thinking of the present day—he came to think of the metals in the following way:

I ponder on the metals
They reveal to me their kinship with the Planets.
Captives on Earth are they,
or they are Air-born.

For it is a fact that the metals that we find in the Earth today came out of the Cosmos in the form of air, and only during the Moon-existence gradually became fluid. They came first in the form of air, when the Earth was in her Old Sun condition; they acquired fluid form during the Moon-existence, and during the time of Earth they were taken captive and bound into hard solid form. That was the second mystery that was disclosed to the pupil.

The third mystery had to be approached by the pupil learning to observe how different are the peoples of mankind all over the Earth. If one were to go to the hot country of Africa with its own peculiar climate, one would find there people who are quite different even in the colour of their skin from the people of Hellas. Or if one travelled across to Asia, there one would find people who were different again. The Greeks had a fine feeling for all these external differences in human beings.

One of the most interesting of all the writings of Aristotle that have come down to later times is his book on Physiognomy, by which we are to understand not merely the physiognomy of the human countenance, but the physiognomy of the whole man studied with a view to becoming familiar in this way with the true nature of the human being. He points out, for example, how man’s hair is curly or smooth according to the climate in which he lives, and how it is not only the colour of his skin that varies with the climate of the land where he is born, but the whole expression of the human form.

In the flowers the pupil learned to see a reflection of the mystery of the Moon, and in the metals a reflection of the Planets; and now by means of this third teaching he came to know the mystery of man himself on Earth. The Natural Science of those times made great progress in the study of the variety of man on Earth, and it went far towards obtaining an answer to the question: What is the true and original form of Man that lies behind the purposes of the Gods?

As the pupil was introduced in a living way to the physiognomy, to the various forms of man over the Earth, he felt rise up within him the secret of the Zodiac. For the Zodiac influences the elements on the Earth; in conjunction with the Planets and with the Moon it carries the winds in one direction at one time of year and in another direction at another—now wafting warm air over some region, now again sweeping it with storms of cold rain. All these conditions affect man, they enter deeply into his life. And the researches into Nature in Grecian times sought for the origin of these natural conditions in the influences that stream down upon the Earth from the stars of the Zodiac, modified by Planets, Sun and Moon.

The Natural History of those times looked with great interest on the fact that a man had black, curly hair, a ruddy countenance, a nose of such and such shape, and so on. It was said: ‘That is a man who refers me to the Sign of Leo—Leo with his forces weakened or strengthened by tire Planets according to their position. He is a man who in accordance with his karma has such and such qualities in his liver. If, for instance, he has a quality in his liver that brings a trait of melancholy to his life of soul, then it is due to the fact that at a certain point of time Venus stood in a particular relation to Jupiter, and that gave a special character to the Leo rays. In the particular nature of the temperament in connection with the nature of the liver, I can behold how the man has been determined from the Cosmos. I can extend this to all the qualities of the different peoples of the Earth. In what the human being experiences from the whole atmosphere around him, I can behold the mystery of the Zodiac.’

And when the pupil had been led to this point, once again he felt a clear knowledge arise in his heart which he now clothed somewhat in the following words:

I experience the mystery of the Zodiac in the variety of men;
There stands before my soul the kinship of this variety of Men
With the Fixed Stars.
As Captives on Earth live Men in their variety,
For they are Fire-born.

(Born, that is, from the warmth ether—from the warmth ether under the influence of the Zodiac.)

Thus did man feel himself in his physiognomy as born of the Fire or Warmth. He knew that he had undergone change during the Moon-existence, and again during the Earth-existence, but that what he attained to in the old Saturn time was his true and original condition. Just as he perceived the metals of the Earth to be Sun-born, Air-born, and the plants and flowers to be Moon-born, Water-born, so did he perceive man to be Warmth-born.

Man had been prepared for all this by the feelings and perceptions he had been able to experience with the warm air and the cold water.

In the time of Aristotle men were able to perceive when they observed a human being, the effect he had upon the warm-and-gaseous in its combination with the cold-and-watery. Owing to the development they had undergone in their souls they were able, by looking at the physiognomy of a human being, to answer the question: How much does this man give to the warm-and-gaseous, how much does he take from the cold-and-watery? Men learned to look at the human being in this way, and gradually, little by little, they learned to look upon the whole of Nature in this aspect. This prepared the way for the old and genuine Alchemy that afterwards came across Africa to Spain and spread over certain parts of Central Europe. Every thing in the world, every flower, every animal, every cloud, every rolling mist, sands and stones, seas and river, woodland and meadow,— all were viewed in the light of the impression they made of the warm-gaseous and cold-watery.

And so men came to acquire a fine faculty of perception for four qualities in Nature. When they perceived the warm-gaseous, they developed a perception for the warmth, and at the same time for the air; they felt what the warmth is for the gaseous. And in the cold they developed a perception for the damp and the dry. They acquired fine faculties of perception and feeling for these differentiations, for their power of perception enabled them to stand with their whole being right within what the world offered.

Having once adopted this standpoint, it was natural for Aristotle’s pupil, Alexander the Great, to regard the whole region in which they both lived from this point of view. And being permeated throughout with the impressions that came to him through this faculty of perception of which we have been speaking, Alexander felt in the whole Greek nature, in so far at any rate as it revealed itself in Macedonia, the qualities of damp and gaseous. And that determined and constituted the mood of his soul at a particular time in his life. This perception that he attained through what one may call a special kind of Initiation received through Aristotle, he took to be an indication of the fundamental character of the world immediately surrounding him, the world of his own experience. It can only be the half of the world—so he said to himself. You see, in those times, people were taught about Nature in such a way that they experienced her. And their experience could lead up to an instruction such as the following:

Here you have a wind blowing from the North-West (if Macedonia were in the centre) and here a South-Westerly direction of wind, here again a North-Easterly wind, and lastly here a South-Easterly.

Now Aristotle’s pupil Alexander had learned from his own experience to feel, in what came from the climatic influences and the winds of the North-West, the damp and cold; and in what came from the South-West, the warm and damp. In this way he had a perception for only half of the world. In the instruction he received, this perception was completed for him, and he himself was able also to feel that what he was taught belonged to what he already knew by his own experience. He was taught how from the winds that blow from the North-East came the dry and cold, while the wind from the South-East brought the dry and warm. So now he had learned to have in the four directions of the four winds the perception of dry and cold, dry and warm, warm and moist and cold and moist. Being a true man of his time, he had the desire to reconcile these opposites. Here in Macedonia one’s experience was limited to the cold and damp and the warm and moist; these must be united with the cold and dry and the fiery and dry, must be united with what blows over from the North of Asia, and with what blows over from the South through Asia.

Here you have the source of the irresistible urge that lived in Alexander to make expeditions into Asia. And from this example you may see how different things were then from the conditions that prevail in more recent times. Think of the education a prince receives today! Think of what he is taught, and then think of the education he receives ‘on the march’ with the troops. Try to make a clear picture of what kind of relationship exists between the instruction in physics given to a prince by some tutor, and what that prince experiences later on in the campaigns of war! Among the things that come out of a retort one does not as a rule find deeds done in a campaign of war! Such an example may help you to see how very far removed today is the knowledge that it is thought fit to teach a child in order to form his inner being, from what the child has actually to be later in external life. In the case of Alexander you have an era when complete unity was still striven for in knowledge between what was given the human being to mould and form him inwardly and what was given him to enable him to take his right place in the world. In those olden times history began in the schoolroom. But the schoolroom was a place that had affinity with the Mysteries, and the Mysteries meant the World ... and the World was seen to be the result of the forces that were in the Mysteries. It was this kind of education that gave the impulse to carry across into Asia the Natural Science of those ancient times.

In a much sifted condition this Natural Science came across Spain into Europe. It can still be traced in the writings of Paracelsus, Jacob Boehme and Gichtl, and many more besides who later had connections with men like Basil Valentine and others.

For a time it was inevitable that whatever of the knowledge could be expressed in logical forms of thought won the day and the other part of Aristotle’s knowledge had to wait. But now the time has come when this other part has fulfilled its time of waiting and all this knowledge of Nature must be rediscovered. It was really so that Alexander had to bury these secrets of Nature over in Asia, for it was nothing but their corpses that were brought across to Europe. It is not our task to galvanise these corpses but to rediscover the original living truth. And we shall only really find the necessary enthusiasm for such a task when we can develop a warm feeling for what took place at that turning-point of time, when we can perceive and appreciate the real purpose of Alexander’s campaigns. For only to outward appearance were they campaigns of conquest; in reality their object was to find the other side of the compass, to open up the other half of the world. They were also a search for a personal experience. And the personal experience consisted in this, that a certain discomfort, a certain lack of satisfaction was felt in the milieu of the cold-and-damp and moist-and-warm alone, and this needed to be complemented and satisfied by the addition of the other perception.

Of the immense historical significance of this event in the evolution of the whole Western world, I shall have to speak in the lectures that are to be given in the near future at the Delegates’ Meeting, on the subject of the occult foundations of the history of Man on Earth.