Supplements to Member Lectures

GA 246 — 4 November 1908, Hanover

13. Occult History

Once one has studied Theosophy for some time, one is able to take in more [of what] was thought to be the outflow of phantasms about two years ago.

Is what lies between an Egyptian incarnation and a Greek one quite the same as what lies between a Greek incarnation and a later one? This is what we want to investigate today.

Mankind has gone from clairvoyance to today's consciousness. People have enjoyed the gods between death and a new birth, and life between birth and death was also filled with the memory of the gods. All the gods: Wodan, Baldur and so on were very perceptible beings for humans at that time. The spiritual worlds opened up to people in their sleep consciousness. This consciousness gradually faded and the awareness of this world here developed more and more.

First after Atlantis is Indian culture: the Indian still feels himself to be a citizen of the higher worlds, the earthly is Maya to him.

Second: Persian culture. There, man has already grown somewhat fond of the physical world.

Thirdly: the Egyptian cultural epoch. Man became more and more familiar with the physical world. Geometry was already cultivated. The Chaldeans are the great astronomers. The Egyptians had their bodies mummified; they were anxious to preserve the physical body for as long as possible. This has an influence on the soul. The soul remains connected to the body, which is held together here with all art.

Fourthly: the Greek-Latin cultural epoch. In Greece, man penetrates even more into the physical. What did the Greeks build in their temples? These are something quite different from Gothic cathedrals. If you look at the columns - they support. There are masses of forces in the room, [that] is known to those who can explore the occult. The Greek temple represents what is also present spiritually. It was built out of the lines that are in space.

When an opportunity is given through man and woman for a soul to embody itself in the physical, then the physical meets the spiritual, gives the spiritual the opportunity to connect with the physical.

This was the case, albeit in a different sense, in Greek architecture. The physical was modeled on the spiritual forces. The god dwells in the Greek temple, there is no need for a human being to be there. A Gothic cathedral is something completely different, it is only perfect when it is filled with a devout crowd.

The Greeks were spellbound by the physical plan. And the Romans were even more entangled with the earthly plan. It was only with them that the concept of the citizen, the sense of personality, emerged. The personality feels that it is left to its own devices on the earthly plan. In the Greek, beauty was on the physical plan, spirit was worked into the physical plan. To the same extent that man conquers the physical world, consciousness becomes paler and paler in the life between death and new birth.

The Indian still loved the spiritual world and thus felt himself to be a citizen of it. The more man loves the physical world, the more he alienates himself from the other world. The Persian made himself more skillful in this world, and thereby he became less skillful, so to speak, in handling the instruments of the other world. Man gradually began to feel like a stranger in that world - as was the case with the Egyptians. The task was to conquer the physical plan. And hand in hand with this went the fact that the hereafter became increasingly shadowy.

A soul that was pulled out of a body that lay down there as a mummy still felt drawn to the physical. This was deliberately arranged by the high power. The Indians' longing for the afterlife was to be killed off. The soul was supposed to feel connected to the physical plan. This was most the case in Greek times. The other side of life was such that one of the best at that time said: “Better a beggar in this world than a king in the realm of shadows.” It cast a shadow over his Kamaloka life. There is something shadowy about feeling together with the physical and also about life in devachan.

The worlds were mediated by initiates. An initiate can consciously leave his body and be consciously active in the spiritual worlds. He can visit the dead, he is the mediator between the physical and the spiritual world. They could follow the development in the spiritual world, could see how the souls became more and more shadowy over there in the spiritual world.

The Buddha was able to do the best for the world when he pointed out the futility of earthly existence. The more the soul was permeated by the content of existence, the less connected it was with the spiritual.

If, for example, an initiate had told Achilles [in the underworld] about Greece, then Achilles would only have missed even more that he was no longer in the physical, it would have been something painful for the soul there in the afterlife.

The event of Golgotha is just as decisive for the spiritual world as it is for the physical plan. The fact that Christ appeared for three and a half days in the spiritual world is a spiritually researched fact. He entered the souls like a spiritual spark. He was the first to bring the news to the dead that life conquers death, [that it] must triumph. He brought this message to the souls.

This is an event that was never there before and will never be there after. The physical development of the earth is thereby given, which leads upwards again. Through the Mystery of Golgotha the possibility was created for the physical to experience something sub-physical. The spiritual was not poured into the physical, but Christ had brought something from the physical plan into the spiritual plan.

For the first time it happened here that something was brought over from the physical plan to the spiritual plan. Until now, the initiates had only been able to bring something from the spiritual to the physical plan. Christ was the first to be able to do this. He was able to say that something had taken place over there in the physical that had an influence on the spiritual plan. The soul absorbs from Christ what it takes with it to the spiritual plan. In this way, the shadow realm became more and more alive. The Christian life gives people something for life after death.

Today, if you look with vision into the spiritual world at the sight of a Greek temple, it disappears, there is nothing in it for spiritual life. But the Gospel of John is experienced on the physical plane as well as on the spiritual, indeed, here it is only a seed for an even deeper understanding over there.

We must not make what is over there stationary, there is history there too. A real historical decline can be observed there up to Greek times and a turnaround through the event of Golgotha. Great things happened for the physical in this event, even greater things for the spiritual worlds.