The History of the Esoteric School 1904–1914, Volume Two

GA 265 — Hildesheim

The Rose Cross at the Altar of the East

From a teaching session, Munich, December 12, 1906.

Let us consider the Rose Cross: the wood of the cross is the dead, the roses are the life that springs from it.

From the instruction session in Berlin on February 8, 1913.¹

When the esotericist regularly performs his exercises and delves into the temple legend or the great cosmic images given to us in Theosophy, or into Jakob Böhme's “Morgenröte” and the other symbols as given in this temple, he will notice that it may seem as if at a certain moment his brain were incapable of thinking, as if a limit had been set to his thinking. This is how the esotericist should feel and inwardly experience. The average person sometimes has the same feelings, that his brain is refusing to work, but he does not come to the experience and awareness of this fact. People actually oversleep their whole lives; not only by sleeping at night, but also during the day they oversleep the most important events because they are completely absorbed by the impressions they receive from the senses. All those who, in an important time such as our own, have turned against what they could have attained as a spiritual current, who, however clever they were in and of themselves, refused to take in the spiritual, who therefore devoted themselves entirely to materialism, have likewise turned against everything spiritual after their death and developed a certain hatred there, which they then, as a power (or powers), hurled back into the physical world. Basically, this has always been the case since the 16th century, and these feelings of hatred make themselves felt in the physical world and have their effect there. The worlds are not separate from each other, they permeate each other.

We have also spoken of how, at the death of Christ Jesus at Golgotha, the physical body penetrated into the physical substances of the earth and how, from this, the strength arose for individuals to undergo martyrdom in the first post-Christian times. In his time, the etheric body of Christ also dissolved into the earth as an etheric substance, and this opened up the possibility for individual personalities to absorb this etheric substance, and thus certain tasks could be accomplished by these individualities here on earth.

The astral body of Christ also entered the astral substance (aura) of the earth at a certain time, and with that, human astral shells could be clothed again, which produced certain events on earth. And now the ego substance can be imparted to people. For even though Jesus of Nazareth left his three covers at baptism, part of the ego substance remained with the covers, and so this power of the earth was also added.²

The new thing that is now gradually being revealed to people is a remembrance or repetition of what Paul experienced near Damascus. He saw the etheric form of Christ. But the fact that this is now to become visible to us is due to the fact that a new mystery of Golgotha has taken place in the etheric world, as it were. What took place here in the physical world at the crucifixion as a result of the hatred of people who did not understand, has now been repeated on the etheric plane through the hatred of people who, as materialists, entered the etheric world after death.

Consider once more how, in the Mystery of Golgotha, a cross was erected from dead wood, on which the body of Christ hung. And then we see that wood of the cross in the etheric world as sprouting, sprouting wood, green, living wood, charred by the flames of hatred, with only the seven blooming roses appearing on it, representing the sevenfold nature of Christ. And through this dying, this second dying of the Christ, it has become possible for us to behold that etheric body. Men will behold the densification, the dead part of the etheric body of Christ Jesus.

From the Berlin Instruction Conference, February 8, 1913, notes in another hand

The rose cross is the symbol for the second death of the Christ in the 19th century, for the death of the etheric body at the hands of the materialists. The consequence of this is that the Christ can be seen in the 20th century as I have often described to you, namely in the etheric body.

Notes from an instruction session without place or date

In Atlantis, everything that people had around them in nature had a perceptible language. The wisdom (contained in the waters) spoke to them of their Tao. In the dewdrop we have in our language the same term as the word Tao is for what the waters of wisdom revealed to man. Dew in Latin is ros, and cross is crux. Ros-crux denotes the same thing: the Tao-cross, the cross and the dew on the plants. This is the esoteric meaning of the Rosicrucian.³