World Mysteries and Theosophy

GA 54 — 9 November 1905, Berlin

Basic Concepts of Theosophy: Human Races

It has often been said that man's best and most important study is man himself, and that man's greatest mystery is also man himself. In view of certain facts, it must be emphasized that this mystery confronts man in the most manifold forms. How multiplied the mystery of man appears to us, and it looks at us from all sides. One such multiplication of the human mystery is undoubtedly the manifold forms of human beings, which we call human races. Natural science and spiritual science have always endeavored to shed light on this diversity of human existence, on these different forms of human beings. This raises a wealth of questions. We carry within us the awareness that there is a unified nature and essence in all human beings. But how does this unified nature and essence relate to the most diverse forms and physiognomies that we encounter in the races? This question becomes particularly pressing when we see how differently disposed and gifted the individual human races are. On the steps of what we call the highest culture stands one, and on the most primitive, subordinate cultural level, apparently for our consideration, stands the other. All this makes it seem strange to us that human beings, who after all have a unified nature, can appear in such different and also imperfect forms. It is often felt to be an injustice of nature that it condemns one person to an existence in a lowly human race and elevates another to a seemingly perfect race. Step by step, human beings embark on a conquest of their own being. Lemurian humanity meant the conquest of the astral body, Atlantean humanity meant the conquest of the life body, and our present humanity means the conquest of the physical body. This is followed by the conquest of the spiritual-soul forces, which is the task of our time. Thus, an even higher meaning enters into racial development, and we understand that racial development is a training of the developing human spirit. We look back to areas where human beings are structured quite differently. Our souls incarnated in those times and learned about the outer world through its phenomena. Later, they returned to earth in a different race and thus learned to look at the world in a different way. And so it continues. Human beings go through race after race. Those who are young souls incarnate in those races that have remained at their earlier racial stage.

The spiritual-scientific worldview seems to be more suited than any other to shed light on this darkness and to clarify this mystery a little. For this spiritual scientific worldview does not speak of the unified human being in the same sense as other worldviews. It has a different concept of the human being from that of philosophers, religions, and so on; it speaks of the ever-returning human soul. It tells us that the soul that lives in today's human individual has already been on this earth many times and will return many times again. And if we look at the matter more closely, we see that human souls pass through the different races. Thus, meaning and reason come to us in the diversity of races. Thus, we see that one person is not condemned to live only in a primitive race, while another is condemned to be on the highly developed stages of racial existence. Each of us passes through the various stages of the races, and this passage means further development for the individual soul. Those who today appear as members of the European race have passed through other human races in earlier times and will pass through others in later times. The races appear to us as stages of learning, and there is a connection and purpose in this diversity.

But if we want to understand this meaning thoroughly, we must delve deeper into what underlies the development of the different races. Those who rise above mere sensory perception into the invisible, supersensible world and seek to answer this question from such realms can truly arrive at a satisfactory solution to the mystery. Ordinary natural science, which must limit itself to sensory observation in this question, has only been able to introduce a guiding thread into these cases that are given to us in relation to the types of humanity. Natural science takes us back to the imperfect stages of human existence, as it is able to do in the sense of today's Darwinian view. It traces human beings back to earlier epochs of Earth's development. It shows us how human beings in earlier times went through stages in which they satisfied their needs with simple, subordinate tools, in which they could only perform minor work. And natural science wants to take us back to even earlier times, when humans evolved from animals. We are led to the conclusion that, scientifically speaking, we will probably never be able to prove the earliest stages of human development, presumably because the areas of the earth where modern humans evolved are now covered by the oceans. There is only one area that natural science keeps pointing us to. That is the area in the south of Asia, in the east of Africa, and down to Australia. Ernst Haeckel suspects that an ancient, sunken continent is to be found there and that the intermediate stages between animal and human once developed there. He calls this continent Lemuria.

However, in the same sense in which Haeckel speaks of this continent and its inhabitants, in the sense of merely ape-like humans as the ancestors of today's humans, Spiritual Science, based on its experiences, cannot speak about this matter. I have tried to show that there are other methods and means of learning about prehistoric times than those on which Natural science must rely on, other than the investigation of the results that have been left behind in the earth. In my account of human history, in the essays “From the Akasha Chronicle,” you will find, based on inner, mystical experience, everything that has always been taught in the so-called secret schools about the origin of man and his division into different races. Physical records and sensory experience cannot take us back to the times that can truly teach us what is decisive about this question. Only supersensible experience can teach us that. Today I can only give a sparse idea of this supersensible experience, and only a comparison can lead us to where we want to take what we are essentially discussing today.

You all know that when I speak here, my words are carried away by the wave movements that are excited in the air here. The vibrating air carries my words through your hearing organs into your soul. While I am speaking here, this entire airspace is filled with sound waves. Imagine if these sound waves could be recorded by some means, if an impression of what is spoken here could be made at every moment, if the rapid progression of the sound waves that intermingle here in this room could be captured, then you would have a record of everything that is spoken here. Just as the words I speak here make an impression on the medium, on the substance around us, so do the other expressions of human nature, though not on the air, which is already somewhat coarse in relation to many other finer substances and materials, for there are substances much finer than air. I am only referring to the ether, although our consideration has nothing to do with it. But I actually mean the finest matter, the akashic matter, in which not only spoken words are imprinted, but all thoughts, feelings, and impulses of the human will. This akashic matter with its impressions really forms a phonograph on a vast scale. And while these sound waves here in the air continually disappear, lasting only as long as the sound is heard, the impressions made by human achievements, up to and including thoughts, in this so-called akashic matter remain forever. Those who develop themselves to the point of being able to read this akashic matter can follow the records that have been entered since time immemorial. And from this knowledge, from these higher spiritual experiences, come the insights that Spiritual Science provides about human development through the various races. We are led back not only to the people recorded by natural science and archaeology when they find remains of humans in the caves of France or other caves around the world, humans who had primitive tools and weapons, humans with receding foreheads, who could therefore only have had an undeveloped mind, humans who were far removed from what we today call civilized people. All this research does not take us back to the forms of humanity that the spiritual scientific worldview teaches us about, even if today's natural scientists believe that they take us back ten to fifteen millennia, perhaps even further. All those human and racial forms that natural scientists can find in the earth point back to very different human physiognomies, to races that lived in a completely different area of the earth, on Atlantis, which stretched between Europe, Africa, and America. Even natural science is no longer unfamiliar with the idea that the Atlantic Ocean was once land. The similarity of the fauna, the animal kingdom, and the various soil formations, as well as certain affinities in languages, all point to natural scientists that we are dealing with a great subsidence of the earth, with a flooding of a vast area of land that took place in the very early stages of our development. According to Plato's account of the island of Poseidonis, which he still refers to as an island in the ocean, this was the last remnant of a bygone world. This is also what Spiritual Science teaches us.

We learn about a race in which the most important abilities that make today's civilized people what they are were not yet present. The Atlantean race did not yet have these abilities, the ability to combine, to calculate, nor the ability to think. What people had at that time was memory and language. These had only just developed in them. But they had other abilities instead. Progress in human abilities only takes place when certain so-called higher stages of human existence are achieved at the expense of earlier stages of development. Just as humans today have only a very limited sense of smell compared to certain animals, while animals have less developed higher senses, namely the brain, but bring their lower abilities to great perfection, so it is here at these higher stages of humanity. The Atlantean had an almost omniscient memory. His knowledge was based entirely on memory. For them, there was no such thing as what we call law or rules. They did not calculate in such a way that they knew their multiplication tables; they certainly did not know them. For them, memory was the basis for all their thinking. They knew that when they had put five beans together twice, that was a pile of so and so many. He did not calculate, but kept this for his memory. Likewise, his language was completely different from ours. I will return to this phenomenon later in the lecture. Since the Atlantean had only developed these abilities, he necessarily possessed a certain clairvoyant gift, which receded as our alert daytime consciousness, our intellectual consciousness, our mathematical, logical consciousness, our cultural consciousness developed. The Atlantean was able, in a completely different sense, to influence the growth of plants through the special magical power of his will. Without sensory mediation, the Atlantean was able to perform certain magical effects. All this was also connected with a completely different type of physique, above all with a significant receding of the forehead and an underdeveloped forebrain. In contrast, other parts of the brain were developed differently than in today's civilized human beings. This made it possible for them to make use of their great memory skills.

When we observe such an Atlantean according to the records of the Akashic Chronicle, we find that at the same time the brightness of our present consciousness had not yet been reached. It was still a dream consciousness. It was brighter than this, but it did not yet have the clear clarity of mind that our present consciousness has. It was more like brooding and dreaming. And what worked within him was not such that he could see himself at every moment as the master of what he was doing, but rather that everything within him was like a kind of inspiration, a kind of intuition. He felt connected to other powers, as if a spirit were flowing through him. For him, the spirit was something much more concrete; it was what was in the wind, what was in the clouds, what grew in the plants. The spirit was something you could feel when you moved your hands through the air, when the trees rustled. That was the language of nature. The independence of the Atlanteans was also not as great as that of people today.

If we look further back, we come to the ancestors of this population, to those people who lived in a part of the world known to both natural science and spiritual science: in Lemuria, the continent between Asia, Australia, and Africa. However, spiritual science must describe the appearance and form of those people quite differently from what natural scientists do today. Outwardly, the description of the form of these people given by spiritual researchers is not so different from that assumed by natural scientists. But spiritually, it is quite different. The Lemurians were even more clairvoyant than the Atlanteans. They were endowed with enormous willpower and were people whose speech and memory had not yet developed. Language only began to develop in later Lemuria. However, the Lemurians could make plants grow, they could command the wind, they could draw natural forces out of the earth as if by magic. In short, compared to today's mental images, what the Lemurians could do borders on the miraculous. But all this took place in a completely dull consciousness, in a deeper dream sleep than that of the Atlanteans. Guided entirely by higher influences, by higher spiritual beings, these Lemurians were dependent creatures in the hands of higher powers, which gave them the impulses for their decisions, for everything they did.

Thus we have three successive forms of development of our species. This Lemurian developed from the not yet human companions of the ichthyosaurs, plesiosaurs, and so on. These are the fabulous animals that existed before our mammals and were destroyed by the great, powerful natural revolutions on these continents. Everything that protrudes from the ocean as volcanic formations are remnants of that ancient Lemurian time. And even those primitive structures of colossal size and such strange shapes, as found on Easter Island, are remnants of the Cyclopean buildings that loom into our time like a monument to those people who lived so differently in their souls than we do.

Only a few words will be said about the relationship between humans and the various animal forms. Today's natural scientist, accustomed to materialistic ways of thinking, assumes that man evolved from lower animal forms. The spiritual researcher cannot do this. He assumes that the spiritual preceded the material, that the spiritual is the source of the external, the material, and that man's outer body is an expression of his soul. What the spiritual researcher describes as the astral body was formed much earlier than the physical body of the human being. This astral body has undergone a process of densification, thus forming the etheric body, and it is only the densification of this etheric body that forms the physical body. The denser form was formed later. The thinner form, namely the astral, existed in much earlier times. Thus, Spiritual Science shows us that a being with such drives, passions, and instincts as the human being did not arise from a random agglomeration of physical matter, but that these drives and passions are the original elements in a matter that is appropriate to them. This matter did not create passion, but rather the earlier passions created the forms of physiognomy. Thus, human beings go through a process of condensation. And indeed, if we go back to those Lemurians, we see that their bodies become thinner and thinner until we come back to human beings who, in terms of their physical matter, are very similar to certain animals that today have a gelatinous matter. If we went back even further, we would find ancient human ancestors, formed in a matter that cannot be seen with the ordinary physical eye: the etheric human beings. But I do not want to go back to this most ancient time today.

Let us begin our observations with those humans who gradually began to appear in a physical shell similar to that which humans have today, although the shell of the humans who inhabited Lemuria and Atlantis was quite different from our type of muscle and bone structure. Everything was much softer, more flexible, and more pliable, and adapted to the requirements of those dull, dreamlike soul forces, as I have described to you. Precisely because human physical matter is becoming denser and denser, the opposite pole to physical matter is being created, which is the tool of the power of the intellect. With the development of the brain, there is a simultaneous densification of the other organs of the human being. Thus, the brain grows into the tool of the intellect, of the spirit. And when we take the three stages together, we have them in the civilized human being. First we have the Lemurian human being, whose consciousness is trance-like, then we have the Atlantean human being, who develops memory and language, and then the actual civilized human being, the human being of our time.

When we look at people today, we see that they have developed from these earlier stages of existence. When the higher appears, the primitive does not always disappear immediately. It remains for the time being and changes in many ways. So we can say that part of the earlier Atlantean population migrated from Atlantis to Europe and on to Asia and formed colonies, while another part remained behind, so that we now have the most diverse stages existing side by side. Each progressive part leaves behind the stages of development as a kind of memory. The same thing happens with human beings. It is he who has developed the most diverse forms of animals out of himself. Just as humanity leaves behind lower races, so man leaves behind certain animal forms at even earlier stages, which are like external manifestations of the retained memory of his former existence. When we look at animals, we can say that they represent the stages of our own development, from the lower animal forms to the forms of our own race. But our own forms did not look like what has been left behind. Conditions were different then. People usually do not have a mental image of how infinitely great the changes that have taken place on Earth are. In ancient Atlantis, there was not yet a distribution of rain and sunshine, of air and water as there is today. There was a completely different atmosphere, saturated with water. There was no rain at that time. Myths and legends record these things in a vivid way. That is why the Norse legends also speak of “Nifelheim” and “Nebelheim.” This is based on a real fact. Our ancestors were different from us today, and those who were left behind found themselves in circumstances they could not cope with. They therefore had to devolve, they fell into decadence, they degenerated.

The physical conditions of our present earth make it possible for the mind to develop to a certain level of education. If the earth had not developed from the completely different conditions of Atlantis to our advantage of rain and sunshine, man would never have been able to develop to the level we are at today. We see that only the progressive race can develop upwards in the appropriate way. But what retains the earlier form and is like a reminder of it declines because it does not fit into the later conditions. When we go back to earlier times, we understand that what we used to be was very different from the animals we see today. These have changed as a result of completely changed conditions. We can also recognize in the subordinate races stages of earlier human existence, which were actually adapted in their nature to other earthly conditions.

The matter becomes much more understandable when we look at it in this way. We will then understand that the Indian population of America, which seems so mysterious to us with its social structures and peculiar instincts, must be completely different. The African, Ethiopian, and Negro races are again different. There are instincts that are connected to the lower human nature. And among the Malays we find a certain dreamlike element. Within the Mongolian population there are characteristics based on a special energy of the blood, as well as certain mental characteristics that are developed in a very characteristic way. Therefore, the Mongolian race will always refuse to accept a pantheistic view. Their religion is a belief in demons, a cult of the dead. The population known as the Caucasian race represents the true cultural race, which is called upon to create tools for working with nature through the development of logical thinking, using the mere intellect of man, who can no longer wield magical powers but must rely on mechanics. Everything that man had in this way in the times of ancient Atlantis was lost, and therefore he made tools, because he could no longer work in this way; hence he needed tools for mechanical action.

Natural science has attempted to classify the different races in a variety of ways. It has attempted to classify them according to the shape of their skulls into those with narrow skulls that are long at the back, those with short and broad skulls, and those that fall between the two. People were also classified according to skin color: black (Negroes, Ethiopians); yellow-brown (Malays and Mongols); and white (Caucasians). This classification is based more on external characteristics and reveals certain differences, but it is not exhaustive. In more recent times, language has been used as the basis for classification. However, if you look at the past from a spiritual-scientific perspective, you will come to completely different conclusions. You will find that our white civilization arose when certain groups separated from the Atlanteans and developed further under different climatic conditions. Certain parts of the Atlantean population remained at earlier stages, so that we see remnants of the various Atlantean races in the populations of Asia and America. But they have changed and differ from the original Atlantean population.

We distinguish seven human races within the Atlantean population. Of these seven human races, five are in an ascending form of development. I will only mention here that the Chinese population, in its main mass, represents in a certain respect a descendant corresponding to the fourth of the seven human races of the Atlantean population, and that the Mongolian race of Asia represents a descendant of the seventh subrace of this Atlantean population. Gradually, memory and language developed. It was not until the third sub-race, the Proto-Toltecs, that language emerged clearly. A culture based on memory also emerged at this time. The fifth sub-race, which we call the Proto-Semites and which had its main seat in what is now Ireland, formed the first seed for our present Caucasian or, as we also call it in Spiritual Science, Aryan human race. Part of this sub-race, which was very different from today's Jewish population but rightly called Semitic because of certain events, moved to Asia and developed the culture of the intellect, which then spread throughout present-day Europe, southern Asia, and the population of northern Africa. In contrast, around this center there is a belt of human population which, in the most diverse ways, still bears remnants of the character traits of inhabitants from earlier times, remnants of the Atlanteans. All these inhabitants left descendants, and so we can form a mental image of the migration I just mentioned flooding over to Asia, colliding there with a population that remained from Atlantis and perhaps Lemuria, and then forming what we now call the Malay races. They have a sleepy nature and a precociousness in terms of passions and sexual maturity. Thus, from a select branch of the Atlantean population, mixed with the remnants of the old population, the human race that we call the Indian-Aryan race was formed. They combined a certain dreamlike, clairvoyant nature with a peculiarly developed, intellectually formed worldview. In no other worldview were the clairvoyant perception of certain deeper forces of nature and a system of thought of such architectural coherence and penetrating sharpness so closely linked.

In completely different forms, we find other, new population structures towards the Near East. Furthermore, of course — the spiritual-scientific worldview can prove this — a group of Atlanteans crossed over to America. There were still remnants of Lemurians and also of Atlanteans, who mixed, partly in blood, partly in the goods and habits of life. This later confronted the European immigrants as the Indian population. Two fundamentally different human developments collided. What lived in ancient times, a completely different spiritual element, something clairvoyant, something of the spirit that permeated the whole world, still lived on in this Indian population. We have a speech that an Indian chief gave when the Indians and Europeans collided. In it, he rebuked the Europeans for breaking their word. After taking away the Indian population's homes, they had promised to give them other places to live. He said something like the following: O you palefaces, you do not understand what the Great Spirit teaches us. This is because you palefaces read everything the gods say in books, and you let the letters in the books tell you what is true. You promised us that you would give us land again, but you did not keep your promise because your God does not teach you to keep the truth and your word. We know a God who speaks to us in the clouds, in the waves, in the rustling of the leaves, in lightning and thunder. And the God of the red man keeps his word. God knows that he must be faithful to the tribe. — That was a great, powerful speech. The Great Spirit was a remnant of a human view that came out of a dreamlike consciousness, out of inspirations from higher powers. But because of this, it was at the same time closer to the divine, to the sources of the divine.

Languages teach us something similar. When we compare the different races of people, we find a completely different structure in the languages of this outer belt of nations. We find the old Atlantean structure in the Mongolian languages, and in the Negro languages we find something expressed in the structure of the languages themselves from the Atlantean origin. Certain languages of Africa place essential value on nouns, and they express what we express through inflections by means of prepositions. From this we can see that they originated from an excellent memory. The Mongolian languages show that they originated at a time when memory no longer functioned as it had previously. This is because the time words are more developed, which already shimmer according to the mind. The Atlanteans did not actually speak of memory at all. Everything was present to them. Only when one begins to forget does the time word develop in language. I would like to say that a magnificent monument has remained from the middle of Atlantean culture, and that is the Chinese language. This language has something purely compositional and at the same time something original, where the sound itself expresses something inner, spiritual, and a certain relationship to the outside world. If we studied certain sections of the population in connection with this, we could understand this completely.

However, we can understand our race if we follow it in the two currents that we can clearly identify. First, there is the current that moved from the West, perhaps from what is now England, to Asia. It may have given rise to the Indian, the pre-Asian-Semitic, the Indo-African-Semitic, and the Arab-Chaldean races. But then we must also imagine another stream that did not travel so far, perhaps only reaching Ireland or Holland, or even the area inhabited by the ancestors of the ancient Persians. Here we have a belt of related earth populations through the Persian region, across the Black Sea to Europe.

So we can identify two zones of human population. One extends from India and encompasses the southern peninsulas of Europe, the other encompasses the northern zones with various gradations. We have the Aryan and various Semitic gradations in Asia and Africa; then in Greece and Italy the Greek-Latin population. But we must already form in our minds the mental image that this arose through mixing with the northern belt of peoples, which would also include the Persian population and everything that developed in the West from underground, such as the Slavic and Germanic populations, and the ancient Celtic population, which more or less underlies all of them. We can form the mental image that we had an ancient Celtic population in Western Europe. This is the westernmost part of the stream of peoples, while the Persian population represents the easternmost part of the stream of peoples. In between are the Slavic and Germanic peoples; mixed with the southern belt, they formed the Greek-Latin race. Even in the languages, it can be proven that there is a kinship between the populations, which is most strongly expressed in the deep kinship of the languages in the northern belt of peoples. We have languages there that are completely different from what constitutes the uniqueness of Semitic-Egyptian culture. In Semitic-Egyptian culture, we find a clear expression in the structure of the language of what developed in the fifth sub-race of Atlantis as proto-Semitic culture. It is characterized by the first glimmer of reason in human development. Logic and reason first developed here. The dreamlike, clairvoyant element of earlier times mixed in various ways and different religions developed. However, the Semitic language does not have the atomistic character that we see in the Chinese, but rather an analytical character. In contrast, the Caucasian languages have a synthetic character.

We distinguish between five human members or races. Whether the word is used rightly or wrongly is open to question. The first race are the ancient Indo-Aryans with their wonderful clairvoyant thinking. They had a culture that preceded the Vedic culture, which is why there are no records of it. What is written in the Vedas are only echoes of the ancient visionary Indian culture. Then comes the second race, the ancient Persian culture, a people who prefer to use their intellectual powers for external work. Ancient India has something that withdraws from the world. In these northern regions, we find people who embrace the world, who want to conquer the world, who engage with tools and the like. Therefore, in this culture, we see how the consciousness develops that humanity has something to achieve, that there is good and evil. Ormuzd and Ahriman confront each other here. Then we come to the Near East. There, another race emerges. What is expressed in the Semitic language structure is the combinatorial, the calculative, the logical-conceptual. We encounter this in the architecture of Egypt, expressed in the pyramids and in the magnificent thought structures, then in the wonderful science, in the astrological form of astronomy.

Now we have three races. And now we come to Europe, to the southern peninsulas. There we find what flows over from the north and is expressed in ancient civilized peoples. We find that something is developing there that seeks inner life. While the Egyptians build externally, with inner symbolism, the Greeks begin to cultivate monuments and sculpture, drawing inspiration from the mystery dramas. However, the most significant event within this fourth sub-race or cultural period is the rise of Christianity. The southern races are incapable of understanding Christianity in its unique form. In Greece, it is Hellenized, in Rome Romanized and developed into a state church. This happened during the gradual emergence of the fifth sub-race in the Middle Ages. This is our own sub-race. It is the one that had the task of bringing culture down to the physical plane. This shows that meaning and reason are part of the sequence of racial development.

Meaning and reason are also present in another sense in this racial development. Human beings consist of three members in their lower nature: the physical body, the etheric body, and the astral body. The physical body is what we can see with our eyes and touch with our hands. The astral body is the bearer of our desires, passions, and instincts, our feelings, lusts, emotions, anger, and hatred. The etheric body is the bearer of the life forces. The human ego lives in these. It expresses itself in various ways.

I will begin with how it expresses itself in our current cultural period. It has developed the physical body in the most eminent sense, chiseling it out in the most wonderful way. The body, the brain, became the tool for intellectual life and intellectual mental image. The body had to be conquered step by step. If you could look back, you would find that in the Lemurian period the body appeared as a clumsy, gigantic structure. The astral body cannot yet move the limbs. The ancestors of the Lemurian period were clumsy. You can still see echoes of this in the Native American population. On the one hand, instincts are still fighting because people do not yet have the consciousness to penetrate themselves from within; they work on the body from the outside, they tattoo it because it does not yet seem finished to them. If we move up to the other races, we find that human beings are only just conquering the etheric body. The life functions, the nutritional functions, are being developed so that human beings are transforming from unconscious beings into conscious, voluntary beings.

In this way, what lives around us as races and souls is organically and spiritually intertwined. Everything makes sense, becomes transparent, becomes explainable. We are getting closer and closer to solving these riddles, and we can understand that in the future we will have to go through other epochs, that we will have to follow other paths than those taken by the race. We must be clear that soul and race development are different. Within the Atlantean race, our own souls dwelt, which then developed into a higher human race. This gives us a picture of the development of humanity up to our time. In this way, we also understand the principle of establishing the core of a universal brotherhood without regard to race, color, class, and so on. I will elaborate on this idea in more detail later. Today, I only wanted to show how the same essence is present in different forms, and in a much more accurate sense than natural science teaches. Our soul progresses from stage to stage, that is, from race to race, and we learn the meaning of humanity when we consider these races. We learn to understand more and more how profound and true the saying is: “One succeeded in lifting the veil of the goddess at Sais. But what did he see? He saw — wonder of wonders — himself!” We see ourselves everywhere and in the most diverse forms. — That is self-knowledge! The great saying at the temple of the Greek school of wisdom also proves true here: O man, know thyself!