World Mysteries and Theosophy

GA 54 — 1 March 1906, Berlin

The Children of Lucifer

Eight days ago, I had the opportunity to speak to you here about the idea of Lucifer. Today, following on from that lecture, it is my task to elaborate on this same idea and its significance for human development, and in doing so I would like to refer to an outstanding work of art, “The Children of Lucifer” by Edouard Schuré.

Those who see theosophy as merely a collection of teachings and dogmas, or the Theosophical Society as merely a sect concerned with very specific religious-philosophical or other ideas and aiming to live a certain way of life, may be somewhat surprised by the topic of today's lecture. But those who see in Theosophy something that can be regarded as a deepening of our entire spiritual life, and even more, as a deepening of our entire culture, will find it understandable that this “Theosophy” is sought not only within the narrow limits just mentioned, but in all areas, in all branches of life, and therefore above all in art.

Many people take a position that leads them to believe that theosophy is something unworldly, even hostile to life. Those who believe this have probably not yet made the actual foundations of the theosophical world movement their own. And it is precisely a work of art such as Edouard Schuré's “The Children of Lucifer” that shows us that the artist's creative work and influence are not only not impaired by theosophical deepening, but that true theosophy and true theosophical life are capable of giving art a high flight and extraordinarily powerful impulses in the most eminent sense.

I would now like to return to the drama “The Children of Lucifer,” but if we delve a little into the genesis of this dramatic poem in our time and into the peculiar structure of the mind from which this work of art emerged, we will at the same time be able to gain some deep insight into what can truly be called theosophical life.

Edouard Schuré drew the best forces of his work precisely from the theosophical worldview, and he undoubtedly belongs to the most select writers in the field of theosophy. Anyone who wants to gain access to theosophical life from any perspective other than that of the well-known compendiums and smaller handbooks can do so above all through the works of Edouard Schuré, the important French writer. The very manner in which Schuré came to express artistically what was to inspire his spirit, which we see in “The Children of Lucifer,” is highly interesting from a theosophical point of view. This is recounted to us in the beautiful monument he has erected to a personality who had the deepest conceivable influence on his spiritual life. This brings us to a most interesting fact about modern spiritual life. Edouard Schuré has published a book and provided it with an introduction by a personality who has looked deeply into the mysteries of existence. It is a book in which one can see the artist. This book breathes a spirit that differs from what we usually find in similar writings, a spirit that has directly processed and absorbed real theosophy as life. The personality who wrote about Corregio, named Margherita Albana, is called by Schuré his guide during her lifetime, and he calls her the spirit of his soul after her death. And when one looks into the psychology of Schuré's work, it is difficult to express it more aptly than he has done.

The last third of the 19th century was a time when a few deeply gifted individuals were granted a glimpse into true spiritual life, after a long period in which spirit was understood as little more than a sum of abstract concepts, after a long period in which the word spirit was not really associated with anything real. When we immerse ourselves in Schuré's work on the one hand and in the spirit of the personality he calls his guide on the other, we are immediately reminded of what was understood within the Greek mystery view at the dawn of our Western spiritual life under the concept of God and divine life. The word “theosophy” only came into being later. It was first used by the Apostle Paul. However, it has been the common property of all profoundly knowledgeable people, and we need only engage with what was present within spiritualized Christianity as theosophy, as a divine concept, as a concept of divine life, and you will be able to grasp the reality of the spirit in a completely different way than is possible with today's concepts, as they are still commonly used. The Greeks understood God, the divine being, to be nothing other than a being who, in terms of his characteristics and abilities, far surpasses the human, but who is nevertheless similar to humans. They call humans gods in the making, and they understand every god to have once passed through the school of humanity. When the Greeks looked up to their gods, they said to themselves: The sufferings and joys, the experiences of life that I now have to go through, the gods once went through just as I myself am doing now. They have previously passed through this school of life that I am now completing, and later I will have risen to those spheres of creation, to those spheres of activity where the gods stand today. The Greeks called their gods “elder brothers” in the whole cosmic development, and they saw in human beings themselves a predisposition to one day become what the gods are today.

This creates a different relationship to the divine than one that merely looks up to something divine, merely senses something in the beyond. Just as the world of the outer realms of nature, the sensory realms of nature, from the mineral through the plant and animal kingdoms up to the human realm, was built up here in the physical world for the Greeks, so above the human realm stood the hierarchy, the order of the gods. For him, the worlds that made up the gods were actual realms above the human realm. And what the Greeks were to experience in those schools, which were at the same time places of worship called mysteries, they did not describe as an abstract, merely scientific knowledge of some higher principles or forces of nature. The Greeks understood what was involved not in a symbolic sense, but in a real sense: that in the schools, humans truly interacted with the gods. The mystery student felt no differently toward the gods than a child must feel today when it looks up, small and undeveloped, to the adult who has already achieved what it itself will achieve in a future life. These experiences were something very real and tangible for the Greeks. Therefore, for those who first coined the word, theosophy was not knowledge of the gods, but knowledge gained in this peculiar way through contact with higher spiritual beings. Those who were initiated into the mysteries not only gained knowledge, but were also enabled to interact with the gods, or let us say with the spirits, just as they interact with people here on our earth. And the knowledge that human beings acquire through the mediation of the senses was called natural knowledge. But the knowledge that was received from the gods themselves was called divine knowledge: theosophy.

I know very well that most of those who think from today's point of view can see nothing more in such an expression as I have just used than a mere poetic image, a symbol, or something highly fantastical and superstitious. It is neither one thing nor the other; it is something that human beings can truly and genuinely experience. Human beings can truly and genuinely bring themselves to the point where, as they direct their gaze toward the sensory world, they can also raise their gaze to the spiritual beings above them, who are invisible to the sensory eye, as well as to all the senses, because they have passed through the stages of spirituality and no longer have an existence for the senses. This was what was sought in the mysteries of the Greeks: the development of human beings to interact with higher beings.

In the last third of the 19th century, as I said, a few deeper natures were again granted an understanding of what such a thing actually means. Above all, a personality such as Margherita Albana belonged to this group. However, I would like to say that such a personality was not initiated into that great spiritual art which had to be undergone by those who wanted to cultivate contact with the gods within the Greek mysteries. Such a personality was a natural initiate, as there are nature poets. However, I cannot go into further detail about the fact that a soul that is naturally initiated into earlier stages of existence has already had experiences, so that what it now experiences are only memories of earlier stages of existence. But what underlies above all else a spiritual personality such as Margherita Albana was, is the possibility of looking into the higher world through the transformation of very specific lower forces of our existence. What does that mean?

All higher means of human knowledge are basically transformations of subordinate forces. What undeveloped humans had in distant times as undeveloped, dull senses can be transformed into the eye that reveals to us the glory of sunlight. Or consider how imperfect the organ of hearing is at the lower stages of development! Everything that is a higher organ, everything that humans have within themselves so that the glorious nature around them can be revealed to them in the most wonderful way, all of this is the transformation, the metamorphosis of lower powers. In the same way, the powers that humans have today can also be transformed into higher sensory organs.

Some people were equipped with higher sensory organs in the last third of the 19th century. This opened their eyes to the spiritual environment. What other people have only in abstract terms or intuitions, the reality of divine existence, was for them as certain as the sensory things are for other people. Such personalities were able to impart knowledge and messages from higher worlds. And Edouard Schur's receptive nature could be stimulated and inspired to the most beautiful and greatest things precisely by such people. In this drama, which you can obtain here in a translation by Marie von Sivers, Edouard Schur& combined soul and spirit and deep esoteric knowledge, true spiritual insight with a truly Schillerian diction and power of language. And that is what makes the drama of “The Children of Lucifer” one that was created not merely from the spirit of the present, as embodied in a few people today, but from the spirit of the immediate future of humanity, a work in which those who have the aptitude and talent for it can develop themselves up to the highest and most significant theosophical ideas. It was precisely this that struck Edouard Schuré, what took place in the Greek mysteries and in those initiation cults.

You all know that within German intellectual life in the last third of the 19th century, there was also a sense of a kind of understanding of what is present in the Greek mysteries. Everything associated with the name Richard Wagner was in a certain way inspired by the spirit of the Greek mysteries. We will have more to say about this chapter in the next lectures. You also know that one of the minds closely associated with Richard Wagner, Friedrich Nietzsche, wrote his first work on Greek tragedy and that in it he wanted to show how this Greek tragedy arose from an ancient spiritual life. Not as far as Edouard Schur, not into the mysteries, but to the gates, to the door of the mysteries, Friedrich Nietzsche's path led him at that time when he wrote the work: The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Greek Life.

Two words stood before his mind: the Apollonian on the one hand, the Dionysian on the other. What did Nietzsche mean by these two words? He understood them to mean two currents of thought. The Dionysian, he says, is that which lives entirely in that element of human spiritual life which knows itself to be one with the whole cosmic spirit around it. For Friedrich Nietzsche, the Dionysian is an intoxication that man experiences when he is completely permeated, imbued in his very essence with that core of the highest spiritual life that floods the entire cosmos. Nietzsche sensed something of what the Pythagoreans called the music of the spheres, something of that primordial chorus of which Goethe also speaks when he begins his “Faust” with the words:

The sun resounds in the old way
In brotherly spheres, singing in competition,
And completes its prescribed journey
With a thunderous roar.

Nietzsche had an inkling of that mysterious hearing and listening to what flows through the cosmos, what makes the planets dance around their sun, what animates the spheres, and he sensed that something divine is expressed in this dance of the spheres and that humans can be imbued with the breath of the divine, and that humans then feel at one with the entire universe. Then, according to Nietzsche, humans live in a kind of intoxication, they live according to what flows through the entire universe, and an echo of that god whom the Greeks call Dionysus lives within them.

For Nietzsche, this is the god who has poured out into the entire material world around us, who lies buried in the material world and then celebrates his resurrection in the human spirit, in the human soul. So that the disciple of Dionysus, the one who is seized by Dionysus, accomplishes his songs, his inspirations under the influence of this god and lets flow what is called the immediate Dionysian art that has emerged from the divine. Thus, the Dionysian dancer and Dionysian singer was the representative of the Dionysian divine principle in the world. For Nietzsche, this Dionysian drama is the original drama, and later drama arose only because an image was created, a calm, dreamlike image of the original Dionysian ecstasy. What the Dionysus disciple receives, what rises before his senses, he can reproduce in a serene Apollonian manner. Thus, Apollonian art is something that was created later as an image of Dionysian art. It is the image, the access, the inkling of something that lived in ancient Greece. Nietzsche already pointed to the primeval age, when the followers of Dionysus did not merely speak of the god, but lived out the divine in their movements, their voices, and their actions as the original artists. All later art appeared to Nietzsche as nothing more than a late echo of this primeval art. All science appeared to him to be only a shadowy reflection of that representation of the forces themselves brought about by humans.

In Richard Wagner's art, Nietzsche saw a renewal of that great art that reconnects humans with the divine. It was therefore clear to Nietzsche that Richard Wagner could not bring human figures onto the stage, but that he needed superhuman figures who not only represented what happens in this world, but also what works behind this world in the spirit. Just as the Greek artist was able to do in the Dionysian drama, so, in Nietzsche's view, Richard Wagner's figures, brought down to the stage, had to rise above the ordinary human so that they could embody something of which man could say that they are there for what is to come. In his book “The Musical Drama,” Schuré also created from this spirit that surrounded Wagner, and he presented the idea of musical drama in a magnificent way; for he was introduced to the true spiritual world, to spiritual reality, by Margherita Albana, who died in 1887. For him, intuition became reality, and with it he was able to find the key to the inner workings of the Greek mysteries. Better than anyone else, Edouard Schuré was able to shed light on what went on within the sacred mysteries of Greece. In his work “The Sanctuaries of the Orient,” he brilliantly reconstructed the so-called Greek primordial drama. What was the Eleusinian primordial drama? Nothing other than a reproduction of an experience that cannot be experienced within the sensory world at all, that can only be experienced when human beings develop themselves to the point where higher senses awaken in them, where they become aware that all the laws of nature they learn about are not abstract concepts, but real thoughts of beings who have been called the Greek gods. Just as human beings today create with their thoughts and put their thoughts into their works, so their older brothers, the gods, put their thoughts into the world of existence.

Let us put ourselves in the mind of such a Greek mystery student who has been initiated. If he could have spoken in our words, he would have said: Look at a work of art, a machine – what are they? They are works of human beings, formed according to human thoughts. When you stand before a work of art or a machine, you also see the artist or the mechanic through the work, and I understand the work when its laws are revealed to me. And what are these laws? They are what first lived in the mind, in the spirit of a human being. How crystallized are the thoughts of the mechanic, of the artist, in the material tool, in the marble work of art. And as I look from the work of art and the machine to the artist and the mechanic, so the Greek artist looked from the earth to the higher beings. If he wanted to penetrate the laws by which an animal was constructed, he said to himself, thoughts of beings of a divine nature are within it. Just as the thought of the mechanic is in the machine, so the thought of a creator, of a god, is in the animal, in the crystal, in the starry sky. This god is a being with whom he feels related, a being who stands on a level that man himself will one day reach. A being that has emerged from a human level is the god of the Greeks, and a being that will one day reach a divine level is man to them. Thus, in the mysteries, they associated with the gods. He associated with the gods as with older brothers or as a child with adults, and the feeling expressed in this is something quite natural. One must first empathize with this way of thinking. From this way of thinking, the mystery student looks up to those beings who are, as it were, slumbering or embodied in their thoughts in the whole of nature that surrounds us. In all of nature, the mystery students saw the slumbering thoughts of God. The essence of the deity has flowed into this, and human beings are only there so that these thoughts of God can once again attain their own existence within them. All the thoughts in the human soul are a reawakening of God in the world. Placed in this way in the cosmos, human life appears as an afterimage of the descent, suffering, and death of the deity and of the deity being buried in matter. Human beings are called upon to redeem the gods from matter. This is the Dionysian path, the path that all gods have taken. Thus the gods live in their thoughts.

In theosophy, the last-born of the gods is called Dionysus. You know that in the legend he is spoken of as a son of Zeus with a mortal mother, Semele. It is said that he was snatched from his mother by his divine father when she was struck by Zeus' lightning bolt. But then the jealousy of the mother of the gods, Hera, flared up against this child who was not hers. She set the Titans on the child, who tore him apart and scattered the pieces all over the world. Only the heart was saved by Pallas Athena, who brought it to Zeus, who formed Dionysus anew from it.

It becomes clear to us that this god was already there before, and it also becomes clear to us that this deity has a special relationship with the world. What is it? In the mysteries, it was depicted as the creator of that in man which humanity has achieved most recently. Isn't it true that when we encounter man in life, he is in part as if created by the hand of the gods themselves? In the first years of his life, he also appears to us in this way, since he has not yet formed or shaped his own existence. Gradually, he matures and becomes independent. Then he works on and shapes his own existence. More and more, the power awakens in him that makes him the creator of his innermost being, the shaper of his soul and spirit. Now, within the mystery teachings, it is said that the last step into life, which man receives from nature or from God, is connected with the god Dionysus. And here we touch upon one of the deepest mysteries of the Greek mystery system, namely that which is called the sexual maturity of man. The moment when he emerges from undifferentiated sexual life into the differentiated life of man and woman is still the last step that nature takes with man, leading him to this maturity, bringing him to the point where the urge to the opposite sex awakens in him. What they then do with this urge, how they refine it, how they imbue it with soul, and what is made of love in a spiritual sense, is then the work of human beings themselves. The last step that the gods take with human beings is to allow them to develop into young men and women in sexual maturity. The power that now expresses itself for the mystery student in all nature, in all knowledge, in all sensuality, and in all soul forces at the various stages, he now also recognizes in this inclination of one sex toward the other.

How, the Greek mystery student asks himself, does man perceive at all? How does any being perceive at all? When we think of an animal instinctively eating the plants that are necessary and useful for its growth, this is a kind of perception. But it is a higher level of perception when our eye turns toward the light and, as it were, absorbs the light. Perception is sensuality, it is seeing, and it is also perception when one sex inclines toward the other. Then comes the transformation of the lower forces into higher and ever higher ones. The last step that nature, or God, in a freer sense, has taken with human beings can also be transformed. Sensuality is transformed into love. It becomes spiritualized, it becomes animated. And the god who was close to the Greeks of the mystery, this power of sexual maturity, was Dionysus. Dionysus did not have only this one function, for sexual maturity is connected with something else entirely. Dionysus is thus understood as the last-born of the gods.

When we look at the human being as he stands before us today, we see a being in whom the deeper observer — and those who engage with the theosophical worldview are gradually led to this deeper view — sees something that has gradually become man and woman. To understand the Greek way of thinking, you need only read Plato and take him seriously, and you will find how he points to a time when there were no men and women yet, when human beings were still both male and female at the same time. The biblical legend also points to such an undifferentiated human race, and the Fall is basically nothing more than a symbolic representation of sexual differentiation. When we realize that the human being as we know him today originated from a two-sexed being, we will say to ourselves: in the course of evolution, the human being has acquired his one-sided sex. He has developed from dual sex to single sex. He has lost half of his productive power. And this half has awakened on the other side as the power of our soul, as the power of our spirit. By becoming unisexual — as a deeper look into nature shows us — human beings have become spiritually and soulfully productive because they have given up half of their physical productive power. This has enabled humans to achieve what we now call self-awareness, what we call the ability to say “I” to themselves, to be independent beings, to have been released, figuratively speaking, from the hands of the gods and become their own creators. Thus, in the course of development, it is connected that man feels the power that forms the basis of his egoism, but which also makes him a free, self-conscious being. Thus, at every stage where sexuality finds its further development in some way, this becoming independent, this becoming freer of man, is repeated.

The god Dionysus is the last-born of the gods, that is, he is the one whom the Greeks imagined brought man up to his present independence. Zeus, Kronos, the older gods, created humans to the point where they were hermaphroditic beings who lived in a dull consciousness, unable to say “I” to themselves, without self-awareness and without freedom. The creator of independence is Dionysus. With this, the divine principle flowed as a unified whole into all of nature to the point where humans became independent. Then it appears to us as humans in countless individuals.

Let me illustrate this clearly. Let us go back to the time when human beings were not yet independent, when they were still dual-sexed beings with a dim consciousness. One could say that, just as my hand is a limb of my own organism, so human beings at that time were a limb of the whole deity. Their consciousness still rested in the bosom of divine consciousness. It was still possible to see through human beings to the divine soul. Now that human beings have become independent, separated from divine consciousness, this soul is fragmented into as many individuals as there are human beings. This was symbolized in a magnificent way in the fragmented god Dionysus, who had been torn to pieces by the Titans. Human wisdom was symbolized by Pallas Athena. She was like a saving, unified consciousness of all humanity, felt with our higher spirit, with our heart. By feeling ourselves as one again, by developing a similar spirit throughout humanity, the heart of the god Dionysus is saved and carried back up to the dwelling place of the gods themselves. Thus, the Greeks had the mental image that the god Dionysus led humans up to the separation of the sexes and finally to sexual maturity. And in the inclination of one sex toward the other, they saw one of the many powers that originate from the god Dionysus. Two spiritual currents then act upon human beings, who thus stand in the world as creatures of the god Dionysus, and these currents are the starting point of our own culture.

One current is that in which the spirit works in the external, serene form and in wisdom, in order to unfold the beauty of external form and order in the sensual instinct. The instinct through which Dionysus has brought human beings to their present stage should not act wildly, stormily, irregularly, and disorderly, but should conform to harmony and order. This principle of Dionysus' external formal design is best seen in Hellenic and Roman art, in Greek beauty, and in Roman statecraft. Through them, order and beauty were brought into the coexistence of human beings, who were created by the god Dionysus as independent beings. And the soul that animates this instinct, that animates this instinct, this soul has been brought to a refinement, to a deification of this instinct through Christianity; everything that draws human beings to humanity, everything that regulates human community in such a way that it is not blind desire that prevails, but ennobled, spiritualized, deified desire, all this is brought about by Christianity properly understood. Spirit and love are the two currents in human development.

This is how the poet of “The Children of Lucifer” sees human development, both present and past, over the last millennia. He sees in what the Hellenic spirit and Roman statecraft have created the living and uplifting principle of the Dionysian human being, and on the other hand, in Christianity, the deepening of the principle of love. Now we can also understand how Edouard Schur came to incorporate these ideas into a work of art that he called “The Children of Lucifer.”

The whole story takes place in a city in Asia Minor. Dionysia had a cult dedicated to the god Dionysus. These Dionysian mysteries were celebrated in Dionysia, where they had a place of mystery. Then this Dionysian movement was interspersed with a second movement. It was in the 4th century of the Christian era. On the one hand, there was Roman world domination, which made those who worshipped Dionysus, who knew that a spark of a divine soul lived within them, members of the Roman state. And now the Greek spirit and the Roman state spirit came into conflict. The original spirit must revolt. And why must it revolt? It must revolt because the outer form wants to incorporate the independent. This can easily become an external order. What is supposed to create order, harmony, and unity easily becomes something that once again suppresses and subjugates human freedom and independence. This is what happened with the Roman spirit — which itself was born out of the Dionysian spirit — in the 4th century. And so, in Dionysia, we are confronted with the two currents of the human spirit: on the one hand, the spirit, and on the other, the rigid formalism of the state. These are the two currents that spread from the Dionysian mysteries into Christianity, which was supposed to spiritualize the human pull toward humanity, ennoble the deeds of Dionysus, and elevate them to a higher light by transforming the mere urge toward purity. However, in that time, in the 4th century, it degenerated into an external formalism that subjugated and suppressed what it should have ennobled and what it should have developed. Thus, on the one hand, we have the enslaving Caesar and, on the other, the enslaving Christian priest, who does not bring out love in order to ennoble it, but brings it out in order to kill it. Thus, in Edouard Schuré's drama, we see two individuals presented to us as representatives of the Hellenic-Roman spirit: on the one hand, the young man who is first called Theokles and then Phosphorus, and on the other, the virgin who has been consecrated as a pure sacrificial virgin in the service of Christianity. We see how Phosphorus rebels against the ossifying, Caesar-like principle and wants to call the Dionysian people to existence in the highest refinement, and on the other hand, the Christian virgin, who is not so spiritualized that she is removed from the world, but so spiritualized that she herself is called upon to work and create in this immediate world. These two individualities deepen each other. How beautifully and grandly and powerfully this is depicted, how these two individualities develop. Phosphorus is led, after he sees how his hometown is subjugated on the one hand by the Caesarian and on the other by the Christian — on the one hand he sees the divine Caesar, on the other the good shepherd, detached from the whole world, and those who are to worship him — he is led before another elder, before that elder whom in Greek language is called the Old Man of the unknown, the indeterminately revealing God.

It is a great transformation that our Phosphorus is undergoing. In a distant mountain gorge, he searches for a clue and comes across one of the temples that were considered initiation temples. There he also meets an old priest, one of the wise men of the unknown God. Which god? Perhaps the one who is not professed, not worshipped in this or that form? The one who, when asked, gives no answer, because everyone must answer for themselves, which cannot be put into words, but which lives as a spark in every human being? As true as it is that man can become aware of the divine spark, so too can he become aware that his whole life is a journey toward the great God who underlies what lives in the stars, what is in the human breast, and what will still underlie all that man himself will achieve on his higher level, because he is not a God of the past, but a God of the future, not a God of thoughts of the past or the present, but a God of thoughts that man will one day be able to think as the highest on the current level of development. That is why he is called the unknown God, because man cannot serve a God who holds his existence as a finished thing in his hand, but because he wants to serve a God who can only stand in perfect form in the future. That is why the free man holds on to the divine spark in his breast, that is why he holds on to that which is scattered throughout the world as the fragmented Dionysus. Then they cannot find the strength for upward development from anything other than this separated spark of God, but then they also know that this upward development is connected with passing through knowledge and suffering, with passing through evil, because human beings are detached, in their inner spirituality, from the divine. That is why free forces must spring up within them to lead this spark back to divinity. If we had remained in the bosom of the gods, without being fragmented in the sense of the Dionysus legend, then the deity itself would lead us to godliness. But as it is, we appear like fallen sons of God. And this power within us, which as sons of Dionysus is supposed to lead us to this godliness, this power within us is the power of Lucifer, the Luciferic principle, that light which man kindles within himself in freedom in order to find the whole God as part of the divine essence.

This power that works within him is the light. And what carries this light within him, and what carries this light within all humanity, the teacher and guide, is Lucifer, the light bearer. All those who develop a mindset like Phosphorus are the children of Lucifer. They are therefore not anti-Christian. They are of such a mind that they say: In Christ appeared God incarnate, who descended and lived out his life in human form. But man must develop himself upward so that he will unfold the God within himself, so that the man who has become God will encounter the God who has become man, so that the man who ascends from below will find a being of the same kind as himself. If Christ is the one who descended deepest from above as the revealing God, then the God whom the God-become-man will encounter is Lucifer. Christ and Lucifer belong together, understood in the right sense. Thus we find Phosphorus, undeterred by Caesarism or by the world's suppression of the free Dionysian principle, rushing to the temple of the unknown God to receive the light that will carry him upward, thus becoming himself a son of Lucifer.

As Phosphorus follows this path, raising his spirit to the view that recognizes Lucifer as the principle of development, Kleonis develops from a Christian virgin into a universal principle. Her love is to be directed solely toward the incarnate God. She develops to the point where she senses that love in human beings can be ennobled to such an extent that the divine love in the incarnate God connects with human love in human nature itself. Thus the Christian virgin rises to the point where she can meet the unknown God. Christ has come alive in the Christian virgin not only through her contemplation and worship of the divine, but also through her elevation to Christian love. Phosphorus has ascended to the point where the spirit shines upon him in the light. Thus, the spirit in man and the soul in woman are on the same level. And now they work together on the same level, in such a way that instead of Dionysus, there is always the free human couple, which embodies the premonition of a future that is yet to come. Christianity and Caesarism have developed into what unfolded in Dionysia: this subjugated and enslaved the people. But the two stand upright and free. They are driven away. They cannot save the old Dionysia. The old Dionysus, who initially perishes in Romanism and outward Christian formalism, cannot accommodate these two who have freed themselves; they are driven out. By representing the life of a future in the present, they must live in the present. They find their way back to the unknown temple. Where Phosphorus was consecrated, where the star of Lucifer appeared to him, there, in the hour of death, uniting both paths, the luminous star of Lucifer appears to them, leading people in freedom to the highest development, and the cross of Christ, the symbol of redemption, which we attain when the incarnate God touches the god-become-man.

Thus, the two who have freed themselves must save what they have achieved through death. They cannot save Dionysia. This is how human development works. Basically, this was something that had already been experienced in the Greek mysteries in a higher life, that life always triumphs over death, that death is only something apparent in the individual human being and also something apparent in human culture as a whole. Thus, at the end of Schuré's drama, we get the inkling that what the two have achieved and developed within themselves as they die has eternal significance beyond death. The whole drama ends in a grandiose manner, in the certain certainty that the spirit must triumph over matter.

Just as death stands here as the victor over life, so can one only portray it if one knows something about the true and real life of the spirit and knows that all death is only something apparent. Those who do not know that all death is an illusion, who do not want to acknowledge that the spirit is something real, must say to themselves: if death were something real for the noble couple who gained their freedom by being rejected and driven out of enslaved Dionysia, then what the two of them took with them would perish. For all those who remained in Dionysia are falling into a dying era of humanity. So apparently nothing remains. If this appearance were a reality, we could never believe that it has any meaning when someone has purchased a higher life with death. For then this drama would end in nothingness. Only the belief and the knowledge that the spiritual is a reality sustains this drama, and that from the death of the liberated couple a real spiritual blossom springs forth, which later works and lives in the humanity that has remained, which has been sunk into the whole spiritual development of humanity. From the death of Kleonis and Phosphorus springs a spiritual flower of humanity, which is then there.

What man experiences through the light and what man recognizes lives on. Schur owed this certainty to the fact that the former Greek world had been resurrected in him through Margherita Albana. And he owes it to Christianity that he was not merely an external artist, but could also take a deep look into the spiritual development of humanity. He showed this view in his book “The Great Initiates,” which will soon be available in German translation. In it, he has spread out the entire historical tableau of humanity from Rama, Krishna, Hermes, Plato, and on through the other initiates to Christ Jesus. He has depicted this tableau of humanity, this spiritual development. In doing so, he has provided a view of history that is theosophical in the most eminent sense and has led countless people in Europe to the theosophical worldview. From the spirit of his view, “The Children of Lucifer” was then created, this wonderful dramatic little work in which theosophical spirit lives in every line and every scene. Thus, the theosophical worldview comes to life, thus art becomes an expression of the theosophical spirit when the truth of the spirit shines back at us in beauty.

There are three things, says Edouard Schuré, that humans can create at first. First, we are dealing with ontology. This leads us to the great laws of the world, but when we are deeply immersed in theosophy, we no longer see them as dead, but as abstract thoughts of God. Then we are dealing with mysticism, which leads us to the gods and higher beings whom we recognize as our elder brothers. And then we are also dealing with symbolism, which shows us the deity in its outer sensual image and as a shadowy reflection in art. Thus, Edouard Schuré is a true theosophist and a true artist, and therefore shows more than any theosophical dogma what the theosophical task in the world is.

It is characteristic that the first theosophical journal appeared under the title “Lucifer,” which we have renewed in our German magazine “Lucifer-Gnosis,” where the entire way of thinking, the entire future task of the theosophical worldview, is clearly expressed, as it lives artistically in the drama entitled “The Children of Lucifer.” Only those who see art as something external will fail to recognize that this work of art contains something supremely alive, which is in no way diminished by the depth of its creative power. If the artist is completely satisfied by this drama, then something of that uplift to the unknown God who works in all of us and whose increasingly general recognition gives theosophy its name also flows from this drama. This drama is thus the expression of that theosophical attitude which takes true deepening and human freedom seriously.

No human being can be free in the highest sense of the word who does not find the divine within himself, who is not an ally, not a brother of the divine being. When man becomes this, he himself becomes part of that power which is a bearer of light, which is a Lucifer. Then he becomes a child of Lucifer. Those who understand something of the mysterious force that works in the universe, which cannot be seen with the eyes or perceived with instruments, of the forces that permeate moral and religious life and work throughout our entire cosmos, those who know something about it speak of the forces called astral light. Those who are knowledgeable describe it as flowing through space like other forces, such as gravity, and acting upon beings. Astral light flows through all beings; it lives in higher animals and in human beings in general. When a human being does something and says, “I am acting,” or “I am driven by instinct,” it is in truth the astral light that is working and living within him. He can surrender to this astral light, unconsciously, with dawning consciousness, and this always happens when a human being allows himself to be oppressed by passions and instincts. But this does not happen when humans make themselves the bearers of their own light, when they connect with the Luciferic force. Then they make this astral light, this creative force in the world, into a conscious, creative force within themselves. Then they become citizens of higher spiritual worlds. If they surrender to the astral light with a subdued consciousness, they can say: Certainly the gods live, and they flow through me, but I am called upon to step out of unconsciousness, to let the light appear as something free, to illuminate my deeds myself with divine power. Everything that arises from the twilight darkness of consciousness, everything that is not brought about by the bearer of light, is what hinders our development. What leads to the goal and to the true human ideal is that which comes from the light, from true knowledge. Therefore, human beings may only truly throw themselves into the stream of life when they have grasped the God within themselves, when the God within them is their guide. To awaken God-consciousness within oneself and then to become a citizen of the earth with the help of the powers that spring from one's own breast—that is theosophical thinking. Margherita Albana, whom Edouard Schuré calls his guide, expresses this attitude in a short saying that could serve as a motto for the theosophical way of life and which will also conclude our reflections today:

Trust in the God within your breast, and then surrender everything that is within you to the stream of life.