World Mysteries and Theosophy

GA 54 — 8 March 1906, Berlin

Germanic and Indian Secret Teachings

I have often pointed out here that it is a prejudice to describe the current theosophical movement in the strict sense of the word as Buddhist, or, as some say, neo-Buddhist. Theosophy or spiritual science is not about introducing a foreign worldview that lies outside our own culture into Europe, but rather about showing, even within our European culture, how humanity's quest for knowledge is based on deeper teachings of wisdom that express themselves in a wide variety of ways. Next time, I will be allowed to show how, in a more recent epoch of German intellectual life, theosophical feeling and thinking found expression to an extraordinary degree, I would say in its intellectual purity, at the turn of the 18th to the 19th century. Today, however, I would like to show, as far as can be squeezed into a single lecture, how there is an influence within Germanic-German folk culture that leads back to views that we encounter in theosophy. A careful comparison between what has been at the root of European, Central European religious and worldview concepts for centuries, perhaps for millennia, with what has been expressed in such a unique, spiritual way in the Orient, will show us how little justification there is for the misunderstanding that the theosophical spiritual movement wants to graft something completely foreign onto European life. If we really want to make this comparison, we will have to at least briefly outline the basic tenets of the so-called theosophical worldview. Let us briefly consider the basic tenets of the theosophical or spiritual-scientific worldview that have been discussed here many times. According to this theosophical worldview, human beings are essentially beings with a dual nature, namely a transitory, so-called outer shell, an external part of their nature, and an imperishable, eternal core. The outer shell is, as it were, the covering or tool of the human being, with which his immortal core acts and operates in this world. This shell is clearly divided into four subdivisions. The first subdivision is the so-called physical body, the body that can be seen with the eyes and perceived with the other senses. The second part is the so-called etheric body. This is the body in which life dwells. It is roughly the same shape as the physical body, but as the bearer of the life principle, it is what underlies the physical body. The third part is the bearer of feelings of pleasure and pain, of instincts and passions. We call it the astral body because the forces that are active in it, for those who are able to look deeper into the world, prove to be the forces that live and exist out there in the starry space, in the astral. We refer to the fourth member as the actual human I. We call it this because the other three members, the physical body, etheric body, and astral body, are shared by humans with the other beings around them. Every mineral has a physical body. Plants have a physical body and an etheric body; animals have a physical body, an etheric body, and an astral body. Human beings also have a fourth member for living within this world, which enables them to say “I” to themselves. Now this I is the final member, the culmination of the development of the three other bodies just mentioned, toward which they have all striven since time immemorial. This I is at the same time the starting point of a new divine development. This “I,” which dwells in the three sheaths, but which does not surround them like onion skins, but rather interacts with them in a lawful manner, powerfully interpenetrating and shaping them, is at the same time the bearer of that which today is only contained as a predisposition in the majority of human beings, the bearer of a higher threefold nature, which we can best describe in German with the expressions: spirit self, life spirit, and spirit man. The spirit self of the human being is described with a word borrowed from Eastern mysticism as Manas. The second is the life spirit, which is referred to in Eastern terminology as Buddhi. The highest, the innermost member of the human being is Atma. It is the actual spirit of the human being, the innermost core of their being, the immortal within human nature. This gives us, like the seven tones or the seven colors in the rainbow, seven members of human nature. The three lower members are a confluence, an extract of the three kingdoms that surround us: the mineral kingdom, the plant kingdom, and the animal kingdom. The three upper members: Manas, Buddhi, and Atma are three members that cannot be perceived by the senses, three members that are of a divine nature. Human beings share these three members with the higher realms of existence, just as they share their lower members, the physical body, the etheric body, and the astral body, with the three realms surrounding us in our earthly sphere. While these three lower bodies extend into earthly existence, the higher spiritual elements of human nature strive upward into the realms of the divine, which are also threefold, just as the mineral, plant, and animal kingdoms here below are threefold. Thus, human beings are rooted in the earthly realm and reach upward with their branches into the spiritual-divine world. And just as they have developed from lowly beginnings in the earthly world, they develop spiritually upward, becoming more and more like the higher spiritual beings. Therefore, we can also say that human beings are essentially divided into three parts: By connecting the three lower members and the three upper members, we have the I in the middle. The I is that which participates in both the earthly and the divine. It permeates the etheric body and the astral body. We refer to this I as the soul. We refer to the actual immortal inner being of the human being, Atma, Buddhi, Manas, as spirit. Through these three members of his nature, man is a citizen of three worlds at once. He is a citizen of the ordinary physical world here. When he has left the physical world here, when his physical body has been shed, along with the etheric body, he enters another world, a kind of intermediate world, an astral world, as we say, the soul world. In this world, immediately after death and for a number of years, he must purify himself, purify himself from what still clings to him from his connection with the earthly physical world. We call this state Kamaloka or sojourn in the astral world. This is not a place, but a state. As long as the disembodied human being still has certain effects of his physical nature upon him, he remains in the spiritual world and then ascends to an even higher world, which we call Devachan or the world of the spiritual.

Now you know that the theosophical or spiritual scientific worldview does not assume that human beings have only one stay in this physical world, but that it is clear that human beings have to go through repeated earthly lives, that their immortal core can only become more and more divine ascend to spiritual regions, that he undergoes repeated experiences, repeated lessons in earthly life. And so, after passing through the soul and spiritual realms, man returns to the physical world, then back to the spiritual, and so on. These repeated incarnations are held together by the so-called law of karma, the law of cause and effect. When a person reappears after having gone through repeated earthly lives, they are born with predispositions and abilities that they have acquired through experience in previous lives, as well as with the guilt they have incurred in previous lives. Thus, one person appears happy, another unhappy and miserable, because they have brought this upon themselves through their own actions. What we humans have worked out here will reappear in future earthly lives. Man is thus in a state of ascent and descent, in a back-and-forth movement between the three worlds: the physical world, the astral world, and the devachan world.

Man is not only himself a being who belongs to these three worlds, but he also has companions in these three worlds. Those who, in the spirit of spiritual science, gain insight into the other worlds, not only into the physical world that humans can perceive with their senses and touch with their hands, know that there are not only beings who have the three members of human nature: body, soul, and spirit, but that there are also beings that are lower than human beings and beings that are higher than human beings. How are we to form a mental image of the beings that are lower than human beings? We are to form a mental image of them as not having a spiritual core as their highest part, as human beings do, but only a soul. Just as human beings have spirit, soul, and body, so the lower beings would have only soul, body, and something lower than the body. If we call this world, the unknown, which constitutes the third, the underworld, for my sake, we could say: Such beings also have a threefold nature, whose lowest member is the underworld, whose middle member is the physical world, and whose highest member is the soul world. But there are also beings who have two parts in the spiritual realm and whose third part rises above the sphere of Devachan, above the sphere of the spiritual. So you see that you can construct a whole series of beings. And such beings really exist, as experience shows. Human beings belong to three worlds. Such beings would also belong to three worlds, and just as human beings are in the process of development, having evolved from a stage at which their soul was their highest being, into which the spiritual core has been lowered, so too are these other beings in a process of continuous development. You see that those who have experience of such things must say to themselves that when human beings have laid aside this physical body and ascend into the soul-spiritual world, they will be the companions of other beings, beings whose lowest link is the soul nature.

This is the outline of the worldview that is not only widespread in some part of earthly culture, but also underlies all deeper religions and is to be renewed through the theosophical or spiritual-scientific worldview. At the same time, however, this is a worldview that is in a state of constant development, not a worldview that must be regarded as abstractly fixed, but a worldview that takes shape in various ways through the different stages of human development. As human beings become more mature on the ladder of development, this also manifests itself in different ways. However, human beings not only participate in this development, but the basic teaching of all world culture shows that certain individual human beings can undergo a more rapid development, that they can ascend more quickly to higher stages of perfection, that they can, so to speak, outpace their fellow beings. Then, while still in their physical bodies, they already gain insight into those worlds which human beings enter when they have passed through the gate of death. All cultures, all religious cultures, preserve as a secret the possibility that human beings can look into the worlds that are closed to them when they dwell in their physical bodies. But human beings can already pass through the gate of death in this life and gain a view of those worlds which they will later have to enter in their upward development. Just as human beings are ahead of animals, such individuals are ahead of the rest of humanity. All the deeper teachings of world culture have accepted such individuals who have gone ahead of the rest of humanity and refer to them as initiates. You see, here we really do have the ladder that I was able to talk about last time in my lecture on Lucifer. We have a whole ladder of beings that places human beings in a wonderful but comprehensible way into the completely natural spiritual world. Thus, every religion and every major worldview is based on the principle that there are divine natures alongside and above human beings, but that these divine natures themselves went through the stages that human beings are going through today in times long past, under different conditions and in different ways; for nothing is repeated in the universe.

So we can say: those who are gods today were once human beings, and human beings will evolve toward divine nature in the future. Human beings are gods in the making, and the gods are nothing more than perfected human beings. This is the basic tenet of all secret science, as it is called. And to understand this statement in its full scope means to be an “initiate.” However, one must not only understand this abstractly with the intellect, but also through experience. This includes the knowledge of the ray of the spirit that is now accessible to human beings. Only then does one know what great, infinite significance this sentence of all secret teaching has, this sentence that, so to speak, runs through all worldviews as a leitmotif to this day.

Now let me take a look at how it runs through the various mental images of Germanic and German prehistory, partly preserved into the present day, and how we can find it. I may well begin by saying that science unfortunately pays little attention to how these things are. At the end of the 1980s, my dear friend Ludwig Laistner published a work entitled “Das Rätsel der Sphinx” (The Riddle of the Sphinx), a beautiful two-volume work. It does not deal with any extraordinarily lofty teachings, but starts from the simplest things. It starts with a very simple fact that still occurs in numerous forms within our current folklore. For example, the folk tale of the Mittagsfrau (midday woman) is still alive among the Wends. It goes something like this: if certain people who work in the fields outside do not take a proper lunch break at harvest time, i.e., if they stay outside in the fields between noon and two o'clock, the Mittagsfrau comes and asks them questions. For example, she asks the flax farmer about weaving linen or something else. The people have to answer these questions. If they hesitate over a question, they are doomed. They have to come up with the answer by two o'clock. If they cannot give the right answer, the Mittagsfrau strangles them or cuts off their heads with her sickle. The farmers now use various means to counter this. The person concerned must be able to recite the Lord's Prayer backwards and forwards. If he can do so, the woman lets him go, but if not, she kills or insults him.

You see, here a folklorist, Ludwig Laistner, starts from simple legends. Now he is investigating similar legends. They can still be found in our folk culture today. He searches for them in the most diverse regions and at the same time finds that this is a simple example of the so-called question torment, of the embarrassment that people experience when spiritual beings ask them questions that they have to answer. He now shows how, in other forms of legend, the same thing becomes more and more complicated until one ascends to the riddle that the Cadmean Sphinx posed to humans and how Oedipus solved it. Laistner explains this beautifully, showing how it works. Just as the ABCs lead to higher science, so the legend of the noon woman relates to the complicated question of the human riddle posed by the Sphinx.

But then Laistner shows something else. I must tell you this because you will see how extraordinarily important it is for theosophy. Like most researchers of legends, he started from the various conceptions of God and came to see them as symbols. You know that some god figures are understood as symbolic representations of the clouds, the sun, the moon, and so on. This is a widely held view that you can find everywhere. But it has been put forward by people — as Laistner learned firsthand from his own experience — who do not really know how the imagination of the people works, who do not know that it is far from the imagination of the people to invent gods for themselves out of wind and weather, out of lightning, thunder, sunshine, and rain. Laistner already realized this when he was still dependent on traditional research, that this cannot be the case. In his book on the Sphinx, he asked: What actually happens when the noon woman comes and puts everyone to the test? — What lies ahead — and Ludwig Laistner has proven this almost exactly — is that these things have emerged from another state of consciousness, the dream state. He has proven that the midday woman is nothing more than the product of a dream experience had by those who slept in the fields during midday. It was not daytime consciousness that fantasized, but the dream that became a symbol. Laistner distinguishes between sleeping in a room and sleeping in an open field. Just as a person can dream with the bedcover in their hand of a frog they are holding in their hand, so the outside world is symbolized in the noon woman. She emerged from a dream experience. Laistner attempted to expand on this idea. He was not yet familiar with Spiritual Science. He therefore had to point out how important elements of our legendary poetry arose from real dream experiences.

However, dream experiences are only rudiments of another state of consciousness. This other state of consciousness can be attained by those who undergo a certain inner development, which we will discuss in the twelfth lecture on April 19. Those who have attended these lectures know that if they undergo certain exercises and train themselves spiritually, they can transform the otherwise chaotic, disordered world of dreams into a completely regular world, which then not only shows them parts of ordinary reality as reminiscences, but also introduces them to the higher spiritual world, which they can then transfer into reality. This is the higher state of consciousness, the astral or imaginative consciousness. It begins with the dream experience becoming regular and the person one day realizing that they are experiencing a new spiritual reality. Then they can rise to an even higher, spiritual reality. The fact that human beings can already achieve today what will be available to everyone in the future, that they can see into the spiritual-soul world, was in a certain sense already present in past times. For human development consists in developing from one level of consciousness to another. The consciousness that human beings now have, in which they perceive with their outer senses and process sensory impressions with their intellect, this consciousness arose from a consciousness that was not the same as, but similar to, dream consciousness. Only this consciousness, which I have called in Lucifer Gnosis the dream-like image consciousness, was somewhat darker. However, human beings did not perceive direct impressions, but symbols, and even what happened in life was expressed to them in images. Human beings lost this consciousness and gained clear daytime consciousness in return. At that time, they did not have the clear consciousness they have today. They could not perceive with their senses, nor could they see daylight. They had to see this consciousness sink into darkness in order to attain the consciousness of bright daylight that they have today. In the future, they will attain a consciousness in which they will have both: the image consciousness that leads them into the soul world, and the bright, clear daytime consciousness alongside it. This is the content of all secret teachings that underlie all cultures.

Thus, human beings can look back on a time when they can say to themselves, "At that time, I saw the world around me as a world of the soul. It brought about a pictorial consciousness in me. It was bright and clear within me. No external sun shone on the external eye, but an inner light illuminated the soul around me, and this inner light descended into darkness, and the external light that human beings perceive with their external senses ascended. Just as remnants and rudiments remain of all things, so too are remnants of that ancient consciousness still present in those sections of the population who are more backward, who have not sharpened their intellects so much, who have not suppressed so much what their pictorial consciousness has responded to, who are less combinative, less intelligent. Thus, their dream consciousness is much brighter. They not only experience chaotic dreams, but also higher truths, which they may not be able to fully comprehend. They experience the same as clairvoyants, and when their inner consciousness awakens, they experience a completely different spiritual world. There they encounter beings that do not exist here and that have a certain relationship to the inner nature of human beings. Ordinary people are more or less aware of this and experience only the image of the noon woman. Others, on the other hand, have a more developed image consciousness. They experience even more. In this way, even in the primitive legends of today, remnants of an ancient astral consciousness have been preserved. We look back on a human past, especially here in Central and Western Europe, a past in which, the further back we go, the more we find of that consciousness that has been replaced by the present bright daytime consciousness. All that has remained in the memory of the people, with greater or lesser clarity, is the fading of astral consciousness into a dark past, into a dark obscurity. I am not saying, of course, the thoughts of the people, but I am saying something that lives in the people and that I only want to grasp in my thoughts. This is what people say to themselves without realizing it: Today, we must remove our consciousness from our everyday view of the world; I must sleep, then I will regain a little access to the world that my ancestors experienced, to a world that has disappeared for people. I do not experience it as a clear mental image, but as a dimly pieced-together memory. — Something like this lives in the people, and therefore the people also know that the astral experiences were richer and richer the further back one goes into the past. And what did the people experience that of which only sparse remnants remain today, such as the question asked of the noon woman, what is that? It is the memory of beings that inhabit the astral world, it is the memory of the old gods. The old ideas of gods are brought out. Now remember that I emphasized as particularly noteworthy that one should pray the Lord's Prayer in reverse order. Those who have heard me here more often will know that in the astral world everything must be read in reverse. The number 341 must be read as 143 in the world of image consciousness, that is, in reverse. It is the same with our passions. When the astral world opens up to us, the passions that emanate from us appear as beings rushing toward us. This is very painful for those who have not been prepared beforehand. Everything that flows out of us seems to flow toward us. You therefore see animals and all kinds of beings rushing toward you. In pathological states, for example in madness, they become aware that beings suddenly appear in the form of animals. These are beings that live in the human being, that emanate from him and appear as if mirrored in the form of animals. What moves backwards in the sensory world moves in the opposite direction in the astral world. So, in order to satisfy the midday woman in the world in which she exists, one must pray the Lord's Prayer backwards. You can see how the legend captures this.

Now we could go through the entire Germanic pantheon and find that it reflects what I described at the beginning of this lecture as the secret science of all cultures. What I presented at the beginning of this lecture, in broad strokes and outlines, as worlds that seem to be piled one on top of the other — in truth they are intertwined — is all reflected in the Germanic pantheon in a popular way. When human beings once lived in a world in which they still had a pictorial consciousness, in which they had not yet advanced to the present combinatory intellect, their ego was not yet as powerful as it is today. They did not think and act like animals, but the three lower members predominated in them: the physical body, the etheric body, and the astral body. The ego was not yet endowed with senses. It still lived an inner life; through this it still had power over the outer life. It was a completely different form of human being, people who could not yet think in the consciousness we have today. Humans were much more imperfect than they are today, but they were more perfect in relation to the lower members. These had developed more powerfully and diversely. They therefore did not yet belong to the spiritual world. In a certain sense, they were soul beings whose highest member belonged to a soul world, whose middle member was also soul, and whose third member was even deeper. The image consciousness encounters such beings on the astral plane, where it discovers their highest essence. These beings, in a certain sense the ancestors of humans, are reflected in the Germanic folk consciousness as giants. They are nothing other than the predecessors of humans. Then the world developed further. Humans evolved into higher spheres. They acquired their thinking and thereby became companions of spiritual beings who, in a certain sense, are more finely organized than the giants because they participated in the higher spiritual worlds. These beings are reflected in Germanic folk consciousness as the Aesir. The original Germanic mythology saw nothing miraculous in all this, but rather saw in it an expression of the statement I quoted: Man is a becoming god, and the gods are what one might call perfected humans, humans who have become gods. Gods are beings who passed through their human stage in the distant past. So you see that the sequence of stages of beings is also expressed in Germanic mythology in the difference between the giants and the Aesir.

But there is even more to it than that. It expresses the fact that the development of such beings takes place in exactly the same way as human development. According to Germanic mythology, today's humans have learned what they know from Wotan. But who was Wotan originally? We hear that our ancestors learned the art of runic writing, the art of poetry, and other things from Wotan. But this has always been attributed to the great initiates. Thus, Wotan expressed an individuality that we had to call a great initiate in the sense of the secret doctrine, a being who had preceded humanity and had already gone through the stages that humanity is only now going through. And how did Wotan become the great teacher of ancient times? No differently than other initiates in the other secret doctrines. There are initiates in all secret teachings. Today, they experience exactly the same thing as then, growing beyond their lower self, developing the spiritual core of their being, and becoming citizens of a higher world already in this life. At the same time, however, it is made clear to us that at a certain hour the whole lower nature stands before them. In every human being there is a sum of passions, desires, and wishes that are attached to their lower nature. The human being must first emerge from all of this. Then it appears before them like a being. When the human being ascends into their higher nature, their lower nature is like something outside of them, whereas otherwise they are stuck inside their drives, desires, and passions. Just as no one can place their brain on a plate and look at it, so too can no one see their inner life, their inner lower nature. This detached entity is called the guardian of the threshold. As an entity, the human being's lower nature stands beside them, and they must say to themselves: This is you! You must cast this off! This is called the descent into hell in all initiations. One must become a comrade of the hellish powers, descend into the depths of the world, because the human being is simply stuck inside and his higher nature only lives half in him. This entity is called the Guardian of the Threshold because people who do not acquire courage and presence of mind cannot get beyond it. Those who have crossed this threshold are called initiates. Man goes through this development in stages. First, a stage is overcome in which man becomes aware of his lower nature. Whereas they were previously trapped within it and identified with it, it now appears to them as something separate, just as the table now stands before me. In all initiations, this stage is called crucifixion or hanging on the wood. Humans are crucified in their own bodies, because they are as indifferent to them as to an external cross to which they are nailed. Once man has overcome this stage, he rises higher. He has then become wise. He is symbolically called a “snake” for the same reason that the snake is the symbol of wisdom. There he drinks from the springs of wisdom in the world.

Then he goes through a third stage. This stage must be passed through in different ways in different religions. Let us consider Wotan. What is presented to us about him? These three stages of initiation are presented to us. We are first told that Wotan once had to hang on the sacred wood. For nine days he suffered there and took upon himself the sufferings of the world. Then the giant Mimir came to him and gave him a drink from the cup of wisdom. Then he was freed from the sacred wood. That was Wotan's first initiation. After he had gone through this, he longed to find the cup from which the drink could flow, which his uncle Mimir had given him at the gallows. But then it goes on to say that this cup of wisdom is guarded in the crevices of the mountains and that Wotan, in the form of a snake, crept through the crevices to Gunnlod to capture the cup of wisdom. That was the second initiation. And the third is where we are told—and this is something very significant—that Wotan went to the source of that wisdom which is the wisdom of the present and which can be found at the source that is at the root of the world ash tree Yggdrasil. There even the giant Mimir dwelt. Here Wotan attained the initiation that enabled him to be the teacher of ancient times, namely the wisdom of the present. Previously, he had attained wisdom from the crevices of the mountains, from the higher worlds. But he is to become the one who can become a teacher in our wisdom, in the wisdom that is conquered through the senses and gained through the intellect. He acquires the power to do so here. This is expressed in a beautiful symbol. It is said that he had to leave one eye behind here. What is the eye that he must leave behind in order to find present wisdom? It is the astral eye. Now that he is to absorb the wisdom of the runes, the wisdom of the present, he must leave behind the astral eye so that he can be a guide on the sensory plane to which humanity has evolved. These are things that show you clearly and distinctly how the secret teaching that underlies all religions is also expressed in Germanic mythology in the three successive images.

Deep truths are expressed in other ways, for example when we consider the legend of Baldur, who is killed by the blind Hödur with a mistletoe branch at the instigation of his enemy Loki. When we consider this legend, we notice that many say that Baldur represents the sun, the setting sun. They say this without having any idea that no people compose poetry in this way. In primeval times, the people experienced on the astral plane in images what we learned as the basis of the secret teaching at the beginning of the lecture. What did the people experience in this regard? I have already pointed to the mental images that spring up like dark memories, but not in clear consciousness, pointed to the sinking of the astral light into darkness so that the present life of the senses can arise. From what is currently darkness, spiritual darkness, from the current sensory perception, which is symbolized by Hödur, the former astral consciousness, Baldur, is killed, at the instigation of Loki. And who is Loki?

Loki's name is already connected with fire. But what is fire in the secret science? It is not what fire is in physical life. Physical fire is only the outer expression of an inner fire, which the secret doctrine knows as the soul of fire. This also lives in human beings in a certain way as their instincts, desires, and passions. However, in the course of further development, that which lives in human beings as instincts, desires, and passions has become separated. It is no longer connected with external fire, but the secret doctrine points this out. You will learn more and more about this as you delve into the occult side of theosophy or Spiritual Science. It shows how passions and desires are related to fire in a similar way to the positive and negative poles of a magnet: the passions are one pole and the physical fire is the other, but they belong together. With iron, you have the two poles inseparable. I know that this seems grotesque to the materialistic worldview. But that is how everything appears to those who do not want to delve into the depths of occult science. When we speak of figures such as Loki, we are looking back to those times. This is a being who had an original existence and tremendous power when passion and fire were not yet separated, when passion still flowed through the seething fire. Loki was such a fire being. And then the world developed further, so that from Loki, the fire, the lower nature was formed, and from the Aesir, the higher nature. Both emerged from Loki's nature. This is the basis of Germanic mythology. This is the secret of Germanic theology, that as beings developed upwards, the world of the gods emerged, which also has its origin in the passionate primordial forces as well as in the spiritual. We are told how these three are the children of Loki. The first child is the Fenris wolf, the second is the Midgard serpent, and the third is the goddess of death, Hel, who is light on one side and has a black body on the other. What does she represent? She represents the lower human nature that causes birth and death. That is why Hel appears black and white. The Midgard Serpent, which is coiled around the continents in the present world, represents the etheric body, which is bound to the present lower human nature. The third member represents what has emerged from the lower passions. Loki is a remnant of an earlier development. He had to give up his children so that the present world could come into being, which is thereby driven to resistance and falls victim to what was the view of the earlier world. Baldur must descend to Hel, into the depths. The depths symbolize ordinary physical human nature. What is Baldur? Baldur is present as the subconscious when, for example, in a trance, the ordinary surface consciousness is extinguished and the old consciousness is reawakened. For us, Baldur is now dead. But in Hel, he is still present as the force, the power of passion bound to the nature of fire.

Thus, we could describe every member of the Germanic pantheon as an outward expression of this secret teaching, and you would see, if we had fifty lectures instead of one, that everything fits together wonderfully, down to the smallest detail, and that we are indeed dealing with a secret teaching that underlies the mental images of Germanic mythology. Here, too, it was initiates, sages, who knew what we placed at the beginning of the lecture. But the people learned in their various remnants of consciousness about beings from other worlds, and they classified these folk spirits, folk beings, into an order, into the world of the old gods. Thus, Germanic mythology appears to have been born out of the consciousness of the people. How Siegfried, who is overcome, finds his higher self, appears to us all as an expression of profound secret teachings. This is not artificial, but in those who are able to go back in this way into the spiritual depths of ancient times, it becomes a complete certainty that this is so. So when we go through Germanic mythology, we get a vivid impression.

If we look to the Orient, we see the same secret teaching as was presented at the beginning of this lecture, but we see it developed somewhat differently there. We can characterize it in a few sentences. We do not want to go into Buddhism or Hinduism. We only need to know that they worship Brahma as the spiritual primordial being who is the basis of everything. Brahma's main ability is creative knowledge. Vidya means creative knowledge. Imagine a person standing next to a machine, studying the machine; that person has receptive knowledge. But imagine the inventor who originally made the machine, assembled it from individual parts; for that person, knowledge was first and foremost creative knowledge. Such creative knowledge, extended to the world around us, is Vidya, and receptive knowledge is Avidya. Thus, there are different gradations of Vidya and Avidya. But Brahma is the owner of everything that is summarized in Vidya and Avidya. Everything is born from thought, and man himself is born from it. But he should develop back to Vidya, to creative knowledge. That is the meaning of human development. And again, man is led through three places, which Indian teaching calls Loka. When man has died, he must be in Bhurloka for a time, the same as Kamaloka. The highest world is the spiritual world, Svargaloka, which is Devachan. From there, they return to Bhurloka and back to the physical world. Thus, we see how they absorb the most diverse forces and substances in the physical world. These have emerged from the Vidya of the all-encompassing Brahma. Above, we have the finest material world, the world of Akasha. Akasha is only a material expression for Indra, who is the soul of this world. Then we come to the world of fire, to Agni. This is the material expression of the god Agni, who is the same in Indian esoteric teaching as the god Loki in Germanic teaching, only with a slightly different nuance. Then we come down to air, Vayu, then to water, and finally to the solid. This is how Indian teaching conceives of the structure of the outer world. And what we call Indian cult are external symbolic expressions of these secret truths. If we now ask ourselves what peculiarity the Indian secret doctrine has that it develops in different images, we can say that it has less of a symbolic character and more of a conceptual one. That is the difference between the Indian and the Germanic secret doctrines. Inwardly they are the same, but outwardly there is a difference, because the outward religions in Europe have taken on a pictorial character that speaks more of the beings of the astral plane, while the Indian people have gone a step further and given them a character that is more closely connected with outward sensory impressions. We must point out this difference between Germanic and Indian teachings: Germanic teachings are closer to the astral, while Indian teachings are closer to thinking. It is therefore clear that Indian teachings are closer to what people today consider their innermost property, that they are easier to understand than the world of Germanic gods, which has sunk into the realm of the unknown.

These teachings have taken on different forms. Just as we see two forms in Europe and India, we see yet another, in the middle, so to speak, in Greece. We can see that the Indian and Germanic characteristics are conditioned by two very different forces in nature. The Indian characteristic is more oriented toward the modern ego, toward the human ego. The Indian has therefore sought his higher consciousness in contemplation of his own inner being. He has sought to rise from avidya to vidya, from receptive knowledge to creative knowledge. The Indian view is a doctrine of knowledge, a higher doctrine than an astral doctrine of images, and an astral doctrine of images is what has found expression in Germanic mythology. And why is this so? Germanic mythology itself gives us a great and beautiful answer to this question. In all secret teachings, the higher consciousness that human beings are to attain is always represented as the feminine, as the soul. That which is received from outside, which fertilizes the soul, is represented as the masculine. So we have the feminine soul, which is fertilized by wisdom, by the spirit of the outside world. Thus, when humans develop spiritually, they rise, figuratively speaking, to the higher feminine in their nature. This is what Goethe means when he says: “The eternally feminine draws us upward.” This should not be taken in a petty way, for it is written in the “Chorus mysticus.” If we understand it in this way, we will understand what the Germanic people mean when they say: When the warrior falls on the battlefield, the Valkyrie comes to meet him, and he reaches the higher soul, — The soul of a warlike people and what is called passing through the gate of death and attaining a higher consciousness is described and symbolized by the Valkyrie's coming to meet him, the reception of the soul into Valhalla, the connection with the higher consciousness, with the Valkyrie. The highest god in Proto-Germanic is the god Ziu, from whom Tuesday takes its name. This is the same god who is called Mars in Roman mythology and Ares in Greek mythology. Mardi is the day dedicated to the god of war, Mars. This was a war religion, which differs from the inner religion of the Indians. Those who live in the inner world develop fewer of the passions that live in the astral world and find expression there. Thus, the consciousness, the warlike nature of the Germanic peoples is reflected in their world of gods. In a natural way, the Valkyrie is the higher consciousness. Because the passion of war was the creator of mythology here, the world of gods was expressed in astral images; because over in Asia, in India, the inner-directed sense was the creator, a more spiritual religion was expressed. These two worldviews found their higher unity, their harmony, when Christianity gave the Germanic people an inner dimension to their outer world.

So you see that there is a deep inner meaning underlying the development of humanity, and that one must seek this deep inner meaning. Then one comes to the wisdom in the development of the world, and then one will not remain with abstract concepts as if there were a single form underlying humanity, but one will see that it is a wisdom that is multifaceted. The secret teaching had to be different in India and different in Europe, different for the contemplative people and different for the warlike people, and different in Greece, the artistically gifted people. Thus, humanity develops through the most diverse forms of cultural existence, always moving forward in this world development and at the same time always upward.