World Mysteries and Theosophy

GA 54 — 29 March 1906, Berlin

Parzival and Lohengrin

Eight days ago today, I had the opportunity to speak to you about the esoteric core, about the spiritual content of those great legendary poems in which German or, indeed, Central European thought and feeling in the first third of the Middle Ages is expressed, and through whose renewal Richard Wagner at the same time achieved something prophetic for our art. Today we will be dealing with a different type of legend, two legends that have also been renewed by Richard Wagner and have been conquered by art in our day in a meaningful way. Today we will be dealing with the legends of Parzival and Lohengrin. With these two legends we touch on a somewhat different country than the one we dealt with eight days ago. I would like to characterize in a few words what actually connects to the Siegfried and Nibelungen legends and what lives in them. They express the consciousness of the Central European population of an ancient spiritual experience of their ancestors, which has sunk into the darkness of time and was replaced in the era in which these legends arose had already been replaced by ordinary everyday sensory perception, an ancient spiritual experience that still lived on as an echo, precisely as a world of gods and legends.

If the legend of the Nibelungs and Siegfried is an echo of the ancient pagan era with its secret teachings, with its views on the initiation of the ancient leaders of the people, and if we have found in Siegfried himself such a great initiate in the style, let us say, of ancient Germanic culture, then in Lohengrin and Parzival we have individualities of a completely different kind. With them we enter the period in which Christianity, a worldview that was completely new to Central Europe, spread and gained influence. The whole essence of the newly emerging Christianity and everything that is connected with it as a result, as a consequence, now lives on in these two legends, the Parzival and the Lohengrin legends. Let us recall how the essence of medieval European development is first expressed in this world of legends. Eight days ago, we emphasized that the legends of Siegfried and the Nibelungs point to a distant past in which a kind of natural bond of love connected the individual tribes, the individual sections of the population. There is something like an echo of this time in what Tacitus reports when he says that the Germans still worshipped an ancient tribal god, whom they looked up to as a father, with whom they were connected through family ties that extended to the tribal community. The love that forged these bonds was given by blood, by natural kinship. Each individual tribe had such a tribal deity, who in turn had a kind of ancestor. This natural love, which is a consequence of blood relationship, lies like a breath over these ancient times, and it is precisely the memory of these ancient times and tribal communities, of this ancient love derived from blood, that is expressed in the legend type of the Nibelungs. We have seen that the characteristic feature is precisely that this Nibelungenlied, this type of legend, arose at a time when tribal love had already receded. Something else had taken its place: the craving for possessions, everything symbolized by gold, everything connected with and based on selfishness. It was no longer the old love based on blood kinship that was decisive, but new relationships based on statutes, contracts, and laws. This change is reflected very precisely in what lives on in the Nibelungen saga.

Time passed again, and other goals took the place of these old communities, which were based on gold, possessions, and mere martial knightly bravery, which counted on possessions. Gradually, other goals and other ideals emerged. They emerged with Christianity. Perhaps nowhere else has the innermost essence of Christianity been expressed so powerfully and magnificently as in the legends we are gradually becoming familiar with, in which the task of Christianity in Central Europe is symbolically played out: in the Lohengrin legend and in the Parzival legend.

What was the lifeblood of Christianity? The absolute equality of all people. At least, that was how Christianity was perceived at the time. Freedom, equality before the highest being that man can conceive of, was regarded as the jewel, as the true calling and mission of Christianity. In ancient times, the ancestors of the Germanic peoples were proud of the name of their ancestors, the name of their tribe, or their family name. They referred to these when they wanted to assign themselves value in the world. They referred to the law, to titles and names in the era that replaced tribal loyalty. Now neither of these should apply anymore, but only the human being who felt essential in his innermost being. The human being without title, without name, was the Christian ideal. Something great was said with this. This is expressed in the Lohengrin and Parzival sagas.

To what extent is this expressed in these two sagas? If we take the Parzival legend, we need only consider the structure of the Parzival legend as it lived in the Middle Ages, lived in Wolfram von Eschenbach. We are dealing here with a young person who grows up, torn from all community, torn from what gave people value and weight in those days. His mother, Herzeloide, had experienced that suffering and pain could be associated with the old order, which was based on titles, dignities, and names. In the old order, her husband was led to the Orient, where he met with an accident. She now wants to raise her son far away from everything that is valid. He should know nothing of the aspirations of worldly knights. But one day he sees such worldly knights. He decides to set out on his own, and now he goes on his journey. We know that this journey takes him to two places that we must consider to be particularly important for the spiritual mental image in the middle of the Middle Ages.

The first of the places Parzival comes to is King Arthur's Round Table; the other place is the castle of the Holy Grail. What are these two? For the imagination of the Middle Ages, King Arthur's Round Table represents a community from which all spiritual power emanates for what existed in the Middle Ages before the influence of Christianity as secular knighthood, indeed as everything secular. We are taken back to ancient times, to those times to which we already referred in our last lecture on the Nibelungenlied. We know that the Germanic peoples, the ancestors of the German and Anglo-Saxon peoples in Europe, occupied a territory that in ancient times was inhabited by other tribes, by the Celts. The Celts: little is known about them historically; history tells us little about those distant times in Europe when this remarkable people had great influence, but were then pushed westward by the advancing Germanic tribes, and there too were suppressed as a people. The Celts were suppressed as a people. Their influence remained. A spiritual residue remains in Europe from this ancient Celtic period. It was during this Celtic period, when people still had clairvoyant insight into the spiritual realms, that mental images about the spiritual world were formed.

It was primarily among the Celts that ancient clairvoyance was at home, the immediate awareness that one could have experiences in the divine-spiritual world. The stories and dramatic actions are essentially an echo of the instruction that the initiated Celtic priests gave to their disciples and, through the disciples, to the whole people. This takes us back to those primeval times in Europe when there were true initiates on European soil, initiates of the ancient Celtic paganism.

What I have told you about the initiation of Siegfried, Wotan, and so on, all leads back to the ancient initiations or initiations by the ancient Celtic priests. These ancient Celtic priests were essentially the same in spirit as the priest-kings who ruled in ancient Egypt, ancient Chaldea, or ancient Persia. They exercised power here. Everything that happened in the secular world, everything that belonged to the external organization, was done under the guidance of the priest-kings. There was nothing state-run, nothing communal, that was not subject to the wisdom of these ancient scholars of Europe.

King Arthur, who is said to have retired with his Round Table to Wales, where he lived and reigned, was nothing other than the learned lord of these wise men, who formed a spiritual center, a kind of spiritual monarchy. It was felt that this spiritual center, I would say “primordial scholar,” with his select group, usually said to number twelve, was really there. There are good reasons for this. It is said that King Arthur in Wales was nothing other than the successor to that leading scholar of the ancient Celtic priests. And this brings us directly to the realization that in ancient Europe there existed what we in spiritual research call a so-called Grand Lodge.

Let us now clarify the concept of a Grand Lodge. You know — and since spiritual scientific matters are so often discussed here, I may well speak of more intimate matters here too — you know that we think very seriously about development and that there is development in humanity, that humanity will rise higher and higher, that each individual will ascend the path of knowledge to those levels where he himself will look into the spiritual worlds, where what lies behind the world as its foundation will be revealed to him. So when we speak of the possibility of human development, it is not far-fetched to realize that there are already highly developed individuals among humanity who have raced ahead of the rest of humanity and who, through a life of renunciation, have traveled the paths of knowledge and wisdom so that they can be guides for humanity today. Today, when everything is leveled, when nothing is recognized, when people talk about development but do not want to believe in it, this is not accepted. But in times when people knew something about it, they actually spoke of the existing development.

According to a natural law, we find twelve different powers of the spirit. I have said of Goethe that he himself speaks of such a secret brotherhood, which he refers to as the Rosicrucians. Such a Great White Lodge was spoken of in the Middle Ages. From it emanated the threads that held life together and ruled it. And the one who directed all this was recognized in King Arthur, who lived hidden in Wales. Around him were his knights, who were no longer quite as powerful as the priests of the ancient Celtic era, for whom the age of love had turned into an age of egoism, where people sought to conquer countries with the sword in their hands. But they were still under the leadership of the White Lodge.

The question naturally arises: if such lodges exist – even today – why do they not reveal themselves? I have often said that it is not only a matter of revealing oneself, but also of being able to be recognized. Even Jesus would probably not be recognized today. It is difficult to recognize a wise man in one's own presence. This is precisely what the theosophical or Spiritual Science movement wants to bring back to humanity. When this is accepted, then people will once again understand something like King Arthur's Round Table, the ruling white lodge.

That was one thing: Arthur. The other is the castle of the Holy Grail. We can only deal with this in a suggestive way. It is said that the Holy Grail is the cup from which Christ Jesus and his disciples once drank the wine at the Last Supper and which later caught his blood. Then the lance with which Jesus' side had been pierced was also brought to Europe. The Grail cup is said to be located on Montsalvatsch, where a holy castle was built. The Holy Grail has the ability to grant eternal youth and the power of eternal life to those who are familiar with its miracles and who live with its sun of grace.

Again, there are twelve, but now they are Christian, spiritual knights. The ancient Knights Templar guard the Holy Grail, and they use the powers they draw from this guard to pour the spiritual knighthood of the heart, of the inner life, over Europe. Thus, the white lodge of worldly knighthood, which was moved to Wales, was countered by the spiritual knighthood in the castle of the Holy Grail, located on the Spanish mountain Montsalvatsch.

What was the task of the knights who were in the castle of the Holy Grail? Not to make conquests, not to acquire external possessions, not to appropriate lands was the task of the knights of the Holy Grail; their task was to conquer the life of the soul. If we are told of the Nibelung hoard, gold as a symbol of possession, as the goal of the Nibelungs, then the Holy Grail is the spiritualized Nibelung hoard, the treasure of the soul. What is the power that emanates from the Holy Grail in reality? What do those twelve knights, who are united in his castle, do? As is often emphasized in the theosophical worldview, a spark of the divine lives in every human being. The mystics of the Middle Ages had their great ideas at the same time that these legends arose. They spoke of man as a fourfold being. First there is the outer physical human being who lives here in this world, who strives for possessions, who pursues gold in this world. The second is the soul human being who suffers and rejoices, who has instincts, desires, and feelings that must gradually be refined. The third human being is even more internal. He is a spiritual human being, the human being who gradually gains access to the spiritual world. The innermost human being is the divine human being. This is the one who today — and this was felt especially in the Middle Ages — is only present in the very earliest stages. The aim of the initiation of ancient paganism was to develop this predisposition of the divine spark more and more in order to raise human beings up into the higher worlds. This is now being sought in a new way within the Christian world. Christian initiation has also been internalized.

You will remember from earlier lectures what the initiation ceremonies were like in ancient times, how people had to undergo procedures that lifted the inner soul out of the physical body so that they could be transported to the higher world and witness the qualities of the higher world for themselves. This involved an external procedure in order to go through all this. Christianity was to bring an initiation that takes place only in the deepest innermost part, in the veiled sanctuary of the soul. There, God was to be sought, the God who brought salvation to Christianity through the shedding of his blood; this God was to be found by each individual human being in their own soul. Indeed, the individual human being should be able to achieve what Angelus Silesius, the great Christian mystic, later expressed in the words: “If you rise above yourself and let God reign, then the Ascension will take place in your spirit.” This upward development of what was predisposed as an inner spark of life in human beings was the task of the Knights of the Holy Grail. The Holy Grail was nothing other than the deepest innermost part of human nature, and it was a unified whole because inner human nature is unified, because a life spent in the pursuit of wisdom awakens the hope that one might understand what is meant by the great unity, by the great divine spark.

They were there as the brothers of the Holy Grail. Parzival wanted to find the way to the Holy Grail. Now the legend tells us that when he arrived at the Holy Grail, he found the then King Amfortas bleeding. He had been told not to ask too many questions and not to ask the wrong questions. Therefore, he did not ask about the king's wounds or the meaning of the Grail. That is why he is cast out. He should have asked about the properties of the Holy Grail and the king's wounds. It is part of the experience to be had in divine life that one must ask about these things. One must have a longing for them. There it is, the Holy Grail; it can be found, it will be given to everyone, but it does not impose itself. It does not come to us; we must feel the urge in our soul for this Holy Grail, the inner sanctuary, the divine spark of life in the human soul. We must have the urge to ask for it. When the human soul has found its way up to God, then God descends to it. This is the secret of the Grail itself, the descent of God, who descends when man develops himself up to the divine. This is depicted in connection with the baptism of Jesus by John: a dove descended and alighted on his head, and a voice from heaven said, “This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased.” The Holy Grail is symbolically represented in the form of a dove.

During his first visit to the Grail Castle, Parzival was not yet mature enough to go through what we have just described. When he felt rejected, something came into his soul that must come into every soul if it is to become truly mature for the final stages of knowledge. Doubt, disbelief, and inner spiritual darkness come into Parzival's soul. Certainly, those who want to ascend to knowledge must first go through the hard school of doubt. Only when one has doubted and gone through the torments and everything that doubt can bring, only when one has gone through that, has one gained that inner certainty that knowledge will never be lost again. Doubt is an evil brother, but a purifying, a refining brother. Parzival is now going through these doubts, and he struggles to attain a knowledge that consists of something other than what is commonly called intellectual or rational knowledge. To a realization that Richard Wagner expressed with magnificent accuracy, perhaps not entirely philosophically or psychologically correct, but in essence, by calling Parzival the “pure fool” who becomes knowledgeable through compassion.

This brings us to the description of the path that must be traveled by those who still have to work their way up to the higher levels of knowledge. You know that this is the path of the disciple and that there are three stages. When someone has acquired the qualities that constitute the preparatory path, when they have cleansed themselves of uncontrolled mental images and lead a pure life, then they are ready to become a chela, then they are ready to receive the guru, the spiritual guide. The first stage of the higher path of knowledge consists in learning to behave completely objectively toward the world, to practice love without the slightest trace of prejudice from within. Isn't it true that in ordinary life, people love first and foremost because they are related by blood, because they have been bound together for a long time by some kind of bond? That is correct. But those who want to walk the path of knowledge must advance to a different kind of love. Nothing that connects me to a person in a special way should give them preference in my love. I must only ask about what is outside of myself. Does the one who is my brother or my brother-in-law have an advantage? No! This is not to say anything against the love of kinship; it is only about the character traits of the person. Even if he is a complete stranger to us, we recognize that he is worthy of our love, and then we love him as one who has been connected to us for a long time. Such a person is on the first level of chelaship. We call him the homeless person because he has lost, in the ideal sense, what is called home. This is also meant by the sentence you find in Christianity: “Whoever does not leave wife and child, mother and brother for my sake cannot be my disciple.” The same is meant by this sentence, and this is how Christianity was also felt in Central Europe. No name and no title should give a person the right to preferential love. A person's innermost dignity and worth should be the basis for love in someone who is ascending the path of knowledge.

Once a person has climbed the first steps of the path of knowledge, the difficult moments of doubt arise. As we get to know the world more and more and immerse ourselves more and more in love, we also learn more about the dark and evil side of the world. These are the difficult days of the initiate. The initiate gradually struggles upward. Then that light of the soul awakens, which, like an inner sun, illuminates the spiritual things and beings around him. We see the objects around us with our eyes because the light shines on these objects. Actually, we only see the rays that are reflected back to us from the objects. We do not see spiritual things because no spiritual light shines on them. But those who have reached the point where the so-called kundalini light shines on them are on the second stage of the path of knowledge. The third stage is reached by those who have managed to perceive their ego without preference, who do not consider themselves superior to other people, who find their higher self in love for all beings. Those who no longer hope for their own egoistic self, but hear and perceive the individuality of beings, we say have reached the third stage of the path of knowledge. In the Secret Doctrine, we call them swans, an expression that is common throughout the world where spiritual research is practiced.

And what does this degree bring? It brings an outflowing over all beings. We are no longer separated from the world by a skin. The pain of others is our pain, the joy of others is our joy; we live and weave in existence. The whole earth belongs to us. We feel ourselves in everything. Then we no longer know that we are looking at objects from outside; it is as if we were inside them, as if we had penetrated them through love and thus knew them. Through compassion, through feeling ourselves one with them, everything has become knowledge.

Parzival is initiated into this wisdom by a hermit, Trevrizent. The fact that he is a hermit, a recluse, is significant. He is someone who has separated himself from the rest of humanity, who has truly left everything behind: father, mother, brother, sister, and has become a disciple of one who knows no such distinctions. There Parzival is taught the higher virtues, and there he matures, entering the castle of the Holy Grail and also asking what the wonders of the Holy Grail are. He is accepted, he frees the wounded Amfortas and becomes the King of the Grail himself. It is an inner, human path, the path prescribed by secret science throughout the world, translated into Christianity, a path on which Parzival is described to us. Lohengrin belongs to the Grail circle. He is the son of Parzival. While Parzival itself describes the higher path of human beings toward the higher self, Lohengrin describes a historical and social mission from the middle of the Middle Ages. Medieval popular consciousness was guided by initiates, not blindly, as scholars have in their mental image. This popular consciousness captured an important epoch in the middle of the Middle Ages. What happened there? In short, an important historical event took place: the so-called urban culture began. The old feudal era underwent a powerful revolution. Whereas previously people had only dealt with land ownership and the rural population, we now see individual cities springing up everywhere in Germany, France, Belgium, and as far as Russia. Cities are being founded; a leap forward in human development can be observed. What happened during this medieval city-building? People were torn away from the connections to which they had previously belonged. Everything that felt oppressed went to the city. There, people were on their own. There, you were only worth as much as you could achieve. What was established in the middle of the Middle Ages as the bourgeoisie came to the fore. This powerful upheaval is expressed in the legend of Lohengrin.

Just as Parzival shows us how human beings can find a higher human self within themselves and how they can devote themselves to the pilgrimage to the higher self, Lohengrin shows us how the medieval people went through a tremendous epoch in human development, namely the liberation of human beings and the emergence of the personality from the old associations. If we want to understand the connection between this historical event and the legend of Lohengrin, we must know that in all mysticism this stage is symbolized by a female personality. That is why Goethe, at the end of the second part of his “Faust,” spoke of the eternal feminine drawing us upward. This should not be interpreted in a trivial way. In truth, it refers to the human soul that draws people upward. In general, the soul is represented as female and that which surrounds people from the outside as male. The striving soul is always represented as female.

In the Secret Doctrine, it is known that it is the great leaders of humanity, the initiates, who always take humanity one step further. Lohengrin is the messenger of the Holy Grail. He is portrayed by medieval consciousness as the great initiated leader who, in the middle of the Middle Ages, takes humanity one step further. He was the bringer of urban culture, the one who inspired the bourgeoisie in its emergence. That is the individuality of Lohengrin. And Elsa of Brabant is nothing other than the symbol of the medieval folk-soul, which, under the influence of Lohengrin, is to ascend another step in its development. This progress in human history is beautifully and powerfully depicted in the legend.

We have seen that the initiate of the third degree is called a swan. The master, who is deeply initiated, rises higher, he ascends into the otherworld, into the worlds that human consciousness cannot reach. He knows everything that speaks through humanity solely within himself. One cannot ask him: Where are you from, what is your name? It is the swan that brings him from even higher spheres. Therefore, Lohengrin is brought into the city era by the swan. Look at the progress that has been made in ancient Greece. The gods in Greece are nothing more than deified initiates. Take Zeus, who unites with Semele; from this union Dionysus is born. Greek culture emerges from this. All the great advances of humanity are represented in this way. Elsa should not ask about the name and origin of the one who guides her and becomes her husband. So it is with all great masters; they pass through humanity unrecognized and unnoticed. If one were to ask them, it would scare them away from humanity. It is necessary that they protect the sanctuary from profane glances and questions. The same is true if the nature of such an initiate were to be brought within the grasp of human understanding. At such a moment, such a being would also disappear, as Lohengrin did. And the fact that the liberation of the medieval bourgeoisie took place under the influence of Christianity is also represented by the fact that Lohengrin is named as the son of Parzival.

So we look into the legends of the Middle Ages and see how the facts of spiritual life are beautifully expressed in both legends. The mission of Christianity for medieval culture thus became the mission of liberating human beings from the earthly human body. This mission was depicted in both legends. It had a particular effect on Richard Wagner. He always tried to portray pure love, which makes people clairvoyant. As early as 1856, he began a drama called “Die Sieger” (The Victors): Ananda, a young Brahmin, is loved by a Chandala girl. But Ananda is far removed from the Chandala girl's love due to caste prejudice. He is not allowed to pursue the Chandala girl's love. He becomes victorious over his own nature by becoming a disciple of the Buddha. In following Buddha, he finds victory, he finds himself again, he overcomes human inclinations, and the Chandala girl learns that in a previous life she was a Brahmin girl who rejected the love of a Chandala youth. She then also becomes victorious and is united in spirit with Ananda, the Brahmin youth. Later, Wagner wanted to use the figure of Jesus of Nazareth dramatically. He had in mind the whole inner essence of Christianity and the teaching of free human beings who are not bound by titles or anything else. The Holy Grail seeks only within the human soul. In 1857, on Good Friday, Wagner recounts, he stood before a wonderful natural scene in Zurich. For a moment, something flowed toward him from the world that expressed within him the entire mood that pervaded the whole of knighthood and Christian knighthood. He said to himself, as if through inner inspiration: On the day when Christ Jesus died, no human being should carry weapons. The full greatness of the figure of Parzival, who attained knowledge through immersion in humanity and in all beings, dawned on him at that moment. He now takes up his unfinished play “Die Sieger” (The Victors) in a modern Christian manner. In Parzival, he depicts the one who leaves his homeland, who knows nothing of names and titles, nothing of bonds and nothing of father and mother, who encounters on the one hand the magic castle of Klingsor and the sorceress Kundry, who, in the moment when Kundry approaches him, experiences the full significance of earthly sensual life and what sensual life means when man learns to know it solely through desire; and on the other hand, at the moment when it approaches him through Kundry's kiss, it becomes clear to him that this sensuality in its truest meaning only appears in man when it is free of desire. Richard Wagner now presents desire-free sensuality in a grand and beautiful way, as it is achieved through the inner power of the spirit, the Parsifal spirit, which he calls the Christian spirit. He presents it as being achieved on the one hand through the Holy Grail and on the other hand in the magic castle. On the one hand, through its conquest, and on the other, through its mortification. These are the two sides that are used to ascend to the spirit. Some kill the sensual, they practice asceticism, they take away their organs so as not to fall prey to weakness. The others remain human beings; they do not want to ascend to higher knowledge in this way, but by developing the higher within themselves into an even greater strength. This is the path that Parzival has recognized as the right one. To become stronger, no matter how strong the temptations that come our way, that is it. And now it is time to be accepted into the Grail. He now asks in the right way and is initiated into the secrets of the Holy Grail; he is ready to become King of the Holy Grail himself.

Wagner strives to reveal the Holy Grail. For years he has conducted studies, not in a scholarly manner, but filled with artistic and visionary gifts. He has conducted his studies by essentially adhering to the spirit of medieval legends, so that he truly expresses the guidance of the Middle Ages brought about by an initiate, where the old order is represented by Ortrud and the new order by the rising consciousness of the people who want to free themselves. This consciousness, which is brought in in a very appropriate way by the Swans, the disciples in the third degree, is symbolized by Elsa of Brabant and Lohengrin. In this way, Wagner appropriately shows the greatness that lies within it. Wagner was concerned with a real renewal of art. It was he who wanted to make art something close to religion again, who wanted to embody moods in his works of art that would lead people back to the divine, thereby making artists religious leaders. Wagner needed material that went beyond ordinary life. He also wanted to present the spirit of Christianity, the spirit of love, to humanity in an artistic way. He felt deeply and seriously how, in recent times, the spirit of love had been replaced by the spirit of egoism, by the spirit of external possessions. He describes what has developed as the social order, and which he has followed in an intense and radical way, as a striving for gold, as a time that must be replaced by the genuine Christian spirit of love. In his music dramas, he wanted to use the superhuman and divine elements that live within human beings to reintroduce something like an influx of love into a world ruled by gold. That is why he also draws on the great legends of the Middle Ages in these questions. That was what lived in Richard Wagner.

From this you can see how theosophy or spiritual science, with its understanding of myths, must approach Wagner's art. It is clear above all to the theosophist that we have nothing else to see in the legends than images and expressions of great truths. The ancient peoples were thus given images of the development of outer life and the soul. The Lohengrin legend makes something clear so that people know what happens to them when they reach certain stages. The truth is proclaimed to the peoples in such a way that they can grasp it. There were and are tribes and peoples who can only grasp the great truths in the form of legends. Today we no longer speak in figurative forms. Spiritual Science contains the same truths that were presented to the ancient peoples in grandiose legends and which Wagner seeks to renew. Spiritual Science speaks in a different way, but what it wants to infuse into the world as spirit is the same. And so we feel that it is not only true what Schopenhauer says, that the great minds understand each other across the centuries, that Plato and Spinoza, Buddha and Goethe, Giordano Bruno and Socrates, Hermes and Pythagoras understand each other across the centuries, talk to each other, are in spiritual communication. Not only is this true, not only do the select individuals understand each other, but also what lives as truth in the spirit of the people. This sounds together as a great historical sphere sound, and we feel this when we realize today what lives in the legends and myths, when we resurrect it for the higher soul of the present. A truth lives in all times and expresses itself in the most diverse forms. Let us penetrate these truths and we will understand how the peoples and times speak in these individual forms, and we will hear it echoing, how in the most manifold tones the one truth proclaims itself to all peoples, to all human beings.