Human History in the Light of Spiritual Investigation

GA 61 — 1 February 1912, Berlin

Human History, Present and Future in the Light of Spiritual Science

It is a striking feature of the human soul to feel the urge to find orientation in the whole of human development in order to gain a certain view of the position of one's own personality within the present life. What the past was like, from which everything that surrounds us in the present has developed, what we feel we have taken on as our life's debt and life's work in the present, how, according to the course of human development and according to what the soul experiences within itself in terms of drives and longings, everything that lives in us as hopes and ideals can blossom for the future, — the human soul must so often ask itself questions about all these things. And it is undoubtedly a healthy trait of the soul to ask these questions. For human beings differ from other earthly beings in that they not only recognize the position they have been assigned within evolution as such, based on its conditions and causes, but can also influence it in a corresponding way through their awareness of their task, their mission. And so we see that, in the spirit of modern times, the contemplation of world development, of human development itself, is taking on a form that proceeds from points of view reminiscent of what has just been asserted.

We see, for example, how Lessing, at the beginning of the latest intellectual trend, writes his “Education of the Human Race” as the most mature document of his own intellectual development, and how in this “Education of the Human Race” he endeavors to show that there is a certain consistent plan in the history of human development, that one can, so to speak, distinguish an old period in which humanity, for example, had to follow commandments given to it from outside in relation to its moral impulses, while the ongoing education through the spiritual -divine powers is such that humanity is increasingly coming to grasp the good as an impulse of its own being, in order to do good out of mere concept — good for the sake of good. And we see, as has often been the case in the lectures of this cycle, how Lessing, based on such a consideration, arrives at the necessity of accepting repeated earthly lives for the human soul, because for him, in a sense, the development of humanity is a real, truly progressive process. So that for him the question had to arise: If a human soul lives in an earlier period of human development and absorbs certain impulses from it, how can it be reconciled with the meaning of human development that this soul would be dead forever for development once it has died? He could only reconcile this with the meaning of development by telling himself that the soul returns to earthly life again and again, and in recurring lives, the powers guiding humanity educate the soul to the summit of development. This is the basic idea, the basic impulse that lay in Lessing's soul when he was inspired to write his “Education of the Human Race.” Then we see again how, based on a profound insight into nature and humanity, Lessing's successor, Herder, endeavors in his “Philosophy of the History of Humanity” to present humanity as a whole, to show how different factors influenced people in certain periods than in later times, so that Herder also sees a meaningful plan in the development of humanity. And in fact, the deeper view of humanity in subsequent periods never strayed from the ideas inspired by Lessing, Herder, and others. Only the thoroughly outward-looking trend of the nineteenth century also took hold of history, so that what was thought and contemplated about the ongoing plan of human development remained, in a sense, more in the background for those natures who directed their soul's attention to the spiritual, while official historical science was not bold enough, not courageous enough, to investigate the effective powers, the real progressive factors in human development.

It is now natural that spiritual science, as it is to become increasingly prominent in the worldview that has been attempted to be characterized here for years, should seek to recognize once again the concrete, actual meaning of human history. It must be said, however, that in many areas that we touch upon in these lectures, especially this winter, prejudices arise again and again, not from current research, but from current thinking about this research. Prejudices pile up especially when one wants to explore the great laws of human history and what should emerge as a force for the present and as hope and ideals for the future. And today, people are all too happy to regard the nature of human beings, as we encounter it directly in the present, as something that, in a certain sense, cannot have undergone any real inner development, but which, insofar as it is the nature of human beings, has actually always been as it is today. At most, it is conceded that present-day man has undergone a development in relation to the more natural animalistic aspects of his evolution, which can be traced back either to those primitive humans whom we excavate from ancient graves or other sites, and who show us somewhat more imperfect forms of man than those of the civilized people of the present, but only in terms of the external physical form of man. Or one traces the ancestry of humans even further back, as we saw in the lecture on the “Origin of Humans,” and believes that there is some animal form from which humans could have developed. The fact that, when you really think about it, even a casual look at history shows us how much people's inner lives have changed over the millennia is something that people today don't really want to pay attention to, and it's hard for them to admit that three, four, or five millennia ago, people's whole mental state and mood were totally different than they are today. We would like to mention just one fact here, which should be particularly striking to those who study the development of the human soul scientifically, but which is by no means properly appreciated in its fundamental significance.

Today, people say that human beings must think logically, that they must link their concepts and ideas together in a logical manner, and indeed that they can only arrive at judgments in a logical way. This proves that people believe that human beings are subject to certain inner laws of logic in the functioning of their souls, and that they can only arrive at the truth through logic, so to speak. However, we also know from historical developments that this logic as a science was only established a few centuries before our era by the Greek philosopher Aristotle. And one can say: if one really knows the spiritual development of humanity, one must also be clear that humans only became aware of the laws of logic after the Greek philosopher Aristotle had given these laws of logic a definite form. Would it not be natural and appropriate to reflect on such a fact and ask oneself: How is it that thinking about logical laws only entered human development at a certain age? If one were to reflect properly on this fact, one would come to the conclusion, which is entirely true, that humans did indeed develop their consciousness relatively late, so that they could become aware of the logical processes in their souls, or rather the logical laws in their souls, and that logic therefore only arose at a certain time because previously the whole mood, the whole constitution of the human soul was such that it could not be aware of the laws of logic. Humanity only gradually developed logical thinking, evolving towards it in the era that we can call Greco-Roman, after the most significant peoples who lived in it. Towards this Greco-Roman era, humanity developed in such a way that it only became conscious of itself in this period of thinking that can be characterized as logical, so that before that, the inner state of the human soul was different.

Now, however, if modern man does not want to engage with the deeper results of spiritual research, he has only one possibility of gaining an idea of what consciousness actually is that is not permeated, interwoven, and interlaced with logical regularity. If people today want to form an idea of pre-logical consciousness purely through external, materialistic observation of nature, they can only do so by turning to the instincts of animals. What can they learn from these animal instincts? It has been repeatedly pointed out here that it would be quite impossible to speak of animal instincts in such a way as to suggest that there is no logic, no inner rationality, in the life and activities of the animal world. Everything that happens in the life of the animal world points to this inner rationality. We see how insects with fully developed instincts live under certain conditions that make it completely impossible for them to know the circumstances in which their offspring must develop in the early stages of their existence. Even though the adult insect lives in natural conditions that are completely different from those needed by the caterpillar, we see how the insect, although it has not experienced the other conditions in its current state, lays its eggs with great natural wisdom in a place where the emerging caterpillar will find the right natural conditions for itself. Here we see how, within what is happening, a ruling reason is at work. Everywhere we see reason and logic prevailing in the animal kingdom, but unless we want to indulge in unwarranted mysticism, we cannot say that animals have any awareness of this logic and reason. And when we consider the marvelous construction of the beaver and other activities of animals, when we go through the whole instinctive life of animals and draw attention to how animals, for example, relate to a change in the weather, which they foresee long in advance and behave accordingly, when we can point out how, according to well-authenticated reports, animals foresee earthquakes and volcanic eruptions — but that is only a metaphor, because it happens through the reason that reigns in animals, in that they “foresee” such things — then we must say: There is something in the instinctive life of animals that shows us how animals are just as entangled in logic and reason as there is an externally acting lawfulness in the world, how everywhere the environment is interwoven with objective reasonableness and objective lawfulness. — Thus, human beings can use animal instincts, that which acts in animals out of a lawfulness or through the stimulation of a lawfulness that is not reflected in consciousness, to form an idea of how that which happens through them can also happen in another way. It does not have to happen simply because, when humans want to do this or that, they say to themselves: This is my goal, this is how it must look, and this is how the tool must look;— but without making these conscious considerations, something similar can develop in the context of the world from other forms of consciousness, from forms that are subconscious to human consciousness, just as human conscious rationality develops in humans.

Now spiritual science points out to us that this kind of rationality, as it currently exists in humanity, this logic built on inner conscious logic, on inner rational goal-setting, has only developed gradually, but that human beings were by no means previously animal beings with merely animal instincts, but beings who had a completely different form of consciousness than our current logical consciousness, but also a different consciousness than that represented by animal instinct. If you look at what has already been said in the lectures of this cycle about the possibility of developing the dormant powers of the human soul and, as it were, opening up what we have called the spiritual eyes, spiritual ears, what we have called, in a real and not a fantastical sense, a kind of clairvoyant consciousness, then we will be able to turn our gaze to the possibility of developing other forms of consciousness out of today's merely logical consciousness, which sets only rational goals, and of educating ourselves, as it were, to other forms of consciousness. It has been pointed out how, through inner, intimate soul processes of meditation and concentration, those who want to become spiritual researchers and look into the deeper foundations of the soul must attain a different consciousness, so that spiritual research envisages a different kind of consciousness, which is developed educationally from the present form of consciousness. How such a form of consciousness, through which the human being not only perceives what he can perceive through his eyes, ears, and other sense organs, through which he does not only perceive what he can perceive through his physical instruments, but independently of his physical instruments sees into a spiritual world, — how such clairvoyant consciousness must develop in the present as the goal of spiritual research, it also becomes apparent when we trace humanity into the past that in earlier times a different form of consciousness existed than that which is currently characteristic of humanity as logical, thinking consciousness. What we know today as consciousness has only developed since the Greco-Roman era. Human beings first had to be educated to this. Now we have moved beyond the Greco-Roman period, and in our time, spiritual scientific research shows us how human beings are placed in the course of development in such a way that attention is once again drawn to how the form of consciousness that has developed since the Greco-Roman era can be further developed and educated to higher forms of consciousness. From this, at least hypothetically, the following thought may arise: It is therefore reasonable to assume that the consciousness which Aristotle, in a sense, codified in his logic, and which entered into human development in the Greco-Roman period, developed out of other forms of consciousness, so that if we go back in human history, we must look for other forms of consciousness, above all other forms of soul life in humanity.

The modern worldview person, who believes he stands on the firm ground of natural science but is only standing on his own prejudices, is still prevented from seeking out such other forms of soul life in human development. For they cannot imagine that, if they go back in human development, at the starting point of humanity, as it were, with primitive humans, there could be any other consciousness than the instinctive consciousness similar to the animal consciousness of today. But if, as we characterized in the last lecture, we trace the development of humanity not back to a point where humans were animals and only developed from animal ancestors in terms of their physical form, but if, as spiritual science does, we trace humans back to where they already existed as spiritual beings, before he possessed a physical body form, if we trace human beings back to the spiritual primordial human being and then take in the idea that this spiritual primordial human being only took on external body forms in the course of time, as we have characterized it, then we can no longer, when looking back, find forms of consciousness that would be similar only to animal instincts, but we come to forms of consciousness that would correspond to an ancient human form, which we must imagine as becoming more and more spiritual and soulful the further back we go. So that, going further back into Greek and Roman times, we have to imagine that human development proceeded in such a way that the inner life of the soul also became more and more entangled in the material world. In the historical development of humanity, we would therefore have to ascend to forms of consciousness that correspond to a more spiritual inner life of the soul.

Now, not only the facts of spiritual research — which show this clearly — but also the external facts of human development show us that the further back we go, even in historical and prehistoric times that can be researched in a historical manner, we come to a different kind of life of the human soul, to a completely different way of relating to the outside world. Such ideas as we are currently developing, as children already learn in school as intellectual concepts, through which we reflect the outside world, are soon no longer to be found when we go back beyond the Greco-Roman era. And it is not without reason that Western philosophers of history have always begun their history of philosophy by placing the beginning of philosophy, that is, intellectual reflection on the world, five to six centuries before the Christian era in the Greek world with Thales, because they recognized that only then was it possible to speak of an intelligent, logical reflection of the world. Only our present age has managed to break through what lies in this feeling of the historians, to let philosophy begin with Thales in the first place. Today, when everything is lumped together, people want to start the history of philosophy far, far back in Oriental thought, with the Indians or Persians, without paying any attention to the fact that all human dispositions to experience and view things were completely different in pre-Greek cultures than they later became in Greek culture. It is part of the superficiality of the “profound” observations of those who observe the Orient, such as Deußen, that our time is capable of taking the history of philosophy beyond Thales. This can only happen if one has no idea how human consciousness developed in its basic forms, and that what constitutes Oriental intellectual life has a completely different content from what began in the inner life of human history from the Greco-Roman era onwards. And when we examine what we encounter in earlier times, we must say: Human beings everywhere felt more or less compelled not to live in the forms of the intellect, in the intellectual forms in which we today begin to reflect the world even as children, but to experience the thought forms that confront us as myths as pictorial thinking about the world in the soul. What we encounter as imaginations is what human beings take into their souls in order to give themselves some kind of understanding of the world. It is images that have been preserved for us in the myths. And the remarkable thing is that, if we go back to pre-Greek times, we very soon find images at the root of all cultures, and the further back we go, the more we encounter the fact that human beings are deeply satisfied and blissful to live in these images, in what could be called a kind of imaginative conception of the world.

Now, anyone who, starting from the present intellectual, rational, logical conception of the world, through the kind of self-education characterized in the book “How to Know Higher Worlds” , makes his soul an instrument for spiritual research, attains a kind of imaginative knowledge as the first stage of true clairvoyant knowledge, and allows this imaginative knowledge, which now presents itself again in a kind of images, to act upon his soul, will say to himself: When I compare this imaginative knowledge of the spiritual researcher with what is still preserved in the wonderful imaginations of the myths and world explanations of the Greeks and also of the pre-Greek peoples, I encounter something that is, on the one hand, the same or similar, but on the other hand, fundamentally different. When today's spiritual researcher rises to his imaginations, he retains his logical thinking in his imaginations, which reflect the spiritual processes behind the sensory phenomena of existence; he retains it and strives for what we must call logical thinking. That is, he carries all rational connections, the whole character of present consciousness, into it, and imaginative knowledge would not be true knowledge if it could not provide insight into the way the images are connected, how everything within the imaginative world is woven into a whole. It is precisely in this regard that I recently experienced a very strange fact. In my “Outline of Esoteric Science,” you will find an attempt to present, on a larger scale, not only the development of humanity on Earth in the sense of imaginative knowledge, but also the earlier incarnations of our Earth in other, preceding celestial bodies. Everything that is factual in this regard, but which can only be revealed to spiritual consciousness, is presented in a way that corresponds to logical consciousness and the facts of sensory life. Now, a theologian who had read this book once said to me: What I read there seemed to me to be constructed entirely through logic and reason, so that one might be inclined to think that the writer of this book had arrived at it purely from today's spiritual life, solely through logical conclusions. That made me think, and I said to myself: Then perhaps the whole presentation has come about not through clairvoyance at all, but through mere logic. And he said that even though he claimed that he could not find what is given in this book as knowledge through his own logic. This fact is often encountered in the present day, especially when one is confronted with the hostile objection that such accounts are based on mere logic, even if these results are only unraveled afterwards in threads of thought in order to make them comprehensible. But everything in “Occult Science” has not been found through logical conclusions. It would also be difficult to find these things through logic. But once they have been found, they are permeated and interwoven with logic. Of course, they are not found by abandoning logic, but certainly not by way of logical conclusion; nevertheless, everything corresponds entirely to what can be called imaginative knowledge.

This is intended to give an example of what can be achieved through self-education of the present consciousness as a kind of new imaginative knowledge that can lead us to the foundations of things. When we compare such knowledge with myths, legends, and other creations that shine down on us from ancient times in human development, we find that it is important to recognize these rays of light that people must have cast into the depths of natural existence. But in order for them to express what they explored through such powerful images as have been preserved for us in myths and legends, it was necessary for those people to be more intelligent than the people of a logical era. For compared to many nature myths and creation myths, what our science is today is often nothing more than amateurism and dilettantism, because with its original reign and weaving of the forces of the world, an Egyptian or Babylonian myth about the workings of good and evil in the world stands higher than the modern monistic interpretation of the world. From what those people were able to think, one senses an inner coexistence and interweaving with the forces that humans today laboriously visualize in mental images; one senses an inner permeation with the deep forces of natural existence that reign in natural existence itself. But then one also senses it in the myths: the way they present themselves in their fullness and grandeur – and in a certain sense uniformly among all peoples across the globe – they were not woven by the intellect, nor by the imagination in today's sense, but by imagination. Not the imagination that is spoken of today as spiritual research, but an imagination that was still free from the intellectual and rational element. Nor was it the reign of mere fantasy, but the reign of a primal imagination, a clairvoyant imagination that had not yet been brought to completion, not something animal-like, even if it was dreamlike, dark, and twilight-like in its reign and shaping, acting as imagination, but not yet saturated with the elements of logic and thought. Thus, before Greco-Roman education intervened in human history, we see peoples intimately connected with what reigns in the depths of beings, and without the application of logic, the immediate interweaving with eternal existence in the great, powerful images of myths — expressing something that is not scientific in today's sense, but was the science of earlier times.

In this sense, we come to the origins of our current intellectual human behavior in Greco-Roman culture, and we see preceding this culture a completely different kind of soul life and culture, a soul life that, because it was not yet logical, because it was still dreamlike, but at the same time was more deeply connected with the spiritual fundamentals of all weaving and working, could now express this weaving and working in pictures. Therefore, perhaps no other word can be found that better characterizes the essence of the culture that immediately preceded the Greco-Roman period, as it was widespread among the Egyptians or Chaldeans, than the word: culture of revelation. Greco-Roman culture was preceded by a culture of revelation, in which, if the human soul wanted to recognize it, what lives and weaves in things rushed into it in powerful images and imaginations, like a revelation that wants to spring forth from things, like a spring gushing from rocks and mountains. Greco-Roman culture, on the other hand, is characterized everywhere by the fact that it gradually experiences a kind of twilight of the old culture of revelation, that in the older times of the Greeks the revelations still spring fully alive from things, but then we see, especially with Socrates, the strong emergence of a permeation of the soul life with intellectual culture, with the intellectual element, and how gradually those things that sprang from the old culture of revelation fade more and more, so that human beings increasingly make the content of their soul life what presents itself to them when they look at the things around them and let them act on their senses. Previously, human beings looked at things, saw the rushing spring, saw what was happening in the forest and meadow. Everywhere they turned their eyes to things, but from every plant something emerged that spoke to them spiritually like a revelation; from every stream, from every rushing spring, they encountered what lived within as a spiritual fundamental force. They then brought this into images, for example, of water beings, nymphs, and so on. What reigned in the depths of things, what opened up to the ancient clairvoyant consciousness like approaching dreams of a spiritual world, gradually faded away and was replaced by a full, unreserved recognition of what human beings perceived with their senses. A culture of perception emerged, in which man placed himself in the world with what he was and what he perceived, in which he saw the world through his physical organs, through his entire physical organization, and grew so fond of it that the whole of Greek civilization is in fact permeated in its attitude by the saying handed down to us by a great Greek, who says: Better to be a beggar in the upper world than a king in the realm of shadows! — In the ancient culture of revelation, it would not have been possible to say this; it only became possible when the world had advanced to the culture of perception, to what the senses see and what the mind develops as intellectual intuition on the basis of the senses, since people only knew that there was a spiritual world behind the sensory world. So one could only say this when the immediate view of this spiritual world behind the sensory world had become uncertain.

People also sensed the dawn of a whole new era. Oh, in the epoch that we can characterize as Greco-Roman, people sensed the dawn of what human beings should now drive out of themselves as their mind, as their intellectual culture. People felt that they had previously been sheltered in a world of revelation with which they felt spiritually connected. Now, however, they felt that they were entering a new element where they were placed more on the tip of their own ego. For those who observe the finer nuances of historical development, this trend emerges with great clarity. And it stands out even more clearly when we remember that such immersion in a culture of revelation shows human beings how they are secure as spiritual beings within the spiritual world, which they perceive clairvoyantly, albeit dreamlike, but that such clairvoyant perception is at the same time connected with a slight turning of the gaze toward one's own ego, with a slight awareness of one's own ego. Only a culture of perception can enable a people to place themselves at the forefront of their own personality. Therefore, in the Greco-Roman age, with the possibility of processing perceptions internally with this intellectual element, human reflection on the self begins, which at first can only be experienced in the mind, as a concept, as an idea, as something invisible within ordinary reality. That is why we see little emphasis in ancient times on what the human self is. Anyone who delves into the origins of ancient cultures will always say: the ancient myths and legends speak of gods, and when humans do their work, they are aware that in one step this god is at work, in another that god is at work, spurring them on. In their striving for things, humans felt as if they were inspired by gods, imbued with spirit, but not yet inspired by the ego. Man only attained self-knowledge and self-awareness through intellectual culture. Therefore, this had to become his nourishment in Greco-Roman times so that he could come to full consciousness of himself. Even in the development of language, we can demonstrate how this gradually emerged, how it was not present in the cultures of revelation, but how humans there regarded themselves as vessels into which the gods poured their spring water. The Greeks first had to go through the great tragedy of having their vision clouded at the expense of their spiritual environment, of having to say to themselves: This is the tragedy. Better to be a beggar in the world I have come to love than a king in the other world, which is uncertain to me! — But this only became uncertain for them in the Greco-Roman era. However, since the ancient mysteries still played a wonderful role in this remarkable era, it was possible to think of this transition of the soul itself in mythical, pictorial terms with the emergence of a completely new consciousness.

What would a person who already thought quite intellectually at that time, who was completely imbued with intellectual culture, have said to himself if he had turned his gaze to this important point in human history, where the soul is torn out of the old culture of revelation in order to ascend to the culture of perception and thereby be educated to self-consciousness? He would have said to himself: In ancient times, human beings were such that when they looked outwards, they saw the spiritual-soul realm reigning everywhere. They did not see an I in this spiritual-soul realm, but they saw what they described as spiritual beings standing above them: They live in my deeds, they live in my perception, in my life, and so on everywhere. Wherever he looked, the I did not yet appear to him. Now man turned his gaze out into the world, and in this time of transition he was particularly struck by the question: “What am I myself?” And the answer to this question fills him with a kind of shudder, so that he has to say to himself: No longer, when I ask myself about myself, do I come to the answer that gods penetrate me, but I feel myself permeated with a lonely self! — This is what a person who was permeated with intellectual consciousness would have said. But someone who had carried something over from earlier times, who would have spoken in such a way that he still placed the emergence of ego-consciousness in the old image, imagining it from the standpoint of the old consciousness, would have said: Once upon a time, the river god, that is, a divine being, Cephissus, and a nymph had a son, Narcissus. This enters the human soul itself as an image. Narcissus sees the spring at Helicon. He is told that he will perish the moment he sees himself. This means that the human ego loses its connection with the divine when the human being sees his connection with the divine. Narcissus sees himself and has taken the seed of death into himself. Such is the human soul as it learns to recognize itself in the culture of perception. Here the transition from the old culture of revelation to the culture of perception is described, only in a different way.

Someone who had already imagined the transition to the new consciousness in the manner of the old consciousness would have said to himself: When people used to look out into the world, they saw spiritual and divine forces everywhere, albeit in their old way of seeing things. This old imaginative consciousness has receded, gradually experiencing something like a twilight, and what ultimately remained were actually the worst forces of spiritual beings working outside. To a person who imagined the new in the manner of the old, these came to consciousness as the Gorgons, in whom people saw only the worst beings in their vision and therefore also depicted them as what arose in their consciousness as only the worst beings. Then the new human being, Perseus, arises and mutilates the Gorgons, Medusa, that is, the consciousness that was still present as a last remnant, represented in the serpent head of Medusa. Then it goes on to describe how two beings emerge from the mutilated Medusa: Chrysaor and Pegasus. I am not a fan of allegorical-symbolic interpretations of myths. I mean — also not in the sense of an allegorical-symbolic interpretation — that the one who experienced the rise of the new with the conditions of the old consciousness still saw clairvoyantly, with the conditions of that old consciousness, what humanity should develop into as the emergence of Chrysaor and Pegasus from Medusa. What did he see? Chrysaor, the image that man received as a down payment for what he lost as the old clairvoyant way. Pegasus, the personification of imagination. For imagination is caused by the old imagination entering a kind of twilight, and people no longer having the strength to enter the new era with an old power of consciousness. And instead of the old imagination, which entered into spiritual reality, they put that which does not enter into spiritual reality, but into the eternal shaping of the human soul, and which wants to represent the new shaping of the human soul. Pegasus is nothing other than what is known as the ego culture in human life. This continues to develop. Therefore, we hear how that which led to the ego culture, Chrysaor, unites with Callirrhoe. This gives rise to Geryoneus as what we must call modern intellectual culture, which the Greeks felt led people out of the old clairvoyant culture, but which had to lead them out because otherwise they would never have been able to grasp ego consciousness. Once again, the figure of Chrysaor has something strangely tragic about it; it characterizes how human intellectual culture itself fares. And as one of those who felt this most deeply, the poet Robert Hamerling, said of this intellectual culture: In the course of human development, we see the conscious culture of the intellectual developing out of the ancient unconscious culture of myth. But this culture has the meaning of every development, to lead to its own death! If the culture of the intellect alone were to continue in its own way—this is clear to Hamerling, and it must be clear to anyone who can truly appreciate the peculiar culture of the intellect in its innermost essence—it would lead to a goal that would be a drying up, an extinguishing of all liveliness, all originality, and all vitality of culture.

This is what has developed from the old culture into the culture of the present: the culture of the intellect. And by pointing out that intellectual culture does not have to remain intellectual culture, spiritual science shows that humanity necessarily had to develop intellectual culture in order to develop self-awareness, but that it can return to something that is more than intellectual culture. What does intellectual culture give to human beings? It gives them what they call a picture of the world. What are human beings striving for in particular today? Let us take what is particularly important to those who want to build a world picture out of intellectual culture today, namely that concepts should not deviate from what is actually out there in reality. And they call everything impossible that does not correspond directly to sensory-material reality. But spiritual research will recognize, beyond intellectual culture, that this is correct, that it gives us not only something that can represent reality, but also something that can educate the soul, that brings forth the powers of the soul, that has educational value, and how, through what is born in the human soul through intellectual culture, the humanity of the future will once again come to an imaginative culture through which it will connect with the spiritual background of things.

Thus, we see in intellectual culture the necessary element for crystallizing the human ego in the course of human history, and we see that through intellectual culture, the old clairvoyance had to be dulled so that the ego could shine forth and live into those incarnations that the soul experienced in Greco-Roman culture and which it continues to live through today and will continue to live through for some time to come. And then we see how a new imaginative culture will be kindled in the future, through which humanity will once again be taken up into the spirit and into spiritual life. Thus the present is linked to the past, and thus the present teaches us, in what it has as its roots, what must develop for the future. In a sense, at one point in human history, we encounter the awareness of this transformation of consciousness in the most grandiose way. But first, it should be noted that with the ancient culture of revelation, which we characterized as preceding the Greco-Roman culture of perception and our intellectual culture, a certain epoch of humanity had also been reached. The culture of revelation was completely immersed in a spiritual life of humanity that we can describe as an ancient imaginative life. If we were to go back even further, we would encounter an ancient culture that, throughout the Near East, points not to the culture described in history as Persian, but to a much older one from which the Persian culture emerged. And this older culture, in turn, followed the ancient Indian culture. Thus, we find the ancient Persian and ancient Indian cultures as the precursors of the culture of revelation.

If we survey these cultures, we find developed in humanity what has now emerged from the spiritual within humanity, but what has not yet emerged from the conscious spiritual, permeated by reason and logic: language. Just as today, according to a frequently repeated saying, the child learns to speak before it learns to think, so too did humanity learn to speak before it learned to think. Before the grasping of the soul's content in the great, powerful images was there, a language developed from the deep foundations of image consciousness, not from animal instincts, but from a clairvoyant consciousness that was even higher than the revelatory consciousness of ancient Egyptian culture. Beyond even ancient Indian culture, the element of language developed. Language is a creation of the human spirit, but a preconscious creation of the human spirit. This takes us back to even earlier times in human development, when the spiritual process of humanity proceeded in such a way that language gradually developed out of a still subconscious spiritual activity.

And then we see that ancient Indian culture maturing, which we admire precisely because we can call it a unified culture in the best sense of the word. This is not the culture of the Vedas. As they are presented to us, they are only an echo of the real ancient Indian culture and did not arise much longer before our Christian era than we are now living after its beginning. This ancient Indian culture could be characterized today by saying that the ancient Indian did not yet feel the difference between the material and the spiritual when he looked at plants, stones, mountains, meadows, and clouds. In everything around him, he did not yet see the spiritual as separate from the material; he did not see colors and forms as we do today, but rather, for him, the spiritual was directly adjacent to the material. He saw the spirit as real as he saw the external material colors: a unified culture, the spiritual as well as the material. Therefore, he perceived the omnipresent spirit everywhere in things, which a little later came to be called the omnipresent spirit Brahman, the universal soul that is felt to be present everywhere. But this culture, which we encounter in primeval times as the starting point of human history, did not yet enable humans, so to speak, to engage in material activities, to truly live out their powers in the material world. Therefore, in the north, in the area where the Persian Empire later spread, another culture arose, one that was almost opposite to it, one that was completely imbued with the idea that although man belongs to the spiritual world, he must work with the material world here on earth.

Compared to the ancient Indian people, the ancient Persian people were industrious, hard-working people who wanted to connect with spiritual powers in order to imprint the spiritual on the material configuration of the earth through their own strength and work. Therefore, the Persians felt connected to their god of light and said: He permeates me — just as humans lost their connection to the divine in the age of perception culture, the Greco-Roman period. The spirit of light, Ahura Mazdao, lived in the ancient Persians. In contrast, he regarded what he had to overcome as resistant matter, permeated with the forces of resistance, Ahriman, the dark spirit. Thus, the expression of the revealing spirit in the human soul before the culture of revelation is connected in the Persians with what we might call the culture of Mithraic enthusiasm. We can illustrate what the ancient Persians imagined with Ahura Mazdao, whom we can symbolize with the sun, in the following way. While later on, human beings still knew: You are imbued with spirit, spirit reigns within you — and even later felt only that they were imbued with the ego — in those ancient Persian times there was an enthusiasm in the spirit, a real standing in God and letting God work through oneself. The ancient Ahura Mazda culture, which preceded the culture of revelation, was an enthusiastic culture.

Thus we see that spiritual science in particular allows us to observe something wonderful, as poets in particular feel, for example when Robert Hamerling imagines something similar at the end of his “Atomistik des Willens” (Atomism of the Will). He does not yet arrive at this in a spiritual scientific way, but through elementary intuitions he comes to the conclusion that humanity developed from an elementary connection with the spiritual forces of nature, that humanity formed myth and language at this elementary stage, but that intellectual culture is called upon to lead human beings to a point where they become completely attentive and completely conscious of their ego, of their central spiritual-soul core. —

Another culture has pointed this out in a magnificent way. At that time, it was pointed out when it was known in a prophetic intuition: A time will come when what permeates and interweaves the world as the highest spiritual-divine will live fully consciously in human beings — but only in their innermost core will this be expressed. But this time must be awaited; it is a time that is yet to come. Something will enter into human beings that will enable them to imagine their innermost being as completely permeated by the divine. Spiritual powers are, as it were, drawing nearer in order to prepare for this uplifting of the human ego. But at present we cannot yet speak of what is present in human beings as if the highest divine-spiritual already permeated them. The divine is still inexpressible. This is how ancient Hebrew culture felt, how it sensed the approach of the ego culture, the intellectual culture, saying to itself: What will one day be able to designate the God who lives in the human soul can only be characterized with an inexpressible name. — Hence their view of the inexpressible name Yahweh. Yahweh or Jehovah is, after all, only a substitute for the inexpressible name of the divine, for what has been composed with these letters cannot in fact be vocalized, cannot be uttered, because as soon as it is uttered, it becomes something other than what is meant as the divine-spiritual being that will only develop in the coming age as the spiritual being of man. — Thus, in the course of development, man had to descend into the sensory-material world, while in future times he will rise again to the spiritual.

Then Christian culture came, entering precisely into the age that had produced the culture of the ego. It sees in the Christ impulse that which, if understood correctly, can become a power within human beings, giving the human ego the impetus to live its way back into the spiritual in the future, just as human beings once descended from the spiritual. Anyone who can understand why Plato, Socrates, and others were only possible in Greece, and why ego consciousness arose at a decisive point in time, will also understand why the mystery of Golgotha had to arise in Greco-Roman culture for the development of humanity, and then also this focal point of the entire development of humanity. Only those who do not reflect on these connections and do not know what human consciousness is and how it changes cannot understand how the Christ impulse, characterized from a different point of view in the previous lecture, fits into the course of human development from the past through the present into the future. Thus, it is precisely in ancient Hebrew culture that the essence of what occurs in the human ego is revealed. And now, looking back over history in this way, we can go into all the details. Philosophers have often quoted the Greeks as saying that all philosophy, all worldview, begins with wonder.

Yes, it must begin with wonder, just as it did in Greece. We can prove this if we look at human history and the present in the right light. Something has remained from the ancient clairvoyant consciousness, but now that it has remained, it no longer has the same effect as it did in the past. That is the dream. Dreams are a last, decadent remnant of ancient clairvoyance, because the conditions of ego consciousness already influence them. What is missing from dreams? If you follow the dream images as they ebb and flow, you will see what is missing from them. As they come and go in normal dreaming, the most incredible things happen. Soon this image is there, soon another one follows it in a way that we would never accept in waking consciousness. Why? Because in dreams, humans cannot be astonished, and because astonishment only occurs with ego consciousness in the culture of perception, and because something of the pre-ego worldview falls into the dream. And what appears as the ego worldview has been wonderfully characterized by the Greeks, who said that it begins with astonishment. But there is something else missing from dreams. In dreams, we can do the most incredible things under certain circumstances, and our conscience never torments us. Conscience belongs to ego consciousness. It only appears when ego consciousness develops. This can be proven, for example, by comparing the dramas of Aeschylus and Euripides. Aeschylus never mentions conscience, whereas in Euripides the concept of conscience already plays a role. Conscience enters human development along with self-consciousness, and dreams again lack conscience, being merely a remnant of the old clairvoyant consciousness.

Thus, as human history transitions into the present, we see how intellectual consciousness gradually develops from other ancient types of consciousness—namely, clairvoyant states of consciousness from which language and myth arose—but which is currently at the peak of its development. Therefore, what we can call spiritual research enters our time as a precursor of the forces necessary for future development. This should indicate that humanity does not need to perish, however frightening the killing power of a mere intellectual culture may be, as depicted by Robert Hamerling. Instead, intellectual culture will give rise to a new way of finding one's way back into the spirit. And thus spiritual science knows what a poet-philosopher of modern times so beautifully expresses at the end of his work, in which he gives voice to his pain over intellectual culture, which has brought all old, elemental communion with the foundations of the world into twilight, but in return has allowed the ego to rise. The poet says: “The kingdom of God set at the end of the world by the legends, the golden age to be striven for, means only the withdrawal of all life into the spirit, which can also be accomplished individually and personally.” Thus, a work by Robert Hamerling concludes with the hope for the future that all life will develop back into the spirit, just as all human life originated from the spirit. Past, present, and future come together in such a way that in the middle, in the present, there is the culture of the self, which brings people to a self-awareness that they did not have before. But they will retain this self-awareness as a lasting legacy of our age and take it with them to spiritual heights, so that we can once again speak of a spiritual age of humanity. And there would be no ideal for the future that could be oppressive in any way if we understood human history in a spiritual-scientific sense. How are we placed in life, which can often be so full of suffering and pain, and how can we relate to the world goals in our ideas? We can answer this great mystery of the world, this great question of humanity, with certainty, especially from the perspective of spiritual science, which gives vitality and confidence for the future of all humanity, just as the poet mentioned above answered it intuitively and imaginatively. In 1856, he inserted beautiful words into his “Venus in Exile” that touch on the past, present, and future of humanity, although he did not yet speak from the consciousness of spiritual science. But what is foreseen in the human soul in a premonitory form and later renewed in another form comes to us so wonderfully in the old myths and legends, which we know intellectually today! What spiritual science can say with strict justification has been expressed in a premonitory way by the poetic mind, and here too we may summarize what can be said about human history, the present, and the future in the words of the poet:

Why am I plunged into the abyss of earthly existence,
Threatened by suffering and the grimness of death,
Why am I drifting in a sea of colorful illusions,
Swimming toward my goal through waves of pain?
I do not know. Only one thing is certain to me:
In my deepest inner being, a voice resounds,
Which joyfully accepts the lot of life
And approves of this earthly destiny!