The Circular Flow of Man's Life within the World Of Sense, Soul And Spirit

GA 68b — 21 October 1909, Berlin

52. The Wrath of Zeus. The Chained Prometheus

Those who reflect on such questions of human mental life as those on our winter program this year, on character, conscience, on the healthy and sick soul, on life and death, mysticism and so on, those who reflect on such questions will perhaps be able to be reminded again and again of a saying of an old sage from the fifth century BC, Heraclitus, whom is called the “Dark” because of the significantly deep nature of his thinking. He, Heraclitus, spoke the words:

You cannot fathom the depths of the soul, even if you wanted to travel all the roads. The soul has such deep reasons.

We are reminded of this depth of the soul in many ways when dealing with matters of the soul. But only slowly and gradually, over the course of this winter, can we, so to speak, engage with the deeper questions of the soul life.

Today and tomorrow, we will deal with phenomena of human inner life that are perhaps no less interesting precisely because they are closer to the most everyday and because one thinks about them less. It is in such phenomena that the noblest and highest core of human inner life, which we call self-consciousness, is obscured for certain periods of time in a certain relationship, obscured by all kinds of feelings, but mainly by affects.

Today we will deal with one of these affects, which plays a significantly profound role in the human soul. We will deal with the force within us that underlies anger and everything related to it. When speaking of the soul qualities and expressions of the human soul, one can ask: How is it that the human soul, which is supposed to lift itself ever higher and higher intellectually and morally through its self-awareness, is repeatedly thrown back by impulses of the kind that anger is? Is a quality of the soul like anger a mere hindrance on the path of human beings upwards to the great ideals of life? And in a practical sense, too, such questions are of the greatest importance in our immediate lives.

The educator, anyone who is entrusted with the care of another person, will readily admit and will recognize how important it is to know what role an emotion like anger plays in the soul's life. Once we recognize such a thing, we can treat everything connected with it in a correspondingly tactful and wise manner. However, our present consideration of the soul life will encounter the greatest difficulties in dealing with such a question as the meaning of anger. Only a deeper penetration into the undercurrents of existence, into the winding paths of the spiritual life, allows us to provide some insights into such a question. So today we will first have to allow something to enter our soul that those of our revered listeners who are present at these lecture cycles have heard from a certain quarter, who have been present more often at these lecture cycles.

But it will be necessary again and again to allow the unique nature of the human being to enter our soul if we want to understand human expressions and effects of force. From a spiritual point of view, the mission of anger is to be considered today. Here we must consider man, not only as he presents himself to our outer senses, to the intellect that is bound to the instrument of the brain, and which is limited to processing the impressions that direct sense observation provides. For such a spiritual-scientific consideration, that which the senses see and which the human intellect, conscious in this sense, can comprehend, is only a part of the human being. That part of the human being that we can perceive with our senses – external science is only concerned with the physical body insofar as it is a science of nature, and in a certain respect it is right with this limitation – spiritual science calls the physical human being. But beyond that, it distinguishes the higher nature of the human being. What we call the physical body has the same composition of substances and forces as everything we call the mineral kingdom, the seemingly dead nature around us. The same world of forces is in our physical body as it is out there in the world.

But there is also a question that the ordinary human mind can ask and to some extent answer, namely, whether these forces and substances that are at work in the human body and that are the same as those in the rest of mineral nature act in the same way as they do in the rest of mineral nature. The answer is no, they do not. When the human physical body – and the physical body of any living being, for that matter – is left to itself, it follows the laws of the mineral world. We see this when the physical body is left to itself at the point of death. We see the way in which the composition of the physical body works when it is left to its own physical and chemical forces. That which, from the beginning of physical life to the end, fights against the physical and chemical forces so that they cannot follow their own path, which they only follow in death, we call the first link of higher human nature – do not be put off by expressions, stick to the concepts – we call the etheric body or the life body. With this, we ascend to the first supersensible link of human nature.

Even for someone who merely employs logic and the instrument bound to the physical, such a life body can be reasonably inferred. For someone who stands on the ground of spiritual science, this life body is a fact of the same reality as the world of sounds and colors. And the spiritual researcher can say to those who reply: “This etheric or life body does not exist at all.” It is not perceptible to the ordinary senses, just as color is not perceptible to someone who is blind. But it exists for the person who has developed the corresponding powers in his soul so that he can really perceive this life body as a fact.

All these things can be discussed in the course of winter in a different context. Today it must be left at that. — Then we come to the third link of the human being, which is called the astral body. This astral body is the carrier of pleasure and suffering, of joy and pain, of urges, desires and passions. This astral body is what humans have in common with animals, just as they have the etheric or life body in common with plants and the physical body in common with minerals. For reason, this astral body, if it is to make use of logic in an unbiased way, can be something that can be logically deduced. For spiritual research, it is a fact, something that is just as present for the perception of the spiritual researcher as color is for the eye and sound is for the ear. Thus, in the astral body we have a second link in the supersensible human being.

And if we ascend further in the composition of human nature, we come to what he no longer has in common with the other realms of nature around him, what we call human self-consciousness or its expression, the ego. This ego is that which, so to speak, every sensible human nature is surprised by when it perceives it for the first time. I would like to quote again the beautiful saying of Jean Paul, when he was still a boy and stood in the courtyard of his parents' house and felt the 'I' for the first time [gap]. From now on, the question of God and immortality was understandable to him. It would be so easy to arrive at the human 'I', at an understanding of it, if one were to say to oneself: There is something expressed in the I that is distinguished from all other concepts or names by the very fact that it is spoken. Anyone can call a table a 'table' and a chair a 'chair'. But when you say the word 'I', it denotes something that only refers to itself, but that has no meaning and cannot be applied to your higher self-awareness when it is spoken by another. Your “I” can never sound sweet to your ear if it is not meant to signify your own soul. This is truly the expression for the “shrouded sanctuary” of the human soul. This is the expression that, as in a short monologue, describes the essence of the human being within, or what can also be described as the divine in human nature.

We have thus placed the four aspects of the human being: physical body, etheric body, astral body and I, before your soul. When we look at the person as he stands before us, these four elements are what constitute his interaction, his mutual interpenetration. What is significant is that the human being is not a closed being, that he is not a being who is finished at any given moment, but a being who is in the process of living development, a being who progresses from this or that stage of progress to another stage.

What then is the nature of this human development? What is the interplay between these aspects of the human being, which we can call the wonder of human development? They interact in the way that presents itself to our minds when we consider what an astral body might look like in a person at a low level of cultural development, and in a person at a higher level of cultural development, in that he does not live in his wild desires and instincts, that he does not desire and crave everything that comes to him in terms of the senses, but that he has purified his urges and desires through the ideals of moral life. You can place two people side by side: the one whose senses are still covetous, who still desires what his senses present to him; and the other, with fine tact and a sense of duty, who shows that he has undergone a refinement of his soul, has purified and cleansed it.

What is this purification based on? It is based on the fact that the human being works from his ego on the other members of his being. The ego has done this, which has become out of instincts, desires and passions. The ego has purified the astral body, transformed instincts, desires and passions, made them into something different from what they were before. In spiritual science, the part of the astral body that the ego has already transformed – insofar as the ego has worked with full consciousness on the transformation of drives and passions, on its moral perfection, on the transformation of the astral body – is called the “spirit self”, or, in an expression of oriental philosophy, the “manas” of the human being.

In general, we can say that in present human development, the human ego has only just reached the point of working on the manas or spirit self, consciously working. In the future, the high spiritual ideal for human beings will be to consciously work not only on the astral body, on the purification of passions, instincts and desires, but also on the transformation of the etheric or life body. Today, human beings can only work unconsciously on this etheric body. What he once transformed in his life body is called the spirit of life or Budhi in spiritual science.

And now an even higher ideal in the sense of spiritual science arises before the human soul; this is an ideal in which the human soul today, when it has a sense of it, can be overcome by a sense of vertigo at the height and grandeur and sublimity of the future of human development. When man is able to work consciously on the physical body, then he will also rework the physical body from his ego or self-awareness.

Today, a person can only do this unconsciously. But you can see it happening in everyday life. You just have to look at life impartially. Imagine a person who feels shame, that is, he feels something in his soul as if he wanted to hide something about himself; a blush of shame rises to his face. What does that mean? A purely inner experience has triggered a physical process, a redistribution of the blood. It is the same when a person turns pale. The blood then moves from the surface to the inner parts. This is a process in the physical body that takes place unconsciously. What a person consciously works on in his physical body is referred to in spiritual science as the Atma or spiritual man.

If we describe the course of human development in this way, we can say that the human being consists of a physical body, an etheric body, an astral body and an I. If the I transforms something of the astral body, the spirit self or manas arises. If something of the etheric body is transformed, the life spirit or budhi arises. And if the physical body is transformed, then the spiritual man or Atma arises.

But that is not the only thing that comes into consideration. When a person can also look at his ideal, in which he has completed the transformation of the astral body, then he has unconsciously already worked on this astral body from his I. He already has something within him that can be described by saying that the I lives in the astral body. That part of the astral body that is not consciously transformed by the I, but which - as we shall see is correct - is already an instrument of the I, is called the sentient soul by spiritual science.

But the etheric or life body has already been transformed to a certain extent by the I, and today it already serves the I as an instrument in a certain way. The I has already sent its power into the etheric or life body. Insofar as this body is merely an etheric body, it is connected with the forces of reproduction and growth. But insofar as the etheric body is transformed by the I, we call it the mind soul or emotional soul of the human being.

But the physical body of the human being is also transformed and becomes an instrument of the I. This physical body of the human being, insofar as it is an instrument of the I, serves precisely as a sensory organ; through the wonderful apparatus of the sensory organs, it serves the consciousness of the I. That is why we call that part of the physical body that is capable of being an instrument of the ego the consciousness soul, which thus dwells in the physical body.

Thus, in the sense of spiritual science, we first have three bodily members: the physical body, the etheric body and the astral body; then three soul members in which the ego lives to a certain extent: the sentient soul , the soul of feeling, and the soul of mind; and finally, by making use of these three members, the I works them over in a conscious way to become the spiritual self, the spirit of life and the spiritual human being.

This is a meaningful scheme. But it is not just a scheme, it is an active force. Only the one in whom it becomes so alive that he sees the forces of the individual human members interacting, comprehends human development. Yes, this human nature is deep, deep, as Heraclitus correctly said. Thus we see the human ego at its work, and within the human body we see the transformation of the inner soul-elements of the human being. If we want to understand this ego, we must ask ourselves, above all, what is the present stage of the human ego, what has it achieved, conquered by working, partly unconsciously, on its astral body? What it has conquered lies in what we can describe with the words: The I makes the human being a being capable of judgment, a being that judges from within, be it judgments of the intellect, feelings or will; this makes the human being a being capable of judgment.

This says a great deal when one says that it makes a human being a being capable of judgment, a being that can think, feel and want from reasonable judgments. It is said that one really learns to distinguish between what is the sensation of a physical being and what is the impulse of a human being. When we look at animals, we can find all the qualities of the human soul in animals to a certain extent. We find sympathies and antipathies in animals, even what is analogous to one of the highest feelings of the human soul, an analogy to love. We find analogies to what we call human intellectual activity. It is easy to observe in the animal kingdom how everything works similarly to that in humans; but who could fail to recognize the difference between what is present in humans and what is present as a quality in animals? We can say with certainty, based on the animal's organization and form, what it will be driven to do in this or that case. Necessity is quite different in the case of a human being who ponders the question: Should you do this or should you not do it? He weighs it up before coming to a decision. Only those who do not look closely at the matter can fail to see the enormous difference. In the course of his development, man has acquired the power of judgment through the interplay of his development, which has just been characterized.

If we want to place before our soul the highest ideal of this discerning human being in relation to an area, in relation to human coexistence, in relation to the way two people relate to each other, two things arise. If we look at the judgment that confronts people, it is the concept of justice and the concept of love. When the human being places the concept of justice before him, he will be able to say to himself: Justice is something that can be regarded as a higher ideal. This means harmony, balance in life's circumstances. One need only think of good and evil, right and wrong. But what is it that afflicts the human soul when it utters the word “justice,” when it surrenders to the concept of justice? It is something cold that the human soul experiences in its feeling when it surrenders to this concept. It feels justice as a necessity, as something that must be, as something that man must submit to based on his sound judgment.

The soul feels differently when it contemplates the concept related to justice, so to speak, the concept of love. Here the soul does not feel coldness, but inner warmth, something of what elevates human nature, because it must say to itself: That is only a truly human ideal when justice is no longer practiced because it is perceived as a necessity, but because one loves what is right, because one loves to do what should be done.

Thus, justice and love stand side by side as a cold ideal that is nevertheless recognized as necessary, and as a warm ideal that fills our soul with inner fire. And in them is contained what the human soul sees as the two ideals when it asks itself: In what direction must it develop its power of judgment first? That through her judgment, through her deliberations, through what lives in her, she experiences the coexistence of human beings in such a way that it is in the sense of justice and love. - In this sense, man looks up to justice and love as two lofty ideals of development, and he sees, enclosed in the interplay of his forces, that which leads to justice and love in coexistence.

That is how it is. But one cannot understand human development, or development in general, without another feeling, which provides insight into the actual nature of development. Development is something that, if it is to flourish, must include something else. And this other process can perhaps best be described by the word maturing. Maturation over time is something that cannot be separated from the concept of development. And we understand each other best when we apply the concept of maturation to the concept of the human ego itself.

Take the life of a single human being, take it in the sense that a serious observer of existence should take it. Is it possible to expect the same of a person in their third year as in their twelfth or sixteenth year? That is impossible. The same cannot possibly be expected of a developing being when the interplay of forces is such that it is developing. There is a time for every stage of development, and it is detrimental to the being's overall development to transgress this law of maturation. It is also detrimental to the individual's human development between birth and death to expect something of the ego at one stage of life that should only be expected at a different stage of life, according to the degree of maturity. But it is also unhealthy to expect a person at a lower stage of development, who has not yet sufficiently purified his passions and instincts, to do things that can only be expected of such an ego in a truly fruitful way after it has gone through the various stages of purification. This is how it is when the human ego sees such significant ideas as justice and love as ideals and says to itself: You must rise up — so that they work like two great guiding stars in the life of man. But the path must be traveled in the right way. If we now consider not the individual life, but the whole of human life over the course of centuries and millennia, how the human ego returns and works on the human being, then we will have a complicated fact before us, which is very compelling to draw attention to the maturing process. If – and this can only be stated today, but will be touched on from various points of view during the winter lectures – if the human being not only lives once between birth and death, but returns again and again, then what spiritual science recognizes as a necessary consequence of development, that the I does not live only once between birth and death, but returns again and again, then it is [conceivable] that spiritual science recognizes as a necessary consequence of development, that the I does not live only once in this life between birth and death, but undergoes successive embodiments.

During all these embodiments, the I works in such a way that it has worked in the distant past on the astral body, etheric body and physical body, so that the sentient soul, mind or mind soul and consciousness soul; let us continue to work so that spirit self, spirit of life and spiritual man will arise. The forces of this development permeate each other in interplay and unite in the ideals of justice and love. This work is done by the “I”. Thus, if we take the word experience in the right way, we must understand that at every moment of life – if we speak of different embodiments, in every single embodiment – the soul acts on the other members of the body in the right way, that the “I” works on every work on every single development, that it does not do too much in terms of acquiring justice and love; for the ego should never go further in relation to what is capable of judgment within it, and it cannot go further than its degree of maturity makes possible.

But what is the regulator in this relationship? What ensures that the ego does not go beyond the degree of maturity at certain stages? Do we understand what the regulator is, what ensures that the ego can at least do the right thing at each stage? What is said here can only be understood if we turn our attention to something that is becoming clearer and clearer to people through spiritual science: If we turn our attention to what man's knowledge, his insights, his ideas and concepts (to name briefly the means by which we know the world) give him, we see that these are not found in man alone, but are poured out over the whole world.

Man tries to understand the world by forming concepts and ideas about the world. Just as you cannot scoop water out of a glass that does not contain water, you cannot scoop wisdom out of a world that is not full of wisdom. Man draws wisdom out through his judgment, through his capacity for knowledge. He comprehends the plant because it is constructed in a way that is full of wisdom. He forms concepts. It is nonsense and foolish to believe that man could form a concept about the plant if the plant itself were not built according to this concept. What man draws out of the world is poured out into the world and underlies things. In the human soul, what is poured out in the rest of the world or in nature outside appears in a different form as wisdom.

If you want to visualize this, all you need to do is think about the following. It took a long time in the development of mankind for man to reach a certain stage of historical development, let us say, to produce paper. Try to imagine the sum of thoughts and work that were necessary to produce paper so that it could enter human development. One could say, if one wanted to speak grotesquely, that within the wasp world this paper was not invented thousands of years ago, but much longer before, because the wasp nest is built from the same material that we have as paper. We have real paper there. What man produces in his materials is worked out into the outer nature.

As such stages, you can realize how what man has acquired as wisdom is poured out into the world. The world is permeated by wisdom and built up of judgments. Wisdom is a rediscovery of judgments that are spread like a net over all existence in nature. Wisdom-filled furnishings are not only to be found in what human consciousness works out, what human beings shape in their souls; wisdom-filled furnishings can be found everywhere. They were already there when the human ego could not yet consciously work. And it was this wisdom-filled work that made it possible for the human ego to work on the physical body, the etheric and astral bodies, even before it was able to work consciously. But this wisdom must also be out there in life today. The human ego is not yet so far advanced that it can find the right thing all by itself, that which would correspond to a much higher power of judgment.

What I want to say becomes clear when you consider the following. Imagine a person standing before a child that he wants to educate. The child does something that it should not do. It becomes necessary for an action to take place; it can be punishment or something else. Such a thing is possible. One possibility is that the educator says that the pupil is doing something incorrectly. The educator dislikes this, and it is possible that he may become angry and that this anger may develop to a certain degree, in an impulse to a certain action. That is one possibility. The other possibility, however, is that the educator, although he has seen the injustice and felt displeasure, remains calm, feels composure and, based on mere judgment and a certain maturity of soul, does what is necessary as a punishment or otherwise in the case in question. Outwardly, the same can happen. The difference lies in the soul being filled with anger one time and with composure the other.

When we consider this difference, we will ask ourselves: Why is there anger in the one case and composure in the other? Would the person who looks at what the child is doing with anger be able to do the right thing in the case in question because of the maturity of his or her self? If you look at life, you will say to yourself that as a rule he will not be able to do the right thing. It takes a certain degree of maturity of the ego to do the right thing despite not feeling any emotion and remaining cold and calm, but still loving the matter at hand and loving what should be. A certain degree of maturity is required for this. And every person stands at a certain point in relation to this maturity. The human ego cannot always have the degree of composure that enables it to do the right thing despite not feeling any emotion. To do so, the human ego must develop to a certain level. What would the educator do if he were calm and did not feel anger? Then the educator would stand by with his composure, do nothing, and leave the matter be.

The wise order of the world ensures that the I is guided towards what is right, at least to some extent, by forces other than those to which it has not yet matured. Before the I is mature enough to act from serenity, it acts out of affect, out of anger. Here we see that in the course of development, the human ego does work on the human astral body, so that in the course of development the astral body develops in such a way that composure blossoms; but as long as the ego is not yet able to attain this maturity, it does not want to work on this composure, then the human being should be driven by something within him to do something. One such mechanism, and a very important one at that, which allows the ego to mature within the astral body and yet still drives it to enter into a certain relationship with its fellow human beings before it is mature, is anger. Just as, for example, the outer nature in its plant kingdom, in its animal kingdom, is wisely arranged, so is everything that we can call the astral nature of human beings wisely arranged. It is arranged in such a way that people enter into a relationship with each other before they can build themselves up completely on the basis of their ideals of justice and love, using their power of judgment. The forerunner of serenity is anger.

In development, it must be the case that what leads up to higher levels of development can also lead to error. If man did not now enter into error, he could not work his way to the truth. So even if anger gets out of hand, if we consider it in its full significance, we can see how it works. Take a young person in his youth, who is not yet able to develop certain ideals; but he sees this or that injustice in his environment; he comes to what one can call a noble anger. And what one can call noble anger at what he cannot approve of, that works in him to help the soul mature into working out in itself what the great ideals of life can become. Like a mother substance, the self, left to its own devices, is made mature through qualities such as anger. That the self is made mature can also be seen from other facts. Because the young man never sees his ideals realized in his environment in the case of things that he cannot yet have any concept of, he repeatedly feels the same noble anger at what displeases him. When people look into life, they can perceive that all the noble surges of anger in youth later come out as love and gentleness. He who views life in its entirety sees the transformation of youthful anger into the love and gentleness of old age.

Thus we see how love and justice, which stand before the human soul as lofty ideals, but which the ego must mature — for it takes an enormous effort to develop the system of human justice and the truth, the real of love, which is not burdened by clouded feelings, we see how justice and love, these high ideals, have set up wrath as a champion in the human social order. It is wrath's [mission] to prepare love.

This is understandable when you consider that what is supposed to become judgment in reality threatens to degenerate into extremism. If we consider the various embodiments, we can say that what a person brings with them in the way of justice and love goes back to a time when they were not yet able to recognize what the right balance should be, when they had no idea of the true feeling of love, but when what arises is anger. Like the dawn of the sun, so shines the nobility of anger, the noble anger that precedes love. In wisdom, the powers that rule the world have placed the nobility of anger in the astral body before a full consciousness of love can be developed, before love can become full justice in the soul.

In times when things were examined more closely than today, it was possible to determine what was in the soul members just by their names. If we go back to the great Greek philosopher Plato, we will find that Plato calls that which we call the consciousness soul, the reasonable soul. But what we call the intellectual or mind soul must be endowed with the ideals of justice and love, and Plato calls this the wrathful soul. What we call the sentient soul, Plato calls the desires soul.

If we turn to Aristotle, we find that he uses similar terms in a similar way; we can also see that they correspond exactly to the expressions of spiritual research. Why does Plato call the soul that precedes the consciousness soul, the wrathful soul? He calls it that because not only wrath but also all wisdom-filled institutions are written into this soul, because he found the wisdom that was poured out into the world also poured out in the human astral body, precisely as a wrathful soul.

In the case of those who have looked more deeply into the nature of the soul, we find that the essence is already indicated in the name. The person who, from the point of view of spiritual science, looks at what passes through the ages as legends and myths of the peoples, as a transmission of the peoples, makes a remarkable discovery in his soul. What might be called the “science of the green table” can answer when you ask where this or that myth comes from: “That is folk poetry.” Only someone who is unfamiliar with folk poetry can speak of folk poetry in this way. But anyone who delves deeper and shines a light into this or that saga or myth will make the remarkable discovery that it contains great wisdom. Before humanity was educated by logical judgment, by pondering and counting, as is right today, before this ability to judge led to the contemplation of truth, another, clairvoyant recognition led to it, to contemplate the truth. So the myths and legends are something quite different than they initially appear. They become an expression of profound truths.

A saga that leads us into the depths of the truth that interests us today was processed by the Greek tragedian Aeschylus in his “Prometheus Bound”. When we delve into the life of this poet, who lived two thousand years before us, we are seized by the world view that permeates his poetry, the world view that is poured out in the Greek myths, the world view of the Greek people.

I could fill the entire lectures over the winter if I wanted to tell you what there is to say about “Prometheus”. This poem ties in with the myths that the name Prometheus encompasses. You are all familiar with the Prometheus myth. Let us briefly recall it. When the Greeks looked back in time, they saw ancient generations of gods at work within our earthly nature, within our earthly and cosmic evolution. Today it is not intended to explain what is meant by this. Imagine that they are personifications of natural forces, or whatever and however you want; that is not the point today. The Greeks saw two ancient dynasties of gods: Uranus and Gaea; these ancient dynasties of heavenly gods, who brought about the first processes on our Earth, were replaced by the dynasty of Titans; the dynasty of Titans to which Cronus and Saturn belonged. Kronos was the son of Uranos. We are told that the Titans, with Kronos at their head, seized power and overthrew the old Uranos. We can assume from the outset – and this is pointed out, and it is true – that according to Greek belief, certain forms of life existed in ancient times that were subject to different rulers then than in later epochs of development. Anyone who is aware that the forms of events change over time will admire the ingenious view of Greek myth, which expresses the beginning of [earthly] development, that interplay of simple primal forces of the world, through the marriage between Uranus and Gäa, and then expresses a later epoch by saying that the Titans appear. The whole face of the earth changes, so that other forms of life, of happening and becoming are there. Thus, in the Titans, we have a second generation of gods, forces that work within the development of the earth. Why is the generation of Titans replaced by the generation whose leader is Zeus? He is, so to speak, a member of the youngest of the generations of gods. He therefore overthrew Kronos and his followers into an unknown world, a hidden world to which the Titans belong, and in which Zeus is the one who exercises world domination.

In Zeus's fight against the Titans, Prometheus, a descendant of the Titans, sided with Zeus. It was he who helped Zeus to achieve his goal. But Prometheus experiences a bitter disappointment, so to speak. He helped Zeus to achieve world domination. Within what the Greeks imagined as a succession of these three corporations of the gods: Uranus, Titans and Zeus's generation, human beings developed into various abilities, they developed into certain stages. When Zeus had taken over the rule, human beings had developed to the point where they could absorb the impressions of their surroundings into their consciousness.

If we understand this Greek myth in the right way, if we really engage with it in a spiritual-scientific way, then we find that the Greek genius, where it expresses itself mythically, takes the concept of development into account in a wonderful way. People who can see what is a few steps in front of their noses believe that as long as man and his consciousness have moved up from the animal to the human form in the sense of today's natural science, they have always been as they are today. So human consciousness is also in a state of development. It has only gradually taken on the forms it has today.

If we go back on the basis of research that is no longer accessible to external natural science, but [rather] to spiritual science, we would come to ancient stages of human consciousness where judgment and deliberation were not yet present. Instead, however, there was an image consciousness, an image consciousness that works differently, that works in such a way that when a person encounters an impression, an image arises within him. He knew directly through the images, through the impressions that the image made on his feelings, he knew in an old, dim consciousness that is preserved like an old relic, like a traditional heirloom in a dream. An old, dim, clairvoyant consciousness was there in those days. It was only into this consciousness that man first acquired the ability to conceptualize. Everything was in development; above all, human consciousness.

This is expressed in the fact that Zeus has taken power. Consciousness increasingly makes way for what is to develop into judgment and deliberation. The sure insight that was conveyed by images was lost. Man only began with the first facts of calculating and counting and considering. People were clumsy. They became dull in relation to their old consciousness. They could no longer grasp their environment. They lived in an almost inhuman way. But out of this dullness there developed more and more that which, as we have indicated, was present in the first beginnings and which worked in man in such a way that it gradually brought him to judge, brought him to posit out of his ego into the world something that was not there before. Call it power, call it essence. The Greek genius expresses it by saying: Prometheus works in human nature that sense which makes it possible for human nature to process the individual things of life into art productions by means of tools. Prometheus is the great benefactor of mankind who, in the name of love, has given humanity what it will continue to develop ever further. Zeus, that is the disappointment that Prometheus experiences, would only have developed in man what is independent of judgment, independent of calculation and deliberation, what has not led to the arts. Zeus had left man without fire.

Travelers will tell you that higher animals, for example monkeys, were spectators and saw travelers warming themselves by the fire. If the travelers leave the fire while it is still burning, they will also warm themselves; but what they do not do is to bring wood and make a fire themselves. This is closely related to the making of fire, to the foresight to bring about something that will serve one later. The foresight is interpreted in Prometheus, who is the forward thinker. The becoming is interpreted by the Greek genius in the form of Prometheus. In Zeus, we see that which is not active in the human ego, that which does not make the human being capable of judgment, but which only works in the human astral body. The Greeks focus on human nature, and they say to themselves: the threefold nature of man — whether they say it to themselves in this form or not is irrelevant — is made up of drives, desires and instincts. These must play against each other. What permeates the astral nature with wisdom was seen by the Greeks in Zeus. What penetrates the human I, what leads the I to a higher level, was seen in Prometheus.

Thus Zeus and Prometheus faced each other, like the I reflecting judgment and intellect and the astral body. Thus they fight against each other in the I, which purifies the astral body. When the Greek allows us to see the whole astral nature, he says to himself: When we look at the human being with his astral body and his I — he stands in the world, suffering pain and joy, doing good and evil; pain and joy, good and evil, are in need of balance. It causes displeasure in the human soul when good is unrewarded and without success, and evil goes unpunished or is successful in the wrong way. It is justice that brings about balance in suffering and joy, in good and evil.

But when we survey the world, says the Greek Genius, then we see that in the world, within human nature and the human astral body, justice is very limited. Man is powerless; that is how the Greek genius felt with regard to justice. Now he looks out into nature, sees and says: Development is what comes before our soul in the sunrise and sunset, in the rise and fall of the plant world; what comes before us is everything that does not comes up to the human astral body; that something is at work in it that is connected with human nature, that is connected with the whole world as something that is a far deeper justice than man in his powerlessness can realize. — He then looked up and said to himself: There must be hidden forces and powers after all, that are behind what we can see, and that have a balancing effect.

These powers are the ones that are powerful in the face of the human impotent being; they are the powers of justice, so that they prevail everywhere, that they can count on these powers that work with might and power to bring about balance and that do not succumb to human powerlessness. They are hidden, and there they must be. The Greek genius saw them and called them the Titans for the reason that they do not have human powerlessness; and Themis, the goddess of justice, belongs to the special female Titans.

Thus, before the eyes of the Greek genius, there is an all-pervasive justice in the realm of the Titans. But then it must transform itself into love. The warm feeling of love must absorb it. That is why it is not Themis who is worshiped as the figure who also penetrates into man, who leads him to the ideal of justice, to love, but the son of Themis, Prometheus. He is the one who takes hold of human beings in their very essence. While Zeus belongs to the realm that pours wisdom and balance into human knowledge on earth, insofar as the astral comes into consideration, Prometheus pours into the human I that which should bring this I ever further forward.

However, we can recognize a force in the individual human being that prevents the I from going too far in its development, a force that stands in its way. Just as anger precedes the still immature composure, the Greek genius saw the interplay of Prometheus' deed with Zeus' anger in the great cosmic context. Zeus is the one who has to watch over the human development of the self so that it does not advance too quickly. Therefore, he must create balances. Prometheus provides people with what is common to ordinary people: understanding, reason, feeling, that is, what comes from the ability to judge.

But this means that something else has emerged in human development. In the human being who has advanced from the earlier to this stage, his consciousness has narrowed. When man still had his old consciousness, the clairvoyant one, man saw through his image consciousness into his spiritual, at least into his soul world. This is connected with a conscious appearance of image forms, so that man can see into a soul world that is hidden from the mind and sense consciousness. Thus a world withdrew from human consciousness. The gaze was tied down on earth, while at the same time advancing to a higher level. What man had implanted as his ideals of justice and love had to pay the price of being banished to the outer sensual world, to earth.

This was the counteraction of the astral. As man developed his ego further, the astral worked like a counterblow. Whereas man could formerly see into the world of the soul, this counterblow obscured the view into the world of the soul, and the view remained limited to the outer physical world. He was chained to the world of the earth. What was in Prometheus chained him to the earth. And so Prometheus was chained to the earth in human nature through what works as a counterbalance in the astral nature in the realm of Zeus, through the wrath of Zeus, forged to the earth. He had developed a higher ability. But it was darkened by the wrath of Zeus.

There are all possible degrees between the brightness of consciousness that a person has during the day and the darkness during sleep. What occurs in affect is, to a certain degree, its darkness. And the cosmic degree of darkness was that human consciousness was chained to the physical world. The consciousness that should have looked into the spiritual world was paralyzed. This paralysis was the chaining of Prometheus to the rock.

The forward-looking in Greek human nature is precisely depicted in the myth in the Prometheus myth. And the Greek tragedian presents this in such a powerful way in the “Prometheus Bound”. If you let the nerve of this wonderful drama take effect on you, then you will see what confronts you in it; what you encounter is something of which one can say: it stands in the world like an old heirloom from earlier times. Certainly, man has developed in a certain way, but all development does not proceed in a straight line. There are always heirlooms from old developments; they do not fit into later times; they seem out of place. Imagine a being with the old image consciousness in our time – it is an impossible being; it cannot possibly find its way in today's world. It is not for nothing that the human soul's powers change. They change so that they are adapted to human conditions on earth.

The image consciousness is adapted to the earlier earth conditions. The mind consciousness corresponds to the present time. The artist presents this to us in the form of Io. She represents a being that has emerged from the level of consciousness of the ancients. What will become of this [image consciousness when it occurs in our time]? Madness! What is the image of the earlier time supposed to say? It may be that one also has the ability to say it, but these abilities are not good. They produce error and deception for the soul.

The Greek genius represents such an awareness, which has remained like an old heirloom, so that error and deception and illusion arise, by seeing the hundred-eyed Argus. Images confront her. But these are deceptions, illusions, that is illusion. Even if this consciousness, when it has seized the human soul abilities, when this consciousness would also fall into madness, one must not believe that it will not have a meaning. That which the developed consciousness has grasped has only grasped one part of the human being, the brain, and has made it its organ.

But the Io is still working on people today. This is human future development, that all the forces that can be there will appear in later times in new forms, like the Io with its consciousness in ancient times. So she is a madwoman. But how she will be when that in human nature which the subconscious works on connects with what is higher human nature, then human judgment will be conscious; the Prometheus in human nature will be redeemed. The Greek sets this whole thing in the past, and in a way it also refers to past events. Just as he was able to extract the meaning of each individual move of the drama from this train of Prometheus bound with Io, he could also extract it from the drama.

I could only hint at where the drama's nerve lies. I could show how the playwright's mind was filled with what is in human nature and how it interacts. That is why Aeschylus was able to show how anger arises from the astral body when the ego is bound in the cosmos, so that it can mature and develop the abilities that are appropriate to it, as it were, projected out of the cosmos into inner human nature. Through this powerful drama, we will see how anger has the mission of being a harbinger of love. In a certain respect, this is also what connects us with the noble word truth, which is related to human nature in a different way to anger.

We will see how Goethe has incorporated into his “Pandora” what he himself felt in his deepest soul about these riddles of life. But because humanity today is so far removed from spiritual science, from that which lives in the soul of a poet, the poems like “Pandora” were not understood. This was already the case in Goethe's time. That is why Goethe felt lonely at the height of his life. In this loneliness, he also felt many dangers – as people still say today: In his youth, Goethe still wrote understandably, but in his old age he came down and wrote [unintelligible]. – In contrast to this, Goethe once broke out in words that you will find spoken in his works: “There they praise my Faust and what else is in my works... and there the old rag-tag believes it is no longer.” That is how he felt about the misunderstood spiritual world. Especially when you are looking at the human soul and want to understand it practically, then you have to start from spiritual science. You have to be able to observe the interplay of forces and the meaning of the individual forces, as spiritual science presents them to us. Then we can look into the deep abysses of the soul in such a way that we can apply it practically. Only then do we understand as different fruits that which speaks to us spiritually from this point of view [through] Aeschylus in his drama [of] Zeus towards Prometheus, whom we will only understand when we understand what the mission of anger is in the astral body for the development of the I into the ability to love. The veil that we must lift if we want to penetrate to our satisfaction and to the right practical life is lifted so that we can say: Certainly, when we look at the soul in a spiritual scientific way, we feel how deep the fundamental tone is, and we also feel that we are on the way to penetrating into this ground. Spiritual science will first advise us to strive for the right thing little by little in order to penetrate the ideals and insights of the soul life that are to be attained; it will show us how to make the words of the ancient sage from the fifth and sixth century, whom we can remember when we explore the depths of the soul to find the boundaries of the soul, understandable in a new way, starting from these ideals. It will be difficult if we also travel a distance, because the soul's ground is infinitely deep.