Knowledge and Immortality

GA 69b — 13 February 1911, Munich

IX. Moses, His Teaching and His Mission

Dear attendees! When I had the honor of speaking here a few weeks ago about the figure of Zarathustra, the intention was to show the significance that such a leading individuality has for the general spiritual life of humanity. We may say that we can feel this significance to an increased degree in a figure whose effects still extend so strongly into the immediate present, as is the case with the figure of Moses. For who would deny that a large part of our emotional and intellectual life, and a large part of what takes hold of the institutions and conditions of our environment through our thoughts, is still deeply influenced by the after-effects of those deeds in the development of humanity that are associated with the name of Moses. Although we go back almost one and a half millennia before the founding of Christianity, we can say that the after-effects of this act can be felt right to the innermost part of our soul tissue. Therefore, it must be of the greatest interest to us to understand what this mission, this teaching of Moses, means in the evolution of humanity as a whole.

Now it is not that easy to speak about the figure of Moses. On the one hand, it is not like the figure of Zarathustra or Zoroaster, whose historical outlines are blurred for us and of whom we can hardly specify even minor character traits from external documents; rather, the personality of Moses stands sharply outlined and vividly before modern man from the biblical record of the Old Testament. On the other hand, however, it cannot be denied that in the broadest sense, especially among those who deal with so-called critical Bible research, all sorts of doubts are attached to this description of the personality of Moses – doubts that not only challenge what the Bible tells us about the figure of Moses, but doubts that even go so far as to question the existence of Moses himself.

Now, as we have already shown on a number of occasions in other descriptions here, a genuine spiritual scientific approach to the religious documents provides the proof that we cannot so easily dismiss what is written in these documents, because more precise research in particular has often shown that the statements of the old religious documents are much, much more correct than one sometimes believes. But it is precisely when one adheres to the image that is given to us from the Bible of the figure of Moses that it is difficult to work this figure out spiritually – difficult for the reason that one must have insight into the way in which it is spoken in those parts of the Bible in which Moses is mentioned. These descriptions are very peculiar; they are so peculiar that we can characterize them in a few words in the following way.

In the Old Testament portions of the Bible, external physical events, external facts that once took place historically before the eyes of men, are continually interwoven with allegorical descriptions; without our being able to immediately and easily recognize the transition, the historical external facts merge into allegorical descriptions of inner soul processes. In the Bible, for example, a character may be presented as undertaking this or that journey, doing this or that, and then as the story unfolds, it may appear that what is being described are external events, whereas in fact the descriptions of these events are being used to depict inner soul conflicts, inner soul developments, soul stages. The description of external events then serves only to illustrate inner soul processes in certain parts. As I said, in the biblical description the transition from one to the other is not always readily recognizable. Only that measure of understanding that can be gained from spiritual scientific principles enables us to recognize: Here, in a biblical account, the will stops describing purely external, physical processes and a sequence of symbolic actions begins, which suggest to us that the personality, which until then did this or that externally, is now undergoing a soul development; it ascends from stage to stage and acquires this or that in its soul life. But it is not the soul life that is described, but symbols are given.

This has even led to the fact that a great theological-philosophical writer who lived around the time of the founding of Christianity, Philo of Alexandria, based on his opinion, regarded all the events described in the oldest parts of the Old Testament as symbols of soul processes [of the Hebrew people]. Such an opinion, however, goes much too far; it does not take into account that in the biblical account, external events are mixed up with internal soul processes. Today, we will endeavor to present the image of Moses that can be gained from the Bible in such a way that the two different descriptions can actually be distinguished.

To get to know the personality of Moses, one must consider the whole culture from which the deed of Moses has grown. And so it is incumbent upon me to first characterize the ancient Egyptian culture in spiritual scientific terms with a few strokes - that culture from which, after all, in terms of external events, what we can call the mission of Moses has grown. Now, however, one can only understand this ancient Egyptian culture in its development and the outgrowth of the deed of Moses [from this culture] if one knows two important spiritual scientific laws, and these two spiritual scientific laws must be the basis of our consideration. One law has been mentioned here several times. It is the fact that the entire nature and configuration of human consciousness and the human soul's makeup has not always been as it is now, but that it has changed significantly over the millennia of human development. We already know – and here it is only briefly hinted at – that the further back we go in human development, the more we encounter a different state of mind, a different kind of consciousness in people than what is considered normal consciousness today.

Where prehistory merges into history, that is, in those times from which we have historical documents, the old state of mind is already changing into the newer one. That is why people today find it so difficult to imagine that the word 'development', which today, in terms of its outward form, exerts such a magical power on people, must above all be applied to the process of the human soul in its becoming. And the further back we go, the more we find that the way we look at things today, which we perceive through our senses and link through the ordinary mind tied to the physical brain, that this way of viewing things by merely alternating our waking consciousness with our sleeping consciousness, which is interrupted at most only by irregular dreams, was not always present, but that this form of consciousness has only developed gradually.

The further back we go, the more we come to another form of human consciousness. Although what we call our present waking and sleeping consciousness has already been prepared in the millennia we are talking about today, in those ancient times, which still reach into the oldest times of Egyptian culture and of which external history does not know much to report, there was a kind of old clairvoyant consciousness, a kind of pictorial consciousness. It was this consciousness that asserted itself as a third state of consciousness, like an intermediate state between waking and sleeping. The waking consciousness, as it is today and on which our present-day view of the world is based, was preparing itself in its beginnings, and our “sleeping unconsciousness” was also essentially already present. But people still had a third form of consciousness that was not permeated by those thoughts, concepts and ideas through which we today enlighten ourselves about our environment. It was filled with images, of which the symbols of today's dream are an atavism. But in these images, which undulated up and down, nothing was arbitrary, but these images could be clearly related to supersensible facts and entities that stand behind our sensual world, so that in this state, man actually of an ancient clairvoyance, he reached into the spiritual, into the supersensible world and, from direct experience, from the ancient, dream-like consciousness of clairvoyance, had knowledge of what takes place in the spiritual world.

The further development of humanity consists in the fact that the power of one soul develops at the expense of another. Our present-day intellectuality, the way in which we connect the external objects given by our senses through our concepts and ideas, could only develop by darkening the clairvoyant consciousness, by descending into an indefinite subconscious of man and transforming itself into the present mental state. This will later combine again with a certain kind of clairvoyant consciousness, but this will then be interspersed with our intellectuality, whereas the intellectual element was precisely lacking in the old clairvoyant consciousness.

Now we have to familiarize ourselves with the fact that this ancient consciousness had to take on the most diverse forms. And for this to be possible, each of the ancient peoples - in accordance with their national character - was called upon to develop this ancient consciousness in a very specific way. One can literally speak of the fact that each nation had the mission to develop consciousness in a very specific way. The Egyptian people, for example, whose ancient, sacred wisdom, on which the ancient Egyptian script is based and which we can still admire today, was the one that received its wisdom in ancient times from its leaders through such clairvoyant awareness, that is, through direct insight into the spiritual worlds. And from the most ancient times the tradition went right down to the later times of the Egyptian people. What we find from these later times as historical accounts is essentially the echo of what the leaders of the Egyptian people saw clairvoyantly in the spiritual worlds in times gone by.

Now, however, we must be clear about the fact - and this is the other fact that is to be presented today from the basis of spiritual science - that for every human soul disposition, for every way of looking at things in the environment, there is a specific epoch for it, and when this has passed, another soul disposition must take the place of the old one. A nation that retains this old state of mind beyond the very specific point in time when an old state of mind should be replaced by a new one must face the decline of its spiritual powers, decadence. And we also see this, because why do nations face decadence? Because, so to speak, they have been inoculated with a certain soul-disposition from their national origin, and now, out of a certain conservative element, they want to keep it. But the world's development says: Up to here [with the old soul-disposition], and now a new one must come in! The nations can keep the old one, but then they will decay, because the time for a new soul-disposition has come.

Now, while the development of Egypt was taking place, a new era was dawning. The clock of the old, clairvoyant culture had run down, and within this culture of the ancient peoples an intellectual culture was to arise, one that was directed towards understanding, towards reason in the ordinary sense, towards the intellectual combination and comprehension of the things of the outer world. This intellectual culture, this kind of state of mind, extends far into our present time. We ourselves have the peculiarity of still bearing in our souls what had to be integrated into the course of Egyptian culture at that time, namely, what we have as our intellectuality, as our way of looking at things. What had to take the place of ancient Egyptian culture in Egypt at that time extends to us. The personality of Moses was destined to bring [man] to an intellectual understanding of the world around him - in contrast to the old, clairvoyant culture. It is therefore no wonder that the deed of Moses reaches to us, sending its offshoots into our souls. Because it has made fruitful precisely that kind of human soul-condition to which we ourselves still belong, we still feel in some way akin to the deed of Moses. Moses was placed in the midst of the Egyptian people, and out of Egyptian culture he was to found the modern culture of the intellect in its very first basis. He founded the New for which the cosmic clock was attuned, and the ancient Egyptian culture was outgrown and fell into decay. He brought what he had to give to the people to whom he had come of his own accord, and led them out of their Egyptian background, in whom the germ of the rational culture of humanity was to develop.

People who are called upon to recognize the course of the world's history are always described to us in such a way that something happens in connection with their birth that has a symbolic significance for the development of their soul. The biblical story describes how Moses was found by the daughter of Pharaoh in the well-known box in which he was placed. Whether or not this is an accurate account need not be discussed further here. We are simply meant to be shown by this description that there were originally predisposed forces in this Moses that were destined to bring something quite new, a completely new kind of soul-disposition into the world. Therefore, it had to be shown symbolically that this soul, in which the germ of something new was, had to remain completely unaffected by its surroundings for a while, closed in on itself, and then placed in that environment from which the new was to be carried out. And now we are presented with facts that belong to the area I have characterized, where biblical history tells us what really happened physically in the outer world - [that area] where one can see [the events] with one's own eyes and follow them historically.

There we are made aware of how Moses, through a certain act he has committed, is led to flee. He flees to Midian to a priest, to the priest Jetro. And in this transition from the purely external events that are presented to us - from the killing of the Egyptian and the escape of Moses - we are gently led to an event that looks like a physical continuation of the facts, but which is nothing other than a symbolic representation of the events that Moses is now experiencing [internally] and that he can only experience by coming into the presence of a priest, a bearer of the most comprehensive cosmic wisdom. This is hinted at and is clear enough for those who understand the images that are used again and again in the same way.

We are told that Moses, when he fled to the priest Jetro, first came upon a well. The well always indicates the source of wisdom - the source of human culture, of spiritual educational elements that someone finds. And then we are led further in a very strange way. We are shown how Moses finds the seven daughters of Jetro, who is also called Reguel by another name. That he was a priest of the deity that was placed above all other gods in those ancient times is indicated to us by the fact that we are told – told by his name – that he belongs to this supreme deity. This is always indicated by the suffix '-el', as in Gabriel, Michael, who 'belong to the highest God'. So Jetro-Reguel was a priest of the highest God. And we are told, by means of symbolic images of the soul processes, that Moses was to come into contact with a priest who could pour the most powerful wisdom into the soul of Moses. It was a wisdom such that his soul became full of light and strength, so that he could fulfill his mission of bringing a new soul state into humanity.

Now, in the old psychology of the soul, things were thought of somewhat differently than they are today, and so we have to realize how ancient psychology actually thought. Today we speak more or less of the human soul as something unified, and for our time we are quite right to do so. We speak of thinking, feeling and willing as forces that live in our soul, and we even know that if these three forces are not in the right harmony in our soul, the health of our soul is affected. And this is based on the fact that our soul has developed from what it used to be into what it is today. In ancient times, the wise said that different areas lived in the human soul, and they listed seven such areas. Just as we list the three areas of thinking, feeling and willing today, they listed seven different areas of the soul, but they did not imagine the soul as a single unit.

We can visualize the ideas of these ancient sages something like this. Let us assume that the human soul today does not feel as a unity, but rather says to itself: Thinking, feeling and willing live in me, but a special kind of spiritual current from the cosmos penetrates into thinking, which is only connected to the thinking of the human being; another current penetrates into feeling and yet another into willing. And these forces would not be held together by the power of the present ego, but by the intervention of divine spiritual beings from without, as it were, who shape our soul life into harmony. Thus it would not be we ourselves who harmoniously unite the members of our soul life with each other, but external powers that reach in from the cosmic expanses. The ancient sages assumed seven such powers, and these seven powers reached into the soul independently, as it were. What was grasped with this wisdom was the outpouring of seven forces that flowed through the world and poured into the seven soul regions of man. And what flowed in as soul forces was imagined in the image of the seven daughters of the bearer of the total wisdom.

This is something that still resonates in all the later mystical ideas, which imagined that which flowed into the soul as wisdom or as soul light or as impulses of will, as female: This also still resonates in Goethe's “Faust”, where it says, “The eternal feminine draws us up,” which must not be interpreted frivolously. And when we are told that Moses met with the seven daughters of Jethro at the well, it means that the seven rays of wisdom emanated from Jethro and poured into the soul of Moses — separate from each other, as was thought everywhere in ancient psychology. In those ancient times, wisdom, the spiritual forces of inspiration in the world, was thought of as personal and concrete, not abstract, as it is today.

In our study of Zarathustra, we saw how that which flows into man is conceived by Zarathustra as concrete world powers, as the Amshaspands and the Izeds or Izards. And here we see the progress in the thinking of mankind: what was presented in living spirituality as having a personal character and flowing into the human soul fades in the Platonic ideas, for example. The seven different powers of inspiration of the soul are presented to us figuratively in the seven daughters of the high priest whom Moses meets at the well. And the fact that he is called to develop one of these powers in order to begin his special mission in humanity is indicated by the fact that he is married to one of Jethro's seven daughters. And we will see which of the seven basic powers falls precisely within the mission of Moses. We can trace these seven soul forces throughout the Middle Ages, for what we encounter in the so-called seven liberal arts as the animators of the human soul are the faded abstractions of the seven ancient spiritual sources.

These seven spiritual sources, which were to flow into the soul of each individual, were conceived in such a way that one was more related to the wise understanding of the world – clairvoyant wisdom, of course – another spiritual power was more related to the loving embrace of facts and entities, a third more to the impulses of the will, a fourth to memory, and so on. It was now intended that Moses should incorporate one of these seven spiritual powers into his special mission and replace what had previously ruled humanity with the wisdom that permeates the world. This spiritual power is intellectuality; it is the kind of understanding and grasp of the world that no longer relies on clairvoyance but on the powers of the external mind.

Now a transition must be created everywhere. The old cannot easily be transformed into the new. Moses was called upon to replace the old clairvoyant wisdom, which was still native to Egypt and had already begun to decline in Moses' time, with the new intellectuality, the rational overview of things. He himself, however, still had to develop the new way out of a certain clairvoyance that he still had through grace. The fact that Moses still saw things in the old way of clairvoyance, but saw them as the new intellectuality should see them, created the bridge, as it were, between the old clairvoyance and the new intellectuality of humanity, free from clairvoyance.

What is this new intellectuality bound to? It is bound to that center of our soul that we designate with the simple word “I”. By consciously ascribing existence to the center of our soul, we enclose the realm of our consciousness as the realm of intellectuality - that realm in which reason and intellect, concept and idea are at work. If one wants to enclose this area, one must be aware that it only holds together because it is held together by the unified ego.

So what was given to Moses [as a task]? Well, an infinitely important deed lay before Moses - one can express it that way if one wants to put Moses' experience into words. Moses could say to himself: The gods have worked through their various powers into the human soul, and when people of ancient times, in their clairvoyance, looked over this or that, when they felt this or that in the outer world, they always spoke of the gods who lived outside in the cosmos. But for intellectuality – for that grasping of the outer world that is bound to the deepest human center – the God must enter into the innermost center of the human being, must connect with this I. And a God must be recognized who is not merely seen in the clouds, in the stars, but of whom it must be said: He works in the clouds, that is the power of the clouds; but when He streams into the soul, He brings about what this human soul experiences in itself.

Not only could this be said of the external gods, but also this: Now such a soul power must develop in humanity, which can only develop through the power of a god who has his being in the I of man. This God, who was to enter into the innermost being of man, into his I, appeared to the clairvoyant consciousness of Moses through the inspiration of the priest. And through clairvoyance, Moses beheld God, that is, through that which could still be kindled in him of clairvoyant power — which is indicated to us by the image of the burning bush. As this is described, everyone who understands these things recognizes that an astral-clairvoyant vision of a reality is present. The new God, who was to have his being in the ego, appeared in the burning bush. And Moses asked this God: If I am now to lead my people in your name, what must I say, who has sent me? You can read it in the Bible yourself – even if the translations of the Bible are otherwise very inadequate, here they are correct. To the question: Who has sent you?, Moses is given the answer: Tell your people that 'I am' has sent you. And that means: That divine power has sent you, which kindles in the innermost human center the possibility that man can speak in this innermost center “I am”, thus attaches his existence to himself, experiences his existence himself: “I am, who I am”!

That was what Moses clairvoyantly pre-experienced: the intellectuality of humanity. With this, he stood at a point where the old culture, in relation to the human soul, was to merge into a completely new culture. This was a transition over an abyss of human culture, as if the world powers had said: In the future, intellectuality must prevail, and those who want to continue the old ways are heading for decline. We must cross over this abyss. Moses might have said this to himself. And so the followers of Moses felt that the transition over a cosmic world abyss had been won. That is why the followers of Moses celebrated the Passover, the festival of the transition over a world abyss, in memory of this act of Moses. Oh, these ancient festivals, which today we are accustomed to celebrating in such a trivial way, relate to great mysteries of the existence of the world. Now when Moses, endowed with the power for thousands of years, came to the court of Pharaoh, it is no wonder that this Pharaoh, who had grown out of the old Hellschic culture of Egypt, could not understand the signs that Moses displayed before him.

We cannot go into the details of the misunderstandings that took place between Moses and Pharaoh. These are all images that are intended to show us that Pharaoh spoke out of an ancient clairvoyant culture and out of a state of mind that also came from this clairvoyant culture. The ancient pictographic script also originated from such a culture. Everything that Egyptians could understand about the course of natural events arose from this. But Moses developed such an understanding of world phenomena, such a combination of facts, as emerged from modern intellectuality. Of course, to those who were still steeped in the old clairvoyant consciousness, this appeared as a miracle, as miraculous events, for just as people today cannot imagine that things happen other than as they imagine them, the ancient cultural people could not imagine that things happen as modern people imagine them. Thus, the concept of miracle has only been reversed.

And we know, of course, as the Bible presents it to us, that Moses really did succeed, through his great strength, which arose from an inspiration of the soul, in leading this people, who were his descendants through blood, as it were, out of Egypt, but in such a way that afterwards, separated from Egyptian culture, they were able to develop an intellectual culture. Therefore, we see that from this mission of Moses everything that we can call thinking, which can be traced back to a unity - to the unity of Yahweh - and can permeate the world with reason, with concepts and ideas, arises from this mission of Moses. That was the mission of the ancient Hebrew people: to infuse human culture with reason, intellectualism, concepts and ideas. And anyone who wants to see things as they are will understand that to this day this peculiar mission of the ancient Hebrew people has been at work and that this peculiar intellectual culture could only emerge from such a source.

How did those for whom Moses was the inspirer relate to those who still came from the old clairvoyant culture? How did the followers of Moses, whom he led out of Egypt, relate to the Egyptians? Here we have to familiarize ourselves with some peculiarities of the state of mind of people who were influenced by the old clairvoyant culture and perhaps still are today. There are always stragglers, and these are the ones whose intellectual development is retarded. To make it clear to us how certain soul powers prevail there, I would like to remind you first of certain things in animals, although I do not want to compare the human with the animal. One speaks of instinctive activity in animals. We will not criticize the word instinct further; everyone knows what is meant by it, namely this elementary, direct action and doing, as we find it in the animal kingdom, which contrasts with [purposeful] human action. In humans, we have considered action; in animals, actions come from instincts. The more we go back to the old clairvoyant state, the more instinctive action becomes for people as well. They are led, driven to their actions; they do not first give account of themselves in concepts and ideas. We also find a certain instinctive action in every old soul condition.

Now I remind you of something that is truer than one might think. You will have heard descriptions that, for example, when eruptions from volcanoes are imminent, the animals move away beforehand and thus do not fall prey to the catastrophe. There is some truth behind these descriptions: just as I follow my instinct when flying, so do animals follow a mysterious urge when volcanoes erupt. Now, people, who have already risen to the level of thinking in terms of concepts and ideas, can no longer act so instinctively; they remain [and succumb] to the disaster. Even though such reports are often exaggerated, But there is some truth in them, because where there is an instinct, there is a more intimate connection between natural events and what is felt in the human soul than there is in such actions, which are based on concepts and ideas. Thus, the state of mind of the ancient peoples also changed; it became different in those who thought intellectually.

And so the followers of Moses now faced the ancient Egyptians: the Egyptians, an ancient people, the followers of Moses, the new people. And this was due to its entire blood composition, intellectually, rationally combining natural phenomena, thinking rationally. Yes, it now comes into consideration that the time for the old instinctive in the state of mind has expired. [And when this time has expired], then the [old] powers come into decline, then they are no longer useful. They were useful in ancient times; then people instinctively sensed the course of natural events and acted accordingly. But this came into decline around the time that Moses was called upon to bring a completely new culture, and there was no longer time for the old instinctive soul powers. And now let us imagine that on the one hand Moses and on the other the ancient Egyptians are confronted with natural events. The ancient Egyptians could not intellectually combine natural phenomena. In ancient times they had felt it instinctively in their souls when the sea level rose again; there was an intimate bond between the soul life and the external natural phenomena. Never would the soul have failed to feel when the sea level receded so that one could cross the dry land. But the ancient times were over. The Egyptians no longer had these ancient, instinctive powers, because the time had come when one should intellectually survey the context of things. Moses was called to do this. He now stood before the sea, and he knew from the course of natural events when to retreat so that he and his people could cross over. Through the newly developed intellectuality, it was possible for him to read this point in time from nature. In ancient times, the Egyptians would have sensed that they could no longer cross, but they were not yet ripe for the new kind of knowledge; they fell prey to the waves because their soul forces had come into decadence, into decay. Thus we see Moses leading his followers across the receding waters by intellectual deduction, and we see the Egyptians falling prey to the floods, because they could only have sensed from their ancient, instinctive strength that the sea was rising again, but they no longer had this instinctive strength.

We are standing at the boundary between the old and the new times, we are standing at the point where the mission of Moses stands out clearly from the mission of the ancient Egyptian people. At such a point, we feel how profound and significant the descriptions of the religious documents are, but one needs spiritual science to understand the religious documents; this wants to be a servant to the understanding of these documents. Today I can only sketch out an outline, but try for yourself to compare everything you find in the Bible or in other documents with what has been said today, and you will see: the more closely you take what spiritual science has to say, the more you will find that what can only be sketched out today with a few lines of charcoal is true, because it corresponds to reality everywhere.

Let us now see further: We see how the special disposition that Moses has to convey to his people as his mission is particularly linked to protecting the purity of the blood. Especially with this people it should not mix, it should keep itself separate from the other peoples, so that the same blood runs down through generations and generations. Why is that so? We can understand that too, if we visualize the changes in the state of mind. Clairvoyance – whether it is the old, pictorial kind or the kind that is often described here, which the modern person can achieve by going through the appropriate exercises – clairvoyance is always tied to the person's spiritual part being able to become independent of their physical body, that they can, in a sense, draw their spiritual part out of their physical body. What the clairvoyant experiences, he experiences only through the tool of the soul, which frees itself, as it were, goes out of physical corporeality. The modern materialist will regard this as foolishness from the outset; he cannot believe that all the activity of his soul is bound to the physical brain. But clairvoyance is not bound to the brain, but takes place in the life of the soul without the brain. Only experience can confirm this, and anyone who does not have this experience can refute it with a thousand seemingly sufficient reasons, much like a blind person can refute the existence of colors. But that is not the point. According to the principles of today's research, one should admit that only experience can decide. So clairvoyance is dependent on the spiritual part of the human being freeing itself from the instruments of the physical body.

We have to look at all ancient cultures in such a way that they were based, in a certain way, on the paths of imagination, inspiration, and intuition, which flowed into the soul. These cultures therefore had something that was independent of the physical body and merely flowed down into the physical world. This is why the remains of ancient cultures are so difficult to interpret, because the moment you become independent of the physical body through consciousness, you can only live in more plastic forms than the physical body. In clairvoyance one does not have such sharply defined contours as in the physical; one has something pictorial that does not refer so directly to the physical world as is otherwise the case with intellectual comprehension; one has something that refers more symbolically to external things. We may say, then, that the clairvoyant cultures - and this includes the Egyptian in all its greatness - must be given to us in such a way in all their traditions that they use images instead of external, sharp conceptual contours. The myths, the old legends, in which the secrets of the world are immersed, are pictorial representations of the secrets of the world; they are echoes of the old pictorial clairvoyance. In a certain sense, the transmission of culture was still bound up with spiritual processes.

But now it was precisely the mission of Moses to give the souls such a constitution and to lay the foundation for culture that was bound to intellectuality, but thus also to the outer instrument of the body. For that is the peculiarity of [intellectual] thought: it conceptualizes things in the same way as our normal, waking consciousness, and this consciousness is entirely bound to the tools of the brain and the rest of the body. Intellectuality is bound to the tools of the physical body. It is no wonder that this special intellectual gift was bound to a special configuration, to special organ predispositions of a people, and had to be transmitted from generation to generation through the physical blood until the mission of the ancient Hebrew people was fulfilled. Thus, the physical instrument for intellectuality had to be bound to the physical peculiarity of this people through the blood flowing from generation to generation, and had to be refined more and more until it was so refined that the physical vehicle for that spiritual power, which then poured in to a much higher degree than the Divine power into the human 'I am' - to a much higher degree than had happened through the old power of Yahweh. And in this respect, the mission of Moses was indeed the preparation for the deed of Christ. But first the outer instruments had to be trained in the appropriate way. And so we also understand that this deed of Moses was bound to a very specific people, whose blood had to be kept pure because this special power, which is bound to the instrument of the outer body, was to flow into human cultural development.

Thus, the act of Moses fits entirely harmoniously and uniformly into the overall development of humanity. We perceive him as the great standard-bearer of intellectuality – in all its peculiarity, which is even expressed in mysticism, that is, in human spiritual activity, which is otherwise the most alien to understanding and reason. Even in mysticism, for example in Hebrew Kabbalah, it is clear to us that this culture has the mission of bringing understanding and reason, combinatory comprehension of external events into human culture.

And when we look back to the Hermes culture of ancient Egypt with its wonderful, old clairvoyant culture, we see how it is called upon to bear the no longer clairvoyant Moses culture in its bosom, but that it itself must perish because the clock of world development is now set to intellectuality. And that is the significance of the Christ event, that with Him and the Mystery of Golgotha, such a powerful spiritual thrust has come into intellectual development – such a powerful spiritual impulse – that little by little, as humanity, having become intellectual, more and more familiarizes itself with the Christ event, the intellectual can also be absorbed by this powerful spiritual impulse, and can be caught by that which in turn leads into the spiritual, into the clairvoyant realm, and carries intellectuality into this realm. We still feel so touched by the significance of the Moses event today because we ourselves are still immersed in the age of intellectual culture and only glimpse a new spirituality and a new mission in the distance.

So, with a few strokes, I was able to draw this picture of Moses for you, my dear audience, as it presents itself to spiritual research in the clairvoyant consciousness, which has an enlightening effect on the external, historical account. This is the only way to distinguish between what is historical and what is a symbolic representation of inner processes in Moses himself. And so Moses stands before our soul as a living being, and we feel how unjustified it is to say that such an impulse should have formed by itself. There are people today who do not understand that effects must also have causes and that effects that point back to the personal also presuppose a personality.

Nevertheless, there are people today who doubt the existence of such a personality as that of Moses. This is certainly a sign of our time. One may say that critical biblical research has a hard time with these things. Those who are familiar with it have a great deal of respect for it, above all because perhaps in no other field of science, not even in the natural sciences, has so much diligence and devotion been expended as in the field of critical biblical research. And yet, in many respects, we see that today it has reached a point where it no longer knows how to help itself in the face of the greatest figures and impulses of humanity, where it only knows how to deny them, just as the historical existence of Jesus is already being denied today. But nevertheless, one must have all respect for the tragedy of this research, which in our materialistic age, out of materialistic ideas, wants to find the inner value of the accounts in the Bible or in other documents. But if one approaches a figure like Moses from a spiritual scientific point of view and shows, based on the secrets of human development, what had to be sunk into the soul of Moses in order for humanity to reach the level we have today, then it seems the most absurd to assume an effect without a cause, that is, a personal creation without personality.

In contrast to this, we can say that it is only through the presentation of spiritual science that the details of the Bible are illuminated in a wonderful way and that the Bible takes on a new value. For now we approach the Bible as a person familiar with mathematical laws approaches a mathematical problem. Those who do not know the mathematical laws see nothing in them but incomprehensible signs, just as they see in problems. Those who do not know the language of the Bible also see only incomprehensible things in it today, perhaps childish images that prehistoric man conjured up. But anyone who gets to know the basics that spiritual science provides and, with its help, deciphers the religious documents, feels something of what has been going on so magnificently through the ages. They feel the language of the nations, of the people in whose souls the spiritual impulses for the progress of humanity are living, that choir of humanity's leading spirits that communicate across the millennia. It is a wonderful phenomenon when the spiritual researcher peers into the spiritual worlds and then looks at the Bible and realizes from the Bible that it tells us something that we can also find through spiritual research ourselves. So we cannot but say: Whoever wrote this must have known what is going on in the spiritual worlds and what is there if such human progress as we now have before us could happen at all.

And so, through spiritual research, we look to Moses as a great leader of humanity. These leaders of humanity become more and more precious to us as we penetrate into the depths of their spirit through spiritual research. And we feel more and more blessed when we look with such sharpened thinking and feeling at these leaders of humanity, of whom it can rightly be said: They illuminate our souls with their spiritual light in order to strengthen our souls with their mighty spiritual power.