On the Astral World and Devachan

GA 88 — 2 November 1903, Berlin

19. About Earlier Conceptions of God

Today I would like to speak of certain phenomena that are connected with the state that occurs approximately in the middle of the third round, the third epoch of the development of the earth, and in which the previously ethereal, finer human races become denser, more material. The faculty of imagination develops. In the first root race, only the faculty of sensation was developed; human beings could sense, they could perceive the difference between cold and warm, between light and dark, between wet and dry, but they could not yet imagine things, they did not yet have the ability to repeat the objects that are outside in themselves, that is, to create within themselves spiritual counter-images to the objects outside. This only occurs in the third root race. On the one hand, we see the imagination emerging, and on the other hand, the coarse material, which expresses itself in the ability to reproduce and in the appearance of the opposites of male and female.

This development is linked to something else, namely to something that can give us a deeper understanding of the concept of God. In those days there was no concept of God; only from the third root race onwards could a concept of God begin to emerge, only then could a consciousness of God arise. We can only understand this if we grasp the process as a real one. If we try to understand how the concept of God began to take hold in humanity, we find that initially a form of religion can be observed everywhere that differs from polytheism and from the other forms of religion. That is why a special word was coined for it: henotheism. Henotheism was the original form of religion that we find everywhere at this time. Polytheism is something later. The original form of the conception of God is the worship and veneration of a primal deity. However, this conception differs from the later conception of a unified God, monotheism, because it is not so distinctly developed, because it is fluctuating and has a blurred form. It is an indefinite concept of God that occurs everywhere. To put it clearly, I would have to say: originally, peoples did not imagine one God, but a divine; they imagined that something indefinite underlies the universe and that this indefinite is divine. Where and how did people come up with this idea that the source of the world is divine? Various hypotheses have been put forward, but it has not been possible to find out where this idea comes from. Henotheism, as it is found today among the so-called primitive peoples, is not the original form of this concept of God, because we are not dealing with direct descendants of these ancient cultures.

When we turn to the Lemurians, we arrive at a point in time when the transition takes place from the general working of cosmic wisdom to the working of Kama-Manas in the individual human soul. Before that, wisdom is a universal being, a being that hovers over everything as a spirit. It is not yet very different from the universal spirit that was active during the lunar epoch. It is precisely in the Lemurian period that the instilling of the All-Spirit into human souls takes place. Imagine it this way: Before, the Lemurians saw the unified spirit, which they could not yet imagine, except for themselves; it hovered above them. And in their further development, they find the same thing within themselves that they used to perceive outside themselves; they find it reflected within themselves, in their own soul. Before their development into conceiving beings, the vision of the Lemurians was a semi-astral vision; they saw the Unity-Deity hovering above them. Now that they look within themselves, what they used to see outside of themselves is reflected in their own soul. What used to be outside is now the same content that now shines in one's own soul. The first conception of God is nothing more than a repetition of this process. You can find the remnants of such a religion in the most ancient Indian religion.

Now let us turn to the Atlantean race. The Lemurian could not only see, but could also create a mental counter-image of what he saw. It is one thing to create an image and quite another to carry that image around with you. Memory was only developed during the Atlantean race. In the first root race, the sense of feeling was developed, in the second the sense of looking, in the third the sense of imagination, and only the fourth root race could retain the images and thus developed memory. If you bear in mind that the Atlanteans were particularly good at remembering, you can imagine that religion also had to take on very specific forms for them.

The Lemurian race perished, it merged into the Atlantean race, which had developed memory. With their excellent memory, the Atlanteans remembered the images that their ancestors, the Lemurians, had created. This is roughly the same as when you see the sun reflected in a drop of water, for example, but do not see the sun itself. Therefore, the Atlanteans developed a twofold consciousness: the divine took hold in our ancestors; they were our ancestors, in whose souls the divine lived. That was the time when people began to worship their ancestors; the cult of ancestors emerged. The ancestors were worshiped because the divine was seen to flash in their souls. A variation of ancestor worship is the later hero worship: Theseus, Jason and so on; this also belongs to the worship of ancestors. But with this, the multiplicity of gods is also introduced. We find the inflow of real spirituality into the human soul — memory, the development of memory — within the fourth human race, within the time of the Atlanteans.

Now we come to the fifth human race. In it, the power of thought develops. The Atlanteans did not calculate in the same way as we do, because for that, the power of thought is necessary, the power of logic. You know that 2 x 2 = 4; you know that, you have acquired it through thinking. The Atlanteans did not yet have that. If he had two and then another two, he did not calculate: 2x2 = 4, but he said: How many were there in earlier cases when things were lying next to each other like that? The Atlantean's ideas were therefore tied to memory. Before the Atlantean's memory lay the whole of life and also that of his ancestors. This is not to be confused with the Akashic Records, but it was human memory. In the past, people felt with their whole nature; it was not like with us today, where you first have to touch something. Today we have rules of thought, for example 2 x 2 = 4, and we follow them.

The religious consciousness in the fifth root race must develop under the influence of thinking. The man of the fifth race not only seeks to perceive what is around him, he not only seeks to come to a feeling, but he seeks to grasp it. Thinking becomes an important means for him to penetrate to wisdom. In this way, he detaches himself more and more from the past because memory is drowned out. Veneration for the old disappears, and only that which lives deeply within the soul as Manas and announces itself as Manas becomes the object of veneration. Thus the fifth human race comes to recognize Manas as the divine.

The fifth human race therefore no longer practices polytheism, but strives to gain mastery of the inner self and to recognize the divine center of man. That is why we have the great masters in the fifth human race: Lao Tzu, Confucius, Buddha, Moses, Zarathustra and so on. Thus humanity was freed from the past and from the worship of its ancestors, [and the worship of] divine wisdom realizing itself in time begins.

If you now grasp the deeper meaning of the mythological ideas of the Greeks, you will see how, in the sequence of the Greek deities, there is, strangely enough, a full awareness of the succession of these religious ideas. We have to imagine that the power that hovers over everything at the time of the Lemurians, the power that lives in space as unified wisdom, is called Uranus [by the Greeks]. Uranus is replaced by Cronus, the god of time, the god who lives in memory; he continually devours his children. He represents the entire ancestral divinity. Then follows Zeus, the humanized god, the god of heroism; he is a variation of the same principle. Then comes the cult of Dionysus. Dionysus is the striving, suffering, feeling, thinking human being himself. He is depicted as being originally killed, dismembered, then resurrected and now striving upwards again in the world. He is the representative of the mastery, the Mahatma, the representative of the fifth race's conception of God. Thus, in the Greek conception, these three stages have been preserved: Uranus – henotheism; Kronos and Zeus – polytheism; Dionysus – Mahatma. This will explain to you why the religion of Dionysus was a secret religion in Greece.

The Greeks hid this cult in the mysteries. Aeschylus was taken to court for revealing the secrets of the mysteries by bringing them to the stage. However, he was able to prove that he was not initiated into the mysteries at all. Socrates had to die because it was believed that his teachings were given out of the mysteries. The penalty for betrayal of the mysteries was always death. In the Greek myths, when there is mention of a descent into the underworld, this always signifies an initiation; it means that the persons concerned were mystics. Dionysus descends into the underworld. This means that he was a mystic, and so was Heracles. Every myth signifies something very definite, not something arbitrary. One did not have to believe, but one knew; one knew through initiation. Initiation enabled the person to truly recognize the meaning of the myth. The initiate of the fifth root race is fully imbued with the idea that the fifth principle of humanity is struggling for existence within him, that he is the bearer of the humanity of the fifth root race. In this way he also comes to recognize the Mahatmatum.

The deeper one looks at things, the more one comes to understand the inner progress of spiritual human development. Now it will no longer seem so incomprehensible if I have often spoken of secrets. You see, Theosophy is nothing more than a continuous unveiling of secret world connections. The secrets that Theosophy can reveal today are still quite elementary. But they are something that places man deep within a great context, which on the one hand makes existence seem small like a small pearl in a large shell, but on the other hand makes it great when he reflects on the higher self and imagines his incarnations as the totality of all the pearls. Theosophy does not make us small, as modern science wants to make us small, saying: in the whole universe there are millions of earths, all of which are inhabited, and of these, our earth is a speck of dust. Theosophy also says that man is one of these dust-corners, but that the divine also lives in man. This divine spark, which we find at the center of our consciousness, did not arise from within us, but was drawn into us from outside; it is the same as that which lives outside in the macrocosm.

It is not a particularly profound insight that Feuerbach arrived at when he said: the ancients were wrong when they said that the deity created man in its own image, for man creates God out of his own image. — Quite right, man creates the deity out of himself again. But: that is the deity that creates this. So we may say: Feuerbach is right, except that he does not admit it to himself. What I have been telling you again and again: mind control is what is needed. And mind control is not just that a thought is clear, but that every thought has a control thought. You should never think or say a thought without applying the corresponding control thought. Man works wonders when he does not allow himself to think only one-sided thoughts.