The Occult Truths of Old Myths and Legends

GA 92 — 1 July 1904, Berlin

II. Reading the Akashic Records: Wolfram von Eschenbach

After I said a few esoteric words last Friday, what I have to say today will not seem so strange to you. I would like to discuss a piece of history from the last few centuries from the Akashic Records. You know that all events that have happened are recorded in a certain way in an eternal chronicle, in the Akasha substance, which is a much finer substance than the substances we know. You know that all events of history and prehistory are recorded in this substance. What is usually called the Akashic Records in theosophical language, however, are not the original records, but reflections of the actual records in the astral realm. In order to be able to read these, certain preconditions are necessary, of which I will at least give you one.

To be able to read the Akashic Records, it is necessary to make one's own thoughts available to the forces and beings that we call the “Masters” in theosophical language. The Masters must give us the necessary instructions to be able to read in the Akashic Records, which is written in symbols and signs, not in words of any existing language or one that existed in the past. As long as you are still using the power that a person uses in ordinary thinking – and every person who has not explicitly learned to consciously switch off their ego uses this power – you cannot read in the Akashic Records. If you ask yourself, “Who is thinking?” you will have to say to yourself, “I am thinking.” You connect subject and predicate when you form a sentence. As long as you yourself connect the individual concepts, you are unable to read in the Akashic Records because you connect your thoughts with your own ego. But you have to switch off your ego; you have to renounce all self-will. You must merely present the ideas and let the connection of the individual ideas be established by forces outside of yourself, through the spirit. It is therefore necessary to renounce - not thinking - but to connect the individual thoughts on your own. Then the master can come and teach you to let the spirit from outside connect your thoughts to what the universal world spirit is able to show about events and facts that have taken place in history. When you no longer judge the facts, then the universal world spirit itself speaks to you, and you provide it with your thought material.

Now I have to talk about something that may perhaps create prejudices. I have to say something that is a good preparation for learning to read in the Akashic Records by eliminating the self-willed ego. You know how today what the monks cultivated in the Middle Ages is despised: they made the sacrifice of the intellect. The monk did not think like today's researchers. The monk had a certain sacred science, the revealed sacred theology, the content of which was given and about which one had no say. The theologian of the Middle Ages used his reason to explain and defend the given revelations. That was - however one may feel about it today - a strict training: the sacrifice of the intellect to a given content. Whether this was something admirable or reprehensible according to modern concepts is not our concern here. The sacrifice of intellect that the monk made, the elimination of judgment based on the personal ego, led him to learn how to put thought at the service of something higher. In a later incarnation, what was brought forth through this sacrifice comes to fruition and enables the person to think selflessly, making him a genius of insight. When higher insight, intuition, is added, then he can apply these abilities to reading the facts in the Akashic Records.

It is particularly interesting to look again at the period in Europe's spiritual development that we considered eight days ago from this point of view, I mean the period from the 9th to the 13th, 14th, 15th century. When one has achieved this selflessness in relation to the content of thoughts and, united with it, the right sense of reverence, of devotion, as the mystic must also have had it, then the time when great spirits appear in world history often appears quite differently than in profane historiography. When we look at this period in the Akashic Records, our gaze is drawn to a great figure who can teach us an enormous amount about that time, a figure who presents himself to the observer as great and who presents himself to the occultist even more powerfully than to the ordinary researcher: Wolfram von Eschenbach.

Wolfram von Eschenbach adapted German, Romance and Spanish legends. He is one of the great inspired poets who were selfless enough to work with great material that had already been given to them, and who did not believe that they had to invent material themselves. Great poets such as Homer, Sophocles, Euripides and Aeschylus never had to search for material. Wolfram von Eschenbach also belongs to these great poets. In his works he presents us with the inner spiritual history of the period from the 9th to the 15th century, which presents itself externally as the preparatory period of our new time, in which, as we have seen, everything that belongs to the external world of the senses is preferably studied. This begins with Copernicus. People began to take the physical plan seriously, not as a symbol for the higher planes as in the past. The world view of the ancients was not a false one, but a world view that started from a different point of view: it regarded the phenomena of the external world as symbols for devachanic states. Copernicus said, “We no longer want to regard the physical world as a symbol, but we want to look at the physical world itself.” Of course, this changed the entire world view of mankind. During this time, the focus was on the practical, physical and material. The earlier cultures, in which our physical life was dependent on traditions and authorities, changed into one in which personal ability was important. In the past, a farmer's son was respected because he was the son of a farmer; the son of a knight inherited the rights of his fathers. This changed during this period. It is the time of the founding of cities. Everywhere the people flocked together from the countryside and founded cities; the bourgeoisie came up, practical inventions emerged: the pocket watch, the art of printing were invented. But that is only the external aspect of the matter. The souls were directed towards the practical side of science, as can be seen from Copernicus, which was further developed in the Age of Enlightenment and politically in the French Revolution. The commercial class looked after practical interests, personal efficiency was necessary. It was no longer so important whether one descended from this or that man. For those who follow events in the Akashic Records, the situation is such that what happens on the physical plane is directed from the higher planes. The leading spirits are influenced by initiates working on the higher planes. Genius personalities lead up to entities working behind the scenes, right up to the White Lodge. The physical aspect is only the outside. The inside is the work of the highest initiates of the White Lodge and their emissaries who go out into the world.

I would like to briefly characterize this occult hierarchy. We have such beings who never show themselves: the masters. For people on the physical plane, they are not perceptible at first. Below them are chelas, secret disciples who take on the great tasks of the masters on the physical plane. The first to teach there are called “hamsas”, which means “swans”. Those chelas who are called “homeless people” are so called because they do not have their home in this world, but are rooted on higher planes. They give the people the lessons that they themselves have enjoyed from the hamsas. They are the messengers for the geniuses of world history. For example, it can be shown that the leaders of the French Revolution were connected with this spiritual side of world history.

The Great White Lodge had to send its emissaries to prepare and teach people so that they could become the organs on the physical plane to carry out the will of the Masters. So it was with Wolfram von Eschenbach. In the Middle Ages it was known that there was a White Lodge, at that time it was called the “Castle of the Holy Grail”. In it was the White Brotherhood. He who was sent out at that time to spread the founding of the city to the physical world was called Lohengrin; he was directly instructed by a Hamsa, and he taught Henry I, who is referred to as the founder of the city. This means that the time-souls were to receive a new impact from the “homeless people”.

In the occult language, the soul is always symbolized by a female personality. Elsa of Brabant represents the soul of the time. She is to be married to a knight who belongs to the old tradition, to Telramund. But an envoy of the Grail comes and woos the soul of the time, Elsa of Brabant. This period is characterized by Wolfram von Eschenbach in such a way that Henry is led to Rome, where the inner, esoteric Christianity fights the enemies of Christianity, the Saracens. Lohengrin is a “homeless person” whom one dare not ask where he comes from. To ask him would be against his monastic vows. He is afflicted with a kind of Janus face; on the one hand he must look towards the occult brotherhood and on the other hand towards the people he must lead in the physical world. Richard Wagner often found poignant words, for example when he has Lohengrin sing: “Now thanks be given, my dear swan.” That is the moment when the swan leaves him and he becomes dependent on physical conditions. He is transported into a world that is not quite appropriate for him; it is not his true world. His world is the world of the other side, so that he must be regarded as a homeless person. When his mission is fulfilled, the homeless man disappears again to where he came from. When his origin is discovered, he must disappear again. This is difficult for him who has entered into relationship with the physical plane. Therefore Elsa of Brabant must ask three times whence he came.

Thus we see that this time is characterized by the initiate Wolfram von Eschenbach in its connection with the higher planes. Lohengrin is the envoy, the messenger of the Grail knights. The Grail knights are the White Lodge on Montsalvatsch. It was the task of the Grail's emissaries, the Grail knights, to renew the old traditions of genuine, true Christianity again and again. This was also the meaning when they spoke about the Grail Castle and the Holy Grail itself. They imagined the Grail Knights as the guardians of that which had come into the world through true Christianity. This is also hinted at in the Gospel of John: “The Word was made flesh.” What has been transfigured by the Christ is physical existence itself; He has entered into the physical world. The other great personalities were teachers of humanity: Buddha, Zarathustra, Pythagoras, Moses - they were all teachers. They are the “Way and the Truth”; the “Life” in the occult sense is only Christ; hence it is said: No one comes to the Father except through me. - Life could only find its sanctification when the Word moved directly into the human body. This descent of the Divine into the physical plane was to be renewed again and again by the White Lodge. Therefore, the Grail Cup is depicted as the same cup from which Jesus dispensed the Holy Communion and in which Joseph of Arimathea caught the blood at Golgotha. Thus the principle of Christianity is to be preserved and live on, and new strength is to be given to it by the fact that, in continuation of the apostles, twelve knights of the Grail are sent out as messengers to take on new tasks.

That was the view of the entire Middle Ages, that when an important stage of civilization is to be reached, a chela, a “swan” should teach people. In this way, Wolfram von Eschenbach viewed and presented history. Those who are able to read between the lines in Richard Wagner's Lohengrin will find that Wagner felt, if not intellectually, then intuitively, that something great was at hand. Therefore, he believed in a renewal of art by connecting to the superhuman. In the Middle Ages this was depicted in such a way that when Elsa of Brabant wanted to banish Lohengrin from this world, he withdrew, and as Wolfram von Eschenbach says, to India. Finally, the castle of the Holy Grail is also imagined as being in India. It is also said of the Rosicrucians that when they withdrew at the end of the 18th century, they went to Asia, to the Orient. That is the story of the founding of cities in the Middle Ages, according to the records in the Akashic Records. Details might perhaps be presented somewhat differently by others, but on the whole they will always agree with it.