VI. The Mystery of the Future

In essentials, therefore, this pre-Christian Initiation consisted in re-evoking what in ancient times had been the natural condition, the normal state of consciousness. Little by little, as civilisation advanced, these memories of olden times receded and the power to experience reality outside the physical body became increasingly rare. Nevertheless, in the earliest periods of the Post-Atlantean epoch there were still many in the ancient Indian, Persian, Chaldean civilisations, indeed even in ancient Egypt, whose etheric bodies were not yet so firmly anchored in the physical body as to prevent them from receiving the impressions of the spiritual world—in the form of atavistic remains of an earlier age. Later, during Greco-Roman times, even these vestiges disappeared and it was less and less possible for Initiation to be achieved in the same way as before. It became increasingly difficult to preserve for humanity the memories of the ancient, primal wisdom.