V. The Seven Degrees of Initiation

The Baptist also baptized in this way in order to bring mankind into a closer union with the Godhead. And this is what all baptism signified in ancient times. It is a radical expression, but one which brings to our consciousness what is meant. Christ Jesus had to baptize with something different. He had to direct men, not to the past, but to the future through the development of a spirituality in their inner being. Through the “holy,” the undimmed and undefiled Spirit, the human spirit could be united with the Godhead. Baptism by water was a baptism of remembrance, that of the Holy Spirit is one of prophecy pointing to the future. That relationship which has been wholly lost, and which baptism by water recalls to mind has also been lost in all that was expressed in the symbol of the wine, of the sacrificial wine. Dionysos was the dismembered God who was drawn into the individual souls, separate parts no longer knowing anything of one another. Humanity was split into many pieces and thrown into matter through what alcohol has brought to the world, alcohol the symbol of Dionysos. In the Marriage at Cana, a great principle was preserved, the instructive principle of evolution. There are, to be sure, absolute truths, but they cannot at all times be revealed to men without preparation. Each age must have its special function, its special truths. Why is it that we can speak today of reincarnation, etc.? Why are we able to sit together in such an assembly as this and foster Spiritual Science? We can do so, because all of the souls which are present within you today have been incarnated upon the earth in so and so many bodies and so and so many times. Very many of the souls which are within you now lived at one time in the Germanic countries where the Druid priests walked among you and brought to your souls Spiritual Wisdom in the form of myth and saga. And because your soul received it in that form at that time, it is now in the position to receive it in another form, the Anthroposophical. At that time it was in the form of pictures—today it is in the form of Anthroposophy. But then it would not have been possible to impart truth in its present form. Do not imagine that the ancient Druid priest would have been able to impart the truth in the form in which it is presented today. Anthroposophy is the form befitting the humanity of the present or of the immediate future. In later incarnations truth will be proclaimed, and men will work for it in quite different forms, and what is now called Anthroposophy will be related as something remembered, just as we now relate the Sagas and Fairy-tales. Anthroposophists should not be foolish enough to say that in ancient times there existed only stupidities and childish ideas, and that we alone have advanced the world so gloriously. Those, for example, who pretend to be monists do this. But we are working in Spiritual Science in preparation for the next epoch. For if our present age were not here, the next would likewise not come. No one should, however, make the future an excuse for present conduct. Much nonsense is indulged in also in respect of the teaching of Reincarnation. I have met people who said that in their present incarnation they did not need to be respectable human beings, because for this they had time enough later on. If, however, one does not begin with it today, the consequences will appear straightway in the next incarnation.