I. The Egyptian period, and the present time.

Now what sort of wisdom was it that was referred to by the ancient sage when he spoke of the “ancient truth”? This will be disclosed if for a moment we pause to consider the difference between life today and life in ancient Atlantis. At that time man was gifted with a dim clairvoyance, around him he saw beings who are also around us today, but whom present day man sees no longer. The earth does not contain only plants, minerals, and animals; spiritual beings are also around us, but these are visible only to clairvoyant eyes. In Atlantis at that time man was normally clairvoyant, divine beings were his companions, he lived with them as we now live with human beings. There was not as yet that sharp distinction between day-consciousness and night-consciousness there is now. At the present time when man enters in the morning, with his astral body and ego, into physical life physical objects are around him; and when at night he rises out of his physical body this world becomes dark and dim to him. This is the case today with the normal human being; but in Atlantis it was not so, particularly in its earliest periods. When at night man stepped out of his physical and etheric body darkness did not then spread around him; he entered a world of spiritual beings and he saw these divine spiritual forms just as he now sees fleshly forms. He saw Baldur, Wotan, Zeus, and Apollo—who are not imaginary, fanciful figures, but are the expression of real beings who, at the time of which we are speaking, had not taken on bodies of flesh, but possessed as their densest form transparent etheric bodies. When at night man withdrew from his physical body these were around him as etheric forms; and when in the morning he again drew into his physical body he was in the world of reality which today is for him the only world; he left for a time, one might say, the world of the Gods and dipped down into the world of physical, fleshly existence. There was no strict boundary between his day perception and his night perception, and when in those times the Initiate spoke to ordinary people of these Divine Beings he was not speaking of something that was strange to them. It was the same as when today we speak of men and call them by their names; the Initiate spoke of such Beings as Wotan and Baldur, for they knew them as divine etheric Beings.