Lecture IX

In primeval ages man experienced God by means of an image. Now the image had withdrawn into the invisible world, and man strove with all his strength to bring forth a conception of God from out his own ego. There, where God is formless, man strove to form an idea of Him and to realize His power. This was not immediately possible; during the first post-Atlantean civilization the memory of what had been lost was still too vivid. Man felt in his soul “The door is shut,” and the longing to enter again into the spiritual world was too strong. Hence in the first age of civilization the people were filled with longing for the hidden world of the spirit; they looked with great reverence up to the Initiates and besought them to allow them to become partakers of this lost world. The first great age of post-Atlantean culture was founded under the influence of Initiates by means of colonies. This was the wonderful awe-inspiring pre-Vedic culture, the last remnants of which are to be found in the Vedas; in it the longing for the spiritual world was so great that men strove by artificial means to regain contact with the Spirits and Gods which they had lost. The longing to fly from the physical world into which they had entered was overwhelmingly strong; we find this feeling in the souls of those who were instructed by the Initiates—the Holy Rishis.