20. A Chapter of Occult History

One peculiarity that is discovered by clairvoyant consciousness in connection with a Greek temple must here be made known.—Let us suppose that clairvoyant consciousness has before it the last echoes of a Greek temple built in the Doric style as are the temples at Paestum, and is able to feel the aftermath of what the Greeks felt on the physical plane; let us assume that clairvoyant consciousness, while beholding the physical form of such a creation, experiences all the rapture and enchantment that it is still possible to experience at the sight. Then clairvoyant consciousness will make a certain discovery. When it frees itself from the body and, without using the physical organs, sees in the spiritual world, then the Greek temple, with all its splendour, has vanished. What was so perfect, so great and glorious in the physical world, cannot be carried over into the spiritual world—not even for modern clairvoyant consciousness. At the place in space where the glorious temple stood, there is nothing corresponding with it in the spiritual world. It was so in the case of all the great masterpieces of that wonderful Greco-Latin epoch, and in another connection too.