Lecture III

And now it will no longer be incomprehensible to you that in the first of these lectures I said: what was incarnated at an earlier time appears in the physical world later on like a shadow-image. Beings of the higher Hierarchies streamed into the individuality of a man belonging, let us say, to the early Greek world, so that when we say “he was incarnated” we must not see this self-contained being only, but standing behind him an individuality of a higher Hierarchy. That is the picture we must have of Alexander, and of Aristotle, in the Greco-Latin epoch. We follow their individualities back into the past. From Alexander we must go back to Gilgamesh and say: in Gilgamesh is the individuality who then, projected as it were on the physical plane, appears as Alexander; behind this individuality is a Fire-Spirit who uses him as an instrument. And if we go back from Aristotle, we see the powers of the old clairvoyance working in Eabani, the friend of Gilgamesh. Thus we see how both old souls and young souls, with the old clairvoyance behind them, are placed right out on the physical plane in the Greek epoch. This confronts us vividly in the great woman mathematician Hypatia, in whom all the mathematical and philosophical wisdom of her time lived as personal ability, as personal erudition and wisdom. This was all embraced in the personality of Hypatia. And we shall understand that this individuality had to be born as a woman in order to bring together in a delicately concise form all that she had earlier received from the Orphic Mysteries—in order to impart to everything she had learnt from the Inspirers of those Mysteries the stamp of a personal style.