III. Progress in the Knowledge of the Christ: The Fifth Gospel

During the time between his twenty-fourth and thirtieth year, now that he was back home in Nazareth, he came into contact with the Essenes, who had one or two colonies in the area. He did not actually become an Essene, but because of the depth of his inner life and the two great sorrows that had settled in his soul and been transformed into love, the Essenes accepted him and often talked to him about their deepest secrets, which they had otherwise only spoken about among their own kind, among initiates. Only to him did they speak of their deepest secrets. And in the Essenes he came to know people who, in those days, through a special inner development, sought to ascend again to that from which humanity had developed downward. He eagerly absorbed what he could learn from the Essenes about the human development of such an ascent. But one day, as he left the Essene house and passed through the gate, he had a particularly remarkable vision: on either side of the gate he saw two figures whom he later, through his later experiences, knew to be Lucifer and Ahriman. They fled from the gates of the Essenes into the rest of the world. And through what he had gone through in his own inner development, he was now so far that he could, so to speak, read in the occult writing the meaning of this flight of Lucifer and Ahriman from the gates of the Essenes. He now knew: Yes, it is also possible in this present time for individual