Lecture Four

It is indeed true that if we go back to the time before and after the Mystery of Golgotha, or further back to the third post-Atlantean culture-epoch, we find that people for the most part believed in ghosts, in demons, as I mentioned recently in the case of the great Tertullian. This is indeed so. But there is a still earlier epoch when men also talked of ghosts, but not in the sense that ghosts were believed in during the epochs just described. In the second and in the first post-Atlantean culture-epochs they spoke of ghosts, but they were conscious that the ghosts were visualised by their own minds, and were pictures of the spiritual world existing behind them. Thus for a long period men had conceptions of ghosts, but with the knowledge that behind these ghosts, seen as pictures, there was a spiritual world. In their conceptual world, with its ghostlike visualisations, they formed an image of the spiritual world. But then men more or less forgot the spiritual world, or perhaps we might say it disappeared from their vision; there remained mere pictures which were looked upon as realities, and from this there arose the superstition about ghosts which is the debased form of those earlier beliefs.