Lecture VII

The spiritual atmosphere was so charged with this influence from Chartres that the following incident happened.—While a man, returning to Italy from his ambassadorial post in Spain, was hastening homeward, he received news of the overthrow of the Guelphs in Florence, and at the same time suffered a slight sunstroke. In this condition his etheric body loosened and gathered in what was still echoing through the ether from the School of Chartres. And through what was thus wafted to him in the ether, something like an Intuition came to him—an Intuition such as had come to many human beings in the early Christian centuries. First he saw outspread before him the earthly world as it surrounds mankind, ruled over, not by ‘laws of Nature,’ as the saying went in later times—but by the great handmaiden of the Divine Demiurgos, by Natura, who in the first Christian centuries was the successor of Proserpine. In those days men did not speak of abstract laws of Nature; to the gaze of the Initiates, Being was implicit in what worked in Nature as an all-embracing, divine Power. Proserpine, who divides her time between the upper and the lower worlds, was presented in the Greek Mysteries as the power ruling over Nature. Her successor in the early Christian centuries was the Goddess Natura.