7. Knowledge of the World of Stars. Differentiation of the Historical Epochs of Mankind and their Spiritual Background

In this context it is most important to be in touch with those personalities who were associated with nature knowledge in the Raphael epoch. A deeper knowledge of nature, a deeper understanding of medicine can be communicated through many a personality who, to clairvoyant perception, emerges out of the spiritual twilight of this age (from the ninth to the fifteenth centuries) and can inform us of the current conceptions of matter and of the current ideas of man's relationship to the whole Cosmos. When we look into this age with spiritual vision, we meet with many personalities who are unknown because their names have not been handed down to posterity, yet these personalities exist in reality. Many of these personalities appear before us and we say: there stands “Paracelsus major,” but we have no record of his name, whilst “Paracelsus minor” lived in a later age, in the Gabriel epoch, and had reminiscences of the nature wisdom of Paracelsus major, though no longer in the pure, sublime and spiritual form of Paracelsus major.