26. Disciplining Humanity as it Becomes More Aware

So what happened? What happened was that the rulers in the Greco-Latin period, the Roman Caesars, the Roman emperors, forced themselves to be initiated. The first Roman Caesar, Augustus, was an initiate. He had the power, he could force himself to be initiated. He made little misuse of it. You see, my dear friends, what has come about, this prevalence of external power, this placing of man in the development of the earth as a citizen of the Roman Empire - because one first became a “citizen” there - it only became possible when man no longer felt himself a citizen of the spiritual world. Only then did man become involved in everything that comes from the “flesh”. But one could force oneself - if one was the mightiest man in the flesh, if one was Roman emperor - to be initiated into the mysteries. And not only Caesar Augustus had forced himself to be initiated, but also a man like Caligula forced himself to be initiated. And what history reports refers to truths. Because Caligula was able to speak with the spirits of the elements, with the spirits of the moon. He could consciously use the formulas that were used at that time by the initiates. He knew that “man is of divine nature,” so he allowed himself to be worshipped as a god. But for people like Augustus, Caligula and Nero, who were all initiates because they forced initiation, their initiation led to an insistence on power in the physical world, but at the same time to a real contempt for the physical. For this Caligula, when he once heard of a court case in which an innocent man had been convicted, he said: That does not matter, because the innocent man was certainly just as guilty as the guilty man. And another time he said: Well, the judges who condemned the guilty man are just as guilty.