Lecture XVII

However, one must be familiar with such matters if one wants to understand the development of ideas about spiritual things in the course of human evolution, and this is the right place in our clarification of the Apocalypse to discuss these things. So we get out to the spiritual world, and the first beings we meet there are those in the third hierarchy. The Apocalyptist shows how well acquainted he is with all of these things whenever he describes something now, because he increasingly tries to let angels appear, and they carry the events. The phenomenal thing is that earth regions can reflect something that angels bring in as the messengers of higher hierarchies; and namely these angel appearances bring us into a region where we see that divine love is the real ingredient of the world to which we human beings belong. For we become aware that the as it were normal angels, archangels and Archai are r something like the embodiments of higher hierarchies, just as we look at|_ the hands, arms, feet, legs and the rest of a person's body and we have the feeling that this is a body for the soul and spirit.