13. The Chymical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz

This raises the question: What does the “King's Hall” represent, into which Christian Rosenkreutz is led, and what does he experience through the presence of the kings and their beheading? The symbols point to the answer. The seeker of the spirit should see how he is founded with his own being in the being of the universe. He should see in the world what is within him, and in himself what is in the world. He can only do this if he sees in the things and processes of the world images of what is working and weaving within him. He comes to see what is going on within him no longer merely through ideas taken from the soul, but he sees the experiences of this soul through images that represent the becoming of the universe. The kings stand before Christian Rosenkreutz to show him: this is how your soul forces live within you; and the experiences of the kings reflect what must happen in the soul under certain conditions. Christian Rosenkreutz stands before the events in the “Hall of Kings” in such a way that his soul sees itself in them. The beheading of the kings is an event within his own soul development. He has entered the “Hall of Kings” with the powers of knowledge that still have only the nature that they were able to acquire before entering the spiritual world. But by living in this world, these “powers of knowledge” gain experiences that also relate to the material world. Not only does the spiritual world shine before the soul, but the material world also reveals itself in forms that cannot be seen in their full meaning by those who remain in the material realm with their observations. One of these experiences is the revelation of the dual nature of human beings. The forces underlying physical growth are also effective in the phenomena commonly referred to as mental. The power of memory and the impulses that form images prove to be based on physical conditions similar to those underlying growth. However, the forces of growth act in such a way that they are in ascending development during human childhood and youth, then decline and, through their decay, cause death, while the powers of memory and imagination, from a certain very early point in life, take on the possibility of decaying within themselves. In every waking period, these forces undergo a descending development, reaching decay, which the entire organism undergoes from the second half of life until death. In each period of sleep, this decay is compensated for, and the powers of memory and imagination experience a resurrection. The soul organism is attached to the human organism as a parasite, and it is able to provide the conditions for memory and imagination because, in the course of the day, it goes through the path to death that the organism as a whole goes through in the course of earthly life. In this way, for the spiritual seeker, the soul organism becomes a metamorphosis of the entire organism. The soul organism appears as that part of the entire organism which brings to fruition in a more intense way the forces that reveal themselves in it from birth to death, so that they form the basis for the life of imagination. The creative thought-being of the world pours into the daily decay of the forces of the soul organism and thus becomes the life of imagination in the human being. The essential point is that the spiritual seeker recognizes the material basis of the soul processes as the transformed general material processes of the whole organism. There is a paradoxical fact that, on the path to the spirit, one first looks at the material conditions of the soul life. This fact can be the starting point for a temptation. One can stop at the discovery that the soul processes reveal themselves in their material form. Then, in seeking the spirit, one can be driven into a materialistic worldview. But if one really sees through what is present, then the opposite occurs. One recognizes in the material basis of the soul life the effective spiritual forces that reveal themselves through the material forms, and thereby prepares the possibility of recognizing the underlying spirit in the whole organism and its life process.