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EGYPTIAN MYTHS AND
MYSTERIES
Lecture 9
The Influence of the Sun and Moon Spirits,
of the Isis and Osiris Forces.
The Change in Consciousness.
The Conquest of the Physical Plane.
September 11, 1908
by
Rudolph Steiner
IN the preceding lectures we reviewed
in some detail a number of facts concerning the evolution of humanity. I tried
to show how man developed in the period of evolution that stretches
approximately from the moment when the sun withdrew from the earth to the time
when the moon also departed. Today something will be added to these facts, which
could be called “facts of occult anatomy and physiology.” In order to understand
everything properly, however, today we must throw a little light on certain
other facts of the spiritual life, for we must not forget that what is really to
be demonstrated is the relation between the Egyptian myths and mysteries,
between the whole Egyptian cultural period, and our own time. Therefore it is
necessary that we be entirely clear about how evolution progressed further
through the various epochs.
Let us again recall what was described as the working of the sun and moon
spirits, especially of the Osiris and Isis forces, through whose activities the
human body first appeared and was built up. Remember that this occurred in the
remote past, that our earth as yet had scarcely crystallized out of the
water-earth, and that a great part of what was described actually took place in
the water-earth. Man at that time was in a condition that we should bring
clearly before our minds so that we may form a clear conception of how things
looked to human vision during man's progress through evolution.
I have described how man's lower members, the feet, shanks, knees, etc.,
appeared as physical forms as early as the time when the sun had shown
indications of withdrawing from the earth. But we must always remember what has
been said so often: all this would have been visible had there been a human eye
to see it. But such an eye did not exist. It appeared only much later. While man
was still in the water-earth, he perceived only by means of the organ described
as the pineal gland. Perception by means of the physical eye began only after
the hip region had been formed. Thus we may say that man already had the lower
part of the human form, but possessed nothing whereby he could have seen the
body. At that time man could not see himself. Only at the moment when his body,
building itself up from below, passed the region of the hips, did man receive
the capacity of seeing himself. When he was shaped as far as the sign of the
Balance, man's eyes were opened for the first time. Then he began to see himself
as in a mist. Then he developed the vision of objects. Until the hip region
evolved, all human perception, all seeing, was of a clairvoyant astral-etheric
nature. At that time man could not yet see physical things. Human consciousness
was still dark and shadowy, though of a dreamy clairvoyant nature.
Then man passed over to that condition of consciousness in which sleeping and
waking alternated. When he was awake man saw darkly what was physical, but as
though it were wrapped in mist and surrounded by an aura of light. In his sleep
man rose to the spiritual worlds and the divine spiritual beings. He alternated
between a clairvoyant consciousness, which grew ever weaker, and a
day-consciousness, an object-consciousness, which grew stronger and stronger and
is the head-consciousness of today. Gradually he lost the capacity of
clairvoyant perception, together with the faculty of seeing the gods in sleep.
However, the clarity of day-consciousness waxed in the same proportion, and the
consciousness of self, the I-feeling, the I-perception, grew stronger.
If we look back into the Lemurian time, into the time before, during, and after
the moon's exit from the earth, we find that man then had a clairvoyant
consciousness in which he had no inkling of what we today call death. For if, at
that time, man withdrew from his physical body, whether through sleep or through
death, his consciousness did not diminish. On the contrary, he received a higher
consciousness and, in certain ways, one more spiritual than his consciousness
when in his physical body. He never said to himself, “Now I am dying,” or, “I am
falling into unconsciousness” — that did not exist in those times. Man did not
yet rely on his own feeling of self, but he felt himself immortal in the womb of
divinity, and for him all that we describe here today were obvious facts.
Let us imagine that we lie down to sleep, that the astral body removes itself
from the physical, and that all this happens in the full moon. We have the
physical and etheric bodies lying in bed, the astral body hovering above, and
all of this in the full moonlight. Now the situation is not so that an astral
cloud simply becomes visible there for the clairvoyant. On the contrary, what he
actually sees is streams from the astral body into the physical, and these
streams are the forces that remove fatigue in the night. They bring to the
physical body replenishment for the wear and tear of the day, so that it feels
refreshed and quickened. At the same time one would see spiritual streams
proceeding from the moon, and these streams are permeated by astral powers. One
would see how there actually proceed from the moon spiritual effects that
permeate and strengthen the astral body and influence its working on the
physical body.
Let us assume that we are men of the old Lemurian time. Then the astral body
would have perceived this streaming-in of the spiritual forces, would have gazed
upward and said, “This is Osiris who strengthens me, who works on me. I see how
his influence goes through me.” We would have felt ourselves sheltered in Osiris
during the night; we would have lived, so to say, in Osiris with our ego. We
would have felt, “I and Osiris are one.” Had we been able to give words to what
we felt at that time, we would have described it approximately thus, when we
returned into the physical body, “Now I must descend again into the physical
body that waits for me there below; this is a time when I must dive down into my
lower nature.” We should have rejoiced when the time came when we could leave
the physical body once again, and rise up to rest in the lap of Osiris, or in
the lap of Isis, where we again united our ego with Osiris.
As the physical body evolved further, and especially after the development of
the upper members, man could see more physically, could perceive the objects in
the physical world about him. In the same proportion, however, he had to tarry
longer when he descended into his physical body. He took more interest in the
physical world. His consciousness grew darker for the spiritual world as his
consciousness in the physical body became clearer. He became disaccustomed to
the spiritual world. Thus the life of man in the physical world evolved further,
and in the conditions that prevailed between death and a new birth consciousness
grew darker and darker. In the Atlantean time man lost almost entirely the
feeling of being at home with the gods, and when the great catastrophe was past,
a great part of mankind had completely lost the natural ability to gaze into the
spiritual world at night. But in place of this they gained the capacity of
seeing ever more sharply by day, so that the objects around them appeared in
ever clearer outlines. We have already pointed out that, among the men who had
remained behind, the gift of clairvoyance was still preserved, even into the
post-Atlantean cultures. At the time when Christianity was founded, remnants of
this clairvoyance still existed, and even today there are occasional persons who
have preserved it as a natural gift. But this clairvoyance is entirely different
from that which is gained through esoteric training.
Thus night gradually grew dark for man in Atlantis, while day-consciousness
began to light up. The night was without consciousness for the people of the
first post-Atlantean culture, whom we tried to characterize in all their
greatness, in the spirituality that entered through the holy Rishis. In the
earlier lectures we examined these people, and now we must describe them from
another side.
Let us try to enter into the souls of the pupils of the holy Rishis, into the
souls of the people of the Indian culture in general, in the time immediately
after the last traces of the great Atlantean water-catastrophes had vanished. A
sort of memory of the ancient world still lived in the soul, a memory of that
world in which man experienced and saw the gods who worked on his body, a memory
of how Osiris and Isis worked on him. Now he had emerged from this world, out of
the womb of the gods. Formerly all this had been present to him as the physical
is present to him today. Like a memory this passed through the mind of the
Indian man of the first post-Atlantean times, to whom the Rishis still could
speak of how things actually had been. He knew that the Rishis and their pupils
still could see into the spiritual world, but he also knew that for the normal
person of the Indian culture the time was past when he could see into the
spiritual world.
Like a painful memory of his old true home, this went through the soul of the
ancient Indian when he saw himself transplanted into the physical world, which
is only the outer shell of the spiritual world. He yearned to be out of this
external world. He felt, “Unreal are the mountains and valleys, unreal the
cloud-masses in the air, unreal even the firmament. All this is only like a
sheath, like the physiognomy of a real being, and we cannot see the reality
behind this, the gods and the true form of man. What we see is Maya, is unreal;
the real is veiled.” The feeling grew ever keener that man had sprung from the
truth and had his real home in the spiritual; that the things of sense were
untrue, were Maya, and that the physical world of the senses was the
night around him. 1 When one feels so strongly the contrast between
the spiritual and the unreal physical, the religious mood will tend to produce
little interest in the physical world and to lead the spirit toward what the
initiates see, as to which the holy Rishis could give knowledge. The ancient
Indian longed to escape from this hard reality, which for him was nothing but
illusion, for to him the true was not what his senses perceived, but what lay
beyond that. Therefore the first post-Atlantean culture entertained little
interest for what occurred externally on the physical plane.
Things were already different among the Persians in the second cultural period,
out of which arose Zarathustra, the great pupil of Manu. If we wish to
characterize in a few strokes the difference between the Indian and Persian
cultures, we may say that a member of the Persian culture felt the physical to
be not merely a burden, but a task to be fulfilled. He also looked up into the
regions of light, into the spiritual worlds, but he turned his gaze back into
the physical world and in his soul he saw how everything divides into the powers
of light and the powers of darkness. The physical world became for him a field
of work. The Persian said to himself, “There is the beneficent fullness of
light, the god Ahura Mazdao or Ormuzd, and there are the dark powers under the
leadership of Angramainyush or Ahriman. From Ahura Mazdao comes salvation for
men; from Ahriman comes the physical world. We must transform what comes from
Ahriman; we must unite with the good gods and vanquish Ahriman, the evil god in
matter, by transforming the earth, by becoming beings capable of working upon
the earth. By thus vanquishing Ahriman, we make the earth into a medium for the
good.” The first step toward redeeming the earth was taken by the members of the
Persian culture. They hoped that the earth would become a good planet one day,
that it would be redeemed, and that a glorification of Ahura Mazdao, the highest
being, would come about.
Thus a man felt who did not gaze up into the sublime heights like the Indian,
but planted his feet firmly on this physical earth. A member of the Indian
culture, who did not plant his feet in this way, would not have thought thus.
The conquest of the physical plane proceeded further in the third cultural
epoch, in the Egyptian-Babylonian-Assyrian-Chaldean culture. At this time,
hardly anything remained of the ancient repugnance with which the physical world
was felt to be Maya. The Chaldeans looked up to the heavens, and the light of
the stars was not merely Maya for them; it was the script that the gods had
imprinted on the physical plane. On the paths of the stars the Chaldean priest
pursued his way back into the spiritual worlds, and when he was initiated, when
he learned to know all the beings who inhabited the planets and the stars, he
lifted up his eyes and said, “What I see with my eyes when I gaze up to the
heavens is the outer expression of what is given me by occult vision, by
initiation. When the initiating priest endows me with the grace of the
perception of the divine, then I see God. But all I see externally is not mere
illusions; I see in it the handwriting of the gods.”
The initiate felt as we would feel if we had been long separated from a friend,
then received a letter from him and recognized his familiar handwriting. We see
that it was our friend's hand that formed these signs, and we observe the
feelings of his heart expressed in them. Approximately thus felt the Chaldean
initiate (and also the Egyptian) who was inducted into the holy mysteries and
who, while he was in the mystery temple, saw with his spiritual eye the
spiritual beings that are connected with our earth. When he went out again,
after seeing all this, and cast his eyes on the world of stars, this appeared to
him like a letter from the spiritual beings. He perceived a script of the gods.
In the blaze of the lightning, in the rolling of the thunder, in the tempest, he
saw a revelation of the gods. The gods manifested themselves for him in all that
he saw externally. As we feel about the letter from a friend, so did he feel in
regard to the outer world. Thus did he feel when he saw the world of the
elements, the world of plants, animals, and mountains, the world of the clouds,
the world of the stars. Everything was deciphered as a divine script.
The Egyptian had confidence in the laws that man could find in the physical
world, through which man can master matter. By this means arose geometry,
mathematics. With the help of this, man could rule the elements because he
trusted in what his spirit could find, because he believed that he could imprint
the spirit upon matter. Thus he could build the pyramids, the temples, and the
sphinxes. This was a mighty step in the conquest of the physical plane that was
accomplished in the third cultural period. Man had progressed so far that for
the first time he was able rightly to respect the physical plane. The physical
world began to mean something to him. But what kind of teachers did he require
for this?
Man had always needed teachers. Even the initiates had teachers, as in the old
Indian time. What kind of teachers did the initiates need? It was necessary that
the initiate should be artificially led to see again, during initiation, what
man had been able to see previously in his dark clairvoyant consciousness. The
neophyte had to be led back into the spiritual world, into the earlier home of
the spirit, so that he could communicate to others what he learned from his
experiences. For this he needed teachers. The pupils of the Rishis needed
teachers who could show them what happened in ancient Lemuria and Atlantis, when
man was still clairvoyant. The same was also true of the Persians.
It was different with the Chaldeans, and even more different with the Egyptians.
They also had teachers who aided the pupil to develop his powers so that he
could see, through clairvoyant vision, into the spiritual world behind the
physical world. These were the initiators, who showed what lay behind the
physical. But a new teaching, a wholly new method, became necessary in Egypt. In
ancient India man had troubled himself little about how what happened in the
spiritual world was imprinted upon the physical plane, about the correspondence
between gods and men. But in Egypt something else was needed. It was necessary
that through initiation the pupil should see the gods, but also that he should
see how the gods moved their hands in writing the starry script, how all
physical forms had evolved. The ancient Egyptians had schools entirely on the
model of those of the Indians, but they also learned how the spiritual forces
were correlated with the physical world. Thus they taught new subjects. In
ancient India the pupil was shown the spiritual forces through clairvoyance, but
in Egypt he was also shown what corresponded physically with the spiritual
deeds. He was shown how every member of the physical body corresponded to some
spiritual labor, how the heart, for example, corresponded to some spiritual
work. The founder of this school, in which was shown not only the spiritual but
also its work upon the physical, was the great initiator, Hermes Trismegistos.
It was he, the thrice-great Thoth, who first showed to men the entire
physical world as the handwriting of the gods. Here we see how piece by piece
our post-Atlantean cultures embodied their impulses in human evolution. Hermes
appeared to the Egyptians like a divine ambassador. He gave then what had to be
deciphered as the deed of the gods in the physical world.
In all of this we have somewhat characterized the first three cultural epochs of
the post-Atlantean time. Men had learned to value the physical plane.
The fourth epoch, the Greco-Latin, is the period when man came even more into
contact with the physical plane. In this time man progressed so far that he not
only saw the script of the gods in the physical world, but he also inserted his
own self, his spiritual individuality, into the objective world. Such artistic
creations as we find in Greece were not known earlier. That man could portray
himself in sculpture, creating therein something like his physical self — this
was achieved in the fourth cultural period.
In this time we see man's inward spiritual elements step out of him onto the
physical plane and flow into matter. This marriage between the spiritual and the
material may be seen most clearly in the Greek temple. For everyone who can look
back and see this temple, it is a wonderful work. The Greeks had the greatest
architectonic gifts. Every art has its climax at some point, and here
architecture had its high point. Modeling and painting reached their climax
elsewhere. Despite the gigantic pyramids, the most wonderful architecture
appears in the Greek temple. For what is attained here? A weak echo may be
experienced by one who has an artistic feeling for space, who feels how a
horizontal line is related to one that moves in the vertical. A number of cosmic
truths light up in the soul that can simply feel how the column carries what is
above it. One must be able to feel how all these lines were already invisibly
present in space. The Greek artist saw the column as though clairvoyantly, and
simply filled what he saw with matter. He saw space as altogether composed of
life, as something permeated by living forces.
How can the man of today get some impression of the liveliness that this
space-filling had? We see a faint reflection of it in the old painters. For
example, we can find paintings where angels float in space, and we have the
feeling that the angels support each other. Today little remains of this feeling
for space. I shall make no objection to
Boecklin's colors, 2 but all occult space-feeling is missing in him.
Such a being as we find above his Piet&aaccent; — you cannot tell if it
is supposed to be an angel or some other being — must waken in the observer the
feeling that at any minute it may fall on the group below it. This must be
emphasized when one tries to explain something of which hardly an inkling can be
conveyed today, such as the space-feeling of the Greeks. It must be expressly
stated that this was of an occult nature. In a Greek temple it was as if space
had given birth to itself out of its own lines. The result of this was that the
divine beings for whom the temple was built, and with whom the Greek as a
clairvoyant was acquainted, really descended into the temple, really felt
comfortable in it. It is true that Pallas Athena, Zeus, etc., were actually
within the temples. They had their bodies, their material bodies, in these
temples. For since these beings could incarnate only as far as an etheric body,
they found their dwelling-place in the physical world in these temples. Such a
temple could become their physical body, in which their etheric body felt at
home.
One who understands the Greek temple knows that it differs profoundly from a
Gothic cathedral. This is not a criticism of the Gothic, for the Gothic
cathedral is a sublime work of art. But an understanding person can well imagine
of a Greek temple, that even if it stood in a solitude with no people anywhere
near, even if it were quite alone, it would be a whole. A Greek temple is
complete even when nobody is praying in it. It is not soulless, it is not empty,
for the god is in it. It is inhabited by the god.
But a Gothic cathedral is only half complete if there are no worshippers within.
One who understands this cannot think of a Gothic cathedral, standing alone,
without a congregation of the faithful, whose thoughts stream into it. All the
Gothic forms and ornaments belong to what streams from it. No god, no spiritual
being, is close to the Gothic cathedral when the prayers of the faithful are not
present. Only when the praying congregation is assembled is the cathedral filled
with the divine. This is shown in the very word
“Dom,” 3 for this is connected with the “dom” in Christendom and
similar words, which signifies something collective. Even the word
“Duma” 4 is related to this. The Greek temple is not a house for the
faithful. It is shaped as a house that the god himself inhabits; it can stand
alone. But in the Gothic cathedral one feels at home only when it is filled by
the believing throng, when the pious congregation is assembled, when the light
of the sun shines through the colored window-panes and the colors are diffused
by the fine dust-particles. Then, as often happened, the preacher in the
cathedral pulpit would say, “Even as the light is split into many colors, so is
the single spiritual light, the divine force, divided among the crowds of souls
and split into the diverse forces of the physical plane.” Such words were often
heard from the preacher. When perception and spiritual experience flowed
together in this way, the cathedral was something complete.
As in the great temple buildings, so was it in everything artistic among the
Greeks. The marble of their sculptures took on the appearance of life. The Greek
expressed in the physical what lived in his spiritual. Among the Greeks the
marriage of the spiritual with the physical was a fact.
The Roman went a step further in the conquest of the physical plane. The Greek
had the capacity of embodying the soul-spiritual in his works of art, but he
still felt himself as part of a whole, of the polis, the city-state. He
did not yet feel himself as a personality. This was also the case in the earlier
cultures. The Egyptian did not feel himself as a separate person, but as an
Egyptian, as a member of his people. Thus in Greece we find that a man laid
little worth on feeling himself to be a person, but it was his greatest pride to
be a Spartan or an Athenian. To be a personality, to be something in the world
through the self, was felt for the first time in Rome. That a personality could
be something for itself was first true for the Roman. The Romans worked out the
concept of the citizen, and it was among them that jurisprudence, the
science of law, arose. This is correctly regarded as a Roman invention. Only
modern jurists, who know nothing of these facts, have had the lack of judgment
to assert that law, in this sense, existed earlier. It is nonsense to speak of
oriental lawgivers, such as Hammurabi. There were no legal rules earlier; there
were only
divine commands. 5 One would have to use harsh words if one were to
speak objectively about this kind of science.
The concept of the citizen first became a real feeling in ancient Rome. By that
time man had brought the spiritual into the physical world as far as his own
individuality. The last Will and Testament was invented in ancient Rome. The
will of the single personality had become so strong that even beyond death it
could determine what should be done with its property, its own things. The
single personal man was now the determining factor. With this deed man, in his
own individuality, had brought the spiritual down to the physical plane. This
was the lowest point of evolution.
Man stood at his highest in the Indian culture. At this highest point the Indian
still moved in spiritual heights. In the second culture, the ancient Persian,
man had already descended a little. In the third culture, the Egyptian, still
more. In the fourth culture man descended entirely to the physical plane, into
matter. There came a point when man stood at the parting of the ways. Either he
could sink lower and lower, or he could achieve the possibility of working up
again, of fighting his way back into the spiritual world. But for this a
spiritual impulse had to appear on the physical plane, a mighty thrust that
could lead man back into the spiritual world. This mighty thrust was given
through the appearance of Christ Jesus on earth. The divine-spiritual Christ had
to come to men in a physical human body, had to go through a physical appearance
in the physical world. Now, when man was wholly in the physical world, the god
had to descend to him so he might find the way back into the spiritual world.
Previously this would not have been possible.
Today we have followed the evolution of the cultures of the post-Atlantean time
down to their lowest point. We have seen how the spiritual impulse occurred
through the Christ at the lowest point. Now man must rise again, transfigured by
the Christ principle. We shall go on to show how the Egyptian culture emerges
again in our time, but permeated by the Christ principle.
endnotes
1 For a clear expression of this
sentiment, see Sacred Books and Early Literature of the East (New York,
Parke, Austin, & Lipscomb; 1917), Vol. 9, p. 104.
2 Arnold Böcklin (1827-1901), Swiss painter.
3 Dom is the German word
for cathedral.
4 The Duma was a
short-lived parliament in late Czarist Russia.
5 Our best modern scholars agree with the views here
expressed. See Wigmore, Panorama of the World's Legal
Systems (Washington Law Book Company, 1936).
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