Part 2 (1/2)
mental life, in the case of the woman was like an ascent of still more inward Imaginations: it was the human image that the woman perceived within her again and again in Imagination. And then she said to herself: what I now perceive Imaginatively, is the same as I experienced in childhood before p.u.b.erty, out in cosmic s.p.a.ce, as Imaginative pictures. Both s.e.xes, only in different ways, experienced the fact that they actually knew in the soul: in me something is born which cosmic s.p.a.ce has fructified in me.
There you have a still more concrete form of the Osiris-Isis-myth: it is universal wisdom in so far as it is won from the atmosphere, but it is in organic connection with man, the deeper layers of the human spirit. You can get an idea of it if you seek it in the following way. You see, men think nowadays in an abstract way, inasmuch as they desire to know through the head what the world contains of laws and so on. In these old times men were clear that in this way, merely through head knowledge, one cannot know, but one knows through the whole human being. One knows what
goes on outside in s.p.a.ce, goes on etherically, by having perceived it formerly as it were, outside, and then after p.u.b.erty pictured or felt it inwardly.
How do you perceive then today, with the abstract perception that you have? You discover something which you see with the senses; then you think it over afterwards. That happens in rapid succession.
With those mysteries, through which man in ancient times penetrated into the laws of the atmosphere present in Imaginations, it was a different matter. As child, up to p.u.b.erty, he perceived, he only perceived; afterwards he worked this over inwardly. One might say it is only a perceptive process and a thinking process spread out in time; whereas today it is placed at man's own discretion to observe abstractly and to reflect, conceive abstractly. Over the whole life was spread what we now crowd together in a few moments as regards the outer physical world, perceive, conceive. That was something which in his relation to the world man thought of as spread out over the whole of human life between birth and death. To the age of p.u.b.erty he perceived certain things, afterwards he reflected upon them.
Such an age was once in existence.
But now think. People said to themselves: 'this perceiving and reflecting, this is connected in a certain way with the day, with the rising and setting sun. With the rising sun, one wakes, gets up, begins to perceive and to think; with the setting sun this ceases, since one lies down to sleep.' Thus people connected perceiving and thinking with the day; and what was spread out over the whole life between birth and death they brought into connection with more widely extended cosmic events in the heavens. Just as it depends on the sun, on the ordinary rising and setting of the sun, that I can perceive and think, so does it depend on greater, more extended star constellations which appear after centuries, after millennia, what man develops in perceiving and thinking of the kind that I have described. And as in those old times people connected the ordinary perception and thinking with the day, with sunrise and sunset - indeed as people do today though they don't think so and even believe they go by the clock - so they connected matters concerning
more comprehensive cosmic mysteries with the other star-constellations, with the other events in the heavens.
You see, a deep logic, a deep wisdom lies in these things. With superficialities one cannot get at the facts. But something else too is bound up with it.
These ancient peoples - and we could speak of others besides the Egyptians and the Greeks - these ancient peoples knew that the more inward- lying forces of human nature are connected with what come to expression in celestial happenings, in star-constellations. That decadence of man which is expressed in the modern att.i.tude to the s.e.x problem, and that greatest decadence which is expressed in the most modern att.i.tude to s.e.xual problems, of this nothing was yet known to those ancient peoples of the ages of which one must speak when one deals with these things. For them it was something very different when they had the feeling: it is the s.e.xual essences which are suffused into the human being when the voice breaks and therewith the thoughts break too - or when the other appears of which I have spoken.
That the divine was then pouring itself forth in man - that was the conviction of the ancients.
Hence what is only viewed in a pernicious sense today is found in all old religious rites: the s.e.x- symbols, the so-called s.e.x-symbols, point thus to this connection - we can call it the connection between the atmosphere with its air-events and the human processes of knowledge which take place during the whole human life between birth and death.
'Through my eye, through my ear' - so said these people - 'I am connected with what is brought by the day. Through the deeper, more inwardly lying forces, I am connected with something quite different, with the secrets of the air, which, however, are only perceived in Imaginative experience.' And this Imaginative experience in its concrete form I have described for you with reference to these early times.
The Old Testament conception in these matters was different inasmuch as it put doctrine in the place of actual experience. The Egyptian of the Osiris-age, especially of the earlier Osirisage, said
as follows: 'The true human being only enters me with p.u.b.erty, for I then take in what formerly I saw in Imaginations. The air transmits to me the true man.' In the doctrine of the Old Testament this was transformed into the conception: The Elohim or Jahve have breathed into man the living breath (Odem), the air. There the essence was lifted out of the direct living experience and became doctrine, theory. This was necessary, for only so could mankind be led - and that is the meaning of the Old Testament - be led from that living in union with the outer world, which still had an inner connection between the microcosm, man, and the macrocosm, the world, to their further evolution (of which I will speak later). As this connection gradually vanished, it was necessary to fall back on just such a doctrine as that of the Old Testament.
But now there came the time of the death of Osiris - and therewith the time too in which, while one thing became finer, the other thing, as it were, became coa.r.s.er. How is that to be understood?
Well, you can imagine it thus: When we go back
into the old Osiris-time, then the human being saw or felt before p.u.b.erty the Light-Imaginations within the outer air (see sketch) - if I speak for the one s.e.x - Thus he saw in his environment the Light-Imaginations in the air up to the time of p.u.b.erty. Afterwards he had the feeling that they had entered into him, and the changes occurred of which we have spoken. For the child the air was everywhere filled with Light phenomena; for the grown man, the matured man, the air was certainly still there, but he knew that as child he had seen something else in it. He knew that the air was at the same time the bearer, the mother, of light. He knew that it was not true that when he looked out into the air there was nothing in it but what was shown physically. Beings live in it which are to be perceived in Imagination.
These Beings were for the Greeks the Being of the Zeus-circle. Thus man knew that there were Beings in the air. But all this - the fact that human states of consciousness became changed - all this is connected with the fact that even objective things became different in the finer substantiality. Naturally, for the modern clever man it is an outrage if one says such things. I know it is an outrage, but nevertheless it is true: the air has become different. Naturally it has not changed in a way that can be tested by chemical reagents; nevertheless the air has become different.
The air has lost the strength to express the Light- Imaginations; the air has - one could say -
become coa.r.s.er. It has actually become different on earth since that ancient time. The air has become coa.r.s.er. But not only the air, but man himself has become coa.r.s.er. That which formerly lived spiritually in the essences which permeated the larynx and the rest of the organism, that has also grown coa.r.s.er. So that in fact if one speaks today of the s.e.xual-essences one speaks of what is different from what one would speak of in ancient times. Everyone in older times knew: 'The perception of the day is connected with my personality; the other, which I experience from the atmosphere, experience with my whole life, that, however, is connected with mankind as such, that goes beyond the individual man.' Hence they also sought to fathom the social mysteries under which men live together, through the link which bound them with the macrocosm, they sought for social wisdom through the star-wisdom. But what lived in man as social wisdom bound him in fact to the celestial. This came to expression in the most everyday concepts. A human pair before the death of Osiris would never have felt anything else than that they had received a child from heaven. That
was a living consciousness and corresponded also with truth. And this living consciousness could develop because man knew that he received out of the air-filled s.p.a.ce what he himself experienced.
Of all this the coa.r.s.e dregs, so to say, have been left. As in the air the coa.r.s.e sediment has remained behind of that power of the air that revealed itself to man in Imaginations in earlier ages, so in man himself are the coa.r.s.e dregs left behind. This had to come about since otherwise men could not have attained freedom and a full consciousness of the ego. But it is the dregs that have remained. In this way, however, all that the ancients meant by the divine, which as you can now readily realize, they connected in a roundabout way with the s.e.xual essences, all this has been coa.r.s.ened, not only in idea but also in reality. But it is there nevertheless; naturally not only in the one way, but in the other way too. The reproduction of mankind was in those olden times thought to be in direct connection with the micro-macrocosmic bond of mankind, as you have seen, but the whole social life of man on earth was in fact also thought to be
in connection with this micro-macrocosmic bond.
Numa Pompilus went to the Nymph Egeria to receive information from her as to how he should arrange social conditions in the Roman Kingdom.
This, however, means nothing else than that he had let the star wisdom be imparted to him, had let the star-wisdom tell him how social conditions should be organized.
That which men reproduce on earth, and which is connected with successive generations, was to be placed in the service of what the stars have to say.
As the individual man directed his life with his ordinary perceiving and thinking, according to the rising and setting of the sun, so the interconnections of mankind which later became 'States', were to be placed under the star- constellations as expressions of cosmic relations.h.i.+ps.
In our language - and languages often contain memories of old conditions - we still have a remembrance of this connection in the fact that the relation of male and female is described by the word 'Geschlecht' (s.e.x) and also the successive
generations as 'Geschlechter' (races). It is one and the same word: the 'Geschlecht' - the family, interconnected, blood relations - and then the relation of man and woman. And so is it too in other languages, and it all points to how man sought to find a recognizable connection with the macrocosm for what lay in his nature, in the deeper strata of his being.
These things have become coa.r.s.ened in the direction we have discussed. Among other things that have remained behind is the attachment in longing and feeling to nationality, the clinging to the national, the chauvinistic impulse for the national; that is the lingering relic of what in older times could be thought of in quite different connections. But only when one looks into such things does one know the truth contained in them.
What is expressed by the nationalistic longing?
When man develops to excess this national feeling, this sentiment for the nation, what is living in it? Exactly the same as lives in the s.e.xual, in the s.e.xual in one way, in national sentiment in another. It is the s.e.xual human being that lives his
life through these two different poles. To be Chauvinistic, is, nothing else really than developing a sort of group-s.e.xuality. One could say that where the s.e.xual essences, in what they have left behind, grip men more, there is present more national Chauvinism; for it is the very force living in reproduction that comes to manifestation too in national sentiment. Hence the battle-cry of the so-called 'Freedom of the Peoples or of the Nations' is really only to be understood in its more intimate connections if one said - in a most respectable sense of course - 'The Call for the Re-establishment of the National in the Light of the s.e.x-Problem'. It is necessary to realize as one of the secrets of the time-impulse, the fact that the s.e.xual problem is proclaimed in quite a special form over the earth today, without people having any idea of how out of their subconsciousness the s.e.xual clothes itself in the words: 'Freedom of the Peoples.' And far more than men imagine are s.e.xual impulses present in the catastrophic events of today, far more than men imagine! For the impulses to what is happening today lie, in fact, very, very deep.
Such truths must no longer in our present age be kept under lock and key. Certain Brotherhoods have been able to keep them under lock and key, because in the strictest sense of the word they have excluded women. Although joint work with women can nevertheless lead to all sorts of bad things, as has indeed constantly been shown today, yet the time has come in which right views, general views, on these matters must be spread among humanity. Ideas are nevertheless spread abroad which are impure, foolish, empty, inasmuch as from certain directions, without knowledge of the more intimate connections, all sorts of things are treated today as s.e.xual problems. But you see how what here is pure, genuine, honourable truth comes in contact, on the one hand, with what can be the most impure, lowest way of thinking, as is shown from time to time in the outgrowths of Psycho-a.n.a.lysis or similar things. You will always find, however, that what on the one hand, rightly understood, is profound truth, needs hardly to be altered at all in words, but only to be permeated with a low- minded type of thought, and it is simply a