The Rudolf Steiner Archive

3. Rosicrucianism

[ 1 ] When we speak of the initiation of the Rosicrucians or the Rosicrucian initiation, we must first briefly consider the concept of initiation. It generally consists of seeking the path to penetrate, through one's own experience, into the higher worlds that underlie our sensory world. We must distinguish between three things: initiates, clairvoyants, and adepts. These are three different ways of relating to the higher worlds.

[ 2 ] Today we want to talk about how human beings can get to know the supersensible worlds through their own experience. We will refrain from discussing the threefold division today, but we will take into account that when we speak of initiation, we are referring to a method of initiation.

[ 3 ] If we consider that people seek the path to the higher worlds from different starting points, we can easily overcome the differences between the various methods. When we reach the summit of a mountain, we have a clear view from above. To get there, we can start from different points and take different paths. It would be absurd to go around the mountain instead of taking the path that lies before us in order to reach the summit.

[ 4 ] Let us apply this principle to initiation. Here, too, we find different starting points given by the fact that people have different natures. Outer natural science is not capable of truly studying these subtle differences. Our physiologists and anatomists are unable to discover these subtle differences between human beings with their crude instruments and methods. But for those who have occult knowledge, there is a tremendous difference between a person born in the Orient and one born in Europe or America. This is evident even in physical nature. There is an enormous difference between a person who still has a living, immediate sense of Christ and a person who is completely alienated from the original Christian feeling and allows his entire worldview to be shaped by the achievements of modern science. Not only are the feelings and thoughts of such a person different from those of a person with a Christian disposition, but this difference can also be observed in their physical nature. There are such subtle differences that affect the finest structures of the body that physiology and biology have nothing to say about them. Therefore, human nature must be taken into account, and one cannot prescribe the same path for all people to ascend to the higher worlds through higher development.

[ 5 ] To understand this, we must go back to earlier times of humanity. Humanity has undergone a long development. In the period we call the Atlantean, our ancestors, that is, our own souls, lived in completely different bodies in ancient Atlantis, over in the West between what is now Europe and America. Then came the floods mentioned in the Bible's account of the Flood and in various other flood legends, floods that caused the downfall of ancient Atlantis. This was followed by the post-Atlantean development, in which we still find ourselves today.

[ 6 ] We have gone through four periods in the post-Atlantean development, and we are still in the fifth. The first of these periods encompassed the ancient Indian culture. At that time, the peoples were taught by the holy Rishis, inspired human beings whom modern man cannot even imagine. Then came the second culture, the Persian, with the religion of Zarathustra. The third culture was the Babylonian-Assyrian-Chaldean-Egyptian culture, from which the Hebrew culture slowly developed. The fourth was the Greek-Roman cultural stream, within which Christianity arose, taking its elements from the people who had developed organically from the third culture. We are now living in the fifth culture, moving toward the sixth.

[ 7 ] Not only has thinking changed in the long time since the Atlantean catastrophe, but also the astral body, the etheric body, and the physical body. However, one must not imagine that all people are equal in our fifth cultural stream. Many characteristics of earlier cultural streams have been preserved. What developed one after the other still lives side by side.

[ 8 ] Because human beings have passed through very different cultural currents, the nature of the introduction to the higher worlds brought to human beings by their spiritual guides had to change along with the resulting changes in their entire being.

[ 9 ] In the Atlantean epoch, human beings still possessed astral clairvoyance. They lived together with their gods and spirits just as they did with the external plants, minerals, animals, and human beings. In the post-Atlantean era, people could no longer gain access to the higher worlds. They could no longer enter the higher worlds by directly beholding the divine-spiritual, but could only artificially put themselves back into the state that enabled them to become companions of the gods again. This is the basis of the Indian type of yoga initiation. This yoga introduction to the higher worlds essentially consists of dulling the consciousness that humans have acquired in the post-Atlantean period, the external perception, and returning to earlier clairvoyant states of consciousness, such as those of the Atlanteans.

[ 10 ] If we continue to follow the development of humanity beyond the Persian and Chaldean cultural currents, we come to the Christian cultural current. It brought with it Christian initiation, which can only be attained through a direct relationship with Jesus Christ through the Gospel of John and the Apocalypse. Then, in the 13th and 14th centuries, the first dawn of the materialistic cultural stream followed. At that time, enlightened people could recognize that the material age was now dawning. Everything that was fully realized in the 19th century, that appeared in its extreme form, had been prepared long before. We find materialism not only in the realm of external activity, but we must seek it in all areas.

[ 11 ] Until the 13th and 14th centuries, people retained a completely different set of feelings and emotions. The change occurs in all areas, even those that seem most remote. In painting, for example, we encounter a great change in people's feelings. Today, it seems arbitrary to materialists when, for example, Cimabue paints the background in gold in his pictures. But at that time, this painter still had the tradition of perceiving the higher world. If one looks into the highest regions of the astral world, one finds that this golden background is reality. Those who later wanted to paint something similar, as imitators of these older painters who still had knowledge of the reality of the astral world through tradition, appear to us like barbarians compared to those who really still had a relationship with the higher worlds. In Giotto, for example, what he painted was no longer a representation of what he perceived as truth, but was painted solely from external tradition. In his time, it was natural to move over to what could only be seen on the physical plane, to materialistic art. Only the greatest painters of that time held fast to tradition. In Raphael's “Disputa,” one can see how the basic tones from bottom to top indeed reproduce with a certain accuracy the experience that human beings have when they rise to the higher worlds. It is necessary to experience this gradual transition from the lower to the higher worlds until one beholds those geniuses emerging from the golden background.

[ 12 ] Those who know spiritual truths know that there is something else behind physical facts; they know that the reason why people today are materialists is that they are under external, materialistic influences. But this is not just a matter of external perception. From the standpoint of occultism, we learn of other reasons. Thought and feeling are realities that radiate out into the world. We are surrounded by materialistic thoughts. These thoughts swirl around us everywhere. Even if the farmer out in the country has no books or magazines that express materialistic views, these materialistic thoughts still swirl around him, influencing him in important ways.

[ 13 ] If we ask how human beings came into existence in times when people still knew about occult powers, we find that in those days, for example in China, it was ensured that when human beings entered the physical world, they were welcomed by people who were filled with spiritual thoughts. This is something completely different from being received by a materialistic doctor and a materialistically minded environment. Here, people encounter things that are completely different from what they used to encounter in an environment filled with spiritual thoughts. This is where we must seek the reason for people's materialistic attitude. Since the 13th or 14th century, human beings have been immersed in a materialistic atmosphere from the moment they are born. This had to be so. But it was therefore also necessary to create a method for those who wanted to ascend to the higher worlds, through which they could become strong and powerful enough to enable them to ascend to the spiritual worlds despite these external materialistic conditions.

[ 14 ] This method of initiation is the Rosicrucian method, which arose at the turn of the 13th and 14th centuries and was first inaugurated by Christian Rosenkreutz, one of the great leaders of humanity. Strictly closed off from the outer world, this method had been effective for centuries, known only to a small circle, and most strictly closed off in the 19th century, the materialistic century. Only in its last third did the need arise to make at least the elementary parts of what had been taught in the schools of the Rosicrucians known to the world in the form of theosophy.

[ 15 ] In 1459, the actual founder of the Rosicrucian movement himself attained that stage through which he had the power to influence the world in such a way that the initiation of the world could be brought about through him.

[ 16 ] Since that time, this individuality of Christian Rosenkreutz has been present again and again as the leader of the movement in question. For centuries it led a life “in the same body.” We should understand the expression “in the same body” as follows: when we look at the physical body, we find that what made it up ten years ago is no longer in the physical body. But consciousness has remained the same. Every seven to eight years, the human being replaces all parts of his physical body, but consciousness survives this continuous exchange of physical substances throughout life. What we go through in this way between birth and death is what the initiate goes through in such a way that when he dies, he is soon reborn in a new body as a child. But he goes through this process fully conscious. Consciousness remains from one incarnation to another. Even physical resemblance remains in the initiate, because the soul consciously builds the new body from the experience of the previous incarnation. In this way, the highest leader of the Rosicrucian training lived through the centuries.

[ 17 ] Only now is it possible to reveal some of the principles of the Rosicrucians. Until now, nothing had been disclosed; only once had something been communicated. According to the Rosicrucian method, the following seven stages lead human beings up to the higher worlds: First, study; second, the acquisition of imaginative knowledge; third, the learning of occult writing; fourth, the preparation of the philosopher's stone; fifth, the correspondence between microcosm and macrocosm; sixth, merging into the macrocosm; seventh, godliness.

[ 18 ] This does not mean that these seven stages must be passed through one after the other. The student who comes before a Rosicrucian teacher receives instructions for higher development in a way that corresponds to his individuality. From the seven stages of higher development, the one that is best suited to him is selected. One begins with the first and second stages, and then perhaps the fourth and fifth follow. Only what is called study must be the beginning for everyone.

[ 19 ] Study here means something different from what is commonly understood in everyday life. Here it means the deliberate acquisition of ideas and concepts, which is called non-sensory thinking. All the thinking of the ordinary person is attached to external sensuality. Observe everything you experience from morning to evening and think away everything you have seen and heard externally. For most people, very little or nothing remains. However, if people want to make their way to the higher worlds, they must accustom themselves to being able to think when the source of their thinking lies only within themselves, without connecting to the external world.

[ 20 ] The only form of thinking free of the senses in European countries is arithmetic. Children learn that two times two is four, first through external observation, using their fingers or beans or those awful calculating machines. But human beings do not achieve a satisfactory result in this area until they can form these ideas without the crutch of external observation. A circle can never be seen in external reality; circles drawn on a blackboard are nothing more than chalk marks strung together. Only a circle imagined in the mind is accurate. The circle must be constructed in the mind; one must think the circle.

[ 21 ] Today, thinking free of the senses can be found in humans only in the realm of numbers and geometry. But this is not accessible to most people and is therefore only mentioned for comparison. The best means of acquiring non-sensory thinking is theosophy itself, because there one hears of things one has not seen. What people learn there, such as how the human being consists of physical, etheric, and astral bodies, or how the earth itself has developed through various states, cannot be seen. Only by straining our thinking and perceiving the inner logic of things can we comprehend these things with ordinary logic, if we are willing to stand on this comprehensive ground of logic. When people today say they cannot comprehend this, it is not because they are not clairvoyant, but because they do not want to apply the logic of comprehension. The experiences of the clairvoyant can be understood with ordinary logic; clairvoyance is only necessary for researching these things. What is presented in theosophy is the only logical thing for theoretical and practical life. On the other hand, what people put forward in a materialistic way about supersensible things is illogical. What spiritual science brings is what is truly concrete and fruitful in life.

[ 22 ] If we consider the principle of education from the standpoint of the theosophical worldview and from the standpoint of materialistic thinking, we can make a comparison. In the former, things are said about the developing human being that cannot be seen externally. But it is precisely in this that the real, concrete reality is to be found. The modern worldview does not understand the developing child. Only when we consider the whole being of the human being, not just the external, can we learn to place the whole fullness of the human being in the world.

[ 23 ] At the same time, people who become familiar with the teachings of theosophical worldview have a means of learning to think without sensuality. True theosophy will always aim to develop thinking that is as free from sensuality as possible. When we look at theosophical teachings, we find descriptions of states that we cannot see. When we consider the development of our Earth and what it emerged from, we describe that planetary state where everything was different from the stage of our present Earth: that ancient Moon—not the present one—where there was no solid, mineral crust on which humans could walk, but where the planet existed only in a kind of plant nature. In this mass, which we can compare to lettuce or spinach, more solid components existed only in the same way as the bark of trees does today. There were no minerals at that time.

[ 24 ] If one disputes this from a materialistic point of view, because one can only imagine plants growing on mineral soil, one can admit that this is indeed not possible under today's conditions. But conditions were very different back then. The materialist cannot imagine this because he always refers to today's conditions.

[ 25 ] But in such images, one can free oneself from what one sees around oneself. Nonsense becomes sense when we consider conditions that are far removed from our own. There we learn to educate ourselves to get away from our sensory conditions. We learn to place images of things we do not know today before our soul. In this way, our thinking is lifted above what is possible today. Those who strive to connect their thinking only with what is possible today cling to present circumstances and cannot free themselves from them. For study in the Rosicrucian sense, it is precisely important to exercise one's thinking on these images of circumstances that no longer exist. Allowing concepts to arise from thinking that is completely free of the senses is a means of arriving at what is called study. This can also be achieved by studying a book such as The Philosophy of Freedom. The author has merely provided the opportunity for the thoughts to think themselves. There, the individual thoughts have emerged from pure, sensuous-free thinking, structured from within themselves, so that no thought can be taken away from where it stands and placed elsewhere, just as little as the hand can be cut off from the body and placed elsewhere. That is the path of sensuous-free thinking.

[ 26 ] Many people want to soar up into the higher worlds in a hot desire, but this is something unhealthy. Healthy striving is only that when inner solid logic is cultivated out of thinking that is free from all sensuality.

[ 27 ] Those who are knowledgeable about the higher worlds know that perceptions in the higher worlds are completely different from those in the physical world. But there is one thing that remains the same in all three worlds, the physical, astral, and devachanic worlds: logical thinking. This reliable guide protects us from all kinds of confusion. Without it, we would never learn to distinguish illusion from reality and would end up taking every illusion for astral reality. Here in the physical world, it is easy to distinguish illusions from reality. This is because external facts correct us. For example, if you take the wrong street, you will not arrive at the right place. In the higher worlds, we must find the right path ourselves through our own mental power, otherwise we will end up in increasingly difficult labyrinths if we have not first learned to distinguish illusion from reality. Through training in the Rosicrucian sense, we can learn this.

[ 28 ] The second aspect of Rosicrucian training is imaginative recognition, recognition in images. This is the first stage of rising from the physical world into a spiritual world. Goethe gave the leitmotif for this in the last words of the second part of his Faust when he said: “Everything transitory is only a parable.” When we begin to see everything around us as spiritual images, we strive upward into the world of imagination.

[ 29 ] In the schools of the Rosicrucians, and even in earlier schools, attempts were made to make the principle of development through the various realms clear to the students. Today, materialistic thinking speaks of development; theosophy also speaks of it, but it is something else to transform the concept of development into an image, to raise it to the level of imagination. Usually, only the intellect is concerned with the principle of development. We arrive at imagination in the following way. Over many weeks or months, the soul was transformed in the following way through the instructions of the teacher. We can best convey this in the form of a dialogue—which, however, never took place in this way. The teacher said something like the following: Look at the plant, how it strives toward the sun with its leaves and flowers and sinks its roots into the ground, striving toward the center of the earth. If you compare it to a human being, it is wrong to compare the flower to the head and the roots to the reproductive organs. Darwin made the comparison correctly. He pointed out that the roots of the plant correspond to the head of the human being. The human being is the inverted plant. The roots that the plant sinks into the ground correspond to the head of the human being. But what the plant chastely holds up to the sun, the flower and the reproductive organs, man turns toward the earth. If you turn the plant completely around, you have man; if you turn it halfway around, you have the animal, which has a horizontal spine.

[ 30 ] When we imagine these things, not only our thoughts but also our feelings and emotions are deeply drawn into the world around us. We learn to recognize the inner relationship between plants and humans. We recognize the pure, chaste nature of plants, which is not yet permeated by desires and passions, and the nature of human beings, in whom the chaste plant substance has been transformed into flesh permeated by desires and passions. But at the same time, this brings something higher into their being; through this, they have attained clear daytime consciousness. The plant sleeps, but man has attained his bright daytime consciousness by being embodied in flesh that is permeated by desires, passions, and instincts. To do this, he had to complete the full cycle. The animal stands in the middle. It has desires and passions, but has not yet attained clear daytime consciousness.

[ 31 ] The teacher said to the student: If you feel this, you will understand Plato's saying: The world soul is crucified on the world body. — Plant, animal, human being: that is the real, deepest meaning of the sign of the cross. What passes through the realms of nature as a general soul, as a world soul, appears as a symbol in the cross. This was taught in the secret schools as the deepest meaning of the cross.

[ 32 ] Then the teacher said to the student: Look how the plant holds its calyx chastely toward the sun, how the sunbeam kisses the flower of the plant. This was called the chaste kiss of the sunbeam, the holy lance of love. In the chaste kiss of the sunbeam, the holy lance of love, which opens the calyx of the plant, reference is made to the future ideal, where man will develop his organs back up to the chastity of the plant. Now man has developed up to the stage where he is filled with desires. Man will continue to develop to the stage where he has transformed his desires, where he will be kissed again by the spiritual ray of the sun, where he will again produce his own kind on a higher level, where the reproductive power will be spiritualized. In the secret schools, this was called the Holy Grail. This is the real ideal of the Holy Grail: an organ that humans will have when their reproductive power has been spiritualized. We see in the past the chaste nature of plants, in the present the human being permeated by desire, and in the future the human being with a purified body, receiving the spiritual ray of the sun in the Holy Grail, as a higher stage of development of the plant chalice.

[ 33 ] This is not abstract thinking, but a state in which we feel each stage of development, not just think about it. When we feel in this way what is developing, we gradually rise so that we come to imaginative knowledge through the images. The image of the Holy Grail stands before us when we detach these images from their sensory appearance and receive the image of that higher world.

[ 34 ] When we allow such images, which represent certain processes of the spiritual world and have been established in the secret schools, to work on us, we say that we are allowing the occult scriptures to work on us. This is the third stage of Rosicrucian training.

[ 35 ] We have such images in the seals and pillars depicted in Munich at the Congress on the Beginning and End of Human Development and in the Apocalypse. Man used to live on a planet that was molten. He only gradually attained his present body through many incarnations, and he will continue to evolve through many more incarnations. Above all, a transformation of the larynx and the heart will take place. These will be the reproductive organs of the future. Today, thoughts, feelings, and sensations are embodied only in words, which allow the vibrations of my soul in this room to reach your ears and awaken similar thoughts and sensations in your souls. Later, humans will create warmth and finally light, just as they now communicate their thoughts in words in the air. Just as humans descended from a sphere of light and warmth in the past, they will create warmth and light themselves in the future.

[ 36 ] This is depicted on the first apocalyptic seal. The initial state of humanity, when the earth was still in a state of molten heat, is depicted by the feet of the human being in the image standing in a fiery metal flow; the future state is depicted by the fiery sword emerging from the mouth of the human being. Such an image affects not only the imagination but also the will of human beings when we observe the great forces of nature in this way. For the same force that lives as a primal force in the will of human beings also lives in the entire external world. If we learn to train our will, then the will of the universe lives within us, and our will becomes one with the will that flows through nature. Human beings learn this through selfless devotion to the occult scriptures.

[ 37 ] The fourth of the Rosicrucian teachings is the preparation of the philosopher's stone. This is a highly secret mystery. At the end of the 18th century, something of it was revealed. For example, a remark was found in a Central German newspaper by someone who had heard something about it. It said: The philosopher's stone really exists, and there are only a few people who do not know about it. Many have already held it in their hands, but they do not know that it is the philosopher's stone. The definition was correct in its wording, but one has to understand it. This is not a mere allegory. The Rosicrucian works on reality, so that he goes into physiology. He works on the real transformation of the earth and of man, deep into the physical body, not only on what is commonly known as moral elevation, refinement of morals, and so on.

[ 38 ] Let us start with human respiration. The regulation of the respiratory process forms an important part of occult development. Humans breathe in, need the oxygen that mixes with carbon in the human body, and then breathe out carbon dioxide. If this were to continue indefinitely, the Earth's atmosphere would gradually become filled with carbon dioxide, which would bring about the downfall of humanity. Human existence presupposes the existence of plants. Plants absorb carbon dioxide, retain the carbon, and release oxygen. Thus, a continuous cycle takes place between humans and plants. Humans, animals, and plants belong together; one cannot exist without the other.

[ 39 ] Now, the development in the human body is as follows: What plants must do for humans today, namely produce carbon—the remains of plants can still be recognized in coal—will later, as occultism can show us, be accomplished by humans themselves through the further development of their heart and respiratory organs. One way in which humans can consciously absorb this plant process and carry it out themselves is by rhythmizing the breathing process so that they do not release carbon dioxide to the plant but build up carbon in their own bodies. In this way, humans learn to build their own bodies.

[ 40 ] If we compare this with what we have been told about the Holy Grail, we now have it concretely before us. Through the rhythmicization of the breathing process, human beings learn to produce within themselves the carbon that occurs in nature as graphite and diamond, as the chaste nature of plants. To produce carbon, the pure, chaste substance, within oneself is called the preparation of the philosopher's stone. One must imagine it as similar to a transparent diamond, but in a softer substance. Human beings are powerful inner machines; through occult training, they learn that they are working on the development of their own gender into a higher form. When a materialistic person heard about this, he remarked, quite characteristically, that it would be a wonderful thing and could perhaps be turned into a profitable industry. Not at all. This remark shows how necessary it is to keep such information secret, for only when people have reached a moral and intellectual level where they can no longer think selfishly can such secrets be revealed to them.

[ 41 ] The fifth is the correspondence between the microcosm and the macrocosm. For everything that happens outside in the world, there is a process within the human being that repeats this in miniature. He only has to reflect on what is going on within him, then he can intuitively arrive at the processes in the outer cosmos. For example, through a certain meditation and concentration on the inner part of the eye, man learns to recognize the sun in its inner essence, for the eye is an extract from the essence of the sun. Goethe once said: The eye is formed by light for light. Light created the eye. Without the sun, there would be no eye. Everything that exists in the sun can be found in a certain way in the eye. Recognizing the light of the sun by concentrating on the essence of the eye is Rosicrucian training. In this way, one can get to know the whole world from within oneself. By concentrating on the liver, for example, a person learns about very specific creative forces of nature, right down to human creativity. In this way, a person learns to recognize the whole world through themselves, for they are a small world. They learn how the microcosm and the macrocosm correspond in reality.

[ 42 ] A certain concentration on the human heart gives him knowledge of the lion nature outside. This is not just a phrase here. Man must learn to find his way into the great universe, then the feeling of oneness with the whole cosmos will come of its own accord. When man learns to walk fully out of every limb of his body — including the etheric and astral bodies — toward the great universe, with patience in each step, he expands his organism into an organism that encompasses the entire space. He is then within all beings. He can then experience that feeling which is called godliness.

[ 43 ] It is important that human beings detach themselves from themselves in order to find the path to the creative forces. The more they come out of themselves, the more they enter into the higher worlds.

[ 44 ] worlds. In the poem “The Secrets,” Goethe described how a person wanders to a mysterious temple to meet various people through whom different schools of thought flow together. Goethe places the cross entwined with roses at the entrance to the temple. “Who has placed the roses on the cross?” the poem asks. Only someone who knows that the cross entwined with roses expresses a development toward a higher state of humanity would ask this question. He also expressed this in the words:

And as long as you do not have this,
This: Die and become!
You are only a gloomy guest
On the dark earth.

[ 45 ] Human beings must increasingly approach the state where they will be reborn internally from the dying part. Just as the bark of a tree dies externally and new shoots develop internally, so too must human beings be reborn internally by surrounding themselves externally with death. That is why in earlier times the initiates were compared to oak trees and called druids. This “die and become” means that man always begins fresh life within himself. What is dying becomes the sustainer of new life. That is why it is said:

From the force that binds all beings,
The person who overcomes himself is freed.

[ 46 ] This means overcoming ordinary life, turning it into a shell so that the sprouting seeds of a higher life can develop within.