The Rudolf Steiner Archive

5. The Pentecost Festival of Spiritual Striving and Working for the Spiritualization of the World

[ 1 ] It has been emphasized on various occasions that the spiritual development to which the spiritual scientific movement aspires must bring human beings into a living relationship with their entire environment. Much in the environment has become dead and dull for human beings, things that our ancestors still filled with reverence. A large number of people, for example, view our annual festivals with indifference and coldness. The urban population in particular has only a faint memory of the meaning of Christmas, Easter, and Pentecost.

[ 2 ] The powerful emotions that our ancestors associated with the festive seasons, because they knew the connection with the great facts of the spiritual world, are no longer present in humanity today. People today view Christmas, Easter, and especially Pentecost with cold indifference. The descent of the Spirit has become an abstract event for many people. But things will change: they will only become life and reality when people come to a true spiritual understanding of the whole world.

[ 3 ] Today, people talk a lot about natural forces, but they say very little about the beings behind these natural forces. When one speaks of nature beings, modern man regards this as a rehashing of old superstitions. That the words used by our ancestors are based on reality — that gnomes, undines, sylphs, and salamanders mean something real — is considered old superstition. What people believe in terms of theories and ideas is, in a certain sense, irrelevant at first; but when people are led by these theories to not see certain things and to apply their theories in practical life, then the matter begins to take on its full meaning.

[ 4 ] Let us take a grotesque example: Who believes in beings whose existence is bound to the air or who are embodied in water? If, for example, someone says: Our ancestors believed in certain beings, in gnomes, undines, sylphs, salamanders, but that is all fantastic stuff! — then one would like to reply: Ask the bees. — And if the bees could talk, they would answer: For us, sylphs are not superstition, because we know very well what we get from the sylphs! — And those whose spiritual eyes are open can see what power draws the little bee to the flower. “Instinct, natural impulse,” as humans respond, are empty words. It is beings that lead the bees to the flower's calyx to seek nourishment there, and throughout the entire swarm of bees that swarms out in search of food, there are beings at work that our ancestors called sylphs.

[ 5 ] Wherever different realms of nature touch, there is an opportunity for certain beings to reveal themselves. For example, inside the earth, where stone touches metal veins, special beings settle. At the source, where moss covers the stone and thus the plant kingdom touches the mineral kingdom, such beings settle. Where animals and plants touch, in the calyx of a flower, when a bee touches a flower, certain beings incarnate, as well as where humans touch the animal kingdom. This is not the case in the ordinary course of contact. Not, for example, when the butcher slaughters the cow or when humans eat the meat of animals, not in the normal course of life, such a thing does not happen. But where, in the extraordinary course of life, as with bees and flowers, the realms touch each other as if through an excess of life, beings embody themselves. And especially where the human mind, the intellect, is particularly engaged in dealing with animals, in a relationship such as that between a shepherd and his sheep, a relationship of the mind, such beings are embodied.

[ 6 ] We find such intimate relationships between humans and animals more frequently when we go back to ancient times. In times of lower cultures, people often had a relationship like that of the Arab to his horse, not like that of a racehorse owner to his horses. There we find those emotional forces that play across from realm to realm, as between the shepherd and the lambs. Or where the forces of smell and taste are developed and radiate across, as between the bee and the flower, there an opportunity is created for certain beings to incarnate. When the bee sucks at the flower, the clairvoyant can observe how a small aura forms at the edge of the flower. This is the effect of taste: the bee's sting in the calyx has become a kind of flavoring agent; the bee senses the taste and radiates it like a flower aura, which is nourishment for sylph-like beings. Similarly, the emotional element that plays between shepherd and sheep is nourishment for salamanders.

[ 7 ] That question does not apply to those who understand the spiritual world: Why are the beings there and not elsewhere? We must not ask about their origin; their origin lies in the universe. But if we give them cause to feed, the beings are there. For example, bad thoughts that humans emit attract bad beings into the human aura because they find nourishment there. Then certain beings incarnate in the aura.

[ 8 ] Wherever different natural realms touch each other, there is an opportunity for certain spiritual beings to incarnate. Where metal clings to stone inside the earth, the seer sees, when the miner chops away at the earth, strange beings huddled together in various places, in a very small space. They scatter and spray apart when the earth is removed. These are strange beings that, for example, are not entirely unlike humans in certain respects. Although they have no physical body, they do have intelligence. However, the difference between them and humans is that they have intelligence without responsibility. Therefore, they do not feel that they are doing anything wrong when they play various pranks on humans. These beings are called gnomes, and the earth is home to numerous species of them, where they live where stone meets metal. They used to be very useful to humans in ancient mining, not in coal mining, but in metal mining. The way mines were laid out in ancient times, the knowledge of how the layers are deposited, was learned from these beings. And these beings knew the best-suited veins, knowing how the layers are arranged inside the earth, and could therefore give the best instructions on how to work them. If one does not want to work with spiritual beings and relies only on the senses, one ends up in a dead end. One must learn a certain procedure from these spiritual beings in order to explore the earth.

[ 9 ] Likewise, beings are embodied at the source. Where the stone touches the source, beings bound to the element of water are embodied: the undines. Where animals and plants touch, the sylphs are at work. The sylphs are bound to the element of air; they guide the bees to the flowers. Thus, we owe almost all useful knowledge of beekeeping to ancient traditions, and it is precisely in beekeeping that we can learn a great deal from them. For what exists today as science about bees is completely riddled with error, and the ancient wisdom that has been passed down through tradition is only confused by it. Science proves to be useless here. Only the old techniques, whose origins are unknown, are useful, because in those days people used the spiritual world as a guide.

[ 10 ] People today are also familiar with salamanders, for when someone says, “Something is flowing toward me, I don't know where from,” it is usually the effect of salamanders.

[ 11 ] When humans enter into intimate contact with animals, as a shepherd does with his sheep, they receive knowledge whispered to them by beings living in their environment. The shepherd's knowledge about his flock was whispered to him by the salamanders in his environment. This ancient knowledge has been lost today and must now be regained through well-proven occult insights.

[ 12 ] If we take these thoughts further, we will have to say to ourselves: We are completely surrounded by spiritual beings! We walk through the air, and it is not just a chemical substance, but every breath of wind, every air current is the revelation of spiritual beings. We are surrounded and completely permeated by these spiritual beings, and in the future, if humans are not to experience a very sad, life-drying fate, they must have knowledge of what lives around them. Without this knowledge, they will not be able to progress. Humans must ask themselves: Where do these beings come from? Where do these beings originate?

[ 13 ] This question leads us to an important insight, and in order to form an opinion about it, we must realize how certain facts unfold in higher worlds, where through certain things that which is harmful and evil is transformed into good through wise guidance. Take, for example, waste, fertilizer: it is what has been discarded and, through wise use, acts in the economy as a basis for later plant germination. Things that appear to have fallen away from higher development are taken up again by higher forces and transformed. This is particularly evident in the beings we have been talking about, and we recognize this to a very special degree when we investigate the origin of these beings.

[ 14 ] How do salamander beings come into being? Let us now examine this question. Salamanders are beings that need a certain relationship between humans and animals. Animals do not have an ego like humans do. Such an ego exists only in humans on Earth today. These human egos are such that every human being has an ego enclosed within themselves. It is different with animals: animals have a group ego, a group soul. What does that mean? A group of animals of the same kind and shape has a common ego; for example, all individual lions have a common ego, all tigers, all pike.

[ 15 ] Animals have their ego in the astral world. It is like a human being standing behind a wall with ten holes and sticking his ten fingers through them. The human being cannot be seen, but anyone with common sense would conclude that there is a central power behind the wall that belongs to the ten fingers. So it is with the group ego. The individual animals are merely the limbs. What they belong to is in the astral world. These animal egos are not human-like, although, spiritually speaking, they can be compared to each other, for an animal group ego is a very, very wise being. The human being as an individual soul is not nearly as wise. Let us think, for example, of certain species of birds: what wisdom lies in their flying at very specific altitudes and in very specific directions in order to escape winter and return by other routes in spring. In this flight of birds, we recognize the wise forces of the group egos. We can find them everywhere in the animal kingdom.

[ 16 ] People are very narrow-minded when it comes to recording human progress. Let us remember our school lessons, where we learned how the current era gradually emerged in the Middle Ages. The Middle Ages certainly had significant achievements, such as the discovery of America, the invention of gunpowder, the art of printing, and finally, linen paper. It was certainly a significant advance that this product was used instead of parchment, but the wasp group soul had already done the same thing thousands of years ago, because the wasp nest is made of exactly the same material as the paper produced by humans; it consists of paper.

[ 17 ] Man will only gradually discover how certain combinations of his mind are connected with what the group souls have worked into the world.

[ 18 ] The group souls are in constant motion. The seer sees a constant flickering along the spine of animals. The spine is as if enclosed by flickering light. The animals are permeated by currents that go around the whole earth in all directions in infinite numbers, like the trade winds, and which act on the animals by flowing around the spinal cord. These animal group souls are constantly in circular motion at every height and in every direction around the earth. These group souls are very wise, but they lack one thing that they do not yet have: they do not know love as it is called on earth. Love is only connected with wisdom in individuality in human beings.

[ 19 ] The group soul is wise, but the individual animal has love as sexual love and parental love. Love is individual in animals, but the wise institution, the wisdom of the group ego, is still devoid of love. Humans have united love and wisdom; animals have love in their physical life and wisdom on the astral plane. Such insights will open up an immense amount of light for humans.

[ 20 ] Now, humans have only gradually arrived at their present self. Humans used to have a group soul, and only gradually did the individual soul develop. Let us trace the development of humanity backwards to ancient Atlantis. Humans used to live in ancient Atlantis, a continent that is now covered by the Atlantic Ocean. At that time, the vast Siberian plains were covered by large seas. The Mediterranean Sea was distributed quite differently then. There were also vast expanses of sea in our European regions. The further back we go in ancient Atlantean times, the more all conditions of life change, and the more the waking and sleeping states of human beings change.

[ 21 ] When humans sleep now, the physical body remains in bed with the etheric body; the astral body and the ego leave. Consciousness darkens, everything becomes dark, gloomy, silent. In the Atlantean era, the difference between sleeping and waking was not yet so great. When awake, humans did not yet see such fixed boundaries, such sharp outlines, such strong colors clinging to objects. When they woke up in the morning, they were immersed in a mass of fog. There was no greater clarity than when we see lights through fog with an aura, for example. But their consciousness did not cease completely during sleep; they could see spiritual things.

[ 22 ] As humans progressed, the physical world became more and more defined, but humans lost their clairvoyance. Then the difference became greater and greater: above, in the spiritual world, it became darker and darker, while below, in the physical world, it became lighter and lighter. All myths and legends originate from the time when humans still perceived the astral world above. When they ascended to the spiritual world, they met Wotan, Baldur, Thor, Loki, and other beings who had not yet descended to the physical plane. This was experienced in the past, and all myths are memories of living realities.

[ 23 ] All mythologies are such memories. These spiritual realities have simply disappeared from human consciousness. When people descended into their physical bodies in the morning, they had the feeling that they were individuals, unique beings. But when they returned to the spiritual world in the evening, they had the feeling that they were not individuals at all, but only links in a great chain, belonging to a great community.

[ 24 ] Tacitus also recounts that the ancient peoples, the Heruli and the Cherusci, felt themselves to be more of a tribe than individual human beings. Certain customs, such as blood feuds, also stem from this feeling that the individual belonged to the tribal group and considered himself part of the tribal community. Everything that belonged to the soul of the entire tribal group was one body. Everything happens gradually in development. It was only gradually that individual consciousness developed out of this absolute tribal group consciousness.

[ 25 ] In the descriptions of the patriarchal age, we also find traces of the transition from the group soul to the individual soul. In the time before Noah, memory was completely different: it extended back beyond what the father, grandfather, and great-grandfather had experienced. The boundary of birth was not a boundary. The same memory flowed in the same blood, reaching back to distant generations. Today, the authorities are interested in knowing the name of the individual. In the time when people remembered what their father and grandfather had done, this was recorded under a common name. What was connected at that time by the same blood and the same memory was given a common name. It was called “Adam” or “Noah.” Names like Adam and Noah do not describe the life between the birth and death of an individual, but the stream of memories as far as it reached. The old names encompass entire communities of people who lived out their lives in that time.

[ 26 ] What happens when we compare certain beings: the human-like apes with humans? The huge difference is that apes have a group soul and humans have an individual soul, or at least the potential to develop one. The group soul of the apes is in a very special situation (drawing). Let us imagine the Earth (see drawing, the horizontal line). Above it, in the astral world, float the group souls of animals, which spread out over our physical world like a cloud. Now let us take the lion group ego and the monkey group ego. Each lion is an individual member into which the group soul pours a part of its substance. When a lion dies, the outer physical body falls away from the group soul, like a fingernail in humans. The group soul then takes back what it had sent in and gives it to another lion that is newly born. The group soul remains above. It extends tentacles, as it were, which harden in the physical world, then fall off and are replaced.

[ 27 ] Therefore, the animal group soul does not know birth and death. The individual animal is something that falls away and grows; the group soul remains untouched by life and death. For lions, it is certainly true that every time a lion dies, everything that was sent out from the group soul returns to the group soul. However, this is not the case with monkeys. There are individual animals that tear something away from the group soul, which then cannot return. When the monkey dies, the essential part returns, but a part of the group soul is cut off. The monkey, as it were, holds on too tightly to what is put forward, and when it dies, a part of the group soul is cut off, so that a piece of it breaks away, so to speak, tears itself away and cannot return. This is how severances from the group soul arise. Severances from the group soul arise in all species of monkeys.

[ 28 ] We see something similar in certain amphibians, in certain species of birds, and particularly clearly in kangaroos. Through these severances, something remains of the group soul, and what remains of warm-blooded animals in this way becomes an elemental being, a nature spirit — the salamander. These elemental beings, these nature spirits, are thus, as it were, waste products of higher worlds, which are put into service by higher beings. Left to themselves, they would disturb the cosmos. For example, higher wisdom uses the sylphs to guide bees to flowers. In this way, the great army of elemental beings is placed under higher wise guidance, and the harm they could cause is transformed into something useful.

[ 29 ] This is how things are in the realms below man. However, it can also happen that man himself cuts himself off from his group soul and, as an individual soul, finds no way to develop further. For while he was guided and directed by higher beings as a member of his group soul, he is then left to his own devices. If man does not acquire the appropriate spiritual knowledge, he is in danger of cutting himself off. That is the question that arises.

[ 30 ] What is it that protects human beings from cutting themselves off, from wandering around without direction or goal, whereas in the past the spiritual group soul gave them direction? We must be clear that human beings are becoming increasingly individualized and that in the future they will increasingly have to find voluntary union with other human beings. In the past, the connection existed through blood ties, through tribes and races. But this union is increasingly coming to an end. Everything in human beings is increasingly moving toward becoming an individual human being. Now only the opposite path is possible. Imagine a number of people on earth who say to themselves: We will go our own ways, we want to find the direction and goal of the path within ourselves, we are all on the path to becoming more and more individual human beings. — Therein lies the danger of fragmentation. Nowadays, people can no longer tolerate even spiritual unions. Today we have gone so far that everyone has their own religion and holds their own opinion as the highest ideal. But when people internalize ideals, this leads to unity, to a common opinion. For example, we recognize inwardly that 3 times 3 = 9, or that three angles in a triangle add up to 180 degrees. This is an inner realization. There is no need to vote on inner insights; they do not give rise to differences of opinion, but lead to unity. All spiritual truths are of this nature. What spiritual science teaches, human beings discover through their inner powers. These lead them to absolute unity, peace, and harmony. There cannot be two opinions about a truth without one of them being false. The ideal is the greatest possible internalization; it leads to unity and peace.

[ 31 ] At first, there was a group soul of humanity. Then, in the past, humanity was released from the group soul. But in the future course of evolution, human beings must set themselves a clear goal toward which to strive. When human beings unite in a higher wisdom, a group soul will descend once more from the higher worlds—when free communities arise from the bound natural communities. What is desired by the leaders of the spiritual science movement is that we find within it a society in which hearts flow toward wisdom, just as plants flow toward sunlight. Where communal truth unites the various “I’s,” there we give the higher group soul the opportunity to descend. By turning our hearts together toward a higher wisdom, we embed the group soul. We form, so to speak, the bed, the environment in which the group soul can incarnate. Human beings will enrich earthly life by developing something that allows spiritual beings to descend from higher worlds. That is the goal of the spiritual science movement.

[ 32 ] This has been presented to humanity in a magnificent, powerful form to show that without this spiritual ideal, human beings would pass into a different relationship: it is a symbol that can show human beings with overwhelming power how humanity can find the way to offer the common spirit a place of embodiment in spiritual union. This symbol was presented to us in the Pentecostal community, when a number of people who had gathered for a common purpose were filled with a fervent feeling of love and devotion. There are a number of people whose souls are still reverberating from the earth-shattering event, so that the same thing lived in all of them. In the confluence of this one, same feeling, they provided that in which something higher, a common soul, could be embodied. This is expressed in those words which say that the Holy Spirit, the group soul, descended and divided itself like tongues of fire. This is the great symbol for the humanity of the future.

[ 33 ] Had human beings not found this connection, they would have degenerated into elemental beings. Now humanity must seek a place for the beings from higher worlds who are descending. In the Easter event, humans were given the power to take such powerful ideas into themselves and strive toward a spirit. Pentecost is the fruit of the unfolding of this power.

[ 34 ] Through the gathering of souls to the common wisdom, what establishes a living relationship to the forces and beings of higher worlds and to something that now has so little meaning for humanity as the Feast of Pentecost should always be accomplished. Through spiritual science, it will become something again for human beings. When people come to know what the descent of the Holy Spirit will mean for them in the future, then the feast of Pentecost will come alive again. It will then not only be a memory of that event in Jerusalem, but the everlasting Pentecost of spiritual striving will come into being for humanity. It will become a symbol of the great Pentecost community of the future, when humanity will come together in a common truth to give higher beings the opportunity to incarnate. It will depend on human beings themselves how valuable this will make the earth for the future and how effective such ideals can be for humanity. If humanity strives toward wisdom in this right way, then higher spirits will connect with people.