The Spiritual Guidance of Man and of Mankind

by Rudolf Steiner

To speak in this way about the Christ—how He is the leader of the higher hierarchies also in the successive worlds, is to teach the science which, under the title of modern esotericism, has endured into our civilization since the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and which, as has been shown, had from that time become necessary. If from this aspect we observe more closely the Being Who lived in Palestine, and Who consummated the Mystery of Golgotha, then we find the following:

Up to the present time many ideas concerning the Christ have found expression. There was for instance the idea of certain Christian Gnostics in the first centuries, who said that the Christ Who lives in Palestine was not present in any physical body of flesh at all; that He had only an apparent body—an etheric body which had become physically visible; so that His death on the Cross had been no real death but only an apparent one, for the very reason that only an etheric body was present. Then we find the various disputes among those who professed Christianity, as for example, the well-known controversy between the Arians and Athenatians, etc., and the most varied explanations concerning what the Christ really was. And indeed right up to our own times people express and have expressed the most varied ideas concerning the Christ.

Now spiritual science must recognize in Christ not merely an earthly but also a cosmic Being. In a certain sense man is, taken as a whole, a cosmic being. He lives a twofold life—one in a physical body from birth to death, another in the spiritual worlds between death and a new birth. When he is incarnated in a physical body, he is living in dependence on the earth, because the physical body is restricted by the forces and conditions of existence belonging to the earth. A man, however, does not only take the substances and forces of the earth into himself, but is joined to the whole of the earth’s organism. When he has passed through the gate of death, he does not any longer belong to the forces of the earth; but it would be incorrect to imagine that he then belongs to no forces at all, for he is then connected with the forces of the solar system and the more distant star-systems. In this way, between death and a new birth, he lives in the domain of the cosmic, just as in the period between birth and death he lived in the domain of the earthly. From death to a new birth he belongs to the cosmos, as on the earth he belongs to the elements—Air, Water, and Earth. Accordingly, while he is passing through a life between death and a new birth, he comes into the region of cosmic influences, for the planets send forth not merely the physical forces of what astronomy teaches, such as gravitation and others, but also spiritual forces, and with these spiritual powers of the cosmos man is connected—each person in a special manner according to his own individuality. If he is born in Europe, he lives in a different relation to warmth conditions, etc., than if he had been born, let us say, in Australia. Similarly, during his life between death and a new birth, one person may stand more closely related to the spiritual powers of Mars, another to those of Jupiter, others again to those of the whole planetary system in general, and so on. It is also these forces which bring man back again to the earth. Thus before he is born he is living in connection with the collective whole of stellar space.

According to the way in which a man stands individually related to the cosmic system, so are the forces directed which lead him to this or that set of parents and to this or that locality. The impetus, the inclination to incarnate here or there, in this or that family, in this or that people, at this or that time, depends on how the person was organically connected with the cosmic before birth. In former times, in that territory where the German tongue was spoken, a specially apt expression was used whereby to indicate a person’s entrance into the world through birth. When a person was born, people said that in such and such a place he had “become young” (jung-geworden). Therein lies an unconscious reference to the fact that man in the time between death and a new birth continues at first to be subject to the powers which had made him old in a previous incarnation, but that before birth there come in their place such forces as again make him “young.” Thus Goethe in “Faust” still uses the expression “to become young in Nebelland”—Nebelland being the old name for mediæval Germany.

The truth underlying the casting of a horoscope is that those who know these things can read the forces which determine a person’s physical existence. A certain horoscope is allotted to a person because, within it, those forces find expression which have led him into being. If, for example, in the horoscope, Mars stands over Aries (the Ram) that signifies that certain of the Aries forces are not allowed to pass through Mars—and are weakened. Thus is a man put into his place within physical existence, and it is in accordance with his horoscope that he guides himself before entering upon earthly existence. This subject, which in our times seems so much a thing of chance should not be touched upon without our attention being called to the fact that nearly everything practiced in this connection to-day is simply dilettantism—a pure superstition—and that for the external world the true science of these matters has been for the most part completely lost. Consequently, the principal things which have been said here are not to be judged according to that which nowadays frequently leads a questionable existence under the name of Astrology.

Now it is the active forces of the stellar world that impel man into physical incarnation; and when clairvoyant consciousness observes a person, it can perceive in his organization how this has resulted from the co-operation of cosmic forces. We may now attempt to illustrate this hypothetically, but in a form corresponding entirely with clairvoyant observations: If a person’s physical brain were extracted and its construction clairvoyantly examined, so that it might be seen how certain parts are situated in certain places, and send out appendages, it would be found that the brain of each individual is different. No two people have brains alike. Then let us imagine further that this brain could be photographed in its complete structure so that one would have a kind of half-sphere in which every detail was visible, then this would make a different picture in the case of each person. And if one were to photograph a person’s brain at the moment of birth and then photograph also the heavens lying exactly over the person’s birthplace, then this latter picture would be of exactly the same appearance as that of the human brain.

As certain centres were arranged in the latter, so would the stars be in the photograph of the heavens. Man has within himself a picture of the heavens, and every man has a different one, according to whether he was born in this place or that, and at this or that time. This is one indication that man is born from out of the whole cosmos.

When we keep this clearly in view we can rise to the idea of how the macrocosm manifests itself in each separate individual, and then, starting from this point, we can attain a conception of how it showed itself in the Christ. But if we were to imagine the Christ after the Baptism of John as though the macrocosm had then been living in Him in the same way as in other people, we should be mistaken.

Let us first consider Jesus of Nazareth: His conditions of existence were quite exceptional. At the beginning of our era two boys were born and named Jesus. The one came through the Nathan line of the house of David, and the other through the Solomon line of the same house. These two children were not born quite at the same time, but nearly so. In the Jesus descended from Solomon, Who is described in the Gospel of St. Matthew, there was incarnated the same individuality who had formerly lived on the earth as Zarathustra, so that in this Child Jesus there appears the reincarnated Zarathustra or Zoroaster. The individuality of Zarathustra grew up in this Child until, as St. Matthew says, His twelfth year. In that year, Zarathustra left the body of this Child and passed over into that of the other Child Jesus Whom the Gospel of St. Luke describes. In consequence of this the latter child became suddenly quite different. The parents were astonished when they found Him in Jerusalem in the temple after the spirit of Zarathustra had entered into Him. This is intimated when it is said that the Child after having been lost and found again in the temple, so spake that his parents did not recognize Him. They only knew Him—the Child descended from Nathan as He had been before up to this time. But when He began to reason with the doctors in the temple, it was possible for Him to speak as He did because the spirit of Zarathustra had come into Him. Until the thirtieth year did the spirit of Zarathustra live in the Jesus who was descended from the Nathan line of the house of David. In this body He ripened to a still higher perfection. The remark must here be added that as regards this personality in which the spirit of Zarathustra now lived, an extraordinary feature was, that from the spiritual worlds the Buddha rayed forth his impulses into its astral body.