Preliminary stages to the Mystery of Golgotha

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Approaching the Mystery of Golgotha (Lit.:GA 152), we find three preliminary stages of the Mystery of Golgotha that the Christ went through before descending to earthly existence with the baptism in the Jordan. Man had been driven into the Fall of Man by a spiritual being that far surpassed man, by Lucifer, and only a superhuman deed could make up for its consequences. Therefore, the Christ decided to leave his solar home and connect with the earth through a human being. But this had to be prepared step by step.

Christ and the Nathanian Jesus Boy

Not the whole human being had suffered the fall into the depths of the earth, but a part of the divine human being, the sister soul of Adam, had been retained in the spiritual worlds and lived here as an archangel-like or angel-like spiritual being, which, however, kept close contact with earthly humanity, with which it had been connected since the time of the Old Saturn. It was only much later that this being was to incarnate on earth for the very first time as the Nathanian Jesus boy.

„This being, which worked in the Nathanian Jesus boy, had for the first time entered into a physical embodiment in the Jesus of Bethlehem. Before that it had taken part in the development of humanity from the spiritual world, but had never lived in a physical human body. It had lived through the times when the human shells were created, through the Saturnian period when the germ of the physical body was formed, through the solar and lunar periods when the etheric and astral bodies were formed, and through the smaller stages which repeated the great periods of time. But when the human I, in Lemurian times, descended into the three sheaths, this being, as it were, remained in the spiritual worlds as a part of the divine human being and did not take part in the development of the I in the three sheaths and its temptation by the Luciferic-Ahrimanic influence. This part of the divine human being, this spiritual being, which had held itself back in the spiritual worlds, descended for the first time into a physical body as the Nathanian Jesus boy, in order to be illuminated by the Christ. The baptism of John represents the penetration of Jesus by the Christ-Spirit.

But this was not the first time that he allowed himself to be penetrated by the Christ. While he lived as a spiritual being in the spiritual worlds, he had already been able to let himself be penetrated repeatedly by the Spirit of the Sun. Preparatory to the Christ-event in the physical body, similar things had previously taken place in spiritual worlds and had had an effect on human development.“ (Lit.:GA 152, p. 93f)

„That is the essential thing about the Mystery of Golgotha, that this Jesus Being, which grew up as the Nathanian boy, was permeated by the Christ Being. But this later Nathanian Jesus being was also present in the three earlier events, only it was not incarnated as a physical human being. It lived as a spiritual, archangel-like entity in the spiritual worlds. And in the spiritual worlds, as in preliminary stages of the Mystery of Golgotha during the Lemurian time and twice during the Atlantean time, it has been permeated by the Christ Being.“ (Lit.:GA 152, p. 102)

„This I thus had very special peculiarities; it had the peculiarity that it was untouched by anything that a human I had ever been able to learn on earth. It was also untouched by all Luciferic and Ahrimanic influences; it was something that we can imagine as an empty sphere in comparison with the other I's of human beings, actually only as something that was still completely virginal in relation to all earthly experiences, a nothing, a negative in relation to all earthly experiences. Therefore, it looked as if that Nathanian Jesus boy, whom the Gospel of Luke describes, had no human I at all, as if he consisted only of physical body, etheric body and astral body. And it is quite sufficient to say first of all: such a developed I as had developed through the Atlantean and post-Atlantean times is not at all present in the Jesus boy of Luke. We speak in the right sense of the word when we say that in the case of the boy of Matthew we have to do with a fully developed human being; in the case of the Nathanian Jesus boy of Luke's Gospel we have to do with a physical body, etheric body and astral body which are so arranged that they harmoniously represent the human being as he came over as the result of the development of Saturn, Sun and Moon. Therefore, as the Akasha Chronicle teaches, this Jesus boy was not gifted for everything that human culture had developed; he could not absorb it because he had never been there.“ (Lit.:GA 131, p. 179f)

The first Christ sacrifice

In the meantime, the 12 cosmic forces that regulate the sensory activity were threatened by the Luciferic influence to become more and more disordered. Monstrous desires joined the sensual activity, of which the 12 senses of the physical body are the tools, which threatened to awaken to ever greater intensity. The red colour, for example, would have been felt as an oppressive stabbing pain, the blue colour as a painful being sucked out. Then the call of tormented humanity penetrated to that spiritual being and drove it towards the Sun-Spirit, so that it was allowed to let itself be penetrated by the Christ. The human form straightened up and was thereby lifted out of the horizontal plane in which the astral desiring forces work. Thus the strength of the sensual activity was softened and harmonised. This happened in the Lemurian period.

„Let us remember what is shown in "Occult Science", how from Lemurian times onwards, with the exception of the one main pair of humanity, the souls gradually descend from the other planets and embody themselves in human bodies through the Atlantean period. So we have to think of the development of the earth in such a way that the souls move in from the cosmic surroundings of the earth and begin their renewed earthly development at different points in time, so to speak. We know that before the Lemurian period the souls had, so to speak, withdrawn to the planets. But we also know that this earthly development of the earth, into which the human souls had to enter, was exposed to the temptations of Lucifer and later of Ahriman. Thus the human souls were induced to enter into bodies within which they were exposed to the temptations of these two spiritual beings in the course of their earthly evolution. If nothing more than this had happened, that the human souls had come down again from their planetary existence into earth evolution and had then been exposed to the Luciferic-Ahrimanic influences, then something would have happened to these human beings on earth, as they pass through their incarnations, which I have not yet indicated in the "Occult Science". However, not everything can be said publicly at the present time. For at first, as these men came down from the planets and had to enter physical bodies, they would have been exposed to a certain danger to the development of the senses.“ (Lit.:GA 149, p. 46f)

„Let us look back to the Lemurian time, when man united with his shells, and see how the human being would have been formed at that time, if only the forces from the cosmos had acted upon man, with which he was in connection at that time. At that time there was a threat that the twelve cosmic forces which had an effect on man would become disordered through demonic beings. As a result, man would have had to develop in a completely different way than he has become today. The senses of man, which developed at that time, would have become over-sensitive under the influence of the forces that wanted to get into disorder. Today man is able to receive the sensation of light, all perception, with serenity. Under the effect of the luciferic-ahrimanic influence, the sensual life would have had to release the strongest desires and impulses. If, for example, man had seen a red colour - and the rays of the sun should have had this effect above all - the desiring soul would have had to flee in burning pain, and on perceiving blue it would have had to overcome itself in torment, consuming itself. The soul would have had to suffer terribly at every sensation, chased by animal lust and desire to searing pain and agony.

Then the cry of pain of tormented humanity went up to that spiritual being. It drove it towards the Sun-Spirit, so that it was allowed to let itself be penetrated by the Christ. This softened the inner strength of the senses, and the being repelled the strongest temptation of Lucifer and Ahriman. By softening the too strong effect of the forces on the senses, it transformed the life of perception into a moderate passive one.“ (Lit.:GA 152, p. 94)

„And we look rightly at a developing human child when, at the moment when the child rises from its crawling, slipping, unhelpful state and stands or walks for the first time, we say at that moment: Rightly and for the salvation of humanity this can only happen for the reason that in the old Lemurian time the first Christ-event took place, because he who as Nathanian Jesus interpenetrated himself with the Christ, at that time in the Lemurian time assumed human-etheric form as a spiritual-etheric being through interpenetration with the Christ.“ (Lit.:GA 152, p. 106f)

The second Christ sacrifice

A second danger threatened humanity in the first Atlantean time through Lucifer and Ahriman together. The life forces, whose tool is the etheric body, threatened to develop abnormally, so that man would have felt a burning greed instead of hunger, or would have been shaken by immoderate disgust towards food that was not suitable for him. Breathing would also have been particularly sensitive; bad air would have filled man with ghastly disgust. A hyper-sensitivity of the life forces would have arisen. Again, this could only be prevented by the Christ uniting with that spiritual being who was later to descend to earth for the first time as the Nathanian Jesus boy. This also made human speech possible; otherwise man would only have been able to produce babbling animal sounds filled with urges. Through the act of Christ, he was enabled to use not only tones or interjections. Above all, the clear vowels now stood out. He was able to separate the sounds from his merely subjective feeling and thus confront it more objectively.

„And let's go further into the Atlantic period. A new danger hovered over man: The Luciferic-Ahrimanic influence threatened the vital functions, the vital organs of man. If, for example, food had stood before man, animal greed would have awakened to devour it. His soul would have been all greed. Breathing would have been particularly sensitive, breathing in and breathing out. Bad air would have filled man with shuddering disgust. Everything connected with the functions of nourishment and life caused a tremendous incitement of sympathy and antipathy, drove the soul from devouring greed to repulsive disgust.

And again it was that spiritual being who averted this danger for man. For a second time it allowed itself to be permeated with the Christ-spirit and thereby saved man's vital forces, which would otherwise have fallen into disorder.“ (Lit.:GA 152, p. 94f)

„Through the Luciferic and Ahrimanic influence everything would have become ignoble in speech if man had only been left to the earth, if cosmic-spiritual influences which came down to earth had not poured into man. Man would have developed his whole culture of life in this way, all his bodily organs, larynx, tongue, pharynx and so on, yes, even the deeper organs such as the heart and so on, in so far as they are connected with it, man would have developed them in this way in the Atlantean time, if nothing had happened through the Christ, that man would only have been able to express in poor babbling - for instance, in the manner of sibyls or mediums - that which causes him egoistic pain, joy, pleasure, lust. Man would indeed be able to produce much more artificial sounds than the animal, but in his sounds he would only have found expressions for that which lives within him. He would have found the living words of feeling for that which takes place in the organism as bodily processes. The whole language would have become a sum of interjections. While we are now compressing our words of feeling to a small measure, the art of human speech would have been developed with all its complexity only into interjections. The disorder in this power of speech - in so far as this disorder expresses the inner being of man - was averted by the second Christ-event, by the fact that this being in the etheric plane, which later became the Nathanian Jesus boy, permeated itself for the second time with the Christ-being, and that it assumed such a being that now permeated the bodily organs of man in such a way that man now became capable of uttering something other than mere interjections. That he became capable of grasping the objective was made possible by the second Christ-event.“ (Lit.:GA 152, p. 108f)

The third Christ sacrifice

And still a third danger threatened humanity towards the end of the Atlantean development. The three soul forces of thinking, feeling and willing, which are active in the astral body, were to be brought into disorder by Lucifer and Ahriman and mixed together in an inharmonious way. Again, this was prevented by the Christ penetrating that angel-like spiritual being.

„And at the end of the Atlantean time, a third danger arose for the human being through the Luciferic and Ahrimanic influence. There was a danger that the human soul forces, thinking, feeling and willing, would become disordered, in disharmony with each other, that the three forces could no longer properly harmonise in the human soul. Inflamed with passion, man would have followed every impulse or fled, filled with fear and hatred, without reason being able to regulate the forces. How did the spiritual being bring help? The spiritual being had to submerge itself in the passion-filled human soul, had to become passion itself, had to become a dragon in order to transform the soul's powers, and allow itself to be illuminated a third time by the Christ-Spirit.“ (Lit.:GA 152, p. 95)

„In an angel-like being the Christ "beatified" himself. If in the case of Christ we say that he embodied himself in Jesus of Nazareth, we now say of this event which passed away in the spiritual worlds: the Christ "beatified" himself in an angelic being which so works that thinking, feeling and willing run in order. This was an important event, for it was still a recent one for the evolution of humanity: it brought the evolution of the soul of humanity into order. Whereas the two earlier Christ-events had set in order the physical and life-related condition of humanity on earth, what had to happen in the supramundane worlds for this third fact? [...]

Up there in the cosmos, what was happening? Well, something had to be expelled that would have roiled chaotically in the human soul; that had to be overcome. The angel-like being, permeated by the Christ, had to do the deed of pushing out of the human soul what had to come out of this human soul, so that harmony and order could exist in thinking, feeling and willing. What had to be defeated in the human soul was that which would have produced chaos and disorder in it; it had to be pushed out. And so the image appears to us - let us place it vividly before our soul's eye - the image of an angelic being, that being which is still in the spiritual worlds, which later becomes the Jesus boy, the Nathanian Jesus boy: It appears to us to be imbued with the Christ-being, and thus capable of special deeds, capable of pushing out of thought, feeling and will that which rages in it as the dragon and would have brought it into chaos. The memory of this prevails in all the images that have asserted themselves in human cultures as Saint George defeating the dragon. St. George with the dragon mirrors that supernatural event where the Christ penetrated Jesus and made him able to cast out the dragon from the human soul nature. This was a significant deed which was only made possible by the help of the Christ in Jesus, in this angel-like being of that time. For this angel-like being actually had to unite with the dragon nature, had to take on the form of a dragon, as it were, in order to keep the dragon away from the human soul, had to work in the dragon so that the dragon was ennobled, so that the dragon was brought out of chaos into a kind of harmony. The education, the taming of the dragon, that is the further task of this being. And so it came about that the dragon was effective, but because the effect emanating from the being described was poured into it, this dragon became the bearer of many revelations which have asserted themselves in the earthly cultures of the whole post-Atlantean development. Instead of the chaos of the dragon appearing in raging or benighted men, the primeval wisdom of the post-Atlantean time has appeared. The Christ Jesus used the blood of the dragon, as it were, to penetrate the blood of man with his help, so that man would become the bearer of divine wisdom. In the reflection of Greek mythology, we encounter this in a significant way, from the ninth century before Christ onwards also in an exoteric way.

It is strange how, for the Greek conception, a figure of the gods grows out of the other figures of the gods [...] In a strange way, the figure of Apollo grew out [...] Apollo is the angelic being of whom we have spoken: a shadow, a projection into the Greek mind of the angelic being who in reality worked at the end of the Atlantean time, who was inspired by the Christ. The projection, the shadowing into the Greek mind of the angel who was inspired by the Christ is Apollo, who speaks wisdom to the Greeks through the mouth of Pythia. And what was contained in this Apollo wisdom for the Greeks! In a manner of speaking, everything that determined them to take this or that measure in the most important matters. Again and again they went to Apollo in difficult matters of life, well prepared in soul, and had their prophecies told by the mouth of Pythia, who was stimulated by the vapours in which Apollo lived. And Asclepius, the healer, is the son of Apollo for the Greeks. The god of healing is Apollo: "healer". The attenuation of that angel in whom the Christ once was is a healer on earth, or a healer for the earth. For Apollo was never a physically embodied figure, but worked through the earth elements.

And the god of the Muses, above all the god of song and the musical arts, is Apollo. Why is he this? Because through that which is active in singing and playing the strings, he brings order to the otherwise disorderly interaction of thinking, feeling and willing. We must always keep in mind that this is a projection of what happened at the end of the Atlantean era. There, from spiritual heights, something did indeed still have an effect on the human soul, which resounded in a faint echo in the musical art which the Greeks cultivated under the protection of the god Apollo. The Greeks were aware that their musical art was, as it were, the earthly reflection of that ancient art which, in heavenly heights, cultivated the angelic being interspersed with the Christ for the harmonisation of thinking, feeling and willing.“ (Lit.:GA 149, p. 54ff)

Language also underwent a further development and only now became a sign for the external world - and thus an external means of communication. The consonants now emerged and imitated the external natural forms through their inner formative power. The comprehension of the world, which initially took place directly and practically with the hands, could now increase to a comprehension through language. Language was, as it were, inwardly seized by thinking, without this thinking as such already coming to people's consciousness, but it worked in language.

„Through the second Christ-event it might well have happened that man would not only have found tones, interjections, words of feeling for his inner being, but that he would have been able in a certain way to release what he had called forth as an inner movement of language. But to designate outer things by words, so that words could be correct signs for outer things, that was still endangered by the Luciferic and Ahrimanic influences right into the Atlantean time. Then the third Christ-event happened. For the third time the Being in the spiritual heights, which was later born as the Nathanian Jesus, united with the Christ Being, and again poured itself into the human faculty of speech with the powers it had now assumed. The power of this Christ-Jesus entity now penetrated organs in the human body a second time, in so far as these organs are expressed in the power of speech. Thus the power of speech was given the possibility of creating real signs with words for that which is outer environment, and thus of creating language as a means of communication over the individual areas of humanity. The child could never learn to speak if these two Christ-events had not occurred in the Atlantean time. And we again enrich our feeling through spiritual science when, as the child begins to speak and becomes more and more perfect in speech, we consider how the Christ-impulses rule within the unconscious, how the Christ-power lives in the power of speech, protecting and promoting it.“ (Lit.:GA 152, p. 109f)

In the moderation of sensual activity and of the life forces, which are much more attenuated than those of the animals, and in the balance of our soul life, we can at any time behold the effects of the Christ, which he sent into humanity before he had even descended to earth.

The Mystery of Golgotha as the fourth sacrifice of Christ

„But this whole event, which we then call together with the crucifixion and resurrection the Mystery of Golgotha, follows on from three others. It is, so to speak, the provisional final completion of the other three. One of these other events already took place in ancient Lemurian times, of the other two, one more at the beginning, the other more towards the end of Atlantean times. Only these first three events did not take place on the physical plane, but in the spiritual worlds. We have to look, as it were, soul-wise, at four events, the last of which - the one with which we have so far preferably concerned ourselves, and which we call the Mystery of Golgotha - took place on the physical plane, while the other three were like preparatory events in the spiritual worlds.“ (Lit.:GA 148, p. 191)

Fourthly, the human I itself was in danger of becoming disordered through the influence of the adversaries. Since the development of the I is at first only possible in the physical body, the Christ had to incarnate in a human body at the turn of the times in order to counteract this danger. Here on earth, the Christ passed through the Mystery of Golgotha with the death of the cross.

Literature
References to the work of Rudolf Steiner follow Rudolf Steiner's Collected Works (CW or GA), Rudolf Steiner Verlag, Dornach/Switzerland, unless otherwise stated.
Email: verlag@steinerverlag.com URL: www.steinerverlag.com.
Index to the Complete Works of Rudolf Steiner - Aelzina Books
A complete list by Volume Number and a full list of known English translations you may also find at Rudolf Steiner's Collected Works
Rudolf Steiner Archive - The largest online collection of Rudolf Steiner's books, lectures and articles in English.
Rudolf Steiner Audio - Recorded and Read by Dale Brunsvold
steinerbooks.org - Anthroposophic Press Inc. (USA)
Rudolf Steiner Handbook - Christian Karl's proven standard work for orientation in Rudolf Steiner's Collected Works for free download as PDF.
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