The Book of Revelation
Rudolf Steiner
An excerpt from lecture five (Dornach, 9 September 1924) in The Book of Revelation and the Work of the Priest, translated by J. Collis. Translation � Rudolf Steiner Press, London. The lecture has been reconstructed from notes taken by the participants, who were priests of the newly formed �Christian Community�.
�Human beings in different stages of consciousness do not see the world in the same way. That we as human beings are living in a process of transformation, a process of transformation of the human being and of our image of the world, is indicated in the Book of Revelation, among other things, by the way there is a relative similarity in the first four letters [to the Christian communities]. The first seal is opened and a white horse appears, one horse. The second seal is opened and a red horse appears, another horse. The third seal is opened and a black horse appears, yet another horse. The fourth seal is opened and a pale horse appears, again it is a horse. (Rev. 6) When the fifth seal is opened there is no longer any talk of a horse. The import of this letter is indicated in quite a different way. So as we proceed in our reading of the letters we find an indication of a fundamentally significant transformation that will take place in our own age.
There is only one thing to be said, which is that we must prepare ourselves to become the new, transformed congregation of Sardis [the fifth letter]. This new, transformed congregation of Sardis will have to understand that there is little value in knowing plants, animals and minerals unless one can find the stars working in every one of them. In the spiritual sense the stars must fall down from the heavens, and this can already be perceived.
Let me give you one specific example of this. People usually notice the external configuration of such things without taking much account of the way they fit into the whole spiritual evolution of humanity. Each one of us can only do something at the place where we find ourselves, and for me the following took place here just before my last trip to England. You know perhaps that when I am in Dornach I set aside one or two hours each week for the men working on the building he re when I talk to them about science and spiritual science during their working hours. The men like it very much if I get them to suggest the subject. They like choosing the subject themselves and among other things they want to know about today's spiritual life and culture. This is also something that you as priests will surely have to understand. Before I set off for England I had one of these sessions with the workmen, and one of them had prepared the question: What is the reason for some plants having fragrance and others not? Where does the fragrance of flowers come from? Well, these lectures have been going on for years and the workmen are by now sufficiently well primed not to put up with the usual chemical explanation about some substance or other being what spreads this or that perfume-you know what scientific explanations usually amount to: poverty comes from la pauvret�. No, these workmen are after real explanations. So here in brief is what I told them over the next hour or so.
Something that has fragrance first of all draws our attention to our sense organs; we perceive the fragrance through our organ of smell. We should then ask ourselves whether our sense of smell is subtle enough to allow us to work as a sniffer dog for the police. Of course you will agree that it is not. On the contrary, you will have to admit that we human beings have rather a blunt sense of smell, not a subtle one, and that as you go down the scale in nature you come to more sensitive organs of smell. Take the dog with an organ of smell so delicate that it can be trained as a sniffer dog Look at the way its forehead slopes backwards following along the continuation of the olfactory nerves which carry the scent into the very being of the dog. We human beings have a forehead that is puffed up.
Our intelligence apparatus is a transformed organ of smell, especially in its capacity for apperception. This alone makes it obvious that as we go down the scale to lower animals we come to more sensitive organs of smell.
Spiritual science teaches us that in their flowers and in the way they develop fragrance very many plants are nothing other than organs of smell, real vegetable organs of smell of immense sensitivity. What do they smell? They smell the cosmic fragrance that is always present. And the cosmic fragrance that emanates from Venus is different from that emanating from Mars or from Saturn. For example the fragrance of the violet is an echo-in-fragrance of what the violet perceives of the cosmic fragrance. Plants that smell nice perceive the cosmic fragrances that come from Venus, Mercury or Mars. Perula fetida perceives the smell of Saturn and passes it on in the asafetida derived from it.
This is something these people want to know, for in a sense they want to know how the stars fall down to earth. What, after all, are the beings in the world but what the stars send down? If you want to speak realistically about these things, you have to say: The stars really are falling down, for they are in the plants. It is not only the fragrance that is in them, but the plants themselves are actual organs of smell.
My first talk today was once again to the workmen, and I asked them to state the questions they wanted answered. One question was as follows: If what you said last time about fragrances is right, so that plants are sensitive organs of smell, where then do the plants' colours come from?
So I had to explain that the fragrances of the plants come from the planets, while the colours come from the power of the sun. I expanded on this, giving examples that show this to be the case. One member of the audience was not satisfied, asking why I had not mentioned the minerals, and why �were they also coloured.I can understand why the plants have colours, he said, and that a plant growing in the cellar without sunlight might have the right shape and fragrance but no colour �� why it would remain pale or even colourless from lack of sunlight. But what about minerals?
So I had to explain further. The sun has a daily course arising from one revolution of the earth in 24 hours. It also has an annual course that brings about the seasons during which it reaches the zenith and then falls back again. But there is another cycle as well, and I went on to explain the Platonic cosmic year. I explained how the sun now rises in Pisces at the vernal equinox, but that in former times it rose in Aries, and before that in Taurus, and then Gemini, and so on, taking 25,920 years to complete one cycle round the Zodiac. In this way the sun has a course that takes one day, another course that takes one year, and a further one lasting a whole cosmic year. Whereas it gives the plants their colours during the course that takes one year, the minerals need a cosmic year of the sun to gain their colours. In the colours of the minerals, in the green of the emerald, the wine-yellow of the topaz, the red of corundum, there lives a force that develops during the sun's cycle through the Platonic cosmic year.
So you see: If you take from the spirit what you have to say about the world, people begin to ask questions about earthly things in a way that shows they are no longer satisfied with attempts to explain the earth by means of the trivia emanating from our laboratories and dissecting rooms. They want to understand in the proper way, and are well satisfied to be shown things in the 'Sardian' way, that involves including the stars and their effects as well. In doing this one is doing what the apocalyptist does; one is bringing Sardis into our present time.
What I have been telling you is merely one example. We must begin to bring this sense for the stars, this sense for the beings of the stars into our present time. We must begin to help people understand anew that the Christ is a Sun Being. This is the fact that meets with the greatest opposition of all.
When I tell you these things, and especially when I tell you how our modern fifth post-Atlantean age must become, in a way, a re-awakened Sardis such as we find described briefly, concisely and marvellously in the fifth congregation and the fifth seal that must now be opened-when I tell you these things you will sense that it is our task today to develop this special way of understanding the Book of Revelation, namely that the Book of Revelation be a task that is knocking daily at the door of our heart. There is no point in merely interpreting the Book of Revelation. It is necessary that we do the Book of Revelation in all things, otherwise we might as well leave it alone. Merely to interpret it is almost valueless�
