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An Outline of Occult Science by Rudolf Steiner

IV. THE EVOLUTION OF THE WORLD AND MAN

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The third era of post-Atlantean civilization began among the peoples who finally gathered together in western Asia and northern Africa after the migrations. This civilization was developed among the Chaldeans, Babylonians, and Assyrians on the one hand, and among the Egyptians on the other. In these peoples the taste for the physical world of sense developed in a different form from that which it had taken among the Persians. The former had acquired the quality of mind lying at the root of the faculty of thought which has arisen since Atlantean times, that is, the gift of reason. Indeed, it was the mission of post-Atlantean humanity to develop within itself those faculties of the soul which it was possible to acquire through the newly awakened powers of thought and feeling. These powers cannot be directly stimulated from the spiritual world, but result from man's observing the sense-world, becoming familiar with it, and working upon it. The conquest of the physical world of sense by these human faculties must be regarded as the mission of post-Atlantean humanity. Step by step that conquest proceeded. It is true that even in ancient India, man, through the condition of his soul, was already turned toward that world; but he still looked upon it as illusion, and his spirit turned to the supersensible world. In the Persian race, on the contrary, there sprang up the endeavour to conquer the physical world of sense, but the attempt was still largely made with those powers of the soul which had been left over as an inheritance from the time when man could still reach the spiritual world directly. Among the peoples of the third epoch of civilization, the soul had for the most part lost the supersensible faculties. It was obliged to seek manifestations of the spiritual in the surrounding world of sense, and to continue its development by discovering the means of civilization existing in that world. Men sought to investigate, through the physical world, the spiritual laws underlying it, and in this way human sciences arose. Human technical skill, artistic work, and their tools and means came about through the recognition and use of the forces of the physical world. To a man of the Chaldaic-Babylonian race the sense-world was no longer an illusion but a manifestation, in its different kingdoms, in mountains and seas, in air and water, of the spiritual activity of powers existing behind it, whose laws man was striving to learn.

To the Egyptian, the earth was a field of work, given to him in a condition which he must, by his own powers of intelligence, so transform that it should bear the impress of human power. From Atlantis, oracle-sanctuaries, originating chiefly from the Mercury oracle, had been transplanted to Egypt. Yet there were others as well,--for example, Venus oracles.

In that which was fostered, in their oracle-sanctuaries, among the Egyptian peoples, the germ of a new culture was planted. This germ proceeded from a great leader who had received his training in the Persian Zarathustra Mysteries, who was the reincarnated individuality of a disciple of the great Zarathustra himself. Let us call him "Hermes." Through acceptance of the Zarathustra Mysteries he was able to find the right way to guide the Egyptian people. This people had so turned its attention to the physical sense-world, during earthly life between birth and death that it was able only to a limited extent to directly behold the spiritual world behind the physical phenomena, although it recognized the spiritual laws of the world. Thus it could not think of the spiritual world as the one in which it could live while on earth, but on the other hand, it could be shown how man will live, in the disembodied state after death in the world of those spirits who, during earthly life, appear through their impressions upon the sense-world.