FIFTEENTH LETTER - June 1945 The Nature of the Planetary World The Sun III In the last two letters we have spoken of the Sun and its activities in connection with the moment of birth. Now we will look at the Sun from the aspect of the prenatal development of the human being. We know that the embryonic development of a human being lasts about nine months. This time is differentiated, of course, in each individual case. If we take the time of nine months as an average, then we find that the Sun moves through three-quarters of the Zodiac, or through nine constellations, whereas it would go through the whole Zodiac if the embryonic state lasted a whole year. This is the reason for the fact that in each horoscope there are about three constellations through which the Sun has not passed during the prenatal evolution. They are those between the positions of the Sun at the time of conception and the time of birth. They are different constellations according to the birthday of the human being. For instance, if somebody is born on the 21st of June when the Sun enters the constellation of Twins, then we can assume that the Sun has not been in the constellations of Twins, Crab, and Lion, because it began its course nine months previously in the constellation of Virgin. If we could imagine ourselves placed upon the Sun, we would see the Earth in the opposite direction from that in which we observe the Sun from the Earth. For instance, if from the Earth we see the Sun entering the constellation of Twins, then from the Sun we should see the Earth entering the constellation of Archer. In one individual horoscope, all the constellations of the Zodiac are penetrated by the activity of the Sun except those three that we have mentioned above. However, in the middle of the embryonic development, from the standpoint of the Sun, we could see the Earth in those constellations. In Figure 1 below we see the path of the Sun during the nine months of an embryonic evolution. It starts in the constellation of Virgin and stands in Twins when the supposed birth takes place. Thus it leaves open Twins, Crab, and Lion. Figure 2 shows the path of the Earth at the same time. The Earth can be seen from the Sun in Twins, Crab, and Lion when the Sun itself is in Archer, Goat, and Waterman, i.e., during the middle period of the embryonic development. Therefore, those three constellations in the “open space” are particularly connected with the planet Earth and its special significance in the universe. It is the Earth onto which we as human beings have descended, and we will seek and perhaps find our task and where sorrow and joy are waiting for us. The three constellations in the “open space” of the prenatal horoscope indicate the nature of those Earth experiences that await the soul. We said that it is the position of the Earth which can be observed from the Sun in about the middle period of the embryonic development during the fourth, fifth, and sixth months. This period and the cosmic events that occur during it are a reflection of important stages in the life between the last death and the new birth. It is also a kind of forecast of the middle period of the coming life on Earth, especially the time between the 30th and 35th years. So far this appears to be entirely a matter of the Earth and the connection with the Sun seems to be only indirect. Yet, a deep mystery is hidden here concerning that which weaves spiritually between the Sun and the Earth. Since the Death on Golgotha, the Christ Being has united with the Earth and is the guiding spirit, the cosmic individuality, so to speak, of this planet. Christ descended to the Earth from cosmic heights and dwelled in the body of Jesus. The descent was observed by the initiates of the pre-Christian cultures. They knew that Christ was the Sun-Spirit, the Guide of the Sun Beings who descended in order to safeguard and embrace the evolution of the Earth. It was the fundamental deed that reaches far into the future, for through this event the present condition of our universe will change completely, and the Earth will become the “Sun” of a new universe. Thus the Earth is carried by the Spirit of the Sun, by the Christ Being, and when the soul goes through the sphere of the Sun in the life between death and new birth, it can no longer find the Christ Being in that realm. We can now imagine that as soon as the soul becomes penetrated by the desire to descend into a new incarnation on Earth, it looks down upon this Earth as the only place in the universe where, since the time of the Mystery of Golgotha, it can experience the Christ Being. This longing of the soul to descend to this place where Christ can be experienced finds its reflection in that part of the horoscope that we called the “open space”. We can read in it the impulses and decisions that the soul has taken on while it was still in the womb of the spiritual world. It shows how, out of experiences and failures in previous earthly lives, the soul wants to unite with the Earth in the great work of love in order to transform it into the shining garment of Christ. When the soul is then born on Earth and lives within a body, a veil of unconsciousness hides all these prenatal experiences. However, they are alive in the striving of the soul for the Truth, in the manifold ways in which destiny leads one until he or she finds the Truth and the Peace of the soul. We may never realize our own prenatal intentions and impulses, we may even betray them, but then we will realize after death where we have failed, and this knowledge will help us to build up the foundations of new incarnations on Earth in order to redeem our own past. The time may now have come when each one of us should strive for a conscious recognition of our own prenatal resolutions, and for this purpose we might be allowed to look at our own nativity, in this case especially at the “open space” and its background of spiritual events. In order to illustrate and elaborate that which has been said about this third aspect of the Sun, we will now consider a few nativities of historic personalities. In previous letters we have spoken about Thomas More who was born on the 7 February 1478. The Sun was then in the constellation of Waterman. His conception must have taken place about the beginning of May 1477. The Sun had then entered the constellation of Bull. Thus it happened that the Sun had not been in the constellation of Waterman (it had only entered it at the time of the birth), Fishes, and Ram. They constitute the “open space”. In this “open space” the planet Jupiter had made a loop in the transition from Fishes to Ram during Thomas More's embryonic development. If we had been able to witness from the Sun the descent of this soul into incarnation we should have seen at a certain moment — about the fifth month of his embryonic state — the Earth in Fishes and behind it the brilliant light of Jupiter. The Earth in Fishes is the constellation that illuminates Thomas More's striving for the recognition of the divinity in the earthly life, but we must also consider the constellations of Waterman and Ram. Thomas More appears, perhaps much against his own will, as a very strong figure in the social and political life of his age. Several times he was on the point of withdrawing completely from the political sphere and following a life of study and devotion, yet destiny brought him again and again to the political stage. When he was 37 years of age he wrote his Utopia, which made him famous. Then he expounded his views on how to create an ideal state, and he passes severe judgments on the corrupt social and cultural institutions of his time. Yet he based his ideal of a perfect state entirely on an absolute sovereignty of religion, even the sovereignty of the Church. Therefore, he experienced the essence of earthly existence in the sphere of the social life. He was a deeply religious and pious man. Still destiny urged him again and again to seek the experiences of the divine, not only in the peace of the soul but also in the face of humanity in the body social. It was the sphere where he searched for the presence and realization of the Sun-Spirit who had united Itself with the Earth through the Mystery of Golgotha. The Earth in the constellation of Fishes inherits the striving for the experience of the Sun-Spirit in the body of humanity, for it is the Christian realization of the Spirit-Man, which was created at the beginning of the evolution of the world (see 5th letter) and is working from beyond Fishes. This experience of the divine from the Earth in Fishes was further aided in Thomas More's life by the other two constellations in the “open space”, Ram and Waterman. The Ram gave him the power to realize the divine in humanity through purified thinking. We know that he was a humanist and a devoted scholar of Erasmus of Rotterdam. The aspect of the Earth in Waterman gave him the power to experience the Sun-Spirit of the Earth in his heart, which was open in kindness and love to all creatures in the universe. His learning was not a matter of formality, but connected with a deep reverence and devotion for the universe of the Creator. Another example of universal significance is Ralph Waldo Emerson. He was born on the 25 May 1803. The Sun was then in Bull. At the time of his conception it was in the constellation of Lion. Thus the “open space” comprises the constellations of Bull, Twins, Crab, and part of Lion, with Twins in the center. The Earth in Twins indicates a searching for the experience of the Sun-Spirit in the sphere of the ego, in the innermost soul life. And indeed we find this realized in Emerson's striving to such a degree that we can only look with deep admiration at this personality. At the age of 30, on his return from a voyage to Italy, France, Scotland, and England, he wrote: “A person contains all that is needful to its government within itself ...All real good or evil that can befall one must be from oneself... There is a correspondence between the human soul and everything that exists in the world; more properly, everything that is known. Instead of studying things without, the principles of all things may be penetrated from within oneself ...The purpose of life seems to be for one to become acquainted with oneself ...The highest revelation is that God is in every-one.” He then settled down at Concord and developed that which is usually called his Transcendentalism. However, in everything that came forth as his teaching, he revealed himself as a master of independence. “I wish to say what I feel and think today, with the proviso that tomorrow perhaps I shall contradict it all.” This is the experience of the Sun-Spirit within the human individuality or the Earth in Twins. (About Twins, see letters 3 and 5.) It was seconded by the Earth in Bull, which brought the experience of the presence of the divine in the manifoldness of created things. This appeared especially in the lectures and essays on Great Men in History and the Philosophy of History. But his inner attitude to history and to the great people in history revealed yet another experience of the Sun-Spirit. If we read his essays on Napoleon I, Swedenborg, and others, we soon will become more aware that he does not act like a critic or a judge but as the bearer of the chalice into which have flown the deeds, the achievements, and failures of those people. He was a true priest who carefully and devotedly bore the cup of human striving on Earth and offered it for transubstantiation to the divine spirit working in humanity. This is the searching for the Sun-Spirit who works from the Earth in Crab or Chalice. Count Leo Tolstoy was born on the 9 September 1828 n.s. [Gregorian Calendar]. On this day the Sun was in the constellation of Lion, very near the point of transition from Lion to Virgin. At the time of his conception the Sun was in Scorpion. Thus the “open space” comprises the constellations of Virgin, Scales, and part of Scorpion, but Virgin is the dominating constellation. This is the constellation that is opposite Fishes, which we have found so strongly connected with Thomas More. Therefore, the striving for the experience of the Sun-Spirit in the Earth was alive in Tolstoy in quite a different way than in Thomas More, and yet it was on the same level, for it sought the Sun-Spirit within the social order. Thomas More experienced the divine of the Earth in the vision of a perfect state that is entirely guided by religion. The single human being is taken into the influence of this objective religion, which orders his existence within the community. For Tolstoy the striving for a just and harmonious community revealed just the opposite problem. He could not start from an objective religious institution that was able to take the human being into its guiding and guarding arms. In fact, at a certain time of his life he severed all the bonds that bound him to the Orthodox Church. He had to start from his own inner being. The question for him was, “How can I find in myself the eternal ‘religio’, how can I transmute my own imperfect being?” We can find this search for the true “humanism” in such early books as The Cossacks. Thus he arrived at the experience of the divine in the life of communities, in the intercourse of humanity even where it borders strangely on social chaos. All his novels show this, especially the book Resurrection. Thomas More in his vision of Utopia looked into the face of the divine as it revealed itself in the social order. Tolstoy had to descend into the unfathomable depths of human nature in order to find, beyond the individual caricature, the shining image of the divine realized in human brotherhood. Thus he found the Sun-Spirit of the Earth or the Earth in Virgin, the “secret revelation” of the riddle of life. There was still another revelation to him of the divine spirit of the Earth that brought the Virgin experience to a higher completion. Through his own destiny, he had been brought to the conviction that balance of soul was the medicine that we needed in order to become really human. In his youth, he had lived the unrestrained and wild life of a young Russian noble until he recognized the ruinous effect of this kind of life on his true humanity. From that moment we see him striving and fighting for balance, and in many figures of his novels we can find this balance of life realized in wonderful descriptions. They are the healing centers within the turmoil of events. It is the realization of the search for the Divine Spirit of the Earth, which is indicated in the position of the Earth in Scales as it took place in Tolstoy's horoscope. Yet he had to fight hard for balance in his soul. Again and again he had to go through crises where everything that he had achieved so far seemed to be torn to pieces and to become unworthy. But again and again he rose and stepped forward to higher stages of human perfection. These continuous death experiences became the source of his tremendous activity and productivity. It is the experience of the Earth in Scorpion. As the opposite constellation of Earth in Bull inherits the striving for the revelation of the divine in the manifoldness of creation, so does the Earth in Scorpion kindle the impulse to search for the manifestation of the Sun-Spirit in the unconquerable creative spirit rising from death and destruction. The famous astronomer Tycho de Brahe was born on the 14 December 1546, when the Sun was in the constellation of Archer. At the time of his conception it had just entered Fishes. Therefore, the Sun had not been in the constellations of Archer, Goat, and Waterman, and they form the “open space” or the Earth aspect of this nativity. Tycho was born into a Danish noble family. His father wanted to bring up his son to enter a political career, and so he sent him, under the guidance of a tutor, to the university for the study of jurisprudence. None of the tutor's severity could prevent Tycho from going his own way. While the tutor was asleep Tycho climbed onto the roof of the house and observed the stars with very primitive instruments. By the age of 16 he had made important discoveries. None could then prevent him from becoming a mathematician and astronomer. After many journeys, with the help of the King of Denmark, he settled down on the small Danish island of Hveen. In his 30th year he built an observatory there, and for a long, peaceful time he was able to make extensive astronomical observations. He produced, among other things, a catalogue containing the exact positions of about a thousand hitherto unnoticed stars. This was a remarkable deed, when we consider that he still had to make his observations with the unaided eye. The determination, with which this individuality went his own way from early youth, shows us the direction of his search for the Sun-Spirit of the Earth. It is the Earth in Goat that penetrated him with the impulse to seek the spirit in that which his eye could reveal to him of the multitude of the stars above him. In the opposite constellation of Crab we met, in connection with Emerson, the experience of the chalice into which flowed human deeds, sins, and hopes in the course of history. Tycho de Brahe observed and became the High Priest of the other chalice where human souls go at the moment of their death and whence they come when they are born; the chalice of the cosmos in which the Earth is embedded. In the revelation bestowed through the activity of his eye, he experienced the divine Spirit of the Earth. The universe above him was surely not only a mechanical world. For him it was a living Being with whom he could float through cosmic space, whose heart beat and language he could understand. He was not only what we would call today an astronomer, he was also an astrologer, although we must imagine that in his day this had a different implication from what it has today. He predicted the death of the Turkish emperor Solyman nearly to the day in which it actually happened. He also predicted other events that became true after his death. In this inner connection with the stars and in the perception of their language we detect yet another experience of the Sun-Spirit of the Earth indicated by the Earth in Waterman, but this does not entirely comprehend the universal character of this personality. There was still more. His observatory on the small island of Hveen was a very strange building. On the roof, where the astronomical observations were made, the instruments were standing and used for the measurement of the angles of the starry positions. But in the basement of the house was something like an alchemistic laboratory, where the substances of the Earth were boiled and examined with regard to their connections with the stars. This striving for a knowledge of the cosmic nature of the substances of the Earth reveals yet another relationship to the Sun-Spirit who has connected Itself with the Earth. It is indicated in the position of the Earth in Archer that actually occurred in Tycho's horoscope as we have pointed out above. These are only a few examples that may show how the soul descending from cosmic heights experiences the Earth as the only place where one can now meet the Sun-Spirit of our universe. When the soul passes through the sphere of the Sun in the life between death and new birth, it has a sorrowful experience. It finds the Sun deserted by its once leading Spirit, because Christ united with the Earth. Therefore, the soul becomes filled with the desire to return to the Earth in order to experience the Sun-Spirit there. The revelations of the divine Spirit of the Earth are manifold and the human being can receive them according to the conditions of “perception” acquired in previous incarnations. The direction of these possibilities is indicated in the “open space” of the horoscope and what happens in it. This comprises, of course, only a part of the twelvefold revelation of the Christ-Being. It is the “pound” (or “talents”, according to the proverb of the Gospels) that was given to us by the Lord of Destiny, but it is our task to increase the gift and it must become the Christian ideal to experience the revelation of the Sun-Spirit more and more comprehensively. Needless to say, it is impossible to give any definite rules about the character of the Earth-Sun relationship in the various constellations. This is just the distinctive character of the third “Sun-Mystery”: that we can only approach it when we become active and creative in our own souls. Nothing would happen if we were only to sit down and wait for something to come to us, except that the “pound” that we had received might be taken away from us. If we learn to look at the nativity, the horoscope, from the point of view of our own spiritual activity, and if we can see in it the signpost to the perfection and the fulfillment of our existence as human beings, then we can come to an entirely different cognition of the “horoscope”. Then it will no longer be the dark, even cruel dominator over our lives, but the guiding hand of our friend in heaven who shows us the way to the true and Christian humanity. The Events in the Sky We have witnessed in the past few months the final scenes of a historic drama that had already started twelve years ago. If we had looked with knowing eyes at the events happening in Central Europe in the year 1933 and later, we would have seen that they bore within themselves the seeds of destruction. The events in 1944 and 1945 were only the revelation of the gigantic hollow space that had been created where Germany once existed. We very often ask ourselves, “How was this destruction possible, and what has brought about this decadence?” The stellar script can help us to find the answer to these questions. But we must not search for them in the present events in the sky. The real causes occurred much further back. To put it clearly, most of the tendencies that started in Central Europe in 1933 have their roots in the events connected with the conquest of Mexico at the beginning of the 16th century. Not all, but most of them have their origin there. The script of the stars can make this clear. Hernando Cortes set out from the island of Cuba on 18 November 1518 in order to conquer Mexico. He landed on the coast of Mexico in March 1519 and founded the city of Vera Cruz. At that very moment the planet Saturn entered the constellation of Goat. Cortes burnt the boats with which he and his small army had crossed the sea so that nobody could escape the struggle that was ahead. Soon the Spaniards came within view of the beautiful city of Mexico, which was built on an island in the midst of a lake and where the emperor Montezuma resided. After many adventures and desperate enterprises against several Red Indian tribes, Cortes had to face an uprising of the empire of Mexico City itself. He defeated a huge army of the Mexicans on 7 of July 1520, and though he had only a tiny army at his disposal, he had the advantage of firearms to which the Red Indians were totally unaccustomed. Following this battle, Mexico City was besieged and conquered on the 13th of August 1521. This was followed by a terrible extermination of the Red Indians. All the time the planet Saturn was in the constellation of Goat. At the end of 1932 and the beginning of 1933, Saturn also entered the constellation of Goat. Thus we have in those events a reflection of history in the beginning of the 16th century. Apart from this an occult investigation would show that the karmic threads of certain of the main actors in the drama of 1933 lead back to the beginning of the 16th century and to Mexico. Much has been said against the cruelty with which Cortes and his men broke and exterminated the Mexican empire. They seemed to act the same as a heap of adventurers and desperados, who had nothing to lose and who were driven by the utmost greed for gold and the riches of the Mexicans. We must also imagine the situation that confronted the Spaniards, although they may have been in general of a low moral character. The last decadent remnants of rituals, which were bound to appear to a European mind as the utter limit of human cruelty, were practiced in the Mexican temples. Not only were human sacrifices performed in these places, but the inner organs of living bodies, mostly captives of other tribes, were taken out and sacrificed to the images of the Indian gods. It is too wide a subject for us to explain the origin of these decadent rituals that had become the gateway to black magic cults. The Spaniards, from the point of view of their European civilization, felt an understandable disgust and destroyed these ceremonies, but their Christianity was still too weak to root up the deeper causes of these signs of utter cultural decline, which were connected with very old and unfathomably deep mysteries of the blood. The action of the Spaniards was a failure seen from the point of view of Christianity. And what was the result? In the 20th century, those dark forces of ancient blood mysteries leapt up again and exercised their cruelty, and they were now filled with the utmost hate for the civilization of Christian humanity. Therefore, a knowledge of the stellar script can teach us, and can become a key to spiritual cognition and comprehension of earthly events. But it can also be a severe warning...