Turning this soul light on the Easter Mystery we discover its claim to primacy in the life of mankind deriving from the possibility that the death-dealing forces which had assumed ascendency in our racial life could be gradually reduced and at last completely overcome. This possibility emerged as the result of the release of the Christ energy into the planetary aura, which henceforth became accessible to every living creature. This release of the Christ Light was not limited to a single outpouring, as we have shown. It did have its inception at a certain historic moment, and that moment was when the Christ burst the bonds of death and stood conqueror over the grave. But ever since that time His life force has continued to stream forth into our planetary sphere and will continue until the earth's evolutionary work is finished.
For a full understanding of the Resurrection Mystery it is necessary to know something of the nature of Christ Jesus, the method of human evolution, the lost meaning of death, and the processes in nature by which the forces of death are transformed into the powers of life.
The true significance of the Resurrection cannot be grasped apart from an acceptance of the human-divine nature of Christ Jesus, of the evolution of forms according to the teaching of academic science and the paralleling evolution of soul by means of the reincarnational process taught by spiritual science. Also, an understanding of the means by which the forces of death entered human life and the measures instituted to vanquish these same forces by the powers of life. Only within such a framework of reference can the mystery of Christ's redemptive work be intelligibly grasped and spiritually apprehended.
The Mystery of the Resurrection is of a cosmic nature as is the Christ Himself by whose powers the resurrectional forces have become active in the life of the race. In saying this we do not rob Easter of the personal significance attributed to it by the orthodox but simply enlarge its scope by showing that we are a part of the cosmic scene in which the resurrected powers are at work, and that we share in their redemptive operations.
The death that the Christ vanquished is the death spoken of in Genesis when the Lord God Jehovah served notice on Adam and Eve, or infant humanity, that they were not to eat of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, for in the day they did so they would surely die. They ate of the fruit and they died, not physically but spiritually. This was no sudden death. It was death to a future attainment which it was their intended destiny to some time realize. It is the death spoken of by the Voice in Revelation, addressing the Church of Sardis: "I know thy works, that thou hast a name that thou livest, and thou art dead."
The term death is also used in this same sense by the Christ when He declared to the Pharisees that "if a man keep my word he shall never see death." But even then His hearers missed the spiritual truth He thus tried to convey to them, as indicated by their questioning His good sense, and wondering if perchance He was not possessed of a demon. Did not their father Abraham die and the prophets, they asked, and did He presume to be greater than these holy men?
Paul makes the statement that "as in Adam all die, so also in Christ shall all be made alive." Thus Adam's fall and Christ's Resurrection are linked events. The whole of humanity is involved in both. Neither event is of an isolated character.
Adam, or infant humanity, departed from the perfect way of the Lord, or divine law, and embarked upon a self-willed way of his own before he was ready and able to do so in safety and witn wisdom. In making such a departure he admitted into his being the first seeds of disintegration and decay and opened himself to the inimical influences of two classes of interloping spirits. The first of these are the Lucifer Spirits, whose nature and activities are made known to us in our Christian Bible, and the others are the Ahrimanic beings about whom much may be learned from the Zoroastrian Scriptures and also from Goethe's Faust in their Mephistophelian character.
Their influence on human life, as described by the late Christian esotericist, Rudolf Steiner, in various of his writings, was such that the Lucifer beings degraded man's passions and feelings while the Ahrimanic spirits distorted his view of the world. The Lucifers aim to detach man prematurely from what earth experience has to offer. The Ahrimanic forces direct their energies toward blinding the mind of man to the existence of the spiritual world and thus bind him ever more firmly to is mortal nature and physical being. These are stragglers from the Saturn Period.
These two classes of beings, says Dr. Steiner, hindered man from adding to the old store of wisdom that he once received, and so it gradually dwindled away. The effect of this was a tendency to dissolution and decay ending in death.
Thus it was that the germ of death entered into the physical body, and had its progressive development not been arrested and counteracted by the germ of life implanted by the Christ, it would have brought man so completely under the power of death at the end of the present Earth Period that his evolution would have terminated at that point, instead of going forward through the three remaining aeonic Periods that culminate in the individualized spirit's return to its Father's house as God-Man.
These are unsupported statements, and unless they can be veri fied by exact scientific data derived from an examination of the sub ject from many and varied points of view, cannot expect to gain credence with the man who takes nothing on faith but demands reasonable evidence to justify his beliefs.
Such data are not wanting. An endless array of evidence is available. Modern man has but to acquaint himself with what spir itual science has to offer, and not until he does will he find the peace of mind he so greatly needs to retain his equilibrium, not to say his very sanity and well being.
It is not within the scope of this discussion to enter into that vast body of evidence available in support of the Easter Mystery as interpreted in the light of Initiate Wisdom. But let one particular aspect of this many-sided subject be touched upon briefly for the light it throws on the problem of life and death, and also as an indication of the truly revelatory character of similar studies per taining to other aspects of the Easter Mystery.
In early humanity man's etheric and physical bodies were not concentric as they are today; and certain etheric centers were not aligned and bound with the physical. This loose connection between the two vehicles enabled man to retain a closer contact with the inner worlds and to draw upon them more fully and freely than now for guidance on the upward way. But gradually the etheric body drew into the physical until by the time of Christ the two bodies were as one. The etheric body, which had entered upon its earthly evolution with two aeonic Periods of development behind it, came highly charged with spiritual energies which it imparted to its associated physical body.
But both the Luciferic and the Ahrimanic spirits of which we have spoken had the power of shutting off from the etheric body a further inflow of spiritual light and life from the inner worlds, and this in turn deprived the physical body of the vitality it had hitherto received from the etheric, with the result that thenceforth the life forces in man were not on the increase but on the decrease. Man went out in death after an earth life poorer than when he came into it. Had this process not been counteracted, man's vitalizing principle, the etheric body, would ultimately have withered away and with it the physical body. Both vehicles would have died out by the end of our Earth Period instead of developing to perfection and transferring their sublimated powers to the next higher vehicles for further evolution in future Periods of time, as we have said.
The Christ came to reverse this trend. The forces He released into the etheric world had the effect of again loosening the etheric from the physical body. He opened, as it we're, the gates by which spiritual light and life could again flow into the bodies of. men and rescue them from premature decay and death. But for this saving fact, declares Dr. Steiner, "man's mission on earth would have been doomed and he would have been lost to the universe." The etheric body which was charged with the life giving forces of the Sun when man entered earth evolution would have been no more than an empty shell when arriving at its close.
From such a fate man has been saved by the Christ. He came to revive, restore and resurrect a humanity that had fallen under the forces of disintegration, decay and death. This He could do because He is in His own Being "the resurrection and the life". He is the Sun Spirit, the highest Initiate of the Sun Period, the first fruits of the archangelic life wave. He is the Solar Logos and the Light of the World. From this body of light He radiated and continues to radiate into the etheric world a redeeming Ray which is absorbed by man's etheric vehicle, thus reanimating it with the forces of life. This life giving impulse is in turn transmitted to the physical body with like effect, and in such manner the humanity that died in Adam is brought to life in Christ. Mortality takes on immortality and corruptibility incorruptibility. Man's redemption from the Fall is assured and also his ability to carry forward beyond this earth evolution into the succeeding cycles of unfoldment. Except for this life giving Christ impulse, the kind of death that over takes the body at the end of an earth life would have been the death experienced by humanity as a whole at the end of the Earth Period.
This act of salvation by which the human race was raised from death to life lay not within the power of any human being. Since it was a task of cosmic scope it called for cosmic powers such as the Christ possessed. The Master Jesus played His glorious and necessary part in that his spiritual status was such that it enabled him to become the human instrument in and through which the Spirit of the Christ could establish a focal point from which to enter into and identify Himself with human evolution and to serve later as the Planetary Regent. But Jesus of himself could not have be come our Savior, nor could the Christ alone have become our life and our resurrection. For this a union, a physical spiritual union between the human and the divine, such as that established in the unique composite being of Jesus the Christ, was necessary. And through that exalted instrumentality the Father, whose will it is that none should perish and all have everlasting life, beheld this divine intent for mankind successfully consummated. Of Christ Jesus He could say, "This is my beloved Son in whom I am well pleased."
In the foregoing we have touched on the merest fragment of the kind of knowledge that must find its way into modern thinking in order to restore the doctrine of the Resurrection to a place where it can revitalize the faith of our times. The need has never been greater than now, when the forces of death have come forth in a terrific assault upon mankind in a final desperate effort to wrest control from the ascending powers of life.
In this planetary crisis peoples everywhere are expectantly looking for the emergence of some redeeming, transforming power, whether principle or person. The universal hope is in the resurrection of a ruined world, the enlightenment of a mind in ignorance. and the spiritualization of a civilization buried in materialism. To the Christian this hope is focused in the Christ and the promise of His presence in the line of divine duty to complete His earthly mission. It is in that hope of glory that we celebrate Easter, the luminous festival of the resurrected life.
Much remains to be revealed of the Christ Mystery when man kind attains spiritually mature; for as Max Heindel, the illumined mystic seer has said: "The real esoteric Christianity has not yet been taught publicly, nor will it be so taught until humanity has passed the materialistic stage and becomes fitted to receive it." (The Rosicrucian Cosmo Conception)
— Corinne Heline
