Translations:Benutzer:Arian/Klett-Mini-Test/249/en

In the Egyptian culture, humanity won for itself a consciousness of inorganic-dead, of physically-mineral nature. The high capacities of those belonging to the ancient Persian culture and to preceding times — to intervene transformingly into the soul-nature of the animal and then into the living nature of the plant, down into the physical organism, and to give artistic expression to this in the creations of domestic animals and cultivated plants — had been extinguished. Human beings had descended fully from instinctive spirit-borne levels of consciousness into earthly existence. They awoke to what presented itself to the senses as the world of outer appearances, and sought within its revelations the spirit working creatively. They developed out of this a consciousness that lived itself forth in pure spirit-borne feeling. Into this forming sentient soul there flowed at the same time, however, the Inspirations and wisdom-gifts of the Mysteries. No longer the soul-nature of the animal, no longer the living quality of the plant spoke to human beings in instinctive directness of spirit — what spoke now was the substance and form of dead existence. In stone — in Babylonia and Chaldea in fired brick — they sought to give expression to their feeling-life in monumental, geometrical and plastically severe, elevated forms. In Egypt this artistic-sacral feeling bore particularly upon perceptions of the spiritual working in the cosmos and in the human being. Outer life shaped itself largely as an image of the royal and priestly mystery-guidance. In the Mesopotamian cultural sphere, by contrast, this identity of inner and outer fell more apart. Here the impulses of Gilgamesh worked into the outer culture, and the initiates of the Mysteries exerted upon it less influence.