al 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.

Hermes tau