oric but the realization of truth when the hero of that time, who is
given up to the life of the senses, says, "Better a beggar on earth than a
king in the realm of shades." All this was still more marked in those
Asiatic peoples who had fixed their attention with veneration and worship
on material images instead of on their spiritual archetypes. A large
proportion of mankind was in this condition at the time of the Greco-Roman
era of civilization. It can be seen how man's mission in post-Atlantean
times, which consisted in the conquest of the physical sense-world, must
necessarily lead to estrangement from the spiritual world. Thus greatness
in one respect necessarily involves deterioration in another.

Man's connection with the spiritual world was kept alive in the Mysteries.
Through these the Initiates, in special states of the soul, were able to
receive revelations from that world. They were more or less the successors
of the guardians of the Atlantean oracles. To them was revealed what had
been hidden through the influence of Lucifer and Ahriman. Lucifer
concealed from man what had flowed from the spiritual world into the human
astral body, without his co-operation, up to the middle of the Atlantean
period. Had the etheric body not been partially separated from the
physical body, man would have been able to experience within himself this
part of the spiritual world as an inner revelation to his soul. As a
result of Lucifer's encroachment, this could be done only in special
states of the soul. At those times a spiritual world appeared to man in
the guise of the astral. The corresponding spiritual beings manifested
themselves in forms which embodied only the higher principles of the human
being, and in those principles the symbols of their particular spiritual
forces were astrally visible. Superhuman forms were manifested in this
way.

After the encroachment of Ahriman, still another kind of Initiation was
added to this one. Ahriman concealed from man everything out of the
spiritual world which would have appeared behind physical
sense-perception, had he not interfered in human affairs from the middle
of the Atlantean period onward. The Initiates of the Mysteries owed the
revelation of what he had thus kept hidden, to the fact that they had
developed within their souls all those faculties which man had attained
since that time, beyond the degree necessary for physical
sense-impressions. Thus there were revealed to th