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Thus he educated a successor to each of the Christ, Saturn, Jupiter, etc., Initiates. These seven Initiates became the teachers and leaders of the people who, in the post-Atlantean period, had colonized the south of Asia, especially ancient India.
Indeed, it was the mission of post-Atlantean humanity to develop within itself those faculties of the soul which it was possible to acquire through the newly awakened powers of thought and feeling. These powers cannot be directly stimulated from the spiritual world, but result from man’s observing the sense-world, becoming familiar with it, and working upon it.
The third era of post-Atlantean civilization began among the peoples who finally gathered together in western Asia and northern Africa after the migrations. This civilization was developed among the Chaldeans, Babylonians, and Assyrians on the one hand, and among the Egyptians on the other.
The conquest of the physical world of sense by these human faculties must be regarded as the mission of post-Atlantean humanity. Step by step that conquest proceeded. It is true that even in ancient India, man, through the condition of his soul, was already turned toward that world; but he still looked upon it as illusion, and his spirit turned to the supersensible world.
And whereas man, before the Atlantean period, had been an exact image of his soul-nature the events of the Atlantean evolution bore within them the causes which lead to the formation of post-Atlantean man, whose physical form is solid and comparatively independent of the qualities of the soul. Toward the middle of the Atlantean evolution a calamity gradually befell humanity.
This condition lasted more or less during the whole of the fourth division of the post-Atlantean period. Only those individuals who had preserved the old mental state as an inheritance could still become directly conscious of the spiritual world. But these were stragglers from an earlier time. Their manner of gaining knowledge was no longer suitable for later conditions.
We have to distinguish a first post-Atlantean period of the earth, in which the Indian civilization now described was the predominant one; then came a second post-Atlantean period in which the prevailing civilization was that which later in this work is called the “ancient Persian,” and still later was developed the Egypto-Chaldean civilization, also to be described.
The first form into which this essence of Christianity could be poured may be described as a comprehensive ideal of life. As such it was opposed to those forms of life which had been developed in post-Atlantean humanity. The conditions operating in human evolution since the repopulation of the earth in the Lemurian period have been described above.
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.
The contrast between the knowledge of the Initiates and the perverted beliefs of the people became more apparent in these nations than anywhere else. Very different conditions existed in those parts of Southern Europe and western Asia where the fourth epoch of post-Atlantean civilization was unfolded. In occult science, it is called the Greco-Roman period.
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