Parts I and II
By Franz Hartmann (Torbole, Lago di Garda)[1]
Translation from German by Robert Hutwohl
This document incorporates live notes. Click on a superscripted endnote number in the text to jump to its corresponding endnote; click on the superscripted endnote numeral in the endnotes to return to the original text reference.
Part I.
We are drawing ever closer to the end of this century and also to the fateful November 13th, on which, it is said, our beautiful Earth will be destroyed by a comet. Such catastrophes have been prophesied many times over the past centuries, and then, as now, there were regions where human understanding was still in its infancy, and where, as now, ignorant people sold their property to squander the proceeds in this world, which they could not take with them to the afterlife. But the prophecies did not come true; the end of the world had to be postponed for unspecified reasons; the money was squandered, but the Earth still rotates as before.
This time, however, things will certainly be serious. Not only modern prophets, but the oldest Indian sages have predicted great upheavals for the end of this century and even described the details. We are now approaching (according to the Brahmin calendar)[2] a major turning point in the history of world evolution, a significant period of the Kali Yuga, or the dark period of the world (the “Iron Age”) in which we now find ourselves.
We are firmly convinced that this time things will be serious, that the old world will perish and a new one will arise, but not in the sense that is usually understood. Our globe will neither explode nor be burned or shattered by a comet, but great changes will take place in the soul of the world, and this is of incomparably greater importance than the changes that affect the visible shell. The change will take place in the mind of humanity itself, and the result will be a higher worldview and increased self-knowledge, from which a different order will also emerge.
Such an apocalypse has occurred many times in world history; nor can it be prevented by any authority or agency. For example, such an apocalypse occurred at the time of the introduction of Christianity, although the Roman emperors did everything in their power to prevent it. Everything the Emperor Justinian did to save the worship of the old gods was in vain. In vain he tried to explain that these gods were not personalities, but cosmic intelligences, spiritual, ruling forces of nature, and that it would be far more reasonable to worship them than to expect salvation from a deceased person. There was something deeper at the heart of Christianity than the worship of a dead person,[3] and even if the masses could not comprehend this mystery, they nevertheless sensed its existence. This inkling of the presence of the Savior in their own hearts[4] was more powerful than the idea of the gods, and therefore the gods had to give way.
Julian sought in vain to revive the ancient faith by attempting to make its symbols understandable, just as “Christian esotericists” today do with the allegories of the Bible to give Christian faith a rational foundation. But true faith has no foundation other than itself; the knowledge of truth rests on nothing but itself. Where truth is known, there it is; where there is no knowledge, there is no proof to support it. Proofs are valid only for probabilities; they are good for things one cannot see and do not know. What has vanished cannot be brought back by proofs and explanations. Therefore, with all his explanations, Julian could no more recall the vanished belief in the gods than it will be possible for those who interpret the Bible to reawaken the spirit of true Christianity through their arguments where it has vanished.
The true, spiritual belief in the forces of nature, called “gods,” had vanished from the popular consciousness by Julian’s time, and no arguments could restore it. “In the world of the gods of Plutarch and Plotinus, of Lobanius and Julian,” says Strauss, “Homer and Hesiod would have recognized their Olympus as little as Paul and John would have recognized theirs in Neanderthal Christianity, or Luther and Calvin would have recognized theirs in Schleiermacher’s Christian faith. The Homeric Olympus was an assembly of independent, frequently intersecting and opposing powers, held together only very imperfectly by the dominion of Zeus. Instead, in the Julian pantheon, a strict monarchy is implemented, following the example of the Roman Empire, with its provincial administration by proconsuls and procurators. This degenerate pantheon was bound to perish because, in a world ruled by external, heavenly autocrats, on whose favor everything depended, no free, individual development, no unfolding of true self-consciousness, which elevates man above the gods, was possible.
If we now compare the history of the Christian heaven with this history of Olympus, we also find that the founders of the Christian Church were men filled with the Holy Spirit of self-knowledge and therefore free-thinking (Luke XXIV, 45). But this spirit is rarely found among theologians and laymen today; knowledge of the heart has disappeared and given way to speculation of the mind; the God-man inherent in humanity is rarely mentioned; instead, blind faith in authority and, with it, egoism have taken over everywhere, hoping to snatch personal advantages and favors from a distant redeemer, whether in this life or in the hereafter. Theologians, philosophers, and theosophists strive in vain to reawaken the escaped spirit of true Christianity or to hold back the escaping one and to pour new wine into old bottles. Inner spiritual enlightenment, which depends on an inner awakening brought about by the light of truth (the grace of God), cannot be achieved through “explanations,” debates, arguments, and philosophical speculation. Logic can certainly point the right way, but it cannot provide self-knowledge. The Spirit of God in man is superior to all speculation.
Julian, for example, sought to help the ancient gods get back on their feet by explaining the symbols of mythology. He demonstrated, for example, that the myth of Cybele and Atys has a profound meaning; that when the mother of the gods castrates her beloved youth out of jealousy because he had slept with the nymph in a cave, this meant nothing other than “that the intelligible cause of the world, the supersensible creative force, puts a stop to the creative cause of the sensible to procreate indefinitely and turns it back to itself, to the supersensible.” Similarly, many mystics in Christianity, such as Jacob Böhme, Eckhart, and others, have strove to free the myths and symbols of Christianity from the superstition clinging to them and to uncover their true meaning.[5] But such intellectual explanations cannot replace the spirit living in these symbols. At most, they can eliminate doubts, misunderstandings, and errors, but they cannot produce spiritual knowledge. No one can be persuaded to be holy if they lack holiness within themselves, and without it, they cannot recognize the holy. But if they do, they recognize it and no longer need persuasion. What is rotten in itself cannot be revived by any philosophical intervention, even if it remains edible for a while. Goodness recommends itself.
What Julian says about the narratives of theology is also true about Christian narratives. They are not historical accounts of some event that once occurred somewhere, but rather pictorial representations of eternally occurring processes in nature. “Let no one,” says Julian, “say that this ever happened or was done; rather, the ancients, following divine (inner) guidance, deliberately wove this unthinkable into their stories of the gods, in order to, through the absurdity of the external story, induce the intelligent to seek its inner meaning, while the simple may be satisfied with the external symbol.”
Exactly the same is true of the stories in the Bible. What interest could they have for us if they referred only to external events? Why should it matter to us whether a few thousand years ago a man named Abraham had one or two wives, whether Jonah was swallowed by a shark, or Joshua commanded the sun to stand still? The unbeliever turns away from such “children’s tales” and toward the news of the day, but the believer feels attracted to them because, even without understanding their inner meaning, he suspects that a deeper mystery lies behind them. Now the philosopher comes along and gives the unbeliever the correct explanation. The rationalist listens to it; it perhaps satisfies his understanding, and he leaves it at that. He may have changed his mind, but he has not gained any new intellectual strength; his knowledge did not spring from within himself, but was merely implanted in his mind by another. The knowledge thus acquired has not made him better. A thousand lanterns cannot replace the sunlight, a thousand opinions cannot replace the light of truth, which, when it rises within a person, scatters all errors like clouds.
In England, a society has been formed to spread the “Gospel of Interpretation,” which seeks to convert and improve the world by explaining the meaning of Christian biblical allegories, thus sparing it the effort of its own faith and thought. If this “esoteric Christianity” were to take over, Christianity would be ill-served, for intellectual knowledge cannot replace the practice of faith; true faith, however, is the spiritual power within the heart, from which true self-knowledge springs, but which, like any other power, can unfold through its own practice, whereas intellectual learning, composed of opinions, can produce nothing but opinion. Intellectual knowledge is composed of impressions received by the imagination; true heart knowledge grows from the heart upward toward God. Eckhart says: “The Bible is like the water on the seashore.” For one it reaches only up to the knees, for another up to the neck, and for whoever goes far in, it reaches far beyond the head. We only know with certainty that which we find within ourselves through our own strength, when it comes alive within us.
Nothing has dispelled the spirit of Christianity more than the attempts of a doubtful Protestantism to make religious truths palatable to rational understanding. This stifled the uplifting belief in the ideal, and replaced it with a superstition that considered the most incredible fairy tales literally true. Christ, the eternal deity within humanity, became a historical, mortal person, just as the gods of the Greeks and Romans were ultimately made persons, and in modern churchdom he seldom appears more than the divine ideal toward which everyone should strive so that it may be revealed within themselves. In the imagination of most people he is everything possible, except what he himself professes to be: the way, the truth, and eternal life in us and in everything.
True knowledge is conditioned by one’s own becoming. Believing that what another tells me is not my own knowledge; clinging to possibilities and probabilities is not yet belief in the truth. There is a world of difference between believing in a narrative that refers to a God who sits enthroned above the clouds far away from us or who appeared on Earth millennia ago, and believing in the God whose power elevates our souls, fills our consciousness, and illuminates our minds. Just as at the time of the fall of the Roman Empire, the world consisted of two factions: one of which ridiculed religious symbols because it did not understand them, turned away from everything higher, and completely succumbed to sensuality and vice, while the other, because it had separated the ideal from humanity and viewed the gods as beings who looked after human affairs, fell into inactivity and superstition, and as a result, the old world perished and the new Christian world arose, so it is today. The same spectacle is constantly repeated, albeit in a different form. Even today, all-denying disbelief, and with it sensuality, is increasingly gaining the upper hand, while, on the other hand, the clerically minded expect their salvation from all sorts of external things, except from the knowledge of God awakening within themselves. Not only in religion, but also in philosophy, belief in authority prevails above all else. If one only knows what this or that authority has said or meant, one is already learned; that man can also know something from his own intuition is known to only a few.
Just as the Neo-Platonists failed to breathe new life into the vanishing belief in the gods by promulgating their philosophy, so too will their present descendants, the Theosophists, fail to breathe new life into the dying world through their discussions, explanations, and classifications. At best, they could replace incorrect ideas with a more correct conception of the course of nature, but breathing life into a decaying and decomposing body is impossible. Nowhere in history is there an example of the revival of a dead system. Old forms pass away, new ones are born, and the Spirit of God breathes life into the new ones. What no human ingenuity can accomplish, the law of God brings about in nature, the law of death and reincarnation, of renewal in all kingdoms, whereby ever nobler forms appear, more capable than the preceding of expressing the spirit that dwells in them; and what no power of persuasion can accomplish in a sleeper, a moment of awakening accomplishes.
Now it is said that the old smear campaign, in which so many thousands play roles they are not capable of, and present something they are not, must be abolished. Instead, a new stage must arise, in which everyone will learn to assert what they are in their essence. Future generations must grow out of blind faith in authority, each must learn to know their own true being, their own higher nature, and cast off everything that does not belong to it. Then, mankind must learn not to seek God in houses, but to recognize themselves as the temple of God and the Spirit of God within themselves. (1 Corinthians III, 1b) It will not be about undermining authority, but about outgrowing it; not about arbitrariness, but about the victory of freedom, which only he who has learned the difficult art of recognizing the law and controlling himself can achieve. Only then will humanity come to know true Christianity, when the Spirit of Christ has entered human consciousness.
(Article II follows in the next issue.)
Part II.
Will this new era begin now? — Everyone, upon reflection, will have to admit that the entire present world order is the expression of inner spiritual conditions, and that these are the result of invisible spiritual influences. For a truly enlightened sage and astrologer, who spiritually recognizes these influences and the laws governing them, it is as easy to predict the moment of the onset of a great change in the soul of the world as it is for an astronomer to predict the reappearance of a comet. If we assume that the ancient sages are right when they teach that similar laws prevail in the spiritual world as in the visible world, that there are “spiritual suns” which, when humanity approaches them, have a similar influence on its spiritual development as our visible sun has on the earth when it approaches it in summer, then there is nothing surprising in the fact that there are periods of general enlightenment and general dullness based on astrological principles.
According to Indian philosophers, we are now in the Kali Yuga, which began on February 17, 3102 BC, and lasted 432,000 years. The first 5,000 years ended on April 9, 1898. From this point on, a fermentation is said to begin, which is the precursor to great events, and anyone who considers the conditions prevailing in the world today will have to admit that this fermentation is underway. This point in time is described in the Vishnu Purana [viṣṇu-purāṇa], which is estimated to be several thousand years old, and our current conditions are described therein quite accurately. It states that around this time, the misunderstood, dark desire for freedom will manifest itself in various forms: as anarchism, disregard for the sanctity of marriage, lawlessness, etc.; that hypocrisy will pass for piety, money will confer prestige and dignity, the sense of justice will diminish, ambitious men will mislead the people, one people will be in arms against another, everyone will distrust each other, thousands will leave their homeland and emigrate, etc. In the following years, a great upheaval will take place, even accompanied by geological changes on the earth’s surface, particularly affecting England and France. Then an era of spiritual progress and enlightenment, of self-knowledge and self-control, will begin; the old systems will be shaken off, and the day of spiritual freedom will dawn. Theological speculation will be replaced by the knowledge of the higher nature inherent in man himself, and when all people unite in this inner knowledge of God, peace on earth will be assured. But it is certain that this will not happen suddenly, with a bang, at the beginning of the next century.
If we compare the predictions of the Puranas with the prophecies of the Bible, we find a remarkable similarity between the two. For example, Matthew 24 states: “Beware that no one deceives you, for many will come in my name, saying, ‘I am the Christ!’ and will deceive many. And you will hear of wars and rumors of wars; but beware, and do not be disturbed. All this must come to pass; but the end is not yet near. For nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom; there will be famines, pestilences, and earthquakes in one place and in another . . . . And because of the increase of lawlessness, the love of many will grow cold.”
Such conditions have occurred many times before and are always present before a major collapse occurs. No specific time is given for when these events will occur, just as the Bible’s descriptions do not refer to isolated events, but to processes that repeat themselves over and over again. It further states: “Immediately after the tribulation of those days, the sun will be darkened, the moon will not give its light, stars will fall from heaven, and the whole starry sky will be shaken. Then the sign of the Son of Man will appear in heaven.” If we consider that the Bible is not a textbook of physics, but that it deals with spiritual matters, this description seems quite accurate. The sun of worldly wisdom will be dimmed by the light of the knowledge of God; the moon of imagination will no longer give birth to theological speculations and enthusiasms; many dogmas that are now still nailed to the spiritual firmament of humanity by belief in authority will fall from the sky, and the entire existing worldview will be shaken. The sign of the Son of Man will also appear in the heavens of humanity, because the consciousness of the human-divine will awaken in their minds and become manifest through corresponding good works. If someone says, “Here is Christ and there is Christ,” no one will believe him anymore, because everyone will know where the divinity is to be found in humanity. We needn’t wait for the Antichrist either; he is selfishness in every form and has long been present, and as for the “Beast of the Apocalypse,” the Church has long been riding on it, both externally and internally. For it is not only clericalism, whose self-interest is always opposed to true religion, but also its own greed, which in everyone and everywhere stands in the way of the knowledge and practice of the truth. When a new worldview opens within us, our old world perishes, and what applies to the individual also applies to a people or to humanity as a whole.
Let us then allow them to submit in peace; we have nothing to fear, even if the light-shy people of bats and night owls creep fearfully into their caves. The old systems have done their duty and can withdraw; the world is overfed with theories and longs for action. The love of truth and of neighbor, of which so much has been spoken and which is so rarely seen, shall become a living force revealed in works of love; then the modern gods will join their predecessors in the lumber room, and man, conscious of his true human dignity, will recognize his unity with God and thus himself as the master of this earth.
What is it that keeps humanity in constant unrest but the constant, inner, albeit unconscious striving for something higher, indeed for the highest—let’s call it knowledge, light, perfection, God—and which everywhere expresses itself only as a striving for the transient, because man does not yet know the true, the eternal, and the imperishable? This striving prevents him from finding peace, and yet without it he would be little more than an animal, and even worse off than that, because the animal finds its satisfaction in the sensual, but the sensual cannot satisfy man in the long run. At all times, men have sought the Deity, but they sought it in external places, in temples of stone or above the clouds. And the Divine remained distant from them because they separated themselves from it, and therefore it could not be revealed within them. They waited for God to come to them or to be brought to them; but God neither comes nor goes; he is omnipresent; he does not change his dwelling place; he does not approach us, he only reveals himself. But we approach him by recognizing him in his revelation, and he can be revealed in our hearts only when dispassionate tranquility reigns there.
The greatest of all riddles is still man. “No one can come to the Father except through the Son.” Only through humanity can man recognize the Godhead. Only in the One who has transcended animality and folly and has truly become a noble human being can the divine nature emerge. God is the One, indivisible Being of all; as the sages teach, nothing exists apart from Him. The entire world is merely a revelation of the creative thought of God, and without God, without essence, it is an insubstantial illusion.
Religion teaches that in time immemorial we were all in God and united with him; but we looked down into the darkness of material existence, and there the soul saw its own reflection. Like Narcissus, who beheld his image in the mirror of water, it was captivated by the sight of its own beauty. It wanted to separate itself from the unity and be god itself. But despite its descent into matter, man could not completely separate himself from its divine origins; it is always connected to its divine essence by a divine ray of light, its body is on earth, its spirit rests in the light, and its salvation consists in recognizing this divine light and, through this recognition, overcoming the delusion of its separateness from the One and thus returning to its divine existence. This is what all religious systems teach, though in different ways; for the word “religion” itself, which comes from the Latin “religere,” means the “binding back” of the soul to its origin.
Millions of years, however, may be necessary before humanity, through experience and disappointed expectations, comes to this realization; for the human mind cannot comprehend the infinite, even though the soul perceives it; no scientific research or logical argumentation can create divine illumination where no divine light exists. All that instruction and teaching can do is show us the way to salvation, but salvation itself can only be provided by the redeeming principle, the Redeemer himself. But even if human efforts are unable to dispel the darkness even after thousands of years, a momentary flicker of divine light suffices. Thus, let us hope that in the new world order now developing, conditions will be more favorable than before, so that the divine spark in the human heart will become a flame in which all passions will vanish, and in whose light man will recognize his all-encompassing divinity.
Notes:
[1] An Apocalypse. I. Franz Hartmann. Wiener Rundschau 3, No. 22 (October 1899), 520–524 [Ein Weltuntergang. I.]; An Apocalypse. II. Franz Hartmann. Wiener Rundschau 3, No. 23 (October 1899), 545–547 [Ein Weltuntergang. II.] [Translation from the German by Robert Hutwohl, ©2025]
[2] See “Lotusblüten.” Year 1893, II, page 489.
[3] “One must rightly hate the intelligent among you, but pity the simpler ones, who, as new followers, have sunk so deeply into ruin that, abandoning the eternal gods, they have gone over to a dead Jew.” — D. F. Strauss. »Julian der Abtrünnige.« [“Julian the Apostate.”] p. 188.
[4] II Corinth. XIII. 5.
[5] See F. Hartmann: “The Symbols of the Bible and the Church.” W. Friedrich, Leipzig 1899.