To speak in this way about the Christ--how He is the leader of the higher hierarchies also in the successive worlds, is to teach the science which, under the title of modern esotericism, has endured into our civilization since the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and which, as has been shown, had from that time become necessary. If from this aspect we observe more closely the Being Who lived in Palestine, and Who consummated the Mystery of Golgotha, then we find the following: Up to the present time many ideas concerning the Christ have found expression. There was for instance the idea of certain Christian Gnostics in the first centuries, who said that the Christ Who lives in Palestine was not present in any physical body of flesh at all; that He had only an apparent body--an etheric body which had become physically visible; so that His death on the Cross had been no real death but only an apparent one, for the very reason that only an etheric body was present. Then we find the various disputes among those who professed Christianity, as for example, the well-known controversy between the Arians and Athenatians, etc., and the most varied explanations concerning what the Christ really was. And indeed right up to our own times people express and have expressed the most varied ideas concerning the Christ. Now spiritual science must recognize in Christ not merely an earthly but also a _cosmic_ Being. In a certain sense man is, taken as a whole, a cosmic being. He lives a twofold life--one in a physical body from birth to death, another in the spiritual worlds between death and a new birth. When he is incarnated in a physical body, he is living in dependence on the earth, because the physical body is restricted by the forces and conditions of existence belonging to the earth. A man, however, does not only take the substances and forces of the earth into himself, but is joined to the whole of the earth’s organism. When he has passed through the gate of death, he does not any longer belong to the forces of the earth; but it would be incorrect to imagine that he then belongs to no forces at all, for he is then connected with the forces of the solar system and the more distant star-systems. In this way, between death and a new birth, he lives in the domain of the cosmic, just as in the period between birth and death he lived in the domain of the earthly. From death to a new birth he belongs to the cosmos, as on the earth he belongs to the elements--Air, Water, and Earth. Accordingly, while he is passing through a life between death and a new birth, he comes into the region of cosmic influences, for the planets send forth not merely the physical forces of what astronomy teaches, such as gravitation and others, but also spiritual forces, and with these spiritual powers of the cosmos man is connected--each person in a special manner according to his own individuality. If he is born in Europe, he lives in a different