Module I
Where the study begins — and it begins with a difficulty rather than a doctrine.
Rudolf Steiner describes a great initiate named Manes, who called a council of the great initiates of past ages to consider how the ancient wisdom might be sustained and carried to a further glory. He says further that this council is not well known — because one must first be able to see it in the Akasha, and only then can one relate to it.
The first lecture takes up the riddles of the path: the duty of the spiritual researcher, and the conflict that arises between spiritual research and spiritual tradition. How does the quarrel between an old teaching and a new one begin, and what resolves it? The teachers of the soul are called as witnesses — Pythagoras, Plato, Aristotle, Ptolemy, Tycho Brahe, Kepler, and Christian Rosenkreutz.
Then the supreme lesson of being taught. How do you know a teacher when you meet one? What are faith, order and truth worth to a soul? And what happened in 1910, when Steiner spoke of the Council of Manes and a stir went through those who heard him.
The third asks what was so important about that council, and brings forward the three individualities — Buddha, Scythianos and Zarathustra — and their relation to the work of Jesus.
The fourth is a simple lesson with great consequences: ask the right question. Which questions reveal an understanding of the invisible in nature, and which do not. Parsifal’s whole story turns on a question he failed to ask. This lecture is about the asking.
It closes on the secret math of inner space — the soul standing between the mathematics of the outer world and the inner. Kepler; the discovery of Neptune, found by calculation before any eye had seen it; and the secret math of Egypt.
2 Week Access. Your enrolment gives you two weeks with this module.
Continues in 135 Secret Blood and the Pristine Soul.
Module II
Can the soul be divided? What are the coordinates of consciousness?
This module opens on questions like these and does not let them go. It works through the sentient, intellectual and consciousness souls — whether they are three things, or one thing seen three ways — and through what the lectures call soul math: the threefold confusion, and the way out of it. Abd al-Malik, Governor of Jerusalem and fifth Caliph, enters here, in his rejection of the Christian Trinity.
From there to the secret blood: the prophecy of the master, the secrets of human anatomy and soul consciousness, and the forming of the esoteric soul out of the magic aether — with its new senses, and new organs of sense.
Then a cry goes out from the lodges: Save the Holy Land. The lodges of Anatolia, the secrets of the Sufi lodges, the shared shrines at the Temple of the Theotokos, and the love that ran between the cultures.
The fourth lecture asks why the Church suppressed knowledge of the soul’s pristine nature, and why Origen’s thoughts were never accepted. It takes up the Tetralemma, corruption in the soul, and whether anyone can navigate the spiritual realm without spiritual senses.
It ends at the Portal to the Tree of Life and Death — how to use Inspiration, Imagination and Intuition, how to harmonise them with thinking, and whether the soul can be joined to its cosmic soul.
2 Week Access. Your enrolment gives you two weeks with this module.
Continues in 136 Arabian Secrets and the Soul of Jesus.
- Teacher: Friend Tazo
Module III
Is there space inside the soul? And if there is, can it be mapped?
The module begins there — with the measures available to us in the soul’s own nature, where the mapping of an inner world would have to start, and the mysterious value of the common denominator. Then the Arabs come forth out of the desert: the arising culture, Abd al-Malik, and the battles between the peoples.
The second lecture turns to what a spiritual teacher actually does for a student of the spirit, and then to harder ground — whether your consciousness is polarised and how you would know, how spiritual beings may be seen, why the mind is squeezed out into nature, and whether spiritual beings can do a soul harm.
Then the journey of the soul, and where it leads. What preparation it asks of you. Whether there is a secret math for spiritual nature, why we cannot see the substances of that nature or the bodies of its beings, and how aetheric substance might be measured at all.
The fourth takes the Hermetic formula — as above, so below — as a mathematics, and asks how to comprehend the mind of Arabian culture, how to read the signs and warnings of the spirits of nature, and whether the trail of the bodhisattvas can still be followed there.
It closes on the source of human intelligence: the systems built to explain it, how to test them for accuracy, and the part the Master Jesus played in forming a new human intelligence.
2 Week Access. Your enrolment gives you two weeks with this module.
Continues in 137 The Sailors of the Inner Seas.
- Teacher: Friend Tazo
Module IV
Rudolf Steiner said one needs spiritual vision to research the work of Manes. The closing module begins by asking what to do with that.
It opens on the magical breath of God and the spirit of Arab alchemy — whether people are afraid of clairvoyants, how clairvoyance could be tested at all, what the Resurrection of Jesus was, which sciences the Arabians excelled at, and how the soul carries sound.
Two lectures were given in the evening. The first asks what the Rosicrucian school is in the modern age, whether warriors will come to an end, and what the defeat of Odin by the Fenris Wolf means. The second asks whether a man can hear spiritual beings, what Angels sound like, and whether there is a heavenly knowledge unlike any other kind.
Then the heart. The longest lecture in the course asks what the language of your heart is, whether two hearts can speak to one another, whether there is a universal heart spirit — and what it means when you doubt where you are going.
And then the crossing. The final lecture is the one this module is named for: the senses that lie latent in the heart and how they awaken, the astral cloud of the heart, the veils of the aethers and the Sushupti Plane, the four initiations for entering spiritual nature, and what it is actually like to cross the sea of the heart. It gathers in al-Kindi and Rumi, the dervish physician Ahi Evran and the dervish Yasawi, the four instructions given to the Dervishes, the poet Rabia Balkhi, Galatians 4 and Romans 7 — and then, without warning, Goethe’s Sorrows of Young Werther at the birth of European Romanticism, and a spiritual revelation found in a song by Bob Dylan.
Also here: The Esoteric Atom — Can It Be Seen?, and two primary sources read alongside the lectures — the Covenant of Ali ibn Abi Talib to the Christians of Armenia, and Imam Ali’s writings on Jesus Christ and Christianity.
We cannot promise you will arrive. But the steps are recorded, and they are there for you to walk.
2 Week Access. Your enrolment gives you two weeks with this module.
- Teacher: Friend Tazo
A room for the conversation the lectures start.
Some questions only arrive three days after the lecture ends. This is where they go.
The Forum is a standing room for everyone working through the Council of Manes — all four modules, in whatever order you are taking them. It runs alongside the classes rather than inside them, so you are not waiting for anyone else to reach your module before you can ask.
What happens here: questions on the lectures, passages from the sources read more slowly than a lecture allows, and the connections that only show themselves once you have sat with the material a while. The teachings of Manes were carried forward by exactly this — pupils and teachers in living discussion — and that is the form the study takes best.
You are welcome to read without posting. Many do, and there is nothing wrong with it.
Entry is by key. Once you are in, you stay in — the Forum does not expire with a class.
- Teacher: Friend Tazo
