people who had received into their hearts the impulses
corresponding to the Mysteries of the Christ Initiation. Out of this
company he chose the seven best, that they might be endowed with the
etheric and astral bodies which bore the impress of the etheric bodies of
the seven best Atlantean Initiates. 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. Since
these great teachers were endowed with the etheric bodies of their
spiritual ancestors, the contents of their astral body, that is, the
science and knowledge they themselves had worked out, was far below what
was revealed to them through their etheric body. Therefore if these
revelations were to speak within them, they were obliged to impose silence
on their own science and knowledge. Then the exalted beings who had also
spoken to their spiritual ancestors spoke out of and through them. Except
during the times when these beings were speaking through them, they were
simple people, endowed with the measure of intelligence and feeling which
they had cultivated and worked out for themselves.

There lived at this time in India a race of people who had retained a
particularly vivid remembrance of the ancient soul-condition of the
Atlanteans, which permitted experiences in the spiritual world. Moreover,
the heart and soul of a great number of these people were powerfully
attracted by such experiences. By a wise decree of fate, the majority of
the race had come to southern Asia from among the best portions of the
Atlantean population. Besides this majority, other Atlanteans had migrated
thither at different times. The Christ Initiate, referred to above,
appointed his seven great disciples to be the teachers of this association
of people, to whom they imparted their wisdom and precepts. Many of these
ancient Indians needed but little preparation for reviving within them the
scarcely extinct faculties leading to observation of the supersensible
world. For longing after that world was really a fundamental quality of
the Indian soul. It was felt that man's original home was in that world.
He is transplanted out of it into this one, which offers only outer
sense-observation and the intelligence connected with it.

The supersensible world was felt to be the _real_ world, and the
sense-wo