The Rudolf Steiner Archive

3. The Origin and Nature of Humanity

[ 1 ] Today we must take a look at the important questions of human origins and nature. When these important questions are raised, one cannot say that the answer is particularly easy. The following lectures will present fewer difficulties for us.

[ 2 ] As I said at the beginning of these lectures, we must conceive of human beings as essentially composed of three parts: body, soul, and spirit. We will see how these parts of the human being are composed as the lectures proceed. Theosophical insight reveals to us a threefold origin of our own nature, and in order to discuss this threefold origin—the physical, the psychical, and the spiritual—we must journey to the most remote regions of the universe; we must cast our gaze upon those processes which we, as theosophists, perceive as processes within the Divine-Spiritual itself and within its life. Esoteric philosophy throughout the ages describes the universe in its depths as a rhythmic life of the World Spirit. Indian philosophy, for example, speaks of the inhalation and exhalation of Brahma. Brahma passes through various stages of his divine life. These stages unfold in such a way that they can be compared to the inhalation and exhalation of the divine Primordial Spirit. The exhalation became the creation of a world; the inhalation is the transition from a world that has fulfilled its task into a kind of state of sleep, which must then pass into a new existence, into a new exhalation. Thus the states of the revealed world and the states of rest alternate continuously. Manvantara and Pralaya—these are the states of revelation and the states of the deity resting within itself. This is a metaphor. The process underlying this metaphor is one that human words in our time would be insufficient to describe.

[ 3 ] According to our human perspective—that is, according to the perspective of those whose spiritual vision is open to these mysterious states of the universe—we must distinguish three breaths of the divine Primordial Spirit, and these three breaths also represent the threefold origin of the human being. The fact that the human being consists of three parts—body, soul, and spirit—is due to the three aspects of the divine breath from which they originate. Let us attempt to trace this threefold origin of the human being.

[ 4 ] Let us first consider seven stages of development, from the first stage to the point where humanity appears to us in its present stage of development. At the first stage of development, which we call the first elemental kingdom of the universe, nothing yet exists of what we now encounter in our world. There is still nothing at all of the diversity of stones, plants, and animals as we encounter them today, nor of the diversity of our world of thought, nor of the thought processes underlying the formation of our world, nor of the laws of nature. What does exist in the first elemental kingdom, however, is the system of predispositions for all that is to come.

[ 5 ] Anyone who has an eye for this system of all further seeds of expansiveness knows that these seeds are of infinite beauty and sublimity. Everything that later comes to light is only a faint reflection of what exists in embryonic form in the first elemental realm. In this realm lie the great intentions of the divine Primordial Spirit—the intentions He has for the individual worlds. And just as [developments] lag behind these intentions, so too do they lag behind in relation to world existence—not in the whole, but in the details. In the great diversity of infinity, these intentions are wonderfully fulfilled. That is why Theosophy calls this first elemental realm the world of the formless, which only later gives birth to form from within itself.

[ 6 ] It is only later on that this world of the primordial spirit takes shape. This can only be compared to the forms that our thoughts take within us. Imagine that everything outside of yourself had vanished and that only what you can remember were present to you. You would be surrounded by a sea of thoughts. You would have forgotten what you have seen and heard, including what you have seen of the physical world. Such thought-forms—only on a grand scale—are the content of the second elemental realm. The entire universe has been a universe of formed thoughts. Just as Plato once imagined the world of ideas, so must we imagine the realm of formed thoughts, the realm of the world of reason, as the mystics of the Middle Ages envisioned it.

[ 7 ] And the development proceeds to a denser stage. For the first time, world-thoughts imprint themselves upon a substance that can truly be called matter. This is the astral realm. The light thoughts have become astral beings that we can now perceive, namely as impulses and passions flooding through space. Only the seer perceives these currents; he perceives them in luminous forms. These currents exist in the third elemental realm. Ancient philosophers speak of these three elemental realms, but people who study this today do not know what was once meant by them. We need only go back to Empedocles to find that he knew of them. He said: Everything is brought about by love and hate. On this second and third stage, the thoughts have condensed downward. Once the third stage was reached, astral matter consolidated. It became denser and denser, weaving into itself those substances and activities that physical human beings only now know. It wove into itself a web of natural laws and forces. Theosophy calls this realm the mineral realm. You must not imagine that the mineral kingdom at this stage already contained fully formed minerals, crystals, and so on. No, everything that later, at much later stages, becomes mineral—that which undergoes chemical compounds and decompositions—still courses through this kingdom like lightning and thunder; this fourth kingdom, which we call the cosmic mineral kingdom or the fourth elemental kingdom.

[ 8 ] What lives in our physical body today, what governs all the laws within our physical body today, everything that is lawfully present in our body—all of that was once dissolved in those forces that coursed through the cosmos, in those mineral forces. Everything that constitutes the body today was present in that mineral realm. That is the origin of the forces and substances that are in our bodies and make up a part of our being. The physical aspect of the human being was formed out of these elemental processes. And at the moment in time when these elemental processes have progressed as far as I have described, at that very moment something else enters this mineral universe, and this other thing, of which I shall now speak, is that which lives within us as our soul component. Originally, both the physical and the soul components were contained within the one divine primordial being. What I have just described was, as it were, the first part of the divine breath. I shall now describe the other part.

[ 9 ] We can summarize the first part [of this development] by saying that we refer to human beings as members of a species. In terms of the species, human beings are more or less the same. After all, we also speak of plant and animal species. So there is also a human species that inhabits the entire Earth. Personality is present in every individual of the species. Because I am a member of the human species, I am physically alike to all other humans, but within this human species lies what I call my personality, and this constitutes the soul. I am a personality because I have personal interests, personal sympathies and antipathies, and so on. Although human beings are alike as species beings, they differ in terms of personality to such an extent that no one person is like another. This personal aspect in human beings did not arise from the same part of the divine breath; it comes from another source to unite with the mineral substance. The generic character arose through [the first part of the divine breath]; the personality arises because, up to the point where it unites [with the generic being], it has taken a different path through the universe. On this other path, that which later constitutes the human personality has already undergone a series of stages, of lessons in the universe; it was already embodied on other levels; it was present in natures similar to our physical nature—similar to plant beings, similar to animal beings—only in a different, distinct form. The forces capable of making us into personalities have already passed through many stages, and this is what I would now like to describe.

[ 10 ] The human personality thus comes from another world; it has already gone through stages of development before uniting with the other part, the generic aspect. It is base desires that flow in, as if from a tributary, into the main current. Imagine that into this stream of universal mineral-elemental substance now flow countless such personality beings who once had physical bodies—beings who, though they looked quite different from us humans, were nevertheless our ancestors. Imagine that these beings had a physicality that was much denser and larger than our own. We can say that they split off from the divine breath. A stream of power had arisen that, through the stages of development, learned to become a personality. All souls that inhabit human bodies have come over from this stream. After having gone through a terrible state, they allow themselves to sink, as it were, into the substance of the universe as a seed, as I described earlier, as murky desires and passions, and have constituted themselves as personalities. They united with that which is itself passion and desire. This stream has evolved downward until it has become the astral world.

[ 11 ] This cosmic nature of instinct and passion is imbued into the physical human embryo along with the potential for development. At this moment, the beginning of the development of our earthly being is established. At the moment these two unite, our earthly journey begins. We also describe this dual origin of humanity by saying: The universal Logos, which is based on the Primordial Spirit, has sent down a stream, the third Logos, and the third Logos has taken on various forms, which I have described as the first, second, and third elemental kingdoms. You must not imagine that this third part of the Logos, this third part of the breath of the divine World Soul, has been inactive until now. No, the entire series of elemental kingdoms that I have listed, and the entire progression of the instinctual nature up to the personality, has been guided from the outside by this spiritual being, the third part of the divine breath. Everything that was necessary to prepare these two sides until they reached the stage of development where they could unite was brought about by the third breath of the divine world soul. And the second Logos, too, passed through various stages until it became the germ of the personality. The third and second Logos flow together, and from this confluence of the third and second Logos arise those structures that gradually build up our earthly sphere.

[ 12 ] Now human development begins as we see it in ourselves. That which is capable of forming a mineral body out of desire, sensuality, and instinct, and that which has learned to develop these qualities as a personality, unite. And now the human being begins his earthly journey. Now the union between the human species-being and the human personality begins. They gradually learn to harmonize with one another. These two are within us. They are within us in such a way that the species-being acts within us as the physical, and the personal, which has come over from the other world, acts as our soul. Only gradually do they find the harmony within themselves to work together in such a way that the soul, which comes from the second Logos, harmonizes with the physical. The body is at first an unshaped vessel for the psyche. The psyche cannot yet find the necessary organs and powers in the physical to express itself fully. Thus the psyche works its way through, as it were, imprinting itself upon the matter. Over a series of developmental cycles, the spirit takes on the material nature. The development proceeds in such a way that the body increasingly becomes the expression, the instrument of the soul, of the inhabitant. Then the stage begins in which the actual spirit—what we call the spiritual aspect of the human being—unites with these two other elements.

[ 13 ] Now this divine breath itself flows into that which has only just come into being after the two parts have adapted to one another, so that one is the bearer and the other the power. Then the Supreme flows into this nature. That which until now was only the central conductor—the general, universal wisdom of the worlds—now flows into the world beings. This is the moment we call the inflow of the First Logos. Everything has now become so mature that it can serve as a vessel for the First Logos. I would like to illustrate this moment of the inflow of the First Logos to you as follows: Imagine a room illuminated by a central light. On the sides of the room are reflective spheres that reflect the light a thousandfold. Each individual sphere reflects the image of the light. This is how we must imagine humanity in the universe, guided by the Spirit from without. Let us assume that the spheres represent humanity as a species in a figurative, symbolic sense. The light that gives light to all comes from without, so that the spheres can only produce an insubstantial reflection from within. This was the case with human development up to the point in time of which we are now speaking. Until then, the human being was like a mirror illuminated by the First Logos, by the spiritual soul of the world. The human being reflected the light of the world soul; he mirrored what the spiritual light radiated.

[ 14 ] Now, however, imagine the light transformed in such a way that the central light flows out and begins to penetrate the spheres, awakening the individual spheres to glow with a part of its essence. The light flows out to bring that which until now could only be a reflection to a living, self-luminous state. The spheres now radiate their own light, which is separate from the central light. Thus we must imagine that at a certain moment in the course of development, the First Logos, the spiritual soul, sacrificed a portion of its radiance in order to pour it into human beings.

[ 15 ] Now the human being is endowed with all three parts of its being. The First Logos has taken possession of the human being. From now on, the human being consists of three parts. The part that has passed through the mineral kingdom has united with the development of the soul and has then progressed to the state of maturity, so that the Spirit, the Sun of the world, the spiritual soul, could take possession of it.

[ 16 ] These three elements have united with humanity in three successive stages of development. We can specify the exact time when this took place. We are now living in the fifth epoch of humanity. This influx of the spirit occurred in the middle of the third epoch of humanity, during the Lemurian period. The third human race, the Lemurians, inhabited a continent that has long since sunk but which once existed south of the Indian subcontinent, the so-called Lemuria. At that time, what we call the human imagination first took shape. This was followed by the fourth human race, the Atlanteans, who lived on a continent between Africa and America, which is still described in Plato’s writings. Following this, the fifth human race developed, to which we belong. In the third human race, during the Lemurian epoch, human beings began to possess a threefold nature. At that time, the first beings developed into what we know today as human beings. But what were those beings like? That which we truly are, that which is eternal within us, was previously of a purely spiritual nature. Our higher nature was previously enclosed within the bosom of the primordial source of the world. It is eternal and imperishable, not in the form it has assumed, but in its innermost essence. Before our spiritual nature took possession of human nature, it was a purely spiritual being and formed a component of what exists as the central sun, as the spiritual light of the world. What descended to the physical human being was not yet what is in the human being today; it was only a reflection of his true being; it inhabited only spiritual world spheres, the spheres of the First Logos. As spiritual beings, we rested in the Logos, as first sparks in the flame of the central light. Then our spiritual being descended deeply into what had been prepared for us as a vessel, and that which descended—that which lives from eternity to eternity in the most diverse forms—is the third element of human nature. We refer to this as the actual individuality of the human being.

[ 17 ] Human beings, then, consist of the generic being, which takes the same form for all people living on Earth. In this respect, people do not differ from one another. This is the physical nature of human beings. The other nature, the soul nature—joy and pain, desire and passion—that is his personal being. This arises and disappears and arises anew in the astral world. The predisposition for such personalities to arise is given in the stream I have described as the second stream. Alongside this, we have individuality, or the causal body. Why do we also call individuality the causal body? The causal bodies have always existed. They are imperishable. Before inhabiting these bodies, they inhabited other bodies in earlier races, all the way back to the Lemurian human race that lived on the island of Lemuria. This causal body has always incarnated, but it first entered a human, psychic body during the Lemurian era. Before that, it was not yet entangled in matter or the psyche. It led a spiritual existence, which it will lead again once it has completed the various lessons it must learn. What we call the causal body is what constitutes our Eternal Self. What we carry within us as the soul, what inhabits our body as the soul, has united with our physical body, so that we can say: The possibility that a personal being arose within a physical body arose because the soul and the physical body united at the beginning of our earthly evolution. This did not emerge from primordial mists, as physicists and astronomers imagine, but arose from what the ancients called the “waters,” over which the Spirit hovered. This means nothing other than the Spirit of whom I have spoken, the Spirit who came from entirely different universal worlds.

[ 18 ] That was when the preparatory stage of human existence began. It took a long time for the physical and astral bodies to become ready to serve as vessels for the actual spiritual soul. In Blavatsky’s “Esoteric Doctrine,” reference is made to this moment of the union of the psychic with the physical, as well as to the moment of the union of the spiritual with the psychic-physical; and finally, reference is made to the three parts of the breath of the World Soul with the words: The World Soul had once again slumbered through seven eternities. — That was a Pralaya. Out of this vast slumber emerged that existence in which the human being learned that it could animate a body subject to mineral laws.

[ 19 ] The human being has emerged from the convergence of three streams. Three developments had to be undergone before they could come together in the human being. The physical body has one origin, the soul has another, and the spiritual being has yet another. That to which the whole being is linked is our causal body, the eternal. This comes from purely spiritual spheres and is destined to return to purely spiritual spheres; but it is to return in such a way that, through the earthly existence it undergoes, it has learned and gathered results to carry back into the realm of the spiritual. Enriched within itself, it is to return once more to the spiritual.

[ 20 ] If we want to visualize these three origins of humanity, we can compare them to something like the construction of a house. The house is built from building blocks; then we have the furnishings, that which fills the interior rooms, that which constitutes the comfort of the house; this can be compared to the human soul. Within the whole is the thought. This can be compared to the causal body, to the ideal spirit that inhabits the body. The sense organs are the windows through which the causal body looks out into the world. Before we moved into the body, we were endowed with spiritual sense organs and saw everything around us unimpeded. Having moved into a “house,” the human being must look out through the windows; through the windows of the sense organs, nature must enter into him. Just as a person cannot always live outdoors but must return to a house, so the spirit must repeatedly move into the building prepared for it in order to view, through the sense organs—the windows—what it previously saw from the outside. Why this is so and what the laws are by which it is shaped—more on that next time.