The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Symbols as an Expression of Ancient Wisdom

[ 1 ] In the last lesson, I spoke about the development of the fifth root race. During my absence, you will have the opportunity to hear about the previous one, the Atlantean race.

[ 2 ] The so-called secret doctrine has always expressed what it has to say in certain images and symbols, because certain truths are difficult to express in our ordinary language. It is a prejudice to believe that truths could always be expressed clearly, for truth is much older than our language. Language only developed in the main epoch preceding our time, during the Atlantean period. The Atlanteans lived on a continent that no longer exists today, and under conditions that were very different from our present ones. The conditions of the climate, of air and water, were completely different then than they are today. The very beginnings of language can be found in the period preceding the Atlantean era, in the Lemurian era, although at that time it was not yet a language, but only a kind of uttering of individual sounds.

[ 3 ] Truth, wisdom, existed before human language. But because human language is still young, it cannot put into words the ancient, eternal wisdom that created the world and is still creatively active in it. The teachings of this wisdom were always conducted in secret and only communicated to the student once he had learned the symbolic sign language in which these secrets were given. It is difficult to translate these signs into our language. Even today, symbolic designations and images must still be used for certain things that can be better expressed through images than through words.

[ 4 ] The transition from a human form in which there were not yet two sexes to our present form is very difficult to comprehend. The human body has changed greatly in the course of a long evolution. In Lemurian times, the body was a kind of fiery mist, like a fiery cloud. There was also no solid earth at that time. The human body contained the same substances as today's body, but it was gaseous. It underwent various metamorphoses quickly. Its will was the expression of its form. When it wanted something, it could not reach for it with its hand, because it had none; it first formed a hand in order to then grasp. Today, this sounds fantastic.

[ 5 ] What is our history today? We only know a few millennia on Earth. There are no records of the earliest times of our Earth's development because there were no fossils yet, i.e., no impressions in rock. The matter that now makes up the things of the outside world and our own human bodies has changed completely since those ancient times. These states cannot be explored physically. It is only through occult research that it is possible to learn anything about them, and for this research we have the Akashic Records. These Akashic Records contain everything that happens in the spiritual world, and since the physical is an outflow of the spiritual, everything that has ever happened and is happening is contained in them.

[ 6 ] During the day, human beings experience impressions and process them psychologically. The astral body contains all the echoes of daily life, everything that human beings have felt, wanted, and thought. This astral body lives in astral space, and what goes on in it is imprinted as an image in the astral world like vibrations, and that remains alive. In this state, freed from physical daily life, human beings inscribe what they have experienced into the higher worlds, and this remains there. In this way, human beings are active for eternity while they sleep. When they sleep, their soul and spirit bodies are outside their physical and etheric bodies, but they are not aware of this. Only clairvoyants can see what has passed through the soul of a human being and then been inscribed in the Akashic Records.

[ 7 ] The further back we go into the past, the more we have to rely on the Akashic Records, and the further back we go, the purer these records are. They are easiest to read in states of the Earth that lie far, far back in time, before the Earth was physical. It is much more difficult to read them during the Atlantean period, and most difficult of all during the post-Atlantean period. This is because the reader must carefully eradicate all of their own knowledge of these times from their soul so that it does not falsify the records. Therefore, it is easier to research the oldest times, of which one has no sensory images.

[ 8 ] However, there can also be great confusion if someone is not entirely confident in reading these characters. For example, if someone lived in Roman times, let us take Virgil. When we perceive Virgil in the Akashic Records, he appears as a living image, like real life; it is like a repetition of life itself. One can now see this life of Virgil replaying itself; it is a faithful reproduction of what happened at that time. If you ask this image a question, it answers as Virgil might have answered. Swedenborg spoke with this Akashic image of Virgil. The individuality of Virgil himself has undergone its own, different development. If someone cannot distinguish precisely, they may confuse the two.

[ 9 ] Now I would like to speak of the symbols that have always been used in occultism for the time of transition from two-sexed to one-sexed human beings, for the separation of the sexes in the Lemurian period. Three symbols were spoken of.

The first symbol: Man received his original armor and a double-edged sword.
The second symbol is the seven trees.
The third symbol is the ten-petaled book.

[ 10 ] The armor pointed to the original relationship between the solid components of the earth and the solid components of our physical body. This body, which is connected to the solidity of the earth, is the first state of human nature. This was not always the case. In the past, the earth was very different. What is solid today was in a different state back then because it was mixed with something completely different and substantial, which is now separated from it. It was described something like this: Ph + G = physical body + spirit, and under this formula, one learned to look at how the spirit had constructed the body. We can stand in awe of what this body contains when we see, for example, how wonderfully the structure of the thigh bone is constructed. The wisest architect could not have solved the problem better, as with the least amount of material [it is possible to support the entire body]. Or when we look at the anatomy of the heart, which functions wonderfully throughout our entire lives, despite all the attacks it is exposed to through human irrationality, as people consume toxins such as alcohol, coffee, and so on.

[ 11 ] If we think of this spirit as an effective, active force mixed with matter, we have the two states in which the body can exist. There is the original shell, in which the spirit was still directly permeating and shaping. Then it separated itself. The second is something humans have in common with the plant kingdom: growth, reproductive power, that is, they have life force: Lk. + W. = life force + water. Just as the physical body is connected to the spirit, so the life force is bound to water. The occultist sees life in water. Everything that lives is springing forth and inconceivable without water. Thirdly, the power of desire arose in human beings. This was originally united with fire as a spiritual force. From the power of desire arose passion, kama, in human beings. In kama, human beings were united with fire. Wk. + F. = power of desire + fire.

[ 12 ] Even earlier, the human ego was not yet bound to a single element, but was a center in the surging sea of elements surrounding the developing human being. You see a degenerate echo of this in the formation of crystals, where the spirit appears as a formative force in the midst of materiality. At that time, the physical body was also crystal-like and radiant. It absorbed the life force and left the water behind. Then humans absorbed fire and received warm blur.

[ 13 ] Then he received the double-edged sword, that is, the ego, which can act from the outside in and from the inside out. It has power over the elements of earth, water, and fire, which were subject to it. When Kama was bound to fire, water to life force, matter to spirit, man formed his armor, and he received the double-edged sword.

[ 14 ] The seven trees are the seven ways in which man can live out his life. We have before us the past, present, and future of the human being. First we have the physical shell (Sthula sharira), then the etheric body (Prana), in which the forces of reproduction, nutrition, and growth are at work, thirdly the part of the human being in which the instincts and passions reign, the astral body, and then only as the central element the fourth, the human self-consciousness. Human beings have acquired their fourfold nature unconsciously, without their cooperation. As soon as they have attained self-consciousness, they begin to work on themselves and organize their astral body. In this way, they gradually radiate their astral body from within. This work will be completed at the end of our post-Atlantean epoch, when the astral body will be saturated with manas.

[ 15 ] There are seven stages:

1. The tree of existence — where humans develop their physical body
2. The tree of growth
3. The tree of kinship — where humans develop sympathy and antipathy for their surroundings
4. The tree of knowledge of good and evil — where humans shut themselves off from the outside world
5. The tree of life — where humans begin to enliven their astral body — transition from the kama body to manas
6. The Tree of the Word — where humans are able to hear the so-called inner word, where they have mystical knowledge
7. The Tree of Godliness — when humans rest in the godliness of the universe.

[ 16 ] Next time, I will talk about the ten-petaled book. The great teachers of humanity have read in the ten-petaled book how modern humans spell.