The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Ninth Lecture

[ 1 ] When we ask ourselves: How has the human being developed from the most ancient times to the present day, how has the human being come into being since time immemorial? — then we will first of all have to remember what we have said about the essence of the human being. Human beings have seven members: the first, the physical body, is, so to speak, the lowest member; higher and more refined is the etheric body; even higher and more refined is the astral body; and only the rudiments of the I-body are present. But it would be wrong to conclude from this that the highest body that human beings have today could also be called the most perfect, and that the physical body is the most imperfect. Quite the opposite is true: the physical body is the most perfect member of the human being. Later on, of course, the higher members will be perfect to a much greater degree, but today the physical body is the most highly developed of its kind. It is constructed with indescribable wisdom. I once described to you, as an example, the structure of the thigh bone. Each individual bone, with its artfully assembled framework and wise arrangement, is such that no engineer today could solve the problem of achieving the greatest performance with the smallest mass. And the deeper one penetrates into the miraculous structure of the human form, the more admirable the structure appears to us, for example, the miraculous structure of the brain or the heart. The heart makes no mistakes, but the human astral body makes many mistakes. The drives and passions of the astral body storm the physical body and overwhelm it. When a person eats the wrong food, they are again following the astral body. The physical heart keeps the blood flowing properly, but the astral body constantly attacks the heart because its urges desire what harms the heart. Coffee, tea, and alcohol are toxins for the heart; they are often consumed daily, and yet the heart endures. It is so durably constructed that it can withstand all the storms of the astral body for seventy or eighty years. In the hierarchy of bodies, the physical body is therefore the most perfect in every detail.

[ 2 ] Less perfect is the etheric body, even further behind in its development is the astral body, and least developed is the ego body. Why is this? It is because the physical body has undergone the longest development. It is the oldest member of the human being. Less old is the etheric body, even younger is the astral body, and youngest of all is the ego body.

[ 3 ] In order to understand this development of the bodies, one must know that not only does the human being undergo repeated incarnations, but that the law of reincarnation is a universal law of the world. Not only does the human being undergo repeated incarnations, but all beings and all planets are subject to this law. Our entire Earth, with everything on it, has undergone previous incarnations, of which we will initially focus on three in particular.

[ 4 ] Before the Earth became this planet, it was another. In ancient times, our Earth was a planet that secret science calls Saturn. Four successive incarnations are: Saturn, Sun, Moon, Earth. Just as there is a Kamaloka and Devachan period between two human incarnations, so between each two planetary incarnations of the Earth there is a period in which it is not visible and does not lead an external life. This period between the incarnations of our planet was called Pralaya, and the period in which it is incarnated, Manvantara. However, the names Saturn, Sun, and Moon do not refer to the celestial bodies that are called by these names today. What is called the Sun here is not our present Sun. Our present sun is a fixed star, and in the course of its incarnations it has worked its way up from the substance and essence of a planet to the rank of a fixed star; the old sun was a planet. Likewise, what is called the old moon is not the present moon; it was the third stage of incarnation of the earth, and so it is with Saturn, which was the first stage of development of the earth.

[ 5 ] Human beings already existed on the planet Saturn. Saturn did not shine, but with devachanic hearing one could have heard it; it sounded. After it had been there for a while, it gradually disappeared, became invisible for a long time, and then shone forth again as the sun. This then went through the same process and reappeared as the moon. Finally, the Earth came into being in the same way.

[ 6 ] However, one should not imagine these four planets, Saturn, Sun, Moon, and Earth, as four separate planets; that would be completely wrong. They are four states of manifestation of one and the same planet. They are true metamorphoses of one planet, and all beings on it metamorphose with it. Man has never been on another planet, but the Earth has existed in different states.

[ 7 ] When our Earth was Saturn, there were only the very first seeds of our human kingdom. What today is so artfully constructed as the human body was only a seed on Saturn, nothing more than the very first seed. There were no minerals, no plants, no animals. Man is the first fruit of our creation. But the Saturn man was very different from today's man. He was largely a spiritual being. They could not yet be seen with physical eyes. There were no physical eyes yet. Only a being with devachanic vision could have perceived these humans. This human structure was like a kind of auric egg, and inside it was a strange shell-like structure in the shape of a small pear, like joined oyster shells, a kind of vortex. Saturn was completely permeated by such beginnings of physical structures; they were, as it were, exudations that condensed from the spiritual. From these structures, which could only be regarded as very faint hints of what was to come, the physical body of the human being was formed in the course of development. It was a kind of primordial mineral around which an etheric body had not yet formed. Therefore, one can say that the human being passed through the mineral kingdom. However, it would be completely incorrect to think that this was our present mineral kingdom. Apart from this human kingdom, there was no other kingdom at all on Saturn.

[ 8 ] Just as the human being goes through certain stages of life, as a child, youth, maiden, man, woman, old man, old woman, so too does a planet go through stages of life. Before Saturn revealed the flakes deposited within it, it was an Arupa Devachan formation, then a Rupa Devachan formation, and later an astral formation. Then the flakes gradually disappear, and Saturn retraces these stages back into the darkness of Pralaya. Such a metamorphosis from the spiritual to the physical and back again is called a “round” or a “state of life” in theosophical literature. Each round is divided into seven subdivisions: Arupa, Rupa, Astral, Physical, then Astral again, Rupa, Arupa; these have been wrongly called “globes”: they are states of form. However, we are not dealing with seven successive spheres; it is always the same planet that transforms, and the beings undergo the transformations with it. Saturn has undergone seven such rounds or states of life. In each round, the structure is perfected, so that it is only in the seventh round that it is perfect in its kind. In each cycle, seven transformations or states of form are undergone, so Saturn would have seven times seven, or forty-nine metamorphoses. Saturn has undergone this, as have the Sun and the Moon, and the Earth is undergoing the same thing, and then three other planets will follow in the future: Jupiter, Venus, and Vulcan.

[ 9 ] So there are seven planets, each with seven times seven states, written in secret science as 777. In secret writing, the seven in the ones place represents the globes, the tens place represents the rounds, and the hundreds place represents the planets. These numbers must be multiplied together. Consequently, our planetary system has to undergo 7 times 7 times 7, or 343 transformations.

[ 10 ] In H. P. B.'s “The Secret Doctrine,” we find a curious passage. The “Secret Doctrine” was largely inspired by one of the highest spiritual individualities. But the great initiates have always expressed themselves very cautiously, they have only hinted. Above all, they always let people do some of the work themselves. So this passage is full of riddles; H.P.B. knew that. The teacher said nothing about successive incarnations, he only said: Learn to solve the riddle of 777 incarnations. - He wanted people to learn that there are 343. The “Secret Doctrine” contains the task, but not the solution; that has only been found recently.

[ 11 ] The first embryonic state of man was thus on Saturn, which developed in ancient times. Saturn then disappeared into Pralaya and emerged from it again as the sun, and with it, man, the ancient inhabitant of the universe, also emerged from the darkness of Pralaya. But in the meantime, humans had gained the power to secrete something from themselves, like a snail secretes its shell. They could secrete shell-like structures as floating forms and retain the finer substances within themselves in order to develop further. In this way, humans formed the mineral kingdom from themselves; but these minerals were a kind of living minerals. Human beings now developed on the sun in such a way that the etheric body was added, as in today's plants. So they went through the plant kingdom on the sun, and we now have two kingdoms on the sun, the mineral kingdom and the plant kingdom; the latter was human beings. But these plant forms were very different from our present ones.

[ 12 ] Those who delve into the deeper relationships regard the plant as an inverted human being. It has the root at the bottom, then the stem, leaves, flower, stamens, and pistils at the top; the pistils contain the female reproductive organs, the stamens the male. In naive innocence, the plant stretches its fertilizing organs toward the sun, for the sun stimulates the fertilizing power. The root is in truth the head of the plant, which stretches its fertilizing organs out into space and whose head is drawn toward the center of the earth. Humans are the opposite; they have their head above and the organs that the plant stretches toward the sun below. Animals stand in the middle; their body is horizontal. If the plant is turned halfway, the position of the animal results; if it is turned completely, that of the human.

[ 13 ] Ancient secret science expressed this in an ancient symbol, the cross, and said, as Plato puts it according to the ancient mysteries: The world soul is nailed to the cross of the world body. That is to say, the world soul is contained in everything, but it must work its way up through these three stages; it makes its journey through the cross of the world body.

[ 14 ] On the sun, man was a plant being, exactly the opposite of man today. He lived in the sun; he belonged to the body of the sun. The sun was a body of light, consisting of light ether; humans were still plants, with their heads directed toward the center of the sun. When the sun later emerged, the human plants had to turn around, but they remained faithful to the sun.

[ 15 ] In the first cycle, the sun is only a repetition of the Saturn period; it is not until the second cycle that the further development of humans begins. When the sun had developed as far as it could in the seven cycles, it disappeared into the darkness of Pralaya and only reappeared as the moon.

[ 16 ] The first lunar cycle was again only a repetition of Saturn's existence in a slightly different form. The second lunar cycle also brought nothing new; it was a repetition of life on the sun. It was not until the third lunar cycle that something new was added: human beings received the astral body in addition to their two previous bodies. In its outer form, it can be compared to today's animals: it has three bodies. At that time, he arrived at the level of the animal kingdom. Man rose to the plant kingdom by rejecting the mineral kingdom, and now he rises to the animal kingdom by rejecting the plant kingdom. So now two kingdoms stand beside him. Then he rejects a smaller part of himself again, separates it from himself, and rises higher.

[ 17 ] In this third lunar cycle, an important cosmic process is now taking place: the sun and moon are separating. Two bodies are formed; the moon splits off from the sun. At the beginning of the second lunar cycle, the sun is still unchanged, then a small constriction appears at the bottom of the sun's body, it constricts, and in the third lunar cycle there are two bodies side by side.

[ 18 ] The sun has retained the nobler parts; it sends its rays to the moon from outside and gives it and all beings on it what they need. This is the advancement of the sun; it has now become a fixed star and no longer concerns itself with the three realms, but only gives what it has to give. It harbors higher beings who can now develop after the sun has separated the lower parts. In the fourth lunar cycle, all this is perfected, and in the fifth, the two bodies merge again and disappear as one into Pralaya.

[ 19 ] The old moon did not yet have a solid crust on which one could walk, as on the rocks of our earth. At that time, the mineral kingdom was like a living mass of peat bog or cooked spinach. This living, internally growing mass was interspersed with wood-like structures. From this grew the plant kingdom of that time, plants that were actually plant animals. They had feelings and would have found pressure painful. And the human beings in the animal kingdom at that time were not like today's animals, but stood between humans and animals. They were higher than today's animals and could carry out their instincts in a much more planned manner. However, they were lower than today's humans, because they could not yet say “I” to themselves. They did not yet have the “I” body.

[ 20 ] These three kingdoms lived on the living body of the Moon. It is important to note that these Moon people did not breathe as humans do today. They did not breathe air, but rather breathed in and out fire. By breathing in fire, they filled themselves with warmth; when they breathed out, they gave off the warmth and became cold. What humans today have as internal blood warmth, humans on the Moon had as respiratory warmth. Many ancient clairvoyant painters symbolized this in the fire-breathing dragon; they knew that in ancient times there were such moon beings who breathed fire.

[ 21 ] After its development through 7 times 7 times 7 states, the moon returned to Pralaya and then reemerged as Earth. In the first earth cycle, the entire Saturn existence is repeated, in the second the sun existence, and in the third the moon existence. During the third cycle, the separation of the sun and moon was also repeated.

[ 22 ] In the fourth earth cycle, the earth begins to form. Now a highly important cosmic process takes place: during its formation, the Earth encounters the planet Mars. The two planets penetrate each other, with the Earth passing through Mars. Mars had a substance that the Earth did not possess at that time: iron. Mars left this iron behind in the Earth in a vaporous state. If this had not happened, the Earth would have remained alone with what was already present, and humans would have developed to the level of the animal kingdom as it existed at that time; they would have been able to breathe warmth, but would never have had warm blood. If Mars had not deposited iron on Earth, humans would not have had warm blood, because iron is contained in blood. Thus, secret science says: Earth owes so much to Mars in its development that it is called Mars in the first half of its existence. Mercury has an equally important significance for the second half. In ancient times, Earth entered into a relationship with Mercury and will remain connected to it until the end of its development. That is why secret science does not speak of Earth, but of Mars and Mercury.

[ 23 ] This stage will be followed by three more stages in the future: Jupiter, Venus, Vulcan. These seven stages of the Earth, as described in secret science, have been preserved in the names of the days of the week, which are, however, quite mangled in the English language:

[ 24 ] Thus, in the names of the days of the week, you have the secret scientific teaching of the Earth's passage through these different periods: a wonderful chronicle that enables human beings to recall these truths again and again. Over the next few days, we will see more and more how theosophy brings us back to an understanding of what our forefathers once simply expressed in names, and how the most everyday things are connected to the most profound.