The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Eleventh Lecture

[ 1 ] We have come in our consideration to the point where the Earth has undergone its so-called lunar state. We have also seen that this lunar state of the Earth was followed by a kind of sleep state of the whole system. Of course, we have to imagine that all beings that inhabit such a planet go through these transitional and intermediate states, so that they undergo different experiences in them than during the actual external state of development. We want to become clear about how the beings have gone through different things during this intermediate state between the moon evolution of the earth and the actual earth evolution.

[ 2 ] We have seen that three types of beings lived on the moon as a kind of physical ancestors of our present natural kingdoms. There lived a kind of plant minerals, animal plants and human animals. Man himself was on this old moon in a state of not yet developed self-awareness. Man had not yet attained to a self that dwelled in a body. During this intermediate state something very important now occurred to the spiritual part of man, if I may so express it.

[ 3 ] If we visualize the old moon sphere correctly, we can describe it in some respects as a being that had a kind of life itself, somewhat like a tree on which all kinds of creatures live. The moon itself was a kind of unified plant-mineral. Its rocks were only a hardening of a kind of plant-mineral mass, and its animal plants grew out of this mass, and that which we can call human animals circled around the moon. At the same time, we have to realize that everything that was self-conscious still lived more or less in the moon's atmosphere in that fire nebula, that it was still part, a link, of a higher being in which all these selves were located, which today are in the body, separated from each other by the skin. So such as today with an I-consciousness endowed walking people did not yet exist. But something else was much more developed than on Earth.

[ 4 ] You know that today on Earth, what is called the folk soul, the racial soul, has become a rather abstract concept. Today, many people believe that the individual soul of man, which dwells in his body, is actually real. When one speaks of German, French or Russian tribal souls, people regard this as something more or less abstract, as a collective concept, as the characteristics that the individual members of these peoples have. For the occultist, this is not the case at all. For him, what is called the folk soul, i.e. the German, French or Russian folk soul, is something that exists absolutely and independently. Only in our present earthly existence is this folk soul present only spiritually, perceptible only to those who can ascend to the astral plane. There you would not deny it, because there it exists as a truly living being. You would meet the national soul there as you meet your friends on the physical plane.

[ 5 ] On the moon you would have been even less inclined to deny this soul of groups, because at that time it had a much more real existence. That which guided the bloodstream down into the bodies of those beings orbiting the moon was the folk or racial soul. It is the fate of our age to deny such entities, which have a real life on the astral plane and are not perceived here on the physical plane. And we are at the very peak of this materialistic development, which would like to deny such entities as the souls of nations and races.

[ 6 ] Among other things, a very characteristic book has recently been published that has been widely advertised and praised, and rightly so, as a correct expression of our abstract and objective thinking, because it seems to have been written from the soul of the contemporary human being. Such a book had to be written sometime. It denies everything that cannot be seen with the eyes and touched with the hands. From the occultist's point of view, this book is a scandalous book, but an excellent book from the point of view of the present way of thinking. It is Mauthner's “criticism of language.” In this book, a thorough cleanup has been made of all the things that cannot be grasped with hands. A book of this kind was bound to be produced in our time as a kind of necessity. This is not meant as a criticism. It is only meant to show the contrast between the occult way of thinking and modern times. In this book you can get to know exactly the opposite of all occult thinking; it is the most wonderful product of a dying cultural trend of the present and from this point of view it is quite excellent.

[ 7 ] You will understand that on this old moon there really was a kind of collective consciousness present that does not exist here on earth. On earth, people feel isolated as individuals. That was not the case on the moon. On the moon there was a living group soul, which then appeared on Earth in a diluted form as a national soul, so that the entire moon sphere had a high degree of common consciousness. This common consciousness on the moon perceived itself as feminine. And now you know that this moon was irradiated by the sun. The sun was felt to be the male principle. This is contained in the old Egyptian myth, for example, the moon as Isis, female, the sun as Osiris, male. Only the consciousness of self enclosed in the human body was entirely absent. That was contained in the atmosphere of the moon.

[ 8 ] During that intermediate state, various entities worked from the moon to the earth through the moon's atmosphere in such a way that the human etheric body and the human astral body became suitable for receiving an ego consciousness. What was there when this sun, which still contained the moon and the earth, shone again? In the surroundings of this newly awakened solar sphere were the entities that now form your soul. They were in such a way that during the intermediate state they incorporated the sense of self into the astral and etheric bodies. The physical body did not yet have it, and so it emerged again as a human animal, just as it was on the moon. So these two no longer matched. On the moon they had still been in tune with each other. What had sunk into the astral and etheric bodies no longer exactly matched what was physical below, and the consequence of this was that before this could be matched, the earlier conditions of Saturn, Sun and Moon had to be repeated. So we have three repetitions before our Earth actually appeared.

[ 9 ] First came the Saturnian existence with the physical bodies of the animal-men, but in a certain respect no longer as simple as they had been on Saturn. At that time the sense organs were in their germinal stages; now the glandular and nervous organs had already been added, but they were unable to absorb what was above in this way. A brief repetition of the Saturn condition had to occur. The spirits of selfhood and independence had to work again on the physical bodies to implant in them the ability to absorb the I. Likewise, the state of the sun had to be gone through so that these physical bodies would be able to receive an ego with regard to the organs that had developed on the sun. The state of the moon had to be gone through as well to make the nervous system suitable for this.

[ 10 ] So first a kind of repetition of the Saturn condition. In this, those entities that had previously been human animals now walked around on Earth like automatons, like a kind of machine. Then the time came when this repeated Saturn condition passed into the sun condition. Then the repetition of the moon state occurred, where the sun had already detached itself. Everything that had previously detached itself as the moon remained behind. So the whole lunar cycle was repeated again, except that the entities were given the ability to absorb an ego.

[ 11 ] This repetition of the moon's cycle was, if one may say so, an evil time in the evolution of the Earth, for, spiritually speaking, the egoity without purifying thinking had been implanted in the human body, which after all consisted only of physical, etheric and astral bodies. In the time when the sun had already gone and the earth had not yet thrown out the moon, man was in a state where his astral body was the bearer of the wildest desires, for all the evil forces were implanted in him and there was no counterweight. To use today's terminology, after the separation of the sun, it was a mass in which people were still entirely group souls, but of the most voluptuous kind with the worst instincts.

[ 12 ] And so, through this passage through a real hell, under the influence of the purified sun that had emerged – not only the physical sun, but also the sun beings who had withdrawn to the sun —, this repetitive moon planet gradually matured to the point where it could expel the terrible instincts and powers and retain on earth that which was capable of development. With the departure of today's moon, all these voluptuous forces went away. Therefore, in the present moon, you have the remnant, also in its spiritual significance, of all the evil influences that were present in the human world at that time, and therefore there is also a pulling-down influence present with this moon existence. That which remained on earth after the separation of the sun and the moon was what was capable of development.

[ 13 ] Let us now first consider the animal-men themselves. They had gradually matured to such an extent that the I could be incorporated into them. So now we have the human being, consisting of four members: physical body, etheric body, astral body and I, walking around on earth. Now, for the first time, the earlier floating, floating position changes and the human being gradually begins to come into the vertical position. His backbone, his nerve cord in the back, became erect, in contrast to the completely horizontal position he had been in during the moon time. And with this straightening up, there was a parallel expansion of the spinal cord mass into the brain, and yet another development went parallel with this. For the floating, swimming movement that man had both in the moon time and during the repetition of the moon time, when the fire-mist forces were still present in the environment, he needed a kind of swim bladder, and that was actually present in human nature, as it still is in fish today. Now the fire-mist — we have called it Ruach — settled. This happened very gradually and slowly. Of course, the air was still filled with dense water vapors, but the worst was settling, and with that began the time when man went from being a gill-breather to becoming a lung-breather. The swim bladder transformed into lungs. Thereby he became able to receive the higher spiritual entities within himself, namely the first predisposition to that which stands above the ego, the spirit self or manas.

[ 14 ] This transformation from the swim bladder to the lungs is expressed in the Bible with the wonderful monumental words: “And God breathed into the man the breath of life, and he became a living soul.” This expresses what has happened to man over thousands of years. And all the entities we have come to know, both the plant animals and the animal men of the moon and their descendants during the lunar period of the earth, they all did not yet have red blood. What they had was similar to the not yet red blood of the present lower animals. Blood-like substance flowed in and out of them from the outside. In order to be able to harbor red blood within themselves, something else was needed. We will understand this when we know that until the ejection of the moon, iron played no role in the evolution of our planet. Until then, there was no iron on our planet. It received it through the planet Mars passing through our Earth and, so to speak, leaving the iron behind. This is where the influence of iron in red blood comes from Mars.

[ 15 ] Legend has preserved this well by attributing to Mars the properties that iron brought to blood, the strong power, the warrior-like. Thus the influence that occurred on the part of the respiratory process was supported by the introduction of iron into our organism. This was of the greatest importance for our development on earth. Under these influences the human organism developed to such an extent that one can say: man began to purify and refine from the I the elements of his being that he had previously received on Saturn, the Sun and the Moon. At first, this work naturally began with the element that he had received last, the astral body. And this purification of our astral body is our culture.

[ 16 ] If you could see this human being, who was still in the process of transformation into the lungs, who was making the first attempts at red blood, then you would find him very unlike our present human form. He was so different that one could really take offense at describing this human being from that time, because to today's materialistic thinker it would seem grotesque. He had approximately the developmental value of an amphibian, a reptile that is just beginning to breathe through lungs, and from the earlier floating, swimming movement, he began to learn to slowly prop himself up on the earth. If we say that in the Lemurian Age man was in a form of movement that was alternately hopping, barely striding, and then again rising into the air, we have at most something in the ancient dinosaurs that can recall it. Nothing has been preserved that geologists could have found as hardenings or petrifications, because the human body was completely soft and no bones had yet been incorporated into it.

[ 17 ] What did the Earth look like after it had freed itself from the moon? It used to be surrounded by fire fog, as if in a boiling, steaming cauldron, and then gradually the dense water vapors retreated. Now it turned out that the earth had only a very thin hardened cover, under which was this seething, bubbling sea of fire, which was the remnant of the fire fog of the old atmosphere. Gradually, small islands emerged, the first beginnings of our present mineral kingdom. While a plant-mineral kingdom still existed on the moon, the first rudiments of our present rocks and stones now emerged through hardening and mineralization of this mass. Even earlier, the animal-plant kingdom had developed into something like the present plant kingdom. And the entities on the moon that were human animals had divided into two armies. Some had kept pace with evolution and become human forms, but there were also those who had not undergone this development. These are the present higher animals. They had remained at an earlier stage, and because they could not keep up, they fell further and further behind. All the mammals and other animals we have today are the remains of human animals from earlier lunar periods. So you must never imagine that man was ever an animal like those that live on earth today. The bodies of these animals were not capable of absorbing the 'I' at that time; they remained at the level of the group soul of the moon. The last ones, which almost reached the connection on earth, but which later proved to be too weak to be inhabited by an individual soul, are the apes, the present ape family. But they too were never the real ancestors of humanity, but rather degenerate entities.

[ 18 ] Thus, in the ancient Lemurian times, the Earth was a kind of fiery mass in which most of today's minerals were dissolved and liquid, as they are in an ironworks today. From this, the first mineral island mass developed. On this, the human ancestors walked, half hopping, half floating. The spirit-self endeavored to gradually take possession of these humans.

[ 19 ] Thus we must imagine the ancient fire age of the Earth as a time when, in certain respects, there was still a last echo present of the forces of the Moon itself, which then gradually disappeared. They manifested themselves through the dominion that human will had over the substances and forces of nature. On the moon, man was still completely connected with nature; there the group soul worked on human existence. Now that was no longer the case, but there was still a magical connection between human will and fire forces. If a person had a gentle character, then through willpower he worked in such a way that the natural element of fire calmed down; this allowed more land to be added. A passionate person, on the other hand, used their will in such a magical way that the fire masses became stormy and angry and tore apart the thin layer of earth. Now all the wild, passionate power that had been inherent in man on the moon and during the repetition of the lunar period on earth came to a breakthrough once again in the newly created individual human souls. The passions affected the fiery masses in such a way that they revolutionized them and a large part of the land inhabited by the Lemurians perished. Only a small part of the inhabitants of Lemuria survived and continued to propagate the human race.

[ 20 ] They all lived already at that time; their souls are the same, having escaped from the stormy fire mass of Lemuria. The part of humanity that had saved itself moved to the land we know as Atlantis, which essentially extended between present-day Europe and America. From there, the human race continued to multiply. Gradually, the Earth's atmosphere had changed so that all traces of the old smoke had been blown out and the air was only impregnated with a mighty mass of fog. Germanic saga has preserved the memory of this in Niflheim or Mistheim; that is a land that was continually traversed by such heavy masses of fog.

[ 21 ] What was it that created from outside during the Lemurian period? During the Saturn period, these were the entities we call the spirits of egoism and the spirit of independence. During the Sun period, they were the archangels, the fire spirits, and during the Moon period, the entities that were, so to speak, the good spirits of the Moon period. The Christian name for them is angels; in Theosophy they are also called the “spirits of the twilight”. We have designated the most outstanding leader of these spirits as the Holy Spirit, the ruler of the fire spirits as the Christ, and that of Saturn as the Father-Spirit. The last one, then, who created with his host, was the spirit whom Christianity calls the Holy Spirit, the ruler of the development of the moon, the spirit who was still present during the repetition of the time of the earth's moon. It was the same spirit who built from the outside and now, so to speak, sent a ray of his own being into the human being. At the beginning of the Lemurian period we have to distinguish between two kinds of spirits: the spirits that prepare the lower physical body, that implant the consciousness of self, that shape the human form, and the spirit that entered into the human being himself at the moment when he learned to breathe physically.

[ 22 ] If you now consider that everything on Saturn that still formed a kind of fire mass, surrounded by a finer atmosphere, was gaseous on the sun was gaseous and then surrounded by those fiery nebula masses on the moon, then you have to understand the evolution of the earth as a purification, just as the evolution of humanity itself is a purification. What we call air today only gradually became pure from all that filled it as a kind of smoke and vapor. We must be clear about the fact that what has separated out of the atmosphere is the substance from which all physicality has been built. The air is the purest of what has remained. It is the best physicality for the leading spirits of the moon, which in Christian terminology are called angels. Therefore, in the air that had been purified, that had been separated, man felt the physicality of the new guiding spirits of the earth, the present guiding spirit Jehovah. In the blowing of the wind, one felt what guided and led the earth. And so they lived over into the Atlantic period, the continent of which forms the present floor of the Atlantic Ocean, by sensing the physicality of the god in the inhaled breath.

[ 23 ] The magical influence that men had had over the sea of fire, over the processes of the earth, gradually disappeared. But another connection remained in the first Atlantean period. Man still had a certain magical power over the growth of plants. If he raised his hand, which at that time still had a completely different shape, over a plant, he was able to make it grow rapidly through his will influence. He was still in close contact with the beings of nature. The whole life of the Atlanteans corresponded to this coexistence with nature.

[ 24 ] What we today call the sense of combination, intelligence, logical thinking, did not yet exist at that time. On the other hand, man had developed other things to a high degree, for example, memory, of whose fabulous development we cannot even imagine today. Man could not calculate, not even that two times two are four, but he knew it from memory. Each time he recalled the earlier experience. This too was retained in Atlantean times, so that even if one no longer felt the folk soul directly within oneself as on the moon, one still felt the effect of the old folk and racial souls. It was so strong that it would have been quite impossible at that time for anyone belonging to one race or folk soul to ever connect with someone who belonged to a different race. There was a deep antipathy between the members of the different folk souls. Only those within the same folk soul loved each other. One can say that the common blood, which in the moon age had poured down from the folk soul, was the basis for belonging together, and one remembered not only vaguely but quite distinctly the experiences of the ancestors. One felt oneself as a link in the chain of ancestors through the common blood, just as you feel the hand as a member of your organism. This feeling of belonging together was connected with evolution insofar as at that time during this transition, which we have observed and which took place at the time of the replacement of the sun and the expulsion of the moon, another significant process took place. This is connected with everything that occurred on earth as a kind of hardening process. The mineral kingdom came into being, and at the same time a hardening process also took place within human nature. A harder substance gradually formed from the soft mass, first hardening to form cartilage and then to form bones, and it was only with the formation of this bone mass that the human being began to walk.

[ 25 ] And with this division into bone mass, another process went parallel. As man developed by the moon's mass being repelled from the earth and only the developmental potential remaining, two types of forces emerged in the beings that inhabited the earth. Now the sun and the moon were outside, and the sun and moon forces therefore acted on the earth from the outside. And from this mixture of sun and moon forces, which had previously been in the earth itself but now radiated in from the outside, what we call the advance to sexual life arose. For all those forces that find expression in sexual life are under the influence of the forces of the sun and moon.

[ 26 ] In ancient times, when the sun, moon and earth were still connected, everything that could be described as feminine was fertilized, so to speak, by the forces of the sun itself. The sun felt itself to be masculine, the moon feminine. Now the moon was drawn out; the forces of the two bodies mixed. In general, we can describe the entities that had come into being until the moon was cast out as a kind of female entity, because all fertilizing forces come from outside, from the power of the sun. Only on an earth that had cast out the moon, so that the sun now illuminated a completely different body, could the old and undifferentiated feminine separate into masculine and feminine, so that with the hardening and ossification process, the transition into the sexual took place. And with that, the possibility was given to develop the ego in the right way.