The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Twelfth Lecture

[ 1 ] Externally, the process that I described to you as the origin of bisexuality took place in such a way that you must still think of both sexes united in that animal of the moon, even in its descendants on the repetition of the moon on earth. Then a kind of splitting of the human body really did take place. This splitting came about through a kind of condensation. Only through the differentiation of a mineral kingdom, as it is today, could the present human body, which represents one sex, come into being. The earth and the human body first had to solidify to the mineral nature they have today. In the soft human bodies of the moon and the first earth, there were bisexual human beings of male-female entity.

[ 2 ] Now we must remember the fact that in a certain respect man has retained a remnant of the old bisexuality in that in the case of present-day man the physical body of the man is male and the etheric body female, and in the case of the woman it is the other way round; the physically female body has a male etheric body. These facts open up interesting insights into the psychological life of the sexes. The woman's ability to sacrifice herself in the service of love, for example, is connected with the masculinity of her ether body, while the man's ambition is explained when we recognize the feminine nature of his ether body.

[3] I have already said that what is separate in the human race has arisen from the mixing of the forces sent to us by the sun and the moon. Now you must be aware that in the case of man, the stronger influence on the etheric body comes from the moon and the stronger influence on the physical body from the sun. In women, however, it is the other way around: the physical body is influenced by the forces of the moon and the ether body by those of the sun.

[ 4 ] The continuous exchange of mineral substances in the present physical body of man could only take place when the present mineral had formed. Before that, there was a completely different form of nutrition. During the time when the Earth was still young, all plants were permeated with milky juices. In this way, nutrition was actually effected in such a way that man sucked the milky juices out of the plants, just as a child today sucks out the milky juices of the mother's breast. The plants that still contain milky juices today are the last stragglers from the time when all plants supplied these juices in abundance. It was only later that the time came when nutrition took on its present form.

[ 5 ] To understand the meaning of gender separation, we must realize that on the moon as well as during the lunar repetition period on Earth, all beings looked very similar. Just as a cow has the same appearance as its offspring, like all cows, because the group soul underlies it, so also the humans looked very much like their ancestors, and this was the case long into the Atlantean period.

[ 6 ] So where does the fact that people no longer resemble each other come from? It comes from the origin of the two sexes. From the earlier bisexuality, the tendency to shape the offspring similarly has been preserved in the female being. In the male being, the influence is different; in him, the tendency is to create diversity, individualization, and the fact that the male force flowed into the female one, more and more dissimilarity was created. Thus, through the male influence, the possibility arises that individuality takes hold.

[ 7 ] The ancient bisexual had yet another peculiarity. If you had asked an ancient lunar man about his experiences, they would have seemed the same to him as those of his most ancient ancestors; everything lived through generations. The preparation for the fact that gradually developed that consciousness, which extends only from birth to death, lies in the individualization of the human race, and thus also developed the possibility of such a birth and such a death as today. Because those old moon people who floated and swam were hanging down from the environment into which they sent their blood strands. When such a being died, it was not the soul that died, it was only a dying like that of a limb; above, consciousness remained, as if, for example, your hand withered on your body and a new hand grew in its place. Thus, in their dim consciousness, these people felt that dying was only a gradual drying out of their bodies. The same withered away, and new ones constantly sprouted; but consciousness was preserved through the consciousness of the group soul, so that there really was a kind of immortality.

[ 8 ] Then the present blood was created, which is now produced in the human body itself; this went hand in hand with the emergence of the two sexes. This created the necessity for a remarkable process. Blood produces a continuous struggle between life and death, and a being that produces red blood within itself also has within itself the scene of a continuous struggle between life and death, because red blood is constantly being consumed and transformed into blue blood, a substance of death. With the transformation of blood within man, there also arose that darkening of consciousness beyond birth and death. It was only then that man, with the brightening of the consciousness of the present, lost the old immortality that existed in the twilight, so that not looking beyond birth and death is intimately connected with sexuality. And yet another thing is connected with this.

[ 9 ] When man had the group soul, existence continued from generation to generation; there was no interruption by birth and death. Now this interruption occurred and with it the possibility of reincarnation. Formerly the son was only a direct continuation of the father, the father of the grandfather; consciousness did not break off. Now there came a time when it darkened beyond birth and death, and only with that was the possibility of a stay in Kamaloka and Devachan given. This change, this stay in higher worlds, has only become possible after individualization, after the repulsion of the sun and moon. Only then did what we call incarnation occur today, and with it this intermediate state, which will also cease one day.

[ 10 ] Thus we have arrived at the age in which we see the old bisexual organism, which represents a kind of group soul, dividing into male and female, so that the same, the similar, is perpetuated through the female, the different through the male. We see within our human race that the principle in the female still preserves the old tribal races and folk connections, and in the male there is that which continually breaks through these connections, divides them and thus individualizes humanity. In man there is indeed an old feminine principle at work as the group soul and a new masculine principle as the individualizing element. All racial and tribal connections will really cease to exist. Man will become more and more different from man. The bond will no longer be through common blood, but through that which binds soul to soul. Such is the course of human evolution.

[ 11 ] In the first Atlantean races there was still a strong bond of belonging together, so that the first sub-races were also divided according to color, and this group soul element we still have in the different colored people. These differences will increasingly disappear as the individual element gains the upper hand. There will come a time when there will no longer be any different-colored races. The difference in relation to the races will have ceased, but the greatest differences will exist individually. The further we go back in time, the more we find the racial element taking over. The true individualizing principle only begins in the later Atlantean period. Among the ancient Atlanteans, members of one race really did feel a deep antipathy towards members of another race. The common blood created a sense of belonging, of love. It was considered immoral to marry a member of another tribe.

[ 12 ] If you, as a seer, were to examine the connection between the etheric body and the physical body in the ancient Atlantean, you would make a remarkable discovery. While the etheric head of the etheric body of today's human being is fairly congruent with the physical part of the head and only extends a little beyond it, the etheric head of the ancient Atlantean extended far beyond the physical head. Particularly at the frontal part it projected mightily. Now we have to imagine a point in the physical brain at the point between the eyebrows, only about one centimeter lower, and a second in the etheric head, which would correspond to this point. In the Atlantean, these two points were still far apart, and evolution consisted precisely in the fact that they moved closer and closer together. In the fifth Atlantean age, the point of the ether head now moved into the physical brain, and the fact that these two points came together led to the development of what is our own today: calculating, counting, the ability to judge, the ability to grasp concepts, and intelligence. Before that, the Atlanteans only had a highly developed memory, but no combining mind. This is the starting point for the development of self-awareness. The Atlantean was not independent as a being until these two aspects came together; on the other hand, he was able to live in much closer contact with nature. His dwellings were made out of what nature gave him. He reshaped the stones and connected them to the growing trees. His dwellings were formed out of the growing nature, were actually transformed natural objects. He lived in the small contexts that were still maintained by blood ties, and in these a strong authority was exercised by the strongest, who was the chief. Everything depended on authority, but it was also exercised in another way.

[ 13 ] When man entered the Atlantic period, he could not yet speak an articulate language; this only developed in the Atlantic period. A chief would not have been able to express commandments in a language. On the other hand, these people had the ability to understand the language of nature. Modern man has no concept of this; he must first learn it again. Imagine, for example, a spring that reflects your image. As an occultist, a peculiar feeling arises in your soul. You say, “My image comes to me from this spring; this is a final sign of how everything was reflected in space on ancient Saturn.” The memory of ancient Saturn arises in the occultist when he beholds his reflection in the source. And in the echo that returns the spoken sound, the memory arises of how, on Saturn, everything that resounded into the cosmic space came back as an echo. Or you see a mirage, an optical illusion in which the air has absorbed the images that have been handed down to it and then reflects them back to you. As an occultist, you see in this a memory of the solar age, when the gaseous sun absorbed everything that came towards it from outer space, processed it, then reflected it back, imbuing it with its own nature. On the sun planet you would have seen how things were prepared inside as a mirage, as a kind of light image within the gases of the sun state. In this way one learns without fantasy to understand the world in many ways, and this is an important means of developing upwards into the higher worlds.

[ 14 ] In ancient times, man understood nature to a high degree. There is a great difference between living in an atmosphere like today's and one like that during the Atlantean era. The air was then permeated with mighty masses of fog; the sun and moon were surrounded by a huge rainbow halo. There was a time when the fog was so dense that no eye could see the stars, when the sun and moon were still eclipsed; they only gradually became visible to man. This becoming visible of the sun, moon and stars is magnificently described in the Book of Creation. What is described there really happened, and even more happened.

[ 15 ] The Atlanteans still had a very strong understanding of the natural world around them. What sounds like the rushing of a spring or the stormy wind and is an inarticulate sound to you today, the Atlantean heard as an understandable language. There were no commandments back then, but the spirit emerged from the water-soaked air and spoke to man. The Bible expresses this with the words: “And the Spirit of God hovered over the waters.” Man heard the spirit out of things; out of the sun, moon and stars, the spirit spoke to him, and you find in that word of the Bible a clear expression of what was happening in the human environment. Then came the time when a particularly advanced part of the human race, living in an area that is also now the bottom of the sea, near present-day Ireland, first experienced a strong integration of the etheric body and thereby experienced an expansion of intelligence. This part began to move eastward under the leadership of the most advanced, while mighty masses of water gradually flooded the Atlantic continent. The most advanced part of these peoples moved as far as into Asia and founded the center of the cultures there, which we call the post-Atlantic cultures. From there, culture then radiated. It went out from that stream of people, who later advanced further east and founded the first culture in India from Central Asia. This still showed strong echoes of the Atlantic culture. The ancient Indian did not yet have such consciousness as we have today, but the possibility for it was there when those two points of the brain of which I have spoken coincided. Before this integration, the Atlantean still had a pictorial consciousness; he still saw spiritual beings through it. He not only heard a distinct language in the murmuring of the spring, but for him Undine, who has her embodiment in water, rose from the spring. In the currents of the air he saw sylphs, in the seething fire the salamanders. He saw all this, and from that arose the myths and legends that have been preserved most purely in Europe, where the remains of the Atlanteans remained, who did not reach as far as India. The Germanic legends and myths are remnants of what the ancient Atlanteans still saw within the mass of fog. The rivers, like the Rhine, were alive in the consciousness of these ancient Atlanteans, as if the wisdom that was in the mists of ancient Niflheim had been deposited in them. That wisdom seemed to them to be within the rivers; it lived in them as the Rhine mermaids or similar entities.

[ 16 ] Thus echoes of Atlantean culture lived on in these regions of Europe; but over in India, a different culture emerged that still showed echoes of that world of images. This culture itself had been lost, but the longing for what was expressed in it remained with the Indians. While the Atlantean had heard the wisdom of nature speaking, the Indian was left with the longing for this unity with nature, and so the character of this ancient Indian culture is revealed in the fact that it wants to go back in time to what was natural to man earlier. The old Indian was a dreamer. Although what we call reality lay spread out before him, the world of the senses was Maja before his eyes. What the old Atlantean still saw as floating spirits, that the old Indian sought in his longing for the spiritual content of the world, for the Brahman. And this way of going back to the old dream-like consciousness of the Atlantean has been preserved in the Oriental schooling in a bringing back of this old consciousness.

[ 17 ] Further north we have the Medes and Persians, the original Persian culture. While Indian culture is strongly detached from reality, the Persian becomes aware that he has to reckon with it. Man there first appears as a laborer, conscious that he should not only strive for knowledge with his spiritual powers, but that he should transform the earth with them. She first confronted him as a kind of hostile element. He had to overcome the earth, and this antagonism is expressed in Ormuzd and Ahriman, in the good and the evil deity, and in the struggle between the two. Man wanted to let the spiritual world flow more and more into the earthly world, but he could not yet recognize a lawfulness, a natural lawfulness within the outer world. The ancient Indian culture did have a true knowledge of higher worlds, but not on the basis of natural science, because everything earthly related to maya; the Persian only came to know nature as a place of work.

[ 18 ] We then come to the Chaldeans, Babylonians and Egyptian peoples. There, man learned to recognize the laws of nature. When he looked up at the stars, he did not merely seek gods behind them, but he examined the laws of the stars, and so that wonderful science was born, which we find among the Chaldeans. The Egyptian priest did not see the physical as something to be resisted, but he incorporated the spirituality that he found in geometry into his soil, into his land. Outer nature was recognized in its conformity to law. Closely connected in Chaldean-Babylonian-Egyptian wisdom was the outer science of the stars with the knowledge of the gods who animate the stars. That is the third step in the development of culture.

[ 19 ] It is only at the fourth stage of post-Atlantean development that man comes to integrate into culture what he experiences within himself as spirituality. This is the case in the Graeco-Latin period. In the work of art, in the formed material, man impresses his own spirituality on to the material, in sculpture as well as in drama. The first beginnings of human city-building can also be found here. This was of a different nature than in pre-Greek times in Egypt and Babylon. There the priests looked up at the stars and sought their laws, and they created an image of what was happening in the sky in what they built. Thus, their towers show the seven-stage development that man first explored in the heavenly bodies, and thus the pyramids show nothing but cosmic relationships.

[ 20 ] The transition from priestly wisdom to actual human wisdom is wonderfully expressed in the first Roman story in the Seven Kings of Rome. What are these seven kings? We remember that the prehistory of Rome goes back to ancient Troy. Troy presents itself as the final result of ancient priestly societies that have established states according to the laws of the stars. Now we come to the transition to the fourth stage of culture. The old priestly wisdom is overcome by human cleverness, of which the cunning Odysseus is the image. We have an even more vivid image that can only be properly understood, which represents the overcoming of priestly wisdom by human judgment. The symbol of human wisdom is always the snake. The Laocoön Group shows how the priestly wisdom of ancient Troy is overcome by human cleverness and human wisdom, which are expressed in the snakes.

[ 21 ] Then the events that had to happen were outlined by the authoritative authorities who have been working through the millennia, and that is how history had to go. Those who have stood at the place of origin of Rome have already predetermined the seven-part culture of Rome, as it is written in the Sibylline books. Think it through: you will find in the names of the seven kings echoes of the seven principles of man. This even goes so far that the fifth Roman king, the Etruscan, comes from outside. He represents the part of the manas, the spirit-self, which connects the three lower limbs with the three higher ones. The seven Roman kings represent the seven principles of human nature; the spiritual connections are drawn within them. Republican Rome is nothing other than human wisdom, which replaces the old priestly wisdom. Thus the fourth period grew out of the third. Man brought forth what he himself had in his soul, in the great works of art, in drama and in law. Before that, all law was read in the stars. The Romans became a law-abiding people because here man created the law he needed, the jus, according to his own requirements.

[ 22 ] We ourselves live in the fifth age. How is the meaning of the whole evolution expressed in it? The old authority has disappeared; man is becoming more and more inward, his outer work is becoming more and more an imprint of his inner being. Tribal loyalties are disintegrating, and the human being is becoming more and more individualized. Hence the germ of the religion that says, “He who does not leave father and mother, brother and sister, cannot be my disciple” — that is, all love based on natural belonging must cease; the human being is to stand in relation to the human being and find soul to soul.

[ 23 ] We have the task of bringing down to the physical plane even more of what flowed out of the soul during the Greco-Latin period. As a result, the human being becomes more and more immersed in materiality. While the Greeks created an idealized image of the life of the soul in their works of art and poured it into the human form, the Romans created something in their legal codes that already represented more personal needs. More and more mankind descended from heaven, and this fifth age has descended the furthest, is most entangled in matter. If the Greek in his creations still raised man above man in his images – for Zeus represents man raised above himself – you can still find something of the man who rises above himself in the Roman legal statutes, , for the Romans placed more importance on being a Roman citizen than on being a person; in our age, you find the person who utilizes the mind to satisfy his material needs. For all machines, steamships, railways, all complicated inventions, what purpose do they serve? In the early days, the ancient Chaldeans satisfied their need for nourishment in the simplest way possible; today, a great deal of wisdom is devoted to it. Crystallized human wisdom is applied to still hunger and thirst. We must not deceive ourselves: wisdom, when applied in this way, has descended below itself, into matter.

[ 24 ] Everything man had previously brought down from the spiritual realm had to descend below itself in order to be able to ascend again. But this also gave our age its task. While in the old man the blood that bound him to his tribe flowed, today love is increasingly fragmented, even though it still flowed in the old blood. A love that is spiritual must take its place; then we can ascend to the spiritual again. That we have descended from the spiritual is well justified, for people must undergo this descent in order to find their way back to spirituality through their own efforts, and the mission of the spiritual-scientific current is to show humanity this way up.

[ 25 ] We have followed the course of humanity up to the time in which we ourselves stand. We must now show how it will develop further and how the person who undergoes an initiation can already today anticipate a certain stage of humanity on his path of knowledge and wisdom.