The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Theosophy and Rosicrucianism XI

[ 1 ] Yesterday, in our description of the development of our various earthly conditions, we came to the point where we realized how the three combined cosmic bodies — Sun, Moon and Earth — successively separated. We started on the one hand with this and stopped at the point where the moon detached itself from the earth; on the other hand, we also tried to reach it by starting from our time and going back through Atlantis to this same point. Now let us realize in what state we have the earth itself. One must keep in mind long, long periods of time, millions of years; then one will no longer be so surprised at the great changes that are taking place in the universe as well as on Earth.

[ 2 ] Let us now take a closer look at the separated Earth. It is still enveloped in a mass of air, but it looked quite different from our present-day air. You must not imagine that this air was something like a glowing furnace inside, although the temperature was much higher than it is today. Many of the substances that are solid today were also present in the earth in a liquid state. The earth was enveloped in an air, densely filled with vapors of the most diverse substances, something that could be described as fire air, a repetition of the earlier moon condition. When the earth had become independent after separating from the present moon, it was surrounded by a strange atmosphere that could be described as fire air. By freeing itself from the atmosphere that had left with the moon, the earth became able to reach certain higher levels. Within this atmosphere, the most advanced animal-men had reached a higher level than they had on the moon, but only those who later became human. A large number of these animal-men remained at the moon level. And the consequence of this was that they did not just stop, but because completely new conditions arose - because there could only be animal men on the moon - they sank half a step and became animals that did not exist on the moon at that time. So we have two kingdoms: humans, and the remaining animal kingdom, which gradually sank to become animals. |

[ 3 ] It was the same with the plant animals. A certain number had developed higher, into animals; others stopped and became plants. And the plant-mineral kingdom was distributed in such a way that some became heavy minerals, and others developed up to plants. Not everything came into being according to one standard; for example, what we know today as animals came into being partly through the human animal evolving downwards and partly through the plant animal evolving upwards. Likewise, in the plant kingdom, we have plant minerals in the ascendant and plant animals in the descent, side by side. The plants that today preferably form our aesthetic plant cover are those that have developed through the upward evolution of the plant minerals of the moon, the violet, for example. On the other hand, everything that seems musty to us is in a descending development, while our green foliage plants will reach higher levels in the future.

[ 4 ] Our minerals have developed on Earth in general. On the Moon, there were no minerals as there are today. This is the degenerated plant mineral kingdom, which was embedded in the Earth as a solid crust. At the time when the Earth threw the Moon out, what remained and later became mineral, solid metal and so on, was still a liquid mass. What was already solid at that time was simply hurled out into space because the Earth could not have developed higher if it had kept these substances to itself. Then inclusions of those metals that were most likely to solidify were formed. Some of them had strange shapes. What you encounter today as granite or gneiss in the mountains clearly showed at that time that it was formed when plant beings descended and became stones.

[ 5 ] Basically, you can see from this that on the sun and on the moon, everything in the rock realm was still in the plant realm. It was not the plant kingdom that developed from the rock kingdom, but the stones from the plant kingdom! What you dig up today as hard coal is only a collection of fossilized plants, of plants that perished, rotted and became stones, so that today they can be dug up as plants that have become stone. If you go back even further, you would see that even the densest stones were once plants and only came into being through the plant's downward development into the realm of stones. For the seer, the following emerges. If you examine gneiss, the mineralogist will tell you that it consists of feldspar, hornblende and mica. Then the mineralogist has to stop. The seer says: What is found in gneiss as feldspar is still clearly visible to the spiritual eye as the solidified form of the plants in the stem and the green leaves from which the plant was built; and the glimmer structure has something to do with what is still formed today in the sepals and corollas of plants. So when an occultist looks at a piece of gneiss today, he will say: this is petrified plant, and just as today plants have leaves and flowers and so on, the mica arrangement originates from ancient sepals and petals. And so we can say about all minerals how they were formed from ancient plants. For it was plants that came over from the moon, and only in the liquid mass of the earth did they solidify. Just as if you have a container of water in front of you and the water begins to solidify, to form ice, more and more solid inclusions formed. And so more and more of the solid earth's crust formed out of the liquid earth. The higher we go, the higher and purer the beings become; those that could not get up petrified. It was the same with animals and humans. Man came so far that he was able to transform his body to an even higher degree.

[ 6 ] These moon men moved about in the primeval ocean by floating and swimming; they were adapted to this form of locomotion. This may seem very strange to modern man, but it is nevertheless true. And I say it without reservation: I would not want to modify some of these grotesque descriptions. Truths are always laughed at when they first appear.

[ 7 ] The human being that swam around in the primeval ocean did not yet have eyes that could see as we do today; they were already present on Saturn, but down there in the primeval ocean, the human being did not yet need to see; he had to orient himself differently. The primeval ocean also contained everything he ate to sustain his existence. There were also animals, some of which were friendly to him, others not. And then the primeval sea was warm in some places and cold in others. Man could tolerate some places and not others. At that time man still had an organ, the size of a cherry stone, the pineal gland, which is now located in the head; but it is not really a gland. This organ was once very large; it was an organ with which man could orient himself in the primeval sea: it protruded like a kind of lantern out of the head. Man moved in such a way that he used this lantern-like structure at the front; it was a finely sensitive organ, a warmth organ, through which he could perceive the warmth that was beneficial to him or not. It was an organ of orientation, but not an organ of sight. It was useful to him when he was swimming around. Later, man no longer needed it; it shrank away.

[ 8 ] At that time there could be no question of an inclination towards the ego. In everything he did, man was still under the guidance of higher spiritual powers. We can compare him to today's animal. We look at today's animals spiritually in the following way: Man differs from animals in that he has an individual soul; every human being has his individual soul, his individual I. This is not the case with animals; whole groups of animals have a soul. For example, all animals that belong to the lion species have one soul, and it lives in the astral world. Similarly, all animals that have a tiger species have one soul together. Therefore, when we speak of animals, we speak of group souls. All horses together have a group soul; they belong together. Just as the individual fingers belong to the hand, so do the animals belong to their group soul. Therefore, we cannot speak of individual responsibility. Only when an individual soul is present can we speak of a soul being good or evil. The human being of that time still had a kind of group soul that was still in the bosom of the deity. So we must be clear about this: what lives in us today also existed back then, but not inside the human body. Man has his origin in two currents: What had come over from the moon and had developed further was the animal man down there; but what lives in you today as an individual soul was up there, with the deity, only your body was down here, in the primeval sea. Later, the two united; then the soul descended and spiritualized your body as an individual soul.

[ 9 ] Imagine a vessel of water; there are many, many drops of water in it, but you cannot distinguish them. If you now take several hundred sponges and dip them into the water, you have individualized the drops that were previously in the mass of water. So think of your spirituality floating above the primeval sea. Now compare the soul resting in the bosom of the Godhead with the water drop: the bodies absorb the souls like the sponges absorb the water drops; thereby the souls became independent, as the water was individualized by the sponges. Below the primeval sea with the floating bodies, above the souls. This could not be better described than by saying: “And the spirit of the Godhead brooded over the waters,” that is, he worked out what was below to such an extent that the soul drops could be received.

[ 10 ] The bodies themselves had to keep themselves afloat, and for that the beings needed an organ. Man did not yet have lungs at that time, but he had a kind of swim bladder; this kept him afloat in the primeval sea. The fish, which have remained at this level, still have swim bladders today and no lungs. Gradually, as the air cleared from the waters, and man was able to rise above the waters and become an air breather, his lungs developed. This was a long process, a process over millions of years, in which man gradually took in air through lungs. This provided the physical structure that could contain the soul within itself. The more man became a lung-breather, the more he was able to take in the soul. You cannot express this better than with the words: And God breathed into the man the breath of life, and he became an individual soul. - At the same time, this enables man to develop something that he would never have been able to develop before: he becomes able to form red blood. Previously, all humans were predisposed to have the same temperature as their environment; if they were surrounded by more warmth, they were proportionate to that warmth. Initially, there was no red blood at all; the animal bodies that are superior to those of amphibians are human bodies that have regressed to a much later period. Only after man had developed into a producer of red blood did animals also develop into those that have red blood. Just as a plant has never developed from a stone, but rather the stone formed from the plant, so the animal had developed out of man. Everything lower has developed out of the higher; that is the doctrine of evolution. First, man had to transform himself into a red-blooded creature, then he could leave the animals behind. In the animals, you literally see the stages that we have left behind. In every animal, man sees more or less a piece of himself that he has left behind. Paracelsus expressed this so beautifully: When we look around us, we see, as it were, the letters of an alphabet; only in man are they united into one word; therefore, the meaning of what is spread out around him lies in him. Then there is one thing you have to consider. A seemingly insignificant but extraordinarily important process for spiritual science took place back then; it basically began with the first appearance of the Earth, when it was still with the Moon: this is a certain interaction between Mars and Earth. During the entire first half of the Earth, Martian forces poured into the Earth; that is why the first half is almost referred to as the Martian state of the Earth. And it is with this passage through Mars that iron is associated, which from then on plays a completely new role in the earth process.

[ 11 ] In plants, iron plays a much more external role. But you can see how things interlock: cosmically, the earth passes through Mars, which gives it iron. In this way iron was stimulated to the functions it now has. This is how iron occurs in the blood. And the aggressive element in man is connected with the iron-containing blood, the element that makes him a warrior on earth. The Greek myth sensed this, and therefore designated Mars as the god of war.

[ 12 ] Only then does the human body become capable of receiving an I; for without red, warm blood, no body can become an I-bearer; this is extraordinarily important. Lung breathing is the prerequisite for warm, red blood. And then the necessary processes arose on earth that incorporated themselves into the blood. Thus man gradually developed until he became a lung-breathing, red-blooded creature, leaving behind the other creatures, the lower warm-blooded animals. In occultism, animals are not merely distinguished in the usual way, but we also mention another characteristic. We distinguish between those that can express their own pain and joy in sound, and those that cannot. If you go down to lower animals, you will also hear sounds, but they are only external, caused by organs rubbing against each other or by external climatic influences; it is the external that sounds in them. Only the animals that branched off at the time when man developed into a warm-blooded creature were able to express their pain and joy through sound. At that time, man's larynx was also transformed into a sounding organ. At the same time as the earth's crust was forming outside, an inner process took place in man: parallel to the external hardening, a skeleton of bones and cartilage formed internally from the soft parts. There were no bone beings before. The external minerals are the counter-image to the bones. The earth has recorded this epoch in the rock masses; man has it in his bones. More and more, man is now changing from a being that walks in a horizontal position to one that walks upright. He turns around so that his front limbs become organs of labor, and only his others serve to move him forward. The two are connected. No being that does not have a sounding larynx and an upright gait can be an ego-being.

[ 13 ] Animals had the predispositions for this, but they have regressed. Therefore, they could not transform themselves into beings that have language, because it is tied to an upright larynx. We can gauge this from a very rough fact. Certainly, some dogs are more docile than a parrot; but the parrot learns more because its larynx is more erect. Parrots and starlings learn to speak because they have an erect larynx.

[ 14 ] So you can see how the earth and man are progressing to ever further stages of development. At the same time, the atmosphere is also changing; it is developing to a state where the earth is surrounded only by a foggy air. That was the time when the Lemurians saw their continent crumble and wandered over to Atlantis; as a result they became Atlanteans. During the phase of this progress, in which man acquired the first elements of language, which were only sounds of feeling, the soul also emerged more and more. The Atlanteans had essentially retained a dull clairvoyance. Now his eyes had developed to the extent that man, emerging from the subterranean sea, became aware of the sunlight that appeared to him through the masses of fog. Physically, he became more and more sighted and perceptive; but in return, the old clairvoyance receded more and more within him. It was only in the last third of the Atlantean period that the most advanced race among the Atlanteans had emerged at one point on the earth's surface. It was a momentous conclusion to this epoch.

[ 15 ] The Atlanteans who migrated more towards the west became neutral natures, cold and indifferent, due to the conditions at that time; they became the copper-colored population of America. The others, who migrated more towards the south, became the black Negroid population, and those who turned more towards the east later formed the yellow Malay population. These masses of people had concentrated at the most unfavorable points from which they could not advance further. But where Ireland is, and to the west of it, where there is now sea, man had been able to develop the furthest. There were those mixtures of warm and cold through which the human body could advance the furthest. From the then still magical willpower, an unspoken sense of self developed in the first being. It was precisely at this point in time that man learned to say “I” to himself for the first time. Then, in the first settlement, people learned to count, to do arithmetic, to develop an incipient sense of judgment, and combinative abilities. But there were always advanced beings among them, the leaders of humanity, who related to people as beings from a higher realm would. They had become teachers and guides and provided the impetus for the migration eastward. From that point near present-day Ireland to farther east and across to Asia, there were already settlements of peoples everywhere. Now the most advanced masses of the population went east, forming a kind of colony along the way. The most powerful, with the most highly developed culture, was near the present-day Gobi Desert. From there, individual parts later went to the most diverse areas of the world, one part to present-day India; they already encountered yellow-brownish peoples there and partly mixed with them.

[ 16 ] That was after the Atlantic flood, when this colony went south and founded the first culture of the post-Atlantic period, the first culture of our era. The most advanced teachers who went down with them, the first great teachers of ancient India, are called the ancient Indian Rishis. Today's Indians are the descendants of that ancient population, but we have to go back far into times that lie dark before the consideration of history if we want to find traces of their culture. The Vedas belong to a later time; because at that time nothing was recorded yet. The ancient Indian people represent the first cultural group after the Atlantean period; therefore, they were also closest to the Atlantean. The Atlantean was a kind of dreamer; his consciousness was dull, he had no judgment and no self-confidence; like a dreamer, half unconscious, he walked around. The ancient Indians were the first to overcome this condition, but they were still half rooted in it. Therefore, the old Indian had within him the longing to experience the old spirit realm and to see as the Atlanteans still could. The old Indian yoga training still consisted of a kind of dimming of consciousness that took people back to the time when people could still see the spirits around them. The Indians longed for this time of clairvoyance of the ancient Atlanteans, and the Rishis taught them the methods in their yoga training, but these were now developed in a different way. The Atlanteans had not yet developed the power of judgment; in India they already had judgment, but they loved, so to speak, what they had overcome, and they knew how to evoke it again, to dampen their consciousness and to remember what they had seen earlier. In its highest representatives, Indian culture has still retained this. The Indian did not seek to raise his consciousness, but to dream it down; hence the inactivity of the Indian being. And it would be a gross disadvantage, even harmful, if Indian life were to a greater extent to take hold of today's culture.

[ 17 ] In the beginning, people had not seen any minerals at all; the Atlanteans saw the minerals most indistinctly. For them, the spirit world was there in their visions; it was the spirit world that lived in everything. They saw people described in colors, in sympathetic colors, if they were sympathetic to them. The Indian sought to conjure up such a world again. But it is precisely this that human progress consists of: that man must increasingly gain a relationship to what is present here in the material world. The Atlanteans did not yet need tools; they oriented themselves through their vision; they did not attach any importance to physical tools. In this the Indian is still a latecomer to the Atlanteans; therefore, the physical world is Maja to him, a kind of deception, a lie. He has no time for the world of the outer senses. He says: Rise up to the world of the dream-like spiritual.

[ 18 ] The progress from this Indian culture at a later time consisted in the fact that in the next cultural sphere, the Persian sphere, which still lies before Zarathustra, mankind first learned to appreciate what external reality is. This was a second colony that started from the Gobi and founded a very ancient realm in the Near East, from which the realm of Zarathustra emerged. The Persian becomes aware that there is a world here in which he has a mission. The divine appears to him as something with which he must connect. Two deities stand before his soul: Ormuzd and Ahriman. Matter still appears to him as something he has to overcome, against which he has to measure his strength. He still draws the strength he needs from the spiritual world to work here in this world. The world appears to him as something dark that must be transformed with the help of the light of good. The Indian founded a science of the purely spiritual world, but it told him nothing about external reality. For the Persian, external reality is something else that must constantly be transformed through work.

[ 19 ] The third colony, which started from Gobi, moved on to the Near East and founded the Chaldean-Babylonian-Egyptian cultural area. These peoples now have a science of the earthly world in addition to the earlier science of the spirit. The Egyptians developed astrology and geometry, through which they learned how to treat and cultivate the earth. Science expanded to include what the ancient Indian still called the world of illusion. Now the world of illusion is a world of the keenest reflection, sensual reflection. When the Indian delved into the world of the stars, it was only the expression of the spiritual for him. But the Chaldean had a love for the physical world; for him it was the link to the divine, into which one worked, into which one delved. And this working from the divine into the sensual, we see in the Babylonian-Assyrian culture.

[ 20 ] We now come to consider the fourth cultural sphere, which we call the Greco-Latin sphere. Here, man himself has already been won over to external observation. The Egyptians already knew that the world is not chaos, but that it has been built meaningfully through immeasurable periods of time. The sphinx and the pyramid express great cosmic truths. The ancient Egyptians enshrined their knowledge in the image; they created the sphinx, which stands before us like a riddle of development: the development of the higher human being from earlier animalistic conditions. This was the wisdom for the Egyptians, which they expressed in their own way into the world. And you can find a measurement calculation in it that was brought down from heaven. The cities were laid out in such a way that the Egyptian expressed a sacred order in their construction that was prescribed to him; the Egyptian tried to give a likeness of the order of heaven. But the individual human being was not yet included in this. You see this only in Greek art, where man has already grasped himself as an immediate reality and where he wants to create an image of himself in space.

[ 21 ] Man becomes more and more familiar with what the Indian called the Maja. Man encounters himself. He creates a world within what the Indian called illusion, and he is aware that he must create this world without the help of the gods. He connects himself more and more with outer reality and out of his own strength creates the divine in outer reality. But if you study the Greek polis, you do not yet see anything of the legal concept. Man first had to establish this in the Roman Empire as Roman law, in private life with others, as a Roman citizen.

[ 22 ] In this way, man comes more and more to an understanding of what is taking place here in external reality.

[ 23 ] The fifth cultural sphere is ourselves, with our materialistic civilization. It is the time in which man has descended the furthest into the outer world. Compare our time with the earlier ones: We do know how to apply the forces of the spiritual world to our external environment; we carry the spiritual world into everything. But from the standpoint of spiritual science, this has a peculiar perspective. Remember the time when man still ground his flour between two stones. He used little mental effort for this. But in ancient Egypt and Chaldea, he delved into the wisdom of the heavens; much was still said to him about the spiritual meaning of the starry heavens and the earth itself. The Greeks created the idealized human form within this world of reality.

[ 24 ] And what is the picture of our time? Much spiritual power is applied to bring forth our natural science with its technical applications. But how great is the difference between bringing food over from America with primitive means or with the help of telephones, machines, etc., when the food is only used to satisfy the same need that the animal satisfies here? Try to see how much of what you have created serves spiritual life and how much mental power is used for material life. What an enormous amount of mental power mankind has to develop today to satisfy material needs! There is not much difference between an animal going and eating grass or you getting food from America and Australia by all kinds of means. But that is not a derogatory criticism, it has to be that way. Man had to descend into this world. The Indian still saw the world as an illusion; today's man sees this world as the only reality. We have descended the lowest and have thereby made the greatest progress on the physical plane. But this descent must not be in vain in the spiritual sense either!

[ 25 ] Within our time, a new element has emerged that has been planted in the first third of the post-Atlantic period: it is the advent of Christianity – the most significant turning point in the evolution of the earth. Everything that came before was, for occultism, only a preparation for Christianity. Buddha, Hermes and so on are only prophetic indications of Christianity, which is precisely intended to lift humanity out of the deepest entanglement in matter. And it will lift people out of this entanglement again. Now the ascent out of matter begins again. And the task of spiritual science is to help with this ascent into the spiritual world.

[ 26 ] The next period of our post-Atlantean culture will indeed bring more discoveries; but man will see more and more only the letters in the outer world. A true Christianity will speak of the outer world as we speak of what is condensed spirit, and out of matter the spirit will arise again. We will not say of the outer world that it is illusion; we will have it completely and lose nothing, and yet ascend to spiritual heights. And to this development Christianity will have to make the greatest contribution. Already in the sixth period, that which today is proclaimed for a few will be able to grasp large masses of people and carry them away with it; and with that, humanity will gain insight into the spiritual world. What is a thought today will be a power in the future. In the sixth cultural period, many will have this power of thought. What is now called Theosophical Christianity will spread to large masses of people. These thoughts will become stronger and stronger; they will have a creative effect on the human form. In the past, the human body looked quite different from what it does today. You would be amazed if I were to describe this earlier body to you. But because the body was still soft, the ego had much greater influence on its formation. Of the influence of the soul's will on the human body, only a very small remnant remains in man today: when you experience a shock, you turn pale because the inner state of the soul penetrates into the blood; the color of the body changes. But you could see from other physical conditions how little control only man has over his body today. This will change again with the ascent; the body will become softer and softer and softer, and man will regain his influence over the body when he allows thoughts to arise more and more strongly within him, which only rarely occur today; these will then be able to reshape the body itself. Man will again be able to form his body himself, but only in a very distant future.

[ 27 ] Sexuality was only imposed on man during the Lemurian period; before that he was a bisexual being, male and female at the same time. With the integration of the I, man divides into two sexes. We will get to know this moment in more detail when we examine the course of human blood more closely. Then we will come to speak about this problem of gender division, and also about the fact that what is now gender separation will in turn disappear.

[ 28 ] So we look ahead to a future in which man will be able to act very differently on the body.

[ 29 ]What, for example, is it when a blush of shame rises in a person's face? What is that? A last remnant of what the person used to have as an influence on his body. More and more, the person will be able to consciously work into his body again. And then the time will come when man will be able to make his heart muscle an arbitrary muscle. Science presents the heart to you as if it were a mere physical apparatus, a pump. But the blood not only flows through the body because the heart pumps the blood, but everything in the blood depends on the soul. The blood pulses faster or slower under the various feelings, and it is the blood that causes the heart to move. But in the future, man will gain conscious influence over the heart; therefore, the heart is an organ that is only now at the beginning of its development. A muscle of spiritual development is the heart, an organ through which the higher man expresses himself and thereby creatively affects his entire body.

[ 30 ] The heart is only at the beginning of its development; therefore, it is also a cross for materialistic science. Materialistic science tells you: all the muscles you use to move are striated muscles; all the muscles that are involuntary, for example those related to the digestive system, are striated. Now the heart is a peculiar organ that turns this whole calculation on its head. It is an involuntary muscle and it has striated muscle fibers: because it is on the way to a higher development, that is why it already has striated fibers today.

[ 31 ] Tomorrow I will show you how certain things can be explained when we look at them in the light of spiritual science.

[ 32 ] In this way, Theosophy sheds light on everything around us. We redeem everything that has become matter from its present frozen state. This is the idea of redemption in its most profound essence! Man has developed ever higher; in so doing, he has always left certain realms behind. He will become mighty and will redeem what he has left behind, and he will also redeem the earth. However, he must not disdain it, but must unite with it if he wants to bring it redemption.