The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Tenth Lecture

[ 1 ] In our last reflections, it was necessary to point out that at this stage of our development some things should be said for advanced and it has already been pointed out that this expression “advanced theosophist” is not meant to imply that it refers to a special theoretical, more in-depth knowledge of the theosophical teachings. It means something that we can understand by visualizing that life within a theosophical branch, if it lasts for some time, has a meaning for the human soul. During this theosophical branch-life one acquires not only ideas and concepts about the human being, higher worlds, evolution and so on, but more than the individual is actually aware of, you acquire a certain amount of feelings and sensations during this branch life, other than those that you bring with you as a complete novice when you first enter theosophy. These feelings and perceptions are related to the fact that one learns, in all calm and composure, with a certain inner faith, to listen to things and descriptions and to accept them as something that is not fantasy or dreaming that one would probably have laughed at and made fun of before entering theosophy and that the majority of our contemporaries today would certainly make fun of as a fantasy. Much more important than the details of the Theosophical teachings is the sum of feelings and sensations that we gradually become accustomed to in our soul. For we do indeed gradually become quite different people as a result, and those who have acquired such feelings and sensations towards other worlds, towards those worlds that are present in ours and constantly pulsate through us , but which are not perceptible to the outer senses, such people who have such feelings and perceptions, who stand to other worlds as has been indicated, are meant here as advanced 'theosophists. So it is not your theoretical knowledge that is being appealed to, but your heart and feeling, if we want to accept such considerations without prejudice, to which the last and also today's consideration belong. If we only wanted to talk about general, abstract 'theories' that would offend the so-called common sense as little as possible, we would only be fooling ourselves; we would not have the necessary will to really open up the worlds that need to be opened up through the theosophical movement, step by step.

[ 2 ] What we want to talk about a little today concerns a topic that should familiarize us with entities that also exist among us if we consider ourselves as spiritual beings, but whose representation has played a lesser role in our previous considerations. In all our theosophical discussions we have placed man as the microcosm in the center of our considerations. But in order to understand man, to get to know his evolution, we have mostly had to look up to other entities, to higher spiritual entities, which in relation to the evolution of our earth planet once played such a role as man plays on earth today. We have seen that before the Earth entered its present state, it was what we are accustomed to calling the old moon, and we have realized that certain spiritual entities, who have higher abilities than humans today, abilities that humans will only have in future states of the Earth, were at that time on the moon at the level of humans under different conditions. They are the angels or angeloi, the spirits of the twilight. And in the same way, the so-called archangels or archangeloi or fire spirits, who today stand two levels higher than humans, went through their human stage on the old sun, just as the asuras, the spirits of personality, the archai, who today stand far above humans in terms of good or evil qualities, went through this stage on the old Saturn. Thus, over time, we have taken a closer look at a whole series of such beings that are involved in the entire evolution of the earth and of our entire life and being. We have come to know a number of such beings, to which we must look up in a certain respect. For those who clairvoyantly observe such beings, a significant difference arises between these beings and the human being.

[ 3 ] If we divide man into parts in relation to the finer structure of his nature, we can break him down into what we call the actual physical body, the physical body, the etheric body and the astral body. Then we distinguish the soul from this corporeality, which we divide into sentient soul, mind soul and consciousness soul, and as the third in the human being we distinguish: spirit, which today is only at the beginning of its development. In future states of development, the human being will bring it to its height. These three parts of his being, the physical, the soul and the spiritual, make up the threefold nature of the human being on the whole.

[ 4 ] If we now look up from the human being to the higher beings of whom we have just spoken, we may say that they differ from the human being in a certain way in that they have no longer developed the coarser physical body, which goes downwards. Therefore, we cannot see the coarser physicality in them that is perceptible to the senses. When we look at the lunar Pitris or angels, as they are called in Christian esotericism, who have gone through their stage of development as human beings on the moon, it follows from what we have said that we cannot ascribe to them a physicality as coarse as that of humans. On the other hand, they have already developed the higher limbs that the human being will only develop in the future, so that we can say: In contrast to man, they are realized in that they are spirit and soul, in contrast to man, who is a threefold entity: spirit, soul and body. Thus, in Cosmos, we have mainly dealt with those entities that are actually human beings, that have spirit, soul and body, and with entities that are above human beings and that have spirit and soul.

[ 5 ] For the occult observer, however, there are actually other entities that are very hidden, especially for today's human stage of development, but which nevertheless play a role in the evolution of the cosmos. There are also entities, namely, those who, with clairvoyant eyesight, search the world, cannot discover what we are accustomed to call “spirit” in the human being, but which essentially consist of body and soul. You now know a whole group of such entities from our previous considerations; these are the animals, they have body and soul. But we know that these animals are connected with their group souls or group Iches, and these are already of a spiritual nature. Thus, in the individual animal standing before us in the physical world, we have a being that has only body and soul, but this continues, so to speak, into the higher worlds and is linked to the spiritual. I have often used the comparison that we may use in relation to these group 'I's of animals: If there were a wall here and I were to put my ten fingers through ten openings in the wall, and you would not see me but only my ten fingers, you would rightly conclude that this movement of my fingers must come from a being that is behind the wall. So it is with the animals and with the group 'I's. They are present, and the animal passes over into them gradually, by degrees. The various animals that are similarly shaped are connected with these their group I's. So only when we speak of the part of animality that constitutes the individual animal here on the physical plane can we speak of the animals having body and soul; we then disregard the continuation after the astral.

[ 6 ] But there are other entities, entities that also only have body and soul, that are no longer visible to the physical eye. They are very often called “elementary spirits” in the various theosophical teachings, but they are called elementary spirits as ineptly as possible, because they are precisely beings that have no spirit, entities without “spirit”, which are therefore better called elementary beings. Why their body is actually not visible, we will see in the course of today's reflection. For the time being, before we give more than just a kind of definition of these entities, we want to say that they are, in a certain way, beings of body and soul that are below human beings. These entities are, of course, denied in our enlightened times, because man in his present phase of development cannot perceive them. Those who want to perceive them must have progressed to a certain degree of clairvoyant consciousness. However, just because something is not perceptible does not mean that it is not effective in our world. The effectiveness of these entities, which have body and soul, certainly plays a role in our world. What they do is very perceptible, only they themselves are not perceptible.

[ 7 ] Now it is a matter of forming a concept of such elemental beings, as far as this is possible without direct observation. These elemental beings are contained in many forms in the spiritual space that has taken us all in, and they are also spoken of as 'nature spirits'. They are given a wide variety of names. But these names do not matter. It is necessary that we form a certain concept of them. This is where it really begins to appeal to your theosophical feelings and intuitions, for I would like to relate quite unembellished how such entities present themselves to the clairvoyant eye.

[ 8 ] There are various entities that are present in the most diverse places on earth. For example, you can see them when you come by name to such depths of the earth that never were inhabited, never interspersed with living beings, with living plants, for example, places in a mine that were always of a mineral nature. When you lift the metallic or rock-like soil there, you find entities that initially make themselves felt in a strange way, as if something were being scattered. It becomes apparent that they were huddled together in enormous numbers, and 'when the soil is uncovered, they burst apart, as it were. And that is the essential thing, that they not only burst apart, fly apart, but also become larger in their own corporeality. After all, even when they have reached their greatest size, they are still smaller than human beings. Today's enlightened man is not familiar with these entities. But people who still have a certain sense of nature, that is, a certain clairvoyant power that all people once had and that had to be lost through the conquest of the external, objective consciousness, such people could very well tell you about these beings, and they have given these beings the most diverse names, goblins, gnomes and so on. These entities differ from human beings in that they are not visible in their corporeality as humans are; and also quite essentially in that no moral responsibility could ever reasonably be attributed to them. What we call moral responsibility in humans, they do not have. What they do, they do almost automatically. But what they do is not at all unlike what, for example, the human mind does, human intelligence. They even have what is called “wit” to a high degree, and anyone who comes into contact with them can experience good samples of their wit, because they can play all kinds of tricks on people, as any miner who has retained some healthy natural sense can still notice from time to time, and that's the metal miner, not the coal miner.

[ 9 ] These entities can also be examined with regard to their structure by means of occultism, just like humans. When we examine a human being in this way, we see the physical body as the lowest link, then the etheric body, the astral body and the I. And that which gradually develops from the lower limbs through the work of the I, we call the spirit self or manas, the life spirit or the buddhi, and the spiritual man or atma. The four members that are relevant for today's human stage are the physical body, etheric body, astral body and I. We can say that the I is the highest of the members and the physical body is the lowest. Now we would be very wrong if we wanted to hold on to the idea, in a very abstract way, that this physical human body has nothing to do with the human I. In the physical human body we have the tool for the human ego. We have seen that this human body is a very complicated structure. We have also said that the ego has its physical tool in the blood system, the astral body in the nervous system, the etheric body in the glandular system, and the physical body in the purely mechanical organs, so that we must imagine that everything that takes place in the astral body from inner human experience finds its material expression in the nervous system, everything that takes place in the etheric body finds its material expression in the glandular system, and so on. Thus, the physical human body, as it were, forms an image of the four-part essence of the human being.

[ 10 ] Now take the physical human body as it appears before you, and if you regard everything that this physical human body is as the tool of the thinking, intelligent ego. You will best understand what is meant by this if you remember that the ego itself remains the same from incarnation to incarnation, but that the tool is built anew with each incarnation. The finer material organization that man has in comparison to animals, especially the organization that reveals human intelligence, has come about through the fact that the I, slowly and gradually, over a long period of time, has learned to work on the astral body. For we know that the astral body of every human being consists of two parts: one part, which he has received from the cosmos and on which the ego has not yet worked, and another part, which the ego has already transformed. In every human being, these two parts of the astral body are developed to a certain degree. In the higher nervous system, especially in the brain, which is rebuilt with each incarnation, you have the external material expression of what the human being has worked on his astral body through his ego, even if it was mostly unconscious. The fact that man has a much more developed and perfect forebrain than animals stems from the fact that this forebrain is the expression, the revelation of the astral body that has been worked on and transformed by the I. But it is nevertheless the astral body that also has its external expression in the nervous system. Now we can easily see that at the moment when any part of our organism is transformed, a change in the rest of the organism is necessary. Why can't man walk on four feet? Why has he transformed his front limbs into organs of labor? Because he worked on his astral body, and that brought about the necessary transformation of his front limbs into organs of labor; and so the brain form of the human body is also a result of this inner work. The outer form is always a true revelation of the inner being. Everything we see in the physical body in its present phase of development is a specified result of spiritual evolution.

[ 11 ] Now you will understand that everything that exists in the material, down to the form, is a result of what is active behind this material. If we have to do with entities such as those I have just described, who lack the possibility of changing their astral body – for they lack spirituality, no ego is at work in their astral body – then this astral body, which is, however, the sum total of the soul experiences that an astral body can have, must find expression in a material form. This material form, which such an entity, not permeated by the I, has, cannot be visible in our stage of development in the physical world, and it is not visible because it lies one degree deeper than our visible matter. Do you understand what is meant by this?

[ 12 ] If you want to understand what constitutes your physical body, say: You can see the physical body. You cannot see the etheric body because it lies one level higher with its substantiality. You cannot see the astral body either, because it is again one level higher than the etheric body. But now there is not only substantiality above, but also below physical matter, and that cannot be seen either, because of all matter only a middle strip is visible, just that which constitutes physical matter, which is seen with the physical eyes. And just as the substantial continues upwards in the physical basis of the ethereal, of the astral, so it continues downwards and is again invisible there. And now that we have visualized the structure of the human being, we will also be able to imagine the structure of these other entities.

[ 13 ] We have seen that when we look at a person from below, he first has his physical body, then his etheric body, his astral body and fourthly his I. The beings we now call elemental beings lack the ego, and therefore they also lack responsibility. Instead, they have developed a principle below the physical body. Call it 'minus one' for all I care. They have developed the principles three, two, one and minus one. But we can go further. There are not only entities that begin with the astral body and have developed minus one in addition, but also entities that begin with two, which have only the principle of the etheric body, then the principle of the physical body, then minus one and also minus two. And finally we have entities that have as their highest principle what is the lowest principle of man; they start with one, then have developed minus one, minus two and minus three. We can get an even clearer idea of why these entities are not visible. For you might object: If they have a physical body, they should be visible after all. If it were not for the higher members of the human being, if the human being had only a physical body, it would look quite different. When a person dies, the physical body is alone; but then it crumbles, dissolves, and disperses into all possible atoms. This is its natural form. That it is as you know it today is due to the fact that it is permeated from above by the I, the astral body and the etheric body. Certainly the beings we call gnomes or goblins have a physical body, but they lack the I, the astral body and the etheric body. It is precisely these beings, who have the physical body as the highest, that we call gnomes. They have three principles underlying their physical body, which make their physical body much less visible than a human being's physical body. The forces of these entities, which underlie the physical plane, also make it so that what is the principle of the physical body can never be physically visible to the naked eye. If they are to have a matter that is approximately physical, they can only have it under tremendous pressure, as happens when external matter compresses them. Then their corporeality is so compressed that they sit huddled together in great numbers and develop in such an awful way as I have described before. Generally, when you remove the external pressure from them, the process that occurs for them is a process of dissolution that takes place with tremendous speed. The same process that you can observe in humans after death takes place with them with tremendous speed when you remove the soil. Therefore, they can never become visible, even if they have a physical body. For someone who can see through this physical earth, they have a small physical body. This physical body, which they have according to the principle of power, does indeed have something in its structure, in its organization, that is similar to the human tool of thought, the human tool of intelligence. It is therefore not without reason that those who, out of a certain natural sense, depict gnomes, show the heads in a particularly characteristic way. All the symbols that are drawn have a kind of reality. They find a kind of intelligence in these gnomes that seems almost automatic. It is really as if you imagine your brain removed and not penetrated by your higher limbs; then it does not work for you exactly in the sense of the upper development, but it works against the upper development. That is why we have the beings we call gnomes before us in this way. We will then be able to shed light on the beings that are lower than humans.

[ 14 ] Now, because it is connected with the deeper task that lies before us, we must first form an idea of how such entities actually came into being in the course of evolution. This question is not only related to past evolution, but also to the future. That is the essential point. In order to get to know this, let us consider the development of the human being. We know how the human being progresses from embodiment to embodiment. We know that in each new incarnation he brings with him the fruits of the previous ones. In this way, for each new incarnation, the human being is co-creative for his form as well as for his abilities and for his destiny. What he has engraved on the outside world as his deeds comes back to him as his destiny; what he has engraved on himself in his previous lives comes back to him as his abilities and talents. Thus he is co-creative both in his outer destiny and in his inner organization. Now we ask ourselves: where does that come from that brings us to a more perfect level? For in comparison with earlier human conditions, every average person today stands at a higher level in this respect. What brings about ever higher degrees of perfection in us is what we have acquired for ourselves in our progression from incarnation to incarnation. We do not perceive the world, see with our eyes, hear with our ears, for no reason. Rather, we acquire certain fruits of life in each incarnation. We take these with us after death, and what is effective in them forms the germinal forces that contribute to the building and expansion in the next incarnation.

[ 15 ] Now various things can happen. The scales can tip either way, to one side or the other. The ideal situation would be for a person to make proper use of their life in every incarnation, not to leave unused anything that can be experienced and that can bear fruit for the following incarnations, but to take with them everything they have acquired earlier. But that does not usually happen. The person degenerates in one direction or the other. Either he does not use his life properly to get everything that could be gained for him. Then certain powers remain unused and he brings less with him into his new incarnation than he could bring. Or else he penetrates too deeply into his organization, he becomes too much one with his incarnation, with his physicality. There are two kinds of people: some would like to live entirely in the spirit, not to descend completely to their physicality. Such people are called dreamers, visionaries, and so on, by those who live in the everyday world. And there are others who descend too deeply into their corporeality; they not only use what can be used, but they become one with their incarnation. It is pleasant for them, they enjoy becoming one with their incarnation. They do not preserve that which departs from incarnation to incarnation. They let it sink into what should only be the tool for the eternal core of the human being.

[ 16 ] I have already pointed out that there is an important myth, an important saga, that presents to our soul what those people can experience who descend too deeply into the temporal and transitory aspects of an incarnation. If we think of it in extreme terms, we can present it to our soul like this: We can imagine a person saying: 'Oh, what does it matter to me what I carry over into another incarnation in my eternal essence. I want to be involved in this incarnation, I like it, it suits me, and I don't care about what will happen later.' Where would this lead if this attitude were to develop radically? It leads to a character who sits at a corner of the road and passes one of the great leaders who point the way for humanity. But anyone who does not want to know anything about the future rejects such a teacher, such a great leader: I want nothing to do with you, who in future incarnations want to lead my essence to where humanity will be perfected. I want to grow together with the present form that I now have! Such a person, who rejects such a leader of humanity, will reappear in the same form. And if the same attitude is in him again, he will also reject the leaders of humanity in the following incarnation, and he will appear again and again in the same form. And when other people who have listened to the great leaders of humanity and who preserve the soul with the eternal essence of their being reappear in a more advanced race, the one who did not want to know anything about the great teacher, who rejects the great leader of humanity, will always reappear in the same race because he could only develop the one form. That is the deeper idea of Ahasver, who must always return in the same form because he rejected the hand of the greatest leader, the Christ. Thus man has the possibility of growing together with the nature of an incarnation, of rejecting the leader of mankind, or of undergoing the transformation to higher races, to ever higher perfection. Races would not become decadent, would not perish at all, if there were no souls that cannot and will not advance to a higher form of race. Look at races that have preserved themselves from earlier times: they are only there because souls could not ascend. I cannot speak further today about what is meant by man “growing with the race”. In the course of the earth's evolution, a whole series of races has emerged and fallen into decadence. Think back to Atlantean times. The Atlanteans progressed through the races; the races disappeared, but the human souls passed over into other, higher races. But for those who want to remain where they are, who want to grow together with the race, there is the possibility that they descend “by their own weight” and become absorbed in the material. There are sixteen possibilities for growing together with the race. These are called the “sixteen ways of perdition”. But by progressing, man will be able to ascend to ever higher and higher levels.

[ 17 ] Thus we see how it is actually possible for a person to become so entwined with a particular incarnation that he, so to speak, lags behind evolution. His other soul brothers are then at a higher level when he returns in a new incarnation. But then he must be content with a lower incarnation, as it has remained for him from some decadent race. This need not frighten anyone. For no one today is on a path where he could not catch up and thus fall out of evolution. But we must keep this possibility in mind.

[ 18 ] Let us take the most extreme case: a person grows as close as possible to what constitutes the essence of an incarnation. He cannot do it at once, because he is not strong enough to do it all at once, but in a period of sixteen incarnations he could do it if he went the sixteen wrong ways. Let us assume that he could do it, then he would achieve the following. The earth with its souls does not wait, it moves forward. But since the material is always an expression of the soul, such a person finally arrives at a stage where he can no longer find a way to get a body for himself, because it is actually possible that there are no more bodies for such souls that have become too intertwined with physicality. Such souls lose the opportunity to incarnate and find no other opportunity. Consider what such souls lose, even if it is only possible in exceptional cases, when this condition occurs to its full extent during future evolution on earth. Only for very special human beings would the possibility arise, even during their earthly state, that they would incline so much towards evil that they would no longer find any possibility of embodying themselves, because there would no longer be any bodies that would be bad enough for them. They would have nothing else either, which is the expression of normal development. Let us assume that such an entity would remain on earth. When the earth transforms into Jupiter – since what comes later is always only the result of what came earlier – it will not find any suitable bodies there either, because such entities are too good for the bodies that will exist for the subordinate nature kingdoms, and they are too bad for the bodies that human beings will have. This means that they must now create a disembodied existence for themselves, that they must cut themselves off from the course of human development. They have earned this by not using life. The world is around them. They have not used their environment to enrich their inner core of being through the senses and to create ever new perfections for themselves. They do not advance with world evolution, they remain behind at a certain stage. Such beings, who remain at such a level, then appear in later periods with a character similar to that of the earlier period, for that is what they have grown into. But they do not appear in the forms and shapes of the later period, but in these later periods as subordinate nature spirits, as we have already described them in a similar way. In the second half of the Jupiter evolution, the human race will provide a whole host of such new nature spirits, for at the Jupiter level, the human being will have developed the fifth aspect of his being, Manas. But those people who have not used the opportunity on Earth to develop the fifth aspect will appear in their evolution on Jupiter as nature spirits with four basic parts, with the fourth as the highest basic part. While man on Jupiter has five, four, three, two, they, as that which cannot externally take shape, have four, three, two, one. This would be the fate of those human beings who did not gradually develop their higher fundamental parts by making use of their life on earth. They will be, so to speak, invisible natural spirits of a future evolutionary period. This is what happened to our present nature spirits in earlier evolutionary epochs, except that this of course changes continually depending on the character of the individual evolutionary epochs. The nature spirits on Jupiter that come from people will already have a certain moral responsibility, since we also have it here on Earth, and in this way they will differ from the nature beings of earthly existence.

[ 19 ] Now let us remember what I said about how Jupiter differs from our Earth. We have described the nature of the Earth as the planet of love, in contrast to the nature of the Moon, which we have called the planet of wisdom. Just as love develops gradually here on earth, so too has wisdom, which we find all around us, developed on the moon. Love emerged in its lowest form during the Lemurian period and is transforming itself into ever higher levels until it reaches the highest spiritual form of love. During their existence on Jupiter, the inhabitants of Jupiter will look to love as the people of the earth look to wisdom. When an earthly human being looks at the wisdom that surrounds him, for example at a bone of the thigh, and sees the wonderful structure, how beam joins beam, he must say to himself: Today, with the greatest engineering skills, man cannot yet achieve what cosmic wisdom has achieved in a piece of thigh bone. The whole Earth is crystallized wisdom that has formed on the moon. And in the same way, love is gradually developing here on earth. Just as we admire the wisdom around us in every flower, so the inhabitants of Jupiter will feel the love emanating from all beings; just as wisdom speaks to us, having been secreted into the earth through the ancient existence of the moon.

[ 20 ] Thus the earth progresses from stage to stage. The earth is the cosmos of love. Every planetary state has its special task, and only when we are imbued with this knowledge will we understand the task of an era. Just as universal wisdom pervades our earth, so love will permeate Jupiter. And just as the destructive forces in wisdom come from the beings of the old moon that have remained behind, so too will destructive forces of love be present on Jupiter, placed in the middle of the general fabric as the ugly forms of the remaining earth beings, who, as nature spirits with selfish love, will have claims on love. They will form quite powerful, devastating forces in the Jupiter existence. The lagging behind of individual people creates the destructive forces of nature. Thus we see how the world is woven, both in its useful and harmful parts. Thus we have a moral element woven into the world process.

	Physical body and above	Below
Gnomes	1	3
Undines	2	2
Sylphs	3	1
Salamanders	4	0

[ 21 ] All nature spirits that are shaped as shown in our diagram, with one limb like that of a human and three limbs below that of a human, are those we call “gnomes”; those called “undines” have two links below human beings; and the “sylphs” have three links below human beings. They all remained in earlier planetary times. They did not make it to the level of a spirit that is already developing in humans today. They are below human level, they are “less spiritual” and consist only of body and soul. They are two-part entities and we call them gnomes, undines and sylphs. Now, when you hear the name “salamander”, you will ask me where these come from.

[ 22 ] Gnomes, undines and sylphs are entities that have been left behind from earlier states of the earth. The salamanders have come about in a certain way, in that they have partially, but only partially, developed the fourth principle, but have not progressed so far as to be able to take on a human form. Where do the salamanders come from? I will explain this to you at the end. Because if you understand this fourth type of being, you will understand many of the secrets of the nature that surrounds us.

[ 23 ] If we trace man back in evolution, we come to ever more spiritual and spiritual forms. We know that the individual animal species have gradually emerged as the retarded brothers of the human progressive evolution, who have remained at earlier stages. Thus man has come so high that he has emerged last with his physical being. The other beings have become such because they could not wait, because they pushed their way into physical incarnation earlier. Animals have group souls; these are indeed something that only exists on the astral plane, but which works into the physical world. That which the moon has given to our evolution, wisdom, we see spread throughout the animal kingdom in the most comprehensive way through the group souls in the animal forms. Man must not ascribe wisdom to himself alone. He does create his culture with it, but to a much greater extent, wisdom is present in the whole planet. A person who is proud of humanity can say: How far has man come in wisdom? New inventions bear witness to this. Even today, schoolchildren are taught about all the things that human wisdom has achieved! Among the things listed, you will also find paper. Paper is certainly an achievement of human wisdom, but wasps could make paper much earlier! The wasp nest is made of exactly the same material as real paper. It is made just like that, only through the process of life, like human paper. We could go through all of nature like this and we would find wisdom everywhere. How much earlier did the group ego of the wasp genus invent paper than man! The individual wasp does not do that, but the group soul.

[ 24 ] Thus we see how human wisdom is woven and imprinted into the whole of the earth's being. We could go over the earth piece by piece and would indeed find this wisdom everywhere. But only up to a certain point is the animal's relationship to its group soul what it, if I may say so, is supposed to be from a cosmic point of view. What is this relationship of the group soul to the individual animal? Think of the group soul of any species of insect. When the individual insect dies, it makes no difference to the group soul whether a hair falls out of your head or a nail is cut off. The animals that are constantly being formed are only new limbs exchanged by the animal group soul. In this way you can follow the line of animals far back and you will find that what is on the physical plane appears as a cloud that is constantly dissolving and reforming. The physical existence metamorphoses and the group soul renews only that which is at the bottom of it. This goes to a certain level. Then something new enters. In higher animals – and the higher you go, the more – something enters that no longer looks anything like what I have just described. Take the ape, for example. The monkey takes too much from the group spirit down into the individual form, which is below; and while otherwise, in the lower animal, everything goes back into the group spirit, the monkey, because it has become too complicated, retains something in its physical organization. Too much of the group spirit has flowed in, it cannot go back. This is the progressive group spirit. It works in such a way that it creates a limb in the lower animals; then it absorbs the whole being again, creates a new one, absorbs that again and so on. It is the same with lions. But if you take a monkey, for example, the group soul creates the monkey, but the monkey takes something out of the group soul that cannot go back. While it is so with the lion, when it dies, that the physical dissolves and the soul returns to the group spirit, it is so with the monkey that what it severs from the group spirit cannot return. In the case of man, you have the ego in such a way that it goes from incarnation to incarnation and is capable of development because it can accept new incarnations. You don't have that with monkeys. But the monkeys can't go back either. That is why the monkey seems so strange to the naive mind, because in reality it is a being that has been cut off from the group spirit; it can no longer return to the group spirit, but it can't reincarnate itself either. Marsupials are another type of animal that is somewhat torn from the group spirit. That which remains of these individual animal souls, so to speak, and which also cannot reincarnate, is the true origin of a fourth group of elemental spirits. These are severed parts of such animals that cannot return to the group spirit because they have skipped the normal point in evolution. Such ego-like entities remain behind from numerous animals, and these are then the salamanders. This is the highest form of nature spirits, because it is I-like.

[ 25 ] With this, I have introduced you to the nature of a number of beings that we will get to know more and more intimately. So far, we have only learned about their nature and reason for being and their context. But they are active in our world and their revelations can be perceived. Today we want to gain a further understanding of these so-called elemental spirits. It can be said that even today these salamanders come about in a strange way when certain particularly low-level human natures, which continue to incarnate, leave behind a part of their low nature. These are particularly evil elements, these regressive natures of certain lower people in our evolution, these partially separated human natures that have remained as a kind of nature spirit and permeate our existence. And much of what permeates our spiritual space, what becomes perceptible to man in a strange way – what you would never dream of, not even that it is there – shows itself all too clearly in its revelations. These spiritual entities are all partly related to man, and they intervene in human evolution, albeit mostly in a disturbing way. Many a pernicious cultural phenomenon that appears natural to-day will only become intelligible to men when they know what disturbing and retarding forces they have to deal with. The effects will find expression in many a decadent manifestation in our culture. It is only because those who know how to interpret the signs of the time see this clearly that our Theosophical Society has come into being, because only knowledge can bring healing to the world. Those who live in the world without knowledge must allow these things to affect them, and often imagine all kinds of fantastic things. Only those who have insight into the workings of these entities will be sufficiently able to recognize the benefits of the theosophical movement, and will understand the profound spiritual and healing nature of the theosophical movement. It wants to free people from the entities that would hold them back in culture. Otherwise, our culture would completely decline into decadence. In the near future, we will be able to experience many dreadful cultural phenomena; and we will also experience that those who cannot find their way around will then call those who correctly identify such cultural phenomena dreamers and fantasists. More and more the world will take on the character that those who know the spiritual, the true reality, are called dreamers and fantasists, while the true dreamers and fantasists are those who declare spiritual reality to be folly. But the true progress of our culture lies in man penetrating what is hostile with knowledge. And knowledge is that which, from the theosophical school of thought, confirms the saying that the leader of Christian life also called out to his followers: “You will know the truth, and the truth will make you free!” But only a truth that also encompasses the full and true reality can be one that will also make man completely and utterly free.