The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Ninth Lecture

[ 1 ] Yesterday, in our description of human development, we reached the point where, after the period characterized by the seven trumpet blasts, the earth with all its beings passes into another state, where, so to speak, the physical dissolves and is transformed into the spiritual, initially into the astral. An astral earth comes into being, and all those beings who have become ripe for it, that is, who have become capable of overcoming their own material nature and using it in the service of the spiritual, enter into this astral earth. On the other hand, everything that is incapable of transforming the physical, the material, into the spiritual, everything that clings to the material, will be cast out and form a kind of secondary earth, the observation of which is very instructive for recognizing the fate of future humanity. To this end, however, it is useful above all to clarify what has become of those people who have attained maturity, who have taken the Christ principle into themselves and allowed it to become effective, during this astralization of our Earth. What can become of human beings is what we should now concern ourselves with.

[ 2 ] We will best understand what can become of human beings if we have the patience to look again at how human beings have become and what possibilities for development lie within them for the future. When we look at human beings today, they stand before us as four-membered beings. The first thing we recognize in human beings is the so-called physical body. This is the member that human beings have in common with all present-day creatures of the mineral kingdom, which can be seen with the eyes and touched with the hands. It is the lowest member of the human being, that which alone remains as the corpse at death. But this physical body would have the same fate as the corpse at death every moment; it would decay if it were not permeated by what we call the etheric or life body. Humans no longer share this etheric body with the creatures of the mineral kingdom; they share it with the beings of the plant kingdom on Earth. The etheric body is a fighter against death in every human being, holding together the parts of the physical body that constantly want to separate between birth and death. What is the physical body of the human being in reality? It is what it becomes after a certain time, when death has destroyed the form: ashes, a pile of ashes that are only artificially arranged in their parts within the life body in such a way that the whole human being makes the impression it makes on the observer today. The second member is therefore the etheric or life body. The third, which humans have in common with all animals, is the so-called astral body, the carrier of all instincts, passions, desires, all thoughts and ideas, and so on, what is commonly called the soul in humans. Then we have the fourth member of the human being, which makes man the crown of earthly creation, which causes him to stand out above all other beings of earthly creation and which enables man in particular to develop as an I, as an individual, self-conscious being of earthly existence.

[ 3 ] In the future, human development will proceed in such a way that human beings will gradually work through and process the lower parts that lie beneath the ego, making the ego the master of the other parts. When the ego has worked through and made the astral body its own, so that nothing remains in this astral body of unconscious and unguarded drives, instincts, and passions, then it has developed what we call the spirit self or manas. This is nothing other than what the astral body is, only that before its transformation by the ego, it is the third member. When the ego then also transforms the etheric body, Buddhi or the life spirit arises, and when the ego, in the distant future, transforms the physical body so that it is completely spiritualized by the ego itself — and this is the most difficult work, because the physical body is the densest — then the physical body has been transformed.

[ 4 ] Thus, when we imagine this human being in his sevenfold nature, we have the physical body, the etheric or life body, the astral body, the ego, and further, that which the human being will develop in the future: the spirit self or manas, the life spirit or buddhi, and the spirit man or Atma. This is the sevenfold human being. But human beings will only develop these higher members in the distant future. On our Earth, human beings are not yet destined to influence themselves to such an extent that they can develop all these higher spiritual parts.

[ 5 ] When we consider the sevenfold human being in this way, we have not yet fully understood the human being who stands before us today. It is true that when we look at the human being as a whole, we can speak of these seven members. But if we want to understand the human being of today, we must speak more precisely.

[ 6 ] You will remember that the physical body was developed on Saturn, the etheric body on the Sun, the astral body on the Moon, and that the I is to be formed on the Earth and has already been formed to a certain high degree. Now, however, we must take a closer look at this earthly development of the human being. What is called the spirit self, the transformed astral body, through which the human being acts and works in complete consciousness within this spirit self, his astral body, will only be attained by the vast majority of human beings at the end of earthly evolution. During our earthly development, however, human beings had to undergo a kind of preparation which made it possible, already in the course of earthly development, to work, so to speak, half consciously and half unconsciously on their three lower members.

[ 7 ] This half-conscious, half-unconscious work began in the Lemurian epoch, to which we have already referred. At that time, the I began to work in a very dull consciousness, initially on the astral body. If you follow the development of the earth from the Lemurian period into the first Atlantic period, you will find that the I first worked on its astral body in a semi-unconscious state, only dimly conscious. What first appeared on Earth at that time as a product of the transformation of the astral body is what we call the sentient soul. Then, during the Atlantean period, when the air was filled with misty water vapors, the ego worked in dull consciousness on the etheric body and developed what we call the intellectual or emotional soul. And from the moment when the great impulse came from the region near present-day Ireland, driving the peoples from the West to the East and bringing them across the great Atlantean flood to our new culture, from the beginning of the last third of the Atlantean epoch, the I worked unconsciously on the physical body, and it worked into it what is called the consciousness soul, which gave human beings the capacity to develop a more or less self-conscious ego out of their group soul nature, which only attained the great impulse of complete individuality with the appearance of Christ Jesus. It was then that human beings actually became capable of what can be called working in the astral body with more or less consciousness. It was only with the introduction of Christianity on earth that we actually began to consciously work on our astral body. So that when we speak of human beings today, we must say: Human beings have developed a physical body, an etheric body, an astral body, then a sentient soul, the astral body that was once transformed in a dim consciousness, the intellectual soul, the etheric body, which was transformed in the Atlantean primeval era, and the consciousness soul, the physical body, which was transformed in the last Atlantean era, so that it gradually developed in order to gradually develop the manas to the extent that can be observed in human beings today.

[ 8 ] Today, the beginning of manas is present everywhere in human beings. Some have more of it, others less. Some must still go through many incarnations in order to develop manas to such an extent that they become conscious of what they are working on within their human being. But when the earth has reached its goal, when the seventh trumpet begins to sound, the following will happen: That which is present in the physical body will dissolve like salt in warm water. The human manas, the spirit self, will be highly developed, so that human beings will repeatedly say the words of Paul: Not I, but Christ in me does everything. — Thus will man live. Through this he will dissolve the physical in his being and make the etherically refined into a being that can live within the astralized Earth. Thus will man pass over as a new being into this spiritually transformed Earth.

[ 9 ] We may say that this great moment of passing over into the spiritualized earth is expressed in a wonderful way in the Bible, where we are told that everything that human beings now work out in their physical bodies during their time on earth is like a seed that will sprout as fruit when the earth has become spiritual. 1 Corinthians 15:37: “And that which you sow is not the body that is to be, but a seed, something, and God gives it a body as He has determined, and to each seed its own body,” that is, the body which is the expression of the soul, of individuality. “There are heavenly bodies and earthly bodies. But the heavenly bodies have a different glory than the earthly ones.” The earthly bodies are dissolved, the heavenly ones appear as the luminous expression of what the soul is. ”It is sown corruptible, it is raised incorruptible.” The imperishable body will then rise again. “It is sown a natural body, it is raised a spiritual body.” Paul calls the etheric or life body the “spiritual body” after the physical body has dissolved and the etheric body has moved into the astral earth. Here Paul foresees the imperishable, spiritual body, as he calls it.

[ 10 ] And now let us consider what man puts into it as an expression of his own Christ ability. It is the same thing that Paul has in mind and calls the “last Adam,” while he calls the first man who came into existence in a physically visible body the “first Adam.” In the Lemurian period, at the end of the Lemurian epoch, we already find various animals below, but human beings are not yet visible to the outer eye; they are still ethereal. They become denser, take on mineral components, and appear in their first form. Just as water condenses into ice, so the physical human being emerges. Then physical development progresses to the point where what is earthly can dissolve, and the earthly disappears. Therefore, the human being who has the etheric body appears as the “last Adam.” The “first Adam” has the ability to see the earth through the physical senses in the physical body; the last Adam, who takes on a spiritual body, is a physiognomy of the inner Christ ability. Christ is therefore also called the “last Adam” by Paul. Thus, what the Incarnation contains comes together. We see in the spirit what will one day become of human beings, whereas before we saw how human beings descended to our earth.

[ 11 ] In order to understand what follows, we must look a little deeper into the mysteries of the Incarnation. If you could follow human beings back to before their physical incarnation, that is, to the time when they were not yet visible to the physical eye, when they descended, so to speak, from the etheric realm, first becoming airy-watery formations and then cartilaginous ones, if you could follow them in this way, you would see how different our Earth also was. At that time, before human beings descended, there was actually no mineral kingdom. The earth had only just inherited the moon. The lowest kingdom was the plant kingdom, so to speak. The earth was much softer. All the distribution of liquid and gaseous substances was completely different. So if you had looked at the earth at that time, before man descended from its atmospheric envelope to solid ground, it would not have appeared to you as it is described abstractly in today's geology and so on, but our earth as a whole was much closer, one might say, to an organism.

[ 12 ] This Earth was permeated by all kinds of regular currents. The Earth resembled a living being more than it does today. And human beings, who existed in those ancient times as more than spiritual-etheric beings, were not born as they are today, but were, so to speak, born out of Mother Earth herself. It was Mother Earth herself who allowed these humans, these still spiritual-etheric humans, to become what they were, and before they separated from the whole Earth, humans were beings who were truly connected to the whole Earth. Imagine how hardened areas develop in any soft body, and you will have a picture of how humans were born out of Mother Earth herself in those days. Yes, human beings were connected to the earth through all kinds of currents and remained connected to it. So human life was completely different then. What you have today, for example, as the blood circulation inside the human being, enclosed within the skin, had its continuation — it existed in the form of natural forces — everywhere out into the surrounding earth. If we wanted to form a picture of how it was then, we would have to say: not perceptible to the physical eye, but to the clairvoyant gaze, a place arose within the earth which stood out and could be distinguished from the rest of its surroundings; but what reigned there as forces was connected to the rest of the earth by numerous threads. That was the beginning of the physical human being.

[ 13 ] There was a time when human beings were connected to the rest of the earth by threads. As we have said, we are touching upon a significant and serious mystery, the mystery that has left its final traces in the fact that when a human being enters the world today, the connection with the maternal organism is severed in the umbilical cord. This connection with the maternal organism is the last remnant of the connection that the human being had with Mother Earth. And just as human beings today are sons of man, born of man, so human beings were once sons of the earth, born of the earth, when the earth was still a living being. And human beings became independent when the umbilical cord connecting them to the whole earth was cut, so to speak. This made them beings born of their own kind.

[ 14 ] We must be clear that the blood vessels that are in humans today are nothing more than the continuations of currents that permeated the entire Earth in the old state of the Earth. The same is true of the nerve pathways: everything you have as nerves continued out into Mother Earth. This has now been cut out, as it were, from what flowed through the whole earth as nerves. And the same applies to the other members of the human being. Man was born out of Mother Earth. What is now enclosed in man through his skin has been drawn into him from the whole earth. Man's being was taken from the earth and drawn into him. Before he became the Son of Man, man was a son of the earth. And “son of the earth” actually means “Adam.” All these ancient names point to significant mysteries. But if we are aware of this, we will understand that before visible man came into being on it, the earth already contained all the forces of this visible man. Before man became man, the earth was the bearer of all human forces. The earth is therefore the mother of the human race. Just as you cannot imagine that human beings could ever have sprung from today's stony earth, so human beings could have sprung from the earth when it was still a living being. What we have been able to indicate in a few words took place in the Lemurian epoch.

[ 15 ] If you now ask yourselves: Did this Earth not have tremendous importance for human beings? — we must say: Yes, because it contained in its primordial structure everything that human beings later absorbed into themselves. Somewhere the heart was preformed, somewhere the brain, every nerve strand was prepared in our Earth. But just as our inner nature was prepared in the Earth, so too do we carry within us, in what we will have developed as our new physical body when the Earth has reached its goal, the form that the future planet, the future embodiment of our Earth, must take. Today, man works on his soul; in this way he makes his body more and more like his soul. When the earth has reached the end of its path, its mission, he will have shaped his body so that it is an outer image of the soul that has taken Christ into itself. This man will live on and implant the powers he has thus formed into the next embodiment of our earth. Jupiter will look like what humans can make it by putting it together from their own bodies. This Jupiter will first get its shape from what humans have made out of themselves. Think about all the bodies that have formed like this coming together to make one world sphere: that will be Jupiter. You have within your soul what will be the form of Jupiter, what powers it will contain. And from Jupiter will be born the Jupiter beings. This is how humans are working today for the birth of the Jupiter bodies.

[ 16 ] What must human beings do, then, to give the future embodiment of our Earth a worthy form? They must ensure that the work they are now consciously able to do is carried out in a Christ-like manner, so that the etheric body, which will be a reflection of this work, can live its way into the spiritualized Earth in a worthy manner. All parts of this body will be as human beings have made them. What man will have made of his physical body, he will bring into this spiritual earth, and what will be formed from this will be the basis for his further development. Just as your present soul is developing in your present body, which you have inherited from the moon, so will the future soul develop in what you yourself make of your body. That is why the body, that which surrounds and envelops the soul, the I, that which is inhabited by this I, is called the temple of the inner self, the temple of the divinity living in man, the temple of God. By shaping this body, you are building a future temple, that is, the new embodiment of the earth. You build Jupiter in the right proportions by shaping the human body in the right way. What must therefore come to light when the earth has reached its goal? A temple of the soul that is harmonious in all proportions. That is why the initiate is given the task of examining this temple that man will then have built. That the soul has done the right thing will become apparent when this temple of God is measured. “And there was given me a reed like unto a rod: and he said unto me, Rise and measure the temple of God, and the altar, and them that worship therein. But the court that is without the temple, these cast out.” (Chapter 11, 1.) This means that everything that was there in preparation must be thrown out of the temple. Man first had to have a physical body and an etheric body before he could work inside. This physical body and the etheric body are the outer court: they must fall away, throw them out. — What man has made himself, he keeps. This is the temple in which new beings are to dwell at the time of Jupiter's existence.

[ 17 ] So we live within a spiritually evolved Earth. We see how this Jupiter age is already being prepared in an exemplary manner. We see how people bring with them the fruits of their earthly existence; we see all this prefigured. And now we must be clear that within this spiritual state of the earth, at a higher stage of development, everything that was there before will reappear. Above all, the carriers of the spiritual currents on which the earth stands and from which it emerged will reappear. The carriers of these currents appear alive again. If we follow Christian tradition, we see in Elijah and Moses the personal representatives of what appeared to us yesterday in the two pillars. Those who give the teachings of the two pillars are referred to in Christian esotericism as Elijah and Moses. Elijah was the one who brought the message and revelation to humanity from the one pillar, the pillar of strength, while Moses was the one who brought it from the pillar of wisdom. “Moses” means wisdom or truth, and “Elijah” means — it is difficult to express the word in English — the guiding force, that which gives direction and impetus. Thus we see these two appear in the spiritual world, at the stage of development they will have reached. For just as in the “Transfiguration” according to Christian tradition, Christ appeared between Moses and Elijah, so at the end of the Earth's development the whole process appears in such a way that the sun, the spiritual sun of love, the revelation of the Earth's mission of love, appears supported by the sun-Mars and the moon-Mercury, by Elijah and Moses. As we saw yesterday, the two pillars that first appear to the initiate as symbols of strength and wisdom, with the sun of love above them, allow us to imagine the evolution of the earth a little further, and in its liveliness, in its personality, what is one pillar appears to us as Elijah, and the other as Moses, and what is above them as the actual Christ principle.

[ 18 ] If we now turn our gaze away from the earth itself, from what is on it, and consider it in relation to the whole of the heavens, we arrive at a very important point in our discussion. The earth and the sun were one body. The earth developed out of the sun, and the moon split off. We have said that this had to happen because of the right measure of development. But now that human beings have gone through these stages of development, after becoming spiritualized, they are ripe to reunite with the forces that are in the sun. He can keep pace with the sun. An important world event is now taking place: the earth is reuniting with the sun. While what we have discussed is happening, the earth is reuniting with the sun. We have said that the sun spirits descended to earth at the event of Golgotha. We have said that this Christ principle will bring things to the point we have described. Now the earth is becoming ripe to unite with the sun. And that which was necessary to prevent development from proceeding too quickly, the moon, will be overcome; human beings will no longer need it. The moon will be overcome in its powers. During this time, human beings can unite with the sun. They will live in the spiritualized earth and at the same time be connected with the power of the sun, and they will be the conquerors of the moon. This is represented by the symbolic figure of the fifth seal: the woman who carries the sun within her and has the moon at her feet. We have arrived at the point in time when man is spiritualized, when man is once again connected with the forces of the sun, when the earth and the sun are one body and the forces of the moon will be overcome. (See the fifth seal image.)

[ 19 ] And now we must remember that only the more advanced part of the beings, the part imbued with the principle of Christ, has undergone this development. They have come this far; but those who are hardened in matter have fallen away, forming, so to speak, a kind of secondary planet of hardened, incarnated matter. Now let us remember how, from an astral point of view, the human being appeared to the clairvoyant before descending to earth as a physical being. Let us remember that we pointed out precisely that the human being appeared in the four types of his group soul, in the form of the lion, the eagle, the ox, and the human being. These four types of group soul appear to us, so to speak, before the human being descends into the physical, before he becomes individualized. These four typical forms that the human being had before entering the physical body are not visible in the physical human being of today; they are under the control of the soul. Like rubber, they are pressed into the human form. In fact, it is so: when human beings are not in control of themselves, when their souls are silent, either because they are asleep or in some other more or less unconscious state, then one can still see the corresponding animal type emerging. But human beings have basically overcome this animal type by descending to the physical plane. When was man given the ability to overcome the animal type in the astral realm?

[ 20 ] Let us remember that we spoke of the seven periods of Atlantean development. These seven periods comprise four earlier and three later periods. In the first four, man was still entirely a group soul. Then, in the fifth period, the first impulse toward the I-soul arose. We thus have four stages of development in Atlantis, in which human beings first advance as group souls, and each of the first four Atlantean races corresponds to one of the typical animal forms: lion, eagle, calf, or bull, and human being. This passes into human beings in the fifth period, when these typical forms are lost. Now imagine that human beings in their present state are permeated by the Christ principle and thereby increasingly overcome their animal nature. But if they are not permeated by the Christ principle, they cannot overcome their animal nature. The four typical heads, lion, eagle, bull, and human, remain, so to speak, as something that takes on its form again when it can emerge once more, and to these are added three others, those of the last three races of the Atlantean evolution, where human beings had already begun to be human. These three also remain if human beings do not work through their souls to make this animal nature disappear. How, then, will the human being who has not taken up the Christ principle during our time appear on the spiritualized earth? He will appear in materiality; he will reappear in the forms from which he came. He has had these animal forms and has gone through three more. What could have overcome animal nature has now been left unused by him. Animal nature springs forth again, in seven forms. Just as the four heads appeared in Atlantis, the animal-human, so seven such typical heads will emerge from the transformed Earth, from the astralized Earth, and the spectacle that took place then will be repeated. The spiritual human being was present in his potential, but he could not yet form an individual shape; he formed the four animal heads. The spiritual human being in his potential is also represented for that time by the woman who gives birth to the human being. The human being of the future is also represented by the woman who gives birth to the spiritual human being. But that which remained in the flesh is represented on the side earth by the animal with seven heads. Just as there were four heads before human beings had the opportunity to overcome animal nature, so those who remained in animal nature appear as a whole, as the animal with seven heads.

[ 21 ] Thus, after the earth has united with the sun, while the spiritualized earth is above, everything that has not absorbed the spiritual principle will appear below, and the animal heads that once existed will reappear, only now they will be out of their time. Now they are the adversaries; before, in the time of preparation, they were in the right time. So we see that, just as then from the physical sea, now from the astral sea — the sun is also astralized — the monster with the seven heads, the seven-headed beast, rises. Everything that is predisposed in the human being through the etheric body — please note this — is called a “head” or a “head” in the language of mystery, which is also used by the apocalyptic writers, because it produces such a typical head shape as the lion's head when seen clairvoyantly. The etheric forces must act upon this. If we follow the Atlantean development, the etheric body was still outside the head. That which is predisposed in human beings from the etheric is called a “head” in the language of apocalyptic mysteries. This refers to that which appears to clairvoyant vision primarily as a head. But what is physically brought about in the human being by any member of the etheric body is called a “horn.” A “horn” is therefore a very mysterious thing in the language of the mysteries. For example, what has been physically brought about in human beings by their passing through the race of the Atlantean epoch, in which the lion was typically present as the group soul, is called a horn. So the physical that comes from any member of the etheric body is called a “horn.” A horn, for example, is the organ that is the outer physical expression of something etheric.

[ 22 ] Now I will speak to you concretely. All physical organs of the human being are actually condensed etheric organs, emerging from the condensed etheric body. Let us consider the human heart. Today it is a physical organ, but it is condensed from an etheric organ. The present human heart received its structure at the time when the human being passed through the group soul stage symbolized by the lion. So the heart is the “horn” of the lion's head, because when the etheric body had developed to the point where human beings appeared with the group soul symbolized in the lion's head, the foundation was laid for what later became the physical heart. From this foundation of the lion man arose the present-day physical heart of human beings. So while we trace the origin of the etheric body back to the transformation of one “head” into another, to the addition of one head to another, we understand the human physical body as the addition of one “horn” to another. In fact, the human etheric body consists of “heads,” and the human physical body consists of “horns.” This is the language of mysteries. All human organs are formed from the etheric body and are therefore nothing but “horns.”

[ 23 ] And now we must reconsider everything we have heard, for this is something about which even the apocalyptic writer says: Here is wisdom. We will only understand this wisdom that the apocalyptic writer has placed in the appearance of the seven-headed beast, which has ten horns, when we consider carefully what “horn” actually means in relation to “head” in the language of the mysteries. We will see that those beings who have retained these seven heads because they have remained stationary in their development have in fact taken on a physical body in the abyss, consisting of ten hardened physical limbs.