The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Fourth Lecture

[ 1 ] Yesterday we spoke about all the different spiritual beings that belong, as it were, as a supplement to what surrounds us in the physical world. We saw how even stones and plants have their own ego, their astral body, and our spiritual vision expanded to encompass a wealth of realities beyond those that the physical eye can see and the physical mind can comprehend. We have also seen how higher beings are, so to speak, active in what human beings accomplish within our earthly evolution; already in relation to the individual human being, we saw that a higher species of being has to intervene. In the sense of spiritual science, we regard the individual human being as the complete master of his inner world and the world of his deeds and his will between his physical birth and his death. But we know that the actual inner being of the human being has undergone many incarnations, and that the human being in his present normal development is not yet capable of working beyond one incarnation, but that higher beings must intervene to provide those guiding forces that work not only between birth and death, but beyond death, from incarnation to incarnation. We have seen that these spiritual beings are called angels or angeloi in Christian esotericism, and that in theosophical usage they are also called the spirits of twilight or dawn; in the sense of Rosicrucian spiritual science, they can also be called the sons of life. All these designations will become clearer to us in the course of time. Then we considered how human communities, races, and peoples are directed by a kind of spirit that we call archangels or fire spirits; and finally we saw how that which extends beyond the narrower communities, which is expressed as the spirit of the age, is directed by the primordial forces which are also called archai or spirits of personality, or asuras in theosophical terminology. Thus, wherever we are, spiritual beings are working in our world, and we see the realms that initially surround us multiplied by three. Let us now try to form an idea of what the more external manifestation of these beings looks like.

[ 2 ] When we look at them from the ordinary physical-material standpoint of our earth, we see them composed of what we call earth, water, air, and fire. As we have already heard, these are initially four states of external matter. What we usually call earth in spiritual science is today referred to as solid; everything that is solid is simply given the name earth in spiritual science. Everything that is liquid, not only water but also mercury and so on, we call water; everything gaseous and airy we call air; and everything that we perceive with any degree of warmth is thought of as being permeated by something we call substantial warmth, which is not an external property for us, but rather a continuation of the states of form just mentioned and equally deserving of such a name. Thus, we have first of all placed before our eyes that which surrounds us materially.

[ 3 ] Now, however, the various entities of which we have spoken live in these different material elements as in their external corporeality. For those who view the world with clairvoyant vision, what we know as liquid elements, especially water, are not merely animated and permeated by the entities we know as water beings, fish, and so on; rather, such a person knows that despite the flowing nature of liquids, no fixed form is retained in this watery element, and that spiritual beings nevertheless dwell within it. They dwell there in a truly embodied form in the watery element, in a flowing, constantly changing form that cannot be distinguished with the outer eye. There they live, these beings whom we have called angels, spirits of twilight. They really have a physical body, but it is not a solid physicality; and when the ancient myths and legends tell of such water beings, this is not fantasy, but corresponds to reality. Furthermore, in what we know as the air element, and preferably in our air, live those beings we call archangels. And it is by no means a fairy tale or mere legend when we see in the flowing air, in the rushing storm, the physical manifestation of these spiritual realms. When it was said earlier that angelic beings live in water, it is primarily the water that permeates our air like water vapor, which is fleeting, dispersing into individual atoms, in which clairvoyant vision perceives the embodiment of what we call archangels. And in what we perceive as warmth, we have the embodiment of those beings whom we know as the spirits of personality, as the primal forces. You will therefore also understand that human beings are composed of these four elements: earth, water, air, and fire, in such a way that not only are the four elements mixed together in human beings, but the entities we have just mentioned are also thoroughly mixed together; they fill the body in the same way as the material, they flow in and out of the physical body of human beings.

[ 4 ] But the series of beings that have to do with human beings is not exhausted by this. We have even higher beings that have to do with the earth, the world, and human beings, beings that stand on an even higher level than the spirits of personality, the primordial beginnings. There, for example, we have those beings that shine toward us in the light; and light is again a more subtle state for us than warmth. Wherever something glows, we have in the light the garment of high beings, which in Christian esotericism are called powers, or exusiai. They are also called the spirits of form, for they are the beings who give form to everything around us. Wherever you see something in a definite, delimited form, it is these spirits who are at work. We have seen that what is active in our Earth's development as the various spirits of the times is governed by the spirits of personality; the spirits of form now have an even higher task. We can understand this best if we consider that from the beginning of actual human development, that is, from the moment when human beings underwent their first incarnation, the spirit of the age has always been changing, and that different leaders have always emerged from the host of personality spirits. But superimposed on everything that is brought about by the spirit of the age is something that passes through the whole of humanity on earth. When human beings began their human mission on earth, spiritual beings intervened in this human community, and it is to them that we owe the fact that we can be active as human beings on earth. And whatever has appeared as spirits of personality in the spirit of the times, as archangels in individual communities, or as angels in relation to individual human beings: those spirits, which we have called the spirits of form, have been directing everything that these spiritual beings do in a higher realm since the beginning of the earthly mission, guiding and directing everything in the great scheme of things. These powers had the task of working in the Earth mission as a whole; they had a planetary task. So we see that when we go beyond the spirit of the age to the spirit of the whole of humanity, we have these powers, these spirits of form.

[ 5 ] Now you know that our Earth as a planet, just like human beings, is subject to the law of reincarnation. Our Earth was formerly what we call the old moon. At that time, what we now call the Earth mission did not yet exist in the same way as it does on Earth. The moon had a different mission; every planetary state has its own mission to fulfill in the context of the world; nothing repeats itself in the same way, everything is subject to evolution, to development. At that time, during the incarnation of the Earth that we call the old moon, those beings whom we refer to in Christian esotericism as the powers, dynameis, or spirits of movement had a task similar to that of the spirits of form here on Earth. If we go back even further in evolution, we come to the planetary state of our Earth that preceded the old Moon state, and then we come to the ancient Sun state, which, as you know, has nothing to do with what we see today as the Sun in the sky. On this ancient sun, as on the Earth, the spirits of form reigned, as on the moon the spirits of movement, and also high beings, those who in Christian esotericism are called Kyriotetes or also Lordships, Glories, or spirits of wisdom. These are the spirits who, so to speak, were in charge during the sun state. And now we come to the last planetary state, the old Saturn. The beings who ruled here in a similar way are called the Thrones, the spirits of will. Thus we have ascended to ever higher levels of spiritual beings, to beings who are not merely the conductors of something that changes like the spirit of the times, but of that which has to do with the mission of planetary states, which first changes from planet to planet.

[ 6 ] The Thrones, the Spirits of Wisdom, the Spirits of Movement, and the Spirits of Form are all still in some connection with us, even if not in such a close, immediately perceptible connection as the other, lower spiritual beings. Let us take an example to clarify how such beings work into our Earth's development. To do this, however, it is necessary to first consider the development of those beings we know as angels, archangels, and spirits of personality. These beings are all higher than the human being of today. But our present human being will also one day reach higher stages in its development. Already in the next incarnation of our Earth, in the Jupiter state, human beings will be as high as the angels are today; human beings will undergo a continuous ascent to ever higher stages of perfection. But the development of the other beings was also like this; they were not always what they are now, they too went through lower stages of development. Take, for example, the angelic beings. They too went through their human stage in earlier times, as we are doing now on our Earth; that was on the old Moon, and by working on themselves at that time, they became the higher beings they are today. And likewise, the archangels or fire spirits went through their human stage on the old Sun; at that time they were beings like us, today they are two stages higher. And the spirits of personality had their human stage on the old Saturn. They were one stage higher than those beings who went through their humanity on the old Sun, and today they are three stages higher than human beings on our Earth.

[ 7 ] But those beings whom we call the spirits of form or powers, whom we look up to as high, exalted beings, have passed through their human stage in an unimaginable past; and when the first embodiment of our Earth began, when the Earth was Saturn, they had already completed their human development. From this we can gauge what high feelings must live within us when we look up to these spiritual beings. But they too are subject to the law of development, and even though they were already higher beings than today's human beings on Saturn, they have passed through ever higher and higher stages through the Sun and the Moon and into our Earth. And so they have finally attained a degree of sublimity that they can have such a large sphere of activity that they no longer need a planet in order to find the substances through which they can exist. For the other beings need our Earth in a certain respect; the angels need water, the archangels need air, and the spirits of personality need fire; but the spirits of form no longer need our planetary state; they therefore needed another place to live when our Earth began its development, and that was the reason why they separated from our Earth.

[ 8 ] I have told you that there was a time when our Earth formed a body with the Sun. At that time, the beings we call the spirits of form were also united with our Earth. But their development had already progressed too far; they needed a finer substance than the Earth could offer them, so they drew the finer substance and the finer beings out of the Earth and, so to speak, departed with the Sun. That is the spiritual reason why the Earth and the Sun separated. It is not merely a mechanical splitting of matter, but world bodies separate in order to become the dwelling place for spiritual beings. The spirits of form tore the fine substance out of the earth, and the sun ball came into being, which now sends light to the earth from outside. And in the sunlight, the spiritual beings of the forces flow toward us; that is why I told you earlier that light is the garment of these forces. When we look up at the sun in the sense of spiritual science and see the bright sunlight shining down upon us, then this light becomes the garment for the spirits who send their guiding and directing forces down to the earth; from the sun they direct the earth's mission.

[ 9 ] When we learn to understand that such cosmic divisions have their cause in the spiritual beings connected with matter, then another fact becomes understandable to us which is otherwise difficult to explain. You know that natural science points to an initial state of our system, to a kind of primordial nebula. Although the so-called Kant-Laplace theory has been modified somewhat by certain researchers such as Arrhenius, we need not concern ourselves with these details here. Let us assume what is commonly assumed: namely, that the sun and the other planets orbiting the sun emerged from the primordial nebula; everything that is dense today was therefore once present in this primordial nebula, which then began to rotate and thereby split off our sun and the other planets. What spiritual science has to say about this does not in any way contradict what is taught here as a hypothesis. If, so to speak, someone had placed a chair in outer space in order to observe, over millions of years, how this differentiation of the primordial nebula into the present planetary bodies took place, it would really not appear much different from what the scientific hypothesis describes. But let us see how the spiritual eye of the clairvoyant views this primordial nebula.

[ 10 ] For him, too, it is a large, powerful ball in a very fine state, in which no sun or earth or Jupiter can yet be distinguished; but this primordial nebula did not form for him out of nowhere; it has a past, and this past lies on the old moon: you must regard it as the predecessor of our earth. You must imagine this old moon, just like our Earth, as a world body, and finally, if we may say so, it underwent a state of spiritualization. What was already differentiated at that time was, so to speak, stirred up again and returned to an undifferentiated state. Then everything went through a kind of cosmic sleep, and then that nebula, which is the rebirth of the old moon, emerged from the womb of the cosmos. For us, it is not merely a material mass, but in this ball live all the spiritual beings, and in it live, in a special state, those powerful beings whom we have called the spirits of movement, of form, and so on. Human beings lived only as germs within it, for they did not yet have an ego on the moon; they only acquired it on Earth. But all the spiritual beings that had already undergone certain stages of development were intimately connected with this primordial nebula.

[ 11 ] What does the materialistic physical hypothesis do when it attempts to explain how the solar system was formed from this primordial nebula? Remember an experiment that is often performed in school to illustrate this process of development: a glass ball is made to rotate in a liquid of equal weight by means of a simple mechanical device. One can then observe how this sphere flattens, how drops break away from it, which in turn form spheres and orbit the main sphere; and in this way one sees a kind of planetary system emerging on a small scale through rotation. This is incredibly suggestive. Why shouldn't one imagine the same thing happening in the world? Here you can literally see how a planetary system is created by rotation; you have it right in front of you! But you forget one thing! Sometimes it is quite nice to forget this one thing, but not in this case: you forget yourself. If you were to carry out this experiment without being there as a human being to turn the crank, the entire planetary system would not come into being. But this is common practice in materialistic thinking, that one always takes only a part of what one has before one's eyes. If one thought correctly and logically, one would have to imagine a giant human being in outer space, turning a huge crank to set the axis in motion. Now, of course, there is no such giant in outer space, but there is something else. The world nebula is not merely matter; it is imbued with spirit and permeated by those beings we have spoken of, who have certain needs and longings, some of whom animate this matter and others that matter. And it is they who, after a certain stage of maturation, carry out the division, so that the higher beings depart with the sun, and that which is needed by the earthly substances and forces remains on earth. In this seething primordial mass, all these spiritual beings are active and gradually form what we now know as our planetary system. For example, there were certain beings that had not quite reached the goal that the spirits of form had to achieve, beings that had lagged behind in their development. These beings were too advanced to have the earth as their scene of activity, but not mature enough to move on to the finer substance of the sun. There were two main classes of such beings, and we will learn more about them and their effect on the Earth later on. For just as the finished and mature forces shine down on our Earth as spirits of form in the light of the Sun and direct it from the Sun, so these intermediate beings also direct the Earth, but from a lower sphere, which is nevertheless higher than the human sphere. These beings took substances that suited them and made them into world bodies between the sun and the earth; and thus Venus and Mercury came into being between the sun and the earth, inhabited by beings who stand on an intermediate stage. And so the other planets of our system also separated themselves by means of other beings who needed them as their scene of activity.

[ 12 ] Now let us once again consider the moment when the sun departs with its beings; the earth remains behind with all the seeds that later developed on it, including the people of the present, who at that time were not yet at the present stage of humanity. Other beings from the animal and plant kingdoms are also present, which have already found their development in previous incarnations of the Earth and are now emerging in a germ-like form. Let us first consider only human beings!

[ 13 ] In earlier times, when the Sun was still united with the Earth, the mighty forces emanating from the high Sun beings were also connected with the Earth and worked upon human beings from within the Earth. But human beings were as they had come over from the Moon, as if they had sprung from their germ, and were initially endowed only with the physical, etheric, and astral bodies. The physical body was not yet as dense as it is today, but more ethereal, more refined. The ego, however, was not yet developed at that time. Now, because the sun shone on the earth from outside and the sun beings worked upon the earth, the conditions on earth changed completely for human beings. You must imagine it like this: As long as the Earth was still connected to the Sun, those high beings who later left with the Sun were hindered in their own development, and therefore also in their power and authority, by the coarse forces of the Earth. Now they had become free, could move freely, and could now set a completely different pace for their development than before, when they still had to carry the entire heavy weight of the Earth's mass. They freed themselves from the Earth in their own development, gaining powers and forces that enabled them to have a more significant effect on humans from outside. Humans, who had previously been under the power of the sun spirits, whose powers were still inhibited by their connection with the Earth, now came under the influence of the freely and powerfully developing sun beings, who acted on the Earth from outside. This would have accelerated development in an enormous way, and human life would have been brought to an end in a very rapid manner, if something else had not happened. Human beings could not keep up with this pace, and therefore one of the spirits that had been there earlier separated with his hosts: he remained united with the earth. And this spirit of form had the task of holding back and restraining what the solar forces would have accomplished with tremendous acceleration, so that these solar spirits would not have acted alone. But if this spirit had remained connected to the earth, it would have continued to work within the earth, and the whole earth would have come to a standstill, for its power, its influence, would have been too strong. What happened then? It took the coarsest substances and forces and left the Earth. What left the Earth is what we now call the Moon. So now this spirit, which had taken on the task of hindering and holding back too rapid development, remains connected to the Moon. Development continues. The Earth and Moon beings split off. The Earth beings now come primarily under the influence of two forces: one comes from the Sun, the other from the Moon. If human beings were under the influence of the Sun's forces alone, they would be old as soon as they were born; under the sole influence of the Moon, they would be frozen, hardened, mummified. He can only develop when the forces of the sun and moon are in balance. Man is placed on the earth, and beings and forces act upon him from outside in a spiritual sense so that he can undergo his present evolution on earth. We have seen that from incarnation to incarnation, human beings are guided by those beings we call angels. But these angels have no independence in the great cosmos; they have higher directors who are the inhabitants of the sun. Under the influence of these sun spirits alone, everything would be crowded together into one incarnation; under the influence of the moon alone, nothing at all would come into being. But in this way, in their interaction, the solid, formative forces emanate from the lunar forces; but that which destroys forms and carries over what is lasting beyond incarnations comes from the sun. And so we understand that, when we consider it purely spiritually, everything in the world has its task.

[ 14 ] And now let us try to picture a little more concretely what has taken place on Earth. We know that when human beings came over from the old moon, they only had their physical body, their etheric body, and their astral body. When the sun detached itself, the physical body was not yet developed enough for the sense organs to be able to perceive external objects. They had existed since Saturn, but they could not perceive external objects. These were organs that produced images from within on the old moon. It was something like this: imagine that one human being approached another; the outer form would not have been perceptible to the human being. But then something like a dream image arose within him, and if this image had certain forms, certain colors, then he knew that it was an enemy, and he could flee. It was a picture consciousness that stood in a real relationship to the soul qualities of the environment. Object consciousness only gradually emerged on Earth; when the sun was already outside as a world body, human beings still could not see it, they only perceived an inner light in their pictures. He did, however, perceive in a certain spiritual-soul relationship the beneficial effect that the spirits of the sun sent down to him; he felt it, so to speak, he saw it shining in auric images; but this has nothing to do with today's external perception. There was therefore a time when the forces of the sun streamed their light to human beings, but human beings did not see the external sun.

[ 15 ] The moon’s departure occurred somewhat later. It was only at the moment when the moon moved away from the Earth that human beings became capable of developing the very first glimmer of self-awareness; it was then that they began, so to speak, to feel themselves as distinct beings. Before that, they felt themselves to be in the bosom of other beings. And only now did the possibility arise for them to perceive the external physical world in its first glimmers through self-consciousness. You can very easily see that this external seeing is connected with self-consciousness; for as long as one cannot distinguish oneself from the external world, one is not a self. The first ability, the first flash of ego-consciousness, therefore coincides with the opening of the eyes to the outside world. This is also linked to the moon’s departure. Earlier, when the moon was still connected to the Earth, it guided the growth forces of the individual human being within the Earth from birth to death, just as it still does now, but from the outside. But so that the human being would not be confined solely between birth and death, the forces acting in from the Sun had to come from the outside. Thus, the development of the Earth was continually accompanied by an interplay of the inner lunar forces and the outer solar forces. And now try to imagine quite vividly and precisely what happened there.

[ 16 ] As long as the sun had already separated but the moon was still connected to the earth, human beings saw the effects of the sun's forces in inner images; they felt the beneficial effects of the sun's forces, for these were always connected with the moon's forces within the earth's body, and this had an effect on human beings in their constitution; but they could not see the sun's forces. Now the moon also left. Human beings' senses were opened, and with that, the possibility of perceiving the soul-spiritual nature of the sun's forces disappeared. Imagine the moment when, so to speak, spiritual-soul perception in images disappears and the first beginnings of an external perception of the sun, of real seeing, begin. But in truth, human beings could not yet see the sun, for the earth was covered with dense vapors. Compared to the earlier dull clairvoyant perception of these solar forces, they would now have been able to see the sun externally, albeit only gradually, if it had not been veiled by the hazy, dense atmosphere. Thus, through their higher development, the beneficial effects of the sun disappeared for human beings. Remembering this state, the ancient Egyptians called the forces of the sun, the pure rays that humans once perceived in dim clairvoyance, Osiris. This perception of Osiris disappeared, and through the cloud cover, external perception was no longer possible: what humans had once seen was dead. “The enemy Typhon has killed Osiris,” and those forces that had emerged as the moon, the forces acting between birth and death, now sought the old Osiris with longing.

[ 17 ] And little by little the fog cleared; of course, this took a long, long time, until the late Atlantean period. And man began to see the sun again, but not as before, when he was in a collective consciousness; now, when man saw the sun, its rays fell into each individual eye: the dismembered Osiris.

[ 18 ] Here we have a tremendous cosmic process. And while we were embodied in ancient Egyptian times, we recognized it in its repetition. That was what the Egyptian priest-wise men originally meant, and they clothed it in an image. They said: Back then, when the moon and the sun first appeared outside, man was in the middle, as if held in balance by the forces of the sun and moon. In the past, there was no sexual reproduction; what was called virgin reproduction took place. The forces that ruled our Earth passed from the sign of Virgo through Libra, the sign of balance, into the sign of Scorpio; hence the Egyptian priestly sage said: When the sun was in the sign of Scorpio, when the earth was in Libra and the rays acted like stings, piercing the sense organs — this emergence of external objectivity, which is the sting of the scorpion, appeared as something new in contrast to the old virgin reproduction — then Osiris was killed. And then the search, the longing of humanity for the old power, for the vision of Osiris, begins.

[ 19 ] You see, we must not merely look for something astronomical in a myth such as the Osiris myth, but we must see in it the result of the deep, clairvoyant insight of the ancient Egyptian priestly sages. They embodied in such a myth what they knew about the development of the earth and of humanity.

[ 20 ] All myths are based on real facts of the higher spiritual worlds. Today, I would like to show you how such a fact underlies the Osiris myth.