The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Sixth Lecture

[ 1 ] The nature of our subject requires us to proceed in a very peculiar way, approaching our goal, so to speak, in circles, drawing ever narrower circles from the periphery in order to reach what we want to reach. Therefore, it may seem at first as if our considerations lack an inner system. But it is precisely by gradually approaching the inner from the outer that we will arrive at a correct understanding of the matter.

[ 2 ] The day before yesterday, we took our observations so far that we encountered the spirits of form, the Exusiai, or, as they are called in Christian esotericism, the powers, as the actual rulers of human existence on earth. This is the inner reality of the matter, that in the course of our earthly evolution, these spirits, who are on such a sublime level that at a certain point in time they could no longer use the earth as their own theater, worked their way into the material and also into the soul. We have seen how they drew the finest forces and substances out of the earth and made our sun the theater of their own development. And further, we have seen how one of the greatest spirits separated itself from its companions in the sun and sacrificed itself completely. This is the same being who remained connected with the forces of the moon from that time onward and who is referred to in the Bible as Jehovah. We must therefore imagine that during the entire time when the sun was still connected with the earth, high, exalted spirits were also connected with earthly existence; that then the most exalted spirits separated themselves and that one of the companions of these exalted powers remained behind, remaining connected with the earth until the next great cosmic event, until the separation of the moon from the earth. And since that time, what we call the outflow, the work of Jehovah, has been contained in the forces of the moon acting from outside. Thus, on the one hand, the high sun spirits worked on our Earth from outside, and on the other hand, Jehovah with his host, with the spirits serving him, and in their interaction they now regulated the earthly development of humanity, which we must now examine more closely.

[ 3 ] What does this mean: that the spirits of form are the actual rulers of earthly existence? Were these spirits of form not already active in the earlier stages of our planet's development? During the Saturn, Sun, and Moon periods? Yes, they were certainly active earlier, but they had a different sphere of activity than on Earth. We will understand this if we simply consider the facts that have already been presented to us. On Saturn, only the first rudiments of the physical body were present; the etheric body and the astral body had not yet flowed in. Of course, these spirits of form, one of whom is Jehovah, were already active at that time; but, if we may express ourselves trivially, they did not have such a prepared ground for their activity. It was only when the spirits of wisdom bestowed the etheric body on the Sun and the spirits of movement bestowed the astral body on the Moon that those beings whom we call the forces found a prepared human being. For only to a human being who already had a physical, etheric, and astral body could they give what we now know as the human form. This form, as you can observe it in yourselves today, did not exist in any earlier phase of development; preparatory stages existed on the moon, the sun, and Saturn, and everything had to undergo a certain development before human beings could be raised to the noble human form. When we ask why the spirits of form could not intervene on Saturn, we must reply: because the germ elements of the physical body formed there were, so to speak, still too young; a certain state of maturity had to be reached first. And this state of maturity did not occur until our Earth stood before the stage of development I spoke of when I described how the Earth, together with the Sun, formed a kind of fine, substantial world body and then continued its development. The spirits of form were already active there, slowly and gradually working on the human body until it was finally able to attain the human form.

[ 4 ] We can point to a time when this shaping of the human being reached a certain conclusion, when the human form was, so to speak, essentially complete. This was not yet the case in the early days of the Atlantean period. If we go back to the early period after the great catastrophe that swept away ancient Atlantis, we find our ancestors in a state very different from our present one. It was not until about the middle of the Atlantean epoch that we reached the point where human beings had essentially acquired the human form we know today. Before that, humans were not at all as solid as they were afterwards, but their entire material content, if we may express it that way, was softer. In the first Atlantean period, we find humans consisting of soft matter that did not yet have the hardness of today's bones, not even as solid as cartilage. Humans were still floating around, so to speak, in air that was still completely filled and permeated with dense water; they were a kind of water creature, similar to certain animals today that can hardly be distinguished from water. The bone structure was already present in the forces at that time, but it had not yet hardened. This is the time when there was also a completely different relationship between the higher and lower members of the human being. Let us remember once again that today, when a human being sleeps, they leave their physical and etheric bodies in bed, while the astral body and the I are outside. Since today the etheric body is almost identical in form and size to the physical body, when a person leaves the physical body with their astral body, they also very quickly leave the etheric body. This was not the case in the first Atlantean epoch. At that time, the etheric body protruded on all sides, especially at the head, beyond the physical body. This protrusion meant that the astral body, even after it had left the physical body, remained connected to the etheric body. When the astral body leaves the physical body in modern humans, it leaves the etheric body at the same moment. And the consequence of this connection between the astral body and the etheric body, which used to continue even after the physical body had been left behind, was that human beings did not experience such darkness and unconsciousness around and within themselves at night as is the case today. Then, when they were out of their physical bodies, they could perceive soul-spiritual beings in a twilight clairvoyance. It is like this: when you imagine that you are falling asleep and your astral body is leaving your physical body, your gaze is diverted from the physical world, but instead you are confronted with a world populated by soul-spiritual beings. Such a person, however, could not need a solid physical body, nor could they need a solid skeletal system; for because the physical body was soft, it was also more mobile.

[ 5 ] And here we come to something that was once quite real to clairvoyant consciousness, however abhorrent it may be to today's materialistic consciousness: in the first Atlantic epoch, human beings had great power over the form of their bodies. Imagine that a person at that time wanted a limb that later became a hand — to put it crudely — to look different, for example, to be longer; then he could actually lengthen it elastically. He could not only move all his limbs, but also stretch them elastically; he could, so to speak, inflate himself. This was entirely possible at that time, however much it may repel today's materialistic thinking; they could stretch their fingers far out, lengthen them; and this was particularly strong if we go back even further, to the Lemurian epoch. And now you will see how two things come together. When did humans lose the ability to stretch and contract their limbs? When the spirits of form had finished working out the forms. As long as humans had not yet completely acquired the physical form that was to remain with them, they were still able to change their shape, controlled by other spirits. If we go back to times before the Atlantean epoch, we find that the human form was not yet complete, that humans had a constantly metamorphosing form. And we must be clear that there came a time when the spirits of form had completed everything they had to do in order to shape the human form in their own image, for they poured their own form into it.

[ 6 ] Let us now assume — and we will see through what events something like this came about — that some human beings could not wait until this point in time when the spirits of form had finished their work: then these beings would have become frozen at some earlier stage, they would have become ossified in their form, so to speak; they would have retained an earlier form. But it was precisely important that this being, which was to become a human being, retained its form and shape in a flexible state until the normal time for the fixed form could arrive. Let us take a point in time shortly before this—in reality, however, it lies far back, for we are dealing with long periods of time. At that time, the outer being of the human being was such that it still needed the forces that worked on it, that reworked it, that refined it. Let us now assume that, through events which we shall learn about later, certain human beings detached themselves from the constantly working formative forces, that they fell out of them so that they were no longer completely permeated by the formative forces as before: then these human beings would have remained at an earlier stage. This is indeed what happened, and in these beings who detached themselves too early, who are closest to us but who did not allow the spirits of form to work on them long enough, we have the apes. They could not wait, they did not remain long enough in the womb of the divine beings we call the spirits of form. And what we have now described for the apes happened again and again during the existence of the earth for various beings; again and again, beings remained behind and became rigid.

[ 7 ] There you have the whole series of today's animals. But if you ask: Does any human being originate from such animal forms? The answer is no! Man remained, so to speak, above the surface of the earth in the pure elements and only condensed when the time was right for him. The biblical account beautifully captures the moment when man descended from pure spiritual heights, without having undergone earthly condensation, to the earth in the story of Paradise. Despite all research, paradise is not located on the earth's surface, but in the vicinity of the earth. Man only descended from paradise to earth later, after he had received his completed form.

[ 8 ] But now let us clarify what should have happened in the middle of the Atlantean period, when these spirits of form had finished forming the physical body. At this point, human beings, whose senses had also been completed, should have looked out into their surroundings and first had to live with their external physical environment. Before that, everything in the physical environment had existed in unclear contours. Only then would the time have come when human beings should have entered into a normal relationship with the external world, so to speak. Then, at that point, human beings would have learned to distinguish themselves from their surroundings, and they would have learned to say “I” to themselves, for one can only say “I” to oneself if one can distinguish oneself from other things. Human beings would have learned this at that point. At that time, they would have had a physical body that they could have called a suitable vehicle for their “I.”

[ 9 ] But we have already mentioned how certain beings have remained behind at all stages of world evolution. Not all beings have reached the stage where they could have worked in the manner just described, not even all the beings we have called the spirits of form or forces. And it is precisely these beings who have remained behind who are of essential importance for human evolution on earth.

[ 10 ] We have already considered that, apart from the exalted beings who work from the sun and the moon, there are others who stand on an intermediate stage, on a stage between human beings and the high sun and moon spirits, and whose sphere of activity is Mercury and Venus, those world bodies that are scattered between the sun and the earth. Just as the sun spirits had attained normal development and arrived at the precise moment when they could work in the right way, so those beings who stood between the earth and the sun spirits did not find this moment in the same way, and because they were not in normal development, they intervened at a different time. And now let us consider what this resulted in.

[ 11 ] Let us look once more at human development as it has taken place. Let us again imagine the physical, etheric, and astral bodies and the I. Now we know that the I is called upon to transform the other members of the human being, that it must begin by gradually bringing the astral body under its control and dominion; this means nothing other than that the human being masters his passions and instincts. So the time had come when the ego was to appear in the human being in the normal way, when it was to work on the astral body; little by little, the astral body was to be transformed and the spiritual self was to be formed. When the exalted powers intervened in the middle of the Atlantean epoch, the first opportunity for such a transformation presented itself. Now we will understand what a strange task the retarded beings had to set themselves. They were not far enough advanced to be able to help human beings in the development of their spiritual self. The consequence of this was that they worked on the astral body, which had not yet advanced to the ego. And they had already been working on it before. So we have a certain period in the evolution of humanity on Earth when the astral body, which has not yet developed up to the ego, is worked on by these lagging spiritual beings. You will understand this better if you remember that on the Moon, human beings had a physical, etheric, and astral body, and that the forces at that time normally acted upon the astral body. Those who had developed normally now acted upon the ego, but the others who had remained behind continued to act upon the astral body according to their old Moon habits. So before human beings had developed their I, these backward but highly exalted beings acted upon their astral body. We call them, after their chief representative, their leader, the Luciferic beings. Two kinds of beings thus acted upon human beings: the normally acting spirits we spoke of last time, and these Luciferic beings, which had not, so to speak, reached the stage of acting upon the ego, and which had already been working upon the human astral body. And in this way the latter also held human beings back in their development. Had such beings not acted upon human beings, they would have been so far advanced in the middle of the Atlantean epoch that the sublime powers would have been able to act upon their egos.

[ 12 ] Now we may ask: Is what these backward spirits did to human beings, in comparison with what the sublime powers did to them, to be regarded as something bad in the trivial sense? No, not at all. If we consider the fact that can be verified by clairvoyant vision, we find that in reality they actually accelerated human development. Human beings would have had to wait until the very last moment to develop certain abilities, whereas they acquired them earlier as a result. Thus, through the Luciferic beings, human beings received certain spiritual abilities before the time that was intended for them and were thus raised to a certain spiritual level. This is not a bad thing, but, strange as it may seem, it is even something that, in a higher sense, represents an infinitely wise guidance in the further development of humanity. For by acquiring certain abilities at a lower level that were otherwise intended for him only in the middle of the Atlantean epoch, man approached these abilities in a completely different, self-conscious, free manner. Man would have been led by the hand until the middle of the Atlantean epoch if these backward entities had not intervened. How, then, are we to understand their backwardness? With superficial thinking, one could easily interpret this as if they had remained behind like a student who has to repeat a year at school. But these spirits did not remain behind because of their sluggishness; the reason for their remaining behind was their willingness to sacrifice themselves. In order to give human beings the opportunity to receive the gift of the spirits of form in a higher, free way, they sacrificed themselves. We have a long period of human development in which human beings received the beginnings of language, thinking, and especially intellectual memory from these Luciferic beings, and in which they received the germ of art and science. Since they would otherwise have had only instinctive activity, they would not have attained any of this before. However, this also meant that something else, which would otherwise have been independent of man through the guidance of the spirits of form, was now given into his power, into his control: man was exposed to good and evil; he was exposed to straying from the right path. Without the intervention of the Luciferic beings, he would never have been exposed to good and evil, but his freedom would also have been lost. By moving a part of evolution forward into a previous age, these beings gave humans freedom. We all carry within us the seed of the activity of these Luciferic spirits.

[ 13 ] We must therefore say: In the middle of the Atlantean epoch, the spirits of form descended, those spirits who had completed their development to such an extent that they could give to human beings what they themselves had: only at that time would human beings have attained their complete germ of the I, if only they had been active. But now, from an earlier time, the Luciferic beings have been active, accelerating evolution by a significant degree—upward on the one side, downward on the other. As a result, something else, something important, has happened. If progress had taken place without the Luciferic beings, human beings would have attained a certain state in the middle of the Atlantean epoch, but without the possibility of freedom. Without merit, he would have become ripe to receive the gift of the spirits of form. But since the Luciferic beings had made him ripe earlier, a certain deterioration had occurred in the other direction, and as a result, not all the forces of the spirits of form, not all the higher solar powers, could act upon him at that point in time. This implies something important. If man, without freedom and therefore without merit, had arrived in the middle of the Atlantean epoch merely through a spiritual, higher instinct, he would have been mature enough for the principle we call the Christ principle to descend to earth at that time, and Christ would have appeared then. But human freedom was given, and human beings were thereby forced down below their instinctive, normal stage of development. The result was that they now had to mature through their own efforts, so that they could receive the Christ principle at the same time that the Luciferic beings had previously intervened. We must be clear that the descent and work of Christ was delayed by the intervention of the Luciferic beings. But this also meant that human beings were in a more mature form when Christ descended.

[ 14 ] So we see that it is these beings who have made man what he is today, who have prepared him for the great moment of the descent of the Christ principle. They said to themselves, as it were: Let us leave man as he is, so that he lives only instinctively in the Atlantean era, then he will also receive the Christ principle instinctively, then he will not be free, not mature in freedom. We will sacrifice ourselves and develop certain abilities and qualities in him, and delay the moment when he can see Christ. — The Luciferic beings began their work exactly as long before the middle of the Atlantean epoch as Christ appeared after that time.

[ 15 ] If we now ask: What was the share of those powers that human beings had already been able to receive in the middle of the Atlantean epoch? — we must answer: It was something that could only approach human beings from outside, whereby they could not yet be with their own souls. Therefore, everything that came to human beings from the powers that were already at work earlier was such that it did not flow from the innermost being of human beings: they followed something external, they obeyed laws. Just as animals must follow the laws that are implanted in them, completely instinctively, so Jehovah gave human beings laws. He gave them the law, which was then also realized externally through Moses and the prophets. In the meantime, however, they matured to receive within themselves the drive and impulse to do what they were supposed to do. And so we see that without the intervention of human beings, their order on earth is prepared by the forces. Where do these powers work? They work primarily where, to put it trivially, blood speaks: in procreation and in everything related to it. In ancient times, we had gods and folk spirits, we had group spirits, and within the groups they created order through laws. There, those who are related by blood love each other, and they love each other because love is implanted through natural laws. And the further back we go, the more we find that everything is considered to belong together, that everything loves everything else that has been implanted with love through natural laws, through external formative forces. The Jehovah principle worked in the same blood, hence the belonging together. Through this kinship, which is connected with the blood, Jehovah lived and created order and harmony. And those who opposed him, who directed their strongest attacks against the principle of blood kinship, were the Luciferic beings. They always want to place man at the center of his own personality; they want to tear him away from his blood relationship until the time when Christ comes and places him completely at the summit of his personality by giving him his innermost power, making wisdom and grace the innermost impulse of his being. And this is what the Luciferic beings have been preparing for a long, long time. Only when Christ descended did human beings become ripe for what these Luciferic beings wanted. Those who professed such views knew well what they were saying when they uttered the words: Christus verus Luciferus, Christ is the true Lucifer. This is an esoteric statement.

[ 16 ] And so we see that in fact two principles were always at work in those ancient times we call pre-Christian: always a principle binding through blood relationship and a separating principle that wants to place human beings at the peak of their own personality. And we can now see how the whole of humanity is shaped under the influence of these two principles.

[ 17 ] Let us imagine a certain Atlantean stage of human development, where human beings are already moving toward their later hardening into the bone structure. I must express myself in popular terms here. The guiding spirits now had to take care that the bones did not harden too quickly. During the Atlantean development, the skeletal system had to remain sufficiently soft for a certain period of time so that it could be transformed. But we know that beings remained behind at all stages. Thus, groups of human beings remained behind at a fairly late stage because the skeletal system hardened too early. The principles worked in such a way that the form principle won a strong victory by preserving a group of people in the form they were in. What had to be the consequence of this? One can harden and hold back something on earth, but the whole evolution of the earth goes beyond this, so that what is artificially held back later encounters times when it no longer fits. Times came when the air had become more purified from water, when climatic conditions had changed, and what had remained standing no longer fit in. Such groups of people, whose skeletal system had, so to speak, been overburdened, then remained behind as a degenerate human race. They could no longer find their place in the conditions of the post-Atlantean era, and the last remnants of them are the American Indians. They were degenerate. And there are also those who have been left behind, not only because their skeletal system hardened too early, but also because the system underlying their nutrition, which is controlled by the forces of the etheric body, while the skeletal system is controlled by the forces of the physical body. The last remnants of that group of people whose nutritional system has hardened now form the black race. And then there are people who have degenerated because their nervous system hardened at too early a stage and did not remain soft long enough to become a suitable tool for higher thinking. The last remnants of this are the Malay race. That is why you find certain drives and instincts in them, certain tendencies toward sensual instincts. And finally, we have those people in whom, at a certain stage, the ego is hardened in the blood, in the outer expression of the ego, if we may say so. These people, who are symbolically speaking hardened in the blood, have their last remnants in the peoples of the Mongolian race. But those people who kept the elements just mentioned so soft that they did not remain in any form of hardening, but were able to develop further and further, so that they even went beyond the closed ego, this group of people went from a point in the Earth's development, which we have already indicated, in the Atlantic Ocean, near present-day Ireland, to those regions that now form Europe and Asia.

[ 18 ] And we discover the following curious fact: We find that there were actual waves of emigration originating from the Atlantic continent. And we will now examine this in greater detail than has been done previously in other contexts. These waves consisted of people whose skeletal systems had become ossified, and whose last stragglers were encountered during the discovery of the American continent. Then there were groups that went to Africa, and others that went to Asia. The latter were those we have referred to as the Mongolian race. The last to emigrate were those people who lived near present-day Ireland and who had remained the most adaptable for the longest time—who, so to speak, had remained in paradise the longest. They migrated from west to east, leaving behind certain peoples throughout the entire expanse of the European continent. The most advanced among them migrated to Asia and there intermingled in manifold ways with those who had come over by other routes.

[ 19 ] Now let us imagine a time not so long ago when a certain, albeit very dim, clairvoyance still existed and the initiates still wielded great influence. If there was an awareness of these circumstances among the people, how must this have manifested itself? Let us assume that in ancient Greece they found peoples who had become hardened before them; then they found another race down there, created by mixing, which had become hardened in an even earlier state: this was indeed the case in the Greek consciousness. When the Greek looked back on the development that had led to himself, he said to himself: I look to Africa, where I find advanced people in the Egyptian period who have already been influenced by earlier cultural epochs—the Babylonian and Chaldean. But even earlier, there was a population on this soil with a strong element of hardening in relation to characteristics that descend into the lower, into the principle of nutrition. And another stage had formed later when they encountered the Asian emigrants. And to these were added those who had remained most flexible for the longest time. Now, in their plastic figures of gods, the Greeks idealized what they knew about human development and what they regarded as the result of divine forces. They knew that at a very early stage human beings had become hardened, and that others had retained their softness and pliability. Then they looked at themselves. Although they were backward in certain respects, they belonged to those who had remained supple and malleable the longest. We see all this wonderfully hidden in Greek plastic art. Those who study it more deeply will find three different types of gods:

[ 20 ] 1. the Zeus type, to which the entire circle of gods grouped around Zeus belongs;

[ 21 ] 2. a type that was later affiliated with the Zeus type, but which existed in the Greek consciousness in a completely different form: in the form of Hermes or Mercury. Look at the hair of the Zeus type and compare it with the curly, frizzy hair of Mercury, and also the shape of the eyes and the position of the ears, and you will soon see that the Greeks wanted to express something different, even though it was later depicted in such a way that it was incorporated into the Zeus type;

[ 22 ] 3. the faun type. This type belongs to an even older humanity and differs clearly from the Mercury type.

[ 23 ] Here we have what the Greeks wanted to express in their own way. What was to the south of them was represented by the faun type. What was to the east, they brought together with the Hermes type, and what they themselves were, what could be called their own type, the race that founded the Aryan tribe, they expressed in the sublime, ideal Zeus type.

[ 24 ] Anyone who wants to see it can see in all forms how finely the Greeks adapted what lives in the outer form to the inner creative forces. I would like to show just one small detail to illustrate how refined Greek artists were in their endeavor to express great worldviews in art. Let us consider the Asian type captured in the figure of Hermes: This type, because it has remained at the level of the lower human forces, has the effect that the forces that give it the form of the face, so to speak, reign in the lower regions of human existence. In contrast, the forces that belong to the Greek type itself work in higher regions; you can see this above all in Zeus in the sublime formation of his forehead.

[ 25 ] We see that the peculiar consciousness of the Greeks influenced even the plastic form, and we understand that we can only comprehend what has been created in the course of development if we trace the forces at work back to the way in which the artists formed the eyes. We see here not only the fine observation of the Greek artist, but also how, in the particular development of what he created, he realized in the outer form what the inner formative forces had shaped. We recognize how the formation of races has been preserved in the individual figures of Greek art—in the figures of mythology—and how in this art, even in small details such as the eye, the spiritually active forces are captured in a unique way.