The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Seventh Lecture

[ 1 ] Yesterday it dawned on us how differentiation, the development of differences, occurs in evolution in general and in human evolution in particular, because human beings and other beings, so to speak, cannot wait for the right moment of development, remain behind in a certain state of hardening, and that other beings, until the right moment—if we want to speak in a rough sense—retain their necessary softness and malleability and can thus also begin the corresponding transformation. We have also clearly indicated the point in time when the actual human form came into being. That was in the middle of the Atlantean epoch, and we have pointed out how in earlier times, especially in much earlier times, what was the outer human being had great mobility. We have pointed out how he could not only move his limbs, but also make them larger through inner forces, and so on. Now, as I mentioned yesterday, it will be a kind of horror for the ordinary consciousness of the present day to hear such things said about the early Earth and humanity. You see, even here among students of spiritual science, the lectures are based on the desire to develop certain truths very gently, little by little, in small doses: they are then easier to digest.

[ 2 ] We will now look back once more at this earlier development. We will remember that even the period we call Atlantean had a definite beginning. It came to an end through great, violent water catastrophes of a very complicated nature; before that, the Atlantean development had lasted for long periods of time—more details about the numbers will be given in the following hours—and then we come back to the beginning of this development, and if we go further back, we come to other catastrophes in the Earth's development, which we can call volcanic, where land masses were torn apart and thrown into the sea, and then we come back to the beginning of this development, and if we go further back, we come to other catastrophes in the Earth's development, which we can call volcanic, where land masses were torn apart and thrown into the sea, and then we come back to the beginning of this development, and if we go further back, we come to other catastrophes and then we come back to the beginning of this development, and if we go further back, we come to other catastrophes in the Earth's development, which we can call volcanic, where land masses were destroyed that lay south of present-day Asia, east of Africa, and north of Australia. These were land masses on which pre-humanity lived, and which are called the Lemurian continent, a term borrowed from natural science. But humanity at that time was of a very soft, malleable physical nature. We are in a time when human beings can take on all kinds of transformations. The figures would appear very grotesque to today's consciousness if we were to describe them. We are there at the very edge, before any kind of personality, any kind of sense of self, entered into human beings, even at an early stage. Because the sense of self was not yet there, because the human form was still so malleable and had not yet reached its final stage, something else was also the case. This form, which each person presented outwardly and which was changeable — depending on their inner state, sometimes one way and sometimes another — this outward form became a kind of traitor to their inner being; depending on whether they had good or bad passions or thoughts, their outward form was shaped. At that time, it was impossible to harbor evil thoughts in secret, because the external physical form immediately took on the expression of those thoughts, and thus human beings appeared in all kinds of forms. It was a time when there were still few of the higher animal species on earth; the earth was populated by lower animals and human beings.

[ 3 ] So at that time, if you were a companion of human beings, and we all were, basically, you could find your fellow human beings by expressing this or that passion, this or that thought. And what are all these expressions of this or that passion and thought? What are the physiognomic expressions of these human passions and thoughts? They are animal forms. Anyone who looks at our animal forms today sees nothing in the higher animal kingdom but all kinds of characteristics and thoughts laid out, as if woven into a large carpet. Everything that can act as passion in the human astral body today and remains hidden was then still such a strong force that it immediately gave the soft body, which was actually only formed from fire mist, the form that was the expression of this passion. And a large part of our present-day higher animals are nothing other than such human beings who have become so entangled in their passions that they have hardened and come to a standstill: animals came into being because human passions hardened and became fixed and rigid. The person who looks at his surroundings with truly occult reason lives with feelings like these. He says to himself: In the course of my human development, I have passed through what I now encounter in lions and snakes; I have lived in all these forms because my own inner being has undergone the qualities that are developed in these animal forms. Those human beings who have become capable of rising above all this to ever higher levels, who have preserved their inner center, have found a balance so that only the possibilities for these passions remain within them, so that these passions are only soul beings and do not take on an outer form. This is what the higher development of the human being means. In animals we see our own past — though not in the same form as the animals were then, for millions of years have passed since then. Let us assume that the passions you find in lions today manifested themselves at that time in the outer form of this human being, in the lion form; then this form hardened, and the lion species came into being. But these lion species have also undergone development since then; that is why today's lion is no longer in the same form as it was then; it is the descendant of a species that branched off long ago. In a certain sense, we see our degenerate descendants in the various animals. In this way, we look at the world around us with understanding.

[ 4 ] Now, however, we must not imagine that all these animal forms that surround us and represent certain states of hardening were therefore evil human passions. They were necessary passions; human beings had to go through them in order to absorb everything that was useful from them into their present being. So when we look back to those times in the Earth's development, we find materially metamorphosing animal forms in our surroundings. They are the expression of passions, and the divine beings we have come to know in previous lectures are working within them. We must therefore imagine that the earth was still in a soft substance, and spiritual beings were shaping this matter, forming the various animal forms, as it were. And now we remember that we said that the Egyptian religion repeated the facts of this third epoch of the earth as its worldview, as its religious creed. What had been experienced on Earth at that time was recognized in the Egyptian form of religion. And now we are not surprised that so many animal and animal-headed figures appear in Egyptian art. This is a spiritual repetition of what once really existed on the surface of our Earth. Indeed, this period repeated exactly what had taken place outside during a certain earth epoch, and it is more than a mere comparison; it is, in a certain sense, literally true when we say that the memory of the Lemurian epoch has been revived in the souls that were predominantly embodied in the Egyptians, and that their religion is a memory of this epoch reborn in the spirit. Thus, epoch after epoch is reborn in the soul in various worldviews.

[ 5 ] Even later, the environment of human beings was quite different from today; the states of consciousness were also, of course, significantly different. We must be clear above all that in the period just discussed, up to the middle of the Atlantean epoch, the present human form only gradually developed; we have seen how, in the middle of the Atlantean epoch, the human form attained a certain completion in the normal way through Jehovah and the spirits of form. If we take this seriously, we will understand that everything we find in human beings today only developed during this epoch, from the Lemurian period to the Atlantean period. If you could see the Lemurian human being clairvoyantly, he would present you with quite different riddles to solve, for he had functions that are separate today but were still united in a certain way. For example, at the time when Lemurian development was at its height, there was not yet such breathing or such nutrition as we have today. The substances were completely different; breathing and nutrition were, in a certain sense, connected, a joint activity that only later became divided. Human beings absorbed a kind of watery, roughly speaking, milky substance, and this gave them what they now have separately in breathing and nutrition. And something else was not yet separated either. You know that during the same period we are now developing, the senses first opened to the outside world. They were not open before. The senses we have today did not yet perceive external things at that time. Man was limited to image consciousness; living dream images arose, but there was no external object consciousness. In contrast, as the first announcement of external life, as the first trace of external sense perception, so to speak, man acquired the ability to distinguish between warm and cold in his environment. This is the very beginning of external sensory perception on Earth for humans, who at that time were still moving in the fluid elements: they felt whether they were approaching a warm or cold place. This ability was then conveyed by an organ that has now atrophied. You may have heard that the pineal gland is located inside the human brain. Today it is atrophied, but in the past it opened to the outside; it was, so to speak, an organ of power that sent its rays outwards. And humans moved through the watery element with a kind of lantern that developed a certain luminosity. This lantern, which would protrude from the head if the pineal gland were to grow again, enabled humans to perceive differences in heat; it was, so to speak, the first general sense organ. In natural science today, it is called a degenerated eye; it was never an eye, but a heat organ, and it could perceive not only the immediate surroundings, but even at a distance. But it had another function. This organ, which closed when the other sensory organs began to open, was in certain ancient times a fertilization organ, so that sensory perception and fertilization coincided for a certain period of time. Through this organ, humans absorbed from their environment those forces that enabled them to produce their own kind. And at a certain time, when the moon had not yet separated from the earth, the earth's atmosphere became particularly capable of emitting, at a certain position of the sun, the substance that caused this organ to glow. There really were such times—and certain sea creatures that occasionally display luminosity still remind us of this today—when general fertilization occurred; times when, due to a particular position of the sun, humans, who were then still completely asexual, underwent fertilization so that they could produce their own kind. Sensory perception and fertilization, nutrition and respiration are intimately connected in the distant past.

[ 6 ] And so the organs gradually differentiated, and little by little man took on the form he has today. But this made him increasingly capable of becoming his own master, of developing what we have expressed in the consciousness of the I. In the period just described, when he moved in the Earth's atmosphere guided by his sense of warmth, it was still higher beings that influenced him. These were primarily the forces of the Sun, which had already emerged from the Earth and acted on the Earth's atmosphere in such a way as to stimulate this organ. In contrast, the forces of the moon—before and after the moon left the earth—stimulated another organ in particular; it is located in a different part of the brain and is usually called the mucous gland. It is an organ that has no real function today. The mucous gland used to be the regulator of the lower functions, the processes of nutrition and respiration, which at that time were still one. Everything that was regulated by this organ was connected with it: the inner forces of the human being, through which he could inflate himself and take on the most diverse forms — everything that was given to his will in his form was connected with this organ, with the mucous gland; that which was less arbitrary depended on the other organ, the pineal gland.

[ 7 ] Thus we see how the human being transforms himself and how, by acquiring a firm, secure form, he increasingly breaks away from those entities that acted upon him from outside and made him an instinctive being. All this gives us an even clearer picture of the processes of human evolution that finally brought about the state in the middle of the Atlantean epoch, when human beings were ready to let the external world act upon them through their sense organs, when they became capable of judging the external world. Previously, judgment had, so to speak, flowed into them. Everything that could be described as a kind of thinking was instilled, much as it is today in animals. And now we must take into account that human beings progressed unevenly, that some entered this or that state of hardening earlier than others, and we have already seen what kinds of human forms developed. We have seen how individuals prepared themselves for atrophy by entering into a certain hardening too early, by taking on a certain form too early, and how this led to the formation of different races. Actually, only those humans were in such a state of maturity that they became receptive to everything that the earth could offer them in its outer appearance who, in the manner indicated yesterday, set out from that location near present-day Ireland and then moved from west to east; who then populated the various regions where there were remnants of peoples who had arrived there by other means, and with whom they intermingled, so that the various cultures arose from these mixtures. And from those who remained furthest behind in their migration, the European cultures arose.

[ 8 ] In order to have all this as a prerequisite, we must first take another look at the great cosmos and then at our Earth itself. It has now become clear to you that human beings developed in connection with animals, that they rejected them and left them behind at an earlier stage of development. Of course, there is a great difference between us and animals; there are higher and lower animal forms. We will see that there is a certain developmental boundary between the higher and lower animal forms that is of importance. If we hold fast to the idea that man gradually rejected the animal forms in his development, we can say that man already existed in a very spiritual, finely ethereal form when the sun and earth were still united. When the sun and the earth separated, he cast off the animals that had remained at that stage of development corresponding to the stage when the sun was still inside the earth. From these beings, which developed as animal forms when the sun beings were still connected with the earth, completely different forms naturally arose in the course of time, for there we have a long subsequent development. But if we take the characteristic form that we still have today, which we can compare with those that remained when the Earth was cast off from the Sun, we must take the fish form. It is, so to speak, what remained when the Earth was left to its own devices, what still had the last echo of the Sun's forces within it. Let us hold on to this moment for a moment. They were completely different beings, above all much more plant-like in nature, but that is not important here. These beings, which existed at that time and represented the first material form of the human being when the sun departed, underwent manifold destinies. We could say: In Pisces, what remains in the outer world reminds us of our emergence from the physical sun, reminding us that we once belonged to the sun. Now the sun has gone out and is outside the earth. It worked from outside, also on the earth human being, and a state developed more and more which is a state of change in consciousness, a waking and sleeping. More and more, a state develops in which the human being is more connected with his ego, also in relation to his higher members, to his etheric and astral bodies; and this state alternates with that in which the astral body withdraws from the physical body. It is the state that is still preserved today in the alternation between waking and sleeping.

[ 9 ] Let us now study this alternating state. We are all familiar with it, for it is one of the most elementary things. We know that when a person is awake, there is a regular connection between the physical body, the etheric body, the astral body, and the ego; when a person falls asleep, the astral body and the ego withdraw from the physical and etheric bodies. In ancient times, the ego did not yet exist, so part of the etheric body went out with it; this state can therefore be compared to the state of sleep. Now we must be clear that by leaving the physical and etheric bodies behind in bed, human beings actually give these bodies the value of a plant. The plant has a sleeping consciousness, as do the physical and etheric bodies of the human being in sleep. But today, during sleep, the astral body and the I-consciousness of the normal human being also have a kind of plant consciousness, for they have no consciousness of their surroundings. This was different in ancient times; back then, when they left their bodies, they had a dim awareness of the spiritual world outside. And now we can form an idea from another fact, an important fact that arose from the separation of the Earth from the Sun. Before this happened, the whole human being, in terms of his physical, etheric, and astral bodies, was under the influence, under the dominion, of the material and spiritual forces of the Sun. Now it depended on the position of the Sun whether the human being was under the influence of the Sun shining directly on him in relation to his physical, etheric, and astral bodies. But now we ask ourselves: Is there not another influence of the sun at this time? Back then, when no physical eye could see the sun, when it did not yet penetrate the dense atmosphere, the etheric body and the astral body, when they were outside the physical body, received important influences from the spiritual forces emanating from the sun. Human beings could not perceive these influences because they were not yet ready to do so. Later, this ability arose when human beings received a force that enabled them to perceive what emanated spiritually from the sun.

[ 10 ] What was the event that enabled human beings to perceive the forces dwelling in the sun, those sublime forces that had to leave the earth, which had connected themselves with the sun? When was this perception granted to them?

[ 11 ] Gradually, the forces stream into the earth. And the most important point, where, so to speak, the matter is decided, where human beings received the full powers, not only the physical but also the spiritual powers of the sun in a state of full consciousness, this point in time is the appearance of Christ on earth. So we can say that there is a moment when humans physically separate from the sun. The fish shows us the thought: You remind me of what my state was once before I had to detach myself from the sun. At that time, however, the higher forces, led by Christ, the high spirit of the sun, also left the earth. And human beings gradually matured to receive these forces in the same way that they received the physical forces of the sun from outside. And the inner spiritual force had to appear on earth as a fact, just as the physical forces of the sun had appeared earlier. What could the initiates remind people of when Christ appeared? Of the old sun home; and the symbol that reminded them of this old home was the fish symbol. The fish therefore appears in the catacombs as a true symbol connected with the evolution of humanity. And the disciple of the first centuries, who saw the fish symbol everywhere, felt what the initiates whispered in his ear with shivers of emotion, for this led him spiritually into the sanctity of Palestinian history and at the same time led him cosmically out into the mighty phases of our Earth's development. Such things were practiced in the initiation schools, and in symbols such as the fish symbol that we find on the walls of the catacombs, we have the outward expression of these mysteries, just as the geologist finds a sign of something from the distant past in a plant imprint. But just as this imprint did not exist on its own, the fish symbol is also an imprint of what was practiced in the mysteries. And this symbol did not appear suddenly. Long before the appearance of Christ, the disciples were told by the prophets of the Messiah, going back to the Druid mysteries, about the coming of Christ, and everywhere this symbol already played its role. So we see how an important moment in the evolution of the Earth is captured in the fish symbol. Let us now go further!

[ 12 ] There was a time when the moon separated from the earth. For a certain period, the earth and the moon were together, then the threefold formation came into being: the sun, moon, and earth. These were tremendous catastrophes that took place; the events of that time were of a stormy nature. What humans were physically at that time was not yet at a very high level, and they left it behind as an ossified stage of development. To understand this, we must first consider one thing above all else: when the sun came out, the earth regressed in its development; it became worse. Only when the moon left with all the worst things did an improvement, an uplifting, occur again. So we have a period of upward development in evolution until the sun went out; then a downward period, when everything became worse, more grotesque; and then, when the moon went out, development rose again. A form has also been preserved from this stage of development, which has degenerated and does not look at all like it did then. But it is there; it is the form that human beings had before the moon left, before human beings had an I. The animal entity that reminds human beings, so to speak, of the lowest stage of Earth's development, of the point where we descended furthest into the passions, where the astral body of the human being was accessible to the worst external influences; the entity in which the lowest point of our shameful development on the Earth planet is held fast is what we see today, albeit degenerated, in the snake. And so, on the other hand, we have also extracted this symbol of the serpent from evolution. This is not something invented, but a symbol rooted in the deepest depths: the symbols of the fish and the serpent have been extracted from the mysteries of our evolution. And just as the natural mind feels when it sees the shining body of a fish in the pure, chaste element, how peaceful it feels, so an uncorrupted mind will feel horror when it sees the creeping snake. Such feelings are not unfounded memories of facts that we once experienced in our evolution. As much as humans enjoy seeing the wonderful, sunny, lively fish shapes in the water and remember their former innocent height, when they had no ego but were directed by the best spirits of evolution, it is true that they remember their most gruesome time in the Earth's development, the time when they were close to falling out of their development when the creeping snake approached them. What we experience in our feelings is connected with cosmic facts, and we understand those unconscious experiences when we see the snake approaching us. falling out of his development when the creeping snake approaches him. What we experience in our feelings is connected with cosmic facts, and we understand those unconscious experiences of the human soul that seem so mysterious to us, but which occur with such vehemence and clarity precisely when man is not yet stimulated by culture. This becomes clear to us. Certainly, human beings can completely overcome their fear of snakes, but that is culture; the naive feeling still resides at the bottom of the soul and leads back to such ancient times. But these are also the times when man was physically only at the stage of the serpent, when those elements began to intervene which we have said prepared him for his freedom, prepared him to receive Christ in his full meaning and greatness and with the right dignity.

[ 13 ] We ask ourselves: What are these elements that helped man not to sink into the depths? They are the beings we mentioned yesterday, who worked upon him when he had reached the lowest point and now led him upward again: they are the Luciferic beings. The sun spirits did not yet work upon him, but these beings, who sacrificed themselves, worked upon him. In a remarkable way, they wandered among the people who populated the earth. Outwardly, they had a certain human form, for even the highest spirits must incarnate themselves in the forms that exist on earth. Thus, certain beings also took on the outward form of human beings at that time. They wandered around on earth saying to themselves: We are the same as humans in form, but our true home is not on earth; our home is on the two intermediate planets, Venus and Mercury. They walked among humans, but they looked up and knew themselves to be one with Venus and Mercury. There were their souls — the best of them — and their outer form was basically a kind of illusion. But this was the only way they could give humans what they needed: guidance and teaching, because their home was not on the earthly planet, which was still in the process of forming, but on Venus and Mercury. And it is they whom we must regard as the first teachers and initiates of humanity, outwardly like the people of that time, but inwardly endowed with high and meaningful abilities, so that they could work upon the whole of humanity and, in particular, in specially separated schools, in the first mystery schools, upon individual advanced human beings. And there have always been such advanced individuals who had their home in the stars and who, despite their connection with the stars, had their form on Earth and walked among human beings. Human beings themselves progressed further and further and came closer and closer to the middle of the Atlantean epoch.

[ 14 ] The present human form only began to develop in the first half of the Atlantean epoch; it was only then that human beings began to find their way into it. There were now beings who were already at a very low level of humanity in this ancient Atlantean period, who then became the backward races; furthermore, there were those who had remained malleable, and those who only inhabited human bodies for a short time. What I am about to tell you happened very frequently in the first Atlantean period. Imagine one of these ancient Atlanteans who was highly developed for an Atlantean. Such a person was often prompted by certain circumstances to separate his physical body, which was very malleable, and his etheric and astral bodies from the spiritual parts, which then withdrew more into the spiritual world in order to take on other physical forms later. It happened very frequently that the physical, etheric, and astral bodies were arbitrarily abandoned by their soul-spiritual beings long before they were ripe for death. And if they belonged to particularly high individualities, they were pure, good bodies. High spiritual beings then settled in such bodies, and so it often happened in ancient Atlantean times that beings who could not otherwise incarnate on Earth used such advanced bodies to descend among humans. It was such beings who worked as the great teachers in the Atlantean initiation schools. They worked powerfully with the means available at that time. When a person left their physical body at night, so to speak, they had a dull clairvoyant consciousness. During the day, the outer contours were still blurred. There was not such a sharp difference between the two states as there is today. Thus it came about that the ordinary human being saw such an individuality alternately, human-like during the day, but quite different at night in a spiritual-soul manner, yet he knew: this is the same being who appears to me during the day in physical form. These were the beings who were, in a sense, Venus and Mercury beings, who intervened in human existence and were with human beings day and night. The memory of these beings remained in the souls of human beings, who incarnated again and again, and such a memory was present in the people who had populated Europe when they pronounced the names Wotan and Thor. When the ancient inhabitants of Europe spoke of the gods, these were not figments of the imagination, but memories of Atlantean figures. And likewise, when the Greeks pronounced Zeus, Apollo, Mars, these were figures they themselves had experienced in the Atlantean era. While in the Egyptian era the memory of ancient Lemuria emerged, in Greece at that time there emerged what had been the earthly experience in ancient Atlantis.

[ 15 ] Now we must be clear about this: if all this in the later religious systems is a memory of earlier earthly events, then an important event must have occurred at the very moment when the last of these memories could emerge. And that was approximately the time when the Greek and Roman peoples remembered the Atlantean times. But that was also the time when Christ brought a significant, new impact into the development of the Earth. We have already touched upon what kind of impact this was when we said that after the long intervening period in which the Luciferic beings prepared human beings, enabling them to receive the first impulse, the sun not only shone upon them externally, but also exerted its inner forces upon them. This period is far from over; it is only just beginning, for it was only with the appearance of Christ that the first impulse was given for that which otherwise shines down physically and corporeally from the sun onto the earth to also radiate inwardly and spiritually. And the light that will shine through human beings from within as sunlight, as spiritual light, as Christ light, will become ever greater, just as the external sunlight shines around them from without. This will be the future of human beings: that they will not only look at the sun with their external eyes and feel its glory, but that they will also bring the spiritual meaning of the sun to life within themselves. When they are able to do this, they will fully understand what actually walked on earth in the form we call Christ Jesus. This will only slowly and gradually become understandable to human beings. And just as it is true that in pre-Christian times they had to understand the spiritual beings who announced the coming of Christ and, so to speak, sent human beings down into the physical world, so it is now true that human beings must understand, through a truly spiritual movement, the spiritual power that emerged from the earth with the sun at that time. Human beings must be able to receive it again as an inner spiritual force; they must understand this spiritual force that gives them the great impulses for the future, they must understand this Christ force.

[ 16 ] And in order to understand this Christ force, all spiritual science is needed, and everything that can be brought forth in spiritual teachings is needed as spiritual substance. One cannot say that anthroposophy is Christianity; rather, one must say that what has been given to the earth and to human beings through the Christ principle will gradually be understood through the instrument of anthroposophy. But through being understood, it will increasingly become spiritual activity, and this great impulse will increasingly be given into the development of the earth. For human beings need this, after they have descended to the lowest depths of matter, in order to tear themselves away from it again and return to their spiritual home.