The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Second Lecture

[ 1 ] Yesterday we attempted to bring to light certain connections in the conditions of life, particularly in the spiritual conditions of the so-called post-Atlantean epoch. We have seen how the first cultural epoch of this era will be repeated in the last, the seventh cultural epoch; how Persian culture will be repeated in the sixth cultural epoch; and how the cultural epoch that will occupy us in the coming days—the Egyptian one—is repeated in our own lives and destinies, in the fifth cultural epoch. Of the fourth culture, the Greco-Latin era, we could say that it has retained an exceptional status, that it does not undergo a repetition. In this way, we have been able to sketch out mysterious connections in the cultures of the post-Atlantean era, which followed the time of Atlantis—the Atlantis that perished through massive water catastrophes. This era following Atlantis, too, will perish.

[ 2 ] At the end of our fifth great epoch, the post-Atlantean one, catastrophes will also follow that will have a similar effect to those at the end of the Atlantean epoch. Through the war of all against all, the seventh culture of the fifth epoch will come to an end. These were interesting connections that have been hinted at in certain repetitions which, if we trace them more closely, will shed deep light into our inner life.

[ 3 ] Today, in order to lay a foundation for our understanding, we must allow other repetitions to come before our mind’s eye. We will let our gaze wander far out into the evolution of our Earth and will see that the vast horizons must be of the deepest interest to us.

[ 4 ] Let us begin with just one reminder, a warning against schematic repetitions. When, in the field of occultism, there is talk of such repetitions—such as: the first cultural epoch repeats itself in the seventh, the third in the fifth—then a certain talent for combination may easily be tempted to apply itself and seek out such patterns for other circumstances as well. One might believe that this is possible, and indeed, in many books on theosophy, all sorts of nonsense is perpetrated as a result. A stern warning must therefore be issued that it is not such combinations that are decisive, but solely the insight—the spiritual insight—otherwise one will go astray. One must be warned against such combinations. What we can read in the spiritual world can indeed be grasped through logic, but not discovered. It can only be experienced through experience.

[ 5 ] If we wish to understand the cultural epochs more precisely, we must gain an overview of the evolution of the Earth as a whole, as it appears to the eye that can direct its spiritual gaze into the events of the distant past.

[ 6 ] If we look far back within this evolution of the Earth, we can say that our Earth did not always look as it does today. It did not have the solid mineral foundation it has today; the mineral kingdom was not as it is today; nor did it support the same plants and animals as today; and human beings did not have physical bodies as they do today—humans had no skeletal system. All of this developed only later. The further back we look, the closer we come to a state that, had we been able to observe it from the far reaches of the universe, we would have seen only as a mist, as a fine, ethereal cloud. This mist would indeed have been much larger than our present-day Earth, for it would have extended to the far reaches of the outermost planets of our solar system and beyond. All of this would have comprised a vast nebular mass, containing not only the material from which our Earth formed, but all the planets, including the Sun itself. And if we had been able to examine this nebular mass more closely—assuming the observer could have approached it—it would have appeared to us as if it were composed entirely of fine, ethereal points. When we look at a swarm of mosquitoes from a distance, it appears to us as a cloud, but up close we see the individual creatures. That is roughly how we would have seen the mass of the Earth in the distant past, which at that time was not material in our sense, but had condensed to an ethereal state. This formation of the Earth thus consisted of individual etheric points, but something very special was connected to these etheric points. However, if we maintain that the human eye could have seen these points, it would not have perceived them in the same way that a clairvoyant would have seen them—and indeed still sees them today in retrospect. Let us illustrate this with a comparison.

[ 7 ] Let us take a seed of a rose, a wild rose, a fully formed seed. What does the observer see? He sees a body that is very small, and if he has not learned what the seed of the wild rose looks like, he will never be able to deduce that a dog rose can grow from it. They would never guess that from the mere form of the seed. But those gifted with a certain clairvoyant ability will be able to experience the following. The seed will gradually disappear from their view, but a flower-like form will appear before their clairvoyant eye, growing spiritually out of the seed. It stands before the clairvoyant gaze, a real form that can only be perceived in the spirit. This form is the archetype of what will later grow out of the seed. Now we would be mistaken if we believed that this image were entirely like the plant corresponding to the seed. It is not at all the same. It is a wondrous figure of light, revealing within itself currents and intricate formations, and one could say that what later grows out of the grain is merely a shadow of this wondrous spiritual figure of light that the clairvoyant can see within the seed. Let us hold on to this image of how the clairvoyant sees the archetype of the plant, and now let us look back again at our primordial earth, at the individual etheric points.

[ 8 ] If now the clairvoyant, just as in the previous example, were to confront such an ethereal dust particle of the primordial substance, then a figure of light would grow out of this ethereal dust particle for him, in much the same way as from the seed, a magnificent figure that is not actually there, but lies slumbering within this dust particle. And what is it, then, that the seer can perceive as a figure when looking back at this primordial earth atom? What is it that grows out of it? It is a figure that is, in turn, different—as different as the archetype of the plant is from the physical plant—from the physical human being: it is the archetype of the present-day human form. At that time, the human form slumbered spiritually within the etheric speck of dust, and the entire development of the Earth was necessary so that what rested there might develop into the human being of today. For this, many, many things were necessary, just as much is necessary for the seed, just as the seed must be sown into the earth, and just as the sun must send its rays of warmth to it so that it may develop into a plant. And we will gradually understand how this became human when we realize everything that has happened in the meantime.

[ 9 ] In the distant past, all the planets were connected to our Earth. However, let us first consider the Sun, the Moon, and the Earth, which are of particular interest to us today. Our Sun, our Moon, and our Earth were not alone back then, but were together. If we were to mix these three present-day bodies together like a porridge in a great cosmic cauldron, and imagine this as a single cosmic body, we would obtain what the Earth was in its primordial state, namely: Sun plus Earth plus Moon. Naturally, human beings could only live there in a spiritual state. Back then, they could only live in this state because what is now in the Sun was also connected to the Earth. And it lasted for a long, long time that the world body—our Earth—still contained the Sun and Moon within itself and was still united with all the beings and forces connected to them. In those times, human beings existed only spiritually within the primordial atom of humanity. This only changed during the time when something quite significant took place in the development of our world, namely, when the Sun separated as an independent body, leaving behind the Earth and the Moon. Now we have, what was formerly a unity, as a duality: two celestial bodies—the Sun on the one hand, and the Earth plus the Moon on the other. Why did this happen?

[ 10 ] Everything that happens, of course, has a profound meaning, which we will understand when we look back and realize that at that time not only humans lived on Earth, but that other beings of a spiritual nature were also connected to them—beings who, though not perceptible to physical eyes, were nevertheless present, as truly present as humans and other physical beings. For example, beings connected to our world live in the vicinity of the Earth, whom Christian esotericism calls angels, Angeloi. We can best imagine these beings by considering that such a being stands at the stage where humanity will be when the Earth has completed its evolution. Today, these beings have already reached the stage that humanity will have reached at the end of its earthly development. An even higher stage is occupied by the archangels, Archangeloi, or fire spirits—beings we can perceive when we direct our spiritual gaze toward the affairs of entire peoples. These affairs are guided by beings called archangels or Archangeloi. An even higher class of beings is called the Primordial Beings or Archai, or the Spirits of Personality, and we encounter them when we let our gaze wander over entire eras and many peoples and their relationships and contrasts, and take in what is commonly called the spirit of the age. If, for example, we consider our own time, it is guided by higher beings called Primordial Beings or Archai. Then there are even higher beings, whom Christian esotericism calls Powers, Exusiai, or Spirits of Form. Thus, countless beings are connected to our Earth, linking themselves to humanity, so to speak, as if on a kind of ladder.

[ 11 ] If we begin with the mineral and ascend from the mineral to the plant, from the plant to the animal, and then to the human being, the human being is the highest physical being; but the others are just as present; they are among us, permeating us. At the beginning of our Earth’s development, of which we have just spoken, when the Earth emerges, as it were, as a primordial nebula from the bosom of eternity, all such beings are connected to the Earth, and it would become apparent to the clairvoyant how, at the same time as the human form, other beings also permeate that image. These are the beings mentioned above and beings of an even higher order, such as the Powers, the Principalities, the Thrones, the Cherubim, and then the Seraphim. These are all beings who were intimately connected with that mighty etheric dust, yet they stand at different stages of development. There are those who possess a grandeur of which humans have no inkling, yet there are also beings who are closer to humans. Because such entities stood at different levels, they could not undergo their development in the same way as humans; a dwelling place had to be created for them. Among the higher beings were some who would have lost a great deal had they remained connected to the lower beings. Therefore, they separated themselves. They extracted the finest substances from the mist and established their dwelling in the sun. There they formed their heaven; there they found the proper pace of their development. Had they remained in the lower substances they left behind on Earth, they would not have been able to continue their development. That would have been an impediment, like a lead weight, in their development. We see from this how what happens materially—such as the division of the world substance—does not occur merely due to physical causes, but through the forces of the beings who require a dwelling place for their development; it happens because they must build their world home. We must emphasize that spiritual causes underlie this.

[ 12 ] Thus, humanity remained behind on Earth and the Moon, along with higher beings of the lowest hierarchy, such as angels and archangels and beings who stood lower than humanity itself. Only a single powerful being, who was actually already mature enough to journey to the realm of the Sun, sacrificed itself and went along with Earth and the Moon. It is the being who was later called Yahweh or Jehovah. He left the Sun and then became the ruler of affairs on Earth and the Moon. Thus we have two abodes: the Sun with the most exalted beings, under the leadership of a particularly high, exalted being whom the Gnostics, for example, tried to conceive of under the name Pleroma. We should imagine this being as the ruler of the Sun. Yahweh is the ruler of Earth and the Moon. Let us emphasize this point in particular: that the noblest, most exalted spirits departed with the Sun and left Earth and the Moon behind. The Moon had not yet been separated; it was still within the Earth. How, then, can one perceive this cosmic process of the Sun’s separation from the Earth? Above all, one must perceive the Sun with its inhabitants as the most noble, purest, and most sublime thing that had previously been connected to the Earth, and then one must perceive what the Earth and Moon constitute as that which, in contrast, has developed into the lower realm. The state at that time was even lower than that of our present-day Earth. The latter, in turn, stands higher, for a later point in time arrived when the Earth cast off the Moon and, with it, its coarser substances, with which humanity could not have developed further. The Earth had to cast out the Moon.

[ 13 ] But before that, it was the darkest, most dreadful time for our Earth; what possessed the noble potential for development had fallen under the power of terrible, very terrible forces, and it was only by casting out the worst conditions of existence along with the Moon that humanity could progress.

[ 14 ] We must sense that there is a principle of light, a principle of sublimity—the principle of the Sun—opposed to the principle of darkness, the principle of the Moon. Had one looked clairvoyantly at the Sun that had emerged at that time, one would have seen the beings who wished to inhabit it. But one would have perceived something else as well. What had emerged as the Sun would not only have appeared as a community of spiritual beings; nor would it have appeared in an etheric form, for that belonged to the coarser realm: it would have appeared as something astral, like a powerful aura of light. What one would have perceived as a principle of light, one would have seen as a luminous aura in the cosmos. But because the Earth had let this light out, it would have suddenly appeared condensed, though not yet solidly mineral. A good and an evil, a bright and a dark principle stood opposed to one another at that time.

[ 15 ] Now let us see what the Earth looked like before it expelled the Moon. It would be entirely wrong to imagine it as our present-day Earth. The core of the Earth at that time was a fiery, seething mass. This core would have appeared as a fiery core, but it was surrounded by mighty waters—though not like the water we have today, for these waters also contained metals in liquid form. Within all of this was the human being, but in a completely different form.

[ 16 ] Such was the Earth back then, when it separated the Moon. Above all, there was no air to be found on Earth at that time; it was not present at all. The beings that existed then did not need any air; they had a completely different respiratory system. Man had become a kind of fish-amphibian. But he consisted of very soft, liquid matter. What they drew into themselves was not air, but rather what was contained in the water. That is roughly what the Earth looked like at that time. We must perceive that era as a time when the Earth was at a lower stage than our present-day Earth. It had to be that way. Otherwise, human beings would never have been able to find the right pace and the means for their development had the Sun and Moon not separated from the Earth. With the Sun still within the Earth, everything would have happened too quickly; but with the forces now active on the Moon, everything would have proceeded far too slowly. As the Moon emerged from the Earth amid mighty catastrophes, what might be called the separation of an air envelope and the water element gradually took shape. The air at that time was by no means the air of today, but contained all manner of vapors. But the being that was gradually preparing itself at that time was only a certain predisposition toward today’s human being. We will have to describe all this in greater detail.

[ 17 ] Thus we have come to know the human being in three contexts. First, in the relationship where he lived together with the Earth, the Sun, the Moon, and all higher beings within a single world body. To the clairvoyant eye, he would appear as we have described. Then we can come to know him under quite unfavorable conditions on the Earth and the Moon. Had he remained in this relationship, he would have become a very malicious, a terribly wild being. When the Sun had separated, we had the contrast of the Sun on one side, and the Moon plus Earth on the other. The Sun shone as the great, mighty solar aura in space, in its radiant glory. On the other side remained the Earth and Moon with all the sinister forces that also drew down the nobler elements within the human being. Thus the twofold nature arose. And then comes the threefold nature. The Sun remains what it is, but the Earth separates from the Moon; the coarsest substances emerge; the human being, however, remains behind on Earth.

[ 18 ] When looking back on the third epoch, human beings perceive the forces as a threefold principle. They ask themselves: Where do these forces come from? — In the first epoch, human beings were still connected to all the higher forces of the Sun. The forces that developed in the second epoch had then gone out with the Moon. Humanity perceived this as a kind of redemption, yet they also retained the memory of the first epoch, when they were still united with the solar beings. Humanity had come to know longing; they felt themselves to be the prodigal son. And through the forces that had gone forth with the Sun and Moon—through these forces—they could feel themselves to be a son of the Sun and Moon.

[ 19 ] Thus our Earth body develops from unity to duality, and finally to the triad: Sun, Earth, Moon. The time when the Moon split off, when humanity first received the opportunity to develop, is referred to as the Lemurian Age. And after massive fire catastrophes had brought the Lemurian era to a close, a state gradually set in on our Earth that could bring about the conditions that were to develop in ancient Atlantis. The first beginnings of land rose up out of the masses of water. This was long after the Moon had split off. But it was only through this splitting off that the Earth was able to develop in this way. In Atlantis, human beings were also quite different from today—we will touch on this later—but by the Atlantean era, they had already reached a stage where they moved as a soft, so to speak, floating mass and animated the atmosphere. Only very gradually did the skeletal system develop. It was not until the middle of the Atlantean epoch that human beings had reached the stage where they resembled our present form to some extent. But in Atlantis, human beings possessed a clairvoyant consciousness, and our present consciousness did not develop until much later; and if we wish to understand the people of that time, we must keep this former clairvoyant consciousness in mind. We understand it best by comparing it with our present consciousness.

[ 20 ] Today, from morning until evening, human beings perceive the world through their senses. Through their sensory activity, they continuously take in visual and auditory impressions. With the onset of night, however, this sensory world sinks into a sea of unconsciousness for human beings. For the occultist, however, this is not really unconsciousness, but merely a lower degree of consciousness. Let us now realize that today human beings have a dual consciousness: a bright waking consciousness and a sleeping or dreaming consciousness. This was not the case in the early days of Atlantis.

[ 21 ] Let us consider the transition between waking and sleeping in those early times. It was also the case then that, for a certain period, human beings were immersed in their physical bodies, but they did not perceive objects with the sharp contours they do today. If we imagine, for example, that we were walking out into a thick winter fog and saw the streetlamps in the evening as if surrounded by a halo of light, we have a rough idea of the Atlantean’s perception of objects. Everything was surrounded by such a fog for the people of that time; everything was as if shrouded in a fog. That was the daytime vision back then. At night, a completely different scene presented itself. But the night vision was also not what it is today. When the Atlantean stepped out of his body, he did not sink into unconsciousness, but found himself in a world of divine-spiritual beings, of I-beings, whom he perceived around him as his companions. Just as man today does not see these beings during the night, so in those times he was immersed in a sea of spirituality in which he did indeed perceive the divine beings. By day he was a companion of the lower realms; by night he was a companion of the higher beings. Thus did humanity live in a spiritual consciousness, albeit a dim one; even though they had no self-consciousness, they lived among these divine-spiritual beings.

[ 22 ] Now let us trace the four periods in the development of our Earth. First, we trace the period when the Sun and Moon were still connected to the Earth. We place this period before our soul. We must tell ourselves: the beings of this Earth are actually pure, ideal beings, and the human being actually exists only as an etheric body and is visible only to spiritual eyes. Then we come to the second period. We see the Sun as a body in its own right, visible as an aura, and the Moon and Earth as a world of evil. Then we come to a third period: the Moon also separates from the Earth, and the forces resulting from this triad act upon the Earth. And then we come to a fourth period. By then, the human being is already a being in the physical world, which appears misty to him; in sleep, he is still a companion of divine beings. This is the period that concludes with massive water catastrophes, the time of Atlantis.

[ 23 ] And now let us take a step further; let us turn to the human being of the post-Atlantean era. As mentioned, he has developed over many millennia. We first encounter him in the early cultural epochs of the post-Atlantean era: the Proto-Indian, the Proto-Persian, the Egyptian-Chaldean-Babylonian, and the Greco-Latin cultures, and in our fifth culture. What, above all, had humanity lost? He had lost one thing that we can imagine if we keep the description of Atlantis in mind.

[ 24 ] Let us try to imagine the state of sleep of the Atlanteans. There, humanity was still a companion of the spiritual realm, of the gods; it perceived a world of the spiritual, truly perceived it. Humanity had lost this after the Atlantean catastrophe. Nighttime darkness spread around him. In its place came a brightening of daytime consciousness and the development of the ego. Humanity had achieved all this, but the old gods had vanished for them; they were now only memories, and everything the soul had experienced was, in the early post-Atlantean era, merely a memory—a memory of their former interaction with these divine beings.

[ 25 ] Now we know that souls remain the same, that they reincarnate. Just as in the ancient times of Atlantis our souls were already present, already dwelling in bodies, so too were these souls present at the separation of the Moon and Sun from the Earth and were already there in the very earliest times. Humanity was already there in the etheric dust. And now the five cultural epochs of the post-Atlantean era, in their worldviews and in what their religions are, are nothing other than memories of the ancient epochs of the Earth.

[ 26 ] The first, the primordial Indian period, developed a religion that appears like an inner illumination, like an inner repetition in the ideas and feelings of the very earliest period, when the Sun and Moon were still connected to the Earth, when those sublime beings of the Sun still dwelt on Earth. We can imagine that a sublime conception had to be awakened there. And the spirit that united with all the angels and archangels, with all the spirits, high gods, and beings in the first state of the Earth, the primordial mist—this was summed up by Indian consciousness under a high individuality, under the name Brahm, Brahma. In the spirit, the first cultural epoch of the post-Atlantean era repeated what had happened. It is nothing other than a repetition of the first Earth epoch in inner vision.

[ 27 ] Now let us consider the second cultural period. In the principle of light and darkness, we find the religious consciousness of the ancient Persian cultural period. There the great initiates set two entities against one another, one of which they saw personified in the sun, the other in the moon. Ahura Mazdao, the aura of light, Ormuzd, is the being whom the Persians worshipped as the highest God; Ahriman is the evil spirit, the representative of all the beings that inhabited the Earth and the Moon. The religion of the Persians is a remnant of the second epoch of the Earth.

[ 28 ] And in the third cultural epoch, it was the case that human beings had to say to themselves: Within me are the forces of the sun and the moon; I am a son of the sun and a son of the moon. All the forces of the sun and the moon present themselves as father and mother. If we have unity in primeval times as the view of the Indians, and duality after the separation of the Sun reflected in the religion of the Persians, then we find the trinity laid down in the religious views of the Egyptians, Chaldeans, Assyrians, and Babylonians, as it existed in the third epoch of the Earth, after the separation of the Sun and the Moon. The Trinity appears in all religious views of the third epoch, and in Egyptian religion it is represented by Osiris, Isis, and Horus.

[ 29 ] But what humanity experienced in its consciousness during the fourth epoch of Earth, the Atlantean epoch, as companions of the gods—the memory of this emerges in the Greco-Roman cultural period. The gods of the Greeks are nothing other than memories of the gods with whom humanity was companions during the Atlantean epoch—the gods whom they had spiritually perceived as ethereal figures through clairvoyance when they had stepped out of their physical bodies at night. Just as truly as people today see external objects, so truly did they see Zeus, Athena, and so on back then. They were real figures to him. What the Atlantean experienced and felt in his clairvoyant state returned for the people of the fourth post-Atlantean cultural period in the pantheon. And just as the Egyptian era was a remnant of the triad from the Lemurian era, so the experience of Atlantis remained as a remnant in the Greek hierarchy of gods. In Greece, as elsewhere in Europe, it was once again the same gods that the Atlanteans had seen, only under different names. These names are not invented; they are names for the same beings who walked among human beings when they stepped out of their physical bodies during the Atlantean era.

[ 30 ] Thus we see how the epochs of cosmic events find their symbolic expression in the religious views of the various post-Atlantean cultural periods. What took place during sleep in the Atlantean era was revived in the fourth cultural period. We are now in the fifth post-Atlantean period. What can we recall now? The first cultural period, the ancient Indians, could envision the first epoch of the Earth; the Persians, the second, the principle of good and evil. The ancient Egyptians envisioned the third epoch in its triad. The Greek, the Old Germanic, and the Roman cultural periods had their Olympus. They remembered the divine figures of Atlantis. Then came the modern era, the fifth epoch. What can it remember?

[ 31 ] Nothing! — That is why, in so many respects, the godless age could take hold during this epoch, and why this fifth epoch is compelled to look not to the past, but to the future. The fifth epoch must look to the future, where all the gods must rise again. This reunion with the gods was prepared during the time when the Christ-force broke through, which alone was so powerful that it could restore a divine consciousness to humanity. The images of the gods in the fifth epoch cannot be mere memories; the people of the fifth epoch must look ahead, and only then will life become spiritual again. Consciousness must become apocalyptic in the fifth epoch of the post-Atlantean era.

[ 32 ] Let us recall that yesterday we examined the connections between the individual cultures of the post-Atlantean era. Today we have seen how cosmic events are reflected in the religious views of these cultures.

[ 33 ] Our fifth epoch stands at the center of the world; therefore, it must look ahead. First, Christ must be fully understood in our time, for our souls are deeply interwoven into mysterious connections. We shall see how the repetition of the Egyptian era in our fifth cultural epoch will provide us with a point of connection, showing us how we can truly cross over into the future.