The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Fifth Lecture

[ 1 ] In these lectures, we have attempted to form a picture of the evolution of the earth in connection with that of the human being, because we had to examine how the past of the earth, how the facts of our earth's evolution, are reflected in the knowledge of the individual cultural periods of the post-Atlantean era. We were able to characterize the deepest experiences of the disciple of the Rishis and show how these inner experiences of such an initiate appeared as inner, clairvoyantly perceived images of the conditions and processes that took place in our primordial Earth when it still contained the Sun and the Moon. We have also seen what a high level of initiation such a disciple of Indian culture had to attain in order to be able to create such a worldview, an image that stands as a repetition of what took place in the distant past. We have also seen what the Greeks thought when, during Alexander's campaigns, they became acquainted with what an Indian initiate experienced, in whose soul arose the image of the divine-spiritual, creative power that began to express itself in the primordial nebula when the sun and moon were still united with the earth. This image, the Brahman of the Indians, which appeared to the Greeks as Heracles, we tried to bring before the soul as an inner repetition of the facts that actually took place in the past. It has already been emphasized that the successive periods of the Earth's development were reflected in the Persian and Egyptian cultural periods. What happened in the second epoch, when the sun withdrew from the earth, was brought to light in the images of the Persian initiates. And what took place when the moon gradually withdrew became the worldview and principle of initiation among the Egyptians, Chaldeans, Babylonians, and Assyrians. Now, in order to be able to look deeply into the soul of the ancient Egyptians — for that is the most important thing for us, and we will only look at the Persian initiation as a preparation — we must once again examine more closely what actually happened to our Earth during the times when the sun and moon separated from the Earth.

[ 2 ] Let us now try to form a picture of the Earth itself, which gradually took shape when the Sun departed and later when the Moon also departed. We will leave aside the great cosmic events and see what happened on the Earth itself. If we look back once more at the Earth in its original state, when it was united with the sun and moon, we would not find our animals, our plants, and certainly not our minerals. What the Earth was originally made of was initially only human beings, only human germs. It is true that the animal and plant germs were already laid down on the old Sun and on the old Moon, that they were already contained in the original state of the Earth, but they were, so to speak, still dormant germs, not germs that one could see would really produce anything. It was only when the sun began to move out that the germs became active, which later became animals. And it was only when the sun had completely separated from the earth and the earth and moon were alone that those germs became germ germs, which later became plants. And it was only when the moon began to move out that the mineral germs gradually formed. Let us keep that in mind.

[ 3 ] But now let us take a look at the earth itself. When it still contained the sun and moon, the earth was only a kind of large, ethereal mist of enormous extent, and within it were the human germs, full of life, but the germs of other beings—animals, plants, and minerals—were dormant. Because only human germs were present and there were no eyes yet, no eye could see these processes externally, so that the description given here can only become visible in retrospect to the clairvoyant human being. This description is made under the hypothetical assumption that someone would have seen this if they had been able to stand at a point in space at that time and watch. Even on ancient Saturn, a physical eye would not have noticed anything. At that time, in its primordial state, the Earth was only a misty fog that would have been perceived only as heat. From this mass, from this primordial ether fog, a luminous ball of mist gradually formed, which could already have been seen if there had been an eye at that time. And if one could have penetrated it with a sense of feeling, so to speak, it would have appeared like a heated room; it would have looked like the inside of an oven. Very soon, however, this misty mass became luminous. And this ball of mist that had formed contained within itself all the seeds that have just been mentioned. We must be clear that this misty haze was not like the fog or cloud formations we see today, but rather that all the substances that have become solid and liquid today were dissolved within it. All metals, all minerals, everything, everything was present in the form of mist and fog, in a very transparent form, in a translucent mist. There was translucent mist, permeated by warmth and light. Imagine that. What had become of the ethereal mist was a translucent gas. And this became brighter and brighter, and precisely through the condensation of the gases, the light became stronger and stronger, so that in fact this misty fog appeared like a great sun shining out into the world space.

[ 4 ] This moment did indeed exist once, when the Earth still had the Sun within it, when it was still illuminated and radiant with light and radiated its light out into space. This light made it possible not only for humans to live on Earth in their original state, but also for all other higher beings who did not take on a physical body but were connected with the development of humans to live in the fullness of light: angels, archangels, primordial forces. But these were not the only ones there; even higher beings lived in the fullness of light: the powers or exusiai or spirits of form, the forces or dynamis or spirits of movement, the dominions or kyriotetes or spirits of wisdom, and those spirits called thrones or spirits of will, and finally, in looser connection with the fullness of light, increasingly breaking away from it, the cherubim and seraphim. The earth was a world body populated by a whole hierarchy of lower and higher, most exalted beings. And what radiated out into space as light, the light that permeated the earth's body, was not only light, but also what later became the earth's mission: it was the power of love. This was the most important component of the light. We must therefore imagine that it is not only light that is radiated, not only physical light, but that this light is imbued with the power of love.

[ 5 ] This is difficult to imagine for the modern mind. Today, there are people who describe the sun as if it were a gaseous ball that simply radiates light. Such a material, purely material conception of the sun prevails today. The only exceptions are occultists. Anyone who reads a description of the sun today, as it is presented in popular books, in books that form the spiritual nourishment of countless people, has not learned the nature of the sun. What is written in these books is as valuable in relation to the sun as if someone were to describe a corpse as the essence of a human being. As true as the corpse is to the human being, so true is what is described in astrophysics about the sun.

[ 6 ] Just as the person who describes a corpse omits the most important thing about a human being, so the physicist who describes the sun today does not describe its essence when he believes he has found the inner components of the sun with the help of spectral analysis; what is described is only the outer body of the sun. In every ray of sunlight, the power of higher beings who inhabit the sun streams down upon all earthly beings, and with the light of the sun's rays, the power of love itself descends, the same power that streams here on earth from person to person, from heart to heart. The sun can never send merely physical light to the earth; that which is the hottest and most fervent feeling of love is invisibly present in the sunlight. With it flow to the earth the forces of the thrones, the seraphim, the cherubim, and the entire hierarchy of higher beings who dwell on the sun and who have no need of any other body than light. But because everything that exists in the sun today was still connected with the earth at that time, all the higher beings were also connected with the earth itself. Even today, they are still connected with the development of the earth.

[ 7 ] Then we must consider that the human being, who was the lowest of the higher beings, was already present in embryo at that time as the new child of the earth, carried and cherished by these high beings, living in the bosom of these divine beings. The human being who lived at that time, at which we now stand with our considerations of the Earth's evolution, must have had a much finer body, because he was still in the womb of these beings. And then it becomes clear to clairvoyant consciousness that the body of the human being of that time consisted only of a fine mist and vapor, an air or gas body, a gas body completely permeated and imbued with light. Let us imagine a regularly shaped cloud, like a chalice-like formation expanding upwards, and let us imagine this chalice glowing and illuminated by the inner light, and we have the human beings of that time, who were just beginning to have a dull consciousness in this earthly evolution, a consciousness like that of the plant world today. Humans were not like plants in the modern sense; they were illuminated and warmed cloud masses in the shape of chalices, without fixed boundaries, not separated from the total mass of the earth by fixed boundaries.

[ 8 ] That was once the form of the human being, a form that was a physical body of light, still participating in the forces of light. Because of the delicacy of the body, not only could a separate etheric body and astral body sink into it, not only the I in the earliest beginnings, but also the higher spiritual beings that were connected with the earth. At that time, human beings were still rooted, so to speak, in the divine-spiritual beings, and these permeated them. It is really not easy to describe the glory of the earth at that time and to give an idea of that era. We must imagine the earth as a sphere shining with light, surrounded by light-bearing clouds, producing wonderful light phenomena with a marvelous play of colors. If one could have reached into this Earth with a feeling hand, one would have perceived warmth, the glowing, translucent masses undulating up and down, containing all human beings of today, enveloped and surrounded by all the spiritual beings, radiating light outward in magnificent diversity! Outside, the Earth's cosmos in its great diversity; inside, the light-enveloped human being, connected to the divine spiritual beings, emanating from them and radiating streams of light into the outer sphere of light. The human being hung like an umbilical cord springing from the divine, attached to this whole, to the light-womb, the world-womb of our Earth. It was a common womb of worlds in which the light plant that was man lived at that time, feeling at one with the mantle of light surrounding the earth. Thus, in this fine, vaporous plant form, man hung as if on the umbilical cord of the earth mother, and was cherished and nurtured by the whole of Mother Earth. Just as today, in a coarser sense, the child is cherished and cared for in the mother's womb as an embryo, so was the human embryo cherished and cared for at that time. This is how humans lived in the distant past.

[ 9 ] Then the sun began to emerge, taking the finest substances with it. There was a time when the high sun beings left the human beings, when everything that today belongs to the sun left our earth and left behind the coarser substances. And this departure of the sun was connected with the fact that the mist cooled down to water, and we now have the water-earth sphere, whereas we used to have the mist-earth. In the middle were the primordial waters, but they were not surrounded by air; slowly the waters turned into dense, thick mists, which gradually became more refined. Thus we have the Earth of that time as a watery Earth, containing substances in a soft state, surrounded by mists that became finer and finer, up to the highest spheres, where the mists became very fine. This is how we once saw our Earth before us. It had been transformed, and human beings now had to sink, so to speak, from their former light-filled gaseous form into the murky waters and incarnate there as formed masses of water in the water, as they had previously been air forms in the air. Human beings became water forms, but by no means completely. Human beings never completely submerged themselves in the water. This is an important moment. It has been described how the earth was water in the middle, and man was only partly a water being, protruding into the misty envelope so that he was half water, half vapor. Down in the water, man could not possibly be reached by the sun; the mass of water was so thick that the sunlight could not penetrate it. The light of the sun could penetrate the mist to some extent, so that humans lived partly in dark, light-deprived water and partly in light-filled mist. However, the water was not deprived of something, something that we must now describe in more detail.

[ 10 ] From the beginning, the earth was not only glowing and luminous, but also resonant, and the sound remained in the earth so that when the light went out, the water became dark on the inside, but was also permeated by sound, and it was the sound that gave the water its shape and form, as we know from the well-known physical experiment. We see that sound is a formative force because it structures and orders the parts. Sound has a formative power, and it was this power that formed the body out of the water. It was the power of sound that remained in the earth. It is sound that resonates through the earth; it is sound from which the human form was formed. Light could only penetrate the part of the human being that protruded from the water. Below was a water body, above a vapor body, which was touched by the outer light and to which the beings that had come forth with the sun had access. Before, when the sun was still united with the earth, humans felt themselves in its womb; now they shone down on them in the light and radiated their power through them. But we must not forget that what remained after the separation of the sun also contained the forces that had to separate the earth from itself, the forces of the moon.

[ 11 ] So we have a time when the sun had just gone out, when that plant-human being had to gradually submerge into the physical watery earth. That is the stage that human beings had reached in their bodies at that time, which we see today in a degenerate form in fish. When we see water teeming with fish today, these fish are remnants of those humans, naturally in a decadent form. We must imagine a goldfish, for example, in fantastic plant forms, with great mobility, but with a feeling of melancholy because the light had been taken from the water. A deep, deep longing arose. The light was no longer there; the longing for light gave rise to the yearning. There was a moment in the Earth's development when the sun had not yet fully emerged from the Earth, and one can still see those figures glowing with light, the humans in the upper part still on the sun stage, below already in the form that has been preserved in the fish form. Now, because man lived with half of his being in darkness, there was a very low human nature down there, for in the part that was submerged, he had the lunar forces within him. Even though these were not solidified into lava, as in the moon of today, they were black, dark forces. Only the worst parts of the astral could submerge themselves there. But above there was a misty form, like the head, into which the light from outside shone and gave it its shape, so that man consisted of a lower and a higher part. Floating, hovering, he moved in this misty atmosphere. The dense misty atmosphere of the earth was not yet air; it was mist, and therefore not yet air through which the sun could penetrate. The heat could penetrate, but not the light. The sun's rays could not kiss the whole earth, only the surface; the ocean remained dark. But in this ocean were the forces that later emerged as the moon.

[ 12 ] Now, as the forces of light penetrated, the gods also entered the earth. So that we have below us the godless, godforsaken water mantle, penetrated only by the power of sound, surrounded by the mist into which the forces of the sun extend. So that man, in the misty body that rose above the surface of the water, was still a fellow citizen of that which shone upon him as light and love from the spiritual world. But why did the sounding world penetrate the dark water core?

[ 13 ] Because one of the high sun spirits had remained behind, connecting his existence with the earth. This is the same spirit we know as Yahweh or Jehovah. Yahweh alone remained with the earth, he sacrificed himself, it was he whose inner being sounded through the water earth as a formative sound.

[ 14 ] But because the worst forces remained as ingredients in the watery earth, because these forces were terrible elements, the misty part of man descended more and more, and from the former plant form a being gradually emerged that stood at the level of an amphibian. In legend and myth, this form, which is much lower than later humanity, is described as the dragon, the human newt, the lindworm. And the other part of the human being, who was a citizen of the light, is depicted as a being that did not come down, that fights against the lower nature, that is depicted, for example, as Michael, as the dragon slayer, as St. George fighting the dragon. Even in the figure of Siegfried with the dragon, we still have, albeit transformed, images of what was then in that duality of the human constitution. Heat entered the upper part of the earth and thus also the upper part of the physical human being, forming something like a fiery dragon. But above it rose the etheric body, in which the power of the sun was held. Thus we have a figure that the Old Testament portrayed quite well in the form of the seductive serpent, which is also an amphibian.

[ 15 ] Now the time drew nearer and nearer when the lowest forces were to be cast out. Powerful catastrophes shook the earth, and to the occultist, the basalt formations appear as remnants of those purifying forces that shook the earth's body at that time when the moon had to separate from the earth. But this was also the time when the water core of the earth became increasingly denser and the solid, mineral core gradually formed. The earth was condensed on one side by the departure of the moon, but on the other side, the upper parts gave off their heavier, coarser substances to the lower parts, and above, more and more of what was still interspersed with water but gradually became similar to our air was formed. Thus, the earth gradually acquired a solid core in the middle, surrounded by water. At first, the mist was still impenetrable to the sun's rays, but as the mist released substances, it became thinner and thinner. Later, much later, it became air, and gradually the sun's rays, which previously could not reach the earth itself, were able to penetrate it.

[ 16 ] Now came a stage in the development of our Earth that we want to visualize clearly in our minds. Previously, human beings were immersed in water, protruding only in mist; now, through the densification of the Earth, water beings gradually acquired the ability to condense their form and take on a solid skeletal system. Human beings hardened within themselves. As a result, the upper part of the human being was transformed in such a way that it became suitable for the new element that had entered. The new element, which had previously been impossible, was the breathing of air. Now we find the first beginnings of the lungs. In the upper part there was previously that which received the light but could not penetrate further. Now humans felt the light again in their dull consciousness. They could feel what was shining down on them as divine forces flowing toward them. During this transition, they felt what was shining toward them split into two parts: the air itself penetrated them, the breath of air penetrated them; previously, only light had touched them, but now air entered them. The human being who felt this must have said to himself: Previously, I felt the force above me as the force that gave me what I now need to breathe. Light was my breath. What now flowed into him was like two brothers; light and air were two brothers to him. Now it had become a duality for him: light and air.

[ 17 ] The breath of air from the earth that flowed into man was also the announcement that man had to learn to feel something completely new. As long as there was only light, man did not know birth and death. In the past, the cloud filled with light transformed, and humans felt this as if they were changing a coat; they did not feel that they were being born, nor that they were dying; they felt eternal, birth and death merely as events. With the first breath, the awareness of birth and death entered: the air, the breath of air that separated from its brother, the ray of light—this is how humans felt at that time—that separated also separated the beings that had previously flowed in with the light, and that brought me death.

[ 18 ] Who was it that made the consciousness: “Although I have a dark form, I am connected with the eternal being” — who was it that drove away, that killed this consciousness? The breath of air that flowed into man — Typhon. Typhon is the name of the breath of air. And as the Egyptian soul experienced within itself what had happened, that the ray that had previously been united split into the ray of light and the breath of air, this cosmic event became a symbolic image for this soul, which was represented as the murder of Osiris by Typhon or Set, the breath of wind.

[ 19 ] A great cosmic event is hidden in the Egyptian myth that has Osiris killed by Typhon. The Egyptians felt the god who came from the sun and who was still at peace with his brother as Osiris. Typhon was the breath that brought mortality to human beings. Here we see one of the most striking examples of how the facts of world evolution are repeated in the inner knowledge of human beings.

[ 20 ] This is how the triunity of sun, moon, and earth came into being. All this was communicated to the Egyptian student in deep, deeply conscious images.