The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Tenth Lecture

[ 1 ] We will remain faithful to our stated program and, in the course of this winter, gather together in these branch meetings a series of seemingly disparate details about human life in health and sickness. These details will later come together to form a whole, culminating in a specific insight that we will gradually work our way up to. In the first of the lectures planned for this series, we gave a kind of classification of disease, and last time we tried to bring to mind what we can really only describe as the wording of the Ten Commandments. Everything else that goes beyond the wording will become clear to us in the course of the next branch meetings. Last time, it was mainly a matter of getting to know the content and the actual tendency of the commandments. Today we want to talk about other details that will hardly show any direct connection with what has gone before or what is to come, for it is a collection of details whose comprehensive meaning will only become clear to us later.

[ 2 ] First, we will deal with a significant moment in human evolution on Earth. Those who have been working within the anthroposophical movement for some time are already familiar with this; others will gradually become attuned to these ideas.

[ 3 ] The moment in human evolution that we want to remember lies far back in time. If we go back through the post-Atlantean period, through the Atlantean period, to the ancient Lemurian period, we encounter the moment when the division into sexes occurred in the human kingdom on our Earth. You know that before this, there was no such division into sexes in the human kingdom. It should be expressly pointed out that we are not talking here about the very first appearance of the two-sex being in the evolution of the earth or in our entire evolution, insofar as it encompasses the realms surrounding us. Phenomena that must be counted as belonging to two-sex being appeared earlier. But what we today call the human kingdom only divided into the two sexes in the Lemurian epoch. Before that, we are dealing with a differently formed human figure that in a certain way contained both sexes undifferentiated within itself. We can imagine the transition from dual sexuality to the division into two sexes by thinking that the earlier dual-sex human form gradually developed in such a way that one group of individuals developed the characteristics of one sex, the female, more fully, while the other group developed more of the characteristics of the male sex. However, this does not mean that the division into sexes has been established, but only through an ever-increasing development of one-sidedness, at a time when humanity still lived in a very thin material world.

[ 4 ] If we have first brought this point in time to mind, it is precisely because we want to ask ourselves today about the meaning of the emergence of the two sexes. Only when one stands on the ground of spiritual science can one ask about such a meaning, for the meaning of physical development comes from the higher worlds. As long as we stand in the physical world and, for my part, view the physical world philosophically, it is a somewhat childish view to speak of purposes, and Goethe was right to mock others who spoke of purposes in nature in such a way as to say that nature, in its wisdom, had created cork so that humans could make stoppers out of it. Such a view is a childish view, and it can only lead us to deceive ourselves about what is essential and what matters. It would be just like looking at a clock and imagining little demonic beings behind it, wisely moving the hands forward. In truth, however, if we want to understand the clock, we must go to the spirit that created it, to the clockmaker. And in the same way, if we want to understand the purposefulness of our world, we must transcend the physical world and enter into the spiritual. Purpose, meaning, and goal are words that we can only apply to development when we view it from the standpoint of spiritual science. In this way, we ask the question: What is the meaning of the gradual development of the two sexes and their interaction with each other?

[ 5 ] The meaning will become clear to you when you consider how what we call fertilization, what we can call the mutual influence of the sexes, was previously replaced by something else. One must not believe that at the moment when the division into sexes took place in human evolution, what we call fertilization also occurred for the first time. That is not the case. We must imagine that in the times preceding the development of the two sexes, this fertilization took place in a completely different way. To clairvoyant retrospective consciousness, it is apparent that there was a time in the earthly development of humanity when fertilization already took place in connection with nutrition, so that the beings who in an earlier time were both male and female at the same time, absorbed the forces for fertilization at the same time as they were nourished. So when human beings nourished themselves during this time, when nutrition was naturally much more refined, the nutritional juices contained within them also contained that which enabled beings to produce beings of the same kind from themselves. You must bear in mind, however, that the nutritional juices taken from the surrounding matter did not always contain these fertilizing juices, but only at very specific times. This depended on the changes that were taking place, which we could compare today with the changes in the course of a year, with climate change and so on. At very specific times, the nutritive juices taken from the environment by the hermaphroditic beings simultaneously possessed the power of fertilization.

[ 6 ] If we look back further into these times with clairvoyant awareness, we find another peculiarity of ancient reproduction. What you know today as the diversity of individual human beings, what today manifests itself as the individuality of each person, on which the diversity of life in our present human cycle is based, did not exist before the emergence of the sexes. There was great uniformity. The beings that came into being were similar to each other, and they were also similar to their ancestors. All these beings, which were not yet divided into the two sexes, presented a similar appearance outwardly, and inwardly they all had a fairly similar character. And the fact that people were so similar to one another did not have the same disadvantage for those times as it would have for us today. Imagine if people were born today with the same appearance and the same character; how infinitely boring human life would be, how little could actually happen in human life, since everyone would want the same thing as everyone else. But that was not the case in ancient times. When humans were, so to speak, more ethereal, more spiritual, not yet so densely interwoven with materiality, people were really similar to each other when they were born and also throughout a certain period of childhood, and educators at that time did not need to pay attention to whether one was a wild child and another a gentle creature. People had different characters in different times, but in a certain sense they were fundamentally similar. However, this did not remain the case throughout the life of the individual. Because they were still in a softer, more spiritual physical state, people were much more receptive to the ongoing influences from their environment, so that they changed enormously under these influences in this ancient period of Earth's history. People became more individual in a certain way because they had, you could say, a waxy, soft nature. They became more or less an imprint of their environment. In particular, at a very specific time in life, which today would coincide with sexual maturity, the possibility arose of allowing everything that was happening in their environment to have an effect on them. The differences between the individual periods, which we could compare today with the differences between the seasons, were great at that time, and whether a person lived in one part of the earth or another was of great importance to them. If people at that time only traveled a short distance across the earth, this had a significant influence on them. Today, when people travel far and see so much, they generally return as they left, unless they have a very special receptiveness. This was not the case in ancient times. Then everything was of the greatest influence on man, so that as long as people were in the soft materiality, they could actually only gradually individualize themselves in life. This possibility then ceased.

[ 7 ] Something else that becomes apparent to us is that the earth itself became increasingly dense, and to the same extent that the materiality, let us say the earthiness of the earth, became more intense, this uniformity became harmful. For this meant that the possibility for people to change during their lives receded more and more. They were born, so to speak, incredibly dense. That is the reason why people today change so little during their lives. This also led Schopenhauer to believe that, fundamentally, people cannot change their character at all. The reason for this is that people are in such dense matter. They cannot easily work on and change matter. If people were still able to change their limbs as they did in the past, for example, making them shorter or longer as they needed, then humans would naturally be capable of much stronger impressions. Then they would basically absorb into their own individuality that which allowed them to bring about a change within themselves. Human beings are always in close contact with their environment, especially with their human environment. To ensure that we understand each other perfectly, I would like to tell you something that you may not have noticed, but which is nevertheless the case.

[ 8 ] Suppose you are sitting opposite someone and talking to them. We are talking here about the normal course of life and about people interacting with each other in everyday life, not about someone who is deeply trained in the occult. So, two people are sitting opposite each other; one is talking and the other is just listening. We usually think that the person who is listening is doing nothing. That is not correct. Such things still show how influential the environment is. It is not noticeable to the outer perception, but for the inner life it is very clear, even striking, that someone who is only listening participates in everything the other person does, even imitating the movements of the physical vocal cords, and the listener repeats what the other person says. Everything you hear, you repeat with a slight movement of the vocal cords and the other apparatus involved in speech. And there is a big difference between whether the person speaking has a croaky voice and you then imitate the corresponding movements, or whether he has a pleasant voice. In this respect, people do everything, and since this happens continuously, it also has a great influence on the entire education of the human being, albeit only in these close relationships. If you now think about this, which is what remains of living with the environment, to the fullest extent, then you will have an idea of how people in ancient times lived with their environment and how they felt. For example, people's ability to imitate was highly developed. When one person made a movement, everyone else followed suit. Today, only insignificant traces of this remain in very specific areas: when one person yawns, the others yawn too. But remember that in those ancient times this was a matter of a dim consciousness, and such an ability to imitate was connected with it.

[ 9 ] As the earth and everything on it became more and more densified, human beings became less and less able to transform themselves under the influence of their environment. In the relatively recent times of Atlantis, for example, sunrise was still a powerful formative force for humans because they were completely under its influence and had magnificent inner experiences which, when they recurred again and again, changed them greatly in the course of their lives. All this became less and less and gradually disappeared as humanity progressed.

[ 10 ] In the Lemurian era, before the moon moved away from the earth, there was a great danger for humans. It was the danger of becoming completely petrified, of mummifying. This danger was averted by the gradual withdrawal of the moon from our Earth's development. At the same time, however, with the departure of the moon, the separation into the sexes took place, and with this separation into the sexes, a new impulse for the individualization of human beings was given. If it had been possible for humanity to reproduce without the two sexes, it would not have entered into this individualization. It is thanks to the interaction of the sexes that the present diversity of human beings has come about. If only the feminine were at work, the individuality of human beings would be wiped out and all human beings would become the same. Through the interaction of the male element, human beings are born with individual characters. Thus, the meaning of the interaction of the sexes is actually given by the fact that with the appearance, with the separation of the male element, individualization from birth has entered the steep slope of ancient individualization. What had previously been brought about by the entire environment was compressed into the mutual interaction of the sexes, so that individualization was suppressed until the emergence of the physical human being, until birth. This is the meaning of the interaction of the two sexes. Individualization occurs through the influence of the male sex on the female.

[ 11 ] But now something else was accepted for human beings, and when what was accepted is described, I ask you to consider it very carefully as characteristic of humanity, for if we stand on the ground of spiritual science, we cannot view it in the same way for human beings as for animals. Health and illness in their finer forces are subject to completely different causes in animals than in human beings. So what is being said applies exclusively to human beings, and we must first bring the finer relationships to the fore in our minds.

[ 12 ] Put yourself back in those ancient times when humans were completely devoted to their environment, when the environment permeated humans and, on the one hand, fertilized them through the nutrients it provided, while on the other hand, they were individualized through the effects of the environment. Now, if we stand on the ground of spiritual science, we know that everything around us, everything that affects us, whether light or sound, warmth or cold, hardness or softness, this or that color, everything that affects us, is the revelation, the outer expression of something spiritual. And in those ancient times, human beings did not perceive external sensory impressions at all, but rather perceived the spiritual. When they looked up at the sun, they did not see the physical ball of the sun, but rather what has been preserved in the Persian religion as “Ahura Mazdao,” the “Great Aura.” The spiritual, the sum of the spiritual sun beings, appeared to them, and so it was in the air and water and in the entire environment. When you take in the beauty of a picture today, you can have something like a distillation of it, only it was more succulent back then. If we wanted to speak in the old sense, we should not say: This or that tastes like this or that; but we would have to say: This or that spirit does me good! This was how it was when people engaged with their surroundings while eating—which was a completely different activity than it is today—and likewise, the time when the forces of fertilization were absorbed was something completely different: a manifestation of the spiritual environment. Spirits came over people, overshadowed them, and inspired them to produce their own kind, and this was also experienced and observed as such a spiritual process.

[ 13 ] Now, it became increasingly impossible for humans to perceive the spiritual in their environment. It became more and more veiled, especially in daytime consciousness. Gradually, humans no longer perceived the spiritual background behind things, but only the outer objects that were the outer expression of it, and they learned to forget what was spiritual behind it. And as they became more and more condensed in form, the spiritual influence also became less and less. Through this condensation, human beings became more and more independent beings and thus closed themselves off from their spiritual environment. The further back we go in these ancient times, the more this influence from the environment is a spiritual-divine one. Human beings were truly organized in such a way that they were a reflection and image of their surroundings, of the spiritual beings floating around them, images of gods that existed in the ancient times of the Earth.

[ 14 ] This was increasingly lost, especially through the interaction of the two sexes. As a result, the spiritual world withdrew from human sight. People looked more and more into the sensory world. We must imagine this relationship very vividly: think of how, in those ancient times, human beings were fertilized from the divine-spiritual world. It was the gods themselves who gave their powers and made themselves similar to humans. As a result, what we call illness did not exist in those ancient times. There was no inner predisposition to illness; it could not exist because everything that was present in humans and worked within them came from the healthy divine-spiritual cosmos. The divine-spiritual beings are healthy, and they made human beings in their image at that time. Human beings were healthy. However, the closer they came to the time when the interaction of the sexes began and with it the withdrawal of the spiritual worlds, the more independent and individual human beings became, the more the health of the divine-spiritual beings withdrew from them and something else took its place. It happened that this interaction between the sexes was enveloped and accompanied by passions and instincts as they were stimulated in the physical world. We must seek this stimulation in the physical world, especially after humans had progressed to the point where the two sexes found each other physically and sensually attractive. This was not yet the case when the sexes already existed. The effect of the two sexes on each other — even in the Atlantean epoch — occurred when physical consciousness was actually asleep, so to speak, during the nighttime hours. It was not until the middle of the Atlantean epoch that what we might call the attraction of the sexes, passionate love, came into being, that is, everything that was mixed with pure supersensible love, if we want to call it that — the expression is worn out today, but it did not need to be —: Platonic love. Platonic love would exist to a much greater extent if sensual love had not been added to it. And whereas in earlier times everything that had a formative effect on human beings was a consequence of the spiritual-divine environment, it now became more a consequence of the passions and instincts of the two sexes interacting with each other. Sensual desire has become linked to the interaction of the two sexes, stimulated by the outer eye, by the outer sight of the opposite sex. Therefore, something was incorporated into human beings at birth that is connected with the special nature of the passions and feelings of human beings in physical life. Whereas in earlier times human beings still received what was within them from the spiritual-divine beings of their environment, they now received something through the act of fertilization that they had taken into themselves from the sensory world as an independent, self-contained being.

[ 15 ] After human beings entered into dual sex, they passed on to their descendants what they themselves experienced in the sensory world. So now we have two human beings. These two human beings live in the physical world and perceive the world through their senses, thereby developing this or that impulse and desire stimulated by external influences. In particular, they develop impulses and passions through their own sensual inclinations toward each other, which are stimulated from outside. What now approaches human beings from outside has been drawn down into the sphere of the independent human being and is no longer in full harmony with the divine-spiritual cosmos. This is passed on to human beings through the physical act of fertilization and becomes ingrained in them. And this worldly life of their own, which they do not have from the divine worlds but from outside the divine-spiritual world, is what human beings pass on to their offspring through fertilization. If a human being is worse in this respect, he passes on worse qualities to his offspring than another who is pure and good.

[ 16 ] And with that we now have what we must imagine in the true, real sense under the term “original sin.” That is the concept of original sin. Original sin is brought about by the fact that human beings are able to pass on their individual experiences in the physical world to their descendants. Every time the sexes are inflamed with passion, the ingredients of both sexes mix together in the human beings descending from the astral world. When a human being incarnates, he comes down from the devachanic world and forms his astral sphere according to the nature of his individuality. Something from what is peculiar to the astral bodies, the instincts, passions, and desires of the parents mixes with this individual astral sphere, so that the human being receives what his ancestors have experienced. What is passed down through the generations, what is truly acquired within the generations and is inherited as such, is what is meant by the term original sin. And now we come to something else: a completely new moment entered into humanity through the individualization of the human being.

[ 17 ] In the past, the divine-spiritual beings, who were completely healthy, formed human beings in their own image. But now the human being, as an independent being, separated itself from the overall harmony of divine-spiritual health. In a certain sense, they contradicted this entire spiritual-divine environment in their individuality. Imagine you have a being that develops solely under the influence of its environment. It will reveal what that environment is. But imagine that it closes itself off with a skin, then it has its own characteristics in addition to the characteristics of its environment. When human beings became individual with the division into sexes, they developed their own peculiarities within themselves. This created a contradiction between the great, inherently healthy divine-spiritual harmony and what was individual in human beings. And as this individuality continues to work, becoming a real effective factor, the possibility of inner illness becomes part of human development in the first place. We have now grasped the moment when the possibility of illness arises in human development, for it is bound up with the individualization of human beings. Before, when human beings were still connected to the spiritual-divine world, this possibility of illness did not exist. It arose with individualization, and that is the same moment as the separation into the sexes. This applies to human development, and you must not transfer it in the same way to the animal world.

[ 18 ] Illness is indeed an effect of the processes I have just described to you, and you can see that it is basically the astral body that is originally influenced in this way. The astral body, which the human being first integrates into himself when he comes down from the devachanic world, is confronted with what flows into him through the influence of the two sexes. The astral body is therefore the part that most clearly reflects the ungodly. The etheric body is already more divine, because humans do not have such a great influence on it, and the most divine is the physical body, this temple of God, because it has been completely removed from human influence. While humans seek all kinds of pleasures in their astral body and can have all kinds of desires that have a harmful effect on the physical body, they still have their physical body as such a wonderful instrument that it can resist the poisons of the heart and other disturbing influences of the astral body for decades. And so we must say that through all these processes the human astral body has become the worst part of the human being. Anyone who delves deeper into human nature will find the deepest causes of illness in the astral body and in the evil influences of the astral body on the etheric body, and only then, indirectly through the etheric body, in the physical body. Now we will understand many things that cannot otherwise be understood. I will now speak of ordinary mineral remedies.

[ 19 ] A remedy from the mineral kingdom first acts on the physical body of the human being. What is the point of giving a mineral remedy to the physical body? Now, please note: we are not talking about any kind of plant remedies, but purely mineral remedies, such as metals, salts, and so on. Suppose a person takes a mineral remedy. Then something very strange presents itself to clairvoyant consciousness. The clairvoyant consciousness can then perform the following feat: it always has the ability to divert attention from something. You can divert attention from the entire physical human body. You then remove the etheric body, the astral body, and the ego aura. You have thus removed the physical body through strong negative attention. Now, if someone has taken some kind of mineral remedy, you can remove everything from your attention and focus your clairvoyant attention solely on the mineral or metal that is now in them. So you suggest to yourself that what is in them in the form of bones, muscles, blood, and so on, no longer exists, and you turn your attention only to what has permeated them as a specific mineral substance. Something very strange then occurs to the clairvoyant consciousness: this mineral substance has distributed itself very finely and has taken on the form of the person. You have a human form in front of you, a human phantom, consisting of the substance that the person has ingested. Suppose the person had taken the metal antimony; then you would have a human form made of finely distributed antimony before you, and so it is with every mineral remedy that a person takes. You create a new person within yourself, consisting of this mineral substance; you incorporate it into yourself. Now we ask ourselves: What is the purpose and meaning of this?

[ 20 ] The meaning is as follows: if you left a person who needs something like this as they are, if you did not give them the remedy and they really needed it, then certain evil forces in their astral body would cause the astral body to act on the etheric body and the etheric body to act on the physical body, gradually destroying it. Now you have interposed a double in the physical body. This double acts in such a way that the physical body does not follow the influences of the astral body. Imagine you have a bean plant: if you give it a stick, it winds itself up the stick and no longer follows the movements of the wind. This double, made of the incorporated substance, is like a stick for the human being. It holds the physical body in place and withdraws it from the influences of the astral and etheric bodies. In this way, you make the human being, in terms of his physical body, independent of his astral and etheric bodies, so to speak. That is the effect of a mineral remedy. But you will also immediately see the bad side of this, because it also has a very bad counterpart. Since you have artificially removed the physical body from its connection with the other bodies, you have weakened the influence of the astral body and the etheric body on the physical body, you have made the physical body independent, and the more you give your body such remedies, the more the influence of the astral body and the etheric body disappears, and the physical body becomes a hardened and independent entity, subject to its own laws. Now consider what people do who administer such various mineral remedies to their bodies throughout their lives. A person who has gradually taken in a lot of mineral remedies then carries within themselves the phantom of these minerals; they have a whole dozen mineral remedies within them. These hold the physical body as if in solid walls. Yes, what influence can the astral body and the etheric body still have on them? Such a person actually carries their physical body around with them and is quite powerless against it. If such a person, who has been medicated for a long time, then tries to find someone else who wants to treat them psychologically, who wants to work on the finer bodies in particular, they will find that they have become more or less impervious to psychological influences. This is because they have first made their physical body independent and deprived it of the possibility of allowing what might happen in the finer bodies to have an effect on the physical body. This has happened because the person has so many phantoms within themselves that they are not in harmony with each other; one pulls them in one direction, another in another. If a person has deprived themselves of the possibility of acting from their spiritual-soul part, then they should not be surprised if a spiritual healing treatment is less successful. Therefore, when it comes to psychic influences, you must always consider what kind of person it is who is to be cured. If the person has rendered his astral body or his etheric body powerless by making his physical body independent, then it becomes very difficult to help such a person through spiritual treatment.

[ 21 ] So now we understand how mineral substances affect humans. They create doppelgangers within them that preserve their physical body and protect it from the potentially harmful influences of their astral or etheric body. Almost all of our medicine today boils down to this because this materialistic medicine does not recognize the finer members of the human being and only treats the physical body in some way.

[ 22 ] Today we have considered this in relation to the influences of mineral substances. We will have to talk about the influences of plant healing powers and the influences of animal substances on the human organism, and then we will move on to those influences, those remedies, which can be psychic, that is, spiritual, from being to being. But you see that it is necessary for our considerations to first regain concepts such as that of original sin and to understand it correctly. Certain things are such today that people read over them and have no understanding of them.