The Rudolf Steiner Archive

15. The Formation and Transformations of the Physical Human Body

[ 1 ] Today, following on from yesterday's consideration of the development of humanity within certain narrow limits, we want to go back to the long-past epochs of development and consider what is connected with it. Before we discuss the fact of reincarnation, which we could immediately follow up on in this context, and before we discuss the questions of human destiny and the law of karma, let us go back to even earlier times and let our gaze wander over great periods of human evolution.

[ 2 ] Modern man presents himself to us as a structure consisting of a physical body, an etheric body, an astral body, and the I—the bearer of the self and of true independence. It is not the I or the astral body that are the most perfect members of the human being because they are spiritually higher, but rather the physical body. It is the most perfect member of the human being, a structure, a composition of the most wonderful details. What a miraculous structure is this physical human body! The astral body is more spiritual, but less perfect; it is the bearer of joy and pain, of instinct, desire, and passion. Why, then, is the physical body more perfect? Consider the human physical heart. What a miraculous structure it is, that it can withstand all attacks throughout its entire life! And it is the same with all the other organs of the physical body: wisdom speaks from them. And how is it with the astral body in relation to this heart? It does not always behave wisely. The astral body needs means of enjoyment out of its longing for enjoyment and thus continually mistreats the physical body; it continually attacks the physical heart, and the latter resists it. Why? Because the construction of the physical body took much longer in the past than that of the other bodies. The physical human body is the oldest member of the human being, and therefore also the most perfect. A fine host of perfect beings have already worked on it. Everything that is physical, everything that is sensual, has developed out of the spirit, has worked its way down from the spirit to its physical form. The first thing that existed of the human being in the physical world was the structure of the human physical body. At that time, there was no seed of the etheric body, the astral body, or the ego carrier in the physical world.

[ 3 ] Everything in the world is in development, not only human beings, but also a planet like our Earth. Like human beings, our Earth has also undergone other planetary incarnations. We call the first of these Saturn, the second the Sun, and the third the Moon. Here we must disregard the Moon as we know it today; it is only a remnant, a remnant, a slag of the old Moon.

[ 4 ] Let us now see why our Moon has been called “Moon” since ancient times. In doing so, we must remember that the naming of things by the ancient occultists was absolutely not random, but something deeply meaningful. The name given to a thing or a being was always organically linked to what the being was supposed to express. The previous planetary state of our Earth was therefore the old “moon”; the one before that was the old “sun,” not the sun of today; the latter is like a memory of that old sun. First we come to that world body to which it is [still] possible today to look back with occult means: it is “Saturn,” the old Saturn, of which we have spoken often. I will now sketchily describe this old Saturn in its development. Let us first clarify what the occultist considers to be the basic elements of our external world. In ancient occultism, a distinction was made between the four elements: earth, water, air, and fire or heat. For today's physicist, this no longer makes much sense; what modern science calls elements no longer corresponds to what the occultist understands by them. The modern term “state of aggregation” is roughly equivalent to “element.” The occultist calls everything that is solid at today's temperatures on Earth “earthy” or “solid.” A quartz crystal, for example, is “earth” for the occultist at today's temperatures. Everything liquid, including liquid metals and so on, is “water” for them, and everything gaseous is called “air.” And what today's physicists see as a state of the three aggregate compositions, fire, is the fourth element for occultists. I am well aware that it is a real abomination to science to regard fire not merely as a state, but as something equal to earth, water, and air. In occultism, one may boldly imagine that heat is something of an even finer substance than the other three: earth, water, and air. You would have found nothing on Saturn but heat or fire; there was no earth, water, or air. If you had been able to observe this with clairvoyant vision at that time, by placing a chair in outer space and observing Saturn's development, you would have been able to perceive only heat, and at first this would have been only spiritual heat. Of all the beings that are on Earth today, only humans existed on Saturn; there was no mineral, plant, or animal kingdom. Under today's conditions, humans need the three kingdoms for their development; in the state they were in then, they did not need them. The whole human being existed, so to speak, only as a heat formation. Nothing, nothing else was there of the human being. Now imagine taking away everything you perceive physically in today's human being, even the air they breathe, and leaving nothing of them except what flows through them today as their present blood warmth, but shaped as if you were to draw the blood system today: only such human beings existed on the old Saturn, nothing else. For the occultist, a celestial body is only a composition of beings. Even the Earth is nothing more than a composition of mineral, plant, animal, and human beings.

[ 5 ] The consciousness of the ancient Saturn people was already in development. It was dull, but comprehensive. Today's bright daytime consciousness has only become possible on Earth. The people on ancient Saturn had a very strange, dull state of consciousness. You know that humans are unconscious when they sleep. Now take the plant, just the physical plant, without the entities hidden behind it: there you have a state of sleep that is even deeper, a dreamless sleep. The plant is a deeply sleeping being. And now imagine a state of sleep that is even deeper, even duller, the deep trance consciousness, and then you have Saturn consciousness. I will describe it to you by describing a kind of abnormal state of the present day—a being that has remained in earlier, now abnormal conditions—using an observed example: A girl who, until the age of eighteen, was completely unaccustomed to any alcohol consumption, is tempted by an event to quickly down a few glasses of red wine. Due to other conditions of her organism, this made such an impression on her that she was as if dead. Someone gave her a pencil, and she began to draw all sorts of things and write names next to them. She had no idea what she was doing. She was like a machine; she had no life, no consciousness. If you now compare what this girl wrote down with what is written in theosophical books about planets and what is today's understanding of the structure of the universe, you will find that what this girl wrote down is indeed a very strange cosmology, but it does correspond in some respects to occult cosmology. It was in a state deeper than ordinary sleep. In this state, the being is capable of going far, far beyond the earth in its dull consciousness and expressing cosmic things. The occultist knows that such a consciousness exists in physical stone: dull and comprehensive, stone without the corresponding egos, and that if stone could express itself in this way, it would do so. This consciousness encompasses vast areas, but it is dull. Such was the consciousness of human beings on ancient Saturn.

[ 6 ] Saturn itself is a being that is unconscious of itself, or rather, it had a lower consciousness that can be described as carrying within itself a mirror image of the entire cosmos, and that it would have been capable of drawing it. To understand this, we must consider something else. So while human beings found on Saturn the place where the first beginnings of their physical bodies could form, Saturn was at the same time the scene on which other beings could develop, beings who today stand far, far above human beings. Let us clarify this with a statement made by an Egyptian sage to a Greek. He said: “You Greeks will always remain big children. You know nothing of the greatest mystery, that gods were once human beings!” These beings then no longer need to enter into physical existence.

[ 7 ] So, on ancient Saturn, humans were like a kind of mineral; they also had a consciousness like that of minerals. But beings that are now far above the human level lived in the human body. These are the primordial beginnings, or archai, or spirits of personality. They went through their human stage on Saturn. They were not human beings as we are today; they only used the physical human body to confront the world, to experience their stage of humanity, to attain ego-consciousness. These exalted beings therefore had their ego-consciousness on Saturn, and they needed the human body as a kind of vehicle, which served as their physical dwelling place. Certain beings permeated the human physical body and imbued it with their qualities, and human beings today owe two things to these beings. First, the ability for an ego carrier to ever take up residence within them; it was these spirits of personality that gave the human body its form at that time, which emanated from their personality. Second, they also gave human beings the possibility of developing selfishness. Through the influence of the spirits of personality, the human body received, as in the germ, the ability to develop as a free personality, but at the same time also the selfishness to develop egoism within itself. I would need not a lecture or a series of lectures, but years, if I wanted to describe all the details here. We can therefore only consider stages, steps, and we will consider seven such steps in the development of Saturn, which are different from each other.

[ 8 ] At the first stage, you must imagine that there was still no physical warmth, but that this was only being prepared. Only the soul was there, soul warmth was present, and it was only in the middle of Saturn's development that the physical human body, formed from physical warmth, came into being. This human warmth body then dissolves again at the end of Saturn's development. We have seven stages: three preliminary stages, a physical heat stage, and three descending stages, and each of these seven stages has seven subdivisions, which we will omit here, but to which we will return when we discuss the development of the Earth. Today's theosophical books refer to them as rounds and globes.

[ 9 ] But now we want to ask: Where did the substance come from that formed the human body? It was high spiritual beings who let their own essence flow out, dripping it down as substance for the physical human body: it was the spirits of the will, or the thrones, who made the sacrifice of letting their own essence flow out. So on Saturn we have the spirits of will or the thrones, which give the substance to the human body, then the spirits of personality, which inhabit it during its human stage, and the human being himself as the physical germ. The Saturn evolution now proceeds in such a way that we must imagine the beginning, the climax, and the ebbing away. After that, the whole thing goes through a pralaya. We can think of the process as being similar to that of a plant. The seed is placed in the earth, decays, and carries the form over into a new existence. Just as there is an intermediate state, a hidden state, between the first and second plants, so it is with the planets. This state is called pralaya. The only difference is that the plant then produces a repetition similar to the old one, but the planet has then reached a higher stage of development. Its path is that of a spiral, as with humans. Indian theosophy calls the visible state of the planet a Manvantara. In the case of the plant, this is its development on Earth. Thus, the planets also pass through an apparent existence and a hidden existence. The latter is called a world sleep.

[ 10 ] After this world sleep of Saturn, when it emerged again from the darkness in a new form of transformation, it was the old sun that now arose. The difference between Saturn and the sun is that in their middle states, the heat substance of Saturn had condensed into an air or gas state. The sun retains the heat, but it also develops something else, air, so that we now have heat and air on the sun. And something else: light is created on the sun. Saturn consisted of dark heat, the second planet, the sun, consists of light — the gas burns —, heat ether, and air. Through Saturn, the predisposition for the physical human body entered evolution once and for all. Now, on the sun, something new is added. As if poured in by spiritual beings, the etheric body is now present in this substance: the second planetary state, in which the human being has now attained the value of a plant. Life is within it. Through this incorporation of the etheric body, however, the physical body of the human being has also changed. It does not retain the egg shape of the Saturn period, but becomes structured within itself. It is now a vibrating heat egg that glows and dims in light formations and has indentations. The etheric body now works on the physical body.

[ 11 ] Whereas on Saturn the Thrones poured out the substance of the physical body from themselves, now it is other beings who pour out the substance as their great sacrifice: they are the spirits of wisdom, called Lordships or Kyriotetes. The Thrones made the greater sacrifice. If they had not laid the foundation, the spirits of wisdom could not have begun their work.

[ 12 ] On the Sun, beings have now once again passed through the human stage. They are the archangels or fire spirits, called Archangeloi in Christian esotericism. They inhabited the human body as representatives and thus received their ego consciousness.

[ 13 ] Here we must mention something that deserves attention. If Saturn had emerged as the sun immediately after the Pralaya, human bodies would not have been able to absorb the etheric body. The new planet, the sun, therefore had to undergo a brief repetition of Saturn. The beings had to take on their old form again, as it were.

[ 14 ] What kind of beings were still on this sun? There were certain spirits of personality who had not become human beings on Saturn, who had not succeeded in gaining their sense of self on Saturn. They had to make up for this on the sun. They now had to make up for this on the sun, so they were still at the same stage as their companions on Saturn. They could therefore only dwell on the sun in a shell, as it were, a mineral body without an etheric body, which was not permeated by an etheric body. A structure had therefore to arise once again on the sun, consisting only of the physical body. There were thus lower structures alongside those consisting of physical and etheric bodies, and these are the predecessors of our present-day animals. So on the sun we have two realms: a human realm and the realm of beings that were on the sun at the stage of Saturn's development, the animal realm. We have two realms on the sun, a human realm and an animal realm. The descendants of the latter are found in today's higher animals.

[ 15 ] Now the sun also passes into a kind of world night and is reborn in a third state of transformation as the old moon, which is initially capable of repeating the earlier states, to which the watery substance is added. When the sun separates, what is heat and light goes out with it. The higher beings also depart with the fine essences. What has become watery emerges as the moon and becomes denser and denser, becoming a kind of secondary planet. So at that time we had warmth, light, and water on the moon. Human beings have their etheric or light body as on the sun; what is new and added on the moon is what we can call sound or tone. To help you imagine this better, let me give you an example. Think of a metal plate covered with dust over which a violin bow is drawn: the dust arranges itself into certain figures, the sound figures of the physicist. What we recognize today as sound is the physical manifestation of sound. The water on the moon was permeated by sound and was thus set in regular motion. The physical body of beings thus enters into an inner experience on the moon; limbs form in shape, for example, the liver; but this passes away again. It is a formation and dissolution of organs, an experience in figures and rhythms. This makes the bodies ripe to take in the astral substance. The Bible expresses this striking of the primordial tone into the watery substance: God ordered everything according to measure, number, and weight. The essential, the new aspect of the Moon's development is thus the inner earthquake that strikes into physical matter. You must think of the ancient Moon as permeated by this inner earthquake, ordered in a regular numerical rhythm. In earlier times, on Saturn, it was heat-like formations that formed the human body; later, on the old Sun, it was air-like formations, appearing like a mirage, like a Fata Morgana. On the Moon, the substance is now watery, undulating, set in motion by an inner earthquake. Internally transforming structures arose from these tremors, through which the human body was permeated. You must think of this as a temporary becoming and passing away: thus, a liver or a lung was formed in the human body and then dissolved again. Such were the conditions on the old moon. The Bible expresses this as follows: God once ordered everything according to number, measure, and weight. This refers to the inner convulsion. Within the old moon, the earlier structures of the human body now arise again, and the physical and etheric bodies are formed once more. Why? Because on the old moon, the repetition of Saturn and the sun takes place first; only then did the actual old moon come into being. Into the physical human body, which now contained water on the one hand and was permeated by the primordial sound and the etheric body on the other, the spirits of movement, called powers or dynamis, now flow in and form the human astral body. Just as the spirits of will sacrificed themselves on Saturn and the spirits of wisdom on the Sun, so now they sacrifice the human astral body out of their own substance. Thus, the Earth is in a state of continuous, progressive development, and so is the human being who inhabits it.

[ 16 ] You have seen how the physical body developed on Saturn. Through the three transformations — Saturn, Sun, Moon — it has now become such that it has reached the third stage of perfection. This human physical body now comes even closer to its present form on the Moon. Its further development, which was necessary for its astral body, could not have been achieved by human beings on Earth unless a separation had taken place at a certain point in time. A basic substance of the planet, the old Moon, remains behind, and a part emerges which then surrounds the basic substance, orbiting the body of its basic substance. Now we have, first, Saturn; second, the sun; third, the moon. The best of the substances and beings has now separated into a fundamental body. It emerges from it as the sun in our Earth time and stands higher in rank than a planet; it becomes a fixed star. And another body separates from it, which remains a planet. Today's sun also first became a sun; it was once a planet. If you were to mix today's sun, today's moon, and our earth in their substance and essence in a large pot, you would have the old sun; if you mixed the earth and the moon together, you would have the old moon.

[ 17 ] In the course of human evolution, our sun thus separates from the planet earth. With it, the best substances and beings leave the Earth. The watery element, which becomes denser and denser, moves toward the sun. The dense forms are the carriers of the beings that inhabit the old moon; humans now choose a place of separation for themselves. A fixed star, a sun, always comes into being through a kind of advancement of a planet. During this development of humanity, it was not only humans who were present and developed in such a way that they had integrated the three bodies, the physical body, the etheric body, and the astral body. There were also beings who had remained behind.

[ 18 ] The humans who had passed through their human stage on the moon were the angels, called Angeloi in Christian esotericism and also lunar Pitris in India. These people had a different consciousness than people today. But there were also other beings on the old moon. There were certain archangels who had remained behind on the sun and now had to catch up on their stage of human development on the moon, and then there were beings who had only just reached the stage of personality spirits, i.e., the Saturn stage of humanity, on the old moon.

[ 19 ] The archangels who had remained on the sun formed human bodies that had only a physical and an etheric body. This was then a realm among humans, a realm that continued on earth as the animal kingdom; they are the precursors of the physical bodies of today's animal world. And such beings, which had only a physical body on the moon, are the precursors of today's plant kingdom. So there was a human kingdom, an animal kingdom, and a plant kingdom on the old moon. On Saturn there was only a human kingdom, on the sun there was a human kingdom and an animal kingdom, and on the moon we even have a human kingdom, an animal kingdom, and a plant kingdom. The mineral kingdom is the last of the kingdoms that arose in the entire cosmic evolution. Man is the oldest kingdom in human evolution; he was already there before the Earth existed. On Earth, he then receives, in addition to his three bodies, the fourth member of his being, the bearer of the I.