The Rudolf Steiner Archive

17. The Stages of our Earth's Development. The Lemurian, Atlantean, and post-Atlantean Epochs

[ 1 ] Yesterday, we came to the age known as the Lemurian epoch in the development of our Earth. At that time, a great cosmic event took place: the moon separated from the substance of our Earth. It was precisely this event that set the right pace for human development. At that time, our Earth was very different in shape and temperature from our Earth today. The temperature was much higher, so that human beings as we know them today could not have lived on this Earth. Its shape was also very different. Gradually, the Earth became denser, so that solid substances formed on its surface. And when we spoke yesterday of bodies becoming harder, this was not to be understood in a physical sense, but in terms of strength and quality. Certain substances dissolved. The whole Earth was in a fiery, liquid state and only gradually became more and more solid. However, this should not be understood as meaning that it became hard and thick in the physical sense of today, but rather in relation to strength and quality. These forces are such that they would have mummified human beings. From the fiery-liquid state of the earth, island-like formations then emerged, and the beings on them bore a distant resemblance to our present-day animals and plants. However, during the first half of the Lemurian epoch, human beings did not live directly on the earth, but in the sphere above the earth in a thin, fine physical body; they were more spiritual human beings. At the beginning of the Lemurian epoch, humans did not yet have their later physicality and did not consume food in its more solid form. Even at the end of Lemuria, you would not have found the forms of the human body, which had already become denser in substance, to be similar to today's bones. The substance of which the physical human body was composed was still soft and gelatinous, so that it differed little from the rest of the substance. Those souls who had descended to Earth too early took on this denser earthly substance in their bodies. The least spiritual people then lived on Earth, while the others still lived above the Earth.

[ 2 ] Only now, during the Lemurian period, does the first mineral sediment arise, so to speak, through the falling out of fine ash masses, fiery liquid metal masses. These masses form, as it were, the beginnings of islands. This is expressed more figuratively, but to the clairvoyant eye, this gradual condensation appears in this way. Then, out of this mass emerges what we can call the plant kingdom, and later the animal kingdom forms. It would take too long to tell you in detail how the physical gradually condenses. Everything really descends from higher spheres, even the condensing continents. But what we now call the human being initially remained, so to speak, in a sphere above the earth. Human beings lived there and formed their soft, delicate bodies in this soft sphere. The etheric and astral bodies were not yet so strongly connected to the physical body; they were still more free. But with the solidification of the physical body, which is now becoming denser and denser, the connection with the etheric body and astral body also became closer, and human beings, who had been floating, floating beings, now became beings who entered the earth.

[ 3 ] During this time, a very important influence came into play in human beings. What would have happened to human beings without this influence? They would have remained beings without initiative, without inner independence, for a long, long time. They would have remained automatons, drawn by higher spiritual beings and their forces. Spiritual forces from spiritual beings flowed continuously into the physical body, etheric body, and astral body. Among these beings there were also those who preferred to work in the astral body and who themselves were backward in their development: these are the Luciferic beings. They pulled human beings down to the physical plane even more quickly than the good spiritual beings who were normal in their development.

[ 4 ] The Luciferic beings were spirits who should actually have completed their work on the Moon. Had they exerted their influence on human beings there, they could only have acted on the astral body, for that was the highest member of the human being on the Moon. But they could not do that on the Moon because they were retarded beings. And they could not act on the I, for they had not learned how to do that on the Moon. Now the Luciferic beings had progressed to the point where they were able to influence the astral body of human beings. But human beings had advanced in the meantime and had integrated their ego. The Luciferic beings could not yet influence the ego; higher beings influenced the ego, and also the astral body, but only through the ego. They did not allow themselves to work directly on the astral body, so to speak; that was a task that these higher beings had already fulfilled during the lunar evolution. If the Luciferic beings had not gained influence over human beings, the higher beings would have worked alone on the astral body through the ego, thereby purifying the astral body. Instead, during the Lemurian period, the Luciferic beings acted directly on the astral body from all sides, and as a result, the human astral body was exposed to all the influences that should have already come to an end on the moon. This implanted certain instincts, desires, and passions in human beings that they would not have received if the higher beings had acted on them alone. The gods would simply not have allowed these influences to enter. Human beings received two things through the Luciferic influence: First, they could be inflamed with a certain rage, a certain enthusiasm, an excitement to do this or that; but this enthusiasm was not directed by their ego, nor was it influenced by the higher beings within them. Second, they received the possibility of falling away from the higher beings, of doing evil, but also the possibility of freedom. Thus, initiative, enthusiasm, and freedom were what humans owed to the Luciferic beings, but at the same time, the possibility of evil arose within them. In this way, the Luciferic beings crept into the astral body of humans and are basically still there today, for it is they who, on the one hand, make humans free and, on the other hand, lead them to evil. Because the human astral body was permeated by the Luciferic beings, humans were brought down from the atmosphere above the Earth too early. The Luciferic beings are essentially to blame for this. They corrupted the human astral body, causing it to become densified too soon; otherwise it would have remained for a long time in the atmosphere that is called paradise in the Bible. So the expulsion from paradise happened through the influence of the gods. Imagine the Earth in its fiery state and then humans being brought down too early by the Luciferic beings to the Earth, where continents were just forming. At that time, the astral body of man still had a much greater influence on his environment; man had greater magical powers than later; there was not yet such a strict separation between natural law and human will. Today, an evil person could not do anything special in this regard. Nothing would happen in nature today as a result of his actions. At that time, it was different. Evil desires in the soul of man had a visible magical effect on nature; they attracted the forces of fire to and upon the earth, and man inflamed the forces of nature through his evil desires, his magical will. Today, there are no longer flashes of lightning as a result of this; but at that time, fire flashed through the air when people became evil.

[ 5 ] Now, because masses of people became evil and man gave himself over too much to the influence of Luciferic beings, tending toward evil, the forces of fire were inflamed on the continents of Lemuria, and Lemuria was destroyed by the raging masses of fire, by the wickedness of a large part of its inhabitants. Those who were saved went west to a continent that was located between present-day Africa, Europe, and America, called Atlantis. Human development continued there for long, long periods of time. Gradually, humanity multiplied again, and the souls that had gone to Jupiter, Mars, and so on during the period of desolation descended to this continent. This took a long time. And so the racial concepts developed in ancient Atlantis. In occultism, it is said that in ancient Atlantis there were people whose bodies were inhabited by souls that had previously been on Mars, Jupiter, Venus, and so on. They were called Martians, Jupiterians, and so on. The external forms of their bodies also differed from one another as a result. Throughout the first half of Atlantis, the human body was still made of a much softer mass; it yielded to the forces of the soul. These soul forces were much stronger than today and controlled and shaped the physical body. A person from ancient Atlantis could have broken a railroad track with ease, not because their physical strength was very great, for they had not even developed their skeletal system, but because of their magical psychic powers. A shotgun pellet, for example, would have bounced off this psychic force. The density of the physical matter only developed later. We still find a similar phenomenon today in certain lunatics who, through the release of strong psychic forces — because in this state the physical body is not in the right connection with the higher bodies — can lift and throw heavy objects.

[ 6 ] Because the physical body was still soft in Atlantis, it could more easily adapt to the soul processes; the physical form could become smaller or larger. For example, if the people of Atlantis were stupid or sensual, etc., they fell, so to speak, into matter and became giants in stature. The more spiritual people were more finely structured and smaller in stature, while the stupid ones were large. The outer form in its soft matter was much, much more attuned to the soul forces than it is today, where matter has become rigid. The bodies were therefore formed according to the characteristics of the soul, which is why the races were so different.

[ 7 ] When myths and legends describe dwarfs as clever and giants as stupid, we see a deep occult trait reflected in this. When such a soul came down to Earth from Mars, the qualities it was related to there continued to influence it and the body it inhabited for a long time. This fact explains the differences and peculiarities between the races.

[ 8 ] If human evolution had continued until the middle of the Atlantic epoch without the influence of Lucifer, humans would have developed a highly lucid image consciousness by that time. There would have been something in his soul that would have revealed the outer world to him in inner images through its power; he would not have perceived external objects through his eyes. Through the influence of Lucifer, however, man saw the physical world earlier, but not correctly; he sees the outer world as if through a veil. The divine spiritual beings had intended for him to develop in such a way that, instead of perceiving the inner world in images through a dull clairvoyant consciousness, he would have perceived the outer world, but in such a way that behind every sense perception there is a spiritual reality. He would have seen the real spirit behind the physical world. With one blow—please do not take this literally, it would have taken some time—without Lucifer, the outer world would have appeared to man at a certain time; he would have awakened. The inner world would have suddenly disappeared, but the consciousness of the spirit from which it originated would have remained. Man would have seen not only plants, animals, and so on, but at the same time also the spirit from which they grew. Because the Luciferic beings pulled man down to earth too early, the outer world has become such that the world of the spirit behind it is hidden from man, and he sees the physical as opaque; otherwise he would see through it to the spiritual foundation of the world. Because humans descended into matter too early, this matter became too dense for them. They could no longer penetrate it. But other spiritual beings that had remained behind were able to mix themselves into this matter from the middle of the Atlantean period onwards, so that it became clouded, as if filled with smoke, and humans could no longer see the spiritual. These are the Ahrimanic or Mephistophelean beings. Mephistopheles-Ahriman is something different from Lucifer. Through a falsehood—Zarathustra calls him a liar—he clouds the pure human spirit and hides the spiritual from it. Ahriman follows Lucifer; he teaches human beings the illusion that matter is something in itself. Thus, in his progress, while the divine-spiritual beings sought to influence him, man allowed two other influences to act upon him: Lucifer, who attacks man from within, in the astral body, and seeks to mislead him, and Ahriman, who works from outside, making man believe something, presenting the outer world to him as Maya, as matter. We must address Lucifer as the spirit that is active within, while Ahriman is the spirit that spreads matter like a veil over the spiritual and makes it impossible to recognize the spiritual world. And these two spirits hold human beings back in their development toward spirituality. It was the Ahrimanic influence in particular that asserted itself in human beings and caused part of the earth to perish: Atlantis.

[ 9 ] In Lemuria, humans exerted a very strong influence on nature with their magical powers. For example, they could control fire. The Atlanteans were no longer able to do this. But they could control with their will the seed forces, in which deep secrets are hidden, the forces of air and water; fire had been taken from them. Let us realize that when we look at a locomotive today, which man has built and now controls, something completely different is at work. Man today understands how to harness the forces hidden in coal and transform them into a propulsive force. This process means that he controls the lifeless, mineral force that dwells within it; but the Atlanteans controlled the life force itself that dwells in the seed. Imagine that the force that, as a living force, causes the stalk to sprout from the earth could be drawn out of the seed by the Atlanteans and made usable. In their magazines, where the Atlanteans kept their vehicles, they stored huge quantities of seeds, just as we have coal stores today. And with the power stored in them, they moved their vehicles forward. When the clairvoyant looks back to that time, he sees these vehicles near the earth in the even denser air, the denser atmosphere, rising and moving with a kind of steering mechanism. The Atlanteans mastered these living forces. However, it is now inconceivable to imagine that such forces, which are in plants, i.e., spiritual forces, can be used magically without simultaneously affecting the forces of air and water. And when the will of the Atlanteans became evil and they used these soul forces for selfish purposes, they simultaneously called upon the forces of water and air, unleashed them, and thus the ancient Atlantis was destroyed. The continents were created through the interaction of the elements and human beings. Now, however, the Ahrimanic influence gradually became so strong that human beings could no longer see the spiritual. They could no longer recognize anything behind physical matter other than the mineral, the inorganic, and thus the magical powers of human beings gradually disappeared.

[ 10 ] In the Atlantean age, human beings were able to control the life force. In the Lemurian era, it was one of the powers of human beings to control the animal seed forces, and it even came to pass that human beings, the Lemurians, used these animal seed forces to transform animal forms into human ones. Every such magical effect of human beings on the seed forces is connected with an influence, a unleashing of the fire forces. When such will becomes evil, the worst forces of black magic are unleashed and invoked. And even today, the worst forces on earth are unleashed by black magicians who misuse such powers, which are generally withheld from humanity. These are powerful and sacred forces that can be used in the wise hands of worthy leaders for the highest and purest service to humanity.

[ 11 ] Man is now gradually losing the ability to shape his body. Cartilage and bones, the hard parts, are becoming integrated, and man is becoming more and more similar to his present form. What has been described above only happened in the Atlantean era. It is therefore understandable that the ancient Atlanteans cannot be found by researchers. The hope of scholars to find traces of such ancient times of human development will never be fulfilled, for man was then a being whose parts were still soft in substance. Such a body cannot be preserved, just as nothing will be found of today's mollusks after a hundred years. Animal remains can still be found from such ancient periods, because animals were already hardened when humans were still soft. Animals entered matter too early; they could not wait. The earliest human forms, which became physical too early, gave rise to the most stunted human formations. The noblest remained at the top the longest, remaining soft; they waited until they no longer fell into a time when they would have had to remain at a stage of hardening, as was the case with animals. Animals remained at a rigid, hardened stage because they could not wait.

[ 12 ] We have described the development of the earth up to the point where the forces of water were unleashed and the ancient Atlantis was destroyed. The people who saved themselves from Atlantis migrated to America on the one hand, and to what is now Europe, Asia, and Africa on the other. These migrations, great migratory movements, took place over long periods of time.

[ 13 ] Now let us take another look at the ancient Atlantean culture. In the earliest Atlantean period, human beings possessed powerful magical forces. With these forces, they controlled the powers of seeds, controlled the forces of nature, and were still able to see into the spiritual world to a certain extent. Gradually, clairvoyance fell dormant, because human beings were supposed to establish the Earth's culture; they were supposed to truly descend to Earth. Thus, at the end of Atlantis, there were two types of people within all the peoples and races: first, clairvoyants, great magicians who stood at the height of Atlantean culture and who could work through magical powers and see into the spiritual world. Alongside them were those who were preparing to found the present human race. They already had the predisposition for the abilities of present-day human beings. They could no longer achieve anything in the sense of the ancient Atlanteans, but they prepared the intelligence and the power of judgment. They possessed the beginnings of arithmetic, counting, combining, and so on. They were the ones who developed today's intelligence, but they no longer used the magical powers that the ancient Atlantean magicians had used at a time when their application was already dangerous because of the great Ahrimanic influence. They were the “others,” the despised ones, much like today's theosophists who unite in small conventicles, or like the first Christians in ancient Rome who gathered in catacombs.

[ 14 ] Now, in Atlantis there were also powerful centers of culture and worship—we will call them the Atlantean oracles—where what is known as Atlantean wisdom was cultivated. Since the souls of human beings were different, having descended from different heavenly bodies, there had to be different oracle sites for different kinds of people. There was a Mars oracle, a Jupiter oracle, a Venus oracle, and so on. Such oracles existed. They were leading places of worship where the initiates, the wise men up to a certain level, the Mars race, the Jupiter race, and so on, guided and directed. But all these oracles were in turn guided by a more powerful oracle, the Sun Oracle. This was the leading mystery center from which culture emanated for the others. In addition, all Mars people were guided by the place where the initiate of the Mars oracle lived with his disciples; all Mercury souls by the Mercury oracle, all Jupiter souls by the Jupiter oracle, and so on. But all these oracle sites were subject to the great initiate of the Sun Oracle.

[ 15 ] This great leader of the Sun Oracle, the greatest initiate of Atlantis, directed his attention everywhere to those strata of people who differed from the common population of ancient Atlantis. These were simple people who no longer possessed any magical powers; the great initiate gathered these despised people who had developed new abilities, albeit primitive ones, and from whom an understanding of the new era could be expected. He took the good material for the future, including those old initiates or magicians who did not cling selfishly to the old ways. We can compare our present time, which offers a similar picture to that of Atlantis, with the time back then. Today, too, there are those who set the tone in the prevailing culture, who are magicians of a kind, working only with the inorganic, and on the other hand there are those who are despised, who want to work for the future, even today. Back then, in Atlantis, the members of their culture, the old magicians, also looked down with contempt on the small number of people who had developed the new ability within themselves, an ability that was of no use in ancient Atlantis. Only the great initiate of the Sun Oracle did not despise them. And so today, the great bearers of our culture look down on a small group of people, the theosophists, who gather in small conventicles and do all sorts of crazy things, who are generally laymen and who are supposed to bring about the future. They are the people who are developing and preparing within themselves a capacity that seems useless to others, but which is suitable for creating a connection with the spiritual world again, based on a sense of the future. Back then in Atlantis, the task was to find the connection with the physical world, with the senses; today, the task is to rediscover the spiritual. And just as in those days the old initiates gathered their followers locally and sent out their call to the despised and the simple, so today, under different conditions, a call is going out, not locally, from the great masters of wisdom, who are pouring a certain spiritual treasure of wisdom into humanity. And those who are predisposed to do so in a certain way follow this call, just as those in former times were predisposed to develop the primitive qualities of calculation, counting, and so on. These teachings are not given merely to enable the intellect to grasp theosophical dogmas, but to enable the heart to grasp them. This gives one the power to know why Theosophy is here today. It is here to meet a great demand of human evolution. And those who know this also find the strength to overcome resistance, whatever may come; they follow their path because they know that what must happen must happen through Theosophy for the further development of humanity on the spiritual path.

[ 16 ] The great initiate of the Sun Oracle led the small group and formed a kind of cultural center in Asia. He drew these people to himself in a certain way so that they could establish the post-Atlantean culture. During the great migrations, everything that had been created in Atlantis had been thrown together and mixed up. Therefore, in the post-Atlantean period, one should no longer speak of races, but of cultures.

[ 17 ] Now let us consider the cultures that followed one another in the post-Atlantean period. The first culture is the ancient Indian culture. A strange mixture of peoples had survived the Atlantean catastrophe and gathered together in ancient India. The people who lived there still had the deepest, most eminent longing for the spiritual world, from which they knew they had been born and which they had now lost. The great initiate of the Sun Oracle sent the seven holy Rishis there. The Indians felt this with painful longing: the sensory world is false, only the world from which we descended, the spiritual world, is true. It was therefore easy for the holy Rishis to teach what they had to say about the wisdom of the primordial world and the mysteries to those who still had a longing for the spiritual world within them. Maya, or illusion, the great deception, was the sensory world for the ancient Indians.

[ 18 ] It was already a different spirit that reigned in the second post-Atlantean culture, the ancient Persian culture. Western thinking and Western research in the physical realm are learning to recognize that this physical world, this world built according to such harmonious laws, is worthy of being penetrated by the spirit. The people of Zarathustra were a people who had an inkling of this. Anyone who knows this ancient Persian people will be able to distinguish precisely between them and the people of India. Maya, illusion, was everything that surrounded them; only the spiritual world, imbued with the highest Self, was true and desirable to them. With such a mindset, it was impossible to conquer the physical world. This was only possible with the culture of Zarathustra, the great disciple of the great initiate of the Sun Oracle. He knew and taught that the outer world is not Maya, but the expression of a divine spirit, that behind it lies what Ahriman had concealed from human beings. This, which lies behind the sensory world, had to be revealed. This is what Zarathustra works toward: finding the spirit in the sensory world. That is his mission. In Ormuzd and Ahriman, light and darkness stand opposed to each other.

[ 19 ] In the third epoch, the Egyptian-Chaldean-Assyrian-Babylonian, humans had already found more connection to the physical world. In the mighty star writing of the firmament, he sees the deeds and wisdom of the gods engraved, and he turns his gaze upward and seeks to understand and fathom them. The wonderful star wisdom of the Chaldean priestly sages is a monument to this.

[ 20 ] The fourth culture, the Greek-Roman, brings man completely down to the physical plane. He has now grown so fond of it that he has completely forgotten where he came from. He has lost his understanding of the spiritual world. This is deeply reflected in the saying of the Greek hero Achilles: Better to be a beggar in the upper world than a king in the realm of shadows. The wonderful sculptures of the Greeks and the Roman citizens are the characteristic features of this culture. The fifth culture is ours. Materialism and the department store have left their mark on it.

[ 21 ] The meaning of all these cultures is that more and more of the physical plane is being conquered by human beings, and two currents, two basic moods, are expressed in the cultures that have survived to this day. Today, the Eastern and Western worlds, with their views and emotional currents, stand opposite each other. The Eastern world calls the physical plane Maja or illusion, and it does not want to become entangled with it in its thinking, actions, and emotional life. Working into this sensory world, laying hands on it, is the principle of the Western worldview. Outwardly, this may lead to a collision, but each has its full justification. May the Western world work its way into the outer culture and thus unfold the powers of the soul, and may the Eastern world go its own way: the summit will bring them both together.

[ 22 ] Thus we have the Indian, who leads a spiritual life within himself, turned away from the outer sensory world, and the Persian, who still sees something hostile in matter, but is already working the spirit into it. We have the Egyptian who studies their laws, the Chaldean who sees in the course of the stars the handwriting of God in space, who reveres the wisdom of the stars as an expression of divine-spiritual beings. Before us stands the Greek, who understood how to imprint on matter itself the ideal of beauty and perfection that nature had created; with him came the time when we could marvel at the marriage between spirit and matter in the physical wonders of art. A deep occult background should be mentioned here. Consider the Greek temple in its magnificent purity and beauty: God truly dwells within it. The essential difference between these works of architecture and sculpture and those of other cultural epochs is that the Greek temple, in its pure form, is so high in the perfection of its lines from a purely architectural and artistic point of view that nothing can equal it. If the soul delves into it—you can still perceive this in the ruins of the temple at Paestum—and contemplates a Doric temple, an Ionic temple, and has something within itself that is called spatial awareness, it senses how these lines are literally poured into space. You know that certain currents exist in space. Using the necessity of these currents, representing them physically, the Greek temple takes shape. What it already finds in space, the Greek creates in space. In the Greek temple, the main thing is that God himself is inside; the Gothic cathedral belongs to the faithful community. The Greek temple is a whole in itself; the Gothic cathedral with its pointed arches is only conceivable with the congregation, whose devoutly folded hands reflect its forms and together with it form a whole. In the Greek temple, spirituality was truly present; it gave spirit beings an opportunity to descend and take up residence there.

[ 23 ] But in this age, which understood so well how to adorn the earth with such marvels, people increasingly lost their connection with the spiritual world. The physical world was light and bright for human beings, but when they passed through death, the spiritual world was desolate, cold, and dark for them during the Greek-Latin culture. Humans had conquered the physical world in the post-Atlantean era, but in the spiritual world it was sad and gloomy for them, and even the initiates, who are teachers of humanity here and there, could offer no comfort. For when they told those who were in the life between death and a new birth about what was happening in the physical world, those human souls became even more unhappy, because they were attached with every fiber of their souls to this sensual world that had now been taken from them. A change also occurred here through the event of Golgotha and the appearance of Christ Jesus on earth. After his death on the cross, he descended into the underworld—this is called the descent into hell—and he also proclaimed to those who no longer lived in the physical body that life had truly conquered death. This gave the souls the opportunity to ascend again into the spiritual world.