The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Sixth Lecture

[ 1 ] Yesterday we saw how the facts of the cosmos emerge from the spiritual life of the beings that stand above humanity. And in particular, a phenomenon such as the one we were able to cite at the end yesterday—the conflict in the heavens, which, so to speak, left so many corpses on the battlefield between Jupiter and Mars that they are still being discovered today by physical science in ever-increasing numbers as asteroids—precisely such a phenomenon must be of very special importance to us. And we will have to return to it; we will see how this phenomenon in the heavens is also reflected in certain processes of Earth’s development, and we will find the earthly reflection of this conflict in the heavens right at the beginning of the Bhagavad Gita.

[ 2 ] Today, however, we shall continue our discussion by first providing a brief outline of the other beings of the spiritual hierarchies, to which we have already alluded but which we omitted yesterday. These are the beings who, strictly speaking, are closest to the human being as we ascend from the human level; those referred to in Christian esotericism as angels, archangels, and primordial principles or primordial forces—that is, Angeloi, Archangeloi, and Archai. According to anthroposophical literature, the archangels may also be called fire spirits, and the primordial principles we may also call spirits of personality.

[ 3 ] These beings, who stand, so to speak, in between human beings and those spiritual beings—whose influence we demonstrated yesterday extends to Jupiter, Mars, and so on—naturally also have a closer relationship with human beings on Earth itself. First, we have the Angeloi, or angels. They passed through their human stage during the ancient lunar evolution; thus, during our present-day Earth evolution, they have essentially reached only as far as human beings will have reached during their Jupiter evolution. They stand one stage above human beings. What, then, is the actual task of these spiritual beings? We will be able to grasp this task when we consider the evolution of human beings on Earth.

[ 4 ] Human beings evolve from one incarnation to the next. The way human evolution is currently unfolding, it extends back through the ancient Atlantean era and the Lemurian era, and actually began in the ancient Lemurian era. And this development through incarnations will continue for quite some time yet, until near the end of Earth’s evolution, when other forms of human development will then take their place. Now you know, of course, that what we call the actual eternal core of the human being—the individuality—continues from incarnation to incarnation. But you also know that for the vast majority of people today, there is still no awareness of life in previous incarnations, that people today do not yet remember what took place within them in previous incarnations. Only those who have developed to a certain degree of clairvoyance look back into their previous incarnations.

[ 5 ] What connection would there be between the incarnations of a human being on Earth who does not yet remember his past lives, were it not for certain beings who, so to speak, link the individual incarnations together and watch over the progression from one incarnation to the next? For every human being, we must assume the existence of an entity which, by being one level higher than the human being, transmits the individuality from one incarnation to the next. Mind you, these are not the entities that govern karma, to which we will return later; these are simply watchful entities that, so to speak, preserve the memory from one incarnation to the next, as long as the human being cannot do so themselves. And these entities are precisely the Angeloi or angels. So that we can say: Every human being is a personality in every incarnation, but watching over every human being is a being whose consciousness passes from incarnation to incarnation. This is precisely what makes it possible, for certain lower degrees of initiation, for a human being—even if he himself knows nothing yet of his previous incarnations—to have the opportunity to ask his angel. This is entirely possible for certain lower degrees of initiation. Thus, we may say: The beings who, as Angeloi, stand one step higher than human beings, are charged with keeping watch over the entire thread of humanity that is spun for the individual soul from incarnation to incarnation. Now we ascend to the next group of beings, to the Archangels, Archangeloi, to the spirits of fire, as we also call them. These beings do not concern themselves with the individual human being, with the individual soul, but have a more comprehensive task: they bring the life of the individual and the life of larger human contexts—such as peoples, races, and so on—into a harmonious order. Within the course of Earth’s evolution, the archangels have the task, so to speak, of bringing the soul of the individual into a certain connection with what we call the national soul and the racial soul. For those who delve into spiritual knowledge, national souls and racial souls are something quite different from what they are for the abstract thinkers of modern science or modern education in general. In any given territory—say, in Germany, France, or Italy—there live so many people, and because these abstract thinkers see only so many people as external forms with their inner eyes, they can conceive of what is called the national spirit or national soul only as a purely conceptual summary of the people. For them, only the individual human being is truly real, not the national soul, not the national spirit. For those who look into the true workings of spiritual life, what we call the national soul or national spirit is a reality. What we call a fire spirit or an archangel lives and works within a national soul. It thus regulates, so to speak, the relationship of the individual human being to the totality of a people or a race.

[ 6 ] And then we come to the beings we refer to as spirits of personality, as primordial beginnings, primordial forces, Archai. These are even higher beings; they have an even higher task in the context of humanity. They essentially govern the earthly conditions of the entire human race on Earth, and they live in such a way that, through the waves of time, they change from epoch to epoch in a very specific way, assuming, so to speak, a different spiritual body. They all, in turn, are familiar with something that for the abstract thinkers of our modern education is actually merely a concept, but which is a reality for those who look into spiritual reality: it is what one might call, using a rather ugly expression of our time, the “zeitgeist.” They are concerned with what constitutes the meaning and mission of an epoch of humanity. Just think for a moment that we can indeed describe the meaning and mission, for example, of the first millennia immediately following the Atlantean catastrophe. These time spirits encompass something that goes beyond the individual people, beyond the individual race. The spirit of an epoch is not limited to this or that people; it transcends the boundaries of peoples. Now, what is actually called the spirit of the age, the spirit of an epoch, is the spiritual body of the Archai, the Primordial Beings, or the Spirits of Personality. It is to these Spirits of Personality, for example, that we owe the fact that very specific human personalities appear on our Earth during certain epochs. Surely you understand that earthly tasks must first be solved by earthly personalities. In a very specific epoch, this or that epoch-defining personality had to appear. But a strange confusion would arise in the entire development of the Earth if all this were left to chance, if, for example, Luther or Charlemagne were placed in just any epoch. This must be considered in connection with the entire development of humanity across the Earth; the right soul must, so to speak, emerge from the spirit of the entire development of the Earth in a specific epoch. This is governed by the spirits of personality; this is governed by the Archai or Primordial Beings.

[ 7 ] And then, when we rise above the very beginnings, we come to those beings we touched upon just yesterday—the so-called Powers, the Exusiai, whom we also call the Spirits of Form. There, however, we encounter tasks that already extend beyond the Earth. In the development of humanity, we distinguish a Saturn phase, a Sun phase, a Moon phase, an Earth phase, a Jupiter phase, a Venus phase, and a Vulcan phase. We have now seen that everything that happens within the Earth itself is governed by angels for the individual human being, by archangels for the connection of the individual human being with large masses of people; for the entire development of humanity from the Lemurian era up to the time when humanity will once again be so spiritualized that it will scarcely belong to the Earth anymore, everything is governed by the Spirits of Personality. But now something else must be governed: humanity must be guided from one planetary state to another. There must also be spiritual beings who, throughout the entire development of the Earth, ensure that when Earth’s development is complete, humanity can once again pass through a Pralaya in the proper manner and find the path to the next goal, the Jupiter goal. These are the Powers or Spirits of Form. Yesterday we characterized their task from above; now we characterize them from below. Those spirits who ensure that, so to speak, all of humanity is guided from one planetary state to another—these are the Powers, Exusiai, or Spirits of Form.

[ 8 ] Now we must gain some insight into the place these beings occupy in the world. In spiritual science—in what is to be continued today as anthroposophy, that is, essentially in the wisdom of the mysteries—these various beings of the spiritual hierarchies have always been spoken of in the same way as has just been done before you. We saw yesterday that present-day Saturn marks the point up to which the Thrones have worked, that Jupiter marks the point up to which the Dominions have worked, and that Mars marks the point up to which the Powers, or Dynamis, or Virtutes have worked.

[ 9 ] Now let us also describe, in a similar manner, how the domains of the entities mentioned today are distributed spatially, so to speak, within our solar system. There is one point that must be addressed which may cause some surprise even among you, who are already prepared in a certain sense, but which nevertheless corresponds entirely to the truth. You see, in today’s school lessons, people are told that from ancient times right up to Copernicus, there was a worldview regarding our solar system known as the Ptolemaic system. Back then, it was believed that the Earth stood at the center of our system, and that, as it roughly appears to the naked eye, the planets moved around the Earth. Since Copernicus, it is said, we have finally come to know what people did not know before, namely that the Sun is at the center and that the planets move in circles or ellipses around the Sun. Fine! But what, above all, should be made perfectly clear to people in such a description of our solar system—if one presents such a matter sincerely and honestly in today’s sense—is something else entirely. One should say: Up until Copernicus, people knew only certain forms of motion in the heavens, and based on that, they calculated what our solar system might be like; what Copernicus did was not, so to speak, to take a chair and sit out in outer space to watch how the Sun stands at some center of a circle or ellipse and the planets move around it, but rather he made a calculation, and this calculation explains what one sees more simply than earlier calculations. The Copernican system of the world is nothing other than a product of thought.

[ 10 ] Let us set aside what Ptolemy assumed. Let’s set up the calculation so that the Sun is at the center, determine where the positions of the individual planets must be, and then see if this agrees with empirical observation. Certainly, for purely physical observation, this initially agrees with empirical data. Of course, all sorts of cosmological systems, such as the Kant-Laplace model, were then built upon this. But with the ongoing discoveries, one got into a situation that, strictly speaking, is no longer entirely scientifically honest, for later two planets were added to the purely sensory observation—we have not yet touched upon them, but we will show later what they mean for our solar system: Uranus and Neptune. However, when describing this planetary system, one would have to draw people’s attention once again to the fact that these two, Uranus and Neptune, actually throw a huge wrench into the works.

[ 11 ] If one were to accept the Kant-Laplacean model of the solar system, then Uranus and Neptune, along with their moons, would have to move in the same way that, for example, the other moons orbit the other planets. But they do not do so; on the contrary, even among these outer planets, among these planets discovered later, there is one that behaves quite strangely. For, if the Kant-Laplacean system of the world is correct, someone would have had to, after all the planets had separated, rotate its axis so that it would be turned ninety degrees, since it follows a different orbit than the other planets. These two differ considerably from the other planets of our solar system. We will see later how things stand with them; for now, it should simply be noted that in the Copernican system one is dealing merely with a calculation, with something that was posited hypothetically, as a premise, at a time when one had completely turned away from an understanding of spiritual connections, from an observation of what spiritually underlies external events. But the old Ptolemaic system is not merely a physical system; it is a system that goes back to spiritual observation, when it was known that the planets are markers for certain spheres of influence of the higher beings. And one must map out the entire system of our planetary solar system differently if one now wishes to characterize these spheres of influence in a corresponding way. I will describe this planetary system to you as it has been explained in the Mysteries of Zarathustra. We could just as well consult other Mysteries, but we shall single out this particular system for the characterization of our solar system with its planets in relation to the spiritual beings active within this system.

[ 12 ] For in Zarathustra’s system, something was incorporated that differs from our observations of the heavens. As you know, one can observe a certain—call it apparent or otherwise—a certain progression of the sun through the zodiac over the course of many years. It is usually said—and this is correct—that since about the 8th century B.C.E., the sun rises in the spring at the vernal equinox in the zodiacal sign ^{1Here and in what follows, the term “signs” does not refer to the signs in the usual sense, but to the images.} of Aries; but every year the Sun moves a little further, so that over the course of very long periods of time, its rising point traverses the entire constellation of Aries. Before the year 800 BCE, it did not rise in Aries, but in Taurus; indeed, for about 2,200 years it rose in Taurus, thus traversing the entire zodiacal sign of Taurus with its vernal equinox. Even earlier, it rose in the zodiac sign of Gemini. Gemini was the vernal zodiacal star in the times that lie, therefore, 800 plus approximately 2,200 years before our era. So if we go back to the 4th and 5th millennia B.C., we must place the vernal equinox in the zodiacal sign of Gemini. But that was the time when the mysteries of Zarathustra flourished. They flourished far back into a gray antiquity, and when speaking of celestial phenomena, everything was calculated with reference to the constellation of Gemini. So that if we were to map out the zodiac, as we characterized it yesterday, we would have to draw the constellation of Gemini here above. We would then have to draw, immediately following the zodiac, that which delimits the domain of the Thrones, which thus has Saturn as its boundary marker. Then we come to delimiting, as we have said, the domain of those spiritual beings called the Dominions or Spirits of Wisdom; the outermost boundary is Jupiter. We then come to demarcate the domain of the Powers, also called the Spirits of Movement: this is the domain that has Mars as its boundary marker. We have seen that the battlefield left by the conflict in the heavens lies in between. But now, if we wish to properly demarcate the domains, we must draw that which has the Sun as its boundary marker. So, just as we mark Mars as the boundary up to which the domain of the Powers extends, we must mark the Sun itself as the boundary that designates the limit up to which the Powers or Spirits of Form extend. And now we come to the boundary that we designate by the mark of Venus. The domain of the Spirits of Personality, or Archai, extends up to Venus. Then we come to the sphere of influence that we designate with the mark of Mercury. So up to here, to Venus, extends the sphere of influence of the spirits of personality; up to here, to Mercury, extends the sphere of influence of those beings we call the archangels or fire spirits. And now we are already very close to the Earth. We can now designate the realm whose mark is the Moon, and we now come to drawing the Earth here.

[ 13 ] So you must imagine the Earth as the starting point, and imagine a sphere of influence around the Earth that extends to the Moon; then comes a sphere of influence that extends to Mercury, then one that extends to Venus, and then one that extends to the Sun. Now you will be surprised by the order of the individual planets, as I have presented them. If the Earth is here and the Sun is here, you would think that I should draw Mercury near the Sun here and Venus here. But that is not correct, for the two planets were confused in terms of their names by later astronomy. What is called Mercury today is called Venus in all ancient teachings, and what is called Venus today is called Mercury in all ancient teachings. So, mind you: One does not understand the ancient writings and the ancient teachings if one applies what is said there about Venus or Mercury to what is meant by those same names today. What is said about Venus must be applied to today’s Mercury, and what is said about Mercury to Venus, for these two designations were later confused with one another. When the world system was turned upside down, when the Earth was stripped of its central position, not only was the perspective changed, but Mercury and Venus were also swapped around with respect to the ancient designations.

[ 14 ] Now you will be able to easily reconcile what is recorded here with the physical world system. You need only think: Here is the Sun ☉, and Venus ♀ revolves around the Sun; further around the Sun revolves Mercury ☿, then the Earth ♁ with the Moon ☾; Mars ♂, Jupiter ♃, and then Saturn ♄ revolve around it. You must imagine the physical movements in such a way that each planet moves around the Sun. But you can still imagine a configuration in which, so to speak, the Earth stands here and the other planets have rotated so that they are behind the Sun on its path. So if I were to draw this, it would look like this: We sketch our usual physical system. We draw the Sun at one focus, and have Venus, Mercury, and Earth with its Moon orbiting the Sun: That is Earth, Mercury, and Venus according to the old designation; the next one following is Mars; the next, after the asteroids, is Jupiter; and then comes Saturn. Now imagine it this way: while the Earth is down there, then Mercury and Venus come, then Mars is up there, then Jupiter is there, and so on. Now you have the Sun, [today’s] Mercury, and today’s Venus here. Isn’t it true that since these planets assume all kinds of positions relative to one another, they can also be arranged like this at times (see drawing S5. 101, below). That will be plausible. Here the present physical system is drawn; only a single moment in time has been chosen where, when the Earth, Mercury, and Venus are on one side of the Sun, the other planets—Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn—are on the other side. That is drawn here; nothing else. Here are the Earth, Mercury, and Venus, and on the other side of the Sun are Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. So it is merely a change of perspective. This system is certainly conceivable, but only if this constellation is present. It was indeed present at a time when Gemini was above Saturn. At that time, one could observe the power structures of the spiritual hierarchies particularly well through clairvoyance. It then became apparent that the sphere of the angels extends all the way around the Earth to the Moon. Truly, if one does not take the physical system as the basis, but rather this peculiar constellation, then around the Earth is the circle of angels up to the Moon, then further on to Mercury is the circle of archangels, then up to Venus is the circle of the spirits of personality, up to the Sun first the circle of the Powers or Exusiai or spirits of form; then comes the circle, as I characterized it yesterday, of the Virtutes or Powers, then the circle of the Dominions, and then that of the Thrones (see drawing).

[ 15 ] So when we speak of the Copernican and Ptolemaic world systems, the point is to recognize that in the Ptolemaic system, something of the constellation of the ruling spirits has been left behind, and therefore we must take the Earth as the starting point of the perspective. A future will come when this world system will be correct again, because humanity will once more know about the spiritual world. Hopefully, people will then be less fanatical than they are today. Our present day says: The people before Copernicus all talked nonsense; they all had a primitive world system. Since Copernicus, we finally know the truth, and everything else is false, and this will remain so into the most infinite of times—even if it were millions of years—and naturally, because the Copernican system is the correct one, it will always be taught. - That is roughly how people today think and speak. There has hardly ever been a population as superstitious as today’s astronomical theorists, and there has hardly ever been such great fanaticism as that which currently prevails in this very field. Future generations will hopefully be more tolerant and will say: From the 15th and 16th centuries onward, people lost the awareness that there is a spiritual world and that in the spiritual world one has different perspectives, that one must arrange the celestial bodies differently there than when observing them merely physically. Before that, this awareness existed; afterward came the time when people viewed the arrangement of the celestial bodies only physically. Fine, that’s possible too, the people of the future will say; from the 16th century onward, that was quite correct. People had to set aside for a while everything that exists in the spiritual world, but then they came to their senses again, realizing that there is a spiritual world, and so they returned to the original spiritual perspective. - Hopefully, the people of the future will understand that astronomical mythology was once possible, not just other mythologies, and will not look upon our time with the same contempt as the people of the present, in their superstition, look upon their ancestors.

[ 16 ] We see, then, that the Copernican system of the world has become a different one simply because only physical observations were taken into account. Previously, spiritual insights had remained as remnants within the Ptolemaic world system. But only by taking this other world system into account can one even begin to form a conception of the rule and activity of spiritual beings within our solar-planetary system. Here we establish the spiritual relationships by saying: The angels reign up to the Moon, the archangels up to Mercury, the spirits of personality up to Venus, the principalities up to the Sun, and the powers up to Mars. Here then come the beings we call dominions, and here finally the thrones. We therefore need only draw other lines into the physical system; then, within these lines, we have delineated the spheres of dominion of the hierarchies. For spiritual forces, it is not our Sun that stands at the center of the system, but the Earth. That is why all eras in which the essence was placed in spiritual development have said: Certainly, the Sun is, for my sake, a more noble celestial body; on it are developed beings who stand higher than human beings; but what matters in development is the human being who lives on Earth. And if the Sun has separated, it has done so precisely so that humanity can continue to develop in the right way. Had the Sun remained united with the Earth, humanity would never have been able to progress at the right pace. This was only possible because the Sun departed along with those beings who can tolerate entirely different conditions. It left the Earth, so to speak, to itself, so that humanity could then set its own pace of development.

[ 17 ] A world system is one thing or another, depending on the starting point or perspective one chooses. If, within our world system, one asks where the center lies in relation to what the purely physical senses can perceive, then it is the Copernican world system! If one inquires about the arrangement of our solar system as it relates to the spheres of influence of the spiritual hierarchies, then we must still place the Earth at the center; this yields different boundaries, and the planets become something entirely different—namely, boundary markers for the spheres of influence of the individual spiritual hierarchies.

[ 18 ] And now you will easily be able to connect what has just been said about the spatial distribution of the individual spheres of influence with what was said earlier about the task and mission of the individual beings. Those entities that are closest to the Earth, that work, so to speak, in the immediate vicinity of the Earth up to the Moon, are the angels. From this realm, they guide the life of the individual soul as it passes from incarnation to incarnation. In contrast, it takes more to distribute entire masses of people on Earth in a corresponding manner and assign them their mission. A simple consideration can show you that the cosmos must be involved here. Isn’t it true that whether a population is predisposed in one way or another in its character really depends not merely on earthly but on cosmic conditions? Just consider that a race with different, let us say, skin and hair characteristics has a different effect than another race—cosmic conditions are at work here, conditions that must be regulated from the heavens. This occurs from a sphere of influence that extends as far as Mercury, to the boundary of the Archangels’ sphere of activity. And then, when the whole of humanity, as it develops on Earth, is to be guided and directed, this must come from an even wider region of space, from a region of space that extends all the way up to Venus. But when the task of the Earth itself is to be guided and directed, this must come from the center of the entire system.

[ 19 ] I have told you: Humanity evolves through Saturn, the Sun, the Moon, Earth, Jupiter, Venus, and Vulcan. The beings of the spiritual hierarchy who direct humanity’s mission from one planet to another are the Powers, the Spirits of Form. They must be in a chosen place; they are such that their sphere of influence extends all the way up to the Sun. The Sun was already there as a special body alongside the old Moon; it is now there again alongside the Earth, and will also be alongside Jupiter. Its sphere of influence extends beyond the individual planets. Therefore, the existence of the Sun must be connected with those spiritual beings whose sphere of influence also extends beyond the individual planets. In this respect, then, the Sun is indeed an exceptional body in that its sphere of influence extends beyond the individual planets. Thus you see that we actually find the outer sphere of space, the outer dwelling place of the hierarchies, not so much on the individual planets as in the spheres delimited by the planets as by boundaries. If you imagine the entire sphere from Earth to the Moon, it is filled with the activity of angels, and the sphere from Earth to Mercury is filled with the activity of the archangels, and so on.

[ 20 ] So we are dealing with spheres of space, and the planets are the markers, the boundary stones for these spatial manifestations of the higher beings. We see, then, that there is, so to speak, a continuous line of perfection to be traced upward from humanity. Human beings themselves are bound to the Earth; that which, as the eternal self, passes from one incarnation to the next is guided by beings who are not only bound to the Earth, but who traverse the air sphere and what lies above it, all the way to the Moon—and so on upward.

[ 21 ] Now, humanity on our Earth has been in the process of development since time immemorial, and the situation regarding humanity in its entire development on Earth is just like the relationship between a small child and an adult: the latter teaches the small child. The same is true of the hierarchies in the universe. Human beings, who are bound to the Earth, can only gradually work their way up to the knowledge they need and the skills they require on Earth. The higher beings must teach them. What must happen for this purpose? In the early days of earthly existence, such beings—who are not otherwise bound to the Earth—must descend from the higher spheres. And this truly happens! Beings who would otherwise only need to live in the vicinity of the Earth must descend in order to impart to humanity what they already know as the older, more perfect members of the hierarchy. They must incarnate in human bodies—not for their own development, for they have no need of that—just as an adult does not learn the ABCs for his own development, but so that he can teach them to children. Thus we look back to the Atlantean and Lemurian eras, when beings belonging to the sphere surrounding the Earth descend from that sphere, incarnate in human bodies, and become teachers of humanity. These are beings who belong to the higher hierarchies, those of Mercury and Venus; the Sons of Venus and Mercury descend and become the teachers of young humanity. So that among this young humanity there are such people who actually represent Maya in their walk upon the Earth. Such people existed. Let us say, to characterize them clearly: A normally developed human being of the Lemurian era encountered such another human being. Outwardly, he did not look much different from the others, but a spirit had, as it were, entered into him, whose realm extended as far as Mercury or Venus. Thus, the outward appearance of such a human being actually represented a Maya, an illusion. He looked just like the other people, but was something entirely different: a son of Mercury or a son of Venus. This phenomenon certainly existed in the dawn of human evolution. The sons of Mercury and Venus descended and walked among humanity in such a way that they now also possessed, inwardly, the character of the beings of Mercury and Venus. We have said that the beings of Venus are the spirits of the personality. Such beings walked the earth as human beings who, outwardly, were strictly limited human personalities, but who, in their immense power, guided humanity. These were the great power structures of the Lemurian era, when the Sons of Venus guided all of humanity. The Sons of Mercury guided parts of humanity; they were as powerful as those we now call national or racial spirits.

[ 22 ] Maya, or illusion, exists not only in the world in general, but also in relation to human beings. The human being standing before us may appear such that his outward appearance is a truth, that his exterior corresponds exactly to his soul; or, on the other hand, it is a Maya: In truth, they have a task that corresponds to the task of a son of Mercury or Venus. This is what is meant when it is said that, fundamentally, the leading individualities of ancient times, as they walked the earth, represent a Maya with their ordinary names, and this is what H. P. Blavatsky meant when she pointed out that the Buddhas represent a Maya. You can find this word yourself in *The Secret Doctrine*. These things originate entirely from the teachings of the sacred mysteries; one must only understand them.

[ 23 ] Now it is up to us first to ask: How is it that such a Son of Venus descends? How is it that a Bodhisattva can live on Earth? The nature of a Bodhisattva, the nature of the Sons of Mercury and Venus, constitutes an important chapter in the evolution of our Earth in relation to its connection with the cosmos itself. Therefore, tomorrow we will consider the nature of the Sons of Mercury and Venus, the Bodhisattvas, or Dhyani-Buddhas.