The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Third Lecture

[ 1 ] Yesterday, at the end of the lecture about the lowest realm, so to speak, of the spiritual hierarchies, thoughts arose in many a soul and many questions arose. And that is only natural, because compared to the thinking and imagining that a person can have today, much of what has been said seems questionable and inexplicable at first. The course of the lectures will naturally shed light on many things. But one thing must be said today so that you have, so to speak, a guideline for the whole attitude that one should have towards such a matter. Today, for example, a person can ask himself the obvious question: Yes, if you really do lift an enchanted being out of a stone by thinking and pondering about the stone and then, as it were, freeing this enchanted being, what then remains in the stone? Is this being still in the stone, or what has actually happened in the stone? What about the second person who follows and undergoes the same process? This question could arise for many things. As I said, many such questions will be answered in the course of the lectures, but it must be said that these things cannot be grasped at all with what the earth gives man to think. For on earth everything is veiled, everything is clothed in maya, and to the mind things look quite different than they are in reality. It is not the fault of the facts that questions remain unanswered. The questions are wrongly posed, but in time we will gain the measure for the right way to ask them. Things look quite different when we gain insight into conditions that are not yet shrouded in illusion. On earth, everything is interwoven; as a result, people's thinking is constantly deceived. We get purer ideas of things when we go back to older times.

[ 2 ] Just as man undergoes embodiment after embodiment, metamorphosis after metamorphosis, so all beings in the world undergo embodiments and re-embodiments, from the smallest to the greatest, and even a being like our earth itself, a planetary being, undergoes re-embodiments. Our Earth did not come into being as an Earth, but was preceded by another state. Especially in our circles, there has always been a lot of talk about the fact that just as a person in this existence is the re-embodiment of a previous life, the Earth is also the re-embodiment of an old planet that preceded it. We call this previous planet the moon and do not mean the present moon, which is only a piece, a remnant of the old moon, but a previous state of our earth, which once was there and also went through a spiritual life, which is usually called Pralaya, as man goes through a spiritual state after death. This moon planet has been reborn, just as man is reborn. But what we have just described as the planetary state of the moon is in turn only the embodiment of a previous planetary state, which we call the sun. This sun, not the present sun, but a completely different being, this sun is the re-embodiment of the last planet to which we have to look back first when we speak of the embodiments of our earth, the ancient Saturn. So we have four successive embodiments: Saturn, the sun, the moon, the earth.

[ 3 ] We have also mentioned several times that each planetary state has a specific task. What is our Earth's task? The task of our Earth is to make man's human existence possible, as we call it today. All the effects of the Earth are such that through them man becomes an ego-being. This was not the case in earlier stages of development. Man has only become a human being in the modern sense on earth. The earlier planetary stages through which the earth has passed had a similar task. Other entities became human on these other planets, entities that are now even higher than man. You may remember from my book “Christianity as Mystical Fact” that an Egyptian sage once made a remarkable allusion to the Greek Solon about a mystery truth; that he told him that it was an important truth that the gods were once human. This was one of the truths that mystery school students in ancient times had to learn: that the gods, who today dwell in the spiritual heights, were not always gods, but that they have ascended and that they too were once human beings, that they too once passed through the stages of humanity. Of course, a dangerous truth immediately follows from this, which the mystery school students also had to draw from it as a consequence: namely, that human beings will one day become gods. And precisely because of this consequence, this truth was considered dangerous; for it is necessary to say at the same time: Man can only become God when he is mature enough to do so; and if he ever imagines that he can find God within himself before he is mature enough to do so, he will not become a god, but a fool. And so for man these two paths are open: to live in patience, as Dionysius calls it, towards deification, towards becoming God, or to imagine beforehand that he is already God. The one path really leads to deification, the other to folly, to madness.

[ 4 ] In the expressions of antiquity, something misleading is often seen because in our present time, no distinction is made between the different levels of divine-spiritual entities. When the Egyptian sage spoke of gods, he did not mean just one level of god or gods, but entire levels of divine spiritual entities. Dionysius the Areopagite and also the Eastern sages, they have always distinguished these levels of divine spiritual entities. Whether we speak of angels or of Dhyan Chohans, it is the same, because those who really recognize the unity of the world's wisdom know that these are only different names for one thing. But even in this realm one must distinguish again. Those entities, which are initially invisible and which stand directly above man, that is, which stand one level higher than man, are called in Christian esotericism angels, angeloi, messengers, that is, messengers of the divine spiritual world. Those entities, which in turn stand one level higher, that is, two levels higher than man, are called archangels, archangeloi, also fire spirits. Those entities, which in turn, when they undergo their normal development, stand one step higher than the archangels, are the entities called Spirits of Personality or Primordial Beginnings, Primordial Forces, Archai. So, first of all, we have three levels of entities that stand above human beings. These three types of entities have all gone through humanity; they were once human beings. Beings who are now angels, if you look at it in terms of world time, have not left their humanity so far behind them; they were human beings on the Moon. Just as you can live on Earth as human beings due to the conditions on Earth, the angels in their stage of humanity could inhabit the Moon. The archangels experienced their stage of humanity on the Sun, and the original beginnings, the spirits of personality, on the old Saturn. So these entities have gradually advanced from humanity, are now higher entities in higher levels of the hierarchy than humans, and we can simply say, when we now list the levels of the world empires in a spiritual sense: We have on Earth the mineral kingdom, the plant kingdom, the animal kingdom, the human kingdom, and now it goes up into the invisible, into the realm of the angels, the fire spirits or archangels, the elemental forces or spirits of personality or archai. As these entities progressed in their inner development and nature, so to speak, from humans to gods or to messengers of the gods – which is actually an accurate term for these entities – as these entities ascended into a spiritual existence, the conditions of the planet on and for which they lived changed. If we look back to ancient Saturn, on which the Archai were human beings, we find it still looking quite different from our Earth.

[ 5 ] Yesterday we spoke about the fact that we distinguish four elements on our Earth: Earth, water, air, fire or warmth. Of the first three elements, there was absolutely nothing on Saturn at all. Of these four elements, only fire or warmth existed on Saturn. Today's materialistic philosopher will say: But warmth can only come from external objects; there can be warm solids, warm water, but warmth cannot exist by itself. That is what the materialistic philosopher believes, but it is not true. If you had been able to observe Saturn with today's senses, how would it have presented itself? Suppose – we assume this as a hypothesis – you had flown through space in the old Saturn era. You would not have seen anything where old Saturn was; but you would have noticed that it was warm there! It would have felt like flying through the heated space of an oven when you flew through Saturn. You would not have been able to feel a draft, you would not have been able to swim, because there was no air or water yet; you would not have been able to walk either, because there was no earth yet. Your hand would not have been able to touch anything; it was just the whole sphere of warmth. Thus, ancient Saturn consisted only of the element of warmth or fire. Our earthly existence began in its first metamorphosis as a planet of warmth, and from this you can already see how it is right when, for example, ancient Heraclitus says: Everything has arisen from fire. — Yes, of course! Because the Earth is only the transformed old Saturn, everything on Earth has also come out of this fire. This was a truth that Heraclitus had from the ancient mysteries. This is also hinted at by saying that he dedicated the book in which he had written down this truth to the goddess at Ephesus and laid it on the altar there. This means that he was aware that he owed this wisdom to the mysteries, the Ephesian mysteries, where this teaching of the primal fire of Saturn was still proclaimed in its purity. Now you can also see from this that those beings whom we call the primal beginnings, the archai, the spirits of the personality, went through their humanity under completely different circumstances than today's human beings. Today, human beings have the opportunity to take in solids, liquids and gases through their physical bodies, through their bone and blood systems. The human being of Saturn, the spirit of personality, had to form his entire body out of warmth, out of fire. And that is what he did: he had only one fire body, the spirit of personality on ancient Saturn. His body consisted only of warmth.

[ 6 ] Yesterday I told you that warmth has two sides, so to speak. One side is that it is actually perceived inwardly as inward warmth; we feel warm or cold without touching our surroundings as we do with solids. But we can also feel warmth outwardly when we touch a warm body. The peculiar thing about the development of Saturn is that, so to speak, warmth gradually changes from the beginning of Saturn, where it was merely internal, to the end, where it becomes more external and more perceptible. If you had made this journey through the world in the initial state of Saturn, then you would not have felt any warmth on your skin when you entered the realm of Saturn, but inwardly you would have said to yourself: It is so comfortably warm. Something that you only know today as warmth of soul would have overcome you if you had made this journey in the very earliest stages of Saturn. You can get an idea of the experiences you would have had if you consider the following. You know that there is a difference when you look at a red or a blue surface. When you face the red color, you say to yourself, “This gives a warm feeling.” When you face the blue, you have the feeling of cold. Imagine these feelings that are triggered in the human soul by the impression of red, which you would not have had at the time, but you would have felt something comfortably warm when you face the red today. At the end of the Saturn period, you would not only have felt this inner sense of comfort, but also as if warmth had approached you from the outside. Inner warmth would have gradually transformed into an external perception of warmth. This is the path that Saturn took: from an inner warmth of soul to an externally perceptible warmth, to what we call external warmth or fire. And one would like to say: Just as the child grows up to become a great human being and undergoes various things, so the spirits of the personality grew on the old Saturn. At first they felt warm inside, so to speak, comfortably warm inside, and gradually they also felt this warmth externalized, realized, even embodied, we could say. And what emerged? If you want to visualize what emerged, then you have to imagine it like this: First of all, we have the internal warming of the sphere of Saturn; here the spirits of the personality find the opportunity to embody themselves first. As they embody themselves, what is called the outer warmth is formed. And if you had been able to make the journey in a later Saturn state, you would have been able to distinguish between externally warm and cold spots in Saturn. And if you had now drawn what you found as enclosed heat bodies, the following drawing would have resulted: In the surrounding area, it is as if a whole series of such heat eggs had formed a surface of Saturn. From the outside, if one could have seen it, it would have looked like a blackberry or a raspberry. What were these eggs? They were the bodies of the spirits of the personality, and these spirits of the personality, precisely through their inner warmth, formed the outer warmth of these Saturn eggs. Of this state, one can truly say: And the spirits brooded over the warmth, and they really hatched the first fire bodies. The first fire bodies were hatched from the cosmic space. If we may use the expression, the outer warmth eggs coagulated in the warmth space from the inside out. So, on ancient Saturn, the spirits of personality, the archai, also called asuras, were embodied in these fire bodies. Saturn consisted only of this element of fire.

[ 7 ] Now, in this old Saturn development, there was the possibility for the spirits of personality to transform the outer warmth into inner warmth. The process was not stiff and hard, but inwardly flexible. In fact, these spirits of personality continually generated these warmth-eggs and allowed them to disappear again. And now you can imagine this process even more clearly. Imagine that you had been making this journey back and forth for some time. You would have noticed that there are now times on this Saturn when no external warmth is perceptible, when only the cozy inner fire is there; then again, there are times when these warmth-eggs appear. You would have perceived something like the breathing of the whole old Saturn, but a breathing of fire. You would have said to yourself: Sometimes I am so immersed in this old Saturn, as if all external warmth had been internalized, taken away, as if it were all just inner comfort, and you would have said to yourself: Now Saturn has inhaled the warmth. And then you would have come through another time and found these many warm eggs, and you would have said: Now Saturn has exhaled its inner warmth, it is outer fire.

[ 8 ] This is the picture which the ancient Holy Rishis presented to their disciples. They took them back, as it were, in spirit, to the ancient Saturn time and made them feel how a whole planet performs something similar to our present inhaling and exhaling. They evoked the idea in them: the fire flows out and becomes countless warmth bodies, the fire is drawn in and becomes the internal egoity of the spirits of the personality. Therefore they compared this life of a planet with breathing out and breathing in, but on ancient Saturn it is only breathing of fire. Air does not yet exist. Let us now assume that the following had happened: all these spirits of personality on Saturn had always inhaled and exhaled warmth, so to speak. They would have gone through their regular Saturn evolution, and the consequence would have been that after the appropriate time everything would have been absorbed again into inner warmth, and Saturn would have disappeared as an outer fire planet, would have been taken up again into the realms of the spiritual world. That is how it could have happened. But then we would never have had the state of the sun, moon and earth, because everything that could have been exhaled would have been taken back into inner warmth, would have returned to the spiritual world. But now let us use a trivial expression that will make it easier for us to understand: It pleased certain spirits of the personality, so to speak, better to take back only part of the exhaled warmth and always to leave something behind, so that when inhaling all these Saturn eggs did not disappear outside, but remained. And so a duality gradually emerged on Saturn: inner warmth and, alongside it, outer warmth, embodied in the Saturn eggs. Not everything was taken back. The spirits left a part of the exhaled warmth to itself, so to speak, they left it out there. Why did they do that? They had to do that; if they hadn't, they wouldn't have become human on Saturn.

[ 9 ] For what does it mean to become human? It means to become aware of the self. You cannot do that if you, as a self, are not distinguished from an external object. Only in this way are you a self. The bouquet of flowers is here, I am there, I distinguish myself as a self from the object. The spirits of the personality would have eternally radiated only their ego if they had not left something outside that would have resisted them: the other is outside, I distinguish myself from the objectified warmth element. In this way, the spirits of the personality have come to their ego, to self-awareness, that they have pushed part of the Saturn entities down into a mere external warmth existence. They said to themselves: I must let something of me flow outwards and leave it outside, so that I can distinguish myself from it, so that my sense of self is ignited by this exterior. Thus they had created a realm alongside themselves; they had, as it were, created a mirror image of their inner selves in the outer realm. As a result, when the life of Saturn had come to an end, so to speak, the spirits of the personality were not at all able to make Saturn disappear. It would have disappeared if they had breathed in all the fire, but in this way they were unable to breathe back what they had put out of themselves. They had to leave the field, which had offered them the opportunity to become self-aware, to themselves.

[ 10 ] For Saturn, no pralaya could have occurred through the spirits of personality alone. Higher spirits had to enter, so to speak, to dissolve it again, so that a pralaya, an intermediate state, a state of disappearance, of sleep, could occur. Higher spirits, of whom we now mention only the name, the Thrones, had to enter and had to dissolve everything again. So that when the life of Saturn came to an end, the following process took place: the spirits of personality had attained self-awareness, had absorbed some of the warmth into themselves again, had taken up self-awareness at their center and had left behind a lower realm for it. Now the realm of the thrones came, and these dissolved what the others had left behind, and Saturn entered into a kind of planetary night. Now the planetary morning came. The whole thing was to wake up again, so to speak, through laws that we will get to know. If the old Saturn had disappeared through the inhalation of all the warmth, then all Saturn existence would have been absorbed into the spiritual world. There would have been no waking up at all. Now the Thrones could indeed dissolve what the spirits of personality had laid down as eggs for a while, but they could only do so for a time. It had to be handed over to a lower existence, so to speak, for further development. Then a planetary morning came; Saturn entered its second state of transformation, the solar state. What was actually born out of this in this solar state? After the sleeping state of the planet, the spirits of personality came over from the old Saturn, who now had their self-awareness, so they no longer needed to go through similar experiences to the ones they had already gone through. But they had exhaled certain warmth, which in turn came out little by little, differentiating itself from the general mass. And the result was that now these spirits of personality were bound, so to speak, to what they had left behind of themselves. If they had taken everything up into the spiritual world, they would not have been bound to the sun; they would not have had to descend; so they had to, because they had left behind part of their former own being. That was what they had to take care of, and that drew them down to a new planetary existence.

[ 11 ] This was karma of Saturn, this was world karma, cosmic karma. Because the spirits of the personality had not taken everything into themselves on the old Saturn, they had prepared the karma for themselves to have to return: they found below what they had caused, as an inheritance of old Saturn. And what happened now that the spirits of the personality were dealing with their created karma? As a result, what I characterized in general yesterday happened: On the one hand, the warmth split into light, and on the other into smoke. And so, in the resurrected Saturn, the new planet emerged from these warmth-eggs on the one hand, like gas, like air or like smoke, as one had called it. And on the other hand, light emerged, with the warmth, so to speak, returning to higher states. Inside the transformed Saturn, smoke, gas, air, on the other hand, light! And if you had now been traveling through the world and come to the place where this old sun was, you would have sensed from afar what had formed as light, because behind it was the smoke. You would have perceived, if not the light, then at least a glowing sphere, like a heat sphere in Saturn. It would have been a glowing sphere if you had approached it, and if you had come to the surface, entered this sphere, you would have perceived not only warmth but also winds, air, flowing gas in all directions. So the glowing sphere transformed into a luminous sphere: a sun was created. It is completely right to call it a sun. And what are now suns are still undergoing this process today: on the inside they are flowing gas, and on the other side they cause this gas to become light; they spread light into space. So now, only now was light actually formed in the state of transformation of the earth, only now was light created. In the warmth, in the old warmth of Saturn, the spirits of personality could first become human; in the light that now radiated from the sun, those entities of the spiritual hierarchies that we call archangels or archangeloi could become human. And if you had approached the sun not only as a modern human being, but as a clairvoyant, you would not only have perceived the radiance emanating from the sun, not just light, but the deeds of the archangels would have flowed towards you in the light.

[ 12 ] But these archangels had to accept something, so to speak. The ancient spirits of personality still found pure fire on Saturn. The archangels, who could only become human on the sun, now found smoke and gas on the sun, which they had to inhabit. What did they have to do to remain in a firm connection with the sun, to set up their home there? They formed their soul, their inner being, out of light, they wove their soul body out of light, but incorporated what was there as gas, as the outer body. Just as you today have a body and soul, so these archangels as human beings on the sun had an inner being that was capable of emitting light, and an outer being, a physical body, that consisted of gas, of air. Just as a human being today consists of earth, water, air and fire in his body, so these archangels consisted of air, and inwardly they had light. But of course the element of fire had been taken over with them, because that was precisely what developed into smoke and light. Therefore, these archangels also had fire within them. Their entire being consisted of light, smoke and fire. We would have found the archangels in bodies woven from gas, fire and light. Through the light they lived a life outwards, streaming out into the universe their radiant power. Through the fire they lived a life within themselves, the comfort of warmth. Through the life in the gas body they lived a life in the sun planet itself. They could now, so to speak, distinguish their own gas body from the general sun substance in the sun planet. They collided with the other: this kindled a kind of self-awareness for them. But this self-awareness could only develop higher and higher because it now also pleased these archangels, if we may call them that, to remain in this gas body, in the smoke body, in a certain relationship, or at least to leave it in the sun substance. For these archangels on the old sun could have absorbed all the smoke, all the gas, so to speak, in the surrounding area, in a changing state. Now you have a real process of armung! On the old sun you would have perceived these currents in the gas as a breathing process. You would have found certain conditions where there was absolute calm, and you would have said to yourself: Now the archangels have inhaled all the flowing gas. But then the archangels began to breathe out again: It began to flow inwardly and at the same time light developed. That was the state of change in the sun: The archangels inhaled all the gas – there was no wind, but there was also darkness, a solar night. They exhaled – the sun was filled with billowing smoke, but it also shone outwards, it became a sunny day. And so there was a real breathing process of the whole solar body: exhaling – sunny day, illuminating the environment; inhaling – sunny night, darkness in the whole environment.

[ 13 ] Here you have the old sun described at the same time in its difference from our present sun. Our present sun is always shining, and darkness is only caused when something is placed in front of its light. That was not the case with the old sun. It had the power within itself to become light and dark in alternating states, to light up and darken, because that was its exhaling and inhaling. Now let us imagine very vividly what actually happened, let us say, outwardly, visibly.

[ 14 ] Let us take this state of exhalation: light spreads, but the sun is also filled with smoke. These smoke forms, these smoke currents are regular formations. So, so to speak, a sum of regular formations is incorporated into the substance of the sun with each exhalation. What used to be merely egg-shaped, a warmth egg, had transformed itself into all kinds of regular formations. Very strange smoke formations with inner life and inner regularity had emerged. If I may use the expression: the eggs have been hatched. It was really something that can be compared to this solidifying process. Just as the chicken comes out of the chicken egg, so the warmth egg had broken in two and out of it came regular smoke figures, and these regular smoke figures were the densest bodies that the archangels had. In bodies of smoke, gas and air, they animated the sun; so they walked as men, so to speak, on the sun. So now we have the spiritual concept of a fixed star, the spiritual concept of a world sun, which is sun, so to speak, through its own power, which allows day and night to change through its own power. Like breathing out and breathing in, it alternates between brightness and darkness, because the sun was once a kind of fixed star. Everything that is self-illuminating in our cosmic space also sends out the life of spiritual messengers into cosmic space with the light: archangeloi.

[ 15 ] So what had the original archai, the primal beginnings, the spirits of personality brought about through their own evolution? What had they created? That a sun could emerge at all. Whereas otherwise only a Saturn existence would have been announced in evolution, whereas otherwise only the Archai filling Saturn with warmth would have been, the fact that the Archai left the outer warmth-eggs to Saturn allowed Saturn to become a sun. And on the sun, the archangels found the opportunity to pass through the stage of humanity. They became the heralds for the world who could say: We have been preceded by the origins, the spirits of personality. We proclaim as the messengers to the universe in the radiant light the former existence of warm, inwardly warmed Saturn. We are the messengers, the heralds of the Archai. Messenger means Angelos, Archai means the beginnings; so these archangels were nothing other than the messengers of the deeds of the primal beginnings or Archai in earlier times. And that is why they are called the angels of the beginning, Archai-Angeloi, which then became the German word Erzengel. So they, these arch messengers, were the people of the sun.