The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Fifth Lecture

[ 1 ] We have considered the workings of higher spiritual beings within our cosmos using two examples: the example of old Saturn and that of the sun, which emerged from him as his reincarnation. It will now be necessary for us to penetrate into the spiritual realm itself, where these higher spiritual beings are, and to show us their way of working from another perspective. In the course of the first half of the lectures, some things will have to be said that a large proportion of you, my dear friends, have already heard here or there. But apart from the fact that there are many listeners here who have not yet heard much about the prerequisites, it is also necessary, precisely because we have to ascend high into the regions of spiritual life in this lecture cycle, to mention some things again, which is a prerequisite in itself.

[ 2 ] From what has been said so far, you will have realized that spiritual beings are active in the most diverse ways within an evolving world system. What actually is this old Saturn, basically? Let us form a precise idea of it. Of course, the old Saturn has nothing to do with the present Saturn. You can imagine that everything that belongs to our entire solar system today was already present in the germ of the old Saturn: our Sun, our Moon, our Mercury, our Venus, our Mars, our Jupiter, all these world bodies were contained in the old Saturn and formed out of it. So imagine a world body that today would have the sun at its center and would extend out so that today's Saturn would still be inside. Only then would you really have this old Saturn, which exceeds our present solar system in size, in your imagination. So, our entire solar system emerged, so to speak, from this old Saturn. It could even be compared, not completely, but approximately, with the entire Kant-Laplacean primeval nebula, from which, according to many modern people, our solar system has formed. But the comparison is not entirely correct, since most people think of some kind of gas as the starting point of our solar system, whereas we have seen that it was not a gas, but a body of heat. A giant body of heat, that is the old Saturn.

[ 3 ] And now we said yesterday: where this old Saturn has already transformed itself into the later sun, the cherubim are at work from the circumference, from the universe. Now you have to imagine that these cherubim, who are active in the vicinity of the old sun, were also already present in the vicinity of the old Saturn. Only they had not yet been called to their activity, so to speak; if it may be said in a trivial way, it had not yet come to them to do something significant, but they were already present in the vicinity of the old Saturn. And there were also other entities present in the vicinity of old Saturn, a class of even more exalted entities than the cherubim: these are the seraphim. And the thrones also come from the same region. Only the substance of the thrones, which are one degree lower than the cherubim, flows down and forms the heat substance of Saturn, as we have explained. So we can imagine this Saturn as a giant ball of heat, surrounded by a host of spiritual beings of an extraordinarily exalted nature. In Christian esotericism they are called thrones, cherubs, seraphim. They are the dhyanic entities of Eastern teaching.

[ 4 ] Now let us ask ourselves: Where do these exalted beings come from? Everything in the world, everything in the universe has developed. And if we want to get an idea of where these cherubs, seraphim and thrones come from, we would do well to start with our own solar system and ask ourselves what will become of our solar system one day. Let us briefly sketch the development of our solar system. We know that it started with the old Saturn, then this old Saturn transformed itself into the old sun, which is transforming itself into the old moon. In the time when the old sun becomes the moon, a special development occurs. This moon emerges from the sun for the first time, and in the old moon we first have a world body that is outside the sun. The fact that the Sun has cast off the coarsest part of itself enables it to develop further. The whole system now develops into the system of our present Earth. Our Earth comes into being because, in addition to all the other moons and Earths, the coarser substances and the vehicles of the coarser entities separate from the Sun. But the evolution continues. The beings that now have to live separately on Earth, that have been thrown out of the Sun, so to speak, develop ever higher and higher in their separation from the Sun. They still have to go through one more state, the state of Jupiter. But through this they gradually mature to unite with the Sun again. And when the state of Venus development has come, then all the beings that now live and surge on our Earth will, so to speak, have been taken up again into the Sun, and the Sun itself will have reached a higher level of development, precisely because it has redeemed back all its beings that it had set out of itself. And then comes Vulcan development, the highest stage of development of our system. For these are the seven stages of development of our system: Saturn, Sun, Moon, Earth, Jupiter, Venus and Vulcan. In Vulcan development, all the beings that emerged, so to speak, from the small beginnings of Saturn's existence are spiritualized in the highest sense; together they have become not only the Sun, but the Super-Sun. Vulcan is more than the Sun, and with this it has attained the maturity for sacrifice, the maturity to dissolve.

[ 5 ] This is the next stage of development: that such a system, in which a sun arises from a starting point, this sun is, so to speak, weak at first and has to throw out its planets so that it can develop further itself. It becomes strong, absorbs its planets again, becomes a volcano. And now the whole thing dissolves, and the volcanic sphere subsequently becomes a hollow sphere; it then becomes something similar to this dance of thrones, cherubim and seraphim. So the sun will dissolve, sacrifice itself into the universe, radiate its essence. And through this it itself becomes a dance of such entities as the seraphim, cherubim and thrones are, which now progresses to new creation in the universe.

[ 6 ] Why are the thrones able to give out of their substance that which Saturn needs? Because the thrones have prepared themselves in an earlier system through seven states, as our solar system is now going through. Before something can become a system of thrones, cherubim and seraphim, it must have been a solar system; that is to say, when a sun has progressed so far that it has reunited with its planets, then it becomes a sphere, then it itself becomes a zodiac. What we have come to know in the zodiac, these exalted beings, are the remnants that have come down to us from an ancient solar system. What used to develop within a solar system can now work its way down from space and give birth to a new solar system. That is why these beings, the seraphim, cherubim, thrones, are for us the highest hierarchy among the divine beings, because they have already gone through their solar system evolution and have ascended to the great cosmic sacrificial service.

[ 7 ] These entities have thereby come into close proximity to the highest divinity of which we can speak at all, the Trinity, the threefold divinity. So, beyond the seraphim, we see that supreme divinity, which you find in almost all nations as the threefold divinity, expressed as Brahma, Shiva, Vishnu, as Father, Word and Holy Ghost. From this highest divinity, the supreme Trinity, so to speak, the plans for each new world system arise. If we look back to ancient Saturn, we say to ourselves: Before any of this ancient Saturn came into existence, the plan arose in the divine Trinity. But this Trinity needs entities to carry out the plan. These entities must first mature for this purpose. The first beings, who are, as it were, around the Divinity Itself, who, as it is beautifully expressed in Christian Occidental esotericism, “directly enjoy the vision of God”, are the seraphim, cherubim, thrones. They now receive the plans for a new world system from the Divine Trinity, from which they originate. Of course, my dear friends, you understand that this is more figuratively speaking than really, because we have to express such sublime activities with human words for which human words are truly not created. Human words are not there to express such high activity, by which, for example, at the beginning of our solar system, the seraphim received the highest plans of the divine Trinity, which contain how our solar system is to develop through Saturn, Sun, Moon, Earth, Jupiter, Venus and Vulcan. Seraphim is a name that has always been interpreted by all those who have understood it correctly in the sense of ancient Hebrew esotericism as meaning that the Seraphim have the task of receiving the highest ideas, the goals of a world system, from the Trinity. The cherubim, the next lower level of the hierarchy, have the task of now developing in wisdom the goals and ideas that are received from the highest gods. The cherubim are therefore spirits of the highest wisdom, who understand how to implement what they are given by the seraphim. And the thrones, in turn, the third degree of the hierarchy from above, have the task, now, of course, very figuratively speaking, of lending a hand so that what is conceived in wisdom, so that these lofty world thoughts, which the seraphim receive from the gods, which the cherubim have thought through, are realized in reality.

[ 8 ] We can literally see, if we only want to see with our soul, how the first step in the realization of the divine plans takes place through the flowing down of the fire substance through the thrones. Thus the thrones represent those entities that have the power to implement the ideas conceived by the cherubim into a first reality. This happens when these thrones allow their own substance, the substance of the original world fire, to flow into the space that has been envisaged, so to speak, for a new world system. If we want to visualize this quite clearly, we can say: an old solar system has disappeared and faded away; within this old solar system, the seraphim, cherubim and thrones have matured to the highest degree. Now these seek out a spherical space in space according to the indications of the highest Trinity and say to each other, here we will begin. And now the seraphim receive the goals of the world system, the cherubim work out these goals, and in this spherical space the thrones allow the primal fire to flow out of their own being. This is how we have grasped the beginning of our world system.

[ 9 ] But there are also other entities that were present in a certain way in the earlier solar system, of which ours is the successor. These entities have not ascended as high as the seraphim and cherubim, who throned, remained on a lower level, and came over in such a way that they themselves still have to undergo a certain development before they can be creatively active, before they can make sacrifices. These entities are now the entities of the second threefold hierarchy. We have just considered the first threefold hierarchy. The entities of the second are those whose names we have already given: the Kyriotetes or dominations or dominationes or spirits of wisdom, then the so-called powers or dynamis, as Dionysius the Areopagite calls them, and after him the teachers of the West, virtutes, virtues. That is the second level of the second hierarchy. And the third level are the so-called forces. They are the Spirits of Form, which are also called Potestates by the Teachers of the West.

[ 10 ] Now let us ask ourselves: if we look back at old Saturn, where are the entities of this second hierarchy now that we have seen that the first hierarchy is in the vicinity of Saturn? Where do we find the dominions, the powers, the authorities? We have to look for them within old Saturn. If we may say that the Thrones extend as far as the boundary, then within old Saturn we have the Dominations, Powers and Authorities. Thus within old Saturn, within its substance, the Forces, Powers and Dominations are at work in three circles. They are spiritual beings active within the substance of Saturn.

[ 11 ] Now let us try to understand the extraordinarily fantastic modern theory of the origin of the world by once again considering what this theory presented as the Kant-Laplacean theory. It presents a nebula as the starting point for our solar system, and now this Kant-Laplacean theory imagines that this entire giant gas mass begins to rotate and swirl. As is well known, she finds it extremely plausible that when it starts to turn, the outer planets gradually split off. First there are rings, which then contract; in the middle remains the sun and the others rotate around it. She imagines it quite mechanically. Now, a very cute school experiment is done to illustrate this. They show how such a solar system is formed on a small scale. They take a container of water, take a large drop of oil, then they cut a map sheet so that they can see the size of the equator, stick it in the equator direction and insert a pin from above. Then you make this drop of oil rotate. Small droplets split off and circle around, and then the person demonstrating this to the students, sometimes quite old students, says: Now look, there you have the formation of a planetary system in miniature! — And it makes perfect sense immediately. After all, what could make more sense than seeing with your own eyes how a solar system like this is formed? Why shouldn't we understand that out there there was once a giant nebula and that it rotated and that planets separated like the droplets, the miniature Mercuries and Satellites from the large oil drop? One must indeed be a little amazed at the naivety with which this is done. For those concerned, who are trying to make the Kant-Laplace system quite understandable, forget only one thing in doing so, which is otherwise quite good to forget, but in this case it just does not work - they forget namely themselves, they forget that they stood there and turned first. That is, of course, an incredible naivety, but the naivety of modern materialistic mythology is very great, greater than that of any other mythology. Only future times will realize this. So, there is someone who organizes the whole thing, who turns the whole thing. Therefore, if one is at all capable of thinking, if one is not abandoned by all the good spirits of logic, it must be assumed that spiritual forces are involved in the rotation of the worlds. Even if one disregards the mistake of substituting primeval gas for primeval fire, one still cannot assume that this mass of gas begins to swirl around by itself. One must ask: Where are the spiritual forces and powers that set this mass, that is to say for us the mass of the primeval fire, in motion, so that something happens inside? We have now listed them: the spiritual forces work from the environment and from within. Those around there, the entities that have acquired their abilities in earlier systems, work from the outside; inside are entities of lesser maturity, which now differentiate the mass inside, which bring about what we had in mind when we said that structures of warmth arise inside and so on. These are entities of the highest intelligence, which arrange everything that happens.

[ 12 ] What is the initial task of the first entities of this second hierarchy? The dominations receive what the thrones bring down from the universe, so to speak, and organize it in such a way that a harmony can take place between the individual world body that is emerging, between Saturn and the whole universe. Everything inside Saturn must be arranged in such a way that everything inside corresponds to what is outside. So what the seraphim, cherubim and thrones bring down from the hand of God to Saturn must be arranged in such a way that these orders are carried out and these impulses realized within. Thus the Lords or Kyriotetes receive from the circumference of Saturn that which comes down through the mediation of the highest hierarchy to transform it so that it fits into Saturn.

[ 13 ] In a further way, what the Lordships receive is reworked by the Powers, Dynamis. And this happens in such a way that when the lordships within Saturn, as it were, give the supreme orders, the powers now take over the next execution of these orders. The authorities, on the other hand, ensure – we will talk about this in more detail, we just want to characterize the matter in general terms for now – that what has been built according to the intention of the universe lasts as long as it is necessary, that it does not immediately perish again. They are the sustainers. Thus, in the dominions, we have the arrangers within Saturn; in the powers, we have those who initially carry out these arrangements, and the authorities are the sustainers of what the powers have built.

[ 14 ] Today, let us disregard how the next hierarchy, which we have already spoken of, works: the spirits of personality, the fire spirits and the angels. But today, let us consider the transition from the old Saturn to the old Sun with the newly acquired knowledge. I already described the essential processes to you yesterday. What happens when the old Saturn becomes the Sun is that the original fire now changes into the state of gas or air, so that the old Sun consists of what is called the rest of the original fire that has remained. This original fire is now mixed and blended with what has condensed into gas or smoke. So there are two substances present: primal fire and a part of the primal fire, condensed into gas or smoke or air – as you will. This applies essentially to the old sun. We will see that it has become different with our sun; through intermediate states, it has developed into something else to date, although there are people who claim that the interior of our sun today is also just a kind of gas.

[ 15 ] But if you open yourself up even a little to the various theories that our materialistic natural science comes up with, you will experience real wonders if you do so with an open mind. There is a popular little book that is bought a lot because of how cheap it is, in which it is claimed that today's sun does not have to have something solid in the middle, but rather gas. Only this gas - one should not actually believe it, but it is in a popular booklet - is as thick as honey or tar. Well, to anyone who is willing to believe that a gas under pressure looks like honey or tar, I will gladly allow him to walk in such a land of milk and honey, where he moves in an air that consists of honey, and I certainly don't want to wish that he has to move in an air that is as thick as tar. Such are the excesses of materialistic theory.

[ 16 ] Now, we are not talking about our present sun, but about that ancient sun, which really consists of the primal fire and what is called fire mist or fire air. You find the expression in Faust because Goethe knew it very well, and in theosophical literature you will find the expression 'fire mist' quite common. So we have to imagine this old sun as a mixture of these two substances. But this did not come about by itself. World bodies do not condense by themselves; spiritual beings must bring about this condensation. What spiritual beings are it then that effect the condensation of the substance of the old Saturn into the sun? They are the beings that we have called Lordships. These Lordships are now pressing in from the outside and compressing the original mighty mass of Saturn so that it becomes smaller. And the forces have been pushing for so long that this old sun has now become the size of a globe, the mass of which, if you place the sun at the center, you have to imagine reaching to Jupiter. So Saturn was as large as a globe with the sun at its center and reaching to present-day Saturn – an enormous globe, as large as our entire solar system, as far as Saturn. The Sun of which we are now speaking was a globe that expanded to the size of the present-day Jupiter. This is the boundary mark for the expansion of that ancient Sun. It is good to imagine boundary marks for the expansion of the ancient world bodies in these planets.

[ 17 ] You see, in this way we are gradually approaching the theory of the formation of the planets by deriving it from the activity of the hierarchies. And now let us move on. We now know that the next state is again a state of condensation. The third state of our world system is that of the old moon. Those who have studied the messages from the Akasha Chronicle know that the old moon was formed when the substance of the sun condensed further into the watery. The moon does not yet have solid earth, but it has fire, air and water. It has organized the watery element. The gas or the air has condensed to the watery element. Who has brought this about? This has been brought about by the second group of this hierarchy of spiritual entities, the group that we call Virtutes. And so it has happened through the Virtutes that the mass of the old sun has been pushed together to the boundary of today's Mars. Mars is again the boundary stone for the size of the old moon. If you imagine a sphere, with the sun in the center and the mass extended to where Mars orbits today, then you have the old moon in its size.

[ 18 ] Now we have arrived at the point where we want to remember that when the old moon was formed from Saturn and the Sun, something completely new happened. Now a part of the dense substance was thrown out, and two bodies were formed. One of the bodies took the finest substances and entities and became a finer sun, the second body became an all the denser moon. So this third state of our planetary system develops in such a way that it is only a unified planet for a while; but then it throws out a planet that is now next to it. At first, as long as it is a unified body, the moon reaches as far as Mars. But then the sun contracts, and it is orbited by a body, roughly where today's Mars orbits it, that is, roughly on the periphery of the original unified body.

[ 19 ] How did this separation come about in the first place? How did a cosmic body become two? This happened at the time of the rule of the powers, dynamis. For those who have followed my work in this area, it is not unknown that something similar happens in the whole universe as in the life of an ordinary human being. Where beings develop, there are those who advance and others who lag behind. How many a father has had to lament that his son has to repeat a year at school while others are making rapid progress. So we are dealing with different rates of development. This is also the case in the cosmos as a whole. And now, for certain reasons that we will come to know, something occurs that is called the Conflict in Heaven throughout esotericism, in all mysteries. And this teaching of the conflict in heaven forms an essential, an integral part of all mysteries; it also contains the primal secret of the origin of evil. The Virtutes, the Powers, were namely at a certain point in the development of the moon at very different stages of maturity. Some longed to rise as high as possible spiritually, others were retarded or at least advanced in their development in a normal way. So there were powers that were far more advanced than their comrades on the old moon. The consequence of this was that these two classes of powers or virtutes separated. The more advanced ones pulled out the solar body, and the more retarded ones formed the moon orbiting around it. So, in a nutshell, we have described the quarrel in the sky, the tearing apart of the old moon, so that the satellite, the old moon, comes under the rule of the retarded virtutes and the old sun under the rule of the advanced virtutes.

[ 20 ] Something of this conflict in the heavens is echoed in the first sentences of the Divine Gita, which, symbolically, in the beginning of the battle, resonates with some of this mighty conflict in the heavens. Oh, it was a mighty battleground that was present there. From the time when the dominions or domineering powers or kyriotetes were at work creating the old Sun until the time of the creation of the old Moon, when the powers or dynamis began their mission, there was a mighty battleground, a tremendous conflict in the heavens. The rulers contracted our entire solar system mass up to the marker of Jupiter, and the Virtutes or powers then contracted the whole system up to the marker of today's Mars. Between these two planetary markers in the sky lies the great battle field of the dispute in the sky in the middle of it. Take a look at this battlefield in the sky! It was only in the 19th century that physical eyes, so to speak, rediscovered the devastation caused by the conflict in the heavens. You have blown up the host of small planetoids between Mars and Jupiter. These are the debris of the battlefield of the conflict in the heavens, which was fought between the two cosmic points in time when our solar system was drawn together to Jupiter and later to Mars. And when our astronomers point their telescopes into space and still discover planetoids, these are the debris of that great battlefield of the struggle between the more advanced Virtues and the less advanced Virtues, which also brought about the blasting off of the moon from its sun.

[ 21 ] Thus we see: When we contemplate the deeds of the divine-spiritual entities, the external things appear to us as an expression, as the external physiognomy of the divine-spiritual entities.