The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Seventh Lecture

[ 1 ] At the beginning of today's lecture, I would like to make a further comment that relates to the end of yesterday's lecture. I have seen that some of the honored audience have attached a certain importance to the fact - and of course this can be taken as a thought - that in the sketchy drawing I gave, the individual planets with the sun were all in a row, so a kind of general, as one says, conjunction was drawn, but I expressly note that this does not matter at all, what it is about. We need this later, namely, it is necessary that we do not indulge in false ideas.

[ 2 ] First, we draw the sun in the sense of the Copernican system; then what is now called Mercury, but in the esoteric is called Venus; then Venus, or Mercury in the esoteric sense. Then, in the sense of the Copernican system, comes the Earth with its moon, followed by the orbit of Mars, then Jupiter and finally Saturn. That would be the Copernican system. And now I said that I would like to do it the way it was taught in a Zarathustra school. You must not think that Zarathustra himself always had to teach; these are elementary truths that were taught in the Zarathustra schools. [The same drawing as on page 103.]

[ 3 ] If we now imagine that the constellation of Gemini is there, then we take the points that simply lie on this line II to the Sun. Connect – it does not matter whether such a conjunction exists or not – simply connect the Sun with the constellation of Gemini. Wherever Saturn, Jupiter, Mars are, it does not matter, I have only drawn this here to indicate the orbits. These are the initial boundary points for the individual hierarchies.

[ 4 ] Now, if we want to depict the realm of Saturn, for example, we have to think of the Earth, not the Sun, as the center and draw a kind of circle – it is not a circle in reality – a kind of egg shape, so that the Earth becomes the center. Likewise, we have to do this for the other heavenly bodies. So I beg you not to mistake the unimportant for the important in this drawing. The main thing is that we get the corresponding figures for the domains of the respective hierarchies.

[ 5 ] Today we want to take a closer look at the nature of those members of the higher hierarchies who stand immediately above the human being. It is good if we start from the human being to study this, because only by fully realizing what we have repeatedly said about the nature of the human being and his development can we ascend to the nature of the members of higher hierarchies.

[ 6 ] We know that man, as he first came upon the earth and developed on it, essentially consists of four members. These four members are thus the physical body, the etheric body, the astral body and the I. Today, we want to sketch these four members of the human being schematically, as we need them. We begin by drawing the human physical body as a circle, then the etheric body, the astral body and finally the I as a small circle. You now know how the development of the human being takes place. In the course of their earthly development, human beings begin to work on the astral body from the I. And in general we can say: the part of the astral body that the human being has worked on from the I, so that this processed part of the astral body has come under the control of the I, is called Manas or spirit self; so that, as has often been emphasized, Manas or spirit self is not to be seen as something newly acquired, but simply as a transformed product of the human being's astral body. It should be noted that all these things that are said here apply to man. It is important that we do not generalize, but realize that the beings of the world are very, very different from each other.

[ 7 ] Now, as a fifth link, we draw the transformed astral body, that is, Manas as a special circle — actually it would have to be drawn inside the astral body. Likewise, we have to draw the transformed etheric body above it, because as much of the etheric body as is transformed is designated as Budhi or spirit of life, and when it is completely transformed, it is just completely Budhi. Likewise, the physical body is transformed into Atma when we look at the human being in the perfection that he can attain in his development through Jupiter, Venus and Vulcan. When man has reached his highest perfection in the Vulcan state, we can draw him schematically in the following way: We would have, we would say, his Atma, Budhi, Manas, the I, the astral body, the etheric body, the physical body. And we would then have to regard as characteristic in this scheme that the human being with his seven principles is a whole, that these seven principles are all within one another. That is the essential thing.

[ 8 ] Because if we now go to the members of the next hierarchy, to the angels, this is not the case with them. We can apply this scheme to man, but not to any angelic being. There we have to say: This angel has developed a physical body, 1, an etheric body, 2, and an astral body, 3, so that these form a whole to a certain extent. But now we have to draw the I, 4, separately, Manas, 5, Budhi, 6, and Atma, 7. If you want to understand the nature of an angel, you have to imagine that the higher limbs that he has and towards which he can develop – in reality he has only fully developed the manas, he will only develop the other two later – that these higher members hover, so to speak, in a spiritual world above that which is present in him in the physical. If one wanted to study the nature of an angel, one would have to say: the angel does not have an ego that directly wanders around on earth in a body like the human being. He also does not develop his manas on the present level of his development on earth. Therefore, what is of him on earth does not look at all as if it belonged to a spiritual being. When you meet a human being, you can see that he has his principles within him, and that everything about him is therefore organically structured. If you want to see an angel, you have to bear in mind that their physical body down here is only a reflection of their spiritual principles, which can only be seen in the spiritual realm. In the flowing and trickling water, in the water dissolving into vapor, further in the winds of the air and in the lightning flashing through the air and the like, there you have to seek the physical body of the angelic beings. And the difficulty for man consists first in the fact that he believes that a body must be definitely limited all around. It is difficult for a person to say to himself: I stand before a rising or falling mist, I stand before a spring that sprays in all directions, I stand in the rushing wind, I see lightning shoot out of the clouds and know that these are the revelations of the angels; and I have to see behind this physical body, which is not as limited as the human one, a spiritual one.

[ 9 ] A person should develop all of his principles in a self-contained way; this is why he cannot imagine that a physical body can be blurred, floating, that it does not even need to be clearly divided. You must realize that eighty angels belong together, who have the densest part of their physical body in a single part of this or that water surface. Nor need this physical body of the angels be conceived as having any limits at all. One piece of water here, another piece far away there. In short, we see that everything around us is water, air and fire of the earth, and that we have to imagine it as containing within itself the bodies of the Hierarchy standing next above man. And clairvoyant vision must be used to look into the astral world in order to see the angelic ego and angelic manas - that looks at us from the higher world. And the area in the solar system where we have to search when we are looking for the angelic beings extends to the orbit of the moon. With these angels, the matter is still relatively simple, because it is so that if, for example, we have the physical body of an angel down there in a mass of water or something similar and we clairvoyantly observe this water area or a wind, we find an etheric body and an astral body in it. That is why these three things have been drawn together here. Of course, what rushes along in the wind, what flows or disperses in the water, is not only the material image that the coarse mind sees; the ethereal and astral of the angels, the next hierarchy above man, lives in the most diverse ways in water, air and fire. If you want to find the spiritual essence of these angels, then you have to look in the astral realm, then you have to look into it clairvoyantly.

[ 10 ] But if we want to draw the next level, that of the archangels, the matter is different. The archangels do not have what we have drawn here as the astral body at all connected to the physical body and etheric body; and what we can seek from them as their lowest level, we have to draw it like this: physical body, etheric body, 1, 2, they have that, so to speak, separately, and all the higher principles are now in a higher world up there. So that we only have the complete picture of the archangels when we search in two places, when we say to ourselves: Not everything is united in a single entity, as it is in humans; the spiritual is, as it were, above and below the spiritual is reflected. - A physical body and an etheric body can only unite if this physical body is only in air and fire. So you could not feel the archangels, for example, rushing along in some mass of water, according to their physical body, but you could only perceive them in wind and fire, and so you would have to seek their spiritual counterpart clairvoyantly in the spiritual world, in this rushing wind and this fire. This is not united with its physical body, nor even with its etheric body.

[ 11 ] And finally we come to those entities which we call archai, primal beginnings, primal forces, spirits of personality. Below we can only draw the physical body, everything else is up in the spiritual world. Such a physical body can only live in fire. Only in fire flames can you perceive the physical body of the primal forces. When you see the fire of lightning flickering, you can say to yourself each time: There inside is something of the body of the elemental forces, but above in the spiritual world, clairvoyantly, I will find the spiritual counterpart, which in this case is separated from its physical body. Especially with these archai, with the primal beginnings or spirits of personality, the clairvoyant faculty can make things relatively easy for itself. Imagine that these spirits of personality are in the realm that extends to the astronomical planet Mercury, which is to say, to Venus in the sense of the Mysteries. Let us assume that someone has managed to observe what is developing up there on Mercury: They can perceive these highly developed entities, these spirits of personality. If he looks up clairvoyantly to Venus to observe the assembly of the spirits of personality up there, and then sees the flash of lightning through the clouds, he sees the spirits of personality reflected in this flash of lightning, because that is where their body is.

[ 12 ] We then come up to the higher spiritual beings, which reach up to the sun mark. We are not so much interested in these forces, exusiai, today. Only this should be emphasized, that their executive organs are the Venus beings and the Mercury beings - the Venus beings, which have their physical body in fire, and the Mercury beings, which have their physical body in fire and wind. Translate it to yourself as saying: Those entities that live in the sun make the Venus spirits in fire flames and the Mercury spirits in wind their subordinate organs. “And God made fire flames his servants and the winds his messengers” [as it says in the Bible]. Read that, these things in the religious records are absolutely taken out of the spiritual facts and correspond to the observations of the clairvoyant faculty.

[ 13 ] So we have seen that these three hierarchies, which are above us, are closely connected with our own existence. Man is the being that he is because he has received something from the solid, from the earth. This is what makes him so separate from all other beings, this is what makes him a coherent being, consisting of individual members. On the moon, man was still one of many such beings, but on Earth he has undergone transformations, just like masses of water that form a constantly changing body. It is only on Earth that man has become, so to speak, trapped in his skin and now forms a self-contained being, so that we can say: man consists of a physical body, an etheric body, an astral body and an I. This self-contained state is, in fact, not so very long ago. If we go back to the ancient Atlantean times, we find that even in the first epoch of the Atlantean period, there were people who did not yet feel the I within them fully, who were still waiting, so to speak, to receive the I completely. And if we go further back in the evolution of the earth, we would have to say: What we have down there on earth in the form of human beings consists only of a physical body, an etheric body and an astral body. And if you go back to the Lemurian period, you will find a human being down on earth who, in his species, no longer has a physical body, an etheric body and an astral body down there, as the angels also have down there. With the development of the human sense of self, from that point on through the Atlantean period, unification occurs. So in the Lemurian period, people walk around on Earth with only a physical body, etheric body and astral body; but they are not people who think in today's sense, who can develop in today's sense as human beings.

[ 14 ] And now something very strange is happening on our earth. These people, who live in the Lemurian period and have only the physical body, the etheric body and the astral body, cannot help themselves; they do not know their way around on earth and do not know what to do on earth. From the region of heaven, the inhabitants of Venus now descend to these beings. They are able to penetrate and inspire the physical body of the first inhabitants of Earth precisely because they have a relationship to a physical body, so to speak. Thus, among these Lemurian people, we find individuals who walk among the masses of people in a very peculiar way; they have a different physical body from the others. One such particularly gifted person did not have an ordinary physical body, but one that was inspired by a Venus spirit, the spirit of personality. But the fact that this human being of the ancient Lemurian times walked around with a Venus spirit in his physical body gave him tremendous influence over his entire environment. Such Lemurians did not outwardly differ particularly from their fellow men; but because a spirit of personality was vicariously present in their physical body, these select individuals had a suggestive effect on their surroundings in the highest sense of the word. The respect and reverence, the obedience shown to them – there is nothing like it today. All the migrations on earth that were undertaken to populate the individual areas of the earth were led by such entities, into which the spirits of personality had entered. No language was needed, there was none at that time, nor were signs needed, but the presence of such a personality was enough. And when it considered it necessary to guide large crowds from one place to another, then these crowds followed without thinking about it. There was no thinking at that time either, that only developed later.

[ 15 ] Thus the spirits of personality descended as Venus spirits in the old Lemurian time. And we can therefore say that these Venus spirits, who wore the human face on earth, just as this human face could be at that time, meant something quite different in the whole context of the world. If we consider their cosmic significance, it extended right up to Venus, and their actions had a meaning in the context of the entire cosmic system. They could lead people from one place to another because they knew this from the context, which can be understood if one knows the neighborhood of the earth and not just the earth.

[ 16 ] The development of humanity progressed further. Then it became necessary for archangels, Mercury spirits, to intervene in the development; they now had to inspire and enliven what was down there on earth. This was mainly during the Atlantean period. Then spirits of Mercury, archangels, archangeloi descended. They could inspire the physical body and etheric body of the people concerned. Among the Atlanteans, there were again people like that who did not particularly differ from the others on the outside, but who were inspired by an archangel in their physical and etheric bodies. And if you consider that we said yesterday that the archangels have the task of directing entire nations, you will understand that such a person, who carried an archangel within him, could indeed give the corresponding laws, read from heaven, to an entire Atlantean tribe without further ado.

[ 17 ] Thus the great leaders of the ancient Lemurian times, when it was still necessary to work on a much more general level, were inspired by Venus spirits. Those who had to direct smaller masses of people in the Atlantean times were inspired by archangels. What are called the priest-kings of the Atlantean times are Maya; they are not at all what they appear to be. In their physical body and etheric body lives an archangel, who is the actual doer. And we can go back to the Atlantean times, we can visit the secret places of these human leaders. From the Atlantean secret places they worked, there they explored the secrets of space. One can describe that which was researched and commanded there in the old Atlantean secret places with the name oracle, although this word comes from later times. The name oracle site is very suitable for the actual teaching and government sites of these Atlantean people, who carried the archangels within them. From there they worked as great teachers, so that they could now also train other people and make them into servants and priests in the oracle sites of the Atlanteans.

[ 18 ] It is important to know that in ancient Atlantis there were people who were actually archangels, who, embodied in their physical and etheric bodies, carried an archangel. If the clairvoyant gaze had been confronted with such a person, it would indeed have seen the physical human being and, behind the physical human being, rising up as in a huge figure, losing itself in the indefinite regions above, the archangel inspiring him. Such a personality was a twofold entity, as if the archangel inspiring him had been there behind the physical man, growing out of the indefinite. When these people died, the physical body perished according to the laws of Atlantis. It dissolved, the physical body, which of course the archangel had also inspired, but the etheric body did not dissolve. There is a spiritual economy that requires exceptions to what must generally be presented as spiritual scientific truth. We say, and in general this is quite correct: when a person dies, he discards his physical body, after some time also his etheric body, and the etheric body dissolves with the exception of an extract. But this is only true in general. There is an enormous difference between an ether body like that of these initiates of the Atlantean oracles, which was permeated by an archangel, and an ordinary ether body. Such a valuable ether body is not lost; it is stored in the spiritual world. And initially, the seven most important etheric bodies of the seven great leaders of these oracles were stored by the highest leader of the Atlantean oracles. They were originally woven because archangels had dwelled in these etheric bodies, who of course returned to the higher worlds at death. Such things are stored, not in boxes, of course, but according to spiritual laws. The Atlantean initiate of the oracle of the sun is none other than the one who is so often referred to as the Manu, who led the remnant of the Atlantean population to Asia to found the post-Atlantean cultures. He took his small group and led them to Asia. For generations he cultivated the people, and when the appropriate seven had been bred and raised, he wove for them an etheric body into their own etheric body, which had been woven in ancient Atlantis by archangels. Those seven who were sent down by the great leader to found the first post-Atlantean culture, the seven holy Rishis of Indian culture, they carried in their etheric bodies the etheric bodies of the great Atlantean leaders, who in turn had acquired these etheric bodies through the archangels themselves. Thus past, present and future worked together. You would have found these seven people, who are called the holy Rishis, to be simple folk, for their astral bodies and their I were not on a par with their ether bodies. Interwoven into the ether body was that which they were actually able to do; therefore they had certain hours when inspiration worked in their ether body. Then they said things they could not have achieved themselves; then flowed from their lips what had been inspired into them through their etheric body. Thus they were simple folk when left to their own judgment; but when they had those hours of inspiration, when the etheric body was at work, then they spoke the greatest secrets of our solar system, of the world in general.

[ 19 ] In the post-Atlantean era, people did not yet need anything from above, so to speak, they no longer needed inspiration at all, but even then a kind of inspiration from above still took place. We have seen how such an inspiration took place in the Lemurian population in that the physical body was inspired by spirits of personality; in the Atlantean period, the physical and etheric bodies were by archangels; and now the great leaders of the post-Atlantean time were first ensouled by the angels descending into their physical body, etheric body and astral body. The great leaders of the first post-Atlantean period therefore did not just have their human physical body, etheric body and astral body, but an angel was inside them. This enabled these great leaders to look back at their previous incarnations. The average person cannot do this because they have not yet developed to the level of manas; they must first become an angel themselves. These guides, who were born out of the ordinary population, carried an angelic being in their physical body, etheric body and astral body, which inspired them and permeated them. This was again Maya, these were again beings that are something other than what they represent on earth. And the great human leaders of gray antiquity were quite something else than they appeared on the outside. They were personalities in whom there was an angel who inspired them as they needed to be in order to be teachers and guides for people. The great founders and leaders of religions were people possessed by angels. Angels spoke through them.

[ 20 ] Now, however, things in the world can be described with complete regularity, but the developmental processes always interlock. What we describe with such complete regularity does not always take place with complete regularity. Of course, this applies in the main, so that in the Lemurian period spirits of the personality spoke through human beings, in the Atlantean period through archangels, and in the post-Atlantean period through angels. But there are also beings that still exist in the post-Atlantean time, who are permeated by spirits of personality in their physical body, who, despite living in the post-Atlantean time, are actually in the same situation as those beings were in the Lemurian time, from whom spirits of personality spoke. So, there may be people in the post-Atlantean time who do have the characteristics of the outer peoples, but who, because humanity also needed such great leaders, still carry within themselves a spirit of personality, who are the outer embodiment of such a spirit. Then there are also people in the post-Atlantean era who, in turn, carry an archangel, a Mercury spirit, which animates their physical and especially their etheric body. And finally, there is the third type of person, who is inspired by an angelic being in their physical, etheric and astral bodies, and thus an angel speaks through them.

[ 21 ] In the sense of Eastern teaching, such human personalities now receive special names again. Thus, a human personality who, although outwardly a person of our post-Atlantic time, actually carries a spirit of personality within them, who is inspired by a spirit of personality right down to their physical body, is called a Dhyani Buddha in Eastern teachings. Dhyani Buddha is therefore a general name for human individuals who are inspired by a spirit of personality right down to their physical body. Those personalities who are ensouled even in their etheric body, who carry an archangel within them in the post-Atlantean time, are called Bodhisattva. And those who carry an angel within them, who are ensouled in their physical body, etheric body and astral body, are called human Buddhas. So we have three levels: the Dhyani Buddhas, the Bodhisattvas and the human Buddhas. This is the true teaching of the Buddhas, of the classes and categories of the Buddhas, which we have to look at in the context of the way the hierarchies express themselves.

[ 22 ] This is the wonderful thing that we encounter when we look back at the earlier, undeveloped people, that among these people we find those through whom the great hierarchies actually from the Cosmos down into the planet, and that only gradually the spirits of the higher hierarchies, which have already worked before our earth's formation, release the people who live down there, the planetary people, to the degree that they mature. We see into this with tremendous wisdom. And it is extremely important that we see through this wisdom precisely in this sense, as it was taught in ancient times, when the primal wisdom of the world was taught to mankind.

[ 23 ] So when you hear about the Buddhas – and in the Eastern teachings, there is not only talk of the one Buddha, but of many, among whom, of course, there are different degrees of perfection again – please note: a Buddha walks on earth, but behind the Buddha, so to speak, there was still the Bodhisattva and even the Dhyani Buddha. But now it could also be the case that, for example, the Dhyani Buddha and the Bodhisattva did not descend to the ensoulment of the physical body at all, but that the Bodhisattva only descended to to inspire the etheric body, so that you can assume an entity that does not go so far as to also ensoul and inspire the physical body of the human being, but only the etheric body. But it can happen that such a bodhisattva, who is not physically visible at all - because if he only appears in an etheric body, he is not physically visible, and there were certainly such bodhisattvas who were not physically visible - that such a bodhisattva, as a higher being, can in turn inspire the human Buddha in a special way. So we have the human Buddha, who is already inspired by an angelic being, but who is still inspired in his etheric body by an archangelic being.

[ 24 ] This is the essential thing, that we are looking into a wonderful complexity of the human being. And many an individuality, to which we look back in earlier times, we actually only understand when we see it as a gathering point of various entities that live and express themselves through the human being. For truly, many an age does not have enough great people to be inspired by the spirits that are to work. Sometimes a single personality has to be inspired and animated by the most diverse individualities of the higher hierarchies. And sometimes it is not only the population of Mercury that speaks, but those of Mercury and Venus speak to us when we have any personality before us. These, then, you see, are the concepts that lead us to an understanding of human evolution, so that we recognize personalities in their true form, while when they appear to us as physical human beings, they are actually merely Maja.

[ 25 ] Tomorrow we will begin to understand the formation of the individual physical planets, which we have so far only considered as brands, in order to then be able to understand them as a residence for the corresponding beings.