The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Third Lecture

[ 1 ] We have led our souls to where those penetrate who apply the methods of human development to the supersensible worlds. We have pointed out that there is a certain stage of development through which what otherwise confronts us in the outer world as heat, air, water, and so on, begins to live and be spiritualized. We have said that this can be called living into the world of elemental spirits. I ask those who have been studying spiritual science for some time to weigh every word carefully and to bear in mind that the words are used not approximately but very precisely. I did not say elemental spirits, but elemental spirits; and I am always referring only to what is mentioned at the particular point.

[ 2 ] Our task today will be to familiarize ourselves with some of the peculiarities that present themselves to the observer of the higher worlds. First of all, it should be pointed out that when we ascend into the supersensible world, other worlds join the world we experience with our sense organs, worlds that lie behind those that can be perceived with the senses and understood with the intellect. We will mention a few outstanding characteristics that may indicate the differences between our ordinary world and the two worlds immediately above it. The world immediately behind our world is called, as you all know, the astral world, and the one that is even more deeply hidden behind it is usually referred to in our language as the spiritual world. One could also call the astral world the soul realm or the soul world, and the other the spirit realm or the spiritual world. If we want to point out one of the many differences that will be important for our subsequent considerations, we can say that in our physical world, one of the most comprehensive laws is that of coming into being and passing away. Everywhere in our physical world we find the alternation of birth and death, of coming into being and passing away. Look wherever you will at our physical world, even among its highest beings, you will find the characteristic feature that they are born and die within the physical world. An apparent permanence within the physical world deceives human beings at most with that which belongs to the lower realms of nature: the dead realm of stones. But even that is only apparent. If one were to extend the observation of the mineral world over long periods of time, one would see that the law of arising and passing away also applies there.

[ 3 ] For the observer of the astral world, it is now obvious that—just as remarkable as the arising and passing away in the physical world—the astral world is characterized by transformability, by metamorphosis. And here, what is now to be said is linked to a point that was already made yesterday and that will occupy us in the most concrete way in many different ways. In the astral world, we are dealing with mobile structures, with structures that transform into one another in such a way that they can be one thing and then another. Even the human astral body, which is closest to us from the astral world and which, like a kind of aura — visible to clairvoyants — surrounds and envelops the physical body in a cloudy veil, has the peculiarity of being capable of constant transformation. Almost every moment, what envelops and permeates the human being as an astral-auric cloud is different, depending on whether the human being develops higher or lower instincts within themselves, experiences wilder, more stormy or calmer passions, or harbors this or that thought. Depending on whether he has this or that impulse of will, the most diverse formations and inclusions appear in this auric-astral cloud; and since in his soul life the human being continually allows this or that thought to rise and fall, this cloud can be depicted at every moment as something different in terms of color and form, even if a certain basic character, let us say a certain basic color, remains in the astral aura of every human being, corresponding to his more or less permanent character trait. Thus we already have within the astral body of the human being that which is changing. Yesterday it was pointed out that the same beings that first appear to the human being when he experiences the astral realm as something visible can, when he advances in enlightenment and the astral becomes recognizable to him, appear to him as good or evil, depending on his own preparation. So strong is the transformative power of that which does not descend to the physical plane for the purpose of vision, but remains in the regions of the higher worlds and descends only to the astral plane, that it can transform itself from good to evil, from light to darkness. Thus, we have metamorphosis, transformative power, as a characteristic feature of this world.

[ 4 ] In the actual spiritual world, we encounter a permanence, albeit only relative, a staying. Therefore, for example, the innermost essence of the human being, if it wants to preserve itself, if it wants to endure from one incarnation to another, must pass through the spiritual world, because only this world has the peculiarity of permanence, albeit not eternal, but relative in a certain sense.

[ 5 ] So, coming into being and passing away is the main thing about the physical world; changing from one form to another is a thing about the astral world; lasting is a thing about the spiritual world. First, we need to be clear that the materials for building humans come from these worlds, that humans are built from these worlds. The physical world is initially before him; he works his way up to the other worlds through what is called initiation, that is, through preparation and development toward supersensible vision. There he first learns to know what eludes him in the ordinary world, but which is just as real as this ordinary world.

[ 6 ] Now we must familiarize ourselves with something else. We have said that, for example, at a certain stage of development, we encounter living beings in the element of fire or heat, something that lives through fire, or, in relation to air, something that lives through air. For ordinary life, the situation is such that whenever an outer covering, an outer garment, an expression appears for some entity, that entity itself withdraws into a higher world for the human being. In the physical world, the human being learns about physical fire. Because he gets to know physical fire, the expression of certain spiritual entities that are at work in fire, in the physical world, he must ascend from the physical to higher worlds in order to get to know these entities themselves. One never finds in the same world those entities whose origin and source of a phenomenon is in another world. What is the cause and source of fire, for example, can only be found when one ascends from the physical world to the next higher world, because the beings in question send their expression down into the lower world and retain their essence in the higher world. This applies not only to the phenomena that confront us, so to speak, on the outer carpet of the physical world. The spirits of fire, the spirits of air, water, and earth conceal themselves from the physical world and are in the higher worlds because they send their expressions down into the physical world. But this applies not only to what confronts us outside ourselves, but to everything that lives within us, initially in the physical world. For us, it is not only the phenomena of the outer world that live in this world, not only the colorful and richly toned world, the world filled with smells and tastes, but also, first and foremost, our feelings, our sensations, and our thoughts. Everything that human beings are here in this embodiment, in this incarnation, lives in the physical world, whatever it may be. We must be clear about this. So every feeling we experience between birth and death, every thought we conceive, every idea and so on, is a manifestation of the physical world. And just as behind the outer appearances, the colors, sounds, smells, and so on, or as we say in spiritual science, the fire, the air, the water, and so on, there are divine-spiritual beings, so too do divine-spiritual beings live behind our sensations, our feelings, our entire soul world. Our entire soul world has divine-spiritual beings behind it. And what we usually experience as our ego, as our self within the physical world, is not yet our true self, it is not yet what we call our higher self. Our higher self stands in a supersensible world, it lives behind our feelings and sensations. Therefore, in the true sense, this higher self is only experienced through development up into the supersensible worlds. There it appears in a completely different form than in the physical world.

[ 7 ] I would like to give you a specific example of how the human self living in the physical world relates to its higher self. I would like to give you an example from our present circumstances, because anyone who has insight into the spiritual worlds knows that these things change over time. For example, someone who has wronged another person may experience within themselves what is called remorse. This leads to those peculiar experiences of the soul that are usually summarized under the word conscience. You all know that in ordinary life, the word conscience refers to a kind of inner voice that drives people to make amends for the wrong they have done. Most people will have little opportunity in their entire lives to think about the nature of this conscience; they simply say to themselves: Conscience is something you feel. You have an inner feeling that you must make amends for wrongdoing; it torments your soul if you have not made amends. For people in the physical world, conscience is initially an inner experience, an experience of the soul. If you ask a spiritual researcher how this works, they will have to make the following observation: they must observe the person who has committed an injustice in relation to their life in the astral world. The person who experiences inner remorse is, for the spiritual researcher, surrounded by strange astral figures that are not there unless remorse lives in the soul. Everything that stirs in the conscience, so to speak, and is only felt by the soul living in the physical world, appears to spiritual observation as certain figures that swirl around the person living in their environment. And when we ask ourselves: How does spiritual research explain the emergence of these figures? The following explanation suggests itself: Let us assume that someone has committed such an injustice. Then, from the thoughts that brought about the injustice, other thought forms arise, which are metamorphoses of the first. Everything that a person thinks, senses, and feels lives in their astral aura as a form, as a thought, sensation, or feeling form. One can depict a thought that is clear, for example, in a sharply defined thought form, as if hovering around the person; likewise, a wild, chaotic thought, or this or that passion, can be depicted through confused forms. These are all forms that surround the human being. When a person commits an injustice against another, they think and feel this or that. These thought or feeling forms then emerge from them and are present in their surroundings; but they do not remain mere thought forms, and this is the essential and important point. They do not remain something that has separated itself from the human being, but find nourishment from certain worlds. Like the wind rushing into a hollow space that presents itself to it, certain beings from very specific worlds — we will talk about this later — rush into these thought forms that are excreted through remorse, and the human being's own thought forms are then filled with a substance from these worlds. Through their thought forms, human beings have caused other entities to live in their environment. These entities are in truth the torment of remorse. If they were not there, remorse would not torment us. Only at the moment when human beings unconsciously feel these entities does the gnawing and consuming of a guilty conscience begin.

[ 8 ] You can now see from this example that a completely different reality exists for spiritual observation than for non-spiritual observation. For the latter, conscience is only an inner experience; for spiritual observation, conscience is a sum of entities that surround the human being, a spiritual-astral reality around him. Why, then, does man not see in ordinary life those entities I have just described to you — which arise when certain spiritual entities envelop themselves in his own thoughts as if in skins or bellows? For the same reason that they do not see spirits of fire, for example. They see physical fire in the physical world; behind the physical fire lies what is spiritual in the fire; and they must first look through the fire into higher worlds if they want to see the spiritual in the fire. In the same way, human beings must see spiritually through their conscience if they want to get to know spirits of conscience, if they want to become acquainted with the tormenting beings that initially live on the astral plane and that came into being in the way I have described to you.

[ 9 ] Now those who can connect the facts mentioned in various lectures and lecture cycles could draw a conclusion here, which I will now draw myself. You know that human soul life has changed over long periods of time. You are all familiar with this fact from my various lectures. You know that when we describe what we call human consciousness today, something different emerges than the consciousness, for example, of the ancient Indians in the first cultural epoch of the post-Atlantean period; that this consciousness was different, especially in the Atlantean period. You all know that human consciousness has developed from a dull, primitive clairvoyance to today's clear, waking consciousness of the physical world. The further back we go in evolution, the more we find that people had a primitive clairvoyance, a certain primitive clairvoyance. We do not need to go back very far, only a few millennia, to find numerous peoples who not only saw physical fire, but were able to see through this physical fire to the elemental spirits of fire. This has gradually developed in human consciousness, that a higher world has withdrawn from human beings, as it were, and that they have been restricted to the physical world. But this does not apply only to the outer world, to the carpet of the sensory world that spreads out around us, but also to the human soul life that manifests itself in the physical. Now you can draw the conclusion: if you mention a phenomenon such as conscience and claim that today's spiritual researchers experience astral-spiritual forms around human beings for what we call conscience, then the ancestors of today's human beings must have seen these astral-spiritual forms; they were clairvoyant, and therefore must also have seen what spiritual researchers today conceive. Now, just as fire conceals the spirits of fire, so the human conscience — this inner voice, as we call it — initially conceals the world I have just described, the world of tormenting and gnawing spirits of conscience. Therefore, in ancient times, people must have seen what I have just described as an astral apparition. But the condition for this would have been that people at that time did not yet have an inner conscience, that it had not yet been developed, that what we today call the soul phenomenon of conscience did not exist in our ancestors, but that our ancestors would have seen what today only spiritual researchers see in the astral envelope, whereas today, because people feel the inner voice of conscience, the outer spirits — let us say, of conscience — are obscured by this inner voice.

[ 10 ] I have deliberately cited this example because it confirms the matter as if it were tangible. One can point to the exact moment, externally and historically, when the transition took place from people seeing the external spirits of conscience to the awakening of the inner voice of conscience. You need only consider Aeschylus' Oresteia and compare it with the same material in the works of the Greek tragedian Euripides, who lived only a short time later. There you have the fulfillment and confirmation of what I have told you in a transition that took place in the course of a few decades from Aeschylus to Euripides. Look at Aeschylus' Orestes; bring to mind what is happening there! Agamemnon returns home after the war. He is murdered by his adulterous wife. His son Orestes, who is absent, comes home and takes revenge on his mother. He takes revenge for his father's death because even the voice of one of the revered gods himself urges him to do so; he takes revenge in accordance with the popular sentiment of the time. The people say that he has done the right thing, that he has only carried out justice. But he sees the Erinyes, the goddesses of vengeance, approaching him as a consequence of his mother's murder. The Erinyes, the goddesses of vengeance in mythology, are nothing other than the pictorial representation of what I have just described to you as a fact of spiritual observation. Now try to examine this older drama and see if there is anything in it that you can describe with the modern word conscience; in earlier times there was not even a word for what we call conscience, and, as researchers have proven, there is no word for it in any ancient language. Now compare the same thing with the poet who dealt with the same material a few decades later, Euripides. There you no longer have the Furies, the Erinyes; there you already have the human being who hears the inner voice of conscience. In the meantime—and this is obvious—the development of conscience takes place. Previously, in the course of human development, clairvoyant observation was so strong that people had a completely different perception of a bad deed they had committed than they did later. What did a person in earlier times feel when they had committed a bad deed? The clairvoyant eye was still awake; they saw what I have described in their surroundings — in Greece it was called the Erinyes. And what kind of feeling arose within them now, since they had this vision of the Erinyes constantly before them? A feeling arose that was entirely in keeping with the peculiarities of the astral world, the feeling of wanting to transform, to metamorphose the figures he saw around him. In the astral world, the ability to transform prevails. When a person has erased a bad deed and transformed it into a good one, the Erinyes of mythology are transformed into the benevolent Eumenides. Here you have the ability to transform. So there was something that man experienced in such a way that he said to himself: I have committed a bad deed; what is visible in the astral world is terrible; it must be transformed; I must do what brings about the metamorphosis. It was a correspondence between human action and what was in the environment. There was still nothing of what is the inner voice of conscience.

[ 11 ] Everything in the world, including the inner life of the soul, develops. So too has what we call conscience developed. And anyone who went back thousands of years and sought in earlier times what lives in the soul today as a self-evident phenomenon would be mistaken. And it is even the case that things change quite rapidly in the area where this is supposed to happen. Just as a plant grows from leaf to leaf and then suddenly blossoms, so it is in spiritual development. The foolish saying that nature does not make leaps is untrue; nature makes leaps all the time. At decisive points, leaps occur continuously. Just as the transition from green leaf to flower is a leap in the plant, so we can observe such leaps in spiritual life: things develop slowly and gradually over centuries and millennia; but then they develop as rapidly as the conscience did here in the time that falls within the fifth century BC, so that an earlier tragic poet does not yet mix anything into his drama about conscience, while the one who comes a few decades after him mixes it in for the first time and then also has a word for what we today call conscience. This is in turn linked to the fact that it is precisely the clairvoyant observation of the spirits of conscience, the Erinyes, that disappears for human beings. These spiritual beings are such that our inner experience of conscience stands before them, just as the outer expression of fire stands before the spirits of fire.

[ 12 ] Thus we see that, in the physical world, we come to a shore of experience in two directions, so to speak. One of these directions is this: when we look at the carpet of the sensory world around us and the phenomena of the world of colors and forms outside, we come to the boundary where, we might say, the outer spirit beings are. But also, when we go within ourselves, when we look at the phenomena of conscience, memory, feeling, will, and thought life, we must first see something very similar within these phenomena, just as we see fire, air, water, and earth. These things stand there and cover up what is spiritually behind them. When conscience asserted itself as a voice in the human soul, as an inner experience in the physical world, it placed itself before the world of the Erinyes, the Furies, and concealed it from human observation. Only when we view the historical life of humanity from this inner point of view does it become understandable. People understand nothing of what has happened unless they can view becoming and development by means of spiritual facts. So we have spiritual beings, so to speak, who are behind the red and blue, behind the sound, behind the external smell and so on, who live out there in the world that surrounds us, and who are veiled by what we see and hear and comprehend with our minds. But we also have beings who lie behind what we call soul and mind life. This raises the legitimate question: how do these two spiritual realms relate to each other?

[ 13 ] If we want to understand this, we must again bring to mind some of what you already know. You all know that human nature is divided into four parts: the physical body, the etheric body, the astral body, and the I, and that this fourfold nature of human beings can be traced back to the entire origin, to the entire becoming of the human being. We know that when we consider the human being as a whole, he did not begin on Earth, but that other embodiments preceded this Earth. We look back from Earth to a previous embodiment of the same, which we call the old Moon; we look further back to an even earlier embodiment of Earth, to the old Sun, and even further back to the old Saturn. We say that before our Earth came into being, there was an ancient planetary formation in the world which we call the old Saturn. At that time, the very first elements of our present physical body were formed on Saturn; on the old Sun, the etheric body was added, and on the old Moon, the astral body. It was only on Earth that the I was incorporated into this previously threefold human nature, so that we owe the seed of our physical body to the old Saturn, the seed of our etheric body to the old Sun, the seed of our astral body to the old Moon, and the seed of our I to the Earth. However, we already know from various lectures that this development did not take place in such a simple manner, that Saturn simply existed first, then transformed into the sun, from which the moon arose, and from the moon the earth. We know that this development is much more complicated. If we first say to ourselves: Saturn was there, it transformed into the old Sun, and this into the Moon — if we stick with this for the moment, because it is approximately correct for our circumstances — then we must not stop at the development of the Moon itself, which immediately preceded our Earth. I have pointed out to you that at the time of the moon's development, a separation occurred between the Earth and the Sun — the Earth was then the moon — in other words, between the moon and the sun. While we speak of Saturn and the Sun as undivided bodies, we must say of the moon's development that one body split into two bodies, so that for a time the old moon and the old sun existed simultaneously. Then the two joined together again, passed through an intermediate state, and reappeared as the Earth's development. And during the earliest Earth development, the substances and entities that are now in the Sun and Moon were united with the Earth itself; only in a later period did what now lives in the Sun separate from the Earth. At first, the Earth remained behind with the present Moon. At a later time, the moon separated from the earth, and the earth remained between the sun and the moon. These three bodies were therefore initially one; the sun and moon only formed later from the earth.

[ 14 ] Now we ask ourselves: What is the meaning of this separation in spiritual life? Let us disregard the first separation in the ancient lunar period and consider only those separations that took place during the actual development of the Earth. Just as certain beings find their development on our Earth, so other beings find their development on the Sun and through the Moon. Beings that could not have found their way forward on Earth because they were at a different stage of development than humans separated from the Earth with the Sun; they did not, so to speak, continue with the Earth's development, but had to continue their development on a stage away from Earth, namely on the Sun, so that at the moment of the separation of the Sun from the Earth, we have the fact that human beings were left behind on Earth as beings who needed the conditions of Earth's development for their own development. Other beings, however, who could not continue their development on Earth, separated the substances they needed and formed the Sun's dwelling place. They then worked on the Earth from the Sun. For just as the physical rays of the Sun fall upon the Earth and illuminate and warm it, so the deeds, the effects of the spirits of the Sun, shine down upon our Earth. The physical rays of the Sun are only the outer, physical expression of the deeds of the spiritual beings of the Sun. That was the meaning of the separation of the Sun.

[ 15 ] What, then, was the purpose of the separation of the moon? If the sun had remained connected to the earth, the beings who later lived on the sun would have been able to progress well, but human beings would never have been able to do so. Human beings would not have been able to keep pace with the speed of development of the sun beings; they would have had to develop much more quickly if the sun beings had not left the earth and exerted a weaker influence from outside. Thus, the speed of development on Earth was slowed down by the separation of the Sun. But this was not yet the speed of development appropriate for human beings; it was too slow. Human beings would have become hardened, mummified, if the Moon, which was still connected to the Earth at that time, had remained connected to it. Human beings would not have developed into beings as they are today, consisting of an outer physical body and an inner spirit-soul life, but would have become hardened and mummified. Because the moon was connected to the earth, there was a tendency for humans and the earth to harden, dry up, and become woody, so to speak. The earth would have gradually become a world body from which human forms would have emerged like dead mummies. The moon had to be separated from the earth. This made it possible to maintain the right pace of development. What was too slow could be accelerated. In this way, human beings became what they are meant to be, whereas if the sun had remained with the earth, they would have been stimulated to an external life and activity that they could not have tolerated. If the moon had remained with the earth, human beings would not have been stimulated at all; they would have dried up and been deprived of the possibility of coming to life. The stimulation that humans received through the life of the sun was external. The sun would have had a stimulating effect on all human life, but at too rapid a pace. Just as the sun stimulates the life of flowers in the field from outside, so would human beings, if the sun had remained connected to the earth, have been stimulated to all feeling, thinking, and willing from outside, but in such a rapid manner that they would have been burned, so to speak, in the physical and spiritual fire of the sun. But the stimulator working from outside had gone out, had moved away, and its effect had therefore been weakened. At first, however, it was too weak because of the hardening tendencies within the earth itself, and part of these hardening tendencies had to be brought out in the form of the moon. This brought a new, life-giving principle into the development of the earth and into human beings, and this principle had exactly the opposite stimulating effect as the sun. While the sun's stimulation works from outside, what now enters works from within, giving life. Everything that is soul life in the physical world, as it is experienced on Earth, could only develop because human beings were saved from this hardening, from this mummification, by the departure of the Moon. All inner life, all inner activity, everything that can be described as feelings, sensations, conscience, and thoughts—all these inner sources of life asserted themselves from within through the separation of the moon from the earth; otherwise they would have dried up in human nature and remained inactive.

[ 16 ] So ask those who measure our cosmos with spiritual vision: Where does the ability come from that we perceive anything external, that we see or look at anything, that human beings are inspired to look? You must say to yourselves: From what is physically or spiritually present in the sun. But ask: Where do the reasons for inner experience come from, the reasons for thinking, the reasons for feeling, the reasons for conscience, for example, and so on? Then you must look up gratefully to the moon and say to yourself: Thanks to the beings who took its substances away from the earth's substance. The moon's substances in the earth would have prevented the inner activity of the soul life.

[ 17 ] However, we must not seek the reasons for the development of the world in human beings alone, but in a certain sense also in the spiritual beings that belong to the higher worlds. It was not only good for human beings that the sun and moon separated from them, but it was also good for those beings that were connected with human beings in their development at that time. Spiritual beings separated themselves from the earth with the sun and made the sun their dwelling place. Just as human beings could not have developed if the sun had remained connected to the earth, these beings could not have developed on earth if the separation had not taken place. They could only develop by drawing into the sun the substances that had previously been united with the earth. There, away from the hardening substances of the Earth, they were able to find the conditions necessary for their development. So we look up to the beings developing in the Sun and say: Up there dwell those beings who needed their Sun for their development just as we need the Earth for ours. They would have had to perish, so to speak, if they had remained connected to the Earth. But now, after everything has happened as I have said, these spiritual beings have found the opportunity to send their beneficial effects down to the earth, that is, to develop themselves to the point where they can help the beings of the earth from outside in the appropriate way. The sun spirits would not be helpers of the earth if they had remained on it. Only after the separation of the sun from the earth did the beings there gradually attain the stages at which they could become helpers of the earth. When the spiritual researcher looks out in his observation into the light and at the things of the outer world, he can say to himself at a certain stage of his development: Behind what physically confronts me as color or sound are the beings that we can regard as sun beings. But the way the sun beings appear to us today in spiritual observation is only how they have become. After this becoming, they appear to us as the high, as the higher spirit beings, as those who confront us when we look out of the sensory world.

[ 18 ] And now we ask ourselves: Who brought about the other possibility of development, the one that provided the stimulus from within and dispelled the hardening in human beings? There must have been beings who, at the right moment, lifted the lunar substance out of the earth substance. So if we want to express ourselves in popular, perhaps even trivial terms, we can say: There must have been spiritual beings who, at a certain point in the Earth's development, said to themselves: We have now followed the development of the Earth, which first existed as a being in space, consisting of the sun, moon, and Earth. Three were united in one. Then they saw that there were other beings who could not progress if they remained connected to the Earth. They saw how the sun spirits separated from the sun, how they left the Earth and found their way to another place. Then they saw that human beings would now become hardened and wooden, and that human beings would not become what they were meant to be. Therefore, they said to themselves: We cannot leave it at what the sun spirits have done; we must do something else; we must now protect the earth from hardening. Now they intervened and separated the moon from the earth. This was an act of beings who were in a certain sense higher than the sun spirits. The latter, when the sun was still one with the earth, had to say to themselves: We can no longer find any possibility of development on earth; we need another scene. But these other beings could say to themselves: We will also find our way forward on earth. They let the sun spirits go out with the sun and remained connected to the earth themselves. But because they remained connected to the earth, they had the opportunity at a certain point in time to become the saviors of human evolution by pulling the moon out of the earth. In a certain sense, these were higher beings than the sun spirits. They could calmly say: Let the hardening of the earth come upon us, let us not go with the sun spirits, but let us reserve for ourselves the right to do something that the sun spirits cannot do, namely, to pull the moon out of the earth. So there were beings who could commit an act that separated a relatively inferior substance from the earth, while the sun spirits took the more noble substance, but who proved their greater power by becoming the restrainer and ruler of something inferior. For it is not the one who rules over the good and perhaps makes them a little better who is the stronger, but the one who succeeds in transforming the evil into good.

[ 19 ] So we see that after the separation of the sun, spiritual beings intervened in the development of the earth, beings who had been reserved for a high and significant task. These beings stand behind the phenomena of our soul life just as the spirits of the sun stand behind the phenomena of our external observation. Look through your eyes, listen with your ears, comprehend with your mind the external things, and you can say: Behind everything I see, hear, and comprehend with my mind lie those beings who have their actual dwelling place on the sun, who live in the sun, who separated themselves when the sun separated from the earth. But if you look back into your own inner being, if you let your gaze fall on what you call thinking, feeling, willing, sensing, conscience, then you see the inner life that has become possible through the fact that certain spiritual beings preserved themselves and then separated the moon from the earth. In their realm they have everything that lies behind the phenomena of the soul life. And just as it is true that when the spiritual researcher looks behind the physical fire and perceives its spirits, he truly sees a spirit that has its actual place of activity in the sun, so when he looks behind the conscience, he sees the conscience spirits that belong to those who extracted the moon substance from the earth. From there come the spiritual beings who enter, as if into a skin, into the thought forms associated with a bad deed. Whatever their value may be, the spirits that surround human beings as conscience beings come from the lunar realm and belong to a spiritual realm that is in a certain sense more powerful and superior to the solar realm.

[ 20 ] From the whole nature of the presentation I have given you today, you can judge that these beings who stand behind our soul phenomena actually belong to a realm that is superior to the spiritual realm which stands behind the outer Maya. We have a twofold Maya: the outer Maya of the sensory world and the inner Maya of the soul life. Behind the former are those spiritual beings who have their center in the sun; behind the Maya of our inner life are the others who belong to a more powerful, more comprehensive realm. Those who can see these things spiritually can know that the spiritual beings behind the outer sensory world come from a completely different source than the spiritual beings behind feelings and sensations, behind the conscience. These beings, which correspond to conscience, for example, are called the Erinyes in Greek mythology. And look at this mythology and see how true it is when it says: Orestes hears from the gods who rule there that he has done a good deed, but other beings, namely the Erinyes, approach him, and mythology has the feeling: these are older beings than those who belong to the realm of Zeus; they assert themselves as avengers even where the outer gods of the sun realm, the realm of Zeus, allow and permit the deed. Thus, beings of an older spirit race appear before man, intervening, as it were, to correct what he undertakes, guided and directed by the beings who have separated themselves from the sun. Here we see a wonderful example of how mythology and the wisdom teachings of ancient peoples reflect what spiritual observation can recognize today in a different way.

[ 21 ] Take everything I have told you today — we will explain it in more detail in the next lectures — and you will find many questions that arise in your own conscience in connection with the subject we have discussed. Some things will remain unclear to you today because we have, in a certain sense, regarded the beings who intervened in the separation of the moon as more powerful than the beings of the sun kingdom; this will become clear, for you will see how relative things are in the higher worlds. But I ask you to accept one thing today as something of a question. We have seen that the earth would have become hardened and lignified if the separation of the moon had not taken place; that the soul life has retained its inner vitality because certain powerful beings cast the moon out of the earth.

[ 22 ] Such things in evolution do not happen all at once; such things happen gradually. Even the beneficial effects that emanate from the sun did not make themselves felt all at once; they were not suddenly there in their fullness, but gradually made themselves felt. And now I ask you to consider that at a certain point in the Earth's development, a spiritual being that was previously connected with the sun, whom we call the Christ being, descended from the sun to the Earth during the life of Jesus of Nazareth and united with the Earth. The Christ Being entered into the body of Jesus of Nazareth. Here we have a very peculiar phenomenon before us. You must not place this phenomenon — and the next lecture will make this clear — in the same context as everything else we have discussed today. We have said that after the separation of the sun from the earth, the earth would have hardened if the moon had not been cast out of it; human beings would have mummified. This applies to a large part of earthly life, but it does not apply to the whole of earthly life. Despite the separation of the sun and the moon, something subject to death would have remained in the earth if the Christ event had not taken place. If the separation of the moon made inner soul life possible, the stimulus — the renewed stimulation of this inner soul life — now came again from the sun through the Christ descending from it. What Christ brought to the earth would have remained a spiritually dead product, a spiritual mummy, if Christ had not come.

[ 23 ] What presents itself to the spiritual researcher when he looks back to the time that preceded the Christ event? Something highly peculiar presents itself to him. When the spiritual eye looks back into ancient times, the outer form of the earth as it presents itself to the physical senses, which is only Maya, disappears, and in its place something appears that could be compared to the form of the human being, but only to this, to the form of the human being. To the spiritual gaze, the earth — I say expressly the earth — is transformed from its outer Maya form into the earthly form of a human being with arms outstretched in the shape of a cross, who in this form is, however, male-female. The spiritual researcher sees the earth of the time before Christ descended in the shape of a cross, and indeed as a human being. We are reminded of the wonderful words of Plato, who formed them out of the mysteries, that the world soul is crucified on the cross of the world body. This is nothing other than the reproduction of the phenomenon that presents itself to the spiritual gaze. Christ died on the cross, and through this the earth passed from mere form into life. For the time before Christ, the Earth appears to the spiritual eye as mere form; for the post-Christian era, the Earth appears as newly enlivened by the Christ principle. At that time, when the Christ principle entered the Earth, something similar happened as during the separation of the Moon; life entered into something that would otherwise have remained form. When viewed correctly, all ancient times pointed to the Christ event. Just as people today reject Christ as a being who entered human evolution at a specific point in time, the initiates of pre-Christian times always pointed to the fact that Christ would come; and they showed what pointed to Christ, what foreshadowed Christ, as it were. Nothing foreshadowed Christ more than that mighty apparition which presented itself to the spiritual gaze under certain conditions, when the earth disappeared in its physical form and the spiritual eye looked upon the world soul crucified on the world body. In the gray Indian past, the wise men told that at the moment when their clairvoyant gaze opened, they found deep, deep beneath the mountains of the earth, near the center of the earth, a cross with a male-female human being hanging on it, with the symbol of the sun on the right side and the symbol of the moon on the left side, and on the rest of the body the countries and individual sea and land formations of the earth. This was a clairvoyant vision that the ancient sages of India had of the figure who was waiting on our earth to be enlivened by the Christ principle. And by pointing to the most important prophetic foreshadowing of the Christ event, these ancient sages of India proved that, where they looked more deeply, they could say: Christ will come, for that which points to him is there. That is why the oldest wisdom, where it ascends to the highest regions, is prophecy; it looks at something that will come in the future. Everything that is in the future is the effect of the present. But what happens in the future as something spiritually significant can already indicate its existence to the spiritual eye in the present. The Christ event was not indicated in an outwardly abstract way, but was hinted at for the spiritual gaze by the fact that the form, the shape of the world soul, presented itself on the cross of the world body before the life of Christ, which connected with the life of the earth at a certain point in time. The wisdom of all ages reveals itself in inner harmony when one considers things to their very foundation. Thus, starting from what has been said, we must consider the wisdom of the different ages and strive to shed light on them so that they may appear in their true form.