The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Fifth Lecture

[ 1 ] The main point of yesterday’s lecture was, after all, that through all the various complex discussions we gained a mental image of what we should initially conceive of as matter and materiality: that what we should actually conceive of as matter and materiality are broken spiritual forms, spiritual forms that have been pulverized, as it were. And in the context of these lectures, we had to point out the most essential aspect of material existence from this perspective, because we as human beings have become entangled in this material existence, because, so to speak, the disintegrating spiritual form has penetrated us and fills us as earthly human beings— which is precisely what is so beautifully symbolized in the expulsion from Paradise: the permeation of the human being with earthly matter. If you have followed what was said yesterday not merely in concepts but by experiencing it to some extent, you will also have gained a mental image of what we actually have within the human being: a kind of dual being. Just think for a moment of how it was pointed out the day before yesterday that, through the Luciferic influence, human beings have had introduced into themselves what we might call our sensory perceptions, as we experience them as earthly human beings. We have indeed pointed out that these earthly sensory perceptions were not actually predestined for human beings from the outset, but that what was predestined for them was a kind of coexistence with the ruling Will, and that the way we hear through our ears, see through our eyes, and perceive through other sense organs today is already a distortion that has come about because of the Luciferic influence. Then we were able to point out that, furthermore, looking more toward the inner being of the human being, everything that appears to us physically as glandular secretions likewise comes about through the shift in the members of the human organism that we have considered. And finally, we have actually been able to trace the entire normal organic activity—all nutrition, all processing of substances in the human body—back to a kind of excess of the astral body’s activity over that of the etheric body, an excess that has indeed also come about through the Luciferic influence. This was something that became clear to us the day before yesterday. So the gross, material processes—the processes of nutrition, digestion, and so on, the processes of glandular secretion, and also the processes of sensory perception—are, as they exist in human beings today, attributable to the influence of Lucifer. Yesterday it became clear to us from another perspective that what we call nerve matter, nerve substance, is in turn, so to speak, due to the Luciferic influence; the same applies to muscle matter and bone matter.

[ 2 ] Let us first consider this dual human being in such a way that we say: On the one hand, we have seen that sensory perception, glandular activity, and the entire organic metabolism are due to the Luciferic influence; on the other hand, the existence of the nervous system and the muscular and skeletal systems is likewise due to this Luciferic influence. How do these two aspects of humanity—the sensory, glandular, and digestive being on the one hand, and the nervous, muscular, and skeletal being on the other—relate to one another? What cosmic, what world-historical task do these two aspects have in their interconnection within human nature?

[ 3 ] Now, even if you consider the matter without resorting to any further occultism, you will easily form the mental image that everything connected with our sensory and glandular activity, with our digestive system, is, in essence, something that—one need only look at it very superficially—belongs to immediate transience once it has taken place in the human being. This is something that, so to speak, the human being leaves behind through his own nature. Let us realize that there is no eternal purpose in our carrying out these organic activities. For you need only look around a little at what science or everyday life teaches, and you will say: As digestive and nutritional apparatuses, we are actually bound up in this life in a quite dreadful way. For this is a wheel that turns continuously in the same way. If one does not wish to count as a special advance of human nature the fact that, when given the opportunity in life, a person may, over the course of years, develop a particular taste for certain foods or drinks that they did not have before, then one must say: There is remarkably little forward development to be found in this ceaseless treadmill of eating and digesting and so on. This repeats itself in exactly the same way, and hardly anyone could even dream that we, as human beings, have any special eternal value through this activity, insofar as we must perform it. Glandular secretion, too, has actually fulfilled its task the moment it occurs. It is, of course, significant for the life of the organism as a whole, but it has no eternal value. Nor does sensory perception as such, for the sensory impression comes and goes. And if you only consider how faint, after perhaps just a few days, what you have taken in as a sensory impression is, how fundamentally different memory is, in fact, from the sensory perceptions themselves, then you must say: Sensory perceptions are indeed something beautiful, something delightful for human life in the immediate experience and observation, but they certainly have no eternal value. For where are the values that arose for you through the sensory impressions you may have had as a child or a very young person? Where has gone what once reached your eye, your ear? How faint the memories are!

[ 4 ] If you consider that human beings, insofar as they are sensory beings, glandular beings, digestive beings, have no eternal value through these activities—if you consider this, you will now be able to easily connect this thought with the general idea expressed yesterday, which, unfortunately, can only be sketched out in brief lectures: the idea of the dissolving form. As form pours into these activities and, so to speak, supplies the organism with disintegrating form—that is, with matter—in such a way that sensory activity, glandular secretion, and digestive activity come about, it becomes tangibly evident that we are dealing here with a form that is breaking apart, with a form that is crumbling. It is only specific processes of the disintegration of form that we encounter in sensory activity, in glandular secretion, and in digestive activity. Of what we can generally refer to as the process of the disintegration of form or as the injection of form into matter, these are particular processes, special processes.

[ 5 ] The situation is quite different when we turn to nervous activity, muscular activity, and the function of the bones—to the very essence of the human skeleton. We were able to discuss yesterday that, in a sense, the skeletal system contains imagination made material, pictorialness made material; the muscular system contains inspiration made material in mobility; and the nervous system contains intuition made material. Now it becomes apparent—and here we come to a more detailed discussion of a matter that can only be touched upon in the more general lectures on Spiritual Science—that when a human being passes through the gate of death, their skeletal system gradually disintegrates through decay or cremation or whatever means. But what remains when the skeletal system decays physically is the imagination; that is not lost. It remains in those substances that we also possess when we have passed through the gate of death and enter the Kamaloka or the Devachan. We do, however, retain a form within ourselves which, when viewed by a truly trained clairvoyant, is not exactly similar to the skeletal system; yet when a somewhat less trained clairvoyant allows this form to take effect upon them, it even bears a certain external resemblance to the human skeletal system, which is why death is not entirely incorrectly represented as the skeletal form in the mental image. This is based on a clairvoyance that is admittedly untrained, but at least not entirely off the mark. And mixed in with this image is what remains of the muscles when they decompose physically: what remains is the inspiration of which they are actually only the expression, for they are in fact merely inspirations saturated with matter. Inspiration remains with us when we have passed through the gate of death. This is something very interesting. And likewise, the intuition of the nervous system remains with us when the nerves themselves undergo their process of decay or disintegration after ‘death.’ These are all real components of our astral and etheric bodies.

[ 6 ] As you know, we do not completely shed the etheric body: it is an essence of the etheric body that we take with us when we have passed through the gate of death. But not only that; something else is also the case. After all, human beings constantly carry their nervous system through the world, and this nervous system is nothing other than intuition, interwoven with matter. As human beings carry this nervous system through the world, there is actually a constant flow of intuition at the points where the nerves permeate the human organism, and this intuition radiates the spirituality that human beings constantly have around them like a radiant aura. So it is not only what we take with us when we pass through the gate of death that comes into consideration, but we always radiate intuition to the extent that the nerves decay. They do, after all, always undergo a kind of process of decay; they must always be reshaped in a certain way, even though the nervous system is the most durable: there is always a radiation taking place that can only be perceived through intuition. So that we can say: intuitively perceptible substance, spiritual substance radiates continuously from the human being to the extent that his physical nervous system crumbles. So that you can already see from this that, insofar as the human being uses his physical nervous system, wears it down, causes it to crumble, he is not actually meaningless to the world. He has his great significance. For what he uses his nerves for determines what kinds of intuitively perceptible substances radiate from him. And again, as a human being uses his muscles, substances perceptible through inspiration radiate forth. This radiation is such that it continually populates the world with a multitude of exceedingly finely differentiated processes of movement. Thus, inspired substances flow out—the words are not entirely well-chosen, but we have no others. And from a person’s bones flows that which we may call a substance perceptible through imagination.

[ 7 ] This is particularly interesting. Not to overwhelm you with the results of clairvoyant research, but because it is truly interesting, it should be mentioned that through this radiation from the bones, when they decay, to a certain extent a person actually leaves behind images—that is, mental images perceptible through imagination—of themselves wherever they go: subtle shadow images remain behind wherever we have been. And when you leave this hall later, for a more refined, well-trained clairvoyant, subtle shadow images will still be perceptible on the benches for a time, until they are absorbed into the general world process—subtle shadow images of each individual that have emanated from their skeletal system. It is on these imaginations that the unpleasant feeling one sometimes experiences when entering a room previously occupied by another, unpleasant person is based. This is mainly due to the imaginations that person has left behind. In a certain sense, one still encounters them there in a kind of shadow image. And in this regard, a reasonably sensitive person is in no way inferior to the clairvoyant in their experience, for they feel the unease caused by what another leaves behind in a room. The clairvoyant has only the advantage that they can visualize in an imaginative image what the other person is feeling.

[ 8 ] But what happens to everything we radiate in this way? Sum it all up, my dear friends: it is, in essence, everything we bring about in the world. For whatever you do in any way—whether you move and walk about while doing something—you set your skeletal and muscular systems in motion. But even if you are merely lying down and just thinking, you radiate a substance that can be grasped intuitively. In short, whatever you set in motion, you continually radiate into the world; it continually passes into the world. Now you see, if these processes did not take place, then when our Earth reaches the end of its development, nothing would remain of it but pulverized matter that would pass into the general space of the universe as dust. But that which is saved from the Earth’s material processes by human beings lives on in the general cosmos, in the general world, as that which can arise through intuition, inspiration, and imagination. In this way, humanity gives the world that from which it rebuilds itself anew as building blocks. It will be that which lives on just as the spiritual-soul aspect of the entire Earth does when this Earth decays in its material aspect like a corpse, just as the individual human soul lives on spiritually when the individual human being has passed through the gate of death. Human beings carry their individual souls through the gate of death; the Earth carries what has become of human intuitions, inspirations, and imaginations over into the existence of Jupiter. In this way, you have characterized the great difference that exists between one human being and another, insofar as the human being is a dual being: The human being who perceives through the senses, who secretes through the glands, who digests and nourishes himself—this is the human being destined for fragmentation in temporality. But that which is developed through the existence of the nervous, muscular, and skeletal systems is incorporated into the Earth so that it may continue to exist.

[ 9 ] But now something enters our entire existence like a mystery—something that, precisely because it is essentially a mystery, cannot be grasped by the intellect but must be believed in and penetrated by the soul, and yet is nonetheless true. For what a human being can radiate into their surroundings is clearly divided into two parts: a part consisting of inspiration, intuition, and imagination, upon which, one might say, the general cosmic existence depends—it absorbs these; but there is something else it does not absorb; that is rejected, not accepted. The general cosmos effectively declares: Yes, I can use these inspirations, intuitions, and imaginations; I absorb them so that I can carry them up to the existence of Jupiter. But it rejects others; it does not take them in. And the consequence of this is that these intuitions, inspirations, and imaginations, because they are not absorbed anywhere, remain standing on their own. They remain spiritually within the cosmos; they cannot be dissolved. Thus, what we radiate breaks down into two parts: into something that is gladly received by the cosmos, and into something that it rejects, that it does not tolerate, that it leaves standing there. The latter now remains.

[ 10 ] How long does it remain? Yes, you see, it remains until a person comes along and destroys it themselves through emanations capable of destroying it. And as a rule, no other person has the ability to destroy these radiations rejected by the cosmos except the person who radiated them in the first place. And here you have the mechanism of karma; here you have the reason why, in the course of our karma, we must once again encounter all those things—imaginations, inspirations, intuitions—that have been rejected by the cosmos. We must destroy these ourselves, for the cosmos accepts only that which is intellectually correct, emotionally beautiful, and morally good. It rejects everything else. That is the mystery. And whatever is intellectually false, emotionally ugly, and morally bad or evil, the human being must erase from existence through other corresponding thoughts, feelings, and impulses of will or actions, if it is to cease to exist. And it will continue to haunt them until they have eradicated it. Here we have the point where it becomes clear to us that it is not true that the cosmos consists solely of neutral laws of nature or expresses itself solely through neutral laws of nature. The cosmos that surrounds us, which we believe we can perceive through the senses and comprehend through the intellect, possesses entirely different forces within itself; it is, if we may say so, in itself a strict repeller of the evil, the ugly, and the false, and it is eager to take in the good, the beautiful, and the true. Judgment by the powers of the cosmos does not take place merely at specific times; rather, this act of judgment is, in essence, something that runs through the entire development of the Earth.

[ 11 ] And now we can answer the question: What is the true nature of human development in relation to the higher spiritual beings?

[ 12 ] We have seen that, on the one hand, the so-called sensory, glandular, and digestive human being has come into being through Luciferic influence. In a certain sense, we can also attribute the other human being to Luciferic influence. But while the former human being is the human being of decay, entirely destined for temporality, it falls to the other human being to save what is human for eternity, for permanence, and to carry it over into a later existence. It falls to the nervous, muscular, and skeletal human being to carry over what the human being experiences on earth. Thus we see that, fundamentally, the human being has fallen from his spiritual heights by becoming the former human being—the sensory, glandular, and digestive human—and that he gradually works his way up into spiritual existence by having received, as a counterweight, the nervous, muscular, and skeletal human. But the peculiar thing is that these secretions of intuitive, inspired, and imaginative substance cannot occur in any other way than through material processes that are processes of destruction. If our nerves, if our muscles, if our bones were not constantly in a state of decay, but remained what they once were, then we would not be able to secrete this, for it is only through decay on the one hand—which expresses itself in the existence of the material—that the burning up and shining forth of the spiritual arises, as it were. If, then, our nerves, our muscles, our bones could not decay and finally decay completely in death, we would be condemned to be beings bound solely to this existence within the earth and would not be able to participate in further development into the future. We would be, as it were, a rigid, petrified present, with no development into the future. In fact, the forces at work in one person and in another are like two forces holding each other in balance. Now standing between the two, mediating between them, is that substance, that materiality, which we have often discussed in this way from the more general mental images of Spiritual Science, but which we have pointed out less frequently in this specific context: standing right in the middle between the two is the blood, which is also, in this regard, a “special sap.” For everything we have come to know there as nervous substance and so on has, as we have seen, only become what it is in the nature of its energetic effects through the Luciferic influence. But in the blood we have something that, as a substance itself, has directly undergone the Luciferic influence. For you have seen that the way in which the physical body, the etheric body, and the astral body interact would be different if no Luciferic influence had taken place. But here we are dealing, in a certain sense, with a kind of supersensible entity that then takes up the substance anew, that is, acts upon the substance through its Luciferic influence so that it becomes what it is. Because certain human bodies are not properly assembled, this gives rise to nerve, muscle, and bone substances. Lucifer has no influence on the substances as such, for these substances arise only through what he has wrought, namely that he has, as it were, displaced the bodies. So wherever he approaches the human being, he has brought about this displacement. But on the blood, as matter, as substance, he has a direct influence. Indeed, the blood is even the only one—and therefore such a special fluid—where it is immediately evident in the substance, in the material substance itself, that things are not as they were intended for the present-day human being on Earth had there been no Luciferic influence. For the blood has become something entirely different from what it was meant to be. Again, isn’t that a grotesque thing, but that is simply how it is. Do you recall what was actually said about how matter, how the material world in general, comes into being? We said: Matter arises when spiritual form reaches a certain limit and then disperses, so that this pulverized form constitutes matter. That is the actual earthly matter. It actually manifests itself so directly only in the mineral realm, for the other substances are altered by being taken up by other agents. But the substance of blood as such is a peculiar substance.

[ 13 ] This blood substance, as such, was originally predisposed to take on a certain degree of form. Imagine that here (a) there were purely spiritual form rays of the blood substance, and here (b) its power would be exhausted. Now, however, by virtue of its original disposition, the blood was not meant to spray out so that it splashes into space, but rather it was meant only here (b) at the boundary to become a little bit—I would say—material, and then to spray back into itself (points upward), spraying back immediately into the spiritual. That is how the blood should have become. So, to put it roughly, the blood should, as it were, have brought it only as far as the formation of a fine membrane, to the very beginning of the material, so that it shoots out of the spiritual for just a moment, becomes a little matter just enough to be perceived materially, then shoots back into the spiritual and is again absorbed by the spiritual. A continuous ebbing out and shooting back into the spiritual—that is what the blood should have become. For the blood is inherently designed for this. Thus, the blood should be nothing but a continuous glimmering, a flashing in the material, and should actually be something entirely spiritual. That is what it would have become if, at the beginning of Earth’s evolution, human beings had received their “I” solely from the spirits of form; for then human beings would perceive this “I” through the resistance that this momentary flash in the blood signifies. In the flash within the blood, the human being would perceive the “I am,” and that would be the organ of their “I” perception. But that would be the only sensory perception the human being would have at all, for the others would not exist if everything had proceeded without Luciferic influence. That would be a living in harmony with the ruling Will. This was intended for human beings as their sole sensory perception: to perceive their “I” in the gleaming of the blood substance and its immediate recoil into the spiritual. Instead of seeing colors, hearing sounds, and perceiving tastes, human beings were actually meant to live within the ruling Will; it was to be like swimming in the ruling Will. It was intended that he should look down from the spiritual universe, into which he would be placed as mere imagination, inspiration, intuition, upon a being on Earth or in the vicinity of Earth, from which he did not feel: “I am stuck in there”—but rather: “I am looking down there; that belongs to me; there shines upon me as the only material thing that which is spiritual blood becoming material, and in it I perceive my I.”

[ 14 ] The only sensory perception that should have come about is, in fact, the perception of the self, and the only substance in the material world that was intended for humankind is blood in this form of momentary radiance. So that if man had become that way, if he had remained the paradisiacal human being, he would look down from the cosmos upon that which is destined to symbolize him on this earth and to give him the consciousness of the self. A purely spiritual being, consisting of imaginations, inspirations, and intuitions, in which the self springs forth with the gleaming blood. And in this gleaming, humanity could say: I am, for I bring about what is of me down there.

[ 15 ] Isn't it strange, but it is truly the case that one can say: Actually, human beings were meant to live within the orbit of the Earth. Now, if here (a) a human being lives within this circle, he should produce his own reflection (b) on the Earth itself, and only through this gleam should his ego be reflected back and say: There below is the sign for me. It should not have come to pass that human beings carry their bone, muscle, and nerve bodies, their glandular bodies, around with them, and even continually pass the grotesque judgment: “That is me”; rather, it should have come to pass differently. Man should have lived within the sphere of the Earth and carved a sign into the Earth through the gleaming form of blood, saying: “There I drive in my stake, my seal and my sign, which teaches me the consciousness of my I.” For with what I have become from my existence on Saturn, the Sun, and the Moon, I float out there in the universe. I need only add the “I.” But I perceive this by inscribing myself down there and always being able to read in the gleaming blood what I am. — Thus, we are not originally destined as human beings to wander about in such bodies of bone and flesh as we are, but rather to circle the Earth and make inscriptions down below, and to recognize from these that we are that, that we are an “I.” Whoever does not take this into account does not know the essence of the human being.

[ 16 ] Then Lucifer came and led humanity to perceive not only its ego as sensory perception, but also to regard as its ego everything it had already possessed on the Moon as an astral body: thinking, feeling, and willing. The ego became mixed up with this. But this made it necessary for human beings to fall into matter. The expulsion from Paradise is the fall into matter. And first of all, that change took place in the blood of human beings, which came about because now the blood does not merely glisten for a moment and is then drawn back into the spiritual realm, but rather the blood substance actually penetrates and sprays out; it was predisposed to spraying out. And so the blood substance, which should actually return to the spiritual realm, sprays into the rest of the human being at the moment it becomes material, filling out the rest of his organism and changing accordingly according to the forces of that organism. Depending on whether it penetrates into an excess—say, of the physical body over the etheric body, or of the etheric body over the astral body, and so on—it becomes nerve substance, muscle substance, and so on. Thus did Lucifer drive the blood into his coarser materiality. While the blood was destined to simply spurt forth and immediately vanish again as matter, Lucifer caused the blood to enter into the coarse material substance. This is the direct act that he accomplished in the material world, this Lucifer, that he actually fabricated the blood, just as it is, as matter, whereas in the other things he brought about at least only disorder. The blood would not be there at all as it is, but only in its spiritual nature, which reaches only to the boundary of materiality, only to the status nascendi, and then immediately recedes again. Insofar as it exists materially, blood is a Luciferic creation, and since the human being has, through the blood, the physical expression of his or her ego, the human being is linked here on this earth, through his or her ego, to the creation of Lucifer. And since Ahriman, in turn, has gained access to the human being through the fact that Lucifer was there first, we can say: Blood is what Lucifer cast down so that Ahriman could catch it, so that both can now approach the human being. Need we then be surprised that, in the sense of an ancient perception, Lucifer-Ahriman regards blood as his earthly property? Are we still surprised that he has his contracts written in blood and that he insists that Faust sign the contract with his blood? For that is entirely what is due to him. Everything else contains, in a certain sense, something divine; he is not entirely comfortable with that. Even ink is more divine to Lucifer than blood, which is truly his element.

[ 17 ] Thus we see how the human being possesses these two beings within themselves—the sensory, glandular, and digestive human, and the nervous, muscular, and skeletal human—and how both are sustained in their gross materiality, through which the corresponding forces of these two human beings are poured forth, by what the blood has become through the Luciferic influence. For is it not true that you can easily see from external science that, insofar as the human being is a material being, he is entirely a product of his blood? Everything in the human being that is matter is nourished by the blood; it is, in fact, transformed blood. So that bones, nerves, muscles, glands—everything, everything—is transformed blood, in terms of matter. The human being is, in fact, blood, and insofar as he is blood, he is the walking Lucifer-Ahriman himself, who is thus continually carried about. Only to the extent that the human being possesses, behind this material aspect, that which is infused into the material from the blood, does he belong to the divine worlds, to the forward development that, so to speak, does not represent a state of backwardness. Lucifer came into the world because he remained behind at certain stages of development, as did Ahriman.

[ 18 ] When we consider what has just been described, we will say: Human beings apparently had something in common from the very beginning of the Earth’s development. They initially had something very much in common in their blood, namely that if the blood had remained as it was intended for human beings, this blood would actually be a pure outflow of the spirits of form. So that in the original blood, the spirits of form would live within us. These spirits of form are, as most of you now know, nothing other than the seven Elohim of the Bible. You need only leaf through the Munich Cycle of Genesis to realize this: If human beings had retained what their blood was originally meant to become, they would have felt the seven Elohim within themselves. That is to say, he would perceive his I as a sevenfold structure, one of which would be the principal member, corresponding to Yahweh or Jehovah, and the other six would initially be subsidiary members for the human being. This sevenfold structure, which humanity would perceive as its I—as projections of the seven Elohim or spirits of form—would originally have taught humanity, had its blood not been corrupted by Lucifer, what we are now reacquiring with great effort as the knowledge of the sevenfold nature of the human being. For so long has humanity, through its corrupted blood, had to wait to recognize that a sevenfold nature actually comes into play—until, conversely, through sufficient emanations of intuitive, inspirational, and imaginative substance from nerves, muscles, and bones, it has matured enough to bring this sevenfold human nature back into the human being! Now we are in the process of enumerating, albeit in abstract form, that nature of the human being which flows into the ego from the physical body and the etheric body, that nature which flows in from the astral body, from itself — Yahweh or Jehovah —, which plays in from the Manas or Spirit-Self, that nature which plays in from Budhi or the Life-Spirit, and that which plays in from the Atma or Spirit-Man. But the human being could not have brought about a specific darkening of the six other members and a special illumination of the one member, the ego, had Lucifer not been banished in the course of world evolution. And the fact that at the beginning of Earth’s development the other members were darkened and the I was made particularly bright—illuminated into a brighter sense of self—happened materially because this I was brought into dense matter so that it could truly come to its consciousness as an individuality, as a singularity, whereas otherwise it would have felt itself as a sevenfold being from the very beginning.

[ 19 ] Thus we see that, on the one hand, if human blood had remained as it was, humanity would have developed an “I” that would have possessed a sevenfold character from the very beginning. Because Lucifer was given to humanity, humanity has come to possess the unified character of the I; it has come to perceive, feel, and know the I as the center of its being. Therefore, we can understand that, fundamentally—because the same seven Elohim were originally meant to reveal themselves through all human I’s—there lay in what the blood was originally predisposed to do something that brought people together, something that socialized people, something that would have made people feel themselves to be a common human race. In what Lucifer gave to humanity lies the fact that the human being feels himself as an individual ego, as a distinct individuality, and separates himself in his independence from the general human race. Hence we also see that the world process on Earth unfolds in such a way that humanity is impelled by Lucifer to become ever more and more independent, while it is impelled by the seven Elohim to feel itself more and more as a member of the entire human race. How this now manifests itself for morality and the whole life of humanity in its development—we shall speak further about that tomorrow.