The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Third Lecture

[ 1 ] At the end of yesterday’s lecture on what might be called the lowest realm of the spiritual hierarchies, thoughts may have arisen in some souls, and various questions may have come to mind. And that is only natural, for in light of the thinking and imagination that people possess today, much of what has been said may at first seem questionable and inexplicable. The course of the lectures will naturally shed light on many things. But one thing must be said today so that you have, so to speak, a guideline for the entire attitude one should bring to such a subject. Today, for example, one might ask the obvious question: Well, if you really do lift an enchanted being out of a stone by thinking and meditating on the stone and then, so to speak, freeing this enchanted being, what then remains inside the stone? Is this being still inside the stone, or what has actually happened to the stone? What about the second person who comes along and goes through the same process? — This question could arise in many people. As I said, in the course of the lectures, many such questions will be answered, but it must be said that with what the Earth gives to human beings for thinking, these things cannot be grasped at all. For on Earth everything is veiled, everything is clothed in Maya, and things appear quite different to the mind than they are in reality. It is not the fault of the facts that the questions remain unanswered. The questions are posed incorrectly, but we will gain the standard for the correct way of asking them in time. Things already appear quite different when we gain insight into states that do not yet contain the whole matter shrouded in illusion. On Earth, everything is jumbled together; this continually deceives human thinking. We gain purer conceptions of things when we go back to earlier times.

[ 2 ] Just as human beings undergo incarnation after incarnation, metamorphosis after metamorphosis, so do all beings in the world undergo incarnations and reincarnations, from the smallest to the largest; and even a being such as our Earth itself—that is, a planetary being—undergoes reincarnations. Our Earth did not simply come into being as Earth, but was preceded by another state. This has been a frequent topic of discussion in our circles: just as the human being in this life is the reincarnation of a previous life, so too does the Earth represent the reincarnation of an ancient planet that preceded it. We refer to this preceding planet as the Moon, and by this we do not mean the Moon of today, which is only a fragment, a remnant of the old Moon, but rather a preceding state of our Earth that once existed and likewise passed through a spiritual life, which is usually called Pralaya, just as the human being passes through a spiritual state after death. This lunar planet has been reborn, just as a human being is reborn. But what we have referred to as the planetary state of the Moon is, in turn, merely the embodiment of a preceding planetary state, which we call the Sun. This—not the present-day Sun, but an entirely different being—this Sun is the reincarnation of the last planet to which we must first look back when speaking of the incarnations of our Earth: the ancient Saturn. Thus we have four successive incarnations: Saturn, the Sun, the Moon, and the Earth.

[ 3 ] We have also mentioned on several occasions that every planetary state has a specific task. What is the task of our Earth? The task of our Earth is to make human existence possible for human beings, as we call them today. All of the Earth’s effects are such that through them, human beings become beings with an “I.” This was not the case in earlier states that they experienced. Human beings, so to speak, only became human in the modern sense on Earth. The earlier planetary states that the Earth went through had a similar task. Other beings became human on these other planets—beings who today stand higher than human beings. You may recall from my book *Christianity as a Mystical Fact* that an Egyptian sage once made a curious allusion to a mystery truth to the Greek Solon; that he told him it was an important truth that the gods were once human beings. This was precisely one of those truths that the mystery student had to receive even in ancient times: that the gods who now dwell in the spiritual heights were not always gods, but that they ascended and that they, too, were once human beings, having once passed through the stages of humanity. Of course, a dangerous truth follows directly from this, one that the mystery students also had to draw as a consequence: namely, that human beings will one day become gods. And precisely because of this consequence, this truth was regarded as something dangerous; for it is necessary to say at the same time: A human being can only become a god when he is ready for it; and if he ever imagines for a moment that he has found the god within himself before he is ready for it, then he does not become a god, but a fool. - And so two paths lie open to man: to await with patience what Dionysius calls his deification, his becoming God, or else to imagine beforehand that he is already God. One path truly leads to deification, the other to folly, to madness.

[ 4 ] The expressions of antiquity are very often seen as misleading because, in our time, we no longer distinguish between the various levels of divine-spiritual beings. The Egyptian sage, who spoke of gods, did not mean by this merely a single level of gods or of God, but entire sequences of levels of divine-spiritual beings. Dionysius the Areopagite and the Eastern sages always distinguished between these levels of divine-spiritual beings. Whether we speak of angels or of Dhyan-Chohans makes no difference, for those who truly recognize the unity of world wisdom know that these are merely different names for the same thing. But even within this realm, distinctions must again be made. Those beings who are initially invisible and who stand immediately above humanity—that is, one level higher than humanity—are called angels, Angeloi, or messengers in Christian esotericism; that is, messengers of the divine-spiritual world. Those beings who, in turn, stand one level higher—that is, two levels higher than humanity—are called archangels, Archangeloi, or fire spirits. Those beings who, in turn, when they undergo their normal development, stand one level higher than the archangels—these are the beings called spirits of personality or primal beginnings, primal forces, Archai. Thus, we have three levels of beings standing above human beings. These three types of beings have all undergone their humanity; they were once human beings. Beings who are angels today, when viewed in terms of cosmic ages, have not left their humanity so far behind; they were human beings on the Moon; and just as you can walk about on Earth as human beings due to Earth’s conditions, so the angels, in their human stage, were able to inhabit the Moon. The archangels went through their human stage on the Sun, and the Primordial Spirits, the Spirits of Personality, on ancient Saturn. Thus these beings have ascended step by step from humanity; today they are higher beings in higher stages of the hierarchy than humans, and we can simply say, when we now enumerate the hierarchical order of the world realms in a spiritual sense: Visibly on Earth we have the mineral kingdom, the plant kingdom, the animal kingdom, the human kingdom, and now we ascend into the invisible, into the kingdom of the angels, the fire spirits or archangels, the primal forces or spirits of personality, or Archai. While these beings advanced in terms of their inner development and nature—becoming, so to speak, gods or messengers of the gods—which is indeed an accurate designation for these beings—and while they ascended into a spiritual existence, the conditions of the planet on which and for which they lived underwent changes. When we look back at ancient Saturn, where the Archai were human, we find it looking quite different from our Earth.

[ 5 ] Yesterday we spoke of how we distinguish four elements on our Earth: earth, water, air, and fire or heat. Of the first three elements mentioned, none existed at all on ancient Saturn. Of these four elements, only fire or heat existed on Saturn. Today’s materialistic philosopher will say: But heat can only be encountered in external objects; there can be warm solid bodies, warm water, but there cannot be heat in and of itself. That is what the materialistic philosopher believes; but it is not true. If you had been able to observe Saturn with today’s senses, how would it have appeared? Suppose—let us take this as a hypothesis—that you had flown through space during the time of ancient Saturn. You would have seen nothing where ancient Saturn was; but you would have noticed one thing: it is warm there! Just as if you had flown through the heated interior of an oven, so it would have seemed to you if you had flown through Saturn. You would not have been able to feel a draft, nor would you have been able to swim, for there was no air or water yet; nor would you have been able to walk, for there was no earth yet. Your hand would not have been able to touch anything; the entire sphere was simply heat. Thus, ancient Saturn initially consisted solely of the element of heat or fire. Our earthly existence began in its first metamorphosis as a planet of heat, and from this you can already see how true it is when, for example, the ancient Heraclitus says: Everything has sprung from fire. — Yes, of course! Because the Earth is merely the transformed ancient Saturn, everything on Earth has also emerged from this fire. That was a truth Heraclitus derived from the ancient Mysteries. This is also hinted at by the fact that, having written down this truth in a book, he dedicated it to the goddess at Ephesus and laid it upon the altar there. This means that he was aware that he owed this wisdom to the mysteries, the Ephesian mysteries, where this teaching of the primordial fire Saturn was still being proclaimed in its purity. Now you can also infer from this that those beings we call the Primordial Beginnings, the Archai, the Spirits of Personality, experienced their humanity under conditions entirely different from those of modern humans. Modern humans have the ability to incorporate the solid, the liquid, and the gaseous into their physicality, into their bone and blood systems. The human of Saturn, the Spirit of Personality, had to form his entire body out of warmth, out of fire. And that is what he did: he had only a body of fire, the Spirit of Personality on ancient Saturn. His body consisted solely of warmth.

[ 6 ] I told you yesterday that heat, so to speak, has two sides. One side is that it is actually perceived internally as inner warmth; we feel warm or cold without touching the surroundings, as we do with solids; but we can also feel heat externally when we touch a warm body. This is the peculiarity of Saturn’s development: that heat, so to speak, gradually shifts from the beginning of Saturn, where it was purely internal, to the end, where it becomes more external and perceptible. So if you had made this journey through the world in the initial state of Saturn, then when you entered the space of Saturn, you would not have felt any sensation of warmth on your skin, but inwardly you would have said to yourself: It is so comfortably warm. Something that you today know only as soul warmth would have overcome you if you had made this journey in the very earliest stages of Saturn. You can form an idea of the experiences you would have had by considering the following. You know that there is a difference when you look at a red or a blue surface. When you face the red color, you say to yourself: “That gives a warm feeling”; when you face the blue, you have the feeling of cold. Imagine these feelings that are triggered in the human soul by the impression of red—which you would not have had back then—but you would have felt something pleasantly warm, as if you were facing red today. At the end of the Saturn era, you would not only have felt this inner sense of comfort, but something as if warmth had approached you from the outside. Inner warmth would have gradually transformed into an external perception of warmth. This is the path Saturn underwent: from an inner, soulful warmth to an outwardly perceptible warmth, to what we call external warmth or fire. And one might say: just as a child grows into an adult and goes through various experiences, so did the spirits of the personality grow on the ancient Saturn. At first they felt as if they were inwardly warm, so to speak, inwardly comfortably warm, and little by little they also felt this warmth externalized, realized, indeed embodied, we might say. And what arose there? If you wish to call to mind what arose there, then you must imagine it like this: To begin with, we have the inner warming of the sphere of Saturn; there the spirits of personality find the opportunity to first incarnate. As they incarnate, what is called external warmth forms. And if you had been able to make the journey in a later state of Saturn, you would also have been able to distinguish between externally warm and cold spots on Saturn. And if you had now sketched what you found as enclosed heat bodies, the following drawing would have resulted: Around the circumference, it is as if all these heat eggs had formed a surface of Saturn. From the outside, if one could have seen it, it would have looked like a blackberry or a raspberry. What were these eggs? They were the bodies of the spirits of the personality, and it was precisely through their inner warmth that these spirits of the personality formed the outer warmth of these Saturn eggs. Of this state one can truly say: And the spirits brooded over the warmth, and they truly hatched the first fire bodies. The first fire bodies were hatched from outer space. If we may use the expression, the outer heat-eggs coagulated from within in the heat chamber. Thus, on ancient Saturn, the spirits of personality—the Archai, also called Asuras—were embodied in these fire bodies. Saturn consisted solely of this element of fire.

[ 7 ] Now, in this ancient Saturn evolution, the spirits of personality had the ability to transform external heat back into internal heat. The process was not rigid and unyielding, but internally flexible. In fact, these spirits of personality were constantly producing these “heat eggs” and causing them to disappear again. And now you can imagine this process in even greater detail. Imagine that you had been making this journey back and forth for a while; you would have noticed that there are times on this Saturn when no external heat is perceptible at all, when only the cozy inner fire is present; then again, times when these heat-eggs appear. You would have perceived something like the breathing of the whole old Saturn, but a fire-breath. You would have said to yourself: Sometimes I am so deep inside this old Saturn, as if all external warmth were internalized, taken away, as if everything were only inner comfort, and you would have said to yourself: Now Saturn has breathed in the warmth. — And then another time you would have come through and found these many heat eggs, and you would have said: Now Saturn has exhaled its inner warmth; it is external fire.

[ 8 ] You see, this is the vision the ancient holy Rishis evoked in their disciples. They transported them, so to speak, back in spirit to the ancient Saturn era and allowed them to experience how an entire planet performs an action similar to our modern-day inhalation and exhalation. They evoked the following image in them: The fire flows out and becomes countless bodies of warmth; the fire is drawn in and becomes the inner selfhood of the spirits of personality. Therefore, they compared this life of a planet to an exhalation and inhalation, but on ancient Saturn it is initially only a breathing of fire. Air does not yet exist. Let us now assume that the following happened: all these spirits of personality on Saturn would, so to speak, have constantly inhaled and exhaled warmth. They would have undergone their regular Saturn development, and the result would have been that, after the appropriate time, everything would again have been taken back into inner warmth, and Saturn would have disappeared as an outer fire planet, would have been reabsorbed into the realms of the spiritual world. That is how it could have happened. Then, however, we would never have had the solar, lunar, and terrestrial states, for everything that could have been exhaled would have been taken back again into inner warmth, would have returned to the spiritual world. But now let us use a trivial expression that will become clearer to us: Certain spirits of the personality, so to speak, preferred to take back only a portion of the exhaled heat and always leave something behind, so that when inhaling, all these Saturn eggs did not disappear, but remained. And so a duality gradually emerged on Saturn: inner heat and, alongside it, outer heat, embodied in the Saturn eggs. Not everything was taken back. So to speak, the spirits of personality left a portion of the exhaled warmth to itself; they left it out there. Why did they do that, actually? They had to do it; if they hadn’t, they would never have become human beings on Saturn.

[ 9 ] For what does it mean to become human? It means: to attain self-consciousness. You cannot do this if, as a self, you do not distinguish yourself from the external world. Only in this way are you a self. The bouquet of flowers is here, I am there; I distinguish myself as a self from the object. The spirits of personality would have eternally radiated only their “I” had they not left something outside that offered them resistance: The other is outside; I distinguish myself from the heat element that has been objectified. Through this, the spirits of personality have attained their “I,” their self-consciousness, by forcing a part of the Saturn beings down into a mere external existence of heat. They said to themselves: I must let something of myself flow outward and remain outside, so that I can distinguish myself from it, so that my sense of self may be kindled by this external reality. Thus they had created a realm beside themselves; they had, as it were, created a mirror image of their inner being in the outer world. This also meant that when, so to speak, the life of Saturn had run its course, the spirits of personality were not at all able to let Saturn disappear. It would have disappeared if they had breathed in all the fire; but as it was, they were unable to breathe back into themselves what they had projected out of themselves. They had to leave the field that had offered them the possibility of attaining self-consciousness to its own devices.

[ 10 ] For Saturn, a state of Pralaya could not have been brought about by the spirits of the personality alone. Higher spirits had to intervene; they had to, so to speak, dissolve it all again so that a Pralaya—an intermediate state, a state of disappearance, of sleep—could set in. Higher spirits, of whom we now mention only the name, the Thrones, had to intervene and dissolve all of that again. So that, as Saturn’s life drew to a close, the following process took place: The spirits of personality had attained self-consciousness, had absorbed part of the warmth back into themselves, had taken self-consciousness into their center, and had left behind a lower realm. Now came the realm of the Thrones, and these dissolved what the former had left behind, and Saturn entered a kind of planetary night. Now came the planetary morning. The whole was to be reawakened, so to speak, through laws we shall yet come to know. Had the old Saturn disappeared through the inhalation of all the warmth, the entire Saturnian existence would have been absorbed into the spiritual world. An awakening would not have taken place at all. Now the Thrones were indeed able to dissolve for a time what the spirits of personality had laid out as eggs, but they could do so only for a time. It had to be handed over, so to speak, to a lower existence for further development. Through this, a planetary dawn came; Saturn’s second state of transformation set in, the solar state. What, then, was actually born in this solar state? Emerging from the planetary sleep of the old Saturn were the spirits of personality, who now possessed self-consciousness and were therefore no longer dependent on undergoing experiences similar to those they had already endured. But they had exhaled certain “warmth-eggs,” which in turn emerged little by little, differentiating themselves from the general mass. And the consequence was that these spirits of personality were now, so to speak, bound to what they had left behind. Had they taken everything up into the spiritual world, they would not have been bound to the sun; they would not have had to descend; but they had to, because they had left behind a part of their former being. They had to take care of this; it now drew them down to a new planetary existence.

[ 11 ] That was the karma of Saturn; it was world karma, cosmic karma. Because the spirits of personality on the ancient Saturn had not fully assimilated everything within themselves, they had brought upon themselves the karma of having to return: they found below them what they had wrought as an inheritance from the ancient Saturn. And what happened now, as the spirits of personality now dealt with, processed their created karma? Through this, what I characterized in general terms yesterday came to pass: The heat split on one side into light, on the other into smoke. And so, in the resurrected Saturn, from these heat-eggs, on one side the new planet arose like gas, like air, or like smoke, as it has been called, and on the other side light arose, as the heat, so to speak, returned once more to higher states. Inside the transformed Saturn: smoke, gas, air; on the other side, light! And if you had now, on a journey through the world, come to the place where this ancient Sun was, you would have sensed from afar what had formed there as light, because the smoke was behind it. You would have perceived, if not the light itself, then a luminous sphere, like a sphere of heat in the case of Saturn. It would have been a luminous sphere that you would have approached, and if you had reached the surface, penetrated into this sphere, you would have perceived not only heat, but winds, air, and gas flowing in all directions. Thus the heat sphere has transformed into a luminous sphere: a sun has come into being. It is quite rightly called a sun. And what are suns today are still undergoing this process: they are internally flowing gas today, and on the other hand they cause this gas to become light; they radiate light into outer space. So it was only now that light was actually formed during the Earth’s state of transformation; it was only now that light had come into being. In the warmth, in the ancient Saturn warmth, the spirits of the personality were first able to become human; in the light now radiating from the sun, those beings of the spiritual hierarchies whom we call archangels or Archangeloi were able to become human. And indeed, if you had approached the sun not merely as a modern human being, but as a clairvoyant, you would not have perceived only the radiance emanating from the sun, not merely light, but the deeds of the Archangels would have flowed toward you in the light.

[ 12 ] But these archangels, so to speak, had to accept certain conditions. The ancient spirits of personality had found pure fire on Saturn. The archangels, who were only able to become human on the Sun, now found smoke and gas on the Sun, which they were compelled to inhabit. What, then, did they have to do to remain in a firm connection with the Sun, to make their home there? They formed their soul, their inner being, out of light; they wove their soul-body from light, but incorporated into this soul-body that which was present as gas, as the outer body. Just as you have a body and a soul today, so these archangels, as human beings on the Sun, had an inner being capable of radiating light, and an outer being, a physical body, consisting of gas and air. Just as human beings today consist in their bodies of earth, water, air, and fire, so these archangels consisted of air, and inwardly they had light. But of course the element of fire had been brought over as well, for that was precisely what developed into smoke and light. Therefore, these archangels also had fire within them. Their entire being thus consisted of light, smoke, and fire. You would have encountered the archangels in bodies woven from gas, fire, and light. Through the light they lived a life outwardly, streaming the luminous power out into the cosmos. Through the fire they lived a life within their own inner being, the comfort of warmth. Through life in the gaseous body they lived a life within the sun-planet itself. They could now, so to speak, distinguish their own gaseous body from the general solar substance within the sun-planet. They came into contact with the other: through this, a kind of self-awareness was kindled within them. But this self-awareness could only develop higher and higher because it now also pleased these archangels, if we may say so, to remain in this gaseous body, in the smoky body, in a certain sense, or at least to leave it within the solar substance. For these archangels on the ancient Sun, in a state of flux, could have absorbed all the smoke, all the gas that was, so to speak, in the surrounding environment. Now they have a real process of arming! On the ancient Sun, they would have perceived these currents in the gas as a breathing process. They would have found certain states where there was absolute stillness, and they would have said to themselves: Now the archangels have inhaled all the flowing gas. — But then the archangels began to exhale again: It began to flow inwardly, and at the same time light began to develop. That was the alternating state of the sun: The archangels inhaled the entire gas—there was stillness, but also darkness, a solar night. They exhaled—the sun filled with flowing smoke, yet it also shone outward; it became a sunny day. And so there was a real breathing process of the entire solar body: exhaling—sunny day, illuminating the surroundings; inhaling—solar night, darkness falling over the entire surroundings.

[ 13 ] Here you have described the ancient sun in contrast to our present sun. Our present sun always shines, and darkness is only caused when something stands in the way of its light. That was not the case with the ancient sun. It possessed within itself the power to alternate between light and dark, to shine and to darken, for that was its exhalation and inhalation. Now let us vividly imagine what actually happened there—let us say, externally, visibly.

[ 14 ] Let us consider this state of exhalation: light spreads out, but at the same time the sun fills with smoke. These smoky forms, these streams of smoke, are regular structures. So, to speak, a sum of regular formations is incorporated into the substance of the sun with every exhalation. That which formerly had merely an egg-like form, which was a heat-egg, had transformed itself into all manner of regular formations. Quite peculiar smoke formations with inner life and inner regularity had come into being. If I may use the expression: The eggs have hatched. It was truly something comparable to this process of solidification. Just as the chick emerges from the chicken egg, so the heat-egg had split open and out had come regular smoke-figures, and these regular smoke-figures were the densest bodies that the archangels possessed. In bodies of smoke, gas, and air, they animated the sun; thus they walked about on the sun, so to speak, as human beings. So now we have the spiritual concept of a fixed star, the spiritual concept of a world-sun that is, so to speak, a sun by its own power, which causes day and night to alternate by its own power. Like inhaling and exhaling, it alternates brightness and darkness, for the sun was at that time a kind of fixed star. Everything that is self-luminous in our world-space sends out into world-space, along with the light, the life of spiritual messengers: Archangeloi.

[ 15 ] So what had the original Archai, the Primordial Beginnings, the spirits of personality, brought about through their own evolution; what had they created? That a sun could emerge at all. Whereas otherwise only a Saturn existence would have been foreshadowed in evolution, whereas otherwise there would have been only the Archai filling Saturn with warmth, Saturn became the Sun because the Archai left the outer heat-eggs to Saturn. And on the Sun, the Archangels found the opportunity to pass through the human stage. They became the heralds for the world, who could say: The Primordial Beings, the Spirits of Personality, have gone before us. We proclaim, as the messengers, to the universe in radiant light the former existence of the warm, the inwardly heated Saturn. We are the messengers, the heralds of the Archai. — Messenger is called Angelos, Archai means the beginnings; thus these archangels were nothing other than the messengers of the deeds of the Primordial Beginnings or Archai in earlier times. And that is why they are called the angels of the beginning, Archai-Angeloi, which then became the German word Erzengel. Thus they, these archmessengers, were the people of the Sun.