Shine like a golden sun in the dark world
Summer in Northern Michigan brings an abundance of fireflies. They light up the night with their luminescence. Their glowing, inner light is a remnant of earlier epochs on the earth when luminous fire-filled dragons lit up the sky.1See Rudolf Steiner's lecture, The Human Being as Body, Soul and Spirit, Lecture VII. About Early Conditions of Earth (Lemuria), GA 347, 20 September 1922, Dornach. Of these bird-like dragons of old, Rudolf Steiner tells us, "They roamed around and particularly liked making little fire clouds around themselves, as only the fireflies in the grass have preserved today. When the moon shone, they were up there like glowing clouds. And if there had been people back then, they would have seen such flocks of glowing balls and glowing clouds up there." Today, we have the fireflies for inspiration as a reminder of our task here on earth. We must fill ourselves with the holy spirit of the cosmos to radiate our own inner fire like the luminescent dragons of old.
"When the Earth was still the Sun, gold was sunlight. It was only when the Sun split apart that the Earth became so cold that the rays of light remaining within it solidified into gold. The miner still knows this, and that is how he treats the gold. On the Moon, the gold became somewhat stiffer than it had been on the Sun; it flowed in streams across the Moon’s surface. On Earth, it became veins of gold and crisscrossed the Earth, just as blood vessels crisscross the human body.
When the Earth’s time came, it so happened that human beings themselves were able to absorb all that which had previously solidified into gold. Light has acquired this significance for humanity. As humanity breathed fire in and out, it burned through them and permeated them with the substance contained in sunlight. The inhaling and exhaling of fire is a process that was outwardly linked to luminous and light phenomena; humanity was then a luminous and glittering being. Remnants of this can be found in the creatures that cause the sea to glow, and also in the firefly. Humanity lost this luminous power by drawing the warmth into itself. In the post-Lemurian era, we already have the warm human being, and now the return journey begins.
As human beings develop physically, they will not only develop warmth within themselves but will radiate it outward again, illuminating their surroundings like a sun. Then they will radiate light as the sun once did, and the Earth can continue to develop. On the Earth that will later become Jupiter, he radiates the luminous golden power, so that humanity will become the creator of gold. 2For a description of the stages of earth evolution, see Rudolf Steiner's book, Occult Science Thus, through his own development, man becomes the chemical laboratory that creates gold. Man becomes the planetary spirit and then brings forth what the planet has brought forth. A material transformation is really going on with him, and so he becomes the source of gold.
Through meditation and concentration, we generate the forces that lead to this. So that today, for humanity, these spiritual activities are the forces of nature through which he prepares for later material transformations. Today, not even a Christ could immediately produce gold in a material sense on our physical Earth, for one cannot produce anything that the environment does not absorb."
Read more: Rudolf Steiner, Man, Nature and the Cosmos, Lecture 13, The Philosopher's Stone, GA 91, 10 August 1905, Haubinda.