The Rudolf Steiner Archive

We often talk about principles as if they were of the same kind and only differed in degree. Yet if we want to understand how things are connected, we need to get to know the principles themselves in their nature.

We need to distinguish three things in the world; three kinds of effects. Only things that take effect can be considered by a perceptive entity, and we therefore focus our attention on the effects. There are therefore three ways in which something may take effect—first, actually in the spirit; secondly in the soul, thirdly at the physical level. Effects in the spirit, anything that can in some way take effect in spirit, is called budhi; anything that can take effect at soul level is called kama; everything that can have a physical effect is called prana. Budhi, kama and prana are the three ways of taking effect. They are of the same kind but at different levels.

Now we have to realize that effects would always be fluid, indefinite, if they did not define themselves. If kama is to happen in a particular way, for instance, it must set itself limits. Budhi, kama and prana must therefore set themselves limits if they are to be defined influences or effects. In the theosophical literature these boundaries are called ‘sharira’, meaning ‘vessel, shell, sheath’. If budhi sets itself a boundary, this is called ‘karana sharira’; if kama does, it is ‘linga sharira’, and with prana it is ‘sthula sharira’. These sharira are thus the limits, the outer forms, which the three kinds of effects set for themselves. Now the following may happen (Fig. 10, starting from below).

First of all we have prana in action; then prana sets itself a limit on the outside—sthula sharira. Prana thus sets itself a boundary in one direction but remains billowing and open in the other. Prana is now joined by kama, setting itself a boundary here—linga sharira. Then prana is no longer billowing and open on this side either, for kama with its boundary has pushed its way in. Kama in turn remains open on the other side. Then budhi comes and limits itself off from kama, and you get karana sharira. The three principles thus have intermediate layers. If this is a spirit, a self-awareness must also live in these three principles and their interfaces—this is known as ‘atman’.

The human being consists of the three principles, the interfaces and self-awareness or atman. Each may have its own subdivisions. If we take it like this, we have the composition of the human being as such.

Here, in the human being (Fig. 10), the physical body is the outer shell, and atman rests inside. The arrangement can of course also be very different. [For the planetary spirit,] the situation is, for example, that prana shows itself initially as active, setting itself a limit, in an inward direction. (Fig. 11)

Prana is then limited on the inside by sthula sharira, kama by linga sharira, and budhi by karana sharira. We would thus have an entity where atman was on the outside, then budhi, then kama and last of all prana. Atman would then appear as wholly expanded in the periphery [an orb] and sthula sharira would be a point at the centre. (Fig. 12)

Such a spirit would be a dhyan chohan, a planetary spirit that must present in a way which is the reverse of the human way. In the human being, sthula sharira is on the outside, in dhyan chohans atman; then comes budhi, and so on.

We can get a clear idea of this if we take the following example. If we close our eyes, it is dark for the time being; once we open them again, we see the light. We only see the light, however, because we have an inner feeling for it and are therefore able to receive it. It must first be there, however, if we are to receive it. And just as we have to be there to sense the light, so there must be an entity out there which reveals light. We are light receivers; out there must be light givers, light revealers. And just as we are only able to sense light because we have kama, the astral body, in us, so a planetary spirit must have a kama that lets light shine out. Kama is thus active towards the centre here, and in the radius of the circle there. (Fig. 13)

The circle which is convex towards the top is for us, for our sentience, for the one which receives, the principle moving towards the giver. The circle which is convex towards the bottom is the kama of the dhyanic spirit. The kama of revelation thus acts downwards—karana sharira. Whereas the human being has a kama that seeks to move towards the centre, so the planetary spirit has a kama that seeks to move outwards, to the periphery, revealing light, whilst the kama of the human being receives light. Two kinds of spirits, natures that complement one another, always go together. A spirit must have the desire—receiving; another must be able to give—giving. Human desirous kama presupposes that there is a giving kama, the kama of love.

Human budhi mediates insight. Such insight as we gain into things comes through our budhi. The planetary spirit must thus be a giver of thoughts, and human budhi a receiver. The planetary spirit thus acts in entirely the opposite way, complementing the human spirit.

Every single thing in the world exists only in the context of the whole; it is part of the whole. As a part it belongs to the whole planetary Earth spirit. Thus this table here consists of matter, which makes it an object we encounter in space; secondly it has energy, for it offers resistance, otherwise it would not exist for us; thirdly this energy does not come to expression at random but according to specific laws (natural laws).

What is energy? What is it that makes life possible in us? It is an energy which takes things in, maintaining life. Human vital energy serves to hold together the matter which is in the human being. Because of this, the matter and its energy in the human being is directed inwards, building the human being up from inside. Without this, we could not be perceived as living human beings. The table on the other hand has matter which is directed outwards, and this functions according to law. Matter as such cannot be perceived, only its properties and qualities such as colours, sounds, and so on. Matter itself is completely beyond sensory perception. A prana in matter withdraws completely from sensory perception but gives itself in order to reveal itself. We also have insight into the law which lies in matter, and the thought which comes to expression in it.

Budhi comes to outer expression in the natural world. Every body which gives outward expression to the planetary spirit is continually radiating outwards; its budhi is thus directed outwards. It becomes light which the senses perceive. Budhi lies in the properties and qualities of things, in the aspect which is on the outside. The law must reveal itself through karana sharira. Manas revealed is law. In being luminous, a body sends us budhi. The thought, expressing spirit, through which it sends us budhi, is karana sharira. The planetary spirit keeps kama to itself, withdrawing it from sensory perception. Its matter ... [Marie Steiner-von Sivers’ notes indicate a gap here.] On the other hand it reveals the cosmic thoughts which human beings must fathom deep down inside. The principle which the planetary spirit revealed wholly on the surface is its budhi. In the Bible, it says that the planetary spirit first of all revealed itself as light. The spirit thus reveals budhi qualities (light) at the first level. Budhi qualities (light) are revealed by the spirit at the first level. These ancient sacred teachings of the polarity between human being and planetary spirit are brought out most beautifully in esoteric Christian teaching. In cabbalistic terms the budhi qualities which come to revelation are called ‘powers’. It is thus the powers of light and darkness which revealed themselves first. Once again we can take Genesis literally.

The spirit thus reveals budhi qualities on the first level. On the second it reveals its karana sharira; it orders things according to laws. Something which is convex in the macrocosm is thus concave in the microcosm. Something which the human being perceives last, comes first in the macrocosm; the microcosm finally comes to perceive and understand the sentient experience in the macrocosm.

The question arises if there is a transitional stage between the two—between human being and planetary spirit. Think of an entity with one conscious awareness. That is the human being. He has different parts, but these share a common awareness. (Struggle between patricians and plebeians.)⁷⁷ We might show it more or less like this (Fig. 14).

Individual parts all radiate towards the common awareness. If we take the latter to be energy, and the parts, too, we can say that the common awareness is predominant, influencing all the others. Now think of numerous entities functioning in this way (Fig. 15)

Each has its own existence. Through [the common ideal] it can connect its own with those of others. The different conscious minds create a common focus; they seek to gain a specific common ideal. This then lives in the different conscious minds as a common spiritual ideal. If they reach the point where their spiritual ideal is of greater value to them than they themselves, they will be drawn to it just as before they drew the parts of their conscious awareness to themselves. Where before they had been the focus or centre for those different spheres, the common ideal will then be the central focus for the large sphere. Individual entities then become parts of a common entity, giving up their separate existences and living in the common ideal. They cease to be centre and give themselves a common centre. A brotherhood lodge then develops from individual people. If the common ideal is so powerful that it draws all the individual conscious minds to it, these people make up a body that has a soul of a higher kind. A brotherhood lodge then develops with a perfectly communal spirit. This is a new entity. The soul could never have come down into the human being if he had not become a house for it with different parts. It is never possible for a higher principle to come down unless individual minds become vital parts, the form for a higher kind of house, so that the common awareness may come to expression in it.

This gives us the transition. Another centre is created. Human development is an inversion, the reversal of all principles. As human beings express themselves in seven ways, we get not one but seven centres. These will be the seven elohim, the pitris for the next planet.

Man thus progresses from a spirit which takes in the surrounding world to a spirit which reveals itself. The two completely opposite natures—human being and elohim or dhyan—are merely forms of one essential nature. At a future time, the human being will no longer be as he is now; he will be a dhyan chohanic spirit. In esoteric terms this is called the ‘secret of man becoming god’.

When individual conscious minds all turn to one centre, with everything outside becoming atman, there will be just a single core of sthula sharira inside, which is unity at its highest level.

Such oneness cannot be achieved on Earth; it needed seven sublime spirits to create it. This, then, is the Logos, with atman in the periphery. In the cabbala, the ‘realm’, union, crowns all. This is also the principle on which the Church is founded, with all human beings having part in one conscious awareness. The law of form is birth and death. The law of life is rebirth. The law of the spirit is karma. Life goes through birth and death, appearing in new forms all the time. Form is transient by nature, life repeats itself, the spirit does not perish, it is eternal.

• 77. Plebeians could not be priests or hold political office. From the 4th century BC onwards, the privileges of patricians grew less and less, and in 287 the plebeians were given equal rights politically.

Today we will try and get a clearer idea of the transition from the Logos to a new system, a new creation.

People usually ask first of all: How did it all come into existence? This is probably the hardest question, but one that is frequently asked. All one can do is to give an approximate idea. Above all we must be clear in our minds that it is our rational mind which asks how things came into existence, getting a more or less plausible notion of how one would have created the world if one had been the creator. The rational mind is, however, one of the things that originated in the Logos, and it is clear that the Logos has a far greater conscious awareness. We therefore cannot judge the Logos with our rational human minds and phrase the question like this: Why did the world have to arise out of the Logos? All we can ask is how the emergence of the world from the Logos proceeded, how things arose. We cannot ask why because why would imply compulsion. The process must be an act the Logos has done in freedom, not something done from necessity.

The creative principle of the Logos can only be given in image form.⁷⁸ We imagine an entity and its mirror image. We have to say to ourselves: The mirror image contains everything which is also to be found in this spirit. It looks exactly the same but is not alive; it does not include the principle of life. It will only be possible to understand how the mirror image can grow like the spirit if we consider that the spirit gives its life, its existence, to the mirror image. We have to consider, therefore, that a spirit gives its life to its mirror image. This is the idea of the first sacrifice. Giving up one’s own existence, transferring one’s own life to the mirror image—that is the original sacrifice.

This is exactly how it is with the Logos. The first Logos relates to the second as if we were standing in front of our mirror image and decided to give our own life to the mirror image. Giving one’s life is the original sacrifice made in freedom. It was the deed of the first Logos. The second Logos is exactly the same as the first Logos, except that it has been given existence through sacrifice. If we study the activity of the second Logos we find that its nature is such that it reflects the essential nature of the first Logos back to that first Logos. The second Logos is thus a reflection of the first Logos having been given the life that flowed from the first Logos.

The first Logos produces a reflection, and then gives its life to the mirror image. In the first Logos everything is directed towards the outside, with its existence an influence on the outside. The second Logos has 1) the existence it has received, and 2) the ability to let its content shine back on to the first Logos. We thus have duality in the second Logos. Its life and content are two things. The content is the same as for the first Logos, but its life is somewhat different from the first Logos (Fig. 17).

The line down the middle of the second circle indicates that in the second Logos life and content are two things, that they have been divided. Yet when it comes to content, image and mirror image are the same in either case, whilst life is two things.

This could not yet as such give a cosmic system, for all one would have, would be the relationship of one Logos to the other; there would be no multiplicity. This could only come with a further sacrifice. A further mirroring process had to come in which the relationship of the two was also reflected.

First, the first Logos was reflected once again, then the mirroring was mirrored. This created the third Logos as a reflection of the other two Logoi. The third Logos thus contains:

1. the mirror image of the first Logos
2. the mirror image of what the first Logos brought about in the second, which is its life
3. the mirror image of the content which the second Logos reflects back to the first.

Let us now visualize this (Fig. 18). The first Logos is reflected in a). If the first Logos is creative activity directed to the outside, its mirror image in the third Logos is the exact opposite of the action of the first Logos. In the first Logos, a) is the most sublime light of the world; in the third Logos it is the most extreme spiritual darkness.

b) in the second Logos is the life which the second Logos received from the first. It is not the life which gives itself in sacrifice but the life which has been accepted. The life which sacrifices itself in the first Logos is love. The opposite of this in the third Logos is absolute desire, longing, striving for Logos. In the third Logos, b) is thus absolute desire.

c) in the second Logos is the mirror image of the first Logos reflected by the second Logos.

In our own mirror image we distinguish

1. the image which shone out and comes back out of the darkness
2. what we have given returns as desire
3. the image itself, which we ourselves are

This corresponds to the three parts in the third Logos:

1. spiritual darkness = tamas
2. absolute desire = rajas
3. the simple mirror image of the first Logo = sattwa.

Tamas, rajas and sattwa are the three gunas, the three parts of the third Logos.⁷⁹

First there are a), b) and c). a) on its own is tamas. If a)—spiritual darkness or tamas—combines with b)—rajas, absolute desire—darkness combines with desire and we have a striving for the first Logos. If a) and c)—tamas and sattwa—are combined, we have the image of the first Logos, created out of the darkness. We can also combine b) and c). Each may occur on its own or be combined with one of the others. All three in combination are what the first Logos itself is. We have seven possible combinations of the three gunas (Fig. 19).

These are the seven different guna combinations. Think of these seven possible combinations as the next world-creative principle which may arise from the three gunas. These seven spirits do exist. They are the ‘seven creative spirits before the throne’, the seven creative powers that come after the three Logoi (Fig. 20).

These seven creative powers give rise to what we call the ‘prajapatis’. As each is able to repeat this exactly at subordinate levels of conscious awareness, life and form, we always have three: three times a, three times b, three times c, three times ab, three times ac, three times be, three times abc, making together three times seven = 21 prajapatis. Each of them acts like an original Logos. This gives us the 21 creators of a specific solar system.

The first concept we meet, therefore, is that of sacrifice made in perfect freedom. Once we have it, the question as to why ceases to have significance. Human progress consists in no longer asking this question but moving on to the concept of the creative Logos.

With a mechanical instrument, a watch, for instance, or a machine, we can predict how it will behave. This is somewhat less the case with natural processes, though to a degree it applies. Thus the time of a solar eclipse can be calculated. We may speak of ‘necessity’ in this case. With a plant it will also still be possible to say what it will do under specific conditions. However, the higher we go in the natural world, the more does it become impossible to say what an entity will do in a given situation. The higher a person is with regard to gifts and content, the less will it be possible to predict his actions, for we cannot grasp his reasons and motives. In that case all we can do is wait and see what he will do in a given situation.

In the same way we have to accept the creation of the world as an act done by the Logos in freedom. Progress consist in knowing that when it comes to the universe we do not ask as to the why, and that the question as to the ground or reason is not justifiable. All of those who understood this never spoke of a ground or reason. Jakob Boehme spoke of a ‘source and origin’ of the world.⁸⁰ To progress to insight into the world-creative power, we can only go to the point where we know that our own evolution must have been the goal, for that is where the creator must once have stood. The creator must have everything we possess, but in reverse. Atman is the lowest point within us. The creator has atman as numerous points in his periphery. When the solar system was in its inception, the world-creative Logos had the qualities we have found to be the goal of our evolution—atman, budhi, karana sharira or manas, kama, linga sharira, prana, sthula sharira—all as part of its essential nature.

We need to be clear in our minds as to where the activity of this creative Logos may lie. So we first of all investigate where the different metamorphoses take us. One form metamorphoses is physical, two are astral, two mental and two arupic, making a total of seven. When we have reached the height of the mental plane, we have become karana sharira from outside; we then become budhi and finally atman (Fig. 21, left). When the Earth has reached its goal we will be active on the higher mental plane. The transition then begins which takes us to the next planet. For this, we must have atman on the outside. This means that karana sharira and budhi must also vanish to the outside (Fig. 21, right).

The consequence is that we should not think that nothing happens in the transition to a new planet—pralaya is not inactivity and sleep—but karana sharira and budhi are shed. We must shed karana sharira on the budhi plane and budhi itself on the nirvana plane.

Evolution therefore becomes this (Fig. 22).

Pralaya is a very different kind of activity from that which occurs during a manvantara. To configure a new planetary chain, the spirit must have gone through the budhi and nirvana planes on the other side. The significance of these planes is that on them the spirits go through exactly the same process between planets as human beings do in devachan. There are also great pralayas—maha pralayas. If we follow the metamorphoses of conscious awareness from one planet to another, we get daytime conscious awareness on Earth, dream consciousness on Moon, and so on (Fig. 23).

It is necessary to go through the nirvana plane between one kind of conscious awareness and another. When the highest state of conscious awareness has been reached and atman has shed all vestments, having become truly all-embracing, it will be capable of creating a new solar system. For this, it must first go through two further planes of conscious awareness. By then it has gained a kind of all-vision, it will then be able to have a view of the whole cosmic system.

Our present daytime conscious awareness can have an overview of the mineral world, psychic consciousness can overview life, intellectual conscious awareness sentience, and spiritual conscious awareness of all that is. Atman has then reached its highest level. Atman is all-awareness.

If atman is to shine out, it must first develop the ability to give everything; it must be creative. It does so by vesting itself in budhi and manas. It can then start a new cosmic system on the arupa plane. When conscious awareness will have reached the final level, therefore, it will still have to go through two other planes. The first plane is the one where it does not peel off budhi but adds it; this is called the ‘para nirvana’ plane. The plane on which the entity descends again so that it may be active on the arupa plane, is called ‘mahapara nirvana plane’. Two planes that are in opposite positions correspond. The lowest is the physical, its opposite nirvana. (Fig. 24)

On the astral plane, desire rules, on the para nirvana plane love, budhi. On the mental plane, perception rules, taking in the thought; on the mahapara nirvana plane the creative thought rules. The budhi plane is absolute, loving dedication to the divine. Its opposite is a state of having completely turned away from all that is divine. Where the budhi plane is beatific, its opposite has absolute wretchedness. That is the eighth plane, the eighth sphere.

Imagine a particular entity has turned its back on evolution on some plane or other, going its own way. It would fall into the eighth sphere and would have to wait there until the whole of evolution has gone round. It could only be taken along again, as lowermost entity, in the next evolution. This cosmic ‘compass rose’ (Fig. 24) shows the opposites very well.

When we have arrived on the nirvana plane, the entity will have reached the point where its atman is completely on the outside. We are then dealing with the kind of Logos which we have called ‘the seven’. These are the seven creative spirits, which is also why we have seven different races [the ‘root races’, with seven sub-races each].

The seven different spirits belong to the nirvana plane. Going through the para nirvana plane and the manapara nirvana plane then, we come to the first and second Logos itself. The second arises on the para nirvana plane, the first on the mahapara nirvana plane. On the nirvana plane the cosmic system is brought to completion by the 7 times 3 = 21 prajapatis. The last of these is abc, the third Logos itself. Only the first Logos is able to take up again anything which has fallen into the eighth sphere. It takes it along with the cosmic dust. To be cast out from evolution is to link one’s life to something which inexorably remains behind, without fail, and to wait until evolution once again coincides with the state in question. A native of an uncilivilized wild place with the soul of such a native is relatively happy; but imagine a more highly developed spirit in the body of such a native or even a dog—that is banishment indeed. The higher soul has taken the road to a lower manifestation. To ‘go into the eighth sphere’ does indeed mean to be no longer progressing in accord with evolution, to be unable to participate in the evolution of the others, but to be cast back to a lower level.

Conscious awareness is perception up to the nirvana plane. From then on it is no longer mere perception but inner activity. On the para nirvana plane it is activity directed to the outside. On the mahapara nirvana plane it is the creative conscious mind of the Logos. This moves on from there through the eighth sphere and on to the physical plane, where it becomes the creative powers of nature. In reality these give expression to divine thoughts which appear to us as powers or forces because we do not have the overview.

• 78. See also part 2 in this volume. Also lecture given in Karlsruhe on 4 February 1907; The Structure of the Lord’s Prayer from GA 97; tr. A. H. Parker; London: Rudolf Steiner Press 1971; also in The Christian Mystery, Hudson: Anthroposophic Press 1998.
• 79. The teaching of the three gunas tamas, rajas and sattva is the foundation of the sankhya philosophy in the Vedanta system. See Rudolf Steiner’s lecture of 18 December 1912, in The Bhagavad Gita and the Epistles of Paul, GA 142; tr. L. D. Monges, D. M. Bugbey; New York: Anthroposophic Press 1971.
• 80. In ‘Aurora oder Morgenroete im Aufgang’, 23. Kapitel, Verse 1-6, in Sämtliche Werke, herausgegeben von K. W. Schibler, 6 Bde, Leipzig 1831–1846, Bd 2, S. 268.

In the previous session¹⁰⁴ I spoke on the evolution of the fifth root-race. In my absence you will have opportunity to hear about the Atlantean root-race which went before.

‘Occult teaching’, as it is called, has always put what it had to say in specific images and symbols, for some truths are difficult to put into words in our ordinary language. It is wrong to think that it has always been possible to express truths clearly, for the truth is much older than our language. Speech only evolved in the main age preceding our time, in Atlantis. The Atlanteans lived on a continent which no longer exists and under completely different circumstances than those we know today. Climatic conditions, air and water were very different then. The first beginnings of speech may be found in the period which preceded the Atlantean age, which was the Lemurian age. It was not speech then, but just a way of letting individual sounds emerge.

Truth, wisdom, existed before there was human speech. Being young, human speech cannot put the original and eternal truths, which created the world and are still doing creative work on the world, in words. The teaching of that wisdom was always secret. It was only told to pupils when they had learned the language of symbolic signs in which those secrets were presented.¹⁰⁵ It is difficult to translate these signs into our language. For some things we still have to use symbolic signs and images, for they are better expressed in images than in words.

It is very difficult to understand the transition from a human form which did not yet have two genders to the human form of today. The human body has changed a great deal in the long process of evolution. In Lemurian times the body was a kind of fiery mist, like a fiery cloud. Nor was there any solid earth then. The human body did have the same kind of matter as it has today, but it was still gaseous. It went quickly through a number of metamorphoses. His will determined the expression of his form. When he wanted something, he could not reach for it with his hand, since he did not have one; he shaped a hand for himself that would allow him to reach. This sounds unbelievable today.

What is our present history? We know only a few millennia on Earth. Nothing has been recorded in writing of the earliest times in Earth evolution because nothing had hardened to stone as yet, and so no impressions could be made in stone. The material which now makes up the things in the outside world and our own human body has changed utterly from those most ancient times. We cannot investigate those conditions physically. Only occult investigation makes it possible to learn something about them, and for this we have the akashic record. This contains everything which happens in the world of the spirit, and since the physical is an out-flowing of the spiritual, it contains everything which ever happened and is happening.

Human beings gather impressions throughout the day and digest them inwardly. The astral body contains all the echoes from the day, everything one has inwardly felt, willed and thought. This astral body lives in the astral space, and anything which happens in it is impressed in the astral world as a reflection, like waves, and stays alive. In this state, which is freed from the physical life of the day, the human being inscribes in the higher worlds what he has gone through, and this remains. In his sleep, the human being is thus working for eternity. When he is sleeping, his soul and spiritual bodies are outside the physical and ether bodies, but he is not aware of this. Only a clairvoyant can see how what has been inscribed in the akashic record has gone through a human soul.

The further we go back into the past, the more do we have to depend on the akashic record, and the further we go back, the purer does the record get. It is easiest to read it in Earth states that lie far, far back, before the Earth became physical. It is much harder to read it in the Atlantean age, and hardest of all in post-Atlantean times. For the reader must carefully erase anything he knows of those times from his soul, so that it will not adulterate the record. It is therefore easier to investigate something that goes very far back, when no sense-perceptible images existed as yet.

Great confusion will also arise if someone is not quite sure how to read those signs. If, for instance, someone has lived in Roman times—let us assume Virgil.¹⁰⁶ When we perceive Virgil in the akashic record, he is like a living image, like real life; it is like a recapitulation of life itself. You can see Virgil’s life take its course again; it is a true reproduction of what happened at the time. If you put a question to this image, it will answer the way Virgil might possibly have been able to answer. Swedenborg¹⁰⁷ talked with this akasha image of Virgil.¹⁰⁸ The Virgil individual himself has gone through a different further development of his own. Someone who is not able to make clear distinctions may confuse these things.

I would now like to speak of the allegories¹⁰⁹ which have always been used in occultism to refer to the period of transition from a two-gender to a one-gender human being, to the separation of the sexes in Lemurian times. Three symbols were used.¹¹⁰

The first symbol: man was given his original armour and a two-edged sword.
The second symbol are the seven trees.
The third symbol is the book of ten pages.

The armour referred to the original relationship between the solid parts of the Earth and the solid parts of our physical body. This body, which is connected with the solid part of the Earth is the first state or condition of human nature. It has not always been like this. The Earth was very different in earlier times. Today’s solid part was in a different state then, mingled with something of very different substance nature which has since been separated off. It would be referred to more or less like this: \(Ph\) + \(S\) = Physical body + Spirit. With this formula, people learned to look at the way in which the spirit has built up the body. We may indeed marvel to see the wonderful way in which the struts are positioned in the thigh bone. The wisest architect could not have found a better solution to the problem [of managing] with the smallest amount of matter [to have the whole body supported]. Or if we consider the anatomy of the heart, which functions for a whole life in such a wonderful way in spite of all the damage people cause from lack of sense, consuming poisons such as alcohol, coffee, and so on. If we think of this spirit as an effective, active power mixed into matter, we have the two states in which the body is able to exist. In the original vestment the spirit was still active by penetrating and configuring it directly and all the way. It then separated from this.

The second principle is something human beings have in common with plants—growth, reproductive powers, that is, vital energy. \(V_e + w =\) vital energy \(+\) water. As the physical principle is bound up with the spirit, so is vital energy bound up with water. The occultist sees water as life. All that lives is swelling and unthinkable without water. The third principle to arise in the human being was the ability to wish. Originally this was linked with fire as a spiritual power. Passion, kama, arose in human beings from that ability to wish. In kama, the human being was united with fire. \(P_w + f =\) power to wish \(+\) fire.

At an even earlier time, the human I was not yet bound to a single entity. It was a centre in the billowing sea of these elements which surrounded the human being. You can see a degenerated echo of the spirit creating form in the midst of materiality in the development of crystals. The physical body was crystalline and radiant at that time. It absorbed vital energy and left the water behind. After that, the human being absorbed the fire and became warm-blooded.

He was then given the two-edged sword, which was the I. It could act from the outside to the inside and from the inside to the outside. It had power over the elements of earth, water and fire which were subservient to it. When kama was bound up with fire, water with vital energy, matter with spirit, the human being developed his armour, he received his two-edged sword.

The seven trees are seven ways in which the human being can be himself. Here we have man’s past, present and future. First there is the physical vestment (sthula sarira), then the ether body (prana), with powers of reproduction, nutrition and growth active in it, thirdly the part of essential human nature in which drives and passions are active, the astral body. Only then comes the most central principle, the fourth, human self-awareness. The human being received his fourfold nature unconsciously, without contributing to this himself. As soon as he had gained self-awareness he began to work on himself and organize his astral body. He is now gradually shining through his astral body from the inside. This work will come to its conclusion at the end of our post-Atlantean period, when the astral body will be steeped in manas.

There are seven stages:

1. The tree of physical existence—the human being develops his physical body
2. The tree of growth
3. The tree of relationship—the human being develops sympathy for and antipathy to his surroundings
4. The tree of knowing good and evil—the human being closes himself off from the outside world
5. The tree of life—the human being begins to bring life into his astral body; transition from kama body to manas
6. The tree of the word—the human being is able to hear the ‘inner word’, gaining mystic insight
7. The tree of being in harmony with God—the human being rests in harmony with God in the universe.

The next time I will say something about the book of ten pages. The great teachers of humanity would read that book the way people spell words today.

• 104. Lecture given on 27 February 1905. The available notes are not adequate for publication.
• 105. Concerning work with the symbols, see lecture given in Dornach on 23 October 1915, [in German] in Die okkulte Bewegung im 19. Jahrhundert und ihre Beziehung zur Weltkultur GA 254.
• 106. Virgil, or Publius Vergilius Maro (70–19 BC). Roman poet.
• 107. Emanuel Swedenborg (1688–1772). Swedish mystic, theologian and scientist. See also Community Life, Inner Development, Sexuality and the Spiritual Teacher GA 253, tr. C. E. Creeger, New York: Anthroposophic Press 1991.
• 108. The anecdote that Virgil visited Swedenborg in the spirit, probably came from Aberglaube und Zauberei von den aeltesten Zeiten an bis in die Gegenwart by Dr Alf. Lehmann, director of the psychic laboratory at Copenhagen University (German edition publ. in Stuttgart in 1898). This is in R. Steiner’s library. It says on page 219 that the well-known Prof. Porthan von Aebo visited Swedenborg in London but could not see him right away as he was seeing someone else.’ Porthan also heard Swedenborg in lively conversation with someone in the next room, though he was unable to catch a single word of what the other person was saying. Then the door opened and Swedenborg took someone who was not visible to Porthan to the door, continuing the conversation all the time until he said good-bye to that imaginary person in the most polite terms. He then turned to Porthan and told him he had just had a visit form Virgil, who had been most amicable and explained many interesting things to him.’ See also the lecture given in Berlin on 30 May 1904, from GA 52, in The History of Spiritism and the History of Hypnotism and Somnambulism, tr. F. E. Dawson, London: R. Steiner Publ. Co., 1943.
• 109. See note 102
• 110. Rudolf Steiner’s source for this clearly was the 18th century French philosopher Louis Claude Marquis de Saint-Martin (1743 - 1803). He publishes his first work Des erreurs et de la vérite ou les homines rappelés an principle universel de la science, par un ph... inc... [philosophe inconnu] in 1775, fictitious place of publication ‘Edimbourg’ (really Lyon). This earned him the epithet ‘Saint Martin, the unknown philosopher’. Rudolf Steiner would often refer to Saint-Martin as representative of a spirituality that had been lost and needed to be regained through the modern science of the spirit. He suggested that the Der Kommende Tag publishing house brought a new edition of the German translation by Matthias Claudius in 1925. The preface he had intended to write was not written because of his death. In the chapter on errors and truth, it says that in his original state, before the Fall, the human being had to fight all the time to overcome disorder and restore unity of all. This was potentially dangerous and so he was clothed in impenetrable armour and armed with a lance which would always strike in two places at once. The country where this human being was to fight his fight ‘was covered with a wood of seven trees, each of which had sixteen roots and 490 branches.’ At the end of the book the ‘book of man’ is described, saying that although it only had ten pages it nevertheless contained ‘all insights and knowledge of what has been, of what is and of what will be.’ See also note 111.

The last time we met I told you that we need to use allegory if we are to put things clearly in occultism.¹¹¹ The world we have around us has only been like this for a relatively short period of time. Our forebears lived under utterly different conditions in Atlantean and Lemurian times. Today people cannot have any idea of this. However, if we want to understand today’s world rightly, we must rise to the concepts and ideas... [gap in notes]. Speech and language is not very old; it only developed in Atlantean times. Our Lemurian forebears did not have speech, they had a kind of singing, producing sounds with great magical powers. They might perhaps sound unarticulated to people today, but went beyond anything we can find in the highest animals today as far as beauty and melodiousness were concerned. These sounds could make flowers grow faster, for instance, or set dead objects in motion. We cannot compare them with our ordinary speech today. We are therefore unable to speak in our language of something which is among the most sublime things.

In the occult schools people therefore always used an allegorical language and alphabet. Those allegorical signs are regular formulas which one must first learn to understand. One formula, for example, is the book of ten pages. What is this book of ten pages?

The book of ten pages is something very real. Its content is great, and the formulas only appear to be simple. It is something very real for the occult student, but it is read in a different way from other books, where the human being, with his ordinary understanding, must create a word from letters and a sentence from words. The occult investigator thinks differently. His thinking grasps wholes, getting a complete overview of major complexes; it is empirical living experience, a vision of higher realities. People develop a common idea on the basis of individual details. The occult investigator gains an intuitive idea all at once from inner experience and does not have to depend on learning many individual details. It is just the way someone being able to have the ‘lion idea’ once they have seen a lion, for instance.

The occult investigator thus also gains the concept of astral and mental spirits in one go, for he sees these things together. There are archetypes for all things of the spirit. Just as a painter may have a particular intuitive image in his head and is able to paint a hundred pictures based on it, so there are archetypal images for all things on the higher planes, and clairvoyants see them. Reading the archetypes of things, in the spiritual ground and origin, is in occult terms called ‘reading in the book of ten pages’. People were able to read in this book of ten pages in every occult school; everyone was able to read in it even at the time when humanity did not yet have the vestment of a physical body.

Let us go back to Lemurian times when the human being vested himself in physical matter. He then lived in ideas that were all images. He did not see these outside but inside himself; he would feel a degree of warmth, or bright colour images arising in his soul as he approached another human being, for instance. It was like a lively dream, in images, but not conscious. Only the teachers and leaders of humanity had a real overview of the things which others only felt surging up and down in a twilit soul. Their vision was not limited, everything lay spread out before them as in a tableau; they only had to turn their attention to it. This is the idea of that all-encompassing oneness which presented itself to the initiate and the occult student. Today we cannot see everything at once because we use our senses as instruments of perception. People would have seen no difference between New York and Berlin at that time, for instance. Anyone who sees things outside his physical body, finds that spatial differences present themselves only through the senses. The whole of modem science consists of individual details which are put together. Anything that happens in the world of the spirit is not discovered bit by bit. Once a particular level of higher insight has been gained, it all lies open before one.

There are ten levels, and they are the ten pages of the book. Let me give you an idea of them.

What does it say on the first page? There is a lot there, but it has to be gained through living experience. Think of a flower. If we planted it this year, we’ll see that it has produced a root, and that stem, branches, leaves and flowers develop and finally the seed which we put in the soil again. We don’t see anything of the plant in the seed, but it is there inside it, contracted into a point. Look at a tulip, how it is contracted to a point and then spreads out again. We see essential tulip nature alternate between tremendous expansion and contraction into point-nature, as if squeezed together to make a nothing. This is something we can see everywhere in the world, in nature and in the human being. A whole solar system will also unfold, go through a sleep state, and then wake up again. In theosophy, we call the two states manvantara = expansion, and pralaya = shrink down to a point. There is no difference for external perception between seed of solar system and of flower; they do not exist in that case. Our present cosmic system will also contract to such a point one day; but the whole of life will be condensed in this, and it will well forth again from it. If we enter in our minds into this manifold life of the cosmos condensed to a point, we have an idea of the divine creative power which creates out of nothing. Anyone wishing to penetrate the secrets of the universe must learn to concentrate his thoughts in a point, not a dead but a living point which is nothing and everything at the same time. It is not easy to enter into this general dormant state of nature which is zero life and at the same time also all life; one must have felt, thought and willed it. One must have thought this through before one is able to read the remaining pages.

Reading the first page is to grasp this oneness of time, space and energy and immerse oneself in it. A truly wonderful description is given in a verse in the Dzyan book.¹¹²

The second page shows us the duality everywhere in the world. You find this wherever you go in the natural world—light and shade, positive and negative, male and female, left and right, straight and not straight, good and evil. Duality is deeply rooted in the nature of all evolution, and anyone who wishes to understand nature must be very clear in his mind about this duality. We only come to understand the world when we see the duality in our own lives. The occult student must make it an obligation for himself to learn to think in such dualities. He should never think of only the one, but always the two together. If he thinks of his relationship to the divine principle, for instance: ‘a divine I lives in me’, this is only one thing, and a second thing belongs to it: ‘and I live in the divine I.’ Both are true. The occult student must say to himself: ‘The human being is a sensual nature but he will be a spiritual entity; I was a spiritual entity once and had to become a sensual one.’

We can only perceive all truth if we make it an inner obligation never to think of just one but always of two. People who learn to think in such dualities are thinking in the right, objective way.

This is reading the second page in the book of ten pages. You will find this duality presented many times in the mythology of ancient Germanic gods and also in Gnostic works.¹¹³ Some crude ideas have ... [gap in notes], seeing above all the duality between the male and female principle and ascribing everything to it. In reality, however, the male and female principle is just a special case of a much higher duality. To make this special case the explanation for everything is to blindfold yourself, to shut out the spiritual reality and cling to the lowest aspect.

The third page presents the triad. Threefold ideas may be found anywhere. The human being is threefold, consisting of body, soul and spirit. Gnostics speak of Father, Word and Spirit. In Egyptian culture we have the three deities Osiris, Isis and Horus. The triad holds an important secret. Anyone who gets in the habit of translating duality into the triad gains something that leads to understanding the whole world. To think the world through in its threefold nature is to penetrate it with wisdom.

Fourth page. Pythagorean square. I perceive the human being as fourfold, consisting of body, soul and spirit, with the fourth principle, self-awareness, dwelling within them. Pythagoras therefore said ... [gap in notes]. Human nature which is at a lower level develops higher nature out of itself. This is the secret of the four evolving from the three. We find this fourfold nature in all entities. To the all-encompassing eye of the great initiate who surveys all periods of time, all entities are alike. The human being is a fourfold entity living on the physical plane. The lion does not live on the physical plane with its fourfold nature; here it has only its threefold nature—physical body, ether body and astral body; its I, as fourth principle, lives in the world of the spirit.

Higher nature only appears as sensual nature on a lower level. When human beings will be able to govern their physical bodies in every fibre, they will be atman; when they govern the ether body they will be budhi; when they govern the astral body, manas. That is fourfold nature: the three principles of lower nature which will one day be transformed into higher nature. Four-foldness is to be found in all entities existing in this world. To the eye of the great initiate who surveys all periods of time, all entities are alike, only different to [gap in notes]. How does a lion differ from a human being? To the human eye, a lion is lower than a human being, and this is because human beings have limited vision. They live on the physical plane today, whereas the lion has left its spirit in the mental and its soul in the astral sphere.

Plants and minerals also have fourfold nature. The plant has only its physical body and ether body on the physical plane. Plants and minerals have the other parts of their fourfold nature in the world of the spirit. But human beings, animals, plant and minerals all have fourfold nature. The student of occultism must always live this inwardly if he wants to read the fourth page. Fifth page.

On reading the fifth page, everything becomes manifest which the human being projects into the world like a shadow image. This is more than just four-foldness. He begins to venerate. It is called ‘idolatry’. The human being is able to think and form ideas. When he begins to reflect on things, he ascribes divine causes to them. Myths arise in which the human being relates the supersensible to the sensible. The world of myth and legend presents ancient cultures in many different ways. The whole process lies open before the initiate, and the moment comes when he begins to perceive the thread which runs through all myths.

The horse, for instance. What is its meaning? It is an entity which has remained behind on a particular level, whilst the physical human being has gone beyond this in his evolution. There was, however, a moment in Hyperborean times when the human being had first of all to develop the potential for intelligence. Potentials evolve a long time in advance. I have told you that all higher development has a price, and this is that something else remains behind. If one wants to rise, another has to go down. At that time, when the human being developed the potential for intelligence, this was only possible because human nature eliminated something which later developed the horse nature. The horse evolved in Atlantean times, and human beings instinctively knew that their evolution was connected with the horse. Later this instinct became a myth. The Atlanteans had instinctive awareness of their intelligence being related to the horse, and the horse was therefore venerated as a symbol of intelligence during the first post-Atlantean period. Intelligence had to evolve in the early post-Atlantean periods. In Revelation, horses appear therefore when the seven seals have been removed. Ulysses invented a wooden horse.

Three things are needed if we want to understand myths. Firstly the myth must be taken literally, secondly it must be taken in an allegorical sense—which happens in religions—and thirdly we have to take them literally again in a higher sense. When this marvellous connection presents itself to the intuitive eye it is called ‘reading the fifth page’.

Sixth page. This contains the secrets of what human beings perceive to be the supersensible and which they seek. The ideals human beings create out of their own nature appear on this sixth page, for instance the great ideals of freedom, equality and brotherhood. On this sixth page, human nature comes together with something which does not yet exist, something human beings must struggle to gain—going beyond themselves in their activity and active will. ‘I love someone who asks the impossible.’ One learns to look to future states of humanity, to see the seeds of the future in the present. An initiate can read the sixth page the way John described the future states of humanity in Revelation.

Seventh page. The student comes to understand the secret and significance of the figure seven. Things evolve in seven stages because the three, on which the seven is based, is repeated, and they themselves are the seventh. The human being must learn to say to himself: ‘I am threefold, from this three a higher three must arise; that is the six.’ Starting from the three, he returns to a higher three, which is the six. He himself is the seventh. To understand this process is to read the seventh page.

We will speak of the eighth, ninth and tenth pages the next time.¹¹⁴ The book of ten pages is an allegory, summing up in a few words what would otherwise need many words to describe. The principle of comprehensive life in abbreviation. Paracelsus said that a physician must read the whole of nature, he must pass nature’s examination, finding the word from the individual letters and not gain his wisdom only from books.¹¹⁵

In our time, the spiritual principle had to move into the background; this had to be so that the great conquests of the physical plane would be possible, and perfection could be achieved in controlling the world perceived through the senses. Now the time approaches when humanity needs to go more deeply into the spiritual again. At present human beings are rushing towards a stage on the physical plane that could not be borne if spiritual life did not develop again. An image of how necessary it is for humanity to deepen their spirituality: You know the tremendous advances made for example in the theory of electricity. A tremendous power lives in these energies, and this means there is a possibility that humanity will abuse them. Humanity will master terrible powers which will be put into effect on the physical plane, and this in the not too far distant future.¹¹⁶ They will be able, for instance, to cause detonations, explosions by remote control, with no one able to determine the originator. Humanity will have power. Woe, however, if they have not reached a high moral level and use those terrible powers for other than only good purposes! The masters who guide humanity foresaw that this time would come. It is the mission of theosophical teaching to prepare hearts and minds for what is coming, to warn them, and to show them the way and the goal.

• 111. Lecture of 27 March 1905 on symbols reflecting original wisdom.
• 112. Verse I, in H. P. Blavatsky’s The Secret Doctrine.
• 113. See G. R. S. Mead, note 81.
• 114Rudolf Steiner never spoke of the 8th, 9th and 10th pages as he then went on a lecture tour and had to give a public lecture in Hamburg the following Monday. Below is Saint-Martin’s description of the book of ten pages.
  ‘These unutterable benefits were connected with the possession and understanding of a most precious book, one of the gifts humanity had received as part of existence. Although this book had only ten pages, it held all insights and all knowledge of what has been, what is and what will be, and human beings were able at that time to read in all ten pages of the book at once, taking it all in with just one look.
  In his case, the book was still there for him, but he had lost the ability to read it easily, and could no longer get to know all its pages at once, but only one after the other. Yet he will never be wholly restored to his rights until he has studied them all; for although each of these ten pages contains specific knowledge belonging to that page only, they are nevertheless interrelated in such a way that it is impossible to have one of them perfectly in mind unless one has learned to know them all; and although I said that human beings could no longer read them except one after the other, each of their steps would lack certainty unless they had gone through them all in one, above all the fourth, which is the point of unification for them all.
  This is a truth to which people have paid little heed, and yet it would be infinitely necessary for them to take them to heart and understand them; for they are all born with the book in their hand; and since the study and understanding of this book is the mission they must fulfil, we can judge how important it is for them not to take a wrong step with this.
  However, they have been utterly remiss in this point; you find hardly any who may have noticed the essential connection between the ten pages of the book, so that they are inseparable in all ways. Some have stopped half-way, others on the third page, others on the first; hence atheists, materialists and deists have come forth; some had an inkling of the connection, but they did not understand the important distinction which had to be made between each of these pages, taking them to be all the same and of one kind, being pages of the one book.
  What has been the consequence of this? It is this. Those who limited themselves to the one part of the book beyond which they did not have the courage to go, nevertheless maintained that they spoke according to the book, thinking to themselves that they understood it; and led astray by this, they considered themselves infallible in their doctrine, doing everything possible to make the world believe this. But these isolated truths, cut off from all nourishment, soon wilted in the hands of those who had thus isolated them, and nothing remained for these ignorant people but a vain spectre of knowledge, something they could not pretend was something solid or the truth unless they resorted to deceit.
  This is indeed the source of all the errors we will have to examine in this treatise, and all the errors we have already touched on concerning the two opposite principles, the natural world, the laws of bodily entities, the different abilities of human beings, and the principles and origin of their religion and worship.
  It will also be apparent to which part of the book the errors mainly relate; however, before we come to this, let us first consider the idea we must have to this incomparable book in its fullness, and to this end refer fully to the different kinds of knowledge and the different qualities of which each of its pages holds the knowledge.
  The first had to do with the general principle, or the centre, from which all central points flow without cease.
  The second with the occasional cause of the universe; of the dual bodily law on which it is based; with the law which is understood in two ways and functions in time; with the dual nature of the human being; and altogether with everything made up and evolved from two actions.
  The third with the foundation of the body; with all the results and productions of all kinds; and here we have the number of the immaterial spirits that do not think.
  The fourth with everything which is active; with the principle of all languages, both in time and outside time; with religion and worship; and here we have the number of the immaterial spirits that do think.
  The fifth with idolatry and decay.
  The sixth with the laws of generation and development in the temporal world, and with the natural division of the circle by the radius.
  The seventh with the cause of the winds and with ebb and flood; with the geographical measure of man; with his true insight, and with the source spring of his intelligent or sensual productions.
  The eighth with the temporal number of the element which is the only support, the only strength and the only hope of man, that is with the real, physical entity that has two names and four numbers, in so far as it is both active and intelligent, and extends its action over the four worlds. It was also concerned with justice, and the whole of legislative power; which encompasses the rights of princes and the authority of generals and judges.
  The ninth with the evolution of the physical human being in the woman’s womb, and with the resolution of the general and specific triangle.
  The tenth finally was the way and the complement of the nine that went before. It was without doubt the most essential and really the page without which none of those that went before would be known; for if you arrange all ten in circumference, in their numerical order, you find the most relationship between it and the first, from which all flows; and if you want to judge its importance, you must know that the originator of things is invincible exactly because of this page, for it is a barricade of wagons around him which no entity can cross.
  Since this work therefore contains all knowledge which the human being may seek and the laws set for him, it is evident that he will never be able to gain any insight, nor ever fulfil his true mission unless he draws on this source; we also know now the hand which must guide him there, and that, if he is not able to walks the steps to this fruitful source by himself, he may nevertheless be certain to get there if he forgets his will and lets the will of the active and intelligent cause take effect, the cause which alone must act for him.’
• 115. See the lecture given in Berlin on 26 April 1906 [in German] in GA 54.
• 116. See also the lectures given in Berlin on 9, 16 and 23 December 1904, in The Temple Legend (note 22).

The texts presented in this volume go back to the years from 1903 to 1906. They represent Rudolf’s preliminary work on the history of human and world evolution which was to be published under the title Occult Science, an Outline in 1910. This had from the beginning been said to be a continuation of Theosophy. An introduction to Supersensible Determination of the World and the Understanding of Man, published in June 1904. Originally, that is, in 1903, when Theosophy was being written^a Rudolf Steiner had intended the cosmology to be the last chapter in this work. He referred to this in his preface to the 1925 edition of Occult Science, dated 10 January 1925. That original intention must soon have changed, however, as it was then planned to produce a separate volume. In the lecture given in Berlin on 9 June 1904 he said: ‘A second volume of my Theosophy, which is due to appear soon, will also be on cosmology.’ It may be assumed that he had already started to write it, for on 5 December 1904 he had a discussion with publisher Max Altmann from Leipzig. Mr Altmann then wrote on 9 December 1904, enclosing a publisher’s contract [in this volume] based on the discussion. The fragment of a manuscript, published for the first time in this volume, bears witness that the plan was to publish a volume on cosmology.

Independently of this, spiritual-scientific cosmology was published in a series of essays in the journal Luzifer-Gnosis from July 1904,^b continuing until the journal had to cease publication in 1908 when Rudolf Steiner had too much other work to do.^* The collected essays were available as special editions at the time, organized in chapters with headings, like those on Knowledge of the Higher Worlds. The Knowledge of the Higher Worlds essays were published in book form in 1909—the preface is dated Berlin, 12 October 1909—but not the Cosmic Memory essays. Evidently because work on the main volume on cosmology, Occult Science, which had been announced a long time before, had come to a conclusion. The preface to this was ‘Written in December 1909’.

Rudolf Steiner gave his reasons why the plan made in 1903/04 was not brought to realization at the time in the above-mentioned Preface to the 1925 edition, dated 10 January 1925:

At the time when Theosophy was written, the subject matter of the present volume could not be brought into an equally finished form. In my inner visions I perceived the spiritual nature of the individual human being, and I was able to put this in words. The cosmic evolution which is now presented in this volume was not then apparent to me at the same level. Individual details were available, but not the whole picture. I therefore decided to publish Theosophy, with the essential nature in the life of an individual which I had been able to perceive, and to continue my work on Occult Science at a steady pace in the immediate future.

It cannot have been so much the actual content which was the problem but rather the way in which the subject might be presented in a form he felt was right for publication. This is evident from the sentence which follows in the preface: ‘The way I felt at the time was that the contents of this book should be presented in thoughts which were a further development, suitable for referring to things of the spirit, of the thoughts used in natural science.’ Looking back to the writing of Theosophy in his autobiography,^c he wrote: ‘At every step I sought to stay firmly connected with the scientific way of thinking.^d

In spite of this, Rudolf Steiner also started to speak of cosmic evolution in his lectures from 1903 onwards. The question arises as to how the presentation given in the 1903/04 fragment and in the lectures given in those early years relates to that used in Occult Science. The answer is found if we distinguish between presentation in form of ideas and that in form of visions, seeing each image as a different aspect of a subject which is extremely difficult to present.

The idea aspect clearly applied in those early years. It is the ‘outline of cosmic evolution’ aspect of which he said on 27 June 1908 in the lectures on the Revelation of St John^e that it followed specific numerical relationships. This outline aspect is closely bound up with the ‘seven great secrets’, especially the second of them, the secret of numbers. This is clearly evident in the texts in this volume. The secret of numbers was always one of the most important in occult schools, for in original wisdom everything was based on number^f For the occultist’s investigations take him into the spirituality of the outside world. There one finds an infinite variety of entities and situations. It needs Ariadne’s clew to find one’s way back again. Number is this clew, the silver thread.^g The world has thus been ordered by number from time immemorial—number in terms of spiritual science also meaning category, archetypal ideas, cosmic thoughts.

It would thus be quite wrong to rate a presentation of cosmic evolution in categories less significant than one in images gained through vision. At the end of his work as a lecturer, Rudolf Steiner himself spoke of these categories as the alphabet of the cosmic script through which he gained his insights in spiritual research (see also Special Note in this volume).

Hella Wiesberger

• a. Two other cosmosophy texts were written in those years. See [in German]
• b. Cosmic Memory. Atlantis and Lemuria, GA 11, tr. K. E. Zimmer. New York: Rudolf Steiner Publications 1971.
• *. Two other cosmosophy texts were written in those years. See [in German] Zur Geschichte und aus den Inhalten der erkenntniskultischen Abteilung der Esoterischen Schule 1904–1914, GA 265, S. 250 ff und S. 372 ff.
• c. Rudolf Steiner, An Autobiography, GA 28, chapter 33; tr. R. Stebbing. New York: Rudolf Steiner Publications 1997.
• d. See also the lecture given in Torquay on 20 August 1924 in True and False Paths in Spiritual Investigation, GA 243; tr. A. H. Parker; London: Anthroposophical Publishing Co. 1927.
• e. Publ. as The Apocalypse of St John, GA 104; tr. J. Collis; London: Rudolf Steiner Press 1977
• f. See lectures given in Dornach on 21 November 1907, in GA 100 and on 15 Nov. 1919, in GA 191 [both in German].
• g. See lecture given in Copenhagen 4 June 1910 [in German] in GA 125.

On 9 June 1904, Rudolf Steiner announced to the Berlin Branch that his book Theosophy, which was due to appear in a few days’ time, would be followed by a second volume, on cosmology. This second volume was also discussed at a meeting with his publisher, Max Altmann from Leipzig. Altmann then send a draft contract. The title of the book is given there as ‘Die Geheimlehre’ (the secret doctrine). This was evidently a working title, for at that time theosophical and cosmological knowledge was identified with the main work of H. P. Blavatsky, the founder of the theosophical movement, which was entitled The Secret Doctrine (vol. 1: Cosmogenesis). Thus the French writer Edouard Schure, for example, asked Marie von Sivers, with whom he was acquainted, if the discussion of the Lemurian age in Steiner’s essays ‘From the akashic record’ (later published as Cosmic Memory) had been taken from Mme Blavatsky’s Secret Doctrine, ‘which seems to me to be the case. At any rate, the matter has gained greatly in clarity as presented by Mr Steiner’s pen.’ Marie von Sivers reply on 16 June 1905 was:

I would also like to reply to a question you asked. Mr Steiner has no need to borrow from The Secret Doctrine in order to tell us about the akashic record. The living source which flows through him is much more abundant than anything available so far. [...] It is his destiny to help us gain clarity about the contents of The Secret Doctrine, add to it and take it further.

In November 1905, the new work was for the first time given its actual title in a notice: ‘Shortly to appear ‘Geheimwissenschaft’ {Occult Science). By Dr Rudolf Steiner (Leipzig, M. Altmann).’ Repeated many times, the notice read as follows from the summer of 1907: ‘The continuation of this book ‘Theosophy’ will very shortly appear under the title Occult Science. The long delay has merely been due to the author’s unceasing lecturing activities. Publication is now due, however, whatever the circumstances.’ (in GA 34). It was completed by the end of 1909 and appeared early in 1910.

Human existence is at a number of different levels of consciousness today. The ordinary state is the one in which we are from waking up to going to sleep. In this state we perceive things through the senses and develop ideas based on our sensory perceptions. The physical world exists for us because of this, and our powers of soul, our thinking, feeling, will intent and actions relate to this world.

Two other states of consciousness regularly take the place of the one above—dream-filled sleep and deep, dreamless sleep. These are often referred to as ‘unconscious’, but the term masks the true situation. In reality they are merely different kinds of consciousness. We might call them dimmer forms of consciousness.

Dream-filled sleep does not present objects, the way waking daytime consciousness does, but images which arise in the soul and pass away again. In the light of our ordinary consciousness, these images may seem highly confusing, yet if we gain clarity about their essential nature they can take us more deeply into the nature of the world. The way they present themselves in the soul’s night-time life cannot provide a proper basis for perceptive insight into them. This only arises for someone who develops his higher powers of insight, as described in this book,¹ which will give him insight into the worlds that lie beyond the one perceived by the senses. In this chapter, a description will be given of the true facts relating to those higher worlds. Anyone who follows the way that leads to insight into these regions will then also find these facts to be true.

The first thing to strike one when it comes to the world of dreams is the allegorical character of its images. This can emerge clearly if we pay reasonably subtle attention to the colourful richness and variety of dream events. This world, which passes fleetingly through the soul, offers all intermediate stages from simple allegory to dramatic event. You dream of a conflagration; you wake up and find that you had gone to sleep by the lamp. The light of the lamp was perceived in your dream, not the way it appears to the senses in the ordinary world but as an allegorical conflagration. Or you dream that you hear a group of horsemen ride past. You wake up, and the sound of the horses’ hooves merges into the striking of the clock which has thus found an allegorical form. You dream of an animal scratching the side of your face. You wake up and find that you feel pain in that area; this pain had found its own allegory in your dream. A longer dream might be something like this. Someone dreams he is walking through woods. He hears a sound. As he moves on, someone emerges from some bushes and attacks him. A struggle ensues and the attacker shoots. At that moment the dreamer wakes up and finds that he has just knocked over the chair beside his bed. The chair hitting the floor had been transformed into the allegorical action in his dream consciousness. External events or also internal ones, as in the example of the scratching animal, may be perceived as allegories through the dream. Affects and moods may also take this form. Thus someone may have an oppressive feeling that something unpleasant is going to happen during the next few days. In his dream the feeling comes to expression in that he finds himself in danger of drowning.

The above examples characterize two qualities of dream-level consciousness—an image nature and something creative within this. Our daytime consciousness does not have this creative quality. It presents the objects that surround us the way they are in the physical world outside. Consciousness at dream level adds something which comes from a different source.

What causes this source to open up? Nothing else but that the function of the senses, on which daytime consciousness depends, has ceased in sleep. It has fallen silent, which is evident from the fact that the human being no longer has self awareness. This self-awareness is bound up with the function of the physical senses; when these fall silent, it goes down into an abyss. In the science of the spirit we refer to this by saying that the human soul has withdrawn from the physical world. Unless you want to insist that human beings cease to exist on going to sleep and are recreated on waking up, you will not find it difficult to realize that in their sleep human beings exist in a world which is not the physical world. This world is called the astral world. For the moment readers may take this term to be a name for the world of which human beings get something of an idea through their dreams. Other chapters in this book will give the term its full justification.²

In their dreams, human beings are in the astral world. The realities and entities of this world appear in images. The conscious mind perceives these images; but human beings have no self-awareness. An analogy from everyday life can give an idea of what the situation is. Human beings only perceive the world around them in so far as they have the organs for doing so. If they had no ears there’d be no world of sound for them, nor a world of light and colour without eyes, and so on. If human beings were to develop a new organ in their bodies, something completely new would also appear in their environment, just as light and colour appear as something completely new for someone who was born blind and has had an operation.

Just as the human physical body perceives the physical world through its organs, so does another body—a soul body—perceive the other, astral world through its own organs when we dream. It is merely that there is no self-awareness with this body. self-awareness is outside the human sphere when we are in this state.

If it were impossible for human self-awareness to arise in this state as well, we would never be able to see through the conditions which pertain here. It is however possible with the higher training, also called initiation, which has been mentioned above and is described in this book. With it we learn to develop organs in the astral body when we are in the dream state, and these are similar to the organs our physical body has for the perception of the physical world. Once these organs have developed, a self-awareness arises during the dream which is similar to the self-awareness we have in our waking life. Once this level of existence is reached the whole world of our dreams will also change to a considerable degree. It will lose the confusing richness of variety which it has in the ordinary sleeper, with an inner order and harmony taking its place which is not just the equal of our ordinary physical world but goes well beyond it with regard to these qualities. Human beings then realize that another world has always existed around them, just as the world of light and colour exists around someone who is blind. They merely were not able to see it because they did not have the organs for it, just as a blind person cannot see the world of light and colour before his operation. The significant moment when the astral organs of perception begin to function in a person is called the ‘awakening’ or ‘rebirth’ in occult science.

At this moment of awakening the individual finds himself surrounded by a higher world where things he knew before in the world of the senses have different qualities and, what is more, facts and entities exist that were unknown to him before. He will now also realize that this other world holds the images out of which the objects in the world perceived through the senses take form. It is not a bad idea to compare the way in which the physical world arises from the astral world with the way ice forms in water. Just as ice is transformed water, so the physical world is transformed astral world. And just as water is always in a state of flux, so we have the astral world as a constantly changing world of images which lies behind the physical world. The astral forms do not have the firm definition and contours we know in the ordinary world. Everything is in flux and changing. And a physical object or entity only arises as if such a flowing image were to be frozen, in a way, for a moment. Anyone wanting to apply the ideas of the physical world with its clearly defined outlines to the astral region would merely show that he does not have real insight into this world, which is of a completely different kind.

Just as the entities of the physical world are embodied in a physical body, so are the astral images a reflection of entities which do not enter into the physical world. They come to expression in a different kind of matter than does the human being living in the physical world and coming to expression in flesh and blood.

What is the nature of this astral matter? It is indeed a form of matter which human beings also have in them. It is merely that in waking everyday life it is covered over, as it were, by ideas based on the world of the senses. Human desires, wishes and dislikes, sympathies and antipathies relate to the things perceived through the senses. People desire one object and reject another. It is nowhere else but in these desires, wishes and dislikes that the source must be sought on which the state of consciousness we have in our dreams also draws when objects are transformed into allegories. The self-awareness we have by day gives our desires and wishes the nourishment they require, taking it from perceptions gained in the outside world. If the activities of the outer senses fall silent, a different, creative power comes into play and creates the images from material consisting of wishes and desires. In occult science it is said that the dreaming human being is in an astral body woven of wishes and desires and that the physical body is then without self awareness. As to initiates, or those who have been awakened, they, too, have left their physical bodies, but their self-awareness resides in their astral bodies. Just as the physical body is able to convey perception of physical things because its organs are made of the same material as the physical world, so is the initiate able to perceive the entities of the astral world because he has organs made of the material of the wishes and desires in which those entities come to expression.

The difference between non-initiates and initiates is that the astral world does not become visible to the former as an outside world, whilst it does so for the latter. This astral world remains mere inner world for those who are not awakened; they live it in their wishes and desires; but they do not see them. The initiate does not merely feel a wish; he perceives it as an object in the outside world, just as someone who is not awakened perceives tables and chairs.

The ordinary world of dreams is, however, only a faint echo of the world perceived by the initiate. This is inevitable, as there is no self-awareness involved. Yet where is our self-awareness during a dream? It has withdrawn to a higher world where initially the human being does not exist as such. Our relationship to that world may be shown in an analogy. Think of a human hand and a tool held in that hand. For as long as the hand is holding the tool the two are a whole, as it were. The latter does what the former decides. However, as soon as the hand puts the tool aside, this is left to itself; the movements of the hand merely express the will of the individual to whom the hand belongs. The physical body in daytime waking life should thus be seen as the tool of a limb belonging to a higher spiritual entity. If this extends a limb, as it were, into the physical body, sensory functions and hence self-awareness arise in that body. self-awareness ceases when the limb leaves the body. The inmost essential spirit of the human being, which is capable of self-awareness, is thus a part of a higher spirit which is extended, as it were, for periods of time and clothed in the physical body. We can get an even better idea of this if we consider the extension to go hand in hand with a tying-off process, as if a drop were to separate out from the higher spirit in our waking hours which is then absorbed again during sleep. In their waking hours, human beings are not aware of their connection with a higher spirit; they are thus truly cut off from it. During sleep, they have to be without self-awareness, for it then withdraws into the higher spirit; this absorbs it, and it rests within it.

The world of images vanishes in dreamless sleep. The physical body then seems to be lying there wholly without conscious awareness; in reality, however, its state of conscious awareness is merely one that is dimmer than the one it had in dream-filled sleep. The power to produce images has also left the physical body. Because of this, only the insights gained by individuals who have been awakened can provide insight into this state. Those who have not been awakened lack perceptions of it. For someone who has been awakened, however, the image-producing body, which before this was still loosely connected with the physical body, shows itself to have been lifted out of it. And it is not inactive now but serves to restore the energies of the physical body, which show themselves to have been exhausted when we are tired, doing so to the required level. This explains the refreshing effect of sound sleep. Tired, the physical body falls asleep. At this moment it hands its self awareness over to higher spirits. In the in-between state of dream-filled sleep the soul is still loosely connected with the physical body. The characteristic aspect of this soul is its creative nature. From the moment of waking up, it begins to use its creative powers to make perceptions mediated through the senses part of our inner life. On falling asleep, there are no more sensory perceptions of the outside world. In the in-between state of dreaming the creative element is still active, transforming itself into the allegorical images I have described; then the allegorical images also cease to develop; the soul turns the whole of its creative power to the body, on which it now works from the outside.

Anyone wishing to set the insights presented in occult science aside, would have to realize the nature of the soul’s night-time activity simply from the fact that we feel refreshed when we wake up in the mornings. Daytime life has inharmonious, chaotic qualities. Things from the physical surroundings influence human beings from all sides. First one thing enters into their inner life and then another. This brings the inner creative powers out of the order which is theirs by nature. Order and balance is restored during the night. The soul restores order and harmony. With the life we live by day the physical body gradually comes to look like a body of air with wind currents passing through it from all sides, with different parts of that body of air showing irregular relative movements. On waking up, the physical body may be compared to a body of air set in regular oscillation by the rhythm and harmony of a piece of music. And initiates do indeed perceive the work the soul does on the body during sleep as though it were a penetration with sound. In their sleep, human beings enter into the harmony of the inner life. This is the very harmony out of which they were created. Before the physical body first opened up to the outside world through its sense organs, it was wholly under the influence of this harmony which differentiated it. This is the harmony of soul, the music of the soul, which passes through the whole world. Human beings are surrounded by its sounds just as they are surrounded by the images of which I spoke earlier. This image world is the perceived real environment for those who achieve awakening through inner training, and at an every higher level this is also true for this third world. Sounds begin to arise around them. And in these sounds, the meaning of the world becomes apparent to them. Just as the form of the physical world has arisen from the images, so were these forms given their inner meaning and nature out of the sounds I have described. From this point of view all things are sound become form.

When awake, therefore, the human being is made up of three bodies:

1. the physical body, which perceives the physical world through organs implanted in it from the outside world and which encompasses self-awareness;

2. a body which has an inwardly mobile image character; its images are at the same time the archetypes of the physical body, the firmly defined forms of which have arisen, as it were, by becoming still and frozen out of the continually changing images of the second body;

3. both the physical body and the image body are filled with a harmony of sound, which is a third body. In dream-filled sleep the soul withdraws from the physical body; it remains connected with the other two bodies, sounding throughout the sound body and filling the image body with images. The latter influence the physical body and impart to it dream images that are like shades. In dreamless sleep the soul is connected only with the sound body; the part of it which was in the physical body during waking hours is now outside it and works on it from the outside. This activity which flows from the soul to the physical body produces a level of consciousness which is so dim that the human being does not perceive it.

These in fact are three states of consciousness for the physical body—daytime waking consciousness, the dream state and the dreamless sleep state. The dimness of the last two clears for the initiate; thanks to this he lives in higher worlds just as the unawakened live in the physical world around them in daytime waking life. This gives us five states of consciousness, and in progressive order of clarity they may be listed as follows:

1. the dreamless sleep state
2. the dream-filled sleep state
3. daytime waking consciousness
4. the initiate’s image level of conscious awareness
5. the initiate’s level of conscious awareness in sound

If we consider that initiates reach the last two levels as a stage of higher human development with their training in occult science, we realize that daytime waking consciousness is a level which is higher than the two which lie below it and has therefore developed from them. This is taught in occult science. There we learn that in a far distant past the human being went through a stage of evolution where he had only a dim sleep level of consciousness without any dream images; he then rose to a dim state of dream-filled consciousness before he finally arrived at the daytime waking consciousness he has today. Someone preparing for initiation takes this line of evolution further. He develops the two higher forms of conscious awareness.

There is an even higher level of conscious awareness which an initiate may reach. It is evident from the above that at the level of awareness of sound the soul is still connected with the human body. This connection may, however, cease altogether. The soul can leave the body altogether. An initiate learns to do this. If he still wants to perceive something at that point he must have developed organs of a still higher kind. When that is the case, the meaning of the world comes to direct expression in his environment, without sound to mediate it. This level of awareness, which for the time being we’ll call the highest, is called spiritual awareness, or consciousness in pure spirit. If we go back to the list above, this level would have to correspond to a state for the human being where consciousness is even duller than in dreamless sleep. This is in fact the case, in general terms. Human beings of the present age are not yet able to live out this state in reality. The soul would have to be completely out of the body; a wholly soulless state would have to interrupt dreamless sleep. This would in fact mean that the physical body was completely given over to itself, that is, temporarily dead. This is something to which the physical body must not be exposed lest it run the risk of being no longer capable of receiving the soul into itself.

In evolution, however, this state did indeed precede the level of dreamless sleep consciousness. The complete sequence of human levels of consciousness is thus the following:

1. a low level of consciousness, the dimmest of all
2. the dreamless sleep state
3. the dream-filled sleep state
4. daytime waking consciousness
5. the initiate’s image level of conscious awareness
6. the initiate’s level of conscious awareness in sound
7. spiritual awareness

At the present time, the living human body has only advanced to the fourth level. Initiates can reach the higher kinds of consciousness. These also take them into higher worlds. Human evolution should be thought of, however, as the physical body itself evolving in the first three stages, having now reached a level where it still shows two other forms of conscious awareness in sleep which are remnants of earlier stages. The first stage has become completely obscured in the course of evolution. The three higher stages for initiates cannot yet come to expression in the physical body at the present time because it cannot develop organs for it. They are prophetic advance evidence of forms which the physical body will assume in future.

If we take the above as our basis for getting a real picture of the world as it is today, it is seen to be fourfold—firstly the physical world perceived by the physical senses, then a world of images which surrounds and penetrates this, furthermore a world of sound which is present in every part of those other two, and finally a spiritual world which lies behind it all.

This world was preceded by one in which man lived as in a dream. At that time the condition of his physical body was like the one in which he finds himself in his dream-filled sleep today. His surroundings were like a panorama of shifting images. Nothing was clearly outlined. This condition was at the time interrupted by another which is like our dreamless sleep today, and this in turn gave way to one which can no longer be realized today and was filled with the level of conscious awareness given as the first in the list above.

In a world that existed even earlier, man could not rise to living experience of dream images. The highest level of consciousness was that of dreamless sleep. This condition was interrupted by the lower and most dim consciousness which today has already become obscured; this in turn by a condition which has lost all significance where present-day evolution is concerned.

In the first world of which we hear in occult science, man also did not have the dull consciousness of sleep; the first of the states described above was then the highest; two others which do not come into consideration today, alternated with it.

Thus we look back to evolution in a far distant past; we perceive four stages which the human physical body has gone through. We also look into the future, when the three levels of higher consciousness which today can be reached by initiates will come to realization in the physical world. Our world will yield to a future world where human physical bodies will have organs by which a human being will be able to perceive an forever shifting world of images whilst also having self awareness, and will indeed see himself as such a world. Beyond this we perceive a world where the images will be filled with harmonious sounds expressing their inner nature. Finally we perceive a world that is spiritual by nature but will have poured its spirit out into physical nature.

This is how the evolution of the world is presented in occult science, a world in which humanity goes through its consecutive stages.³ These stages are given names which have also been applied to the planets which surround the world.⁴ The stage of development where man was still at the dimmest level of consciousness is called Saturn evolution; the second stage, when man lived in a dreamless sleep level of consciousness, Sun evolution; the third, when the dream level of consciousness arose, the Moon stage; the fourth, which is the present one, with man having fought his way through to clear daytime conscious awareness, Earth evolution. And the stages for the future, when the levels of higher consciousness which initiates are able to reach now will come to physical expression, are consecutively called Jupiter, Venus and Vulcan evolution.

The distinction between the levels of consciousness initiates have and those which humanity will have during those future Jupiter, Venus and Vulcan evolutions lies in the fact that the former must rise to higher worlds in order to live in those states of conscious awareness, whilst future humanity will have them in the physical world. This is because in the case of present-day initiates appropriate organs of perception are created out of the powers of those higher worlds; in future, organs which will be their equal will arise for physical bodies out of the physical environment. The human being can perceive the world around him which provides the material for his organs. In future the physical environment will have creative powers which at present belong only to the higher worlds. We can therefore see the evolution of the world to be such that higher and higher worlds are physically embodied in succession. The Earth is the fourth embodiment. Its physical differentiation is such that it is able to impress the organs for clear daytime consciousness in the organism. In the terms of occult science it evolved from a different physical state where it was only able to impress organs for dream-level consciousness in the body. This state is given the name ‘Moon’. The Earth thus developed out of this Moon by acquiring a new faculty, and that is to develop the organs for daytime waking consciousness. The ‘Moon’ had arisen from the ‘Sun’. What has now become ‘Earth’ was therefore ‘Sun’ at that time. In occult science the term ‘Sun state’ is used for the state where the cosmic body which is in that state is able to create only the organs for dreamless sleep consciousness in a human body. And before the Earth was ‘Sun’ in this sense, it was at the ‘Saturn stage’.

What gives such a cosmic body the power to create the requisite organs in the human body? It would never be able to do this if it were not that these organs were first created in human beings who were ahead of their time with regard to higher worlds. By developing Jupiter organs in advance, today’s initiates are creating the possibility for the image world around us to assume physical character. Images become rigid and assume physical bodily nature because the forms they will assume exist first of all in the spirit. Initiates thus come to reshape the cosmic body on which they dwell. The creative powers which later on will call the objects of humanity’s physical surroundings into existence shine out from them, as it were.

This is how the initiates of the Moon stage created the physical form of the Earth in the spirit before it became physical earth. They perceived the Earth as their object of a higher world.

In occult science, seven great world cycles or periods are known through which the entity is going which at its fourth level is Earth. Each period has to do with a higher development of the human body. From this insight, occult scientists see 'four-foldness’ as something which characterizes the present stage of world evolution.⁵ This refers, for instance, to the ‘four elements’ known to Pythagoras and his school. Four is the number of the ‘macrocosm’, that is, the world which humanity presently inhabits. This has raised humanity to the fourth level of conscious awareness.

The human being is seen as ‘microcosm’ in relation to this ‘macrocosm’ in occult science. His soul already holds the potential for the future physical ‘macrocosm’. He is therefore in the process of expanding his inner ‘microcosm’ into ‘macrocosm’. The creative womb for the latter lies in him. From this point of view, the soul is seen in occult science as a creative seed for the future, an ‘inner’ principle which seeks to come to realization in something that will be something ‘outer’.

To be able to be creative in the outer world this soul must first grow mature. It must have living inner experience of the things to which it will later give outward form. Before the soul had the ability, for instance, of impressing organs for clear daytime consciousness on the physical body, it had to go through a sequence of developmental stages where it gradually acquired this ability. Thus it had to have living experience of the first state of consciousness in itself before it was able to create it; and the same holds true for the other levels of conscious awareness. These stages of development which precede the creation of the different kinds of conscious awareness in the soul are called levels of life in occult science. There are therefore seven levels of life, just as there are seven levels of consciousness. Life differs from conscious awareness in that the former has inner character, whilst the latter depends on a relationship to the outside world.

With reference to the Earth we can say that before the clear daytime state of consciousness developed on it in the human body, this cosmic body had to go through four states which may be seen as four states of life

The levels of the soul’s living experience are found if we think of the outside world as it is perceived in the states of consciousness, being made part of inner life. First we have the dimmest state of consciousness which comes before dreamless sleep. In the latter, the soul works on the body to harmonize it; the corresponding state of life is harmonization of one’s own inner life. It therefore fills itself with a world of sounding movement. Before, in the dimmest state of living experience, it was within an unmoving inner life of its own. It entered wholly into feeling this in an indifference that knew no differentiation. This lowest state of life is called the first elemental world.⁶ Here, matter is experienced in its original nature. Matter begins to stir and move in all kinds of different directions. Self experience of this mobility is the first level of life and the first elemental world. The second level is reached when rhythm and harmony arise in those movements. The corresponding level of life consists in inwardly becoming aware of rhythm as sound. This is the second elemental world. The third level develops as the movements become images. The soul then lives within itself as though in a world of images that take form and dissolve again. This is the third elemental world. At the fourth level the images assume definite form; individual elements emerge from the shifting panorama. This means that it is no longer only inner living experience, but can be perceived outside. It is the world of outer bodies.

In this world we have to distinguish between the configuration which it has for man’s clear daytime consciousness and the configuration which it experiences within itself. The body truly has living experience within itself of its form, that is, of matter in regular configurations. At the next level, this mere experience of form is overcome; its place is taken by living experience of changing form. Configuration arises and changes. It would be reasonable to say that at this level the third elemental world shows itself in a higher configuration. In the third elemental world the movement from one configuration to another can only be experienced as image; in this, the fifth world, image progresses to becoming a solid external object, but this external object does not come to an end in the form, for it keeps the ability to change. This is the world of growing bodies that reproduce themselves. Its capacity for change shows itself in that very growth and reproduction. In the next world the ability is also gained to have living experience of the way the outer influences the inner. It is the world of sentient entities. The final world to be considered is one with not only inner experience of things outside but of sharing in their inner experience. This is the world of shared inner experience. The sequence for the levels of life is thus as follows:

1. dim living experience of matter
2. living experience of inner movement
3. living experience of inner configuration
4. living experience of definite boundaries
5. living experience of changing form
6. living experience of influence of the outside world as sentience
7. sharing in the living experience of the outside world

The living inner experience of the soul has to be preceded by the creation of this life. For we cannot have living experience of anything unless it exists. If living inner experience is called soul element in occult science, then the creative element is referred to as spiritual. The [physical body] perceives by means of organs; the soul experiences itself inside; the spirit directs creative activity to the outside. Just as seven soul experiences preceded the seven levels of conscious awareness, so do seven kinds of creative activity precede these experiences in the soul. What corresponds to the dim experience of matter in the creative sphere is the creation of matter. Matter is flowing into the world there in an indifferent way. This sphere is called the sphere of formlessness. At the next level matter differentiates and its parts enter into relationship with one another. We then have different forms of matter which combine and separate. This is called the sphere of form. At the third level matter no longer needs to relate to matter itself; instead, forces develop in matter, forms of matter attract or repel one another, and so on. This is the astral sphere. At the fourth level matter is configured by forces around it; at the third level these had merely regulated external relationships, and now they work into the inner aspect of entities. This is the physical sphere. An entity which is at this level reflects the world around it;⁷ the forces of that world work on its differentiation.

Further progress means that the entity not only becomes differentiated inwardly in tune with the forces of the surrounding world but also gives itself an outer physiognomy which bears the imprint of this surrounding world. Whereas an entity of the fourth level was a mirror reflection of its surroundings, an entity of the fifth level expressed this surrounding world in its physiognomy. At the sixth level, physiognomy becomes something that flows out. An entity at this level creates things in its surroundings just as it first created itself. This is the level of configuration. At the seventh level configuration becomes creation. The entity which has reached this level creates forms around itself which are on the small scale what that surrounding world is on the large scale. It is the level of creative work.

The evolution of the spiritual principle thus proceeded like this:

1. formlessness
2. giving form
3. embodying strength
4. configuration in accord with the forces of the surrounding world
5. capacity for physiognomic expression
6. power of configuration
7. creative ability

When Saturn evolution began, the human body was at the level of formlessness. It had to struggle through to creative ability before a soul was able to have its first, living experience of matter in it. This means that the body had to evolve through the seven levels of creative activity; after that, its soul was able to live in all parts of it. The soul then had to reach a point where it can impart its inner movement to the seven forms of the body. The first time the body went through its seven forms it was still quite lifeless itself. It was only at the seventh level, where the body became creative, that its life awoke. And it had to awaken now, for the body expended matter in the process of creation. This the soul had to replace. Then a second cycle started. The matter flowing into the body as a replacement itself went through the seven levels from formlessness to creative ability. Once it had reached that point, the soul no longer limited itself to the living experiences that came with the movement of the matter as it came flowing in but began a new level of life. Having become creative itself, the matter flowing in began to fill the body inwardly. Before, it had always only replaced what had been expended; now it settled in the body. And once again it went through all levels from formlessness to creative ability. It would first be formless when deposited in the body, and then gradually progress to forms, develop powers, configuring structures, giving them physiognomic expression, and so on. During the whole of this cycle the soul went through its third level of life. It harmonized this inner differentiation and made good any disorder that had arisen through the inner processes. Having thus created inner configuration, matter then let the outside world influence it at the fourth level. It was able to do this, for the soul which dwelt in it had now become ready to live with dim awareness in impressions coming from outside and thus restore to order any disorder caused by the outside world. In the next cycle the body no longer just differentiated itself; it assumed a new configuration under the influence of the outside world. The soul had gained the ability to regulate the process of transformation. Then a cycle came where the body perceived the influences of the outside world by being sentient of them. The soul was again the regulator at this level of existence. The body had then reached its final level; it was able to have living experience of the outside world. The soul had reached the point where it anticipated a future level, which would be the next level of conscious awareness in what for Saturn existence was a higher world. It was thus going through the dreamless sleep state in this last Saturn cycle. And in the first Sun cycle it transferred this to the physical body.

It can be seen that during the Saturn period the physical human body went through a physical stage seven times. Each time it arrived at such a stage, the soul had reached a higher level in its living experience. At the seventh stage it went beyond Saturn evolution, so that its inner experience pointed to the Sun stage.

When the Sun cycle began, the physical body had reached the point where it was able to take its own configuration in hand. Before, the soul had regulated configuration; now the body had its own configurer in it. This we call the ether body. The soul was then no longer in direct connection with the physical body; between them was the ether body, acting as a mediator. The soul’s experiences were now the ether body’s, just as before they had become the physical body’s. This ether body now must first of all go through the seven form states from formlessness to creative activity. Working to configure the physical body, the ether body was all the time losing tone. And this was continually regulated by the soul. Sun evolution went through seven physical stages in this way. At each stage, the soul had reached a higher level; at the seventh it began to anticipate a new state of conscious awareness. Still sharing the experience of the ether body as it became the creator of new structures which were in the image of the whole Sun world, it did already sense inwardly a world of images surging up and down within it.

In the first Moon cycle it transferred this world of images to the ether body and this then configured the physical body according to those soul images. Whereas at the Sun level the ether body came between physical body and soul as a configurer, so the body of images I have characterized now found its place between ether body and soul. In occult science it is known as the sentient body. For as human inner sentience of the outside world flows inward, as it were, thus making the contents of the outside world something the inner world possessed, so did the images in the body of images act from the inside to the outside, impressing their contents on the ether body which in turn transferred them to the physical body.

During Moon evolution the human being again went seven times through all the form states, letting the soul mature to a higher level in each of them. During the seventh level the soul had the ability to give its images the more perfect form; it was able to enter into the living experience of everything that happened around it on the cosmic body, and its world of images thus reflected the whole Moon world. At the same time it anticipated experience of the highest level of consciousness which would come at the next level; it began to have vision of solid forms within its changing world of images. This made it ready to influence the ether body so that it was able to develop organs in itself that were of a more lasting nature.

With this, it became possible to make the transition to the first Earth cycle. The physical body now received the solid image forms into itself; they became its organs. A fourth body then began to develop in the human being. Perceptions of external objects came in between image body and soul. In a way, the body had now outgrown the soul; it had become independent. Before that the fruits of the images which the soul had gained from the outside world had developed in it. Now the outside world was bringing out direct perceptions in the body. The inner life of the soul then became a sharing of those perceptions. This independent activity on the part of the body came to be reflected in self-awareness. This, however, only matured slowly. First the human being had to go through a cycle of forms during which only a dim life of matter was sensed in his organs; in a second cycle the influence of matter caused internal movement; the ether body was able to share in the experience of the outside world through this, and it transformed the organs to make them living instruments of the physical body. In a third cycle the image body, too, grew able to recreate the outside world. It stimulated the organs to such effect that they themselves produced images which lived in this, though they were not yet reflections of external things. It was only in the fourth cycle that the soul itself became able to enter into every part of the bodily organs; it thus separated the images from those organs and clothed the external things in them. It then had an outside world with which it came face to face as an inner, independent entity.

Now the time had also come when the organs of the body which the soul was using would from time to time become exhausted. The possibility of being connected with the outside world would then cease. Sleep would come, in which the soul would again act to harmonize the physical body via the image and the ether body, the way it had done before. In occult science, therefore, sleep appears as something left behind from earlier stages of evolution. At the present time, the human being has gone some way beyond the middle of the fourth Earth cycle. This is reflected in the fact that he is perceiving not only external objects, doing so in clear daytime consciousness, but also the laws that are behind them. The soul has begun to experience the inner reconfiguration of things.

During Saturn evolution the human body was at the level of dimmest consciousness. One should not assume, however, that other levels of consciousness did not exist in entities which at that time existed in connection with that early embodiment of the Earth. Above all one entity existing at that time had a form of consciousness equal to the waking daytime consciousness human beings have today. Conditions in the Saturn environment were however very different from those we have on Earth, and this meant that that level of consciousness also had to function in a very different way.

On Earth, the human being has minerals, plants and animals around him as objects for sensory perception. These he considers to be at a lower level, with himself at a higher level than they are. The opposite was the case with that spirit on Saturn. It had three groups of entities above itself and had to consider itself to be the lowest of the entities it was able to perceive. In occult science, those three groups of higher spirits are given different names, depending on the language a people have and the age to which their occult teachers belonged. The terms used in Christian occult science are, going from below upwards: Dominions (Kyriotetes), Mights or Virtues (Dynamis) and Powers (Exusiai).⁸ The fourth and lowest spirit followed, just as on Earth the human being is the highest entity above the mineral, plant and animal worlds.

Conditions being so very different, the nature of perception also differed. An initiate knows this from experience. For it is like the spiritual consciousness he achieves as his third level, going beyond waking daytime consciousness. There it seems that impressions do not come to the senses from external objects but move towards the senses from inside, flowing into the outside world from them and out there coming upon objects and life forms, to be reflected in them and then appear to the conscious mind in the reflection.

This is how it was for that spirit on Saturn. It let its vital energy flow to the things on the planet, and their reflection came back to it from all sides in infinitely many ways. It perceived its own life as mirror image reflected from all sides. And the things which reflected its nature back to the spirit were the beginnings of the human physical body. For the planet consisted of these. Anything else that was perceived appeared not on the planet but in its surroundings. The spirits called Exusiai (Powers) appeared as shining spirits which illuminated the cosmic body from all sides. Saturn as such was a dark body; it received its light not from dead sources of light but from those spirits which dwelt around it and shone out to give it light. Their light was revealed to the perception of that Saturn spirit just as today an animal body makes itself perceptible to the human being. The spirits called Dynamis (Mights) revealed themselves in a similar way from the outer periphery by resounding in spirit, and the Kyriotetes (Dominions) through something called ‘cosmic aroma’ in occult science, a kind of impression which we may compare with an odour today.

Just as the human being on Earth rises beyond perception of external things to ideas which live only within him, so that spirit on Saturn knew not only the above-mentioned spirits, which revealed themselves to it as if from inside, but also others which it perceived from the outside; in Christian occult science these are known as Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones.⁹ Nothing in the compass of earthly human experience can compare with the sublime characteristics in which they showed themselves at that time.

Finally this spirit on Saturn also knew a third group who also dwelt on the planet. They populated the inner part of the planet. This was entirely made up of human bodies at the level which they had reached at the time. To get an idea of these bodies, we may compare them with automatons consisting of the most subtle etheric matter during the periods when they took physical form. They reflected the life of that Saturn spirit; they themselves were wholly lifeless and had no sentience whatsoever. Two kinds of spirits dwelt in them, however, and these developed their own life and capacity for sentience in them. They needed a basis for such development. For they did not have a physical body of their own and yet were made in such a way that they could only develop their higher faculties in a physical body. They therefore made use of the human physical body.

The bodily, soul and spiritual element was thus present on Saturn in a way similar to the one in which it exists on Earth. Only on Earth it makes up the threefold nature of the human being—his body, his soul and his spirit. Each of these is threefold in turn, with the body consisting of physical, ether and sentient body; the soul of sentient soul, rational soul and spiritual soul; the spirit of Spirit Self, life spirit and spirit human being. On Saturn, the bodily, soul and spiritual elements were not parts of one entity but existed as independent entities, the physical bodily part being the first beginnings of the human body and the actual material basis of the planet itself, the ether body being Angel, the sentient body Archangel; the sentient soul was represented by those Saturn spirits I have characterized, the rational soul by the Powers, the spiritual soul by the Mights, the Spirit Self by the Dominions, the life spirit by the Thrones, the spirit human being by the Cherubim, with the Seraphim above them all.

During the time when it was at its physical level, therefore, Saturn had a differentiated body consisting of subtle ether bodies; Angels and Archangels were active in this just as vital and nerve energies are active in the human body today. And where the latter has its sensory instruments on the outside, so Saturn was covered, as it were, with nothing but senses on its surface; these were not receptive, however, but reflective. They mirrored everything which made an impression in the surroundings of the cosmic body. The luminous Powers shone on to the surface of Saturn, and their light was reflected in many ways by that surface. Sound came to Saturn from the Mights and then went out again into space as a manifold echo; finally the aroma of the Dominions radiated to the Saturn surface, which reflected it in many changed ways. The soul life of that spirit on Saturn consisted in the perception of all those reflections.

We can call that spirit the actual spirit of the planet Saturn. For only one of its kind existed, just as in a human being on Earth there may be a rich variety of parts, senses and so on but only one self-awareness. The whole of Saturn was the body of that planetary spirit.

Saturn evolution proceeded in seven cycles in which soul life unfolded. In each of the seven cycles the planet went through the seven forms from formlessness to creative ability.

In the first cycle the Thrones were the soul element that gave direction, in the second cycle the Dominions, in the third the Mights, in the fourth the Powers and in the fifth the planetary spirit of Saturn itself. This did not have full clear consciousness from the beginning of Saturn evolution but only gained it in the fourth cycle. It was also only then that it was actually able to experience events on the planet as a soul. During the fifth cycle it was then able to be active as soul itself. During that cycle the Archangels developed into an inner life of the soul, the contents of which were taken from Saturn events. They were able to do so by using the human bodies which had by that time developed into appropriate instruments for them. This then enabled them to guide events as independently active souls in the sixth cycle. The same was then the case for the Angels in the seventh cycle.

In the fifth cycle the planetary Saturn spirit would have been unable to be active as soul in the way described if it had remained within the Saturn body. The consistency of that body would not permit this. The Saturn spirit therefore had to leave the Saturn body and act on it from the outside. A separation of Saturn into two cosmic bodies thus occurred in this cycle, though one of them, the one which had gone out, must be called Saturn soul. It was, as it were, a prophetic foretelling of the next planetary embodiment—the Sun. In its fifth, sixth and seventh cycles, Saturn was thus orbited by a kind of Sun, just as Earth is today by its Moon.

Something similar had to happen for the Archangels in the sixth cycle. They left the Saturn mass and orbited it as a new planet, known as Jupiter in occult science. In the seventh cycle something similar happened for the Angels. They withdrew their mass from that of Saturn and orbited it as an independent planet. This is called Mars in occult science.

Similar processes had already occurred during preceding Saturn cycles. In the third cycle the Powers guided soul development. In the fourth, they left the planet and orbited it as a bright, independent planet which is called Mercury in occult science. In the third cycle the same situation occurred for the Powers, who became independent as a planet called Venus. In Sun evolution, the human body which had been automatic came alive in itself. This happened because the light which previously shone on to Saturn from the luminous spirits in the periphery was now being taken up into the constituents of the Sun body itself. The Sun became a luminous planet. The perfected human bodies were developing luminous life. Sound now came in from the surroundings and the cosmic aroma was flowing from the spirits connected with aroma.

A transformation had come for the spirit of the planet Saturn. It had multiplied. One had become seven. Just as a seed is one, and there are many seeds in the ear of corn that grows from it, so did seven scions come from the one spirit of the planet Saturn during the transition to the Sun level. And its life also changed. It developed the ability to gain perceptions of a region that was one level lower. This became possible because a number of human bodies had remained behind in their development, staying at the Saturn level. This made them unable to receive the luminous life of the Sun. They became dark spots within the radiant Sun planet. The seven Sun spirits which had evolved from the spirit of the planet Saturn perceived them as a world of nature which was below them. Thus the seven spirits lived on the Sun’s surface; beneath them they beheld a world with entities which had bodies, only these were one level lower than the human bodies on Sun. The latter, however, gave them the nourishment they needed through the light they radiated. Where the Saturn bodies had only been reflecting the Saturn spirit’s own essential nature back to it, the Sun bodies held the position relative to the Sun spirits which today the Sun with its light holds for the plant world. With regard to bodily organization the human being was at the level of plant nature during Sun evolution. It would not be right to say that he actually went through the plant stage himself at that time. For the kind of plant world we have today could only develop under the specific conditions which we have on Earth. To use an analogy we may think of the Sun human body as a plant form which was turning organs towards its own planet that were similar to those which plants today develop as their flower. And just as today’s plant receives its light from an outside sun, so did the human Sun plant receive its light from its own planet, which, of course, was Sun. Today a plant puts its root down into the soil; on the Sun body this aspect was turned towards the sounds and odours that were coming in; the human being took these in and processed them inwardly. We might call today’s plant a human body which has remained at the Sun level and turned round completely. It is therefore chastely extending its organs of growth and reproduction upwards to the Sun, whilst the human being today hides them and lets them face downwards.

The human body only developed fully in this way during the fourth Sun cycle. The three preceding cycles had been preparatory. The first cycle was really only a recapitulation of Saturn existence. Its seven form levels were seven recapitulations of the levels of life on Saturn. It was only during the second Sun cycle that life flashed up in the human body. This life was not yet so fully developed that the Archangels which on Sun took the place which the planetary spirit had held on Saturn, were able to take satisfaction in it. It was rather the Powers which now sucked the energy which can flow from this life; during the third cycle the seven spirits developed from the Saturn spirit took that place; and during the fourth Sun cycle the Archangels lived in the life of the Earth bodies the way the planetary spirit had been mirrored in the bodies on Saturn. During the fifth Sun cycle the Archangels rose to a higher level of existence, and the Angels took their place on the planet. During the sixth Sun cycle the Angels, too, had developed to a level where they no longer needed the physical parts of the human body; all they still used for their own purposes was the light streaming out and in, and in this they then lived. The human physical body had become an independent entity, a model for the present-day human physical body. It behaved entirely like a physical apparatus at this level; except that it was an apparatus the parts of which were living. It was, as it were, a living instrument for the senses, though it did not take their perceptions into itself, not having the necessary degree of consciousness for this. The body was in a plant-like sleep, as it were, and that was its highest level of consciousness. Any sensory perceptions composed in it went into the consciousness of the Angels, Archangels and so on, depending on the sequence of the different Sun cycles. Those higher spirits were keeping watch over the sleeping human body.

What were the causes, the influences under which Sun evolved from Saturn? We perceive them if we take a look at the final states in Saturn evolution. Let us assume the seventh cycle had reached the fourth form level, which would be the physical one. The human body had developed so far that it was able to serve the Angels as the sense organs which mirror their essential nature for them. These have a kind of human consciousness at this level, though only by using the senses of the human body. They successively developed the higher levels of conscious awareness. The moment the Angels, too, developed to such higher forms of conscious awareness they could no longer use the human body. They therefore left it. It had to die. This meant, however, that that physical Saturn body disintegrated before the physiognomic form of the seventh cycle developed. This physiognomic level was therefore not the least bit physical any more. The planet existed only as a soul planet then. The physical form went down into the abyss. In the soul planet the Angels lived in an image consciousness that was beyond the physical. And the higher spirits were working on it with correspondingly higher forms of consciousness. At the point in time where the Angels, too, had grown beyond image consciousness, the soul planet also had to disintegrate. Its place was taken by another, where the configuring form was developed. It only floated in the world in which an earthly initiate is when he has entered into higher consciousness connected with sound. For the same reasons another planet evolved from this one at the end of the seventh Saturn cycle and this belonged to a yet higher world. The creative form of existence had been brought to realization in this.

It has been shown that as the higher spirits rose to corresponding forms of conscious awareness, satellites of Saturn always separated off and these had to float in higher worlds, for the main form of Saturn was unable to accommodate such forms of conscious awareness. Then, however, Saturn itself rose to such higher worlds. The consequence was that each time it arrived in such a higher world it would unite with whichever satellite was in that world. By the end of the seventh Saturn cycle, Jupiter, Mars, Venus, Mercury and Sun had therefore reunited with Saturn. All was one world again.

In that one world, the creative form of Saturn’s vital energy existed. Through it, the world, which had become spiritual in the way shown, was taken down again to the lower levels of existence. This was what happened as the Sun evolved. In the course of its cycles the planets that had originally developed on Saturn emerged again. Each was now, however, closer by one degree to physical existence.

If a human observer gifted with senses in their present form were able to follow the evolution of the planet I have described, he would see the cosmic body emerge from the darkness at certain times, disappearing again from the sight of such an observer for long intervals. During these, it would only be perceptible to an observer whose consciousness was able to be present in higher worlds. Distinction is thus made between twilight or night-time states of planetary existence in physical terms. Do not think, however, that the planet and its spirits grow inactive during those intervals. It merely falls into higher worlds then and thus comes to expression in an existence which is much more real than mere physical existence.

When Sun had completed its seven cycles, a time came when the human body had developed so far that it was not only able to receive the incoming light into itself and be enlivened by it, but gained the ability to let the world of sound created from the Mights continue to influence it and also to reproduce it in sounds. At this level of existence, which is called Moon evolution, the human body itself produced sounds. At the Saturn level, a sound reflected to the surrounding world by the planet was merely an echo of its surroundings; now the sound had changed as it went out into those surroundings. It had changed to such effect that it reflected in a wide variety of ways what was happening in human bodies. These human bodies had thus made the sentient body fully part of their essential nature as a third body. For it was their inner nature, their world of feelings, which was expressed in sound.

The seven spirits which had evolved out of the Saturn spirit during Sun evolution had now become seven times seven. The world surrounding them had become such that they had living experience of their own world of feeling in the sentient bodies which had developed. They then felt themselves surrounded by two worlds which were at a lower level and one which was above them. The world above them made itself felt as cosmic aroma coming from cosmic space; they experienced themselves as entities giving sound, and the two realms which were at a lower level had arisen because a region of human bodies had remained at the Saturn level and another at the Sun level. These Moon spirits were thus surrounded by entities that were like automatons and were continuing their Saturn maturation on Moon under conditions which were very different from those which existed on Saturn, and also by plant-like Sun bodies which were in a similar position.

Three kinds of entities were thus present in the actual Moon mass. The entities which were like automatons, dark in themselves, had still retained the ability from Saturn to let life shine out around them. They were not lifeless the way today’s minerals are. There was no mineral basis on Moon like the one we have on Earth. Instead there was a basis consisting of those entities. You can get an idea of them if you think of them endowed with a life that is present in every part of them, so that the mineral soil of our fields would have been a living, porridge-like mass on Moon; woody parts in this mass were like the rock masses found in softer mineral matter here on Earth. In this living basis, the parts of which may be called vegetable minerals, the Sun entities I have characterized who were at a level between present-day animals and present-day plants, had taken root. The freely moving entities dwelling on Moon were the human bodies, developmentally halfway between animal and human. They provided dwelling places for the scions of the planetary spirit of Saturn. This spirit would not have been able, however, to develop waking daytime consciousness in them. The entities always had to go out of the body to live in such a consciousness. When in the body and therefore sharing its life, they only had a consciousness filled with dream images. In this state of consciousness they would not see anything of their physical surroundings, but they let their inner experiences go out into the surrounding world in sound. The passions and desires of the Moon entities were then coming alive as sound during their sleep.

To consider just one example of this living experience, it should be noted that what we call our love life today, which is the basis of procreation, happened during dream-filled sleep on Moon. Waking daytime life was free from desire and, it has to be said, also loveless, given wholly to vision of the surrounding world. The human ancestor on Moon knew nothing of sexual relationships as yet in his daytime life. The place of the feelings people have in sexual love today was taken by dream images which only showed today’s factual reality in allegorical form.

On Moon, therefore, it was not the human ancestor who lived in the world of images when awake but the spirits who came immediately above human beings—the Angels. The dream world of the human being was clear daytime reality to them, as it were. They watched over the dreaming human world just as the Archangels had been watching over the Sun world when it was in plant-like sleep.

The first two Moon cycles were recapitulations of the preceding states of evolution. The seven forms of the first cycle recapitulated the seven Saturn cycles, and the seven forms of the second the seven Sun cycles.

During the third Moon cycle the human body had developed so far that the spirits which were at the Archangel level were able to experience its dream images as their environment; in the fourth cycle this was then the case for the Angels. The scions of the spirit of the planet Saturn were able to use the human body during this cycle to such a degree that enveloping it from outside they were able to use it to gain clear daytime consciousness. By the fifth cycle these spirits had risen to a level where they no longer had need of the physical human body; this then perceived its environs for itself but only reached a lower level of consciousness for these perceptions. Those spirits only had need of the ether body and the sentient body during this time. In the sixth cycle they also left the ether body to itself and in the seventh the sentient body.

The Moon was a re-embodiment of the Sun planet. At the time when the stage of Sun evolution was recapitulated on Moon, that is, in the second cycle, the Sun body separated from the Moon mass. This separate Sun body was inhabited by the spirits which had assumed a level of consciousness and of life, the conditions for which could not be found on the Moon itself. During the second cycle these spirits were the Powers; they had shared the life of the physical human body during Sun life. Now, on Moon, this Sun level had a limited, retarded existence in the above-mentioned animal-plants. The Powers could not live in them. Instead they gave those animal-plants life from outside by sending the light they needed to them from the Sun. During the third Moon cycle the scions of the Spirit of the planet Saturn had also reached a level where they could no longer exist on Moon. The Archangels therefore left the Moon in the fourth cycle, and in this space of time this was also the dwelling place of the Angels, as the Earth was later to be in its fourth cycle for human beings.

The other planets had emerged step by step during Sun evolution and did the same now during Moon evolution. Only they were closer to physical existence by another level now, when the Moon was at the height of its evolution, that is from the physical form of its fourth cycle onwards. With the fifth cycle, Mars, then inhabited by the Angels, reached a subtle, etheric and physical form; with the sixth cycle this happened for Jupiter, dwelling place of the Archangels. Finally in the seventh Moon cycle the same also happened for Mercury. Mars and Jupiter had grown even denser by then, the density of the former being such that it became possible to develop heat by moving its constituents and letting it flow out into cosmic space.

Earth evolution received the fruits that had ripened on Moon. The human body had by then gone through three levels of evolution. At the first it was able to be like a physical instrument that served as an organ of perception for spirits which had advanced so far at Sun level that they could dispense with any such apparatus. They were spirits already able to dedicate their work as creators to the Sun planet from outside. The spirits of the planet Saturn had had their bodily organization not in the Sun planet but in the creative powers that maintained Sun life.

On Moon, the Archangels had become the creative powers. The Angels of the Moon, which had clear daytime consciousness at the time, were able to look up to their creators and admire their bodily organization.

These three levels of planetary evolution were first of all recapitulated in the first three Earth cycles. This was to prepare the human body so that it could gain living experience in itself of the images which had evolved during Moon consciousness. It had to grow able to have not only a life and an image body in itself but also to reflect the surrounding world inwardly in its images. On the Moon it had come so far that the Angels were able to behold its images. The human Moon body was the world surrounding the Angels. And they had also advanced themselves in beholding the Moon human being; they had won through to a point where they were able to do at a higher level what they had been perceiving on the Moon. Apart from the two worlds which were below them, they also had spirits who were their equal around them. When Moon evolution had come to an end, they were able to impress the nature of those spirits into the human body. Earthly human beings were then able to see in their physical environment, whilst they dwelt in their bodies, what the Angels had only been able to behold on Moon when they rose to a higher world—those of their own kind.

The human body could only be guided upwards to this ability in stages. And this happened during the three Earth cycles. In the first, the human being was able to perceive himself as he had been on Saturn, in the second as on Sun, in the third as on Moon. During the first Earth cycle other human beings were nothing but walking automatons to him; during the second they appeared as plant-like entities; during the third they had animal character.

When the fourth cycle began, the human being was able to perceive the creations of the Angels, of his own kind, around himself. The Angels were three levels of consciousness above him. They were able to create what he perceived.

The human body now had four parts—the physical [body] which became a mirror for the surrounding world, the living [body] which was able to transform things perceived in the surrounding world into inner movement, the image body which was able to transform the inner movements and give them the character of allegories, and finally the body which became the bearer of clear daytime consciousness. This harmonized the inner images with the impressions gained of the surrounding world and thus made the connection between inner experience and the events outside.

Clear daytime consciousness was, however, limited to the physical outside world; vital processes and the images of the image body were inwardly enlivened but not perceived as outside world. The human image body remained the object of the Angels, at the next higher level, and the human life body actually that of the Archangels. All things connected with the human life body, the laws governing its growth and reproduction, were thus hidden from the human being; with regard to them his conscious awareness was at the level of dreamless sleep. For the Archangels, on the other hand, these processes were objects in their outside world on which they acted, which was like the situation a human being faces with regard to working on a physical machine. Everything connected with image consciousness, the laws which are more of a mystery to the human being, giving a particular character and mien to his countenance, specific form to his walk, and so on; everything which came to expression in his character, temperament and so on, was thus governed by the Angels. Only the things he brought about in his outer environment were subject to his own laws.

The human being developed into an entity which we may characterize like this in the fourth Earth cycle.

The Angels, having developed to creative consciousness at the Moon level, were no longer able to find a place for themselves on Earth when the image body began to belong to the human being himself, that is, from the time when the second cycle had passed its midpoint. They then withdrew to a higher community with new conditions of life; the Sun again separated from the Earth and from then on sent its powers to it from the outside.

In the third Earth cycle, the human bodies which had not reached the point in the second cycle where they could have their image body cared for by the powers gathered on the Sun had to fall into a lower form of existence. They went down from the animal and human to the purely animal level. Where could they now find the powers needed for their image body? They were not open to the Sun powers of the perfected Angels. Entities do, however, lag behind in their development at every level. Up to the third cycle, Angels had fallen behind in their evolution which were then unable to find a place on the Sun. During the second half of the third Earth cycle they were not yet able to find the capacity to ascend to the Sun. Yet they also were not able to continue to influence the image bodies of human beings who were advancing in perfection. They therefore withdrew from the Earth mass to become our present-day Moon. This is therefore a cosmic body representing an earlier part of Earth evolution in something of a hardened state. It is the dwelling place of spirits who did not want to be creators of the perfect human body. We find them active in the image bodies of animals; yet they do all the time also direct their attacks against the image body of the human being—though this is a region that has grown beyond them. As soon as the human being deviates just a little from being dedicated to his higher nature, which comes to him through impressions gained through the senses, as soon as he becomes subject to powers that influence his image body, those spirits will be able to influence him. Their activities are evident in dissolute dreams which reflect the animal desires that come from lower human nature.

When the third Earth cycle had passed its midpoint, the Earth having grown physical for the third time, conditions did not exist for a form of the physical human body that was able to take in perceptions from the outside. The physical died off. The result is that the laggard Angels’ sin of omission was no longer felt to be so painful by the entities that had ascended into Sun existence. The Moon was therefore incorporated into the Earth’s body again. When the whole Earth had gone beyond image existence and into a higher world as the cycle continued, it also united with the Sun again. The powers in the human body which in the third cycle were only able to see the image-enlivened body in the surrounding world then gained creative ability. This enabled them to enter into the fourth cycle. There they were initially still in the world which is only perceptible to spiritual awareness, but were descending to progressively lower worlds in stages. Finally the human body had developed so far that it was able to develop organs for the perception of others of his own kind; these had a subtle etheric form. The physical body thus gained the abilities for its earthly form. This was also the time when Earth could no longer be the arena for the perfected Angels; the Sun separated from the Earth with them and shone on it from outside. The physical body continued to develop. The images of the image body developed a liveliness they did not have before; the organs of the physical body provided nourishment for them in the reflected images of external objects. The time had come when the outer Earth environment was taking these images away from the Angels that had lagged behind. These then had to draw the part of the Earth that would be their dwelling place out of the Earth. The Moon once more separated from the Earth, orbiting it as a satellite.

How far had the human body come by this time? It had developed its fourfold nature. Its organization was such that it could support an ether or life body and give a home to an image body. Its sense organs also allowed the earthly surroundings to be reflected in those images. The human physical body had therefore reached a completely new level. It reflected inwards, just as on Saturn it reflected the essential nature of the Spirit of the planet Saturn to the outside. Because of this, the part of that spirit which was then its lowest principle was now able to live in it. This principle had become tied off from the spirit of the planet Saturn; it had lost the ability to receive the revelations of the upper realms and becomes the vehicle for human self awareness. The human being learned to see himself as an ‘I’. From now on he had the nature in which the planetary spirit on Saturn had revealed like an outer environment of the planet.

The human being had thus reached a level where the Archangels revealed themselves in his ether body, the Angels in his image body, and the planetary Saturn spirit in his self awareness. He was then able to advance to the level where the Saturn spirit in him would be able to relate to the image body in a way similar to the way the Saturn spirit itself did when it gradually grew out of its own planetary existence and became an inhabitant of Jupiter. The human being continued to inhabit the Earth, however, and because of this such powers could only influence him from outside. It means that the Earth came into the sphere of influence of Jupiter powers. A similar process occurred at a later level with regard to spirits which were then at a level where they only influenced the ether body from outside, from Mars.

When Sun, Earth and Moon were still one body, the human body was made of a material on that planet which was like air. Apart from human bodies, only the descendants of the human-animals from Moon were present in bodies which were in a fluid state. The descendants of the Moon creatures which had lived there as plant-minerals had reached the solid state. Apart from the liquid human-animals, there were also animal plant-like creatures [at that time] which had evolved from the lunar plant-animals. Yet whilst the former were more watery in appearance, the animal-plant-like creatures consisted of a dense porridge-like mass which when it grew more substantial came close to the material of which mushrooms are made today.

When the Sun withdrew its substance from the Earth, so that the latter had only the Moon mass in it, all conditions changed on the planet. The material of which human bodies were made condensed to become a liquid form of matter which may be compared to our blood today. Creatures which before had been liquid became solid, and the solid plant-minerals had a very dense consistency. Before the Sun separated, the life of the human body consisted essentially in a kind of breathing, taking in and giving off air-like matter. After the separation a form of nutrition evolved out of the liquid surroundings. And reproduction was also connected with this nutrition. The viscid human body was impregnated out of the reproductive material in its surroundings and divided under the influence of that impregnation. Whilst the Moon substance was still within the Earth, the development of the body was such that semi-solid parts developed in the liquid mass, gaining cartilage-like density. It was not yet able to develop solid, bone-like limb inclusions, for the Earth mass was not suitable for this for as long as it still had the Moon in it. It was only when the Moon departed, with the most substantial form of matter removed, that the beginnings of solid skeletal structures developed in the human being.

This was also the time when it became no longer possible to take impregnation material from the surroundings. With the departure of the Moon mass, Earth substances had also lost the ability to impregnate the human body. In the time that had gone before, the human body did not have two genders. The human being was female by nature, with the male principle present in its earthly surroundings. The whole Moon Earth was male in character. When the Moon departed, some of the human bodies changed into bodies of male character. They thus took the impregnating powers into themselves which before had been present in the sap of Earth itself, as it were. The female nature of the human body underwent a transformation which made it possible for the male, which had now arisen, to impregnate it.

All this happened because a form of double-sexed human body changed to become single-sexed. The earlier human body had impregnated itself with substances it took in. Now the one kind of human body, the female one, only had power to let the impregnated principle ripen. The way this happened was that the male power in this body lost the ability to prepare impregnating substances. This power remained only for the ether or life body, which had to effect the ripening process. The male kind of human body lost the potential of doing something with the impregnating material inside itself. Its female principle was limited to the ether body. This is why in present-day human beings the situation is such that in males the ether body is female, whilst in females it is male.¹⁰ A solid bony skeleton developed at the same time.

Another important process came first, however. When the human body changed from airy to liquid consistency, the first beginnings of an organ started to develop which would take in airy matter. This was the beginning of respiration as a separate process. At the time, substances which would later separate out from the general mass and be liquid and solid were still airy, they were part of the air. And when the liquid form of matter began to develop, the human body was not living on solid ground but in a fluid element. Its locomotion was a swimming kind of floating. And the air which was above the fluid element was much denser then. It contained not only everything which later came to be water, but many other substances were dissolved in it. The whole human breathing apparatus was therefore also different.

Before the Sun departed, the function of the whole breathing process was still different. It was to receive and give off heat from and into the environment. We may say that the warmth which human beings still prepare in themselves with their blood circulation was at that time inhaled and exhaled from and into the environment. Once the Sun had departed the process changed so that air will only produce warmth through its activity in the body after it has been inhaled. By breathing air the way it does today, the human body came to generate warmth internally.

This major change in the human body was connected with a cosmic event which in occult terms is called the withdrawal of Mars from the Earth. Mars is the planet which before that withdrawal had with the powers inherent in it brought about the process in the human body that was later taken over by the blood circulation. With the blood taking over the Mars activity in this way, the spirits concerned were able to go outside the Earth, and the influence of Mars on the human being was then such that it influenced him from outside. The way it happened physically was that iron became an important constituent of the blood; iron is the form of matter on which Mars powers have a specific influence. Respiration as it is today thus has to do with the withdrawal of Mars. All this gave the human being something which we may call the inner power of the blood. Ensoulment had become possible. The human being did indeed breathe in his soul when he breathed air.

For as long as Earth was connected with Sun, it was the Sun’s power which regulated the other influences in the human body. In the Sun’s power lay the principle which acted as male and at the same time female principle in the human body. Under its influence, law and order also came into the Mars process of taking in and giving off of heat. When the Sun had departed some human bodies changed and became infertile. These were the precursors of future male bodies. For as long as Moon powers were still connected with the Earth, the rest were still capable of self-fertilization. They lost this when the Moon departed. From then on the Sun took effect, with the spirits that dwelt on it influencing the capacity for reproduction. The male’s ether body came under the influence of these Sun spirits. The female’s ether body, being male, retained its relationship to the spirits who had made the Moon their arena. The female physical body was correspondingly under the influence of the Sun powers. It had developed the form it now had when the Sun was already shining on the Earth from outside. The male physical body on the other hand came under the Moon influence because under the influence of that planet when it was still united with the Earth it had assumed a form which with regard to reproduction was infertile. While all this was going on, the senses also developed, bringing the sentient body’s image world under the influence of the earthly environment and thus the human being under the influence of the scions of the planetary body of Saturn. The pulsating power of the blood also evolved in the body, this led to ensoulment and made it possible, with sensory perceptions available, to develop an inner life and sympathy and antipathy towards the surrounding world.

The human being had reached this level when the Earth emerged as an independent physical planet in its fourth cycle, having separated from sun, moon and mars.

By that time human beings had achieved the division into two sexes. They looked into the surrounding world through the senses. They knew sympathy and antipathy with regard to their surroundings. And by distinguishing themselves from those surroundings they were endowed with the beginnings of self awareness. The human body had become fourfold. And inwardness of soul had arisen in the fourth principle of that body through the blood, for this allowed mars powers to come in.

Human beings had thus developed everything they were able to have as the fruits of the first three levels of planetary evolution. A fourth principle had arisen in their bodies because other influences, which could not play a role in its development, had withdrawn from the Earth.

In occult terms this humanity is called the third main race on Earth.¹¹ We can really only speak of races developing from this time onwards. For it was only then that human reproduction existed and hence also differences within humanity brought about by human beings influencing one another. The principle we may call heredity or blood relationship developed. The Earth as the fourth planetary form of evolution did not yet have an influence. Perceptions of the surrounding world had first taken hold of the images in the sentient body. The ether body was not yet under the influence of the earthly surroundings. The fourth planet did not yet influence hereditary conditions. Only the first three did so. This is why the race where this was the case is called the ‘third’.

It was followed by the fourth, and here the earthly environment began to influence the ether body itself. This could only happen if spirits were able to influence the human being whose evolution was at a level where they did not have the creative ability to influence the ether body to the effect of impregnating it, yet had nevertheless gone beyond merely receiving impressions from the perception of the physical surroundings. These were spirits who had not advanced to creative ability on the Moon, that is, during the Earth’s previous embodiment, which would have enabled them to populate the Sun; yet they had gone beyond the level where inner life depended wholly on the images of the human body. Within Earth evolution they do have the ability to perceive things through the human being’s senses, but not the ability to create those senses. There these spirits can ... the human being ... [manuscript ends here]

• 1. This was not included in the fragment. Instead, a series of essays on ‘How to Know Higher Worlds’ (published in book form in 1909) began to appear in Lucifer Gnosis in June 1904; the inner training is also described in Occult Science.
• 2. Those other chapters were never written.
• 3. Conscious awareness - life - form. These three basic principles, each in 7 stages or metamorphoses, were mentioned here for the first time. See also Cosmic Memory. Atlantis and Lemuria (GA 11), and lectures and lecture courses in the years that followed, up to 1907/08. In a lecture given in Dornach on 27 August 1915, Rudolf Steiner referred to them as follows: ‘Very early on, I drew attention to the fact that to gain an overview of world evolution one must above all consider seven states of conscious awareness—I listed them at the time—as well as seven states of life and seven states of form. There are questions relating to life which can be answered by merely considering changes in form; there are questions we can answer by considering just the metamorphosis of life; but some phenomena, certain facts of life, cannot be answered except by rising to a point where one considers the different states of conscious awareness which apply’ [see Chance, Providence and Necessity, tr. M. Spock; New York: Anthroposophic Press 1988]. See also the lectures given at the end of December 1918, in which the principles of conscious awareness - life - form as shown as stages of initiation. Rudolf Steiner also referred to the way in which the attempt was made to show this in the forms of the First Goetheanum [How Can Mankind Find the Christ Again? tr. 0. D. Wannamaker, F. E. Dawson, G. Hahn; New York: Anthroposophic Press 1984],
• 4. These terms are taken from Rosicrucian occultism. See lecture given in Munich on 20 May 1907 in Bilder okkulter Siegel und Saeulen. Der Muenchner Kongress Pfingsten 1907 und seine Auswirkungen (English in Anthroposophical News Sheet 1948; 16:19-22). In the Theosophical Society people spoke only of seven spheres, rounds and globes. See also Note 18.
• 5. See Special Note (follows), also lecture given in Berlin on 28 January 1907 (in GA 96; The Lord’s Prayer, tr. A. M. W., rev. M. Cotterel; Anthroposophical Publishing Co. 1958).
• 6. See chapter on the physical world and its connection with soul land and spirit land in Theosophy, also lecture given in Berlin on 11 November 1903 (in German) in Über die astrale Welt und das Devachan (GA 88) and lecture given in Munich on 4 December 1907 (GA 98; Engl.: The Elemental Kingdoms publ. in Anthroposophical News Sheet 1946; 4: 13-16).
• 7. The image of the mirror (see also lecture given in Cologne on 29 December 1907, publ. in German in GA 101) is one of the most important symbols of the spiritual world. It is used many times in the whole of Rudolf Steiner’s works.
• 8. The terms go back to Dionysius the Areopagite (1st century AD) who is mentioned as a disciple of Paul in Acts 17: 34. Treatises On the Heavenly and Ecclesiastical Hierarchies appeared in Syria in his name in the 5th century; John Scotus
• 9. Middle English cherubin and seraphin later became cherubim and seraphim. The early plural in -ins later became -im (= Hebrew plural). Cherub and in analogy to it seraph, was introduced by Wyclif. Rudolf Steiner used different spellings, often side by side.
• 10. See Steiner’s autobiography (GA 28), chapter 37.
• 11. The Lemurian age. Concerning the term ‘race’, Rudolf Steiner wrote in essays published in 1904 - 1908 (in GA 11, see Cosmic Memory. Atlantis and Lemuria; Tr. K. E. Zimmer; New York: Rudolf Steiner publications 1971), chapter on the life of the earth: ‘We have to be utterly clear about it that the evolutional forms of the far distant past and those of the future are completely different from those of the present time, so much so that the terms we use at present may only serve as emergency solution and really lose all meaning when it comes to those distant ages. Basically we can only begin to speak of ‘races’ when evolution had more or less reached its second third in the third main state (Lemurian). Only then did the principle we call ‘race’ today begin to develop. ... Yet very soon now, at the end of our fifth age, the word ‘race’ will lose all meaning again. Humanity will in future be differentiated into groupings we will no longer be able to call ‘races’. The usual theosophical literature has caused a great deal of confusion in this respect.’ See also lecture given in Berlin on 9 November 1905 (in German) in Die Weltraetsel und die Anthroposophie (GA 54).

The Earth is the fourth of the seven planets on which the human being develops his seven states of conscious awareness, one after the other. The Moon has been shown to be the arena for the unfolding of image awareness.¹²An ‘image’ is merely similar to and not the same as the object. The level of conscious awareness which is being developed on Earth produces ideas, however, which in some respect are ‘the same’ as the object to which they relate. This is why the Earth level of conscious awareness is also called ‘awareness of objects’. This only develops during the fourth lesser cycle (round) on Earth. The conditions previously gone through on Saturn, Sun and Moon are briefly recapitulated in the first three cycles. Once again it has to be said, however, that this is not a matter of mere recapitulation, for in the course of it the physical body, ether and astral body are transformed so that they may be vehicles for the ‘I’, since awareness of objects in the fourth round depends on the development of the I.

When a kind of sleeping state has followed the third recapitulation found on Earth—between the ‘archetypal’ and ‘arupa’ globes—and the fourth round begins, everything—initially arupic—emerges which may be considered to be the outcome of Saturn, Sun and Moon evolution. In this case, therefore, we have the descendants of the three Moon worlds—a mineral world which in a sense was still plant-like, a plant world which had something by way of animal life, and an animal world which was at a higher level than our present animal world. These three realms together made up the planet which followed re-emerged from the twilight state—the Earth. It has to be remembered, however, that this Earth still held the former Sun and the former Moon in it. When the Moon manvantara was coming to an end, Sun and Moon united again, entering into pralaya as one body. They then also emerged again as one body, though the tendency to separate had already been clearly apparent in the third Earth round. Now—in the fourth round—Earth went through the rupa and astral state, after which it entered into the process of becoming physical again.

The development of this physical condition for the three above-mentioned worlds was the responsibility of the Spirits of Form. Especially in the highest of them, the animal-human world, they transformed the earlier ‘seeds of senses’ into truly formed-out sense organs. In all earlier physical states which humanity had gone through, the sense organs did not yet have a firmly established form.

Having gained a definite form, these organs ceased to be active; they lost their productivity, becoming purely passive, suitable only for perceiving anything by way of objects presented from the outside. Productive power thus withdrew from the sense organs; it went more to the inside; it created the organ for the mind. - This organ could not be created, however, unless part of human nature was cast down to a lower level. Man himself cast part of his essential nature down into an inferior region. He separated off part of himself, making it his lower nature. This lower nature retained the productive power which the sense organs had to yield up. This productive power cast down into a lower sphere became the power of sexual reproduction as we have it on Earth. The Spirits of Form would have frozen all productive power and therefore all life, letting it harden into mere form, if they had not concentrated this power on a part of the essential human being. They therefore brought about gender division. Without this there would have been statues rather than living human beings.¹³

The whole of this process went hand in hand with a complete transformation of the Earth. Conditions arose in which the life forms which have been described were able to live. This became possible by the Earth—still united with the Moon at that point—separated off from what remained behind as sun. As a result, the sun became an independent body in relation to earth. This was the external physical condition for sensory perception to arise, conscious awareness of objects, and for the potential for sexual organs to develop. At the time, however, bisexuality still pertained. This was because the moon powers were still within the earth. The organ for the mind did exist by this time, but it was still quite inactive. It would only unfold activity once the sexually productive power had decreased by half, so that every individual would only have half the earlier productive power. This meant two sexes. Externally this was brought about by the powers departing from the earth which would then orbit it as our present moon. If the separation had not happened, the whole earth would have to turn into a rigid mass, into mere form. As it was, the principle which absolutely had to grow rigid had departed, becoming moon, where human life was not able to unfold. Earth thus saved for itself from the common planetary matter the principle which could be productive, even if only in the lower sphere of sexual life. Jehovah was the representative of the ‘spirits of form’. He therefore brought about the development of the sense organs; if he had been active on his own, he would also have made everything be completely frozen in rigid form.

Two events were significant in what followed. One was the development of two sexes, for the above reason. The form of the sexual principle came from the form spirits. But this does not include the feeling which one sex has for the other. This arose because specific spirits descended from a distant arena, from Venus, to be embodied in the two sexes. Through them, love in its lowest form, the attraction between the sexes, came to be embodied on earth. This love is meant to rise to higher and higher levels, later to assume the most sublime forms.

Just as the Venus spirits provided the element [of feelings for] the separate sexes, so they also made it possible for the mind to be fruitful. It received the half of the productive powers which had not gone into sexual powers. The monads which, as I have shown arose in Saturn, Sun and Moon cycle were able to descend down into the mind organ—initially their manas part. Their activities would have been cold and dry, however, if the astral body had not been influenced to the effect that human beings felt a certain passion, of a higher kind, in using their minds. This influence came to them from Mars. Luciferic spirits conveyed it; they had gone beyond the level of what would later be human existence on Earth, but had not yet got so far that they could have completed their Moon evolution with the Moon manvantara, as the lunar pitris did. As initiates they brought the astral powers of Mars to the human astral body, igniting in it a passion for using the intellect. They thus brought life into the way humans gained insight; they fired them with independence. This is the help which the luciferic principle gives to human evolution. They did, however, add self-interest to the gaining of insight. For they ignite thinking through passion, and this means self-interest. Yet it was only because of this that human beings made the earth serve their purposes, put it to their use. Jehovah would only have given the form of the organ for the mind, and the Venus spirits would only have awakened a mind without passion in this; for anything they might have given in this direction had been given over to the power of reproduction.

• 12. Refers to the description of Moon evolution with a letter dated 19 November 1905 mentioned under Sources, Part I, at the beginning of this Notes and references section.
• 13. See lecture given in Berlin on 28 October (GA 93a) in Foundations of Esotericism; tr. V. & J. Compton-Burnett; London: Rudolf Steiner Press 1982.

Dear fellow students, esteemed audience! I would very much like to stick to the topic, and since we will be talking about threefolding afterwards, I would ask that any questions relating to threefolding be deferred to later. But I do believe that it is justified to say a few words about the threefold order here, because Dr. Unger himself, in his discussions, took the threefold order as the basis for his views on the creation of technology as a free art.

In a certain sense, it cannot be maintained – I also expressed this in my “Key Points of the Social Question”, and Dr. Unger probably meant it that way – that the idea of threefolding as such, that is, the threefolding of the social organism as an idea, as a concept, is a kind of new discovery in the strict sense of the word. Rather, there may be a kind of new discovery in the social laws to which I referred in the essays of 1905. The threefold social order is actually an old idea and has been mentioned many times before in this form. The essential thing about the way in which the threefold social order is presented here and how it appears in the present is not its actual character as an idea but the position it seeks to occupy in relation to the whole social organism. The idea of structuring the life of humanity as a whole into a spiritual part, a state-legal part and an economic part has had to come up again and again. And if, here and there, someone were to claim that this is something completely new as an idea, I believe that, as I am well aware, there are bound to be claims of primacy. That is why I pointed out in the “key points” that the way the idea of threefolding appears here is something quite different.

The idea of threefolding, as it is advocated by me, for example, is the result of decades of observation of the needs of contemporary humanity. If you look at the situation with open eyes in the present day, you had to recognize as early as the end of the 19th century that things were heading for a catastrophe. And in the spring of 1914, in a series of lectures that I gave in Vienna to a small circle (a larger one would probably have laughed at me at the time because of my remarks), I pointed out that in the near future the conditions of the civilized world (I did not just say “European conditions” at the time) were heading towards a decisive catastrophe. You see, that was at a time when disaster was already very close. Nevertheless, in the following weeks, people in positions of responsibility for the course of events spoke in the following way. A statesman with responsibility, to call outstanding - of course only in the sense of what our time so often calls “outstanding” - said, when it came to discussing the general world situation in a parliament: the relations between Central Europe and Russia were in the most favorable way imaginable; one could be convinced that peace would be consolidated more and more. He could see this from the friendly neighborly relations that existed, for example, between St. Petersburg and Berlin. — So it was in May 1914, spoken of by those in positions of responsibility, after it had been necessary, as it was by me, to point out with all energy beforehand that the circumstances were pushing towards a catastrophe, and simply because the three elements of human coexistence, the spiritual, the legal and the economic, had interacted in such a way in all of social life that the catastrophe in its depths can actually only be seen in the confusion of these three areas. One could see, especially if one had an eye for it, how the increasing intellectualism of modern times affected our entire public life, how the complete devotion of people to the intellectual element, as had developed in the usual scientific mind-set, which has permeated everything else as well – one could see how this devotion to the intellectual prepared everything for the catastrophe in a certain sense. That is where the deeper reasons lie, and anyone who does not yet see them there today cannot meaningfully participate in a discussion about constructive forces.

You see, back then you could experience something like this – I'm not saying this out of immodesty, but because it seems symptomatically significant to me as my own experience – in the summer of 1914, I gave a German lecture in Paris about the things I usually talk about and, for example, also talked about yesterday. This lecture was not given for a German colony there, but was translated word for word, so it was explicitly given for the French, not for German colonists living in Paris – they were not there either. So in May 1914, with what had flowed from German spiritual life in the strictest sense — for basically it is the case that everything that is asserted here as anthroposophy has flowed from German spiritual life — one could somehow make a certain impression with it all over the world. We were at that stage in the spiritual realm. But what worked against this was, again, the economic realm. And one only has to look through it carefully to see how this disharmonious working of the spiritual life with the economic life was the primal phenomenon of all the phenomena that were preparing in the 1880s and had reached their peak at the turn of the 19th to the 20th century. Of course, countless forces and currents converge there, so that it is impossible to summarize everything in a few words.

But if one wants to emphasize an important phenomenon, a fundamental phenomenon, it could be done in the way I once did in a lecture in Nuremberg in 1908. At the time, I pointed out how characteristic it is of modern social life that the personal has actually been increasingly eliminated, especially in what is called capitalism, in capitalism in general – without wanting to belittle capital in the economy , of course, you cannot conduct modern economic life without capital investments, that is, without capitalism. And the way that capitalism is often talked about today is nothing more than the purest layman or dilettante behavior. What it is about is that the capitalist essence, basically since the beginning of the 20th century, let's say – it was already prepared earlier – has become more and more impersonal and impersonal. I like to tell an anecdote here; anecdotes are sometimes indicative of what happened. When international economic life was still more dependent on personality, it once happened that the finance minister of the King of France also had to come to Rothschild in Paris because the king, for reasons you can easily imagine, had to turn to the banker. He came just at the time when Rothschild was dealing with a leather merchant. Now, capitalism leads to a certain instinctive socialism; one must realize that. Rothschild, who was very powerful and who asserted the personal element in everything he administered in a capitalist way, not the impersonal capitalist – Rothschild was therefore dealing with a leather merchant. The servant entered and announced the finance minister of the king. He should wait until I am finished, said Rothschild. The servant could not really understand this and the one who was waiting outside could not understand it at all. He thought there must be a misunderstanding. “Please say,” he sent the servant again, “the minister of the king of France is here.” Rothschild had him say again that yes, he would just have to wait. The minister did not understand this at all, he tore open the door and was inside. He said: I am the Minister of Finance of the King of France. - Fine, said Rothschild, I still have work to do, please take a chair and sit down. - Yes, but I am the Minister of the King of France! - Please take two chairs, - said Rothschild.

I tell this story so that you can see from this anecdote, too, that under capitalism something was indeed at work that lay in personal will and personal emotions. This personal element ceased to exist. What I have said is, of course, not a line of argument, just an illustration. The argument would have to be developed in a whole series of lectures. But just at the turn of the 19th to the 20th century, this personal element took a turn towards the purely factual. I would like to say: forces came into play through which the capital masses moved as if by themselves. Share capital came to the fore, as opposed to individual capital, and society took the place of the influence of the individual personality. This introduced an impersonal element, so that in modern economic life man was gradually harnessed as if into an impersonal element. And in place of personal initiative came what might be called routine. It was no longer possible to develop anything other than routine in economic life. Those who study economic history will find how these things are rooted in the development of modern economic life, and how they are the things that pushed towards the terrible world catastrophe. That was now there, and so one could believe, especially at that time, that the right time had come when people could understand from their practical lives that the interaction of these three areas must be sought in an appropriate way. And that is the essential thing about the threefold social organism: not the idea as such, but the way in which, in every detail, things are thought out of the concrete, out of direct life practice. There is something thoroughly anti-utopian in this impulse of threefolding, as it appears here, something that rejects every kind of utopia, that only wants to work out of the practical side of life.

This is what is so rarely seen and what is often not given due consideration, even by adherents of the so-called threefolding idea. It happens very often that the threefold order is discussed, even by its adherents, as if it were a utopia, as if it had not emerged from what all people actually want in their fields. One need only summarize the individual wills. Most of the time people are not consciously aware of what they want, but they do want it. The subconscious plays a much greater role in social life than one might think. That is why people have repeatedly said to me: Yes, what is written in the “Key Points”, which after all underlie the impulse for threefolding that is emerging today, that is what this or that society in this or that field also wants. Another came with a different area of specialization. “That is nothing new,” they said. — ‘All the better,’ I said. ”The less something is new, the better. The more it is rooted in what people already want, the better.” What matters is that a certain understanding should arise among the individual specialized fields. And here I do believe that Dr. Unger's lecture today could be of extraordinary importance because it was inspired by the thought that ultimately what the technician wants in his field cannot be solved as a special question without turning one's gaze to the whole of social life. It is therefore of little significance when people say that the specialized ideas have already been expressed or have appeared here or there in echoes, or when they say that everything has already occurred before. Let us assume the most extreme hypothesis. Let us assume that Dr. Unger had not said anything new, but that his ideas had been expressed for decades by the most diverse technical branches and societies for my sake. But I believe that one thing must be agreed, even if this hypothesis were correct: they have not been implemented, these ideas – surely no one will claim that. Some may claim that they have been nurtured, but no one can claim that they have been implemented. Today they are questions as they were decades ago. And that is because they were treated in a specialized way, so that the technician limited himself to his circle and dealt with all special technical questions from this point of view. But things cannot be solved that way today. We not only have a world economy, we also have a world consciousness, something that encompasses the whole world and that can only be dealt with as a world issue in the economic and technical fields. The reason why a solution could not be found is that the technician was, to a certain extent, isolated. The technician was even painfully aware of this isolation because, as a modern technician, he is the most modern aspect of the personality in modern life. It can be said of the most diverse other aspects of modern life: they have their roots here and there. The modern technician is what he has become through modern technology. He represents a class in the entire social order, and his particular profession gives rise to a social context that is itself a social issue. However, this can only be treated in the context of social life as a whole. Therefore, what Dr. Unger formulated with the words “Technology as a free art” will remain a utopia as long as the connection between the special wishes and ideas of technicians and universal social ideas is not found. The technician most of all needs to acquire a universal view of social needs, and this is because he has placed himself in modern life as something new. The farmer also needs this social perspective, inasmuch as agriculture itself is being spun by technology. But as a farmer, he is ancient. But the essence of the social question must emerge most significantly from that which has emerged as something completely new in modern social development. And that is perhaps what needs to be emphasized. I do not want to go into specific questions of threefolding, which arise when one is speaking about specific questions of the technicians. The essential point is that the questions of the technicians are treated as a chapter of the great general social questions. It is not a matter of assuming, for instance, that the anthroposophical side simply wants to draw the question of the technicians into the threefolding movement from the outside. The threefolding movement would be a mere slogan if that were the intention. But slogans are not at issue here. The point is that the movement, which could also call itself something else, aims to bring the three aspects of social life into the right relationship with one another. This is in contrast to intellectualism, which seeks to throw everything into one pot , even if it then takes out of that pot, for example, the Fourteen Points, which, insofar as they were Woodrow Wilson's Fourteen Points, truly leave nothing to be desired in terms of their intellectualism. The idea of threefold social order was first expressed by me, just when, at a terribly serious moment, the solution of the questions was once again sought not from the practice of life, but from minds, from intellectualism, with Wilson's fourteen points. Particularly abroad, one could see how these fourteen points, when they arose, addressed something pathological in humanity, and it was highly regrettable that at the most serious moment in the recent development of German history, in the fall of 1918, 1918, Central Europe even agreed to these Fourteen Points and could not see how, at the present moment, we are compelled to engage directly in practical life without any vague theories and to study things from that basis. The Fourteen Points were a utopia; further development has shown that. Humanity will have to convince itself that nothing can be achieved with such utopias, but that something can only be achieved if one engages realistically with what is there; if one is able to think out of what exists not only logically — that is easy today — but realistically.

Anthroposophy strives for this kind of thinking, which can only be grasped when, when we speak of the spirit, we do not do as that farmer did when he was shown a magnet: “Oh, nonsense, that's a horseshoe, I'll use it to shoe my horse.” That is more or less how someone who denies the spirit of this reality behaves. And there is no way around it: if someone wants to think in a realistic way, they must also address the spiritual. That is why anthroposophy is a spiritual science. And what it has in common with the deepest, most significant demands of our time is that it wants to be realistic, that it wants to be practical when it comes to practical matters, especially in the economic and technical spheres. And although everyone has or believes they have this or that different opinion – for example, that anthroposophy does not deal enough with God, which is a completely unfounded opinion, or that for some people it deals far too much with God, who are opponents from this point of view, and the same applies to the other things mentioned here, they are said from different points of view again — but everyone, even if they have different views on one or the other, if they are serious about realistically shaping our social conditions in some specialized area based on the universal thinking of the whole, will then also find points of contact with what asserts itself as the anthroposophical movement. For it does not want to be fanciful, but human. And it will be happy to join forces with anyone who understands the human element.

Dear attendees, dear fellow students! Anthroposophy can be a matter that the individual deals with in his or her own little room, so to speak, as something that touches the most intimate questions of the heart and soul, something from which one can gain the conviction that it is connected with what binds the individual, in that he experiences himself in his full individuality and personality, to the eternal, to the divine. I spoke more from this point of view yesterday. Today I would like to speak to you about the other point of view, from which anthroposophical spiritual science can be a matter of our present age. This age, which has thrown a huge number of questions to the surface from the depths of human development, and which now not only concern the individual in his quiet chamber, but which are a common, a, if one may say so, thoroughly social affair of the whole of humanity.

If we wish to examine anthroposophical striving from this point of view, then we must first give some points of view about what I would call “the signature of our time”, which particularly characterizes certain forces and currents, certain aspirations in our time. Naturally I shall not have the opportunity to characterize the details of our age, but I would like to present the main lines of those aspirations and currents, which are of course well known in the widest circles, although unfortunately their full weight is all too rarely appreciated. These lines show how the individual moves, so to speak, in our age, without particular consideration being given to the individual.

Perhaps some people found it strange, even paradoxical, when I said something yesterday that actually contradicts a great deal of what has emerged in recent human history where worldviews are intended to be shaped. I have uttered the sentence that man, when he grows up in the scientific consciousness, which has long since become the general consciousness of mankind and which has also been incorporated into certain religious views, acquires a concept of being, a feeling of the existence of himself, which he can no longer hold on to when he looks back on his own thinking in his self-reflection. I have said that man can arrive at the proposition, “I think, therefore I am not”, only through the consciousness of time — and by that I mean the consciousness of the last three to four centuries. Man cannot apply the concept of existence, which he needs to justify his scientific view of the world, to what he opens up in his thinking, especially in his intellectual life. And perhaps in the striving for a world view that began with Descartes and has infected almost all of the world view striving of modern times, one must see in the sentence “I think, therefore I am” more of a kind of rescue attempt, a search for some kind of fixed point within oneself. One must grasp the emergence of this sentence “I think, therefore I am” psychologically, one could say. And psychology could tell us: philosophers and those who follow them occupy themselves with this sentence, believe in this sentence, because it offers them a certain illusory help against sinking into non-being, [which overtakes one] when one looks into one's own inner self and has been educated in the external scientific world view for one's existence. It might even seem paradoxical to anthroposophists when this sentence is spoken by someone who, with his Philosophy of Freedom, published in the early 1890s, sought to counter the dominant philosophy of the time. In my Philosophy of Freedom, I started out from pure thinking. It might therefore appear that what was said in the past about pure thinking, by means of which the general forces of the world are grasped as if by the corner of their cloak, should today be condemned. But that is not the case. And precisely because, starting from pure thinking, one rediscovers the being of the soul, precisely for this reason, in the sense of a matter of the times, it is for anthroposophical spiritual science. But one will only arrive at an understanding of what has just been said if, in the sense I have indicated, one familiarizes oneself a little with the signature of our time, with the most important characteristic properties of this our time.

And such a property, one can say, sheds light on all the others, and follows precisely from the way in which humanity of our age approaches scientific conviction, in which one has become accustomed to in the last few centuries. My dear audience, today man is so proud to say that he has cast off the belief in authority of the past centuries, as prescribed by the religious authorities. Man today is so proud to say that he only believes in what he can grasp in his own personal being. And yet, to the discerning, it seems as if the old authoritarian belief of the confessional religions has merely jumped to another area, and this area is precisely what is called “science” in the abstract, with a great deal of vagueness but with all the more conviction. Science. — As soon as a modern man hears the word “science,” everything within him that once went in quite different directions because of the old belief in authority is stirred. Nowadays, for reasons that people in wider circles do not really understand, anything that is said to be scientifically established is an authority of much greater power than any authority ever was. How often do we hear the answer to something that arises as a question from within the human mind: “Science says this or that.” This general power, science, has taken all authority for itself today. It has taken this authority from those people who consider themselves to be at the height of their time, including with regard to questions of world view.

But what is the relationship of today's humanity to scientific authority? It has become the case that what is scientifically recognized is what everyone is believed to understand, given the way they have developed up to a certain point according to ordinary human education, the usual human education. Science should, in principle, establish nothing but what every human being, given the necessary preconditions, can affirm. Science should be something very general. Science should live in every human being in the same way. For one knows how it is received by those who, above all, cling to the authority of science when a single personality somewhere rebels against this general validity of scientific judgment. So that one could say: The ideal of a scientific world view is that it provides a set of judgments about world and human affairs that apply equally to every human being with complete uniformity. One might say that a gigantic uniformity is the ideal of this scientific conviction.

When one expresses something like this, it might at first seem trivial. In life, however, this triviality means an extraordinary amount. For with the great influence that science, especially in so far as it is based on natural scientific foundations, has gained in our time – and as I explained yesterday, rightly so in certain areas – one must assume that, where science increasingly uniforms people, it increasingly becomes the case that one person becomes just a copy of another. And indeed, if we do not take science in terms of its content, but rather in terms of what it has achieved in the most recent period of human development, we see how this uniformity, based on scientific conviction, seeks to be made a general human affair. One need only look at the terrible, destructive forces that are raging in the east of Europe today – forces whose significance here, unfortunately, is still not sufficiently appreciated in terms of their destructive power – to see how, after all, the people who today devote themselves to such forces of destruction with a certain fanaticism, actually started out from the assumption that certain teachings, which come from scientific foundations, or perhaps it would be better to say a certain state of mind that comes from these scientific foundations, should also be made the basis of social thinking. And what is striven for by this transfer of the scientific state of mind into social thinking, that great prison of humanity, where one man is supposed to be just a copy of another in the social sphere as well, as for example in Leninism or Trotskyism, there it is taken to the point of paradox, but indeed to the point of the most tragic paradox. Everywhere one looks – and I have only pointed to an extreme, a radical case – one sees, one could say, how the scientific state of mind seeks to achieve this levelling of humanity, as if it were flowing out in the developmental tendencies of our time. This is basically one of the main forces that can be found in the signature of current human development: this levelling from the perspective of theory, of thinking, of research. This is not to say anything against the justification of this research, as can be seen from my remarks yesterday. For on the ground of natural science this research is fully justified, and it has led science and technology to the great, fully justified triumphs, which I do not need to describe here.

However, this one pole of modern human development is juxtaposed with another one that is no less characteristic of the present spirituality of humanity. To the same extent that humanity strives towards this levelling out through intellect and intellectual observation of nature, to the same extent does the individual and the personal take revenge on human nature; polarities arise everywhere in the world, and here too there is an inner polarity. And we see how, in contrast to the levelling out just described, the instinctive forces of human nature come to the fore. One is tempted to say that the impulses of the will emerge from the individuality of the human being with instinctive force, right down to the animal level. While people strive towards a certain leveling with their heads, the most personal element in the human being asserts itself everywhere, that which distinguishes the individual human being from every other human being to the greatest extent. So that at the moment when we disregard the thoughts that people might have about the world in the indicated scientific sense, and move on to what people feel, what people recognize as the basis, as the impulse of their will, we can see how people completely miss each other, how the individual no longer has any kind of understanding for the other. Only in the narrowest circles is there still an understanding, often artificially cultivated, from one person to another. People do not understand each other today. We talk so much about social ideals, about artificial institutions that are supposed to bring about a social life, and this is mainly for the reason of deceiving ourselves about the elementary fact that we have actually become terribly anti-social in our instinct, in our development of will and feeling. An anti-social element runs through humanity as soon as one disregards the life of thought and looks at what actually lives in the depths of the emotional life and in the depths of the impulses of the will. This is the great controversy of our time, in which humanity is embroiled: on the one hand, it seeks to level the mind and, on the other, it develops a differentiation from the very depths of the human organization that has an incredibly anti-social effect.

This is basically the situation in which man finds himself. And from this question, which is one of the most important components in the signature of contemporary intellectual life, basically all other questions arise; basically, that is what has developed into such a terrible catastrophe in the second decade of the 20th century.

If you follow the judgments floating on the surface, how nations and people judge each other, how they assign guilt and innocence to each other, how they talk about what they want to recognize as right or wrong, then you have only a surface view of everything that is said on the surface. In the depths below, the antagonism and polarities of which I have just spoken rage.

In a certain sense, anthroposophically oriented spiritual science is juxtaposed to this. It wants to become a matter for the whole human being, for the fully human being, and wants to take hold of his feelings and will. On the one hand, as I explained yesterday, it draws from sources of knowledge that learn to look into the human interior. It draws from certain abilities that can be developed beyond the everyday through the method I mentioned yesterday. From these latent powers of knowledge, dormant in ordinary life and in ordinary science, it draws out something that looks down into human nature, into those regions that are covered in ordinary life by the so necessary power of remembrance, by memory, just as the space behind a mirror is covered by the mirror. If we break through what our memory power faces, as I suggested yesterday, and develop powers of supersensible insight, then we will indeed, as I indicated yesterday, first of all gain insight into the human organs themselves in their vitality. We arrive at the point where a living medicine must search, where a living anthropology must search. But we then go beyond what we find in the present human being as the spiritual-material, to the prenatal human being, or rather to the human being as he was in the spiritual world before he entered this earthly life through conception. We arrive at a real expansion of those powers of the human soul life that would otherwise - filling the period of time that lies between a few years after our birth and our present moment - only extend to this life within our earthly existence. By breaking through memory, we attain a higher soul power, a higher power of knowledge; we attain the ability to behold the spiritual-soul essence of the human being as it was before the human being was conceived for this earthly life. And from there the current then flows, which is so difficult for today's man to think about: the current of penetrating from self-knowledge to world knowledge.

I know very well, my esteemed audience, how much paradox is found in what I have described of world knowledge in my “Occult Science”. But anyone who can find their way into this growth of a supersensible power of knowledge, into this — I would rather not use the expression at all because it is so often misused today — into this true, genuine clairvoyance, will find how what is otherwise only given for a small span of time in the ability to remember expands, how it expands into a power of knowledge of the world.

What is presented here – of course, people always say that it should be proven. But those who constantly speak of proving at every opportunity have never familiarized themselves with the nature of proving itself. Only what is at least suspected as a fact can be proven. All other so-called proving is a dialectical playing with concepts, a piling up of concept upon concept. And humanity only succumbs to great illusions when it comes to this kind of proof, which is so often demanded; this is not to object to justified proof, of course. The anthroposophical researcher simply has to point out what arises when the cognitive faculty is expanded in the way indicated. And I would like to suggest what happens in the following way.

If we look at our ordinary, earthly memory, we can say that this memory, together with all the experiences we have gone through from a certain point in our earthly existence, forms us. These experiences are initially mostly in the subconscious of the human organization at the present moment. We either bring them up voluntarily or they drift up into consciousness by their own power. Memories emerge from the stream of experiences we have gone through. And the possibility of remembering must be continuous in order for our soul life, our soul condition, to be a healthy one. We as human beings, by having this possibility of remembering, not only stand within ourselves, but we are also connected with everything with which we are connected through experiences in the outer life. Through our healthy reflection, we can already find out the difference between the image that emerges today as an after-experience in our memory, and that intense, saturated experience that was once there, that lives in our memory, the memory of which has remained with us from what had united us with the world. When we had an experience, we were involved in it as human beings; we were connected to the objects; the objects poured their essence into our personality. Everything that was experienced intensely, that we went through with the outside world, with nature or with other people, was transformed into images, and from these images we conjure up the experience again. Why can we conjure up what we have experienced in the present? Because we were once connected to it as human beings, because we were one with the outside world during the experience.

If you take a look at what anthroposophical spiritual science has achieved in the most diverse fields of knowledge, you will realize how, in everyday life, we only ever see part of what we are. We must indeed expand our powers of knowledge if we want to look down into our own inner being. Take just what I have already said: that when we break through our ordinary powers of remembrance, we first look down into the living context of our organization, and then, through the organization, we look beyond into the forces within which we lived in a purely spiritual and soul existence before our earthly existence. Man's entire being is connected with the entire existence of the world. And just as he, as a human being, who is enclosed between birth and death, is only connected with what he has enjoyed or experienced together with the world in the characterized way, so he is connected with the entire human development of the earth and also with the development of the earth itself, through what one then discovers through further research within oneself. It is nothing less than an overcoming, a breaking through of memory, and a re-emergence of memory power on a higher level. By overcoming the power of memory on a small scale, which preserves our earthly experiences, we arrive at a higher level of a new power of memory, through which we can develop images of the destinies that the earth itself has gone through in other planetary forms, as I have described in my “Occult Science”. And just as we conjure up in pictorial form what we have experienced since our birth through our everyday memory, so, if we get to know the whole human being through spiritual science, we can conjure up what the whole human organization has been through, what it was connected with: the entire development of the world. For the human being is a microcosm. We are not dealing with a different world from the one with which we ourselves were connected. This is what I have shown in my “Occult Science”.

Thus we see, my dear audience, how anthroposophical spiritual science becomes an expansion of human consciousness. We see how, by descending into the depths of the human being, we simultaneously ascend into the objective evolution of the world. To the same extent that we momentarily renounce the ordinary inner life, we enter into this inner life that would otherwise have remained the objective outer life. In the same moment that one submerges into the regions that are otherwise withdrawn from consciousness, one emerges into those regions that have formed us as objective beings, as human beings, out of the entire cosmos. This is the only way that the world knowledge that anthroposophical spiritual science seeks to provide can come about.

In view of the present situation, as I have characterized it, the objection of the modern human being to such world knowledge is: Yes, but there one enters a region in which subjectivity can assert itself in any arbitrary way. And it is always pointed out with a certain sense of well-being, one might say, by certain people that the most diverse spiritual researchers who were already there have given account in the most diverse ways of what they have seen in the universe. However, this diversity is mainly emphasized by those who have not really dealt with what is said by the most diverse spiritual researchers in an intimate way. Just as it seems understandable that a tree looks different when photographed from different sides – and that an overall picture of the tree is actually only formed in an external way when the tree is photographed from four or six sides, and these photographs are then viewed together – it should also be quite understandable that a person who applies the spiritual-scientific method to his own soul life naturally starts from his subjective point of view, but that as he advances in his research, the point of view from which he stands will surely become apparent. And just as photographing a tree from a certain side is objectively [correct], so too can the description of a spiritual scientist be objectively [correct] - even though it reads differently from that of another who has started from a different point of view. It will be noted, however, that the Anthroposophical spiritual science, which I have to represent, always endeavors to characterize that which is characterized from the most diverse sides, and that in this way it is to be compensated in a certain way for what can become one-sided through the description of only one point of view, which can occur when someone takes my books and compares them with each other in an abstract way and then says: Yes, this is what it says about one thing and that is what it says about another. This can easily be taken out of context and made to look like contradictions. But this arises from nothing other than the effort to describe things from the most diverse points of view, so that precisely through these particular turns of phrase in anthroposophical spiritual science a kind of comprehensiveness can be achieved.

Those who become thoroughly acquainted with what is sought and found on the inner path will be able to realize more and more clearly how an inner capacity develops there that is actually similar to what man has in the mathematical state of mind. It is the same in mathematics, where we have something that gives us a certain soul content that is derived entirely from the inner being. For mathematics is derived entirely from the inner being; we know that a mathematical truth is true when we have grasped it inwardly, even if millions of people say otherwise. What takes place in the soul when we know how to grasp a mathematical truth, which is both inward and outward at the same time, takes place in a similar way when we come to the inwardly objective through the subjective, which can really be present to us in anthroposophical spiritual science. Only the beginning of the research path is subjective, but the true anthroposophist remains silent about this. What then arises after the subjective idiosyncrasies of the researcher have been overcome is thoroughly objective, and one can speak of it as of an external observation made through the senses or also through the scales or with the measuring rod; just as one can speak of mathematical findings, only that these are formal, while the findings made through spiritual science are substantive.

This shows, however, that this anthroposophical spiritual science is above all concerned with speaking directly to the human being. That is also its task. While present-day science strives for standardization, in a sense strives to make one human being an imitation of another, anthroposophical spiritual science cannot but speak to each human being as to an individuality. This, I might say, is the direct social trust that one acquires in working for this anthroposophical spiritual science, that one does not want to put forward something that, because one has researched it, should now apply to all people, but through which one only wants to appeal to people by saying: one has researched the content of anthroposophical spiritual science oneself. But this content is the true content of human nature. When I speak to individuals, I do so in such a way that I do not speak to them in a generalizing way, but address each one as an individuality. I count on the fact that, because man is man, because human beings have the same soul, spirit and body, related strings will resonate, and what is struck by one person will come back from the innermost being in an individual way. One does not speak to people through anthroposophy as one otherwise does in science, as if one were seeking followers for something that has now been established. Rather, one speaks through anthroposophy in such a way that you appeal to the inner being of each individual and say: If you look into your own inner being, you will discover in this way in your own being that which I want to communicate to you because I have researched it. The way of speaking from person to person about spiritual science, all kinds of teaching, takes on a different tone, a different attitude, by wrapping the messages in formulas of anthroposophical spiritual science. This is what is effective in anthroposophical spiritual science against the signature of our time, as I have described it: that which, in turn, appeals from thinking, but from thinking from the fully human being, appeals at the same time to every single human being. The opposite of this is what is striven for in levelling. The individualization of the human being through knowledge and the development of the content of a worldview is striven for. This content of anthroposophical spiritual science is intended to be the most subjective and at the same time the most objective, the most personal and at the same time the most generally valid content of human scientific endeavor. Contemporary humanity needs this contrast to levelling. What I have described to you, which is basically an anti-social element, because it asserts itself as the opposite pole, arises from this leveling: the lack of understanding of one human being towards another. From anthroposophical spiritual science, loving understanding of one person towards another should arise; and above all, not only a general knowledge of human nature, a general anthroposophy, will come, but through what this general anthroposophy and world knowledge will be, a state of mind will be stimulated that in turn also includes loving understanding for every single peculiarity of our fellow human being.

A social life cannot be founded if it is not founded on the deepest, most sacred roots of human existence itself; but for the present phase of human development, these are the individual roots, as I indicated yesterday. Therefore, spiritual science will essentially give this other slant to the spiritual signature of the present time, which we need so urgently.

This means, however, that the other pole, which had to be characterized with reference to the signature of the present, will also take on a different character. In practical life, something will happen that is not an anti-social element, but a social element. This anti-social element, where does it actually come from? It comes from the fact that, precisely because head culture has reached a high point, the instincts of human nature prevail and take hold of feeling and will. What anthroposophical knowledge is shines into feeling and into will; it does not blunt the elemental power of feeling and will, as people so easily believe; it does not take away people's original naivety. No, when anything beautiful is illuminated, it does not lose its peculiarity, but it comes out even more. That which lies in the depths of human nature does not become duller when it is illuminated anthroposophically, but it is unfolded in just the right way, without the person having to suffer from today's disease, nervousness. Thought, in turn, shines into feeling; feeling takes hold of it, and by shining into feeling with thought, the “I think, therefore I am not”, the “I am only in the picture by thinking” — thinking is transformed into being. And only by immersing ourselves in the realm of the will, which is otherwise only experienced in sleep — for in ordinary cognition, what does man know of the relationship that exists between a thought that is to lead to the will and the raising of the hand? By means of this thinking, which delves spiritually into this volition, there develops what might be called the path leading from one human being to another in the clear light of spiritual knowledge. Humanity can only become a social whole if feelings and volitional impulses are illuminated, not by abstract, intellectualistic knowledge, but by higher vision. And it is through this infusion of higher vision that a true social science, a social ethics, will arise. It is precisely such a social ethics that my book The Philosophy of Freedom seeks to provide. There I showed that man can only feel free if he develops an impulse for action, for willing, out of purest thinking. Man could never feel free if he had to draw impulses of the will from any other basis. If we stand before a mirror and merely have an image before us – the comparison is more than a mere comparison – then this image cannot force us. If something pushes me, then I am forced by causality. If I look at the image, I cannot be forced; the image has no power in itself to force me. If I grasp my volitional impulses in the pure pictorial thought, then these pictorial thoughts have no causal power, no momentum. By recognizing the pictorial quality of thinking, one recognizes how, in pure thinking, free will is truly absorbed, so that the impulses for free action can only be found in the most individual part of the human being. But it is precisely through the will entering into this pure thinking, which is initially an image for us, and the will entering in, as is the case with loving social action or with higher supersensible knowledge, as you can see in the explanations in my book “How to Know Higher Worlds”, that otherwise pure thinking is filled with what is man's very own eternal being. And the first clairvoyance, ladies and gentlemen, is already there when a free decision of the will flashes through the mind. And basically all that I then give as a method for ascending to the highest spiritual worlds is nothing other than a metamorphosed formulation of what I have described in my Philosophy of Freedom as underlying free will. When one recognizes how, in this pure thinking permeated by the will, there is something in which man can grasp world events as if at a corner, then one also gradually learns to see how one can expand this state of mind, which otherwise only exists in the free action of man, in the way described yesterday, and how one can thereby come to supersensible knowledge. If man wants to know himself as a free being, he must begin with this true supersensible vision, otherwise freedom will always be something impossible for him. Freedom is also irreconcilable with natural causality — not even for a Kantian or for someone who at least claims to be one. And there is no other way to harmonize natural causality and human freedom than to see things as I have just described.

But then something else is established. What I have described in my Philosophy of Freedom as the basis of social will has been much, much misunderstood. People have objected: How are people supposed to work together in the social organism if everyone only follows the inner impulses of their individual being? — But that is not the point at all. The point is that through a real, genuine, true spiritual development of the human being, what I would call real social trust can be cultivated. A dignified existence in social life is only possible if we are not forced to act from the outside by commandments or other means, but if we are free to act from the innermost urge of our being. But then we must be able to develop this great trust in the other person, the trust that he will gradually come to act from the innermost urge of his human nature as well. And as man progresses to the innermost part of his nature and gradually such an understanding develops from one to the other, a social ethic, a social organism, will be able to arise out of the individual shaping of the individual will through full mutual trust. - So what conscious trust is depends on what, in the sense of man's striving today, can only be seen as social will.

One can best see how anthroposophical spiritual science relates to the current signature of spiritual life by looking at what has gradually become of the religious conception of humanity from the underground movements that I have just characterized. Spiritual science is repeatedly attacked from this very quarter, with the accusation that spiritual science seeks to enter the supersensible worlds through knowledge, but that precisely in this, it is said, the essence of religious life consists: that one does not know that in which one has trust as a divine world order, that one therefore has a merely subjective trust. So, according to this, the essence of religion would consist precisely in developing a mere belief in it, and in excluding the certainty of knowledge. But my dear audience, this certainty of faith, which is identical with what we might call trust, cannot be established in the religious life by anyone who honestly reflects on these matters, except through what follows from a truly supersensible knowledge. A historical consideration could teach humanity this. Where do today's people, who rebel against anthroposophy in the manner indicated, take their religious trust from? Is it something truly elementary? That is a mere illusion. It is the remnants of the historical religions. They are the remnants of what has developed in history as the historical religions. In the sense of anthroposophical spiritual science, these religions have their full justification, and their ultimate height, through which the development of the earth has received its true meaning, has received its highest height in Christianity. Christianity contains what can be regarded as the original religion, the last form of religion to which humanity has been able to ascend, and which must continue to be the one for the rest of humanity's time. Anthroposophical spiritual science not only does not touch Christianity, but it is the first to establish it in a deeper sense. But on the other hand, it must be said: where did religions get their content from? They got it — this can be historically proven — from spiritual visions, albeit from ancient instinctive spiritual visions. Religions have acquired their supersensible content from ancient instinctive visions in no other way than that which spiritual science in anthroposophical orientation now seeks to show scientifically. This content has been handed down and is to be found in scripture and tradition. Religions would have no content if there had not once been instinctive supersensible visions of human beings. From this, and from many other things, it can be seen how wrong it is to say that the anthroposophical side should not point the way to the supersensible worlds, for the supersensible worlds must be preserved for the religions precisely as the distant unknown, to which one cannot come through knowledge, but only through naive trust and belief. The value of religions will reveal itself when it is illuminated by the light of knowledge. Those who believe that the greatness and significance of Christianity could be affected by any kind of spiritual-scientific discovery are fundamentally weak Christians. In my opinion, those who believe that one should not approach Christianity with any kind of science because it could suffer from it are weak Christians. Just as there is nothing about America in the Gospels, but America must be accepted as a reality, so must the repeated lives on earth be accepted, even though the Gospels say nothing about them.

This is what makes anthroposophy a matter of time, out of a certain state of mind. I have presented this in my “Riddles of Philosophy”, where I have shown how the individual philosophical views up to the present day tend to converge into the anthroposophical view. So that in fact from the signature of the spiritual present one can read how one can ascend to the anthroposophical worldview.

I would now like to sketch this signature of the spiritual present for you with a few strokes, from anthroposophy itself, so that you can see that the one who stands on the ground of anthroposophy does not shy away from to communicate the results of his research, which he has explored along the path I have described to you, and which are as certain to him as the results of astronomy, physiology, biology, and botany.

If we look back over a relatively short span of human development with an anthroposophically sharpened eye, we find, for example, that we cannot understand Greek culture. In the previous lecture, Dr. Heyer pointed out how human consciousness has changed in the course of historical development. In order to substantiate this purely empirically, we need only look at the special nature of the Greek consciousness. Herman Grimm, who, although challenged in many respects, had retained the keen eye of a historical observer for such things, pointed out our relationship to the Greeks with the following sharp words. He said: What the Romans have experienced, how a Caesar, a Brutus has lived, that we can understand. Our elements of consciousness have not changed so much since then that we could not understand that. What is told to us by Alcibiades, by Pericles, by Plato, by Sophocles, people only imagine they understand if they remain on the standpoint of today's understanding of humanity. The figures of Pericles and Alcibiades, who only emerge shadow-like before the ordinary ideas of humanity, are actually like fairy-tale heroes. Herman Grimm sees fairy-tale figures throughout Greek history. Spiritual science is called upon to bring about what can expand consciousness, so that one can truly change one's inner soul state, so that one can in turn stand within this particular inner experience of the Greeks. And here we must say: this experience of the Greeks was based on a historical law, the full extent of which is only now being recognized by anthroposophical spiritual science. It is the law that I will now characterize in the following way.

The further we go back in human development, to Greek, Egyptian, Persian and Indian cultures and prehistoric times, the more we find that the entire human constitution is actually different. We see today that in childhood life develops in such a way that the soul life is bound to a high degree to the bodily organization. Take my little book The Education of the Child in the Light of Anthroposophy or other things I have said about education, and you will see how, with the change of teeth in the seventh or eighth year, the whole soul constitution of the child changes. And from ordinary life we know how the whole soul constitution of a human being changes when he reaches sexual maturity. It is less noticeable that similar changes take place at the beginning and the end of the twenties; these take place more inwardly, but they are quite clearly still present even for the modern human being. When we come to the later years, to the thirties, the soul and spiritual life of the human being becomes highly independent of the physical. We enter a stage of our development in which we change our soul through external experience, through being with the world. We no longer change our soul through what happens in us in such a way as the change of teeth, sexual maturity, or the changes after the age of twenty. But what extends in us more during the youthful years until the end of the twenties, in ancient times extended up to the high age of man. This law is a historical law. This can be observed by those who have acquired the ability to observe the inner soul life, which shows us, in the remnants that still occur today in old people, that such a development was once present. If we know this, then we can look back, for example, to the ancient Indian times, to times that lead into prehistory, where man's soul and spiritual life was dependent on physical development up to the fifties. One became a patriarch at the same time through physical development and in spiritual development, just as today one becomes a sexually mature person both physically and spiritually. This harmony of the physical with the soul-spiritual went up into old age in ancient times. In those ancient times, man also experienced the descending line of physical development, which begins around the age of 35. Until then, our organism grows and sprouts; from then on, it goes downhill, from then on, there is a descending development. Today, we do not go through this descending development in the same way; we are certainly weighed down by old age, but that is different from what it was in ancient times. In ancient times, as the external physical body became stiffer and drier, there was a simultaneous bright illumination of spirituality, so that in the patriarchal age one grew into a certain spirituality through natural development. What was still present in older times for older ages was still present for the Greeks until their mid-thirties. What the Greeks still went through until about the age of 35, we as human beings in our thirties simply no longer go through and therefore no longer radiate it into our social lives. This brought into the whole social life of the Greeks what, for example, Goethe felt when he was driven by longing in Italy to relive Greek culture and where he said: But when I look at these Greek works of art and see how the Greeks, in creating their works of art, followed the same laws that Nature herself follows in creating her works of nature, then I feel necessity, then I feel God. The Greeks were only able to reproduce the laws of nature in their works of art by feeling themselves in the harmonization of the spiritual and mental and the physical and bodily, which occurs when a person reaches the middle of their life in full, physical development. They were only able to do this in their most excellent exemplars [...] because they were able to experience this themselves. From this organization of body and soul there arose the Greek way of artistic creation, the Greek way of religious feeling, and also the Greek way of thinking in medicine. That was the signature of the spiritual life in humanity, which simply arose from the fact that in the thirties what I have described was experienced. One could say: Just as the equilibrium of the balance-beam is experienced in the middle of the beam, so the Greeks experienced the equilibrium of human life in that they still grasped the interplay of soul and spirit into the middle of their thirties. We no longer grasp it. If I am to continue in the same vein, we only achieve physical development that still has an influence on the soul until the end of our twenties in today's age. As a result, in our later years, what arises from the depths of human nature and permeates the world view ceases. But this has also brought about the necessity that what no longer develops naturally in humanity after the age of 28 must be consciously achieved through anthroposophical spiritual education, that what used to arise from human nature itself must now actually be inwardly achieved by the soul. This has become the signature of our time: we only live within the physical realm in our younger years. This is what has now also, and in fact - now I may say it without being misunderstood - legitimately led into materialism. For the child, in looking at itself, must be materialistic, because spirituality first breaks away from matter. We have become materialistic as humanity in the newer centuries to the extent that we are bound to the age that is in the ascending material, organic development, and the less we still receive from nature in the descending development after the age of 35.

This is the signature of our time. It has led us into materialism, as we as humanity have abandoned ourselves to unconscious forces in the last few centuries.

What anthroposophical spiritual science wants is for us to receive from the spirit what nature no longer gives us, just as naively as we used to receive it from nature, to develop the courage to receive from the spiritual realm what we can no longer receive from the natural realm. The spiritual signature of our time points out to us the necessity of developing our full humanity, which we can no longer obtain from nature, out of spiritual, free will activity. This does not establish a decadence. No, decadence is established precisely by the fact that in a time that demands the spirit, one only wants to abandon oneself to nature. Materialism has emerged as a necessary phenomenon. Overcoming materialism must likewise occur as a necessary phenomenon. Anthroposophical spiritual science believes it can read this from the signs of the times, from the signature of the times. From this consciousness of the world and humanity, it wants to have an effect.

People who have delved a little deeper into the signature of our time and who have spoken out in recent times have basically only ever pointed out in a negative way what forces of decline are at work in our time and what must basically be the case if we consider the development of the human race that we have just characterized. There is no need to refer to Spengler, who is much referred to today, but one can refer to one of our best philosophers, Gideon Spicker, who wrote his work out of a broad-minded consciousness and who repeatedly pointed out how man in our time can no longer create the connecting bridge to that which, in full consciousness, gives him his true humanity, that which in turn connects him to the eternal, that which allows him to be permeated by the divine-eternal. And Gideon Spicker spoke words worth heeding in 1909, in which he described the signature of our time in his own way. He said: We have come to have metaphysics without supersensible conviction; a theory of knowledge without objective meaning; a logic without content, a psychology without soul, an ethic without commitment and a religion without reason. —

Now, my dear attendees, dear fellow students. Anthroposophy wants to give people a theory of knowledge again that leads to reality, because reality is both material and spiritual. Anthroposophical spiritual science wants to give people a real conviction of the supersensible world by showing the way to see this world. Anthroposophical spiritual science wants to establish a logic that in turn delves into the reality of things. Anthroposophical spiritual science wants to speak of a soul life as reality, not just of the soul life that we interpret pictorially from the scientific results of anthropology. Anthroposophical spiritual science aims to create a binding social ethic from the foundations of humanity. And anthroposophical spiritual science aims to provide a religious conviction that is based on knowledge, on the vision of that which must exist in religious life as the divine existence.

In this way, anthroposophical spiritual science aims to have an effect on the signature of our time, but not because it arises from some utopian sense or arbitrary decision, but because it appears necessary in the most essential sense for our age to those who are now able to observe the greatest need and deepest longing of our time.