The Rudolf Steiner Archive

The first, from which all else arose, was godhead unmanifest. From it the second then arose, which is life, or also unmanifest creative substance. This life then went through the most manifold variety of forms and was named akasha or mahat in the forms. This akasha or mahat contains everything that there is in the world by way of forms of life. All the hierarchies—Thrones, Cherubim, Seraphim, Kyriotetes, Dynamis, Powers, Powers of Origin, Archangels and Angels came forth through life and created the forms under which this one life appears.

The first power, unmanifest godhead, is also called the Father; the second power is the Son, being at the same time life and creative substance; and the third power is the Spirit. Together these powers of origin thus appear as Father, Son and Spirit, as conscious awareness, life and form. The power of life is under the guidance of Michael, the one who belongs to the Sun; the power of form is under the guidance of Samael, who belongs to Vulcan, where all life will have been transformed into living forms. The power of conscious awareness is under the guidance of Anael, who encompasses everything there is. Thus the upper three are:

These three are reflected in the higher triad of the human being

Atman is the part of the human being he must reach through evolution. In it, life spirit is reflected in two reflections in his spirit—as rational soul and sentient soul. And the Spirit Self is reflected in his soul in the astral as sentient body and ether double body. Finally atman is reflected in him as his physical body.

A reflection of the highest three is also in the human being, but as the element which goes below the actual physical level, his lower nature, in him.

The descent of man really went down as far as the fourth planet, the fourth round, the fourth globe and the fourth root race. Then humanity had descended so far into form that the right moment had come for ascent, to bring ascending evolution to expression as well in the form. But the human physical body went beyond this lowest point of descent, and the development which came after this time in the physical human being was really below the level of the actual physical human being. These are the lower forces, which drag the human being down and prevent him from moving forward. These powers, ruling in man as the lower triad, do, however, contain the reflection of the highest triad, but their use does take one on the path of black magic. These are the forces that took the original Turanians⁹⁵ to perdition. They are also beginning to be known again in our time, taking people on the black path. A white magician only uses such higher powers as the human being has in his head. Through the seven gates in his head he is connected with the seven reflections of cosmic forces, [right and left eye, right and left ear, right and left nostril, mouth = 7]. Through an organ up in the top of the head, which has not yet been opened, the human being is connected with atman; through the right eye, life spirit, budhi, flows into him; through the left eye, Spirit Self, manas, flows into him.

Budhi is reflected in his spirit as rational and sentient soul. With the right ear he is connected with everything which flows through the world as thought; through the left ear, the sensations of the world flow into him. Manas is reflected in his soul as sentient body and ether double body.

Through the right nostril, he is connected with the nutrient powers of cosmic life, which flow into his sentient body; through the left nostril he is connected with the powers of growth in the world, which flow into his ether double body. Through his mouth, the human being is connected with the spirit human being—atman. Through his mouth, the highest which is in him comes to expression. Because of this, words should be sacred to human beings, and they should not talk to no purpose but only when they want to express thoughts. They must get used to a chastity of words.

If the human being enters inwardly into the significance of his sense organs, he can connect with the cosmic powers through his sense organs. Everything which is below the level of physical evolution must be cast off. The real human being is the one who lives in his head and is connected with the powers of the cosmos through the seven gates of his head.

• 95. 4th Atlantean sub race. See Cosmic Memory (note 11), chapter on our Atlantean forebears.

Note: The notes on instruction given on the Logoi (last lecture in Part 1 and Part 2) did not cover the ‘creation out of nothing’ concept which is an essential part of it. The extracts from other lectures which follow are intended to make up for this.^*

From a lecture in Berlin on 30 October 1903⁹⁶

World evolution can be seen to be in three stages—conscious awareness, life and form. The different kinds of conscious awareness come to expression in the seven planets Saturn, Sun, Moon, Earth, Jupiter, Venus and Vulcan. Seven worlds of life are gone through on each planet, and each of these in turn through seven states of form.

Our physical Earth is such a form state, the fourth form state or globe in the fourth life world of the fourth planet or state of consciousness. Let us now think of the Earth as it is today and ask ourselves: What are we doing here? We take objects from the world around us, first of all from the mineral world, and make them into artefacts. We make combinations, creating a whole from separate things. This is creative work in form. Something new may also arise in another way, similar to the way in which stems, leaves and flowers arise from the root of a plant. The flower is not put together like a machine, where things are combined, but needs to grow from something which is already there, in a process which is part of life. Something new is created out of something which is already there.

With the third way of producing something, which is from the conscious mind, the process is such that we may say: Essentially there was nothing there, really—a nothing.

Let us go back to the very beginning of such a planetary evolution, the very beginning of Saturn evolution. What do we observe there? No physical planet existed as yet, not even in the most subtle arupa form, and the moment has not yet come when Saturn exists in its first beginnings. Nothing existed as yet of our planetary chain, but the whole fruit of the preceding planetary chain was there. It is rather like waking up in the morning, when we have not yet done anything, and all we have in mind is the memory of what we did the day before. Going back to the very beginning of Saturn evolution we thus have the memory of an earlier planetary chain, of what went before, in the spirits which were then manifesting.

Let us now go to the end of the planetary chain, to the time when the Vulcan stage will come to an end. In the course of the planetary chain, the potential, which was there to begin with has gradually emerged as creation. In the beginning, therefore, conscious awareness flowed out; out of the content of what had gone before, from memory, conscious awareness created something new. Something will thus be there at the end, which was not there at the beginning, and that is everything which has been learned. The potential, which was there at the beginning has flowed out into all kinds of things and entities. A new conscious awareness has arisen at the end, with new content—a new content of the conscious mind. It is something which has arisen from nothing, from lessons learned.

If we look at renewal in life, we have to say that there must be a seed to make it all possible. But the new content of conscious awareness at the end of a planetary evolution has truly arisen from nothing, from lessons learned. This needs no foundations, it creates something which arises out of nothing. We cannot say that when someone looks at someone else that he has taken something away from that other person when he afterwards keeps a memory of them. This memory has arisen from nothing. This is the third way of creation—out of nothing. The three ways of creation are thus the following.

Combining existing elements (form)

Letting new structures with new life content arise from existing foundations (life)

Creating from nothing (conscious awareness).

These are three definitions of spirits that give rise to a planetary chain, are at the back of a planetary chain. They are called the three Logoi. The third Logos produces by combining. When something else arises from a substance, something with new life, the second Logos is behind it. And whenever something arises from nothing, we have the first Logos. The first Logos is therefore also often called ‘something that lies hidden in the things themselves’, the second Logos ‘the substance dormant in the things which creates living things from living things’, and the third Logos ‘the one which combines all that is, putting the world together from those things’.

The three Logoi always move through and into one another in the world. The first Logos also learns of the inner wisdom and of the will. The creative activity of the first Logos is learning from experience, that is, gathering thoughts out of nothingness and then again creative work based on the thoughts which have come from nothingness. Creation out of nothing does not mean, however, that there would have been absolutely nothing there. It means that things were learned from experience in the course of evolution and that new things were created in the course of evolution, with something which exists melting away, as it were, and something new is created out of the experience.

Creation happens like this, to use an analogy: Someone looks at another person and remembers the image. If he had the creative gifts of the first Logos he would be able to say to himself: ‘Right, I’ve seen N and also know the idea of N in reverse. I can also produce a negative of him, with black where there’s white and vice versa.’ He has thus learned from the object and its negative and created something completely new. He might endow this with life. It would be a new structure which did not exist before. Let us now assume something does this with many people and those many people were to perish. The observer would then be able to create a new world on the basis of what he has learned.

If we study the world, we will always see the three Logoi interacting. Let us visualize the way the three Logoi work with reference to the human being in our planetary system. Let us think of a point at the beginning of Saturn evolution when nothing was as yet in existence. What happened there? Everything that had existed before was allowed to come out drop by drop, as it were. What arose there would have been the very first pouring out of matter from the sum of what had been learned from earlier experiences. Everything that had been taken in before was made to flow out in form of matter. This also included the matter from which humanity would later arise. Initially this matter existed merely as matter. The out-flowing had to be continually built up and brought together by combination. The combining of the matter which had flowed out was a new creation. It was initially the work of the third Logos; once matter had flowed out it was therefore the work of the third Logos.

What significance did this have for the human being? It meant that first of all, all the parts were brought together which would then make up his physical body. At the time, on Saturn, the human being was very much an automaton. If you had spoken a word into him he would have said it out again. Forms of entities were created. This is called ‘the work of the third Logos’. It continued into the Sun period of evolution when the human being also received his ether body, life. That was the work of the second Logos. Let us now continue on into the Earth period. There the human being himself was given conscious awareness, that is, the possibility of learning from experience out of nothing. That was the work of the first Logos. The Saturn human being received the principle which is form in him. The Sun human being received the principle which is life in him from the second Logos. The Earth human being received the principle that would develop into conscious awareness in him from the first Logos.

We need to get a clearer understanding of the concept of conscious awareness. For this, we need to get a complete idea of this concept on a specific plane. Human beings are conscious, but we need to know where his conscious awareness is. Today, human beings are conscious on the physical plane when we speak of waking consciousness. This might, however, also be on the astral plane. A creature which has its life on the physical plane and its conscious awareness on the astral plane is an animal.

In the human being, conscious awareness is localized in the head. In the case of an animal, a tiger for example, conscious awareness is on the astral plane. It creates a focus for itself outside the head and from there it influences the tiger. When a tiger feels pain, the pain also goes across to the astral plane. The organ for this is in front of the head in a tiger, where human beings have their forehead. In human beings, the focus has become enclosed in the head and filled with the forebrain; conscious awareness has been captured by the brain and frontal skull and is therefore on the physical plane. In the tiger, and in all animals altogether, the focal point for consciousness lies in front of the head, in the astral; that is where it goes into the astral world. It is different again with plants. If we were able to trace their conscious awareness we would, going from above downwards, always come to the tip of the root. Following the line of growth we would then come to the centre of the earth. That is the point where all sensations of plants come together, where the conscious awareness of plants is absorbed. It is in direct connection with the mental world. The whole plant world has its conscious awareness in the mental sphere. Conscious awareness for the whole of the mineral world is in the highest spheres of the mental world, on the arupa plane. The conscious awareness of stones is such that if we wanted to find the focus we would find it to be like a kind of Sun atmosphere. When we work on the mineral world here on Earth, breaking stones, every single act connects in a specific way with this Sun atmosphere. We thus have a range of entities on the physical plane, but their conscious awareness is on different planes.

Lecture given in Stuttgart on 15 September 1907⁹⁷

Let us first of all investigate the meaning of involution and evolution. Let us consider a plant, a fully developed plant with root, leaves, stems, flower and fruit, in short with all the parts which a plant is able to have. That is the one thing. And then consider the tiny seed from which the plant may arise again. Looking at the seed we see just a small grain, but the whole plant is already inside it, wrapped up in it, as it were. Why is it in there? Because the seed grain was taken from the plant, and the plant has put all its powers into it. In occultism, distinction is therefore made between two processes. One is that the seed unrolls and develops into a whole plant—evolution; the other that the plant folds up, its structure creeping into the seed, as it were—involution. So if a life form which has many organs develops in such a way that nothing is visible any more of those organs, that they have shrunk together into the seed, this is called ‘involution’, and the going apart, unfolding is called an ‘evolution’. This duality alternates everywhere in life, but always only in the sphere of the manifest. You can see this not only in plants; it is like this also in the higher spheres of life.

You might, for instance, follow the evolution in your mind of European cultural life from Augustine to Calvin, beyond the Middle Ages. If you consider the cultural life of that time you will find a degree of mystic inwardness in Augustine himself. You cannot read his works, especially his Confessions, without getting a sense of the inwardness of this man’s life of feelings. If we then move on in time we come to the marvellous figure of John Scotus Erigena a monk who had originally come from Scotland and was therefore also called John the Scot and lived at the court of Charles the Bald. He did not do so well in the Church. Legend tells of the brothers torturing him to death with their pens. This should not be taken literally, however. It is true, however, that he was martyred. John wrote a magnificent book De Divisione Naturae (about the divisions of nature), which shows great profundity. Then we come to the mystics of the Pfaffengasse,⁹⁸ where this inwardness of feeling spread among large masses of people. These were not only the leading clerics but also the populace; people who worked in the fields or in a smithy—all were caught up in this inwardness of feeling which was a trait of that time. Moving on we come to Nicholas of Cusa who lived from 1401 to 1464. We can continue like this to the end of the Middle Ages; we will always find that depth of feeling, an inwardness that spread through all levels of society.

If we compare that period with the one which followed, beginning in the 16th century and continuing into our own time, we perceive a tremendous difference. To begin with, there was Copernicus who had a comprehensive thought which brought a renewal in cultural life; he made it so much part of human thinking that anyone who believes in something different today will be considered a fool. We come to Galileo, who discovered the laws that govern the swing of a pendulum on observing the movement of a lamp in a church. We can thus follow the course of time step by step, and would always find the complete opposite of the Middle Ages. Feeling grew less and less, the inwardness vanished; the rational mind, the intellect, emerged more and more, with people getting cleverer and more intelligent all the time.

We thus have two periods of time which were exact opposites in character. Spiritual science gives us the explanation for this. There is an occult law which says that it must be like this. The period from Augustine to Calvin was one of mystic evolution and intellectual involution; since then we have been living in a period of intellectual evolution and mystic involution. What does this mean? From Augustine to the 16th century it was a time when mystic life unfolded in the outside world. Something else existed at the time that was only a seed—intellectual life. If was like a seed lying hidden in the soil of the mind which then gradually unfolded after the 16th century. Intellectual life was thus in involution at that time, just as a plant lies in its seed. Nothing can arise in the world that has not first been in such an involution. From the 16th century onwards, intellectual thinking has been in evolution, and mystic life has gone into the background; it is in involution. Now the time has come where this mystic life must emerge again. The theosophical movement must help it to unfold again, to go into evolution.

Involution and evolution are thus always alternating in life in the sphere of the manifest. However, if we stop at this we are only looking at the outside. To see the whole, there has to be a third principle which is behind those two. What is this third principle? Imagine you come up against a phenomenon in the outside world and reflect on it. You are there, the outside world is there, and your thoughts arise in you. Those thoughts were not there before. If you develop the idea of a rose, for example, it will only arise the moment you relate to the rose; you were there, the rose was there; and when the thought, the image of the rose arises in you, something entirely new comes up which has not been there before.

This also applies in other spheres of life. Think of Michelangelo at work. He hardly ever used models. Let us imagine, however, that he collected a group of models. Michelangelo was there, the models were there. But the image of the group in Michelangelo’s soul is something new; it is a completely new creation. This has nothing to do with involution and evolution. It is something completely new which arises in the relationship between an entity able to receive and an entity able to give. New creations like this always arise when essence relates to essence. They are a beginning. Remember how we considered the way thoughts are creative here yesterday, how they can ennoble the soul and will later even work on the forming of the body. Something which some entity thinks, the creation of a thought, an idea, will work on and continue to have an effect. It is a new creation and also a beginning, but it does have consequences. If you have good thoughts today, those thoughts will bear fruit into the far distant future, for your soul follows its own way in the world of the spirit. Your body will go back into the elements again, it will decompose. But even if everything out of which the thought has arisen vanishes, the thought will continue to work.

Let us take the example of Michelangelo again. His magnificent works have raised the hearts and minds of millions of people, but they will fall to dust one day. There will be generations that will no longer see any of his creations. What lived in Michelangelo’s soul before his images assumed physical form, something which was first of all a new creation in his soul—this will live on. It will remain and will emerge at later stages of evolution and take form. Do you know why we have clouds and stars today? Because there were entities in the long distant past which had the thought of clouds and stars. Everything arises from thought creations, and the thought is a new creation. Everything has arisen from thoughts, and the greatest things in the world have come from the thoughts of the godhead.

There you have the third principle. In the sphere of the manifest, things alternate between evolution and involution. But behind this, deeply hidden, lies the third principle, and this alone gives the fullness, a creation which is entirely new, having arisen from nothing.

Thus there have to be three things—creation out of nothing, and then, when this manifests and proceeds in time, it assumes the forms of the manifest: evolution and involution.

Lecture given in Berlin on 17 June 1909⁹⁹

In Christian esoteric language, creating out of the given is called ‘being creative in the spirit’, and creation out of given situations that are right, beautiful and full of virtue is called the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is beatitude for the human being when he succeeds in creating something which is right or true, beautiful and good out of nothing. For human beings to be able to create in the sense of this Holy Spirit, they had first to be given the foundation for this, as for all creation out of nothing. They were given this foundation when the Christ came into our evolution. When human beings on Earth became able to have living experience of the Christ event, they were also able to rise to being creative in the Holy Spirit. It is thus the Christ himself who creates the most eminent, most profound basis. If human beings come to be such that they stand firmly on the ground of the Christ experience, that the Christ experience is the vehicle into which they enter so that they may develop further, then the Christ sends the Holy Spirit to them, and they become able to create what is right, beautiful and good in terms of further evolution.

We see, therefore, how the Christ event came on Earth as a final conclusion, as it were, of what had been impressed in the human being through Saturn, Sun and Moon. It has given humanity the most sublime principle which will enable them to live into the prospect of the future and be more and more creative out of the given situations, out of something which is not in this place or in that one, but depends on how human beings relate to the realities that surround them, which is the Holy Spirit in the most comprehensive sense. This is yet again such an aspect of Christian esoteric thinking. This relates to the most profound thought we are able to have concerning all evolution, the thought of creation out of nothing.

Because of this no true theory of evolution can ever leave aside the thought of creation out of nothing. Let us assume there were only evolution and involution. This would be endless repetition, as we see it in plants. All there would be on Vulcan then would be what had its beginning on Saturn. But in addition to evolution and involution the thought of creation out of nothing came in the middle of our evolution. When Saturn, Sun and Moon had passed, the Christ came to the Earth as the element of great enrichment, so that there will be something that is wholly new on Vulcan, something which did not yet exist on Saturn. Someone who speaks only of evolution and involution, will speak of the process of evolution as though everything would just repeated itself, like a cycle. Such cycles can never truly explain world evolution, however. We need to add this creation out of nothing to evolution and involution, something which brings something new into the existing situations. This gives us true understanding of the world.

• *. New translations have been made of these excerpts for this volume, as the German editions have changed since the lectures were first translated into English.
• 96. In Foundations of Esotericism (see note 13).
• 97. In Occult Signs and Symbols, tr. S. Kurland; New York: Anthroposophic Press 1972.
• 98. In the Pfaffengasse—popular name given to the region on the left bank of the Rhine where ecclesiastical states were numerous—Chur, Constance, Basle, Speyer, Worms, Mainz, Trier, Cologne.
• 99. In Geisteswissenschaftliche Menschenkunde GA 107 [in German].

Part I

Fragment: handwritten manuscript by Rudolf Steiner (see editor’s introduction ‘About this volume’). Words given in italics are underlined in the original MS.

Earth evolution: Handwritten notes which had been enclosed with a letter written to Marie von Sivers (Marie Steiner from Dec. 1914) dated 6 January 1906. The letter no longer exists. The additional comments are taken from the letter written on 7 January 1906 (in Correspondence and Documents (GA 262), tr. C. v. Arnim, London/New York: Rudolf Steiner Press/Anthroposophic Press 1988).

Shortly before this he had sent her his description of Moon evolution with a letter dated 19 November 1905. This manuscript is no longer extant. A comment in the letter: ‘I’ll need to do some more work on it for Lucifer,' suggests that, like others from those early days, the manuscript was then kept by the printer.

The nature of the Christ: Extract from a handwritten letter to Marie von Sivers dated 13 January 1906 (from GA 262—as above).

Names of the days in the week and human evolution: Handwritten material enclosed with an undated letter [Nuremberg, 25 November 1905] to Marie von Sivers (from GA 262—as above).

Three lectures on cosmology: notes taken by Franz Seiler and Walter Vegelahn.

Planetary evolution: Handwritten notes of Mathilde Scholl and Marie von Sivers.

Part II

The first, second and third sonhood of God: two handwritten notebook pages (Archive No. NZ 471/72), undated, c. 1903/04, probably written down for Marie von Sivers.

The godhead revealed as All Soul and All Life: Handwritten copy of Rudolf Steiner’s original by Jan Peelen. Original no longer extant. Written down at Peelen’s request in Cologne on 27 April 1905.

Signs and evolution of the three Logoi in humanity: Written down by hand by Rudolf Steiner for Edouard Schuré. Title added in the latter’s writing. Probably written down during visit to Schuré in Barr/Alsace in September 1906. Schuré probably asked for this as he was planning to report on the 18 lectures Rudolf Steiner gave in Paris in May 1906 (in Esoteric Cosmology, Spring Valley: St George Publications 1978), where the three Logoi were discussed in the lecture given on 9 June 1906.

Notes from private teaching sessions: In the summer of 1903 and 1904, Rudolf Steiner gave a number of private lessons for Marie von Sivers, her sister Olga and her friend Maria von Strauch-Spettini in Marie von Siver’s flat in Berlin- Schlachtensee. Marie von Sivers had made brief notes. About the Logoi: These notes, with no date or place given, came from Mathilde Scholl, probably from a private lesson she was given.

Part III

About the cabbala: Notes taken by Franz Seiler and Marie von Sivers.

Symbols reflecting original wisdom: Notes taken by Marie von Sivers, Walter Vegelahn and Camilla Wandrey.

The book of ten pages: Notes taken by Walter Vegelahn, Marie von Sivers, Camilla Wandrey and an unknown person. They themselves marked the larger gaps in taking down notes (...).

The sketches

In the Notes, the sketches are facsimiles of copies made of Rudolf Steiner’s sketches.

The sketches in the lectures on planetary evolution are facsimiles of Mathilde Scholl’s original sketches. It should be noted that they were copied from the blackboard, so that minor variations cannot be excluded.

Marie von Sivers’ notes do not include sketches.

Earlier publications

From Part I

Earth evolution / The nature of the Christ as the macrocosmic human being in reverse / Names of the days in the week and human evolution: in Correspondence and Documents (GA 262), tr. C. v. Arnim, London/New York: Rudolf Steiner Press/Anthroposophic Press 1988).

Planetary evolution: in Beiträge zur Rudolf Steiner Gesamtausgabe Nr. 67/68, Nr. 69/70, Nr. 71/72, Nr. 78. English typescript translation R 73, Rudolf Steiner House Library, London.

From Part II

Berlin, 2, 3, 4, 7 July 1904: in Beiträge zur Rudolf Steiner Gesamtausgabe Nr. 67/68.

Schlachtensee summer 1903: in Über die astrale Welt und das Devachan, GA 88.

From Part III

Berlin, 18 March 1904 and Berlin 3 April 1905: in Beiträge zur Rudolf Steiner Gesamtausgabe Nr. 29 and 32 resp.

Titles

The volume was given its title by the editors.

Titles of the texts in Part I: ‘Earth evolution’ and ‘Names of the days in the week and human evolution’ by Rudolf Steiner; titles of the two lecture courses by the note-takers; the rest by the editors of this volume.

Titles of texts in Parts II and III: The title of the material written down for Edouard Schure was added by the latter; the titles given to lecture notes come from the note-takers; the rest are by the editors of this volume.

To round out the contents of this volume, reference may be made to some further important references Rudolf Steiner made to the cosmic alphabet with the help of which it is possible to read the cosmos, the great book of nature.

In a lecture given in Dornach on 1 August 1924^a he looked back on how for him there had been a kind of shibboleth (test word, motto) for the anthroposophical movement from its beginning to enable people to read the great ‘book of nature’ again in the spirit, to find the spiritual background to the world of nature again. For this, he said, was one of the most important impulses for the new Michael age which had started in 1879. He showed how one can read the book of nature by comparing it with printed books. These involve a specific number of letters, and so does the writing in the book of nature, except that there the letters are categories, archetypes, cosmic thoughts. These make up the alphabet of cosmic alphabet. Just as someone who sees only the individual letters—a, b, c, etc.—and does not know how to combine them properly, is unable to appreciate the greatness of Goethe’s Faust, for instance, so, Steiner said, all that is active and moving in the cosmos, and the way the human being is connected with this, can only be read by someone who knows how to combine the letters of the cosmic alphabet.

In the same sense, he once said with reference to Occult Science: ‘What does it actually say in this Occult Science? [...] Thoughts are written in it, but these are not ordinary thoughts. They are the thoughts which do creative work in the world out there. [...] I may call the powers I have described in it the world-creative powers or cosmic thoughts.’ (Dornach, 24 March 1922, [in German] in GA 211.)

We can understand that the letters of the cosmic alphabet cannot be found with logical or philosophical conclusions but are gained from vision in the spirit. In the course of human evolution, people have again and again sought to read the great book of nature. This is why there are different alphabets, or rather different names given to individual letters in the cosmic alphabet. Rudolf Steiner emphatically referred to Aristotle’s ten categories and the ten sephiroth of the Jewish cabbala as such alphabets. (Dornach, 10 May 1924).^b The same applies to the book of ten pages to which the French philosopher Saint-Martin referred as late as the 18th century.

The Rosicrucians also know of a ten-letter cosmic alphabet. (See German text on the ten metamorphoses of the Sun Logos according to the Rosicrucian chronicle in GA 88; also the discussion of the Rosicrucian words ‘One who is able to understand well the work of numbers, will see how his world is made ...’, [in German] in esoterische Stunden, Berlin, 12 February 1908, GA 266/1.) In his report on the theosophical congress in Munich in 1907 Rudolf Steiner referred, clearly not without purpose, to the fact that the letters E. D. N.—1. C. M.—P. S. S. R. in the programme were ‘the ten initial letters of the words expressing the goal of true Rosicrucianism: ex deo nascimur, in Christo morimur, per spirituatn sanctum reviviscimus.'

A number of statements Rudolf Steiner made show that the results of his spiritual scientific investigations were also due to the ability to read the cosmic alphabet. He said this most clearly in a lecture given in Dornach on 22 April 1924 (in GA 233a).^c Considering Aristotle’s categories, he said: ‘Basically everything anthroposophy has given us and will ever be able to give, is experienced the way anything read in Faust is experienced from the letters [in the book]. For all the secrets of the physical and the spiritual world are contained in these simple ideas which make up the cosmic alphabet. [...] So you see how in ten concepts, the inner power of light and influence needs to be unveiled again, one had what for millennia had been a tremendous, instinctive revelation of wisdom.’

20 years earlier, in the lecture on the Cabbala (Berlin, 18 March 1904, in this volume) he was quite specific about this: ‘You will find it said in my Theosophy that the occult teaching [in the Cabbala] agrees with the things taught in theosophy.’

He put it even more definitely in a lecture given in Dornach on 19 September 1922 ([in German] in GA 344): ‘If we consider the whole human being as I have presented the subject in my Theosophy, in his nine parts, we find that from above down they are spirit human being, life spirit, Spirit Self, spiritual soul, rational soul, sentient soul, sentient body, ether body and physical body. These are nine. They would not connect with earthly life in the right way if there were not also a synthesis, which is the tenth. This gives us ten, and these also appear in the sephiroth of pre-Christian times, though in a form that was right for that time, when I-awareness did not yet wholly exist.’ See also the two undated sketches by Rudolf Steiner (archive Nos. 685 and 712) which follow below.

As the nine becomes the seven which determines all evolution, and as ultimately everything goes back to the three, which in turn must be seen as the two and the one—since everything can only manifest in polarities, with the one as the oneness behind them—all this can be seen from the notes made for J. Peelen and E. Schuré (in this volume).

A look at his cosmological investigations connected with the secret of numbers permitted the following to be said in a lecture given in Stuttgart on 29 August 1906:^d ‘There are thus seven planets with seven times seven states each, which is written as \(777\) in occult writing. In occult writing, the seven in the unit position indicates the globes, the \(7\) in the tens the rounds, and the one in the hundreds the planets. These numbers have to be multiplied with one another. Our planetary system thus has to go through \(7 \times 7 \times 7 = 343\) transformations.’ He then referred to a ‘strange passage’ in Blavatsky’s The Secret Doctrine, the content of which Steiner said was largely inspired by one of the most sublime spiritual figures: ‘But the great initiates always expressed themselves with great caution; they only gave pointers. Above all they always let people do some work for themselves. The passage is therefore full of riddles. H. P. B knew this. The teacher did not speak of consecutive incarnations, he merely said: Learn to solve the riddle of \(777\) incarnations. He wanted that one should learn that these are \(343\) [states of transformation]. The task is given in The Secret Doctrine, not the solution. This has only been found quite recently.’

The solution was evidently found by Rudolf Steiner himself. It may be found in the fragment written in 1903/04, where he used completely original German terms for the 7 metamorphoses gone through in states of conscious awareness, life and form. In the lectures on planetary evolution (in this volume), he also pointed out that the sum of the digits in these 343 states in the whole of evolution is 10. What does the number 10 signify?

Ten was the number given as the basis of cosmic order even in the occult knowledge of antiquity. The Pythagoreans considered it to be the all-encompassing, all-limiting mother, for it is the sum of the first four numbers: \(1 + 2 + 3 + 4 = 10\). And the four is the sign of the cosmos or of creation, since Earth is in its fourth embodiment—everything we find on our Earth, including the fourth principle in the human being, depends on the fact that this creation is in the fourth state of its planetary evolution (Stuttgart, 15 September 1907, in GA 101).^e As the sum of the four is ten, we speak of ten creative or cosmic thoughts.^*

It is evident from the material presented in this volume that Rudolf Steiner’s spiritual scientific alphabet is differentiated into three and seven letters, the three main letters conscious awareness - life - form, in theosophical terms first, second and third Logos, in Christian terms Father, Son and Spirit, and their possible relationships, of which there are only seven. In the 12^th lecture on planetary evolution in this volume, Rudolf Steiner added the terms used in the sankhya philosophy founded by the Indian sage Kapil: sattwa, rajas, tamas, the three gunas, also with seven possible ways of combining them. These are the foundation of the sankhya system (shankya = number). Here it is enlightening to read what Rudolf Steiner said in the lectures he gave at the end of 1912, when the Anthroposophical Society was founded (GA 142).^f

In 1924, the last year of his lecturing work, Rudolf Steiner had been asked by the Christian Community priests to talk to them about Revelation. Once more the fundamental significance of the principle of number in occult investigation emerged on a grand scale. This completed a great sequence which had begun with Christianity as Mystical Fact in 1902.^g In the chapter on Revelation, he showed the route, as it were, which he had to follow to reveal ‘the cosmic thoughts which are the basis of all things, the ‘fundamental ideas of creation’. Immediately after this—in 1903—he began to work on the unveiling of those cosmic thoughts in writing Theosophy, and the spiritual scientific cosmology which remained a fragment, progressively developing the theme more and more strongly.

H. W.

• a. Steiner R. Karmic Relationships vol. 3. Tr. G. Adams. London: Rudolf Steiner Press 1977.
• b. Steiner R. From Beetroot to Buddhism. Answers to Questions GA 353. Tr. A. R. Meuss. London: Rudolf Steiner Press 1999.
• c. Steiner R. The Easter Festival. Tr. G. Adams. London: Rudolf Steiner Press 1968.
• d. In At the Gates of Spiritual Science GA 95. Tr. E. H. Goddard, C. Davy. London: Rudolf Steiner Press 1976.
• e. Steiner R. Occult Signs and Symbols from GA 101. Tr. S. Kurland. New York: Anthroposophic Press 1972.
• *. Why it is ten and not twelve, seeing that the number of the macrocosm is really twelve, may be seen from the lecture on the Cabbala. It ‘distinguishes twelve principles in the world, the first and last of which remain secret because they cannot be put into words at all. Only the other ten are put in words.’
• f. Steiner R. The Bhagavad Gita and the Epistles of Paul GA 142. Tr. L. D. Monges, D. M. Bugbey. New York: Anthroposophic Press 1971.
• g. Steiner R. Christianity as Mystical Fact GA 8. Tr. A. Welbum. Hudson: Anthroposophic Press 1997.

The lecture cycle on the basic elements of Theosophy that I recently announced will have to be given later at a more appropriate time. I have postponed those lectures and decided for now to dedicate Thursdays to the subject of cosmology, the evolution of the world, that is, the teaching about the inception of the world and the shaping of the human being within this world in a theosophical sense.

I am aware that this involves the most difficult chapter of theosophical teaching, and I can inform you that several of our branches have decided not to even touch upon this chapter because it is too difficult. Nevertheless, I have decided to do so, because I believe that the indications I am able to give may be useful to many of you. Even though we cannot cover the subject completely at once, we can nevertheless receive indications that will serve to allow us to penetrate more deeply into the material later.

Those of you who have been involved in the theosophical movement for a long time will know that these questions—How did the world begin? How did it evolve to the point where human beings can inhabit it?—are the first ones taken up in the theosophical movement. Not only one of the first books that brought the attention of the west to the ancient world view, “Isis Unveiled” by H. P. Blavatsky, treated the questions about the beginning and evolution of the world, but also the book to which we owe the majority of our oldest followers, “Esoteric Buddhism”, by Sinnet. How does a solar system form? How did the planets and the star groups come into existence? How did our Earth develop? What stages did it go through and which ones still stand before it? These questions are dealt with in depth in “Esoteric Buddhism”. Then at the end of the 1880s Blavatsky's “The Secret Doctrine” appeared, and in the first volume it deals with the question: How did the world system evolve?—and in the second volume: How did the human race evolve on Earth?

I only need to point to one thing in order to show the difficulties involved. When you open the first volume of Blavatsky's “Secret Doctrine”, you find that certain assertions in Sinnet's “Buddhism” are described as erroneous and are partially corrected. The theosophical writers misunderstood some of these things and some of them were incorrectly described. Therefore Mrs. Blavatsky corrected them. She said that a kind of Babylonian speech confusion occurred and that the leading personalities [of the Theosophical Society] were not really knowledgeable concerning these questions. You all know that exalted masters who are far beyond our average development imparted the teachings in “The Secret Doctrine”. Already before the “Secret Doctrine” a book appeared in which Sinnet, the author of “Esoteric Buddhism”, published a series of letters from a Mahatma. We see from this the difficulties in understanding this secret doctrine, and we understand how Sinnet and Blavatsky, so diligent in receiving this teaching, were downright desperate at the difficulty in understanding it. “Oh”, one of the teachers said, “you are accustomed to grasp things with a different intellect and so cannot understand what we have to say even though you make a great effort to do so”. If we consider this statement, the difficulty becomes apparent. Misunderstandings arise everywhere that cosmology is taught. Having explained all that, I ask your indulgence if I now try to contribute something about this teaching.

I would like to begin by clarifying the position of theosophical cosmology in relation to modern science and its methods. Some could say: look at the advances our astronomers have made; we can attribute that to the telescopes, the mathematical and photographic methods that have given us knowledge of distant stars. Present day science with its thorough methods seems—in their opinion—to be the only reliable source of knowledge about the evolution of the world system. They feel they have the right to ridicule whatever is said from the other side concerning this subject. Many an astronomer will object: What you theosophists tell us about astronomy is ancient wisdom that the Chaldeans or Veden priests taught and that belongs to the oldest stores of wisdom that humanity possesses; but what meaning can what was said thousands of years ago have when it is only since Copernicus that astronomy has acquired a relatively firm basis. Therefore, what Blavatsky says in “The Secret Doctrine” seems only to contradict what our telescopes and so forth make clear to us astronomers. But the theosophist does not need to contradict what the astronomer claims. It isn't necessary, although there are theosophists who think they must fight against present day astronomy in order to make room for their own teaching. I know very well that the leaders of the theosophical movement think they can instruct astronomers. I would like to illustrate the theosophists' [correct] attitude in respect to astronomers with one simple example.

Take a poet whose work gives us pleasure. This poet may find a biographer who will try to explain the inner spiritual aspects of the poet's being. There is, however, another possibility—the physiological, the scientific way. Let's say that a natural scientist studies the poet. He will only take into consideration the poet's physiological and physiognomic characteristics; he studies him from the natural scientific point of view, and will tell us what he can see and combine with a natural scientific understanding. We as theosophists would say that this investigator describes the poet from the standpoint of the physical plane. He won't say a word about what we call the poet's biography—the soul-spiritual aspect. So we would have two coexisting ways of describing the poet, which do not need to contradict each other at all. Why shouldn't the natural scientific and the soul-spiritual coexist and each be relevant in its own way? One doesn't have to contradict the other.

It is the same with natural scientific cosmology, with what our astronomers tell us about the structure of the world and the evolution of the world system. They will say what their physical senses reveal to them. Alongside this, however, the soul-spiritual way of looking at things is possible, and when we look at it this way, we will never collide with astronomy; on the contrary, both ways of thinking will sometimes support each other. When, for example, scientific brain physiology was far less advanced than it is now, there were authors who wrote biographies of important people. The astronomer cannot therefore object that the esoteric way of thinking is antiquated and impossible just because Copernicus gave astronomy a new basis. The esoteric sources are completely different; they existed long before the eye learned to observe the heavens through telescopes and before the stars could be photographed. Copernican and esoteric research have quite different things to say; and the force of the one in the human soul is not dependent on the other. The force that gives us information about the soul-spiritual aspects goes so far back that no historian can tell us when this way of describing the world structure began. It is not possible to discover how the spiritual leaders came upon these esoteric views.

Esoteric schools existed in Europe before the founding of the Theosophical Society in 1875. The knowledge was only disseminated in small circles, however. A strict rule stated that the knowledge was not to pass beyond the walls of the schools. If someone wanted to enter a school, he had to work hard on himself before the first truths were communicated to him. It was held that a person had to make himself ready before receiving these truths. There were many degrees in the schools through which one had to pass—trial grades; and whoever was considered not ready had to prepare himself further. If I described those degrees to you, the strictness of the trials would make you dizzy. The things about the evolution of the world were considered to be the most important and were communicated only to those who had reached the highest degrees. During the 17th century, which had a great influence on culture, this knowledge was in the hands of the Rosenkreuz (Rose Cross) movement, which was originally based on oriental knowledge, and this knowledge was passed on to the European adepts in the various degrees. At the end of the 18th century and especially at the beginning of the 19th century, these esoteric schools disappeared from the European cultural scene and the last Rosenkreuz adepts withdrew to the Orient. It was the era in which men were to organize life according to external knowledge; the invention of the steam engine, scientific research into cell biology and so on came about. Esoteric wisdom had nothing to contribute then and those who had reached the highest points of this wisdom, the highest grades, withdrew to the Orient. Although there were esoteric schools later on, they do not interest us much now; but I must mention them because Mrs. Blavatsky and Mr. Sinnet, when they received cosmological knowledge from the Tibet-Buddhist esoteric schools, went to the basic sources.

A long spiritual development in Europe had brought the European brain, the European thinking ability, to such a point that difficulties arose for the understanding of esoteric truths. These truths were understood only through great exertion. When this knowledge was first made public partly by “Esoteric Buddhism”, partly by “The Secret Doctrine”, the followers of the esoteric schools took notice, and it seemed to them a mistake that the strict rule not to let anything go beyond the walls of the schools had been broken. The followers of the theosophical movement knew, however, that it was necessary to make some of these things known. Western science could not accept what they said because no one was able to prove what Mrs. Blavatsky and Sinnet had written. Especially puzzling was the beautiful cosmological song that comes from the so-called Dzyan verses,¹ which introduce both volumes of Madame Blavatsky's book. The authenticity of these verses, which relate the history of the universe, was challenged; no scientific investigator could make anything of them; it all seemed a slap in the face of everything European scholars knew. There was one researcher, an orientalist named Max Müller,² whom I greatly respect, who energetically stood up for oriental wisdom. Everything he was able to learn about oriental wisdom he made available to Europe. But neither Max Müller nor any other scientist could do anything with what Madame Blavatsky proclaimed. They all said that the contents of “The Secret Doctrine” were pure fantasy. The scholars had never found anything like it in Indian documents.

Madame Blavatsky said that the place where she had obtained her secrets still contained great treasures of ancient literature, but that the most important parts of this wisdom had been kept protected from western eyes. Even the little that was revealed wasn't understood because of the European way of thinking; the commentary that contained the key to understanding was lacking. The books that showed how the individual propositions were to be understood were carefully hidden by the native Tibetan instructors—at least that's what Madame Blavatsky said. But other thinkers claimed that this literature testifies that an ancient wisdom existed that went far beyond anything the world knows about spiritual matters today. The oriental wise men say that ancient wisdom is contained in those books, which they have carefully protected, and that this ancient wisdom has not been handed down by people like us, but they derive from higher beings, that they derive from divine sources. The Orientals speak of a divine ancient wisdom. But Max Müller said in a lecture to his students that it is not possible to verify that such an ancient wisdom existed. When a great Brahmin Sanskrit scholar heard about this from Mrs. Blavatsky, he said: Oh, if only Max Müller were a Brahmin and I could take him to a temple; I could convince him there that a divine wisdom exists.

The things that Blavatsky revealed through the Dzyan verses are in part from such hidden sources. If Mrs. Blavatsky had invented these verses by herself we would be facing an even greater wonder.

We are not obliged, however, to take the esoteric messages about the origin of the world from the old writings. There are forces in man that enable him to observe and investigate the truths himself, when he develops these forces in the right way. And what one can experience in this way agrees with what Mrs. Blavatsky brought from the Far East. It turns out that the occultists in Europe also protected knowledge that the teacher passed on from generation to generation without ever entrusting it to books. The occultists could therefore assess what Blavatsky indicated in “The Secret Doctrine” according to their own knowledge, especially what they had acquired through their own capabilities. It was tested and confirmed,³ but it is nevertheless difficult for the European occultist to come to terms with it. I will just mention one point: European esoteric knowledge is in a very definite way determined by Christian and Cabbalistic influences and has therefore taken on a one-sided character. If we take this into consideration though, and go back to the basis of this knowledge, full agreement with what has been revealed through Mrs. Blavatsky is possible.

Although a kind of verification of what Mrs. Blavatsky told us about cosmology was possible, it is difficult to make the scholars understand what is meant when the origin of the world is spoken of based on esoteric knowledge. It is of course amazing what the scholars have accomplished in deciphering the old documents, how they struggle to decipher the Babylonian cuneiform characters and the Egyptian hieroglyphics; but Max Müller said that these inscriptions give no indication about the origin of the world. We see how the scholars work around the edge of things and don't get to the core. I am not criticizing the great care and the exact mosaic work the scholars have performed. I will only point to the books that have appeared concerning the Bible-Babel arguments.⁴ That is all fine mosaic work, but the scholars are stuck at the periphery. One feels that they have no idea of how to arrive at the key to these mysteries. It is like when one begins to translate a book written in a foreign language. At first it is imperfect. It's the same with the translations of the old creation myths by our scholars. These are mutilations of the ancient teachings that were handed down from generation to generation. Only those who reached a certain degree of initiation could know something about them. At the end of these lectures I will come back to this.

Initiates are those who have attained knowledge of these things through their own experience. You may ask: what is an initiate anyway? In Theosophy and in the esoteric societies so much is said about so-called initiates. An initiate is one who has developed to a high degree the force that slumbers in every person—and which can be developed by every person. The initiate has cultivated these forces and adapted them to the point that he can understand what kind of forces in the universe are the subjects of what I want to explain. Well, you will say: we are always told that such occult forces exist which slumber in men, but that doesn't make it certain. That is the result of a misunderstanding. The mystic, the occultist, does not assert anything that a scholar cannot assert in his field. Let's say that someone tells you a mathematical truth. If you haven't studied mathematics you don't have the necessary knowledge to verify this truth. No one will deny that to judge a mathematical truth the necessary capacities must be attained first. No authority can decide about such a truth, only the individual who has experienced it can judge. And only someone who has experienced an esoteric truth can judge it. Our contemporaries, however, demand that the occultist prove what he says to the satisfaction of every average intelligence. They stand by the sentence: what is true must be provable and everyone must be able to understand it. The occultist, however, asserts nothing else than what any other scholar asserts in his own field, and he demands nothing more than every mathematician also demands.

You could ask: why are occult truths reported today? The previous method used by the esoteric schools was to keep them in small groups. This method is still used by the occultists of the “right”. Whoever has experience and can read the signs of the times, however, knows that this is no longer correct. And the fact that it is no longer correct is the reason for the origin of the theosophical world movement. What is most developed in our times is understanding. We thank the advances in industry and technology to our combining thinking with the senses. This understanding, or intellectualism, celebrated its greatest triumphs in the 19th century. Intellectual thinking has never been so strongly developed as it is today. I said that the oriental wise men possessed an ancient wisdom, but it was in a completely different form than that of today's thinking. The great teachers of the Orient did not have this cleverness of logical thinking, this pure logic; they didn't need it. Therefore it was difficult to understand them. They had intuition, inner vision. True intuition is not acquired through logical thinking; rather a truth appears directly before the spirit of the person concerned. He knows it. It doesn't need to be proven to him.

The Teachers of the theosophical movement now have the right to impart a certain part of this esoteric wisdom. We have the right to clothe in the modern form of thinking the wisdom that has been imparted to us in the form of intuition. Thought is a force like electricity, like steam power, like the power of heat. And whoever receives the thoughts that are taught within the theosophical movement and devotes himself to them without being mistrustful from the start, in him these thoughts are a force. The listeners don't realize it at first; the seed begins to grow later. No theosophical teacher asks anything more than to be heard. He doesn't demand blind faith, only listening. Neither believing acceptance nor unbelieving rejection are correct standpoints. The listener should only consider the thoughts conveyed to him, free from belief or doubt, free from Yes or No. He must be “neutral” and allow the teachings to work “on probation”. Whoever does this has not only thoughts flowing into him, but also a spiritual power that acts.

People find the easiest access through thinking because Western European culture has developed this capacity to such an extent. Even the most faithful church-going Christians cannot imagine to what extent people believed earlier. This source of conviction no longer flows. Today we must fructify our thought in a completely different way. In the past spiritual communications had to be imparted in secret esoteric schools because thinking was not cultivated as it is today. Today we must combine spirituality with the force of thinking, by which we kindle the thoughts so they live. The spiritual speaker speaks in a different way to his listeners than does a common speaker. He speaks so that a kind of spiritual fluid, a spiritual force flows from him. The listener should be objective, without a Yes or No; he should live with this thought, meditate on it and let it work in him. Then a force will be lighted in him.

Today we must announce esoteric truths about the origin and evolution of the world in the form of European thinking and science. These lectures will describe in this way the conditions that preceded the formation of our earth. We will be led back to the most ancient times where, in the grayest light of dawn, those beings formed who later developed into human beings. We will be led to the stage where this human being was imbued with earthly forces, where he was surrounded by earthly matter, to the point where he now stands. We will learn and see the pre-earthly and earthly evolution of our world, and how Theosophy gives us an outlook into the future. We will see where the evolution of the world is going. We want to show all that without opposing the ideas of today's astronomers. If we develop the forces that slumber in us, we will see for ourselves the great goal to which we are heading: the acquisition of cosmological wisdom. We will consider this cosmological wisdom in the next lectures.

• 1. Later, the Tibetologist David Reigel identified these verses as a part of the “Kui-Te” books, probably also as the fifth, esoteric part of the “Kalachakra-Tantra” with the title “Jnana”.
• 2. Max Müller, 1823-1900, one of the most well-known orientalism, speech and religion experts. He was a member of the Theosophical Society, as long as it stood on a purely Indian philosophical basis.
• 3. An obvious reference to “The Transcendental Universe, 6 lectures on occult science, theosophy and the Catholic faith”, London 1893/94.
• 4. Friedrich Delitzsch, 1850-1922, Professor of Assyrology and Semitic languages, found a certain relationship between the Old Testament and Assyrian creation myths (“Bibel und Babel”, Leipzig 1902). His lectures on the subject generated vehement arguments and many articles contradicting him.

After the introductory remarks last Thursday, I would like to begin by giving you a sketch of world development according to theosophical knowledge. I ask you to bear in mind that as there are only a few hours available, I can only give a sketch in which much can only be briefly indicated. There may be an opportunity later to elucidate further.

Before we pursue the history of the development of the universe and, above all, the formation of our planet Earth, we must make our own certain concepts that westerners no longer possess because they have occupied themselves for so long with only physical phenomena. In every book that deals with cosmology, we are told that we only need to look into space to see thousands and thousands of worlds unveil themselves before our eyes, worlds that are similar to our solar system, and that our Earth, the planet on which life has existed for millions of years, is like a particle of dust within these many worlds; and that man is merely a tiny being on this particle of dust. Natural science has considered this to be the case ever since the advent of the Copernican theory. Science tells us how erroneous it was that man in ancient times saw the Earth as the center of the universe and believed that cosmic evolution was only a preparation for human existence. Science has drummed into us how small the human being is compared to the universe, that is was arrogant of man to believe that the world is fashioned the way it is because of him. Schiller wrote the following beautiful words against this way of thinking:

To the Astronomers

Don't blab so much to me about dust clouds and suns!

Is nature so grand only because it lets you count?

Your subject is surely the most sublime in space;

But, friends, the sublime lives not in space.

And Goethe, about whom you know from other lectures that he possessed occult knowledge, expressed his thoughts about this point as follows:

“For what purpose would the world exist with its solar systems and stars if it didn't direct itself to the human being, so he could edify and be edified by it?”

So you see, people like these with their true spiritual world conception could not be satisfied with the idea of the insignificance of man and the dust particle nature of the universe.

Let us now consider the human being in relation to the history of evolution from the theosophical point of view. I must, however, anticipate this with some thoughts. Let's look for a moment at contemporary humanity's standpoint concerning cosmology. Everything that man can grasp with his senses—be they the rough senses of daily life or the more exact ones that natural science offers us by means of its microscopes and analytical methods—is ultimately merely the exterior, physical human being. Those of you who have heard theosophical lectures more often know that this exterior human being is only the wrapping, the outer manifestation of the inner man. What is the inner man actually? When you study the physical man anatomically, you find that he is composed of various systems: the skeletal and muscle system, the nervous system that has developed into the brain, and so forth. You also know that the brain is the organ of thinking. As Theosophists you also know that it isn't the brain that thinks, but that the brain is only an instrument, that the brain only serves the true being of man as a thinking instrument. This being who thinks in man cannot be discerned with physical sense instruments; not even someone who has opened his astral [soul—tr.] senses can see it. A highly developed clairvoyance is required in order to perceive what it is that thinks in a human being. In a theosophical sense we call that which thinks in man the true Self. This inner nucleus of being, this true Self, is spiritual in nature. It isn't something that extends in space, nor does it flow in time. It is timeless and spaceless, it exists beyond space and time, it is eternal. You have heard a description of this Self in my lectures about the Devachan [spiritual world-tr.], and you will find an exact description in my forthcoming book, Theosophy.

In order for the human being to live and think in the present stage of evolution, the spiritual Self needs a physical brain. We could perceive with this spiritual Self in the astral world and in the Devachan, or mental world, without a physical brain, but in the outer, physical world we can only perceive with the physical brain. If we wish to understand contemporary man correctly, we must say: The contemporary human being is a spiritual Self embodied in a physical brain. This physical brain had to first originate, it had to develop; it isn't eternal as is the spiritual Self. We can follow the spiritual Self back into infinitely remote times, and forward into the infinite future. From a certain point in time this spiritual Self clothed itself in a brain, created it, formed this brain to correspond to its own being. Such an organ cannot be formed just like that, however. It would be impossible for someone to simply create a viable brain through some process or other. It would be an artificial thing, but not a viable brain that could serve as an instrument for a spirit. In order for a brain to arise, other organs had to develop first. A brain can only develop in a physical body, such as the human one. Therefore it was necessary that the evolution of the rest of the physical body precede the brain instrument. When we look back on the preceding evolutionary stages we see how slow and gradual this process was. That the human being with his spiritual Self received such an organ with which he can come to understand the world, that is the goal and meaning of our present earthly development. Everything that has happened since millions of years had as its goal that evolution reach the point in which a brain can serve a spiritual Self.

Let us go back for a moment to the beginning of the earth's evolution. He whose spiritual vision has been sufficiently trained will have the following perception: At the beginning of our planetary evolution, our spiritual Self had reached a certain stage in its evolution. Every one of us was at a certain stage of evolution when the Earth was in its germinal stage. You can think back to the time when the earth's evolution began, and to all the spiritual Selfs that are incarnated today on Earth. You were all there, not as you are now, but at a completely different stage of evolution. During the Earth's evolution we have a distinct task; the human being must became something through this earthly evolution. Allow me to indicate in a descriptive way what the spiritual Self was when it entered into earthly evolution. Our spiritual Self had a completely different consciousness when it stood before the gates of our earthly existence than it does now. We can comprehend this if we imagine that we were dull dreamers who were not able to turn the images that flew by us into concepts, but could only see them as a panorama. Every individual spiritual Self had such a dream consciousness, and it had to pass through earthly evolution and must pass through future evolution in order to develop a bright, clear, conceptual picture-consciousness. The dream-like consciousness in which the spiritual Self was immersed at the start of earthly evolution is comparable to that of the animal's, but the consciousness level is not the same. The task our spiritual Self is to perform during the course of this planetary period is that consciousness brightens more and more—and when we complete this earthly evolution in the distant future, we will have brought this bright, clear consciousness to its zenith.

The beings who entered into earthly evolution at that time we call Pitris, which mean “Fathers”. We were those Pitris then; that was our nature during that earlier phase of evolution. Before we entered into earthly evolution, we passed through preliminary stages, and we worked ourselves up to the dream-like Pitri stage. That is where we stood when earthly evolution began. The Pitris had to gradually develop all the organs they needed in order to become acquainted with and understand their physical environment by means of a physical brain within the physical corporality we know today. The last thing man had to accomplish was to become a physical thinking being in order for his Self to be able to think within the physical world.

Now I come to the second preliminary thought. When you examine the human brain scientifically from all sides with the senses only, you will find that it is composed of the same matter and is ruled by the same energy as that of all other earthly physical systems. If you take a crystal, a piece of limestone or rock-salt, a plant, an animal, and you examine them chemically, you find that all physical nature, insofar as it is seen with the eye and touched by the hand, consists of the same chemical and physical energies—those that are active in the mineral, vegetable and animal kingdoms. Therefore, in order for the human being to reach his present stage of evolution, he had to clothe his spiritual Self with a physical body. That took a long time and the process is not yet complete. In the future the human being will develop further in this mineral wrapping. There are germinal organs in our bodies that are still to develop, new senses that are now only present in outline. So you see, the human being—his spiritual Self—needed a long time to clothe himself in the physical body which he now has.

Let us go back to the time when the human spiritual Self began the work of forging this mineral body, that can walk and stand, that possesses growth and reproductive faculties, a nervous system and the kind of brain a human needs. Go back to when all that was in a germinal stage, and then go forward to a time when the human being will have reached his highest point of evolution, when in the center of his head an organ will have developed through which he will have other perceptions than those we know today. In the segment of time between these two points flows the mineral evolution of man. In Theosophy we call such a time segment a “Round”. The Round I have just described to you—this evolutionary segment—we call the “Mineral Round”.

Before the human being could form this body in order to create the brain, however, he first had to prepare other parts of his being. The spiritual Self, this purely spiritual entity, could not have managed such a mineral body. Consider the spiritual Self as a point. And think of the point as being inside a mechanism such as our body; this point would never have been able to think by means of a physical brain.

So we have two things: we know that our spiritual Self had a dream-like consciousness in the beginning, but could never have managed the physical body. It had to create an intermediary in order to move its body. How do I move my hand? I first have the thought: I want to move my hand. If I only had the thought it would live in me, but it could never raise up a physical hand, just as a mere thought could never lift up a bottle, for example. If you want to move the bottle, energy must be added to the thought, which is the intermediary between the thought and my physical body. And we call this energy an astral [soul] energy. This is an energy present in the astral world. I would not be able to move my arm if there wasn't an astral energy in me that acts as intermediary between my thought and my physical arm. There must be an intermediary between my spiritual Self and my physical body and this intermediary is an astral essence. If I move my leg or my hand, if I put my brain into action in order to hatch thoughts—my physical body must be integrated with my thought through the astral organism.

You know from previous lectures that man has such an astral body that the clairvoyant sees in its astral cloud, which we call the aura, and in which his will and his desires live. When I have a thought, it alone is powerless to act. If it is accompanied by a wish, the will, it becomes an energy, a radiation, which is recognizable to the clairvoyant. The human being had to create an astral body, a desire-body, which could be the intermediary between his thoughts and his physical-mineral body, before he built up the physical body he now has. Before the evolutionary period, which I called the “Mineral Round”, another evolutionary period in which the astral body developed, had to precede it. We must therefore go back to the period in which the astral body was prepared. Only then could the physical-mineral body impregnate the astral body. This period, that also had a beginning and an end-point, we call the “Astral Round”.

As you can see, we have two “times”. One is that in which we now live: the mineral round. Another one preceded it: the astral round. But the human astral body also required preparation. A certain method is required to insert it into human nature. The astral body wasn't there when we were born and will not be there a short time after we die. It comes into being and it expires, it is subject to certain laws of origination and expiration. Consider a child. The child's astral body is correspondingly small; it grows according to the child's physical growth. Growth and reproduction are functions of the mineral-physical and the etheric [vital or life-tr.] essences of man. The human being must develop in earthly life according to the laws of growth and reproduction. That we are born and grow, that we survive at all, is not due to our astral bodies. Only wishes, wants and desires reside in the astral body. We are astral beings, just as animals are astral beings, and with the plants and animals we have that essence in common which is capable of bringing forth its own kind and making it grow from small to large. To use another expression: it is the form-giving element. Our physical and etheric bodies must have a very certain form when they are born, and this form must grow. You can conceive of this better if you take a seed ... [gap in the manuscript].

The forming energy is not an astral function. The astral can live within this energy, but it must be formed first itself. The human astral body could not have originated if another evolutionary period had not preceded it—the period in which the human form was prepared. Allow me to call this period the “Formation Period”; in Theosophy it is called the “Rupa-Round”. It is the period in which the form of man was prepared, so that his present form could develop.

All that we can observe in these three “rounds” are the wrappers for the spiritual Self of man. During the mineral round the human being “clothed” himself with the mineral wrapping. In the preceding period, the astral round, the human being prepared the astral wrapping, and during the period preceding that, the “rupa” or formation round, he acquired the ability to give himself the form he needed to perceive, think and act as a human being.

When we were still “Pitris”, when we still lived in a dream-like consciousness at the beginning of our earthly evolution, we were, if I may use the expression, result, fruit. In a way similar to a plant that grows from a seed planted in springtime in new earth, we had to prepare ourselves in order to evolve on the earth. We were the result of another world, and we had then to be the beginning of a completely new world, in which we had to first find ourselves. Just as you receive a seed in the autumn and let it rest over the winter, then plant it in new earth in the spring, so acted the Pitri-natures. They had to be replanted in a new environment, in the matter of the earthly world that was not present in the previous planetary stages. In order for this to happen another evolutionary period had to precede the one we just referred to. We now arrive at a very ancient evolutionary period.

The farther back we go from the present, the harder it becomes to imagine the conditions. The theosophist does not believe that he can go back to the beginning of the world with his questions. When people hear about Theosophy for the first time, they often ask: How did the world begin? Mostly such questions are not answerable, for we cannot go back to the very beginning of the world. You have seen the point in time where we have come from the Pitri-nature. The clairvoyant can follow this point in time by using certain methods. But the human being did not originate there; he was already at a certain phase of evolution. The theosophist does not speculate about this or indulge in abstract concepts. He follows up his experiences, his intuitions in the super-sensible region, and he describes his experiences insofar as he has them. In the same way as a geographical investigator would only describe what he has seen, say about Africa, and not what he has not seen, so the theosophical investigator would not describe the beginning of the world that lies very, very far back. The theosophist can only follow a part of our evolution through experience and does not indulge in speculation.

It was a seed that came from an earlier time into our evolution. Man was a formless seed. We call this point in time the “Arupa-Round”, the formless round. Thus we have three time segments before the one we are in now. We call these segments “Rounds”. The first, second and third rounds have gone by; we are now in the fourth round, and three more rounds will follow in the future, of which we have still to speak. We call the humans of the fourth round the humans of the mineral realm because they were formed by mineral energy; and we call a human of the previous round, the astral round, in which he formed his astral body, a human of the third elemental realm. We differentiate the humans of the third, second and first elemental realms. During the first elemental realm, or the first round, men's thoughts moved in a formless thought-matter. During the second elemental realm, or the second round, human thoughts moved in a formed thought-matter. And in the third elemental realm human thoughts could already form into wishes; they could take on the form that we can follow as astral energy in the astral world. Only in the fourth round is man advanced enough to dominate the mineral realm. Just as in the third round he formed an astral brain from astral matter, so in the fourth round he was advanced enough to form a physical brain with which he could think.

Thus we have three elemental realms and the mineral realm. The human being of the past lived in the three elemental realms. I can only hint at what followed, but you will understand the analogy. Another round, during which man will reach a still higher stage of evolution, will follow our present one. He will then not only think with his physical brain, but also with what we call astral energy. He will not only be able to command physical matter, he will also be able to dominate astral energy. I will give you an example for clarification. If I want to move this glass from here to there, I need a physical intermediary—my hand. Man has advanced far enough in the fourth round that he can consciously act in the physical, mineral world. He cannot yet, however, consciously handle astral energy. He has not yet developed an astral organ of will. He will be able to do so during the fifth round. In the fifth round the human being will be able to command the astral world as well as he now commands the physical world. He will be even more advanced during the sixth round. He will then be able to command the form-giving world, as he today commands the physical world, and in the fifth round will command the astral world. In the fifth round he will not only be able to realize a wish in the place where it is wished, but will also be able to send a wish to distant places. In the sixth round he will be able to form himself. After the sixth round our earthly evolution will have reached its culmination, and by then the human being will have taken unto himself all that he is able to learn on the Earth.

The human being has seven rounds to go through. I could only describe these rounds approximately—but we must be clear about this: During our mineral round man and the earth were not always physical, but had to evolve to that stage. They had to reach this stage in order to be physically perceptible. From our mineral round we look back on previous evolutionary stages. We can thereby conclude that there is a seven-stage evolution of our Earth and that the spiritual Self has seven stages or rounds to go through. During each of these seven rounds the spiritual Self was in one of the nature realms. Look at the human being. He has gone through the first, second, third elemental realms and finds himself now in the fourth round, which is our contemporary world.

Next time I will show that during this fourth round it is only man who has reached the mineral stage. Everything that is already mineral, non-living natural matter such as crystals, rocks, and so on, already reached the culmination of their evolution during the first round. Plants reached the culmination of their evolution during the second round, and today's animals reached their evolutionary culmination during the third round. Man has reached his physical-mineral evolution during the fourth round.

We see, therefore, that our Earth was preceded by another one millions of years ago. Man first appeared in the first elemental realm. The plant nature appeared during the second elemental realm. Then came the third elemental realm and animals were included in earthly evolution. The human being as such was, however, still an astral being, not yet able to descend to a physical incarnation. Only during the fourth round, when minerals, plants and animals already existed, was man able to descend to a physical incarnation. Therefore, in the four rounds we have four coexisting realms: the mineral realm in the first round, the plant realm in the second round, the animal realm in the third realm and the human realm in the fourth round. The human realm had sent out the three other preparatory realms in advance. Goethe was right when he said: “What would nature amount to if it weren't directed towards man?” The great cosmic event had to occur; the human being had to evolve through three realms in order to take on a mineral form during the fourth round. The human being was the co-creator in invisible form. As “Pitri” he came from another evolutionary stage. We worked with our dream-like consciousness during the first round. We worked in the preparation of our Earth in order that a realm could be formed that would be the foundation of our evolution.

That is the path of evolution up until now. We will continue next time.

A week ago, I tried to explain the manner of thinking, so strange to western minds, through which the theosophist attains his insights and knowledge of the cosmos. The sketchy character these lectures necessarily have prevents me from delving more profoundly into theosophical cosmology. Nevertheless, I will attempt today to give you at least a picture in descriptive form of the origin of the world based on Theosophy. I beg those who have scientific bents to bear in mind that in the course of three short lectures it isn't possible to go into scientific explanations of what I will say today. These scientific explanations will be included in a subsequent lecture cycle, in which I will speak in more detail about this subject. Also, in the second volume of my Theosophy, which will soon be published, cosmology will be discussed.¹

Allow me first of all to mention an important thought, which is basically very simple, but which must be clear to whoever wishes to understand evolution in the theosophical sense. When we speak of development, or evolution in a broad sense, we don't only mean the development of animal or plant life from a previous form, but we also mean the great transformations within the universe, and we include the origin of matter, the matter we can today perceive with our physical senses.

We said last time that in the history of the evolution of our planet there are seven consecutive stages, and I also briefly described these to you. You must therefore think of how our earthly planet goes through seven stages, which we call Rounds, in rhythmical sequence. Everything that exists and lives on our Earth was also existent before our present Earth come into being; it was existent in a kind of seed state, just as a whole plant is present in a seed, sleeps in the seed, so to speak, before it takes on form in the outer world. Such a slumber stage is called a “Pralaya”. On the other hand, the state in which everything awakens, gradually emerges and progresses from a beginning to a high point of perfection, we call “Manvantara”. When the state of perfection is reached, a Pralaya, a sleeping state, occurs once more, and this is followed again by a state of waking and growth. Thus the planet goes through this sequence seven times, reawakening seven times to a new Round.

The time between one Manvantara and the next passes in a state in which everything living on the earth sleeps, so to speak. But it isn't comparable to normal human sleep. In normal sleep only the activities of understanding and sense are interrupted, but you can see the physical body. The sleeping state of the Earth must be thought of differently. No earthly being is visible during this sleeping state. This state would be perceptible only to the opened eye of the so-called Dangma, the highest developed seer. This state is indescribable in words, for our words are inadequate for this kind of existence. I find no words in any language for this state. Therefore the developed seer says something quite different in order to give an idea of this state. He says: imagine a plant. You see this plant. Now imagine a kind of plaster impression of the plant, but in such a way that the plant itself is empty space and a Round is the plaster. Consider that the plaster is spiritual and only perceptible for certain senses. Whoever can see the plant cannot see the plaster impression at the same time, that is, the negative of the plant. Something similar is what the developed seer would perceive of the Earth during the Pralaya sleep. The Earth is not there. It is the hollow form, swimming in a great, mighty sea of the highest spiritual beings that is gradually disappearing and out of which the Being of the Earth itself flows.

Then something begins to originate within this hollow space, something not yet perceptible to the physical senses; it is only perceptible to the highly developed seer who can consciously move in the spiritual plane. At the beginning of the Earth's existence he would see a sphere in space, a purely spiritual sphere in which only the spiritual is present. Every time before a new Round begins, our Earth exists in such a spiritual state. When it awakens from the Pralaya sleep, it does so as such a sphere. The spiritual seer perceives it in a wonderful reddish glimmer. But that Earth contains everything that later becomes Earth. The densest bodies are also contained in this sphere.

How can we imagine this? It can be made clear by means of a simple process. Imagine a glass full of water. The water is fluid. When you cool the temperature sufficiently, the water becomes ice. You have the same thing in front of you as previously—ice is nothing other than water, only in another form. Raise the temperature and the ice reverts to water, with higher temperatures even to steam. By this example you can imagine how all matter derives from the spirit through densification. The spiritual sphere—seen only by the seer's developed eye—densifies gradually after it passes through a small Pralaya. It can then be seen by a less developed seer's eye. Then follows a kind of short sleeping state, and now the sphere is visible to the astral eye, that is, for whoever has developed this sense on the astral plane. Again a Pralaya state follows, and the sphere appears again as physical solid matter. Only now can physical eyes see it, physical ears hear it, physical hands grasp it. That is the fourth stage. Then a short Pralaya comes again. This stage disappears and again an astral sphere presents itself, but with much more highly developed beings. An analogous state appears in the sixth Round, also only visible to the spiritual seer. Thereafter another Pralaya and then a state only visible to the highest developed seer. Then follows what is invisible even to the Dangma. A long Pralaya follows and then the whole process begins again. This happens seven times. In this way the Earth is transformed from the lowest to the highest level.

Let us now follow the first Round. We can study it best by observing what exists on our Earth where it is most solid. In the first Round there were no mineral forms yet, no physical nature energy and no chemical energy. The Earth had carried out the previous evolution only to create a foundation for physical existence; it created this foundation in order to prepare a physical existence in the fourth Round. Our Earth looked like a fiery mass, with such tremendous temperatures that none of our present substances could have the form they now have. All substances were jumbled up in that fiery primal porridge—allow me to use that trivial word—in homogeneous, undifferentiated matter. Theosophy says: the Earth was in the fiery stage. Common fire is not meant, however, but fire of a higher, spiritual nature. There were no chemical elements involved. But what was in the interior of this matter was active. Two kinds of spiritual beings were active: those we call “Dhyani Chohans”,² and those beings who had not yet descended to physical materiality, who had a partially spiritual body, and who flowed through the fiery matter with tremendous rapidity. We see here a continuous emergence and disappearance of irregular forms, also of forms that remind us of those that will exist on Earth at a much later time.

The emerging and disappearing seems to follow a pattern. Forms arise which are reminiscent of later crystals and plants—even something that takes on human form, and then disperses. The humans who would later incarnate lived in that fire, modeling and preparing their bodies. That is how the Earth's first Round appears to us. Then followed the transition from this fiery, flowing Earth to the sleep-state.

The second Round began in the same spiritual way. “Ether” is finer than our present-day gas, but denser than the Earth was in the previous stage. In this very fine matter what we call chemical elements formed. You can find this second stage wonderfully described in religious books, where it is written that the divine beings ordered everything according to mass, number and weight. What had earlier been irregular was now organized in chemical elements according to number. The chemist will understand me, for he knows the regular periodic system of the elements. The individual substances were not yet related to each other. Now, however, as matter became differentiated, we see the most wonderful forms coming into existence which remind us of later forms, only they are not yet solid: star-like forms, angular forms, tetrahedrons, polyhedrons, round forms and so on. The forms that will later constitute nature are intimated. As in the first Round crystal forms were prearranged, the plant forms were constituted in the second Round. Then all flowed away; the astral and spiritual natures went through a Pralaya stage again and re-appeared in the third Round.

When we consider the physical state of the third Round, we find matter in a quite different state. It is not yet differentiated as air and water, but forms a kind of mist, or steam. It is no longer an ether form, but rather somewhat as cloud formations are today. And within these mist formations, which we find described in old sagas—the sagas of Nebelheim (home of mist) and Niflheim describe this state—we see matter in another form, no longer organized according to number, but equipped with energy. The esoteric researcher speaks here of the Law of Selected Relationships. The chemical substances organize themselves according to the Law of Selected Relationships. Now, however, in the third Round, energy emerged, which allowed the small to become larger and expand. The substances could organize themselves from within, energize themselves. Not only the first plant forms, which we met in the second Round, appeared, but growth was also possible. The first animal forms appeared, which we would consider to be extremely grotesque today. Gigantically large, colossal shapes formed themselves out of the mass of mist. For the occultist there is something of truth when he looks at the clouds and sees that one cloud looks like a camel, another like a horse. In the third Round the beings were mist-like forms, which reproduced by one transforming itself into the other, one deriving from the other, like the lower cell organisms, which are reminiscent of this process. These animal bodies, which formed out of the mist, could now provide the basis for those individualities who came from previous worlds to find bodies. The human being could now incarnate. He found a body which allowed him to appear, at first in an imperfect, primitive, groping way. Failed incarnations were also possible. We could say that during the third Round beings existed on the Earth who were intermediate beings between man and animal, in which the human being did not feel completely right, but could nevertheless incarnate.

Then another Pralaya occurred, and then the fourth Round. That is the Round to which we belong today. The Earth passed through the spiritual state, went through the astral and etheric states and finally arrived at the physical state which we have now reached. During the first Round the foundation for the mineral kingdom was formed, during the second Round the foundation for the vegetable kingdom was formed, during the third Round the possibility for animal forms was established. And now, during the fourth Round, the human being acquired the ability to take on the form he has today.

Let us consider the state of our physical Earth somewhat more closely. The state of the Earth in this fourth Round must be described as being much denser than the states of the previous Rounds. First there was a fiery state, then a misty one, then one between air and water. Still during the beginning of the fourth Round we had a kind of gushing matter, similar to protein. Gradually it all condensed, and what we have today as matter is nothing other than the condensed, originally gushing matter, exactly as ice is condensed water. At the beginning of the fourth Round all beings were created so they could live in this gushing matter. Man had a form similar to the one he has now, but his consciousness was extremely dim, comparable to that of a dreaming person. He dreamed his being in a kind of sleeping consciousness; the spirit was still lacking. Let us consider this state more closely. The human being was possible in that flowing, gushing state. We call these people of the first race³ dream-men. It is difficult to describe them. Another stage followed this one, in which matter became denser and separated into a more spiritual and a more physical materiality, comparable to the North and South Poles.

Now I ask you to consider the difference between the esoteric and the usual understanding of Darwinism. We have the human being present in the indicated stage of the earth, as well as the vegetable kingdom. The animal kingdom was also present, but without sexual reproduction capability, without warm blood and not yet capable of bringing forth sounds. The human being was also mute. He could not yet think, not even dim thoughts. The spirit had not yet entered the bodies. In the following, second race, matter separated into two poles. The human beings withdrew the matter that was useful to them and separated out the less useful matter, from which a kind of lateral branch of the higher animals formed. The lower animals were similar to today's mollusks, even fish-like forms developed.

The human being developed further and at the third stage discarded the matter that would not enable him to become the bearer of a higher consciousness. He gave it up as material for the animals, which now looked like amphibians with gigantic forms. They are described in fables and myths as flying dragons and so on. Until then, no being possessed sexual reproductive capacities. Not until the middle of the third race, the Lemurian epoch, does this appear, albeit primitively. The scene of this development, Lemuria, was in Asia in the Indian Ocean.

During the middle of the Lemurian age the great event occurred which allowed man to become a human being. The human beings who came over from previous planetary states were not all at the same level of development. Those who had reached a normal evolution during the previous misty earth cycle were able to incarnate during the third epoch. Among them, however, there were some who had already reached a higher stage; they could not incorporate during the third race at all. During every Round there are humans who develop to a normal stage and others who are more advanced. These are the masters. They are more highly developed individuals. In Theosophy they are called solar pitris or sun pitris. They had reached a higher spirituality, but could no more incarnate in the bodies of the men of those times than a contemporary person could incarnate in a plant. They waited for further evolution until the appropriate time had come, during the fourth race, when their incarnation could take place. Thus a spiritually highly developed humanity arose. The sagas and myths relate how at that time personalities existed who rose far above their fellow men. Individuals such as Prometheus, the Indian Rishis, Fire-Rishis, who were the leaders of humanity, including Manus, who gave later humanity laws. Only these solar Pitris could incarnate as adepts.

I already mentioned that at the start of the fourth Round sexuality did not yet exist. The separation of the sexes occurred only during the Lemurian time. Therewith the first incarnations were possible, the taking over of a body which hadn't already existed. Previously one being derived from another. With the separation of the sexes during the middle of the Lemurian age, birth and death arose and therefore the possibility of the effects of karma. The human being could burden himself with guilt. Everything we know as “human” arose at that time.

The Lemurian continent was destroyed by a fire-like catastrophe, and the Atlantean continent arose on the floor of what is now the Atlantic Ocean. During the Atlantean time another important event occurred to which I drew your attention when I spoke of the Whitsun holiday. I said that, with the exception of the solar Pitris, all beings lived in a lower spiritual condition. The solar Pitris could only take on selected bodies. Other bodies would only have allowed them to live with a dim consciousness. Dull-minded individuals would have resulted had they used the existent bodies. The Pitris therefore waited until certain animal-like forms evolved further. On the one hand they sank deeper into instinctual desires, but on the other hand, by this means the prerequisites for the later development of the brain were given. Matter was differentiated into nervous matter and sexual matter. The Pitris who had waited for that later time incarnated in this inferior matter. Religion indicates this as the biblical fall from paradise: the incarnation in worsened matter. If that hadn't happened, they would have remained in a much less conscious state. They would not have attained the clear thinking we now posses, but would have remained in a much duller state. They paid for this by allowing their bodies to be inferior, which however was compensated for by refined brain matter, thereby allowing them to achieve a higher level of consciousness and spirituality. A particular result of the evolution of the Atlantean race was the development of a phenomenal memory.

After Atlantis was destroyed by water, continued evolution resulted in our contemporary fifth race, during which deductive reasoning was a special achievement. This enabled the human race to bring art and science to a high level of development, which previously had not been possible. During the fifth sub-race of the fourth Round humanity reached a high-point: control by the spirit, which had incarnated in matter, so that humanity could ascend to higher and higher stages of evolution.

We have seen how the cosmos evolved in rhythmic stages to the point where we now stand. In previous Rounds the following developed:

1. the mineral kingdom

2. the vegetable kingdom

3. the animal kingdom

and then—

4. the human being

Theosophical cosmology is a self-contained whole, derived from the wisdom of the most developed seers. If I had a little more time I would be able to indicate to you how certain natural scientific facts are conducive to testifying to the accuracy of this image of the world. Look at Haeckel's famous phylogenic trees, for example, in which evolution is materialistically explained. If instead of matter you consider the spiritual stages, as Theosophy describes them, then you can make the phylogenic trees as Haeckel did—only the explanation is different.

In order that you do not confuse what I have said with what is described in many theosophical books as the various astral or physical states, I would like to bring the following to your attention. Evolution is often described as if they were concurrent stages. You find spheres placed next to each other, so that it appears as though life went from one sphere to another. In reality only one sphere exists, and only its conditions change. It is always the same sphere which goes through the various metamorphoses: spiritual, astral, physical, and so on.

We have seen that the introduction to these lectures, which we took from Goethe's words, is completely justified—that it is after all the human being who is the goal, the task of the earthly planet. The esotericist knows that every planet has its specific task. Nothing in the cosmos is coincidental.

The task of physical evolution is that what is created for us humans achieve its objective. You will not find a human being as he is today on Earth on any other planet. Beings, yes—but not human beings. The Earth exists in order that “I”-conscious human beings could be created. Through the first four Rounds the kingdoms of nature evolved in order that in the fourth man could be made a self-conscious being, who could reflect himself in his body. He will rise to higher levels of evolution, something that few can understand correctly. In the next, the fifth Round, the mineral kingdom will disappear. All mineral matter will be transformed to vegetable matter. Then the vegetable kingdom will reach its culmination and in the next Round the animal kingdom will form the lowest kingdom. During the seventh Round the human being will achieve his highest level of evolution. He will have become what planetary evolution intends.

Whoever understands this can have a profounder insight into the religious documents. There was a time when people believed like children in the religious documents. Then the Enlightenment came, and nothing is believed any more. But a time will come when people will learn to understand the images preserved for us in religious documents, fairy tales and fables. Thus we have the seven Rounds as the seven days of creation in the Bible. The first three days of creation have gone by, we are now in the fourth day of creation and the last three days of creation are yet to come. The first three days of creation in Genesis represent the past Rounds, and the last three indicate what is to come in the future. Rightly understood, Moses wanted to say with the description of the first three days, that we live in the fourth Round; he describes the fourth day of creation in a quite special way. That is why you find a double creation in Genesis.⁴ Those who judge the Bible with their intellect only will never understand it. The human being of the seventh day of creation has not been created. That man was made of clay is a symbol of our fourth Round. The double creation tells us in images of what has been created, the stage in which we now find ourselves, and of the stage at the end of the seventh Round. When we see the Bible's message in this way, a meaning of these documents suddenly arises which we could not have previously understood. Humanity will finally see that there is such a profound meaning there that one would almost have to become a different person in order to understand it.

It is necessary that in our times the high, spiritual meaning of these old documents be revealed, and that is the task of the theosophical movement. It doesn't criticize the materialism of our times because it considers it to be necessary. But it strives to enable people to again recognize the spiritual meaning of these documents. We will work on this during the coming winter. Today's lecture is the last of this cycle. We will, however, still meet here every Monday at eight o'clock.

• 1. The second volume of Theosophy never appeared. Instead, Steiner's An Outline of Esoteric Science, which includes a detailed description of cosmological evolution, was published in 1909.
• 2. Dhyani Chohans: in Christian terminology these are archangels.
• 3. “Race” in this sense is a theosophical term. Steiner later used the expression “cultural epoch” and similar ones.
• 4. Double creation: This may refer to Genesis 1, 26, where God creates humankind. In Genesis 2, 7, this creation is described again, albeit differently.

Today I would like to return to a few things concerning human principles. We must seek out what is in the world as it is in ourselves. A clock is a device that is only possible because of an intelligence that has designed it and put it together. It is foolish to say that the clock has given itself this wise arrangement. It would be equally foolish to say that man has created himself in his design.

We have a small organ in our ears, the 'Organ of Corti'. There are hairs on it; and the hairs are tuned to a certain tone. This sounds when a note is struck on the piano. The vibrations of the air are transferred to the hairs, which then resonate. The same is true of the eye. The eye is also a complex apparatus that has come into being through wisdom. Man is wisdom materialized in this way. The world has been made according to thought.

We call the wisdom in space 'cosmic wisdom' or ['Mahat']. Mahat is the sum of wisdom that is spread throughout the world. So it is a distillation of wisdom from the clock. This is just as man draws wisdom from nature.

Mahat is the archetype of wisdom. “Mala” is the image of Mahat in man. According to Indian teaching, it was like this: Brahma was initially alone, slumbering, then he awakened. One night of Brahma was over. The creative wisdom awakens in him. Nothing else existed yet except for the creative wisdom of Brahma. And this creative wisdom is Mahat. A solar system exists as a thought in the mind of Brahma. We think this cosmic thought after him.

Wisdom is present everywhere in the world. It flows from a kind of spiritual seed into our soul. Cosmic wisdom is in the soul. Mala lives in many. Mahat only lives once. When Mahat becomes individual, that is, becomes Mala, it needs a connecting link. That is Ahankara. Through Ahankara, every person is connected to the general wisdom of the world.

I withdraw into myself and step back from the external sense world. By breaking this bridge, I am allowed to look inward. Through Ahankara, I have within me that which is common to all. I have to go back to world wisdom. First, man finds Manas within himself and then he finds Ahankara, which leads him back to unity, to divine wisdom. When we go through Ahankara, you will realize that we are going through an important spiritual process. We generally go up more. It is the awareness that one's own self is a piece of the divine self. I then do not persist in my self, but I begin to feel as a link in the general Mahat. I am only because I was originally brought into the world by a divine thought. Ahankara leads to absorption in the world of God's thoughts. I and the Father are one. I do not speak because I want to, but because I let Ahankara flow in. For the physical sense world, we would be wrong to say, “I and the others are one.” Mahat is at the same time what we call Atma in Theosophy.

I think two thoughts. First: “I want to go to town tomorrow”; and second: “I want to visit a friend.” These are two thoughts that are present in my soul as one. So people are thoughts of Mahat. People are together in Mahat. Mahat has many Atmas, but all Atmas are together in Mahat. This Mahat of the world system in which we develop is the “third Logos”. And so we can say: we consist of three principles, firstly of Manas, secondly of Budhi and thirdly of Atma. When we rise to this, we are no longer individuals.

At the level of the Atma, we call the thought an image. Let us now try to grasp the difference even more clearly. What lives in us as thought is, in its true significance, a shadow image, in its true essence. It behaves like a shadow in relation to an object. The shadow image is only there when the lamp is there and I am there. But one can also sit in such a way that one only ever sees the shadow images. If we could go out into that sphere where the true essence of these shadows is, we would recognize the archetypes. And we also call these archetypes “spirits”. Spirit is a spiritual essence that is both thought and will. Thus it is a creative thought. The living entities are realities, they are individuality. An intellectual thought is what lives with kama manas. If we free the intellectual thought from the symbols, we are left with only a gray generality, an abstract thought. The soul must have passed through this abstract thinking. Then, instead of from below, new content flows in from above. When we walk down the street, our thoughts are stimulated from the outside. But they must also be able to receive impressions from within.

We can make ourselves passive, that is, we can surrender to Mahat, the third Logos. We then call this “spiritual” or “intuition.

In this way, the spiritual flows into us through Ahankara, through Manas. Therefore, Manas can be influenced from above, by Budhi, and from below, by Brahma, by the sense world. We thus have nine principles. Then we still have to deal with the tenth. The seventh principle is the third Logos. We can [also] only speak of seven principles. When a principle disappears downwards, one must enter from above.

Man has currently developed four principles. The fifth principle is emerging, and the following two are still quite undeveloped. What we discard below must be replaced above. Our consciousness does not fill the whole body. We have as little control over the manas body in Kamaloka as you have over the physical body here. After Devachan, Ahankara or Budhi occurs.

It is not as cold in Devachan as it is often made out to be, because the spirits that pass through do not feel. While we are attached to the particular in physical life and Kamaloka, here we feel the great, the whole, the great primal essence of the world, in which all things flow together. Ahankara comes to life all the more once we have freed ourselves from particularity in Kamaloka. The more Kama disappears, the more Budhi arises in us.

The development of Budhi is an essential development of the emotional life, but in such a way that the world of special interests is transformed into the world of common interests. The mystic calls this the purification of the astral body. It would be wrong to think that the mystic should become insensitive. On the contrary, one should not be cold towards the world, but aligned with the center, of which every single being is a part. We must become objective.

Justice in feeling is the same as what St. Paul calls the law. St. Paul says: Through the law sin entered into the world. Without the law sin would have been dead.

You will not be able to call the Kama nature of the lion or the tiger sinful. Because the animal is not capable of awakening in itself, ennobled, that which lives outside as Kama. It is different when the being is capable of uniting all special interests under the law. Budhi is subject to the law. If there were only animal kama natures, there would be no sin in the world.

Out of Budhi is born the law. So long as Kama appears only in nature, there is no sin. Only after there were beings through whom Budhi could work, that is, beings who could shape the law, was there sin. I use the power of feeling to come to the great unity of nature. The animal can find satisfaction in sensual pleasure. Man cannot, because Budhi demands more. Budhi is the sum total of the world of feelings. This has been distributed among the individual creatures. Not a single drop of the world of feelings should be lost. What remains unrefined is still alive, but our task is to lead it back to the common reservoir from which it emerged. That is why Theosophy demands joint action. Our task is to collect the feelings so that they can pass over to the new planet as a unity. What is left over from the moon has been left behind as the eighth sphere, unprocessed. This remainder of our moon is connected with the unprocessed part of our ancestors. It is what pulls us down. These are milestones that have to be dragged along, and this is what causes the delays in cosmic development. This also has to do with what we have come to know under the Brothers of Shadow and their influence.

There are two objections that are often made. They are easiest to grasp right now. Sinnett's book was the first popular [Theosophical] book. This book has acquired many members, who are now well-known, for the society. The book was written under the influence of a master. The master wanted to make these teachings accessible to the West. It was also partly inspired by questions that Sinnett himself addressed to the master. The connection was established through Mrs. Blavatsky.

The book first won a great many people who are now leading figures for the cause. The book “Isis unveiled” was much too heavy a book. The “Secret Doctrine” was published much later.

This book by Sinnett contains all the questions – at least hinted at – including those I have just mentioned, but not in the form of the explanations I have given. Instead, they are presented in two forms: firstly, from the wisdom itself, the secret knowledge of the masters of our lodge from time immemorial; and secondly, from the other part, the outer form. This form is adapted to the ways of looking at things and the way of thinking in the Occident. The book arose out of these two needs. The book has, to a certain extent, distorted ideas. This is due to the fact that they could not be understood in their full depth at the beginning. The work in detail always depends on the personality of the editor concerned. That which is inspiration is the core of wisdom, a comparison from higher regions. Wisdom is not preserved in the form in which it appears in our books. It is received in the form of arupa. The editor in question has to bring it into form, so that it still differs from what was originally received.

Today we may be able to express things even more clearly than they are in the “Secret Doctrine”. The same esoteric teachings also live in the secret teachings of the Rosicrucians. A few have studied Sinnett's book. Eduard von Hartmann wrote a treatise about Sinnett's book at the time. This treatise culminates in the fact that one has to deal with fantasies, and in a sentence that warns against it. But he approaches the book with a certain impartiality that is otherwise not found in the West. Eduard von Hartmann has familiarized himself with the sevenfold division. He has grasped that the higher part of human nature consists of Atma, Budhi, Manas, and that it becomes immortal when it is drawn to a higher one. In this way, it also becomes immortal. Eduard von Hartmann correctly says that only in the course of the third round does a fertilization of the individuality occur, so that one cannot speak of a survival of that which develops from the third round onwards and in the same. He cannot see what it is in man that re-embodies itself when you have not yet developed the sixth part. So they are not immortal. So he cannot see how one can speak of an immortality of the beings from the first, second and third rounds. Then come the fifth, sixth and seventh rounds; from the beginning, that is, from the first epoch of our first earthly developmental series, it is lunar. Then comes the earthly epoch and after our earthly epoch we still have three following ones. In each round we have seven races. Even if the sixth basic part has not yet developed in our humanity – from the very beginning, what is immortal in man was already present and in a much more perfect, more brilliant way. It was there. What has now, so to speak, submerged was also present in an earlier epoch, but in a liberated state, not yet having entered the body. All of us who are now alive may be called thoughts of the divine primal spirit. The physical basis, the etheric and the kamic basis, is developing below. This is the first chain of development.

And now imagine that at the beginning of development all individual souls were present as spirits. Imagine this original sphere, which is now scattered, of coarse matter. This sphere was in an atmosphere of a purely spiritual nature, in which the individual souls lived. They were still virginal and untouched by any materiality. These individual souls then still lived in close harmony with Atma. They were still one with Atma. The first stage of soul development is still 'being with Atma'. The formation of matter continues, but the development of the spirit descends. The Budhi comes to meet the physical. The moon epoch develops Manas in the floating atmosphere, so that Atma, Budhi, Manas are already emerging, and have been prepared: body, life force, Kama. In the third round they unite, the two, in Kama and Manas they can devour each other.

In the development of our group and our race, two currents have merged. One that descended and one that ascended. Imagine a crowd gathered in a meadow; they are led by a guide. Each individual builds a tent and makes windows in it. The group soul thinks the individuals. The individuals were related to the group soul as my left and right hands are to the human organism. From the very beginning the entities were there. At first the tent is still together and comfortable. Then it changes into physicality. Think again of the lamp reflected in many spheres. The mirror images then become luminous themselves. Each individual sphere becomes luminous and a selfish being.

And now something about the purpose of the world process: we have to compare the two concepts of 'intention' and 'achievement'. The intention is what wants to come to the outside, and the end is what the intention has realized in. It is best to look at a specific case to make this clear. Let us take a moon manvantara or an earth epoch and, within it, the pralaya. In the moon manvantara, the following has developed: Kama. How did these people come about? They were put together from the outside by Kama. Kama worked with love in them to bring them into being. They go out of the manvantara with a specific goal. What has been drawn in is universal Kama; what flows out is now love. It is a reversal of the current. In the beginning, Brahma has the tendency to emanate all Kama. This then comes back in a different form. It passes through special beings. Emanated wisdom and emanated love come back to Brahma again. That is the purpose of the world. Hunger is like nourishment, because before saturation the same condition exists as afterwards.

Because God gives people the power of creation, they give it back to him. What has been given as a sacrifice is given again as a sacrifice.

On the whole, the world can only be understood as an act of love, as freedom and as sacrifice. One should not criticize the world process on one's own initiative. The gift of thought is only given to people of the fifth round, during the fifth round it will still have a completely different development, and in the sixth it will

[termination of the transcript].

Today I will talk about the development process of the three human races up to the initial stages. Let us first stay with our round and our race. It is the fourth round and the fifth race in which we live. I will describe the development of our present race. The [Atlantic] race precedes it. This lived on a continent between America and Africa. Parts of Africa still belong to it, at certain times also Egypt - although Egypt has repeatedly been under water - and Greenland. This race was preceded by the Lemurian race. In this race, man received the Manas from Kama. This was preceded by two other human races. It is an exaggeration to call the preceding races human races.

The individualities that make up our causal body – that was before the middle of the third race – they were not actually incarnated, but were in a state of spiritual-cosmic descent at that time. Try to visualize this correctly for now. I will use an image to make this completely clear.

Imagine: a child is learning to write, and you start by taking a certain book, let's say a book about physics, and having sentences from physics copied out. However, it is not important that we write a, e, i, u, because the content of the physics book floats over everything, so to speak. The teacher is the mediator. Let us assume that I have the child write the sentences of the physics book so that he gets used to recognizing the content. At first, the content will remain outside. But the time will come when the content is absorbed into the child, and the child then writes the content from within, which has been imposed on him from the outside. Now imagine the living content of all the causal bodies that have been incarnating continuously since the third human race as the content of the physics book. Also, imagine that they will also incarnate. This content was not yet incarnated at the time, as a virgin individuality [hovered] over what is now taking place down here.

First of all, we have to imagine that everything that later incarnates is present in a complete unity. It was, as it were, all world soul, which still contained everything that later developed as a causal body. The idea of Giordano Bruno will make this clear to us in a very wonderful way. The idea is not in the book, but you have to form it. We compare the world with the individual human soul, and then we imagine the world soul with its thoughts instead of the human soul with its thoughts. These are living beings. Human thoughts must be expanded into living entities. They would then experience the causal bodies as the entities of thought.

Everything that lives in us was once in the third human race, which was full of thoughts of the world soul. Then the cosmic descent happened. It was all like currents coming out of the divine center. Christian esotericism says: The angels proclaim the glory of God. Every thought proclaims the glory of God. It is, so to speak, the mouthpiece of God. This now descends into the Rupa-region of the mental world. It takes shape in the most diverse ways. Only now can we speak of the individual being formed. Now man begins to feel himself. He is in the Rupa-region. Now he descends further into the astral region. The beings have then become astral entities.

Now there is a law in the spiritual cosmos that says that the lower connects with the upper when the lower and the upper have become similar. The upper has become astral. Just as human thoughts surround themselves with astral matter, so do world thoughts surround themselves with material and astral entities.

Entities had come from the moon that had already been physically real before, entities that were clumsy entities that were not only similar to animal forms. They were gigantic figures, entities that could not think, in which only chemical forces had formed. What was manasic worked like a thread from the outside, just as the individual bee is guided by the bee soul. What guides here is the same as what descends later. That is already doing the work. As Kama develops, the reaching down happens from above. They have become astral from the physical form, they have returned to the state of the germ.

The beings we call Pitris pass over to the Pralaya and are fertilized by that which had previously hovered above them. Everything that is chemical in us comes over. The Moon Pitris had no brain; they had no intellect. They were only ruled by what has now receded as the sympathetic nervous system and now performs the unconscious functions.

Now that which is Kama-Manas splits off first from the effervescent part of the world soul. This now passes through three elemental realms. It develops arupically, rupically and astrally. And at the moment when the intellect has become astral, our round begins. The Moon-Pitris come from the planet like seeds. The first sphere is an arupic sphere. There the seed-bodies float first. There the arupic intellect is formed. Then there is a small pralaya. The second sphere follows. They work into each other in such a way that now strange formations arise, formations which are more finely shaped on one side. The outer clumsy entities of the moon Pitris are preserved. This contracts during the time when the second sphere is forming. In the third sphere, the intellect becomes astral and the former Kama nature also becomes astral again. Now they are together and now the fourth sphere also begins, the actual human race.

Now man develops into the etheric form. In the first race, the beings or human beings were entirely etheric, until in the third race the I descended, where that which is worked into it can connect with manas and work with manas, the intellect. Externally, kama-manas appears. Man recognizes good and evil. Now he begins to incarnate further and further. In the second race, the further development is prepared. We begin to form incarnations only in the middle of the third race in the Lemurian race.

What I will use now is a correct image. We first exist in the world soul, as it were in a cornucopia. Then we descend deeper and deeper, and as this descent happens, there is a mysterious affinity with some body down there. Because I am now Atma, there is a physical body down there that belongs to me in an occult way. Then I descend into prana, then comes kama, which evolves into manas. Together: the egos in Atma are distributed among the beings evolving in kama.

When the Lemurian race unfolded, there were not yet animals in the sense that we know them today, but they were very different beings. What was ready was the entire mineral kingdom. These were not individual minerals, but a jumbled realm. The mineral kingdom also froze into solid forms. Inside, KamaManas developed in man, outside the mineral kingdom. Now the principle of the plant kingdom was dissolved in the generally floating mineral kingdom. They were not yet individual plants - as in the “Opodeldok” the etheric plant forms interweave - because the plant principle lives in it. Likewise, that which became animals does not yet live in physical forms, but was a swelling, soft mass, although individualized to a certain degree.

The spirit hovered over the waters. The world spirit had not yet sunk into the individual beings. First the mineral kingdom solidified, then the plant kingdom and then the animal kingdom. The consolidation of the human kingdom took place simultaneously. One must not assume that humans have developed from the animals we call monkeys. The apes are those beings who missed the connection at the time, who were therefore not incarnated with Manas. The ape egos are taken up by decadent bodies. Within the mental realm, there are still countless other animal souls that would incarnate if animal bodies were to arise within the present time. We must not imagine this in a moral way, but more cosmically, concerning the world soul.

Let us assume that our Theosophical Society does not succeed now, then the American-European development would come to a standstill. But if we triumph, then [gap in transcript]

A culture was established in the Gobi Desert, and from there all the development of that time was broadcast. Now, not a geographical closure is to be formed, but more of a moral one; a core is to be formed that will serve as the foundation for the next race. If the right egos are not found now, a failure would be recorded and there would be a delay. In the normal development, Nirmanakayas can only develop when the physical body has dissolved back into the mental.

Plato is a so-called five-rounder. This state has been artificially achieved. But then you will have all astral bodies. The Buddha or Christ natures are not just five-rounders or six-rounders. They work from the mental body. These are then a kind of double nature, which now develop in the physical body what others will only achieve in much later periods of time.