The Rudolf Steiner Archive

We shall now study man in the state of waking life in the physical world, in the state of sleep and in so-called death. Everyone is familiar, from his own experience, with the waking state.

When the human being sinks into sleep, his astral body and ego, together with what has been worked upon in the astral body by the ego, withdraw from the physical and etheric bodies. When you observe the sleeping human being clairvoyantly, physical body and etheric body lie there in the bed. These two members remain connected whereas the astral body emerges together with the higher members; with clairvoyance we can see how, when sleep begins, the astral body, bathed in a kind of light, draws out of the other two bodies. To describe this condition with greater exactitude we must say that the astral body of modern man appears as if it consisted in many streams and sparkles of light and the whole appears like two intertwining spirals, as if there were two 6-figures, one of which vanishes into the physical body, while the other extends far out into the cosmos like the trail of a comet. Both these trails of the astral body very soon become invisible in their further extensions, so that the phenomenon then has an ovoid shape. When the human being wakes, the trail no longer extends into the cosmos and everything draws again into the etheric and physical bodies.

Dreaming is an intermediate condition between waking and sleeping. Sleep that is filled with dreams is a condition where the astral body has, it is true, loosened its whole connection with the physical body, but is still connected with the etheric body. Man's field of vision is then pervaded with the pictures we call dreams. This is, in very truth, an intermediate condition because the astral body has detached itself completely from the physical body, while remaining connected, in a certain way, with the etheric body.

The human being, while he is asleep, lives in his astral body outside his physical and etheric bodies. The fact that he must sink into sleep has deep significance for his whole make-up. Do not imagine that the astral body is inactive and has no work to do during the night while it is outside the physical and etheric bodies. During the day, when the astral body is within the physical and etheric bodies, influences come to it from the outside world, impressions which man receives as a result of the functioning of his own astral body, through his senses, through his activity in the physical world. Feelings and experiences, everything that works in upon him from outside continues on into the astral body. This constitutes the actual feeling and thinking part of man, and the physical body, together with the etheric body, is only the transmitter, the instrument. Thinking and willing take place in the astral body. While the human body is active in the external world during the day, the astral body is receiving impressions all the time. But let us remember, on the other hand, that the astral body is the builder of the etheric and physical bodies. Just as the physical body with all its organs has hardened out of the etheric body, so everything that streams and is active in the etheric body has been born out of the astral body.

Out of what is the astral body itself born? It is born out of the universal astral organism which weaves through the whole of the cosmos. If you want to envisage, by means of a simile, the relation of the small portion of astral substantiality contained in your astral body to the great astral ocean in which all human beings, animals, plants, minerals, and planets too, are contained and out of which they are born, if you want to envisage the relation of the human astral body to the great astral ocean, think of one drop of a liquid in a glass. The drop derives its existence entirely from the liquid in the glass. Similarly, what is contained in an astral body was once embraced within the astral ocean of the cosmos. It has separated out from this ocean and having passed into an etheric body and a physical body, has become a distinct entity, like the drop of liquid.

As long as the astral body lay within the astral ocean, it received its laws and its impressions from this cosmic source. It had its life within this cosmic astral body. After its separation it is exposed, during man's waking consciousness, to the impressions received from the physical world; so that it is divided between the influences coming from the cosmic astral body and those which it receives from outside as the result of the activity imposed upon it by the physical world. When man has reached the goal of his earth-evolution, this division, will merge into harmony. Today, these two kinds of influences do not harmonise.

Now the astral body is the builder of the etheric body and indirectly—because the etheric body is in turn the builder of the physical body—also of the physical body. Everything that the astral body has built up piece by piece through the ages has been born out of the great cosmic astral ocean. Because only harmonious and sound laws proceed from this astral ocean, the work carried out by the astral body in building the etheric and physical bodies is originally sound and harmonious; but as a result of the influences which came to the astral body from outside, from the physical world, impairing its original harmony, there arise all those disturbances of the physical body which prevail in mankind today.

If the astral body remained all the time within the human being, the strong influences of the physical world would soon destroy the harmony brought by the astral body from the cosmic ocean. The human being would very soon be spent by illness and exhaustion. During sleep the astral body withdraws from the impressions of the physical world, which contain nothing that produces harmony, and passes into the cosmic harmony from which it was born. And so in the morning it brings with it the lingering effects of the refreshment and renewal it has experienced during the night. Every night the astral body renews its harmony with the cosmic astral ocean and reveals itself to the clairvoyant as anything but inactive. The clairvoyant perceives a connection between the astral ocean and the one comet-like trail and observes how this part of the astral body works to eliminate the debility caused by the world of disharmony. This activity of the astral body expresses itself in the feeling of refreshed vigour in the morning. Having lived during the night within the great cosmic harmony, the astral body has of course again to adjust itself to the physical world; hence the feeling of greatest vigour does not arise until a few hours have elapsed after waking, when the astral body has again drawn into the physical body.

We will now turn to death, the “brother” of sleep, and study the condition of the human being after death. The difference between a man who is dead and one who is only sleeping is that at death the etheric body passes away together with the astral body and the physical body alone is left behind in the physical world. From birth until death the etheric body never leaves the physical body except during certain states of Initiation.

The period immediately following death is of great importance for the human being. It lasts for many hours, even days, during which the whole of the incarnation that is just over comes before the soul of the dead as in a great tableau of memories. This happens to every human being after death. The peculiarity of this tableau is that as long as it remains in the form in which it appears immediately after death, all the subjective experiences of the man during his life are expunged.

Our experiences are always accompanied by feelings either of joy or pain, upliftment of sorrow, in other words our outer life is always associated with an inner life. The joys and sorrows connected with the pictures of the past life are not present in the memory-tableau. The human being confronts this memory-tableau as objectively as he confronts a painting; even if this painting depicts a man who is sorrowful or full of pain, we still look at him quite objectively; we can, it is true, discern his sorrow, but we do not experience it directly. So it is with these pictures immediately after death. The tableau widens out and in an astonishingly brief span of time man sees all the detailed events of his life.

Separation of the physical body from the etheric body during life can take place only in an initiate, but there are certain moments when the etheric body suddenly loosens from the physical body. This occurs when a man has had terrible experiences, for instance, a dreadful fall or has been in danger of drowning.—The shock causes a kind of loosening of the etheric body from the physical body and the consequence is that in such a moment the whole of the previous life stands before the soul like a memory-picture. This is analogous to the experience after death.

Partial separations of the etheric body also occur when a limb has “gone to sleep” as we say if a hand, for instance, has gone to sleep, the seer can perceive the etheric part of the hand protruding like a glove; parts of the etheric brain also protrude when a man is in a state of hypnosis. Because the etheric body is woven in the physical body in tiny, pinpoint formations, there arises in the physical body the well-known sensation of prickling in a limb that has gone to sleep.

After the lapse of the time during which the etheric body together with the astral body is emerging from the physical body after death, there comes the moment when the astral body, with the higher members, leaves the etheric body. The latter separates off and the memory-tableau fades away; but something of it remains; it is not wholly lost. What may be called ether- or life-substance dissipates in the cosmic ether, but a kind of essence remains and this can never be lost to the human being through his further journeyings. He bears this with him into all his future incarnations as a kind of extract from the life-tableau, even though he has no remembrance of it. Out of this extract is formed what is called, with concrete reality, the “Causal Body.” After every incarnation a new page is added to the Book of Life. This augments the life-essence and, if the past lives were fruitful, causes the next life to develop in the proper way. This is what causes a life to be rich or poor in talents, qualities and the like.

In order to understand the life of the astral body after its separation from the etheric body, we must consider the conditions obtaining in physical life. In physical life it is the astral body that is happy, suffers, satisfies its desires, impulses and wishes through the organs of the physical body; after death these physical instruments are no longer at its disposal. The epicure can no longer satisfy his desire for choice food because the tongue has passed away with the physical body; but the desires, being connected with the astral body, remain in the man and this gives rise to the “burning thirst” of the Kamaloca period. (Kama = desire, wish; “loca” is “place”, but it is in reality a condition, not a place.) A man, who during physical life learns to transcend the physical body, shortens his time in Kamaloca.

To take delight in the beauty or harmony of things means growth and development, for this leads us beyond the material world. To delight in art that is materialistic increases the difficulties of the Kamaloca state, whereas delight in spiritual art lightens them. Every noble, spiritual delight shortens the time in Kamaloca. Already during earthly life we must break ourselves of pleasures and desires which can be satisfied only by the physical instrument. The period of Kamaloca is a time of the breaking of material pleasures and impulses. It lasts for approximately one third of the time of the earthly life. There is something singular about the experiences undergone in Kamaloca. The human being begins actually to live backwards through the whole of his past life. Immediately after death there was a memory-tableau devoid of the elements of joy and suffering; in Kamaloca the human being lives through all the joy and all the suffering again in such a way that he must experience in himself all the joy and the suffering he caused to others. This has nothing to do with the law of karma.

The journey backwards begins with the last event before death and proceeds at triple speed, to birth. When in this backward passage of remembrance the human being reaches his birth, the part of the astral body that has been transformed by the ego combines with the causal body and what has not been so transformed falls away like a shade, a phantom; this is the astral corpse of the human being. He has laid aside the physical corpse and the etheric corpse and now the astral corpse. He now lives through new conditions: those of Devachan. Devachan is all around us, just as is the astral world.

When the life has been lived through backwards as far as earliest childhood, when the three corpses have been discarded, man reaches the condition mysteriously indicated in the Bible by the words: “Except ye become as little children, ye cannot enter the Kingdom of Heaven.” (Devachan, the spiritual world—this is the Kingdom of Heaven in the Christian sense.)

The world of Devachan must now be traversed. It is a world as manifold and differentiated as our physical world. Just as solid regions, continents, are distinguished in the physical world, with an expanse of water surrounding the solid land, with the air above and above the air still finer conditions, so there is a similar differentiation in Devachan, in the spiritual world. By analogy with conditions on earth, the phenomena to be found in Devachan have been given similar names.

Firstly, there is a region which may be compared with solid, physical regions: it is the Continental region of Devachan. What is physical here on the earth is, in this region of Devachan, found to be a multitude of spiritual Beings. Think, for example, of a physical human being. To devachanic vision he appears like this: what the physical senses perceive, vanishes, and light flashes up in the sphere immediately around the physical man, where otherwise there is a void; in the middle, where the physical body is, there is an empty, shadowy space—like a kind of negative. Animals and human beings appear here in negative pictures; blood appears as green—its complementary colour. All formations which are physical in our world are present in the Archetypes of Devachan.

A second region—not separated off, but like a second stage—is the Oceanic region of Devachan. It is not water it is a particular substantiality which in rhythmic streams pervades the world of Devachan in colour that may be compared with that of young peach-blossom in Spring. It is fluidic life and it pervades the whole of Devachan. What is divided among individual human beings and animals here below is present in Devachan as a kind of watery element. We have a picture of it when we think of the diffusion of the blood in the human organism.

The third region of Devachan can best be characterised by saying that what lives here, in the physical world, within beings in the way of feelings, of happiness and suffering, joy, pain and the like, is present there in external manifestation.

To take an example.—Suppose a battle is waged here on the earth. Cannons, weapons and the like—these are all on the physical plane. But within human beings on the physical plane there are mutual feelings of revenge, pain, passions; the two armies confront one another full of opposing passions. Think of all this translated into external manifestation and you have a picture of how it appears on the devachanic plane. All that happens here on a battlefield, appears, in Devachan, like the bursting of a fearful storm. This is the atmosphere, the surrounding air of Devachan. Just as our earth is surrounded by air, so all the feelings that break out here, whether they come to physical expression or not, spread out in Devachan like an atmosphere.

The fourth region of Devachan contains the archetypal forms, the archetypal foundations of all truly original achievements on the earth. If we examine closely the happenings of the physical world, we find that the vast majority of inner processes are instigated from outside. A flower or an animal gives us joy; without the flower or the animal we should not experience this joy. But there are also processes which are not instigated from outside. A new idea, a work of art, a new machine—all these things bring into the world something that was not there before original creations come into being in all these domains. If new creations did not arise in the world, humanity would make no progress. Original creations given to the world by great artists and discoverers are only higher in the sense of degree than every other truly original act—even the most insignificant. The point is that something original arises in the inner being.

Archetypes exist in Devachan even for the most insignificant original actions; all these things are already prefigured in yonder world; any original achievement of a human being is already present in the germinal state, even before his birth.

Thus in Devachan we find four regions whose counter-images on the physical plane are Earth, Water, Air and Fire. There is the Continental region as the solid crust in Devachan-in the spiritual sense, of course; then the Oceanic region, corresponding to our area of water; the Atmospheric region, the streaming flow of passions and the like—beauty, but also tumult is to be found there. Finally, there is the all-pervading world of the Archetypes. Everything in the way of initiatives of will and original ideas to which, later on, effect is given in the physical world by beings who return thither—all this must be lived through by the soul in yonder world in order that fresh power may be gathered for the new life.

In the last lecture we described the worlds through which the human being has to pass after death, when everything that binds him to his physical instrument has been laid aside in Kamaloca or—as we say in Rosicrucian Theosophy—in the Elemental world. We also spoke of “Rupa-Devachan,” or the region known as the Heaven world, the world of Inspiration. We heard that this region-the Spirit-Land proper-has a fourfold constitution, like the physical world. There is the Continental region, permeated by a flowing oceanic region which is more aptly to be compared with the blood circulation in the human organism. In the surrounding “air” of Devachan which is analogous to the atmosphere of our earth, is to be found all that pervades the souls of beings in the physical world in the way of joys, sufferings, sorrows, afflictions, only this air must be conceived in a much wider sense because this world is the dwelling-place of other, quite different Beings who are not incarnate in physical bodies. Finally we heard how in the fourth region of Devachan everything that is truly original, from the most trivial to the most lofty inspiration of the inventor or artist, exists as an archetype. In this world Lies the motive force of the progress of our earth. But in addition to these constituent realms of the spiritual world proper, we find that which links our earth with still higher worlds.

Up to now we have been considering things that have reference only to earth-evolution, not those that transcend this evolution. A man who attains Initiation acquires knowledge of what our earth was in the past and will be in the future, of what links the earth with worlds beyond our system.

Important above all in Devachan, in this “world of Reason”, is the Akasha Chronicle as we are accustomed to call it. The Akasha Chronicle is not actually brought into being in Devachan but in an even higher region; when, however, the seer has risen to the world of Devachan, he can begin to perceive what is known as the Akasha Chronicle.

What is the Akasha Chronicle? We can form the truest conception of it by realising that what comes to pass on our earth makes a lasting impression upon certain delicate essences, an impression which can be discovered by a seer who has attained Initiation. It is not an ordinary but a living Chronicle. Suppose a human being lived in the first century after Christ; what he thought, felt and willed in those days, what passed into deeds—this is not obliterated but preserved in this delicate essence. The seer can behold it-not as if it were recorded in a history book, but as it actually happened. How a man moved, what he did, a journey he took—it can all be seen in these spiritual pictures; the impulses of will, the feelings, the thoughts, can also be seen. But we must not imagine that these pictures are images of the physical personalities. That is not the case. To take a simple example.—When a man moves his hand, his will pervades the moving hand and it is this force of will that can be seen in the Akasha Chronicle. What is spiritually active in us and has flowed into the Physical, is there seen in the Spiritual. Suppose, for example, we look for Caesar. We can follow all his undertakings, but let us be quite clear that it is rather his thoughts that we see in the Akasha Chronicle; when he set out to do something we see the whole sequence of decisions of the will to the point where the deed was actually performed. To observe a specific event in the Akasha Chronicle is not easy. We must help ourselves by linking on to external knowledge. If the seer is trying to observe some action of Caesar and takes an historical date as a point of focus, the result will come more easily. Historical dates are, it is true, often unreliable, but they are sometimes of assistance. When the seer directs his gaze to Caesar, he actually sees the person of Caesar in action, phantom-like, as though he were standing before him, speaking with him. But when a man is looking into the past, various things may happen to him if, in spite of possessing some degree of seership, he has not entirely found his bearings in the higher worlds.

The Akasha Chronicle is to be found in Devachan, but it extends downwards into the astral world, with the result that in this lower world the pictures of the Akasha Chronicle may often be a mirage; they are often disconnected and unreliable and it is important to remember this when we set about investigating the past. Let me indicate the danger of these possible mistakes by an example.—If through the indications of the Akasha Chronicle we are led back to the epoch in the earth's evolution when Atlantis was still in existence, before the great Flood, we can follow the happenings and conditions of life in old Atlantis. These were repeated later on, but in a different form. In north Germany, in central Europe, eastwards of Atlantis, long before the Christian era and long before Christianity made its way thither from the south, happenings took place which were a repetition of conditions in Atlantis. Only afterwards, through the influences coming from the south, did the peoples begin to lead a life that was really their own. Here is an example of how easy it is to be exposed to error.—If someone is observing the astral pictures of the Akasha Chronicle, not the devachanic pictures, he may be confused in regard to these repetitions of Atlantean conditions. This was actually the case in the indications about Atlantis given by Scott-Elliot; they tally with the astral pictures but not with the devachanic pictures of the true Akasha Chronicle. The truth of this matter had sometime to be made known. The moment we know where the source of the errors lies, it is easy to assess the indications correctly.

Another source of error may arise when reliance is placed upon indications given by mediums. When mediums are possessed of the necessary faculties, they can see the Akasha Chronicle, although in most cases only its astral reflections. Now there is something singular about the Akasha Chronicle. If we discover some person there, he behaves like a living being. If we find Goethe, for example, he may not only answer in the words which he actually spoke in his life but he gives answer in the Goethean sense; it may even happen that he utters in his own style and trend, verses he never actually wrote. The Akasha picture is so alive that it is like a force working on in the mind of the human being. Hence the picture may be confused with the individuality himself. Mediums believe that they are in contact with the dead man whose life is continuing in the spirit, whereas in reality it is only his astral Akasha-picture. The spirit of Caesar may already have reincarnated on earth and it is his Akasha picture that gives the answers in seances. It is not the individuality of Caesar but only the enduring impression which the picture of Caesar has left behind in the Akasha Chronicle. This is the basis of errors in very many spiritualist seances. We must distinguish between what remains of the human being in his Akasha-picture and what continues to evolve as the true individuality. These are matters of extreme importance.

When the human being has passed out of Kamaloca, he has weaned himself from all the habits for which a physical instrument is necessary. He enters into the region described above. The period that now begins for him is exceedingly important and we must understand what it is that happens.

All the man's earlier experiences in his life of thought and feeling, all his passions, confront him in Devachan as his environment. Firstly, he sees his own physical body in its archetypal form. Just as on the earth we move among rocks, mountains and stones, in yonder world we move among the archetypes of all the structures that exist in the physical world. A man, therefore, moves over his own physical body. The fact that his own physical body is an object outside him is a pointer to him after death, for he recognises by this that he has left Kamaloca and has entered into Devachan. On the earth he says to his body: “I am that!” In Devachan he sees his body and says: “Thou art that!”

The Vedanta Philosophy teaches its pupils to meditate upon the “Thou art That!” in order that through such exercises they may understand what it means to say to the body: “Thou art That!”

In Devachan the human being sees around him what he experienced inwardly here on earth. If he has harboured revenge, antipathy and other evil feelings towards his fellow men on earth they confront him externally like a cloud and this teaches him what significance and effect all these things have in the world.

Let us be clear about what happens to the human being in Devachan. How have the organs, the eyes, for instance, of physical man on the earth been formed? There was a time when no eye was yet in existence. The eye has been formed out of the physical Organisation by light. Light is the progenitor of the eye. What is around us on the earth creates organs in physical bodies and substances; in Devachan, what is around us works upon our being of soul. So that everything a human being has developed here on earth in the way of good and reprehensible feelings is to be found, in yonder world, in his environment; it works upon his soul and so creates organs of the soul. If a man has lived a righteous life on earth, his good qualities live around him in the “air” of Devachan; they work in the Spiritual, creating organs. These organs serve as architects and moulders for the building of the physical body in a new incarnation. What was within the human being on earth is transferred to the outer world in Devachan, and prepares the forces which build up the human body for the next birth.

But let it not be imagined that the human being has nothing to do except to care for himself; as well as this he has very important work to do in Devachan. We can form an idea of this if we consider for a moment the evolution of the earth. How greatly certain regions have changed since a couple of thousand years ago! There were then quite different plants, different animal forms, even the climate was different. In respect of the products of nature the earth's surface is continually changing. In Greece, for example, there could never again arise what sprang forth from the soil in the days of ancient Greece. Evolution proceeds precisely through the fact that the face of the earth undergoes constant change.

When a human being dies, a very long period elapses before he is born again. When he appears again on the earth he does not find the same conditions as of yore; he has to have new experiences; he is not born a second time into the same configuration of the earth; he remains in the spiritual worlds until the earth has entirely new conditions to offer him. There is good purpose in this for thereby he learns something entirely new and his development goes forward quite differently. Think, for example, of a boy in ancient Rome. His life did not in the least resemble that of a modern schoolboy; and when we ourselves are born again we, in turn, shall find quite different conditions. Thus does evolution proceed from incarnation to incarnation. While the human being sojourns in the spiritual regions described, the face of the earth is perpetually changing.

What beings are active here? By what beings are the changes in the earth's physiognomy brought about? This leads at once to the answer to the question: What is the human being doing in the period between death and a new birth? He himself is working from out the spiritual worlds, under the guidance of higher Beings, at the transformation of the earth. It is human beings themselves, between death and rebirth, who carry out this work. When they are born again they find the face of the earth changed, changed into a form which they themselves have helped to fashion. All of us have been engaged in this work.

To the question: Where is Devachan, where is the spiritual world?—I answer: It is around us all the time. In very truth it is so. Around us too are all the souls of discarnate human beings; they are at work around us. While we are building cities and machines, human beings who are living between death and a new birth are around us, working out of the spiritual realms.

When, as seers, we seek for the Dead, we can find them within the light-if we perceive the light not merely in a material way. The light that surrounds us forms the “bodies” of the Dead; they have bodies woven out of light. The light that enfolds the earth is “substance” for the beings who are living in Devachan. A plant nourished by the sunlight receives into itself not the physical light alone but in very truth the activity of spiritual beings, among whom there are also these human souls. These souls themselves ray down upon the plants as light, weaving as spiritual beings around the plants. Looking at the plants with the eye of spirit, we can say: the plant rejoices at the influences coming from the Dead who are working and weaving around it in the light. When we observe how the vegetation on the face of the earth changes and ask how this comes about, the answer is: The souls of the Dead are working in the light which enfolds the earth; here is Devachan, in very truth. After the period of Kamaloca we pass into this realm of light. Only those who are able to point to where, in truth, the Dead are to be found have any knowledge of Devachan in the sense of Rosicrucian Theosophy.

When the faculties of the seer develop, he often makes a striking discovery. When he stands in the sunlight, his body holds up the light and casts a shadow; very often he will discover the spirit for the first time when he looks into this shadow. The body holds up the light but not the spirit; and in the shadow that is cast by the body the spirit can be discovered. That is why more primitive peoples who have always possessed some measure of clairvoyance, have also called the Soul, the shadow they say “shadow-less”—“soul-less.” A novel by Adalbert Chamisso is unconsciously based on this idea: the man who has lost his shadow has also lost his soul—hence his despair.

Such, then, is the work that is performed by human beings in Devachan between death and a new birth. They are by no means in a state of inactive repose; they work creatively from Devachan at the evolution of the earth. They are not, as is often said, in a state of blissful rest or dream. Life in Devachan is just as full of activity as life on the earth.

When the human being has reached the point where he has transformed into spiritual forces his activities in the last earthly life, when these experiences have come to him from the outer world of Devachan and have worked upon him, then he is ready to come down from Devachan to a new birth. The earth draws him once again to her sphere.

When the human being descends from Devachan, he passes, first, into the astral region, the “Elemental World.” Here he receives a new astral body... If iron filings are scattered on a piece of paper and a magnet is moved about underneath, the filings arrange themselves into forms and lines, following the forces of the magnet. In exactly the same way, the irregularly distributed astral substance is attracted and arranged according to the forces which are in the soul and correspond with what this soul has achieved in the previous life. Thus the human being himself gathers together his astral body. These human beings in the making, who to begin with have only an astral body, appear to the eye of the seer like bell forms opening downwards. They shoot and whirl through the astral world with tremendous speed-with a speed that can hardly be conceived.

These incipient human beings must now receive an etheric body and a physical body. What happened hitherto, up to the stage of the formation of the astral body, depended upon themselves, upon the forces they themselves had developed. But the forming of the etheric body does not, in the present phase of evolution, depend upon the human being alone; in respect of the forming of an etheric body, man is dependent upon beings external to himself. Consequently the human being always has a fitting astral body but there is not in every case perfect accordance between the astral body and the etheric and physical bodies; this is often the cause of maladjustment and lack of satisfaction in life. These incipient human beings whirl around space as they do because they are seeking for suitable parents, parents who will afford the best possible opportunity of receiving an etheric and a physical nature befitting the astral being.

The parents who can provide this can only be relatively the best and the most suitable. Co-operating in this search are Beings who member the etheric body to the astral body and whose rank is similar to that of the Folk-Spirits. The Folk-Spirit is not the intangible abstraction it is usually considered to be. A Folk-Spirit is as real to the eye of the seer as our soul that is incarnate in our body. A whole people, although it has not a common physical body, has a common astral body and the rudiments of a common etheric body. This lives within a kind of astral cloud and is the “body” of the Folk-Spirit. Of this nature are the Beings who guide the ether-formations around the human being who is thus no longer entirely under his own control.

Now comes a moment of extreme importance, equally as important as the moment after death when the whole of the past life is seen as a memory-picture. When the human being passes into his etheric body but has not yet acquired his physical body—it is a brief moment but of supreme importance—he has a pre-vision of his coming life, not in all its details but only as a survey over what his future life has in store for him. He can say to himself (but he forgets it when he actually incarnates) that he has a happy or an unhappy life in front of him. It may happen, if a human being has had many unfortunate experiences in a previous life, that he now gets a shock and is hesitant to enter into the physical body. The result of this may be that he does not come right down into the physical body and so the connection between the several bodies is not fully established. This produces idiocy in the coming life; it is not always the cause of idiocy, but frequently so. The soul rebels, as it were, against physical embodiment. Such a human being cannot make right use of his brain because he is not properly incarnate in it. He can only use his physical instrument aright when he allows himself to be born into it in the full and proper sense. Whereas in other circumstances the etheric body extends only slightly beyond the physical body, in the case of idiots portions of the etheric body are often to be seen as an etheric sheen extending far beyond the head. Here is a case where something that is left unexplained by physical observation of life, is explained through Spiritual Science.

We have come to the point in our studies where we heard that the human being who is descending from spiritual regions is clothed in an etheric body and has, for a brief moment, a pre-vision of the life that is awaiting him on earth. We have heard of the abnormalities and conditions to which this may give rise. Before proceeding, we will answer a question which may seem of importance to one who turns his spiritual gaze to Devacha: In what sense is there community of life among human beings between death and a new birth? For there is community of life, not only among men on the physical earth but also in the higher worlds. Just as the activities of human beings in the spirit-realm reach down into the physical world, so all the relationships and connections that are established between men on the earth stretch up into the spiritual world.

We will take a concrete example of this, namely the relationship between mother and child. Is there a relationship between them which endures? There is indeed and moreover a much more intimate, much firmer relationship than can ever be established here on earth. Mother-love, to begin with, is a kind of natural-instinct, it has something of an animal-like character. As the child grows up this relationship becomes a moral, ethical spiritual one. When mother and child learn to think together, when they share experiences in common, natural instinct with draws more and more into the background; it has merely provided the opportunity for the forging of that beautiful bond of union which is present in the very highest sense in the mother's love for the child and the child's love for the mother. The mutual understanding and love which unfolds here continues on into the regions of the spiritual world, even although, as the result of the one dying earlier, the other seems for a time to be separated from the dead. After this period has passed, the link that was on earth is equally vital and intimate. The two are together, only all the purely natural, animal instincts must have been outlived. The feelings and thoughts which weave between one soul and another on earth are not hindered in yonder world by the encasements that exist here. Devachan actually assumes a particular appearance and structure as a result of the relationships that are woven here on earth.

Let us take another example. Friendships and affinities are born from the kinship of souls; they continue on into Devachan, and from them the social connections for the next life develop. By establishing connections with souls here, we are therefore working at the form which Devachan receives. We have all of us worked in this way if bonds of love were forged between us and other men; thereby we create something that has significance not only for the earth but which also shapes conditions in Devachan. What happens here as the fruit of love, of friendship, of mutual inner understanding—all these things are building stones of temples in the spiritual region above and men who have this certainty cannot but be inspired by the knowledge that when, here on earth, bonds are forged from soul to soul, this is the foundation of an eternal “Becoming.”

Let us suppose for a moment that on some other physical planet there were beings incapable of mutual sympathy, incapable of forming bonds of love among one another. Such beings would have a very barren Devachan. Only a planet where bonds of love are forged between one being and another can have a Devachan rich in content and variety. A being who is already in Devachan and whose presence, it is true, cannot be experienced by ordinary men, has, according to his stage of development, greater or less consciousness of communion with those who have remained behind on the earth. There are, indeed, means whereby consciousness of these bonds of communion can be intensified. If we send thoughts of love-but not of egotistic love-to the Dead, we strengthen the feeling of community with them.

It is a mistake to assume that the consciousness of the human being in Devachan is dim or shadowy. This is not the case. The degree of consciousness once attained by a man can never be lost, in spite of darkenings which occur during certain periods of transition. The human being in Devachan has, through his spiritual organs, clear consciousness of what is happening in the sphere of the earth. Occultism reveals that the human being in the spiritual world lives together with what is taking place on the earth.

Thus we see that life in Devachan, if viewed in its reality, loses every element of comfortlessness; that the human being, when he ceases to regard it from his earthly, egotistical standpoint, can experience it as a condition of infinite blessedness—even apart from the fact that all freedom from the physical body, freedom from the lower nature in which he is enclosed here, brings with it a feeling of intense relief. The fact that these encasements have fallen away—this in itself brings a feeling of beatitude. Devachan is thus a time of expansion and expression in all directions; there is a richness and an absence of restriction that are never experienced on the earth.

We have heard that on his descent to a new birth, man is clothed with a new etheric body by Beings of a rank similar to that of the Folk-Spirits. This etheric body is not perfectly adapted to the reincarnating human being; still less perfectly adapted is the physical sheath he receives. We will now speak, in broad outline, of the incorporation of the human being into the physical world. Much of the subject baffles any attempt at outer description.

We have heard that in accordance with his qualities, the human being clothes himself with an astral body. Through what is contained in this astral body he is attracted to certain human beings on the earth; through the etheric body, he is drawn to the folk and to the family in the wider sense, into which he is to be reborn. According to the way and manner in which he has developed his astral body, he is drawn to the mother; the essence, the substance, the Organisation of the astral body draws him to the mother. The ego draws him to the father. The ego was present even in ages of remote antiquity, when the soul descended for the first time from the bosom of the Godhead into an earthly body. This ego has developed through many incarnations; the ego, the “I,” of one human being is distinct from the ego of another and at the present stage of evolution gives rise to the force of attraction to the father. The etheric body attracts the human being to the folk, to the family; the astral body attracts him particularly to the mother; the “I” to the father. The whole descent to the new incarnation is guided in accordance with these principles.

It may happen that the astral body is attracted to a mother but that the ego is not attracted to the corresponding father; in such a case the wandering continues until suitable parents are found.

In the present phase of evolution, the “I” represents the element of will, the impulse of perceptivity. In the astral body lie the qualities of phantasy or imagination, of thinking. The latter qualities, therefore, are transmitted by the mother, the former by the father. The individuality who is approaching incarnation, seeks out through his unconscious forces the parents who are to provide the physical body.

What has here been described takes place, in essentials, by about the third week after conception. True, this being who consists of “I,” astral body and etheric body is, from the moment of conception onwards, near the mother who bears within her the fertilised germ-cell; but it works in upon the germ-cell from outside. At about the third week the astral and etheric bodies take hold, as it were, of the germ-cell and now begin to participate in the work on the embryo; up to that time the development of the physical body proceeds without the influence of the astral body and etheric body. From then onwards these bodies participate in the development of the embryo and themselves influence the further elaboration of the human-germ. Therefore what was said about the etheric body holds good still more for the physical body and complete suitability is even less easy to obtain here. These significant facts shed light upon a great deal that happens in the world.

Up to this point we have been speaking of the normal evolution of the average man of modern times; what has been said does not altogether hold good of a man in whom occult development began in a previous incarnation. The higher the stage to which he attained, the earlier does he begin to work upon his own physical body in order to make it more suitable for the mission he has to fulfil on the earth. The later he takes command of the physical germ, the less control he will have over the physical body. The most highly developed Individualities, those who are the guides and leaders of the spiritual life of the earth take command already at the time of conception. Nothing takes place without their collaboration; they direct their physical body right up to the time of their death and begin to prepare the new body directly the first impetus for this is given.

The substances of which the physical body is composed are perpetually changing; after about seven years, every particle has been renewed. The substance is exchanged but the form endures. Between birth and death the substances of the physical body must continually be born anew; they are the ever-changing element. What we develop in such a way that death has no power over it, is preserved and builds up a new organism.

The Initiate performs consciously, between death and a new birth, what the average human being performs unconsciously between birth and death; the Initiate consciously builds up his new physical body. For him, therefore, birth amounts to no more than an outstanding event in his existence. He exchanges the substances only once, but then fundamentally. Hence there is considerable similarity of stature and form in such Individualities from one incarnation to another, whereas in those who are but little developed there is no similarity of form whatever in their successive incarnations. The higher the development of a man, the greater is the similarity in two successive incarnations; this is clearly perceptible to clairvoyant sight. There is a definite phrase for indicating this higher stage of development; it is said that such a man is not born in a different body, any more than it is said of the average human being that he receives a new body every seven years. Of a Master it is said: he is born in the same body; he uses it for hundreds, even thousands of years. This is the case with the vast majority of leading Individualities. An exception is formed by certain Masters who have their own special mission; with them the physical body remains, so that death does not occur for them at all. These are the Masters whose task it is to watch over and bring about the transition from one race to another.

Two other questions arise at this point, namely, that of the duration of the sojourn in the spiritual worlds, and that of the sex in consecutive incarnations.

Occult investigation reveals that the human being returns to incarnation within an average period of from 1,000 to 1,300 years. The reason for this is that the human being may find the face of the earth changed on his return and therefore be able to have new experiences. The changes on the earth are closely connected with certain constellations of the stars. This is a most significant fact. At the beginning of spring the sun rises in a certain zodiacal constellation. The sun began to rise in the constellation of Aries (the Ram) 800 years before Christ; before that epoch it rose in the adjacent constellation of Taurus (the Bull). About 2,600 years are required for the passage through one constellation. The circuit through the whole twelve constellations is known in occultism as a Cosmic Year.

The peoples of antiquity were deeply sensible of what is connected with this passage through the zodiac. With feelings of awe and reverence they said: When the sun rises in spring, nature is renewed after her winter repose; nature is awakened from deep sleep by the divine rays of the vernal sun. And they connected this young, fresh power of spring with the constellation from which the sun was shining. They said: This constellation is the bestower of the sun with its new vigour, it is the bestower of the new, divinely creative power. And so the Lamb was regarded as the benefactor of humanity by men who lived in an epoch now lying 2,000 years behind us. All the sagas and legends concerning the Lamb originated in that age. Conceptions of the Godhead were associated with this symbol. During the early centuries of our era, the Redeemer Himself, Christ Jesus, was depicted by the symbol of the Cross and underneath it the Lamb. Not until; the sixth century A.D. was the Redeemer portrayed on the Cross.

This is the origin, too, of the well-known myth of Jason and the quest of the Golden Fleece.

In the epoch preceding 800 B.C. the sun was passing through the constellation of Taurus; in Egypt we find the veneration of Apis the Bull, in Persia the veneration of the Mithras Bull. Earlier still, the sun was passing through the constellation of Gemini, the Twins; in Indian and Germanic mythology we find definite indication of the Twins; the twin goats drawing the chariot of the God Donar are a last remnant of this. Then, finally, we come back to the epoch of Cancer which brings us near to the time of the Atlantean Flood. An ancient culture passed away and a new culture arose. This was designated by a particular occult sign, the vortex, which is the symbol of Cancer and to be found in every calendar.

Thus the peoples have always had a clear consciousness of the fact that what proceeds in the heavens runs parallel with the changes taking place on the earth beneath. When the sun has completed its passage through one constellation, the face of the earth has changed to such an extent that it is profitable for the human being to enter a new life. For this reason the time of reincarnation depends upon the progress of the vernal equinox. The period required by the sun for its passage through one zodiacal constellation is the period within which the human being is twice incarnated, once as a man and once as a woman. The experiences in a male and a female organism are so fundamentally different for spiritual life that the human being incarnates once as a woman and once as a man into the same conditions of the earth. This makes an average of 1,000 to 1,300 years between two incarnations.

Here we have the answer to the question concerning the sex. As a rule, the sex alternates. This rule, however, is often broken, so that sometimes there are three to five, but never more than seven consecutive incarnations in the same sex. To say that seven consecutive incarnations in the same sex are the rule, contradicts all occult experience.

Before we begin to study the karma of the individual human being, one fundamental fact must be borne in mind. There is a common karma, karma that is not determined by the single individual although it is adjusted in the course of his incarnations. Here is a concrete example:—

When in the Middle Ages the Huns poured over from Asia into the countries of Europe and caused alarming wars, this too had spiritual significance. The Huns were the last surviving remnants of ancient Atlantean peoples; they were in an advanced stage of decadence which expressed itself in a certain process of decay in their astral and etheric bodies. These products of decay found good soil in the fear and the terror caused among the peoples. The result was that these products of decay were inoculated into the astral bodies of the peoples and in a later generation this was carried over into the physical body. The skin absorbed the astral elements and the outcome was a disease prevalent in the Middle Ages, namely, leprosy. An ordinary doctor would, of course, attribute leprosy to physical causes. I have no wish to dispute what such doctors say but their line of reasoning is as follows:—In a fight, one man wounds another with a knife; he had harboured an old feeling of revenge against him. One person will say that the cause of the wound was the feeling of revenge, another that the knife was the cause.—Both are right. The knife was the final physical cause but behind it there is the spiritual cause. Those who seek for spiritual causes will always admit the validity of physical causes.

We see that historical events have a significant effect upon whole generations and we learn how, even in fundamental conditions of health, improvements extending over long periods of time can be brought about.

As a result of technical progress in recent centuries there developed among the European peoples an industrial proletariat, and together with it, untold racial and class hatred. This has its seat in the astral body and comes to physical expression as pulmonary tuberculosis. This knowledge is yielded by occult investigation. It is often not within our power to help the individual among those who are subject to general karma of this kind. We are often compelled, with aching hearts, to see an individual suffering without being able to make him well or, happy because he is connected with the general karma. Only by working for the improvement of the common karma can we also help the individual. It should not be our aim to promote the well being of the single, egoistic self, but to work in such a way that we serve the well being of humanity as a whole.

Another example, directly connected with topical events, is the following—Occult observations have revealed that among the astral beings who participated in the various battles of the Russian-Japanese war, there were dead Russians, working against their own people. This was due to the fact that during recent times in the development of the Russian people, many noble idealists perished in the dungeon or on the scaffold. They were men of high ideals, but they were not so far developed as to be able to forgive. They died with feelings of bitter revenge against those who had been the cause of their death. These feelings of revenge were lived out in their Kamaloca period, for only in Kamaloca is this possible. From the astral plane after their death, they filled the souls of the Japanese soldiers with hatred and revenge against the people to whom they themselves had belonged. Had they already been in Devachan they would have said: I forgive my enemies! For in Devachan, with the clouds of hatred and revenge confronting them from without, they would have realised how terrible and how unworthy such feelings are.—Thus occult investigation reveals that whole peoples stand under the influence of their forefathers.

The idealistic strivings of modern times cannot attain their goals because they are willing to work only with physical means on the physical plane. So, for example, the Society for the Promotion of Peace, which sets out to bring about peace by physical methods alone. Not until we learn how to influence the astral plane too can we recognise the right methods; not until then can we work in such a way that when the human being is born again he will find a world in which he can labour fruitfully.

We come today to what man experiences in the physical world, in so far as these experiences are determined by an earlier incarnation. At the outset it must be emphasised that life is not determined by previous incarnations alone but also, though in a small degree, by the present life. The law of how man's past, present and future are connected, is called in Spiritual-scientific literature, the Law of Karma. It is the true law of human destiny; an individual life is only a specific application of the great law of the Cosmos, for the law of Karma is a universal, cosmic law with a specific application in the life of a human being. Whenever we envisage a connection between preceding conditions and subsequent effects, we are thinking in line with this law. I want therefore to explain in detail the individual application of this cosmic law in the life of the human being.

Suppose we have two vessels of water in front of us and put into one of the vessels a red-hot iron ball. The water will hiss and become warm. If we take the ball out and put it into the other vessel, the water in this case neither hisses nor gets warm, because the ball is no longer red hot; it has been cooled by immersion in the first vessel of water. The effect of the behaviour of the iron ball in the first vessel determines its behaviour in the second. Thus are cause and effect always connected in physical life. Subsequent behaviour depends upon what has happened previously.

Another example is afforded by certain animals whose organ of sight has atrophied in consequence of having made their home in dark holes and caves. In such animals, the substances which formerly nourished the eyes were led to other parts of the body because as it was no longer necessary for the eye to see, these substances were not required. The eyes atrophied and remain atrophied in all subsequent generations. Through their earlier wanderings these animals determined the actual behaviour of their organs; the destiny of subsequent generations was determined by what had happened in the past; these animals prepared their destiny for the future. And it is the same in human life.

Man determines his future by his past and because his innermost being is not confined to one incarnation but passes through many, the causes of what confronts him in a given life are to be sought in an earlier life.

We will now consider the chain of happenings which can be understood if we think of the consequences of human deeds, thoughts and feelings. It is so often said in everyday life: Thoughts are duty-free!—meaning that we can think what we like and nobody in the external world will be affected. This is one important point where a man who has really grasped spiritual impulses is at variance with the materialistic thinker.

The materialist agrees that injury is caused if he throws a stone at a man, but he thinks that a thought of hatred which he may harbour against a fellow-creature, does not hurt him. Those however who have real knowledge of the world know that far, far stronger effects proceed from a thought filled with hatred than can ever be caused by a stone. Everything that a man thinks and feels has its effects in the outer world and the seer can follow with great precision the effect of a loving thought that goes out to another man, and the very different effect that is produced by a thought filled with hatred. When you send out a loving thought to someone the seer perceives a form of light shaped like a sort of flower-calyx, playing around his etheric and astral bodies, thereby contributing something to his vitality and happiness. On the other hand a thought of hatred bores its way into the etheric and astral bodies like a wounding arrow.

Very varied observations are to be made in this domain. There is a tremendous difference in the astral world if one voices a thought that is true or a thought that is untrue. A thought is related to a thing and is true if it coincides with that thing. Every event that happens causes an effect in the higher worlds. If someone relates this event truly, an astral form rays out from the teller, unites with the form emanating from the event itself, and both are strengthened. These strengthened forms help to make our spiritual world richer and more full of content—which is necessary if humanity is to make progress. But if the event is related untruthfully, in a way that does not coincide with the facts, then the thought-form of the teller comes up against the thought-form that has proceeded from the event; the two thought-forms collide, causing mutual destruction. These destructive “explosions” caused by lies work on the body like a tumour which destroys the organism. Thus do lies kill the astral forms which have arisen and must arise, and in this way they obstruct or paralyse a part of evolution. Everyone who tells the truth actually promotes the evolution of humanity and everyone who lies, obstructs it. Therefore there is this occult law: Seen with the eyes of Spirit, a lie is a murder. Not only does it kill an astral form, but it is also self-murder. Everyone who lies places obstacles along his own path. Such effects are to be observed everywhere in the spiritual world. The clairvoyant sees that everything a man thinks, feels and experiences has its effect in the astral world. A man's disposition, temperament, enduring qualities of character, thoughts that are not merely transient—all this streams continually not only into the astral world but into the world of Devachan as well. A man with a happy disposition is a source, a centre, of certain processes in Devachan; a man who is hypocritical has the effect of multiplying the essences and substances associated with hypocrisy in human character. Thus Spiritual Science shows us that we do not live as isolated beings but that our thoughts continually produce forms which cast shadows in the world of Devachan and permeate it with all kinds of substances and essences. The four regions of Devachan-the “Continental,” the “Oceanic,” the “Atmospheric” and the region of original “Inspirations” are influenced all the time by the thoughts, feelings and sensations of human beings.

The higher regions of Devachan, in which the Akasha Chronicle appears, are influenced by deeds. What happens in the external world plays into the very highest region of Devachan—the “world of Reason.” We shall understand in this way how on his descent to a new incarnation the human being reconstitutes his astral body and attaches it to himself All his thoughts and feelings and experiences had become integral parts of the astral world, leaving many traces there. If his thoughts had contained much truth, these traces gather together to form a good astral body for him. What he had incorporated into the lower Devachanic world as his temperament and so on, gathers together the new etheric body, and from the highest regions of Devachan where the Akasha Chronicle is to be found, his past deeds play their part in establishing the station, the localisation of the physical body. Here are the forces which bring a human being to a definite locality. If a man has done evil to someone, this is an external fact which reaches into the highest regions of Devachan; when the time comes to enter a new physical body it works as forces which the man has left in his trail, and impels him—under the guidance of higher Beings—to the associations and to the place where he will now be able to experience the effects of his past deeds in the physical world.

Experiences in the external world which do not inwardly affect us very strongly work upon our astral body in the next incarnation, drawing into it corresponding feelings and a characteristic life of thought. If a man has spent his life profitably, if he has been very observant and has acquired wide knowledge, his astral body in the next incarnation will be born with special gifts in these directions. Experience and acquired knowledge thus express themselves, in the next incarnation, in the astral body. Inner experience, all that a man feels in the way of happiness, sorrow and so on—this works down to the etheric body in the next incarnation and imbues it with lasting propensities. The etheric body of a man who experiences much happiness will have a temperament disposed to joy. A man who tries to perform many good deeds, will, as a result of the feelings evoked, have a decided talent in the next life for good deeds; he will also possess a thoroughly developed conscience and will be a person of high moral principles.

That of which the etheric body is the bearer in the present life—the permanent character, talents etc.—appears in the next life in the physical body. For instance, a man who has developed bad inclinations and passions in one life will be born in the next with an unhealthy physical body. On the other hand, a man who enjoys good health, who has great powers of endurance, unfolded good qualities in the previous life. A person who is continually prone to illness, has worked bad impulses into himself. Thus we have it in our power to create for ourselves health or illness in so far as these inhere in the natural constitution of the physical body. All that is required is the elimination of bad tendencies for we then prepare a healthy, vigorous physical body for the next life.

It is possible to observe, in all details, how the tendencies that were present in one life, work, in the next, on the physical body. A person who is disposed to love everything around him, who is loving to all creatures, who pours out love, will have in the next incarnation a physical body that remains young and fresh until late in life. Love for all beings, the cultivation of sympathy, gives rise to a physical body that preserves its youthful vigour. A man who is full of antipathy against other human beings, who criticises and grumbles at everything, trying to keep aloof from it all, produces, as the result of these tendencies, a physical body that ages and becomes wrinkled prematurely. Thus are the tendencies and passions of one life carried over to the physical, bodily life of subsequent incarnations.

The very details can be observed and it can be found that a passion for acquisition, an urge that makes a person hoard possessions and becomes a rooted disposition in him, produces, in the next life, a tendency to infectious diseases in the physical body. Absolute confirmation is possible of cases where a pronounced tendency to infectious diseases leads back to an earlier, very strong sense of acquisition, the bearer of this quality being the etheric body. On the other hand disinterested striving, free from any desire for self-profit and wishing only to work for the well-being of all mankind—this tendency in the etheric body gives rise, in the next life, to a strong power of resistance to infectious diseases.

Thus knowledge of the connection between the physical and the astral world enables us to have a clear understanding of the world in its inner process of development; things are often connected in quite a different way from what people like to imagine. Many people deplore pain and suffering, but from a higher point of view this is quite unjustified, for if they are overcome and the person is ready for a new incarnation, suffering and pain are the sources of wisdom, prudence and comprehensiveness of vision. Even in writing emanating from the modern, materialistic standpoint, we find it stated that there is something like “crystallised pain” in the face of every thinker. What this materialistically minded author says here has long been known to the occultist, for the greatest wisdom of the world is acquired by the quiet endurance of pain and suffering; this creates wisdom in the next incarnation.

No one who shudders at the unpleasantness of pain, who is unwilling to bear pain can create in himself the foundations for wisdom; indeed when we look deeper, we cannot really bemoan illnesses, for regarded from a higher standpoint, from the standpoint of Eternity, they take on a very different aspect. Illnesses calmly borne often appear in the next life as great physical beauty; great physical beauty in a human being is acquired at the cost of illnesses in the preceding life. Such is the connection between impairment of the body through illness, particularly also through external circumstances, and beauty.

The following words of the French writer, Fabre d'Olivet can be applied to this very remarkable connection: “When we observe the life of the human being, it often seems to be like the formation of the pearl in the oyster-shell—the pearl can only come into being through disease.” And so it is actually in human life: Beauty is karmically connected with illnesses and is their result. When I said, however, that a man who unfolds reprehensible passions creates in himself the disposition to illness, it must be fully realised that in this case it is a matter of inherent tendency to illnesses. It is a different matter if a man falls ill through working in a poisonous atmosphere; this too may be a cause of illness but is not connected with the inherent constitution of the physical body.

Everything that is a fact on the physical plane, everything that constitutes a deed, expressing itself in such a way that it has a definite effect in the physical world, from a footstep and movement of the hand to the most complicated processes, for instance the building of a house, comes to the human being in a later incarnation from outside as an actual physical effect. As you see, we live our life from within-outwards. What lives as joy, pain, happiness, sorrow in the astral body appears again in the etheric body; the lasting impulses and passions that are rooted in the etheric body appear in the physical body as constitutional tendencies; deeds that require the agency of the physical body appear as outer destiny in the next incarnation. What the astral body does becomes the destiny of the etheric body; what the etheric body does becomes the destiny of the physical body; and what the physical body does comes back from outside in the next incarnation as a physical reality.

Here you have the actual point where external destiny intervenes in human life. This working of destiny may be postponed for a long time but must inevitably approach the human being sooner or later. If a man's life is followed through the different incarnations it can always be seen that his life in a subsequent incarnation is prepared by Beings who work at his physical embodiment in such a way that he is led to a particular place in order that his destiny may overtake him.

Here again is an example drawn from life. At a Vehmic Court in the Middle Ages a number of judges condemned a man to death and executed the sentence themselves. Earlier incarnations of the judges and of the dead man were investigated and it was found that they had all been contemporaries; the prisoner who had been put to death had been the Chief of a tribe who had ordered the death of those who were now the Vehmic judges. The deed of the former physical life had created the connection between the persons, and the forces had inscribed themselves in the Akasha Chronicle. When a man again comes down to incarnation, these forces cause him to be born at the same time and place as those to whom he is tied in this way, and they work out his destiny. The Akasha Chronicle is a veritable source of power in which everything that is due to be expiated between one human being and another, is inscribed. Some people can sense these processes, but very, very few are really conscious of them.

Suppose a man has a profession in which he is apparently happy and contented; for some reason or other he is forced to leave it and finding no other occupation in the same place is driven far away—into another country, where he has to strike out on an entirely new line of work. Here he finds a person with whom he has in some way to be associated. What has happened in such a case? He had once lived with the person whom he has now met and remained in his debt for some reason or other. This is inscribed in the Akasha Chronicle and the forces have led him to this place in order that he may meet the man and discharge his debt.

Between birth and death the human being is perpetually within a network of these forces of soul which weave around him on all sides; they are the directing powers of his life. You bear within you all the time the workings of earlier lives; and all the time you are experiencing the outcome of former incarnations.

You will realise, therefore, that your lives are guided by Powers of which you yourselves are not aware. The etheric body is worked upon by forms which you yourselves previously called into existence on the astral plane; beings and forces in the higher regions of Devachan, inscribed by you yourselves in the Akasha Chronicle, work upon your destiny. These forces or beings are not unknown to the occultist; they have their own place in the ranks of similar beings. You must realise that in the astral body and in the etheric body, as well as in the physical body, you feel the workings of other beings; all that you do involuntarily, everything to which you are impelled, is due to the working of other beings; it is not born from nothingness. The various members of man's nature are all the time actually permeated and filled by other beings, and many of the exercises given by an initiated teacher are for the purpose of driving out these beings in order that a man may become more and more free.

The beings who permeate the astral body and make it unfree are known as “Demons.” Your astral body is always interpenetrated by demons and the beings you yourselves generate through your true or false thoughts are of such a nature that they gradually grow into demons. There are good demons, generated by good thoughts; but bad thoughts, above all those that are untruthful, generate demoniacal forms of the most terrible and frightful kind and these interlard the astral body—if I may so express it. The etheric body is also permeated by beings from which man must free himself; these beings are called “Spectres”, “ghosts.” And finally, permeating the physical body there are beings known as “Phantoms.” Besides these three classes there are yet other beings, the “Spirits,” who drive the Ego hither and thither—the Ego itself also being a Spirit. In actual fact the human being generates such creatures who then determine his inner and outer destiny when he descends to incarnation. These beings work in your life in such a way that you can feel the “demons” created by your astral body, the “ghosts” or “spectres” created by your etheric body and the “phantoms” created by your physical body. All these beings are related to you and approach you when the time comes for reincarnation.

You will remember that religious documents express these truths. When the Bible speaks of the driving-out of demons, this is not an abstraction but is to be taken literally. Christ Jesus healed those who were possessed of demons; He drove the demons out of the astral body. This is an actual process and, the passage is to be taken literally. The wise man Socrates also speaks of his “Daimon” which worked in his astral body. This was a good demon; such beings are not always evil.

There are, however, terrible and corrupt demonic beings. All demons that are born of lying work in such a way as to throw man back in his development; and because owing to the lies of eminent figures in world-history demons who grow into very powerful beings are all the time being created, we hear of the “Spirits of Hindrance”, “Spirits of obstruction.” In this sense Faust says to Mephistopheles: “Thou art the Father of all hindrances!”

The individual human being, membered as he is within mankind as a whole, has an effect upon the whole world according to whether he speaks the truth or lies; for beings created by truth or by lies produce quite different effects. Imagine a people which was composed entirely of liars, the astral plane would be populated solely by the corresponding demons and these demons would be able to express themselves in constitutional tendency to epidemics. Thus there is a certain species of bacilli who are the carriers of infectious diseases; these beings are the progeny of the lies told by human beings; they are nothing else than physically embodied demons generated by lies.

You see therefore that lies and untruths of earlier ages appear in world-karma as a definite host of beings. A passage in Faust indicates how much deep truth is contained in myths and sagas. You will find there a connection between vermin and lies in the role played by rats and mice in connection with Mephistopheles, the Spirit of Lies. Legends have often preserved wonderful indications of the connection between the spiritual world and the physical world.

In order to understand the Law of Karma we shall have to speak about many other things. The Movement of Spiritual Science itself is the outcome of an intimate knowledge of the Law of Karma.

You have just heard that forces which lie in the etheric body work upon the physical body in the next incarnation. Thus the attitude of mind, the tendency to think along particular lines, works upon the physical body. A spiritual or a materialistic attitude of mind is by no means without importance for the next incarnation. A man who has some knowledge of the higher worlds—he need only believe in their existence—has in his next life a well centred physical body and tranquil nervous system, a body which he has well in hand, including the very nerves. On the other hand, a man who believes in nothing except what is to be found in the world of the senses, communicates this kind of thinking to his physical body and in the next incarnation has a body prone to nervous diseases, a frail, fidgety body in which there is no steadfast centre of will. The materialist scatters himself in pure details; the Spirit binds together, for Spirit is Unity!

The tendency or disposition comes to light, in the case of the individual, through destiny in his next incarnation, but it continues through the generations, so that the sons and grand-children of materialistic fathers have to pay for this by badly constituted nervous systems and nervous disorders. An “epoch” of nerves is the outcome of the materialistic attitude of the last century. And as a counteraction, the Great Teachers of mankind have recognised the necessity of allowing the inflow of spiritual ways of thinking.

Materialism has also found its way into religion. There are people who “believe” in the spiritual worlds but have not the will to acquire real knowledge of them. Can it be said that such people are not materialists? It is materialism in religion which makes people want to have the mystery of the Six Day of Creation—as the Bible describes the evolution of the worlds—displayed before their very eyes; it is materialism which speaks of Christ Jesus as an “historical personality” and ignores the Mystery of Golgotha. Materialism in natural science is primarily a consequence of materialism in religion, and would not exist if the religious life were not saturated with materialism. Men who have been too lazy to deepen their religious life—it is they who have introduced materialism into science. And the derangement of the nerves caused by this materialism works itself out among racial stocks and among whole peoples, as well as in the individual.

If the stream of spirituality is not powerful enough to influence lazy and easy-going people as well, the karmic consequence of nervous derangement will gain greater and greater hold over humanity, and just as in the Middle Ages there were epidemics of leprosy, so, in future, materialistic thinking will give rise to grave nervous diseases; there will be epidemics of insanity besetting whole peoples.

Insight into this domain of the Law of Karma reveals that Spiritual Science should never be a matter of strife but a healing power in humanity. The more spiritual men become, the more will troubles connected with diseases of the nervous system and derangement in the life of soul, be expunged.

In order that you may better understand the Law of Karma as it works in human life, I shall speak of what happens immediately after the death of a human being. We heard of the memory-tableau which appears when he is freed from the physical body and is living for a short time in the etheric and astral bodies before passing through the Elemental World.

To help you to understand the inner working of karma, let me describe a strange feeling that arises during the experience of this great tableau. It is the feeling of expansion, growing out of oneself. This feeling becomes stronger and stronger as long as the human being is living in his etheric body. He has a strange experience in connection with this tableau. To begin with, he sees pictures of his past life as in a panorama. Then a moment comes, not very long after death and lasting for hours, even days, according to the nature of the individuality, where he feels: I am myself all these pictures. He feels his etheric body growing and expanding as if it embraced the whole sphere of the Earth, as far as the Sun.

Then, when the etheric body has been abandoned, another very remarkable feeling arises. It is really difficult to describe this feeling in words drawn from the physical world. It is a feeling of expansion into wide cosmic space but as though one were not actually within every place. The experience can only be approximately described. The individual feels as though with one part of his being he were in Munich, with another part of his being in Mainz, with a third in Basle, and with another far outside the Earth sphere, perhaps in the Moon. He feels as though he were dismembered, as though he were not connected with the spaces in between. That is the peculiar way of experiencing oneself as an astral being, spread out in space, transferred to different centres, but not filling the regions between them.

This experience lasts throughout Kamaloca during which period man is living through his life backwards to his birth. He lives through all that belongs to his life and these experiences then become part of the rest of his life in Kamaloca. It is important to know this in order to picture how the law of Karma works. The individual feels, at the beginning, as though he were within that human being with whom he was last connected and then, retrogressively, within all the persons and other beings with whom he was associated during his life.

Suppose, for example, you once thrashed a man in Mainz. After your death, when the time comes, you experience the thrashing you gave him, with its accompanying pain. If this man is still in Mainz, a part of your astral body after your death feels as if it were in Mainz, experiencing the event there. If the person you thrashed has died in the meantime, you feel yourself at the place in Kamaloca where he now is. You have, of course, been related not only with one but with many human beings who are scattered over the Earth in Kamaloca. You are everywhere and this gives rise to the feeling of dismemberment of the bodily nature in Kamaloca. It is thereby possible for you to experience, within all these others, the associations you had with them, and you thus form a lasting connection with everyone with whom you have come into contact. You have a tie with this man whom you thrashed because you have lived with him in Kamaloca. Later on you pass into Devachan and then, in turn, back through Kamaloca. Now, during the process of up-building, your astral body once again finds the ties which bind it to the man with whom you were united. And since there are many such connections you see you are linked by a kind of bond with everything with which you were associated.

The event observed by occult sight of which I told you in the last lecture, offers a clear explanation here. Five Vehmic judges in the Middle Ages condemned a man to death and executed the sentence themselves. In his previous life, this man had been a kind of Chief and had ordered the death of the five. Then the Chief died and passed into Kamaloca. During this period he was transported into the others at the place where they now were and he was obliged himself to experience what they had felt when they had been put to death. This is the starting-point of forces of attraction which bring human beings together when they return to the Earth, in order that the law of Karma may be fulfilled.

Such is the technique of karma, the way in which karma works. You see from this that there are forms of existence, kindred ties, which begin already on the astral plane. On the physical plane there is continuity of substance; on the astral plane, however, related yet separated parts of the bodily nature may be experienced. It is as if you were to feel your head, then nothing at all between head and heart, then the heart, then the feet, with nothing between heart and feet. One part of you may be in America, quite separated from but yet belonging to your astral being; another part may be on the Moon and a third on yet another planet; there need be no visible astral connection between these parts of your being.

This view of the law of Karma makes it clear that what arises in one human life-cycle is the outcome of many causes which lie in past lives. How is the law of Karma to be reconciled with heredity? It is said that there are many contradictions between heredity and this law.

People are apt to say of a gifted man that he must be the offspring of a gifted family, that he must have inherited his talents from his forefathers. When we observe the physical processes from the occult standpoint we know that it is not like this. We can, however, in a certain sense speak of processes of physical heredity, and we will take an example.

Within a period of 250 years, twenty-nine musicians were born in the Bach family, among them the great Bach. A good musician needs not only the inner musical faculty but also a well-formed physical ear, a special form of ear. Laymen cannot perceive the differences here; it is necessary to look very deeply, with occult powers. Although the differences are very slight, a particular inner form of the organ of hearing is necessary if a man is to become a musician, and these forms are transmitted by heredity they resemble those which have been present in the father, grandfather and so on.

Suppose that on the astral plane there is an individual who acquired great musical faculties hundreds or thousands of years ago; he is ready for reincarnation and is seeking a physical body. If he cannot find a physical body possessing suitable ears, he cannot be a musician. He must look around for a family which will provide the musical ear; without it his musical talents could not manifest, for the greatest virtuoso can do nothing unless he has an instrument.

Mathematical talent also needs something quite specific. A particular construction of the brain is not, as many people think, necessary for mathematicians. Thinking, logic, is the same in the mathematician as in others. What is needed here is a special development of the three semi-circular canals in the ear which lie in the three directions of space. Special development of these canals determines mathematical talent—herein lies the gift for mathematics. This is a physical organ and its form must be transmitted by heredity. It will be remembered that eight first-class mathematicians were born in the Bernoulli family.

A man of high moral principles also needs parents who transmit a physical body suitable for the functioning of his moral gifts. And he has these parents and no others because he is this particular kind of individuality.

The individuality himself seeks his parents, although under the guidance of higher Beings. From the point of view of mother-love many people take exception to this fact. They are fearful that they might lose something if the child were not to inherit certain qualities from the mother. True knowledge, however deepens mother-love, for it reveals that this love is present before birth, even before conception, as a force which guided the child to the mother. The child loves the mother even before birth and mother-love is the reciprocal force. Spiritually regarded, therefore, mother-love extends to the time before birth; it is rooted in mutual feelings of love.

It is often imagined that the human being is subject to the irrevocable law of karma in which nothing can be changed. Let us take a simile from everyday life to explain the working of this law.

A merchant makes entries of debits and credits in his account books; taken together, these entries tell him the state of his business. The financial state of his business is subject to the inexorable law governing the calculation of debit and credit. If he carries through new transactions he can make additional entries and he would be a fool if he were unwilling to embark on other business because a balance was once drawn up. In respect of karma, everything good, intelligent and true that has been done by a man stands on the credit side; evil or foolish deeds stand on the debit side. At every moment he is free to make new entries in the karmic book of life. It must never be imagined that life is under the sway of an immutable law of destiny; freedom is not impaired by the law of karma. In studying the law of karma, therefore, the future must be borne in mind as strongly as the past. Bearing within us the effects of past deeds, we are the slaves of the past, but the masters of the future. If we are to have a favourable future, we must make as many good entries as possible in the book of life.

It is a great and potent thought to know that nothing we do is in vain, that everything has its effect in the future. The law of karma is the reverse of depressing; it fills us with splendid hope and knowledge of it is the most precious gift of Spiritual Science. It brings happiness inasmuch as it opens out a vista into the future. It charges us to be active for its sake; there is nothing in it whatever to make us sad, nothing which could give the world a pessimistic colouring; it lends wings to our will to co-operate in the evolution of the earth. Such are the feelings into which knowledge of the law of karma must be translated.

When a human being is suffering, people sometimes say: “He deserves his suffering and must bear his karma; if I help him, I am interfering with his karma.” This is nonsense. His poverty, his misery is caused through his earlier life, but if I help him, new entries will be made in his book of life; my help brings him forward. It would be foolish to say to a merchant who could be saved from disaster by 1,000 or 10,000 Marks: “No, for that would alter your balance.” It is precisely this possibility of altering the balance that should induce us to help a man. I help him because I know that nothing is without its karmic effect. This knowledge should spur us on to purposeful action.

Many people dispute the law of karma from the standpoint of Christianity. Theologians maintain that Christianity cannot acknowledge this law because it is irreconcilable with the principle of the vicarious Death. And there are even certain Theosophists who say that the law of karma contradicts the principle of the Redemption, that they cannot acknowledge the help given to the many by an individual. Both are wrong for neither has understood the law of karma.

Suppose some human being is in distress. You yourselves are in a more fortunate position and can help him. By your help you make a new entry in his book of life. A more influential person can help two, and affect the karma of both of them. A man who is still more powerful can help ten or a hundred people and the most powerful can help unnumbered human beings.

This does not by any means run counter to the principle of karmic connections. Precisely because of the absolute reliability of the law of karma we know that this help does indeed influence the destiny of the human being.

Mankind was verily in need of help when the Christ was sent to this plane. The death on the Cross of the Redeemer, of the one central Being, was the help that intervened in the karma of untold numbers of men. There is no variance between Christian Esotericism and Spiritual Science when both are rightly understood. There is profound agreement between the laws of both and we are by no means obliged to abandon the principle of the Redemption.

We penetrate still more deeply into the law of karma when we study the evolution of humanity as well as the evolution of the Earth. We have considered certain facts which help us to understand this law of karma, and we shall understand it still better when we pass on to the evolution of humanity itself, not only during the Earth period but also during the other planetary incarnations of the Earth. We shall discover certain supplementary details of this law when we go back to ages in the remote past and receive indications, too, about the far future. By way of introduction we will consider a fact of great significance.

We have realised from what has been said that the external, physical body of man—the part of him that we see with physical eyes—is built up by the higher members of his being; Ego, astral body, etheric body and all the members up to Atma, the highest of them, work at the physical body. The various parts of the body, as they exist in the human being today, are not of equal but of different value in his nature. Even superficial thought will make us realise that the physical body is the most perfect part of our nature. Take, for example, a part of the thigh-bone. This is not simply a compact, solid bone, but full of artistry, constructed as it were of intersecting beams. Anyone who studies this bone not only with the intellect but also with feeling will marvel at the wisdom which, in its creation, has used no more material than is essential to support the upper body with the smallest possible amount of power. No engineering art applied to the building of a bridge is equal to the wisdom that has brought such a bone into existence!

If we investigate the human heart, but not merely with the eye of the anatomist or physiologist, we shall find here an expression of sublime wisdom. Do not imagine that the astral body of man today is as far advanced in development as the physical heart. The heart has been built up with art and with wisdom; the astral body, with its desires, induces the human being to pour definite heart-poison into himself for many decades, but the heart withstands it for many decades. Only at a future stage of evolution will the astral body have reached the stage of development of the physical body today, and then it will be at a far, far higher level than the physical body. Today the physical body is the most perfect; the etheric body is less perfect, the astral body still less perfect, and the Ego is the “baby” among the bodies.

The physical body as it is today, is the oldest member of man's being; work has been performed on it for the longest period of time and not until it had reached a certain stage in the course of evolution was it permeated by the etheric body. When these two bodies had worked together for a time, the astral body was added, and then, finally, the “I”, which in the future will attain undreamed of heights of development. Just as the human being has repeated incarnations, so, too, the Earth, has passed through incarnations and will pass through still others in the future. Reincarnation is enacted throughout the Cosmos. Our Earth in its present form is the reincarnation of earlier planetary bodies of which there have been three. Before our Earth became Earth, it was what is called by occultism—not by Astronomy—the Moon. The present Moon is as it were a body of dross which was discarded as useless.

If we could mingle Earth and Moon, together with all their substances and all their beings, we should have the “occult Moon”—the forerunner of the Earth; the Earth of today is the remnant of the Old Moon that remained after the dross had been thrown off just as the Moon of today is a discarded remnant of the Old Moon incarnation of the Earth, so is the Sun in the heavens a body that proceeded from a still earlier condition of the Earth. Before the Earth was Moon, it was, as we say in Occultism, Sun, and this Sun was composed of all the substances and beings which today form Sun, Moon and Earth. This Sun released itself from the substances and beings which form the Earth and the Moon of today, which it could not, as a higher celestial body, retain and it thereby became a fixed star. Occultists know that a fixed star need not always have been a fixed star. The Sun only became a fixed star after having been a planet.

The Sun we see today was once united with the Earth and took with it many beings who were at a higher stage of development than the beings of the Earth; just as with the Moon that we see went the interior portions and the Moon is therefore a body of discarded dross. The Moon is a planet that has degenerated; the Sun is a body that has ascended.

The Sun existence was preceded by the Saturn existence. Thus there are our consecutive incarnations of the Earth: Saturn, Sun, Moon, Earth. When the forerunner of the human being was developing on Saturn, his only principle was that of the physical body; the etheric body was added on the Sun, the astral body on the Moon, and the “I” on the Earth.

The lecture entitled “Blood is a very special fluid” will have shown you how intimately the “I” is connected with the blood. This blood was not within the human body before the embodiment of an Ego, so that this red human blood is connected with the evolution of the Earth as such. It could not have been formed at all if the Earth, in its evolutionary course, had not come together with another planet, namely, with Mars. Before this contact of the Earth with Mars, the Earth had no iron; there was no iron in the blood; the blood upon which the human being is dependent today, did not exist. In the first half of Earth existence, the influence of the planet Mars is the ruling factor, and the influence of the planet Mercury in the second half.

Mars has given iron to the Earth and the Mercury influence manifests on the Earth in such a way that it makes the human soul more and more free, more and more independent. In occultism therefore, we speak of the Mars half of Earth evolution and of the Mercury half. Whereas the other names describe a whole planet, Earth evolution is spoken of as “Mars-Mercury.” Used in this connection the names do not designate the planets we know today but the influences at work during the first and second halves of Earth evolution.

In the future the Earth will incarnate as a new planetary body, known as Jupiter. The human astral body then will have developed to a stage where it no longer confronts the physical body as an enemy, as is the case today, but it will still not have reached its highest stage. The etheric body on Jupiter will have reached the stage at which the physical body is now, for it will then have three planetary evolutions behind it as the physical body has today.

On the planetary body following Jupiter, the astral body will have developed as far as the physical body of today; it will have behind it the Moon, Earth and Jupiter evolutions and will have reached the Venus evolution. The final planetary incarnation will be that of Vulcan, when the “I”, the Ego, will have attained the highest stage of its development. The future incarnations of the Earth will thus be: Jupiter, Venus and Vulcan. These designations are also found in the names of the days of the week.

There was a time when the names of the things and facts around us in our lives were given by the Initiates. Men have no inner feeling today of the way in which names really belong to things. The names given to the days of the week were meant to be reminders to human beings of their development through the evolutionary stages of the Earth.

Saturday (Sonnabend) is Saturn-day; Sunday (Sonntag) = Sun-day; Monday (Montag) = Moon-day. Then Mars and Mercury, the two conditions of our Earth. Mars-day (Dienstag) = Tuesday, in old German Ziu—Dinstag; in French, Mardi, in Italian Martedi. Wednesday (Mittwoch) is Mercury-day, in Italian Mercoledi, in French Mercredi; Mercury is the same as Wotan; Tacitus speaks of Wotan's day, in English Wednesday. Then comes the Jupiter day; Jupiter is the Germanic Donar, hence Donnerstag, in French Jeudi, in Italian Giovedi. Then Venus-day; Venus is the Germanic Freia; Freitag, in French Vendredi and in Italian Venerdi.

Thus in the names of the consecutive days of the week we have reminders of the development of the Earth through its different incarnations.

We will now consider the series of incarnations passed through by our planet, and realise that these were embodiments, that is to say, conditions of our Earth when it was once Saturn, Sun, Moon. We must be fully aware that these incarnations were necessary for the development of every living thing, especially of man, and that man's own evolution is intimately connected with the Earth.

We shall, however, only understand in the right way what took place then, if we realise how the man of today—we ourselves—has changed in respect of certain characteristics in the course of evolution. And first we will consider the changes which have come about in man's conditions of consciousness. Everything in the world has evolved, even our consciousness. The consciousness that a man has today he has not always possessed, it has only gradually become what it is now.

We call our present consciousness the objective consciousness or the waking day-consciousness. You all know it as that which you have from morning when you awake, to evening when you fall asleep. Let us be clear as to its nature. It consists in man's turning his senses towards the outer world and perceiving objects-and hence we call it objective consciousness.

Man looks into the surroundings and sees with his eyes certain objects in space which are bounded by colours. He listens with the ear and perceives that there are objects in space which produce a tone, which resound. With his sense of touch he feels objects, finds them warm and cold, he Smells, tastes objects. What he thus perceives with his senses he reflects upon; he employs his reason to understand these different objects, and it is from these facts of sense perception and their comprehension in the mind that the present waking day consciousness has arisen. Man has not always had this consciousness, it had first to develop, and he will not always have it as it is, but will ascend to higher stages. Now with the means supplied by occult science we can survey seven states of consciousness of which our present consciousness is the middle one: we can survey three preceding ones and three following after.

Many will wonder why we are just standing so nicely in the centre. This comes from the fact that other stages, preceding the first, are beyond our sight, others follow the seventh which are again beyond our sight. We see just far behind us as we do in front; if we took one step back, we should see one more behind us and one fewer before us-just as when you go into the fields you can see as far to the left as to the right.

These seven states of consciousness are the following: At first a very dull deep condition of consciousness which humanity hardly knows today. Only persons with a special mediumistic tendency can still have this consciousness today which once upon Saturn was possessed by all men. Mediumistic persons can come into such a consciousness, which is known to the modern psychologist. All the other states of consciousness have been deadened in them and they appear practically lifeless. But then, if from memory or even in this condition they sketch or describe what they have experienced, they bring to light quite extraordinary experiences, which do not take place around us. They make all sorts of drawings which, although they are grotesque and distorted, yet agree with what we call in theosophy cosmic conditions. They are often entirely incorrect, but nevertheless they have something by which we can recognise that such people during this lowered condition have a dull but a universal consciousness; they see cosmic bodies and therefore their sketches are of that nature.

A consciousness that is dull like this but in compensation represents a universal knowledge in our cosmos, was once possessed by man on the first incarnation of our Earth, and is called “deep trance consciousness.” There are beings in our surroundings who still have such a consciousness—the minerals. If you could talk with them, they would tell you what goes on in Saturn—but this consciousness is entirely dull and insensible.

The second condition of consciousness which we know, or much rather, do not know, since we are then asleep, is that of ordinary sleep. This condition is not so comprehensive, but in spite of its still being very dull, it is clear in comparison with the first. This “sleep-consciousness” was once the permanent state of all human beings when the Earth was “Sun”; at that time the human ancestor was in a continuous sleep.

Even today this state of consciousness still exists; the plants have it, they are beings who uninterruptedly sleep, and if they could speak they could tell us how things are on the Sun, for they have Sun-consciousness.

The third condition, which is still dim and dull in relation to our day-consciousness, is that of “picture-consciousness”, and of this we have a clear idea since we experience an echo of it in our dream-filled sleep, though it is but a reminiscence of what on the Moon was the consciousness of all human beings. It will be well to start from the dream in order to get a picture of the Moon-consciousness.

In the dream-life we find indeed something confusing, chaotic, but on closer observation this confusion nevertheless displays an inner law. The dream is a remarkable symbolist. In my lectures I have often brought forward the following examples, which are all taken from life. You dream that you are running after a tree-frog to catch it, you feel the soft, smooth body; you wake up and have the corner of the sheet in your hand. Had you used your waking consciousness you would have seen how your hand was holding the bed-cover. The dream-consciousness gives you a symbol of the external act, it forms a symbol out of what our day-consciousness sees as a fact.

Another example: a student dreams that he is standing at the door in the lecture hall. There he is roughly jostled, and from this ensues a challenge. He now experiences every detail, until, accompanied by his second and a doctor, he goes to the duel, and the first shot is fired. At this moment he wakes up, and sees that he has overturned the chair at his bedside. In waking consciousness he would simply have heard the fall; the dream symbolises this prosaic event through the drama of the duel. And you see too, that the conditions of time are quite changed, for the whole drama flashed through his mind in the single instant in which the chair fell. The entire preparation took place in one moment, the dream has reversed time, it does not conform to the circumstances of the ordinary world, it is a creator in time.

Not only can external events be symbolised in this way, but also inner processes of the body. A man dreams he is in an air hole of a cellar, obnoxious spiders creep about him; he wakes up and feels a headache; the skull has taken on the symbol of the cellar hole, the pain, that of the hideous spiders!

The dream of the present-day man symbolises events which are both external and within. But it was not so when this third state of consciousness was that of the Moon humanity. At that time man lived entirely in such pictures as he has in the modern dream, but they expressed realities. They signified precisely such a reality as today the blue colour signifies a reality, only at that time colour hovered freely in space, it was not resting upon the objects. In that former consciousness man could not have set out on the street, as today, have seen a man in the distance, looked at him, approached him; for forms of beings with a coloured surface could not have been perceived at that time by man, quite apart from the fact that he could not then walk as he does today. But let us suppose that one man on the Moon had met another, then a freely hovering picture of form and colour would have risen up before him. Let us say, an ugly one, then the man would have turned aside in order not to meet it; or a beautiful one, then he would have drawn near it. The ugly colour-picture would have shown him that the other had an unsympathetic feeling towards him, the beautiful, that the other liked him.

Let us suppose there had been salt on the Moon; when salt stands on the table today, you see it as it is in space, as object, granular, with definite colouring. At that time it would not have been so. On the Moon you would not have been able to see the salt. But from the place where the salt would be, a picture of colour and form would have proceeded, floating free; and this picture would have shown you that the salt was something useful. Thus the whole consciousness was filled with pictures, with floating colours and forms. In an ocean of such form and colour pictures the human being lived; but the pictures of colour and form denoted what was going on around him, above all, things of a soul character and those which affected the soul nature—what was advantageous to it or harmful. In this way the human being orientated himself rightly with regard to the things around him. When the Moon passed over into the Earth incarnation this consciousness changed into our day-consciousness, and only a relic of it has remained in the dream as one has it now—a rudiment, as there are rudiments of other things. You know, for instance, that there are certain muscles near the ear which nowadays seem purposeless. Earlier they had their significance; they served to move the ears at will; there are very few persons who can do this today.

So conditions are to be found in man which have remained as a last relic of a former significance. Although these pictures no longer have a meaning, at that time they signified the outer world. Even today you still have this consciousness among all those animals—note this carefully—which cannot utter sounds from their inner being. There is in fact a far truer division of animals in occultism than in external Nature Science, namely in to those which can utter sounds from within and those which are dumb. It is true that you can find among certain lower creatures the power of producing sounds, but then this happens in a mechanical way, through friction, etc., not from their inner being. Even the frogs do not create sounds so. Only the higher animals, which arose at the time when the human being could express his suffering and joy in tones, only these, together with man, have gained the power of bringing to expression their pain and pleasure through sounds and cries. All animals which do not utter sounds from within still have such a picture-consciousness. It is not a fact that lower animals see the pictures in such outlines as we do. If some lower animal, the crab, for example, perceives a picture that makes a distinctly unpleasant impression, it gets out of the way, it does not see the objects, but sees the harmfulness in a repelling picture.

The fourth state of consciousness is that which all men now have. The pictures which man formerly perceived as colour pictures floating freely in space, wrap themselves, so to speak, round the objects. One might say they are laid over them, they form the surface and seem to be upon the objects, whereas formerly they seemed to float in freedom. In consequence, they have become the expression of the form; what man earlier had within himself has come out and fastened itself on the objects and through this he has come to his present waking day-consciousness.

We will now consider something else. We have already said that man's physical body was prepared on Saturn; on the Sun was added the Etheric or Life-body, which interpenetrated and worked on it. It took what the physical body had already become by itself, and worked on it further. On the Moon was added the Astral-body; this still further altered the form of the body. On Saturn the physical body was very simple, on the Sun it was much more complicated, for then the etheric body worked on it and made it more perfect. On the Moon the Astral body was added, and on the Earth the Ego, which brought it to a still greater completion. At the time when the physical body existed on Saturn, when as yet no etheric body had interpenetrated it, all the organs it contains today were not yet within, for it lacked blood and nerves, nor had it as yet any glands. The human being at that time had merely the organs-and these only in their rudiments-which today are the most perfect, and which have had time to arrive at their present perfection, namely, the marvelously constructed sense organs.

The wonderful construction of the human eye, the wonderful apparatus of the human ear, all this has only attained its perfection today because it was formed out of the general substance of Saturn, and the etheric body, astral body and ego have worked on it. So too the larynx; it was already laid down on Saturn, but man could not as yet speak. On the Moon he began to send out inarticulate tones and cries, but only through the continuous activity described, the larynx became the perfected apparatus it is on the Earth today. On the Sun, where the etheric body was inserted, the sense organs were further elaborated and all those organs were added which are primarily organs of secretion and life, which discharge functions of nutrition and growth. They were first laid down during the Sun stage of existence. Then the astral body worked further during the Moon existence, the Ego during the Earth existence and thus the glands, the organs of growth and so on have matured to their present perfection. Then on the Moon the nervous system originated through the incorporation of the astral body. The principle, however, which enabled the human being to evolve an objective consciousness and at the same time gave him the power to sound forth his pleasure and pain from within—the ego—this formed in man his blood.

Thus the whole universe is the builder of the sense organs. Thus have all the glands, organs of reproduction and nutrition been formed by the life-body; thus the astral body is the builder of the nervous system and the ego the incorporator of the blood. There is a phenomenon described as “chlorosis”—anæmia or green-sickness. There the blood comes into a state where it cannot sustain the waking consciousness; such persons often lapse into a dim consciousness like that on the Moon.

Now let us consider the three states of consciousness which are still to come. One can ask how it is possible to know something about them already. It can be done through Initiation. The initiate can have these states of consciousness even today in anticipation. The next known to the initiate is the so-called psychic, *[Later called by Dr. Steiner Imagination.] a consciousness in which one has both together, the picture-consciousness and the waking day-consciousness. With this psychic consciousness you see a man in outline and forms as in day-waking consciousness. But you see at the same time what lives in his soul, streaming out as coloured clouds and pictures into what we call the “Aura.” Nor do you go about the world in a dreamy state like the Moon-human being, but in complete self-control, as modern man of the waking consciousness. On the planet that replaces our Earth the whole of humanity will have this psychic or soul-consciousness, the Jupiter consciousness.

Then there is still a sixth state of consciousness which man will also one day possess. This will unite the present day-consciousness, the psychic consciousness only known to the initiate and in addition all that man sleeps away today. Man will look deep, deep into the nature of beings when he lives in this consciousness, the consciousness of Inspiration. He will not only perceive in pictures and forms of colour, he will hear the being of the other give forth sounds and tones. Each human individuality will have a certain note and the whole will sound together in a symphony. This will be the consciousness of man when our planet will have passed into the Venus condition. There he will experience the sphere-harmony which Goethe describes in his Prologue to Faust:

The Sun-orb sings, in emulation
Mid brother-spheres, his ancient round;
His path predestined through Creation
He ends with step of thunder-sound.

(Bayard Taylor's translation)

When the Earth was Sun the human being was aware in a dim way of this ringing and resounding, and on Venus he will again hear it ringing and resounding “auf alter Weise” (as of old). To this very phrase Goethe has retained the picture.

The seventh state of consciousness is the Spiritual consciousness,* [Since called Intuition] the very highest, when man has a universal consciousness, when he will see not only what proceeds on his own planet, but in the whole cosmos around him. It is the consciousness that the human being had on Saturn, a kind of universal consciousness, although then quite dim and dull. This he will have in addition to all the other states of consciousness when he will have reached Vulcan.

These are the seven states of human consciousness which man must go through in his journey through the cosmos. And each incarnation of the Earth produces the conditions through which such states of consciousness are possible. Only because the system of nerves was laid down on the Moon, and further developed to the present brain, has the modern waking day-consciousness been possible. Organs must be created by which the higher states of consciousness may also have a physical basis of experience, as the initiate already experiences these states spiritually.

That the human being can pass through seven such planetary conditions is the meaning of evolution. Each planetary stage is bound up with the development of one of the seven states of human consciousness, and through what takes place on each planet the physical organs for such a state of consciousness are perfected. You will have a more highly developed organ, a psychic organ, on Jupiter; on Venus there will be an organ through which man will be able to develop physically the consciousness possessed by the initiate today on the Devachanic plane. And on Vulcan the Spiritual consciousness will prevail, which the initiate possesses today when he is in Higher Devachan, the World of Reason.

To-morrow we will examine these planets separately, for, just as our Earth earlier, in the Atlantean and Lemurian Ages, for instance, had a different appearance from that of today, and as later it will again look different, so too have Moon, Sun and Saturn passed through various conditions, and so will Jupiter and Venus pass through still others.

We have learnt today the broad, comprehensive cycle of the planets, tomorrow we will occupy ourselves with the changes under one by these planets while they were the theatre of human evolution.

We shall most easily understand the progress of humanity through the three incarnations, Saturn, Sun, and Moon, preceding the Earth, if we add a further survey of man in sleep, in dream.

When man is asleep the seer beholds the astral body with the ego enveloped in it as though floating over the physical body. The astral body is then outside the physical and etheric bodies, but remains connected with them. It sends threads, as it were, or rather currents into the universal cosmic body, and seems partly embedded in it. Thus in the sleeping man we have the physical, the etheric and the astral body, but this last sends out tentacles towards the great astral universe.

If we picture this condition as an enduring one, if here on the physical plane there were only human beings who had the physical body interpenetrated with the etheric body, while above hovered over them an astral soul with the ego, then we should have the condition in which mankind existed on the Moon. Except that on the Moon the astral body was not strongly separated from the physical body; it sank down into the physical body just as strongly as it expanded into the cosmos.

But if you picture a state of sleep where no dream ever comes then you have the condition in which humanity existed on the Sun. And if you now imagine that the human being has died, that even his etheric body is outside him, united to the astral body and ego, but yet that the link is not quite dissolved, so that what is outside, embedded in the whole surrounding cosmos, sends down its rays and works upon the physical substance—you then have the condition in which mankind existed on Saturn.

Below on the cosmic globe of Saturn there was only what we have in our purely physical body; it was surrounded, so to speak, by an etheric astral atmosphere, in which the egos were embedded.

Human beings were already actually in existence on Saturn but in a dull, dull consciousness. These souls had the task of maintaining in an active and mobile state something that belonged to them down below. They worked from above on their physical body, like a snail fashioning its shell; they acted from outside, just like an instrument, on the bodily organs. We will describe the appearance of that on which the souls above were working; we must give some little description of this physical Saturn, of Saturn in general.

I have already said that the part of the physical body elaborated then was the foundation of the sense organs. The souls outside worked upon the Saturn surface, upon what lived in man as rudiments of the senses. They were actually in the cosmic space surrounding Saturn below were their workshops, there they worked out the types for eyes and ears and for the other sense organs.

Now what was the fundamental quality of this Saturn-mass? It is hard to characterise, for we have scarcely a word in our language which is suitable; our words are quite materialistic, they are only adapted to the physical plane. There is one word however, that can express the delicate work that was carried out there. One can denote it with the expression: Reflection. The Saturn globe in all its parts had the quality of reflecting everything, such as light, tone, perfume, taste, that reached it from without; all was thrown back again; one perceived it in cosmic space as a reflection in the mirror of Saturn. One can only compare it with the effect of looking into the eye of our neighbour, when our own picture looks out from it towards us.

Thus all the human souls were aware of themselves, but not only as a picture in colour they perceived themselves in taste, in scent, in a definite feeling of warmth. Saturn was thus a reflecting planet. The human beings living in the atmosphere threw their essence and being into it and out of the pictures that then arose, the rudiments of the sense organs began to take form, for they were pictures that worked creatively.

Imagine yourself standing before a mirror from which your own figure confronts you, and that this figure begins to create, is not a dead form as in our modern lifeless mirror. There you have the creative activity of Saturn, there you have the kind of way the human beings lived on Saturn and accomplished their work.

This took place below on the Saturn globe; up above, the souls were in the deep trance consciousness of which I spoke yesterday. They knew nothing of this mirroring, they only occasioned it. In this dull trance consciousness they had within them the entire cosmic All, and thus the whole cosmic All was mirrored from their being. They themselves, however, were embedded in a basic substance of a spiritual nature, they were not independent but were only a part of the spirituality surrounding Saturn. They could not therefore have a spiritual perception, higher spirits perceived by means of them, they were the organs of perception for other spirits.

A whole number of higher spirits were in the surroundings of Saturn; all those whom Christian esotericism has called Divine Messengers, Angels, Archangels, Primal Forces, Powers of Revelation. All these were contained in the Saturn atmosphere. Just as the hand belongs to the organism so did the souls belong to these Beings, and just as little as the hand has an independent consciousness, so little had they at that time a consciousness of their own. They worked out of the consciousness of higher Beings, the consciousness of a higher world; they thus fashioned the forms of their sense organs, which then became creative, and they also moulded the Saturn substance. You must not think of this substance of Saturn as being as dense as the present human flesh. The densest condition that it could attain at all was not as dense as our present physical air. Saturn became physical, but only reached the density of fire, of warmth, the warmth in which our modern Physics no longer admits any matter to exist. Warmth, however, for the occultist is a finer substance than gas it has the characteristic of continuous expansion. And since Saturn consisted of this substance it had the power of spreading from within outwards, of raying out everything, of reflecting. Such a body radiates everything; it has no need to keep it all within itself.

Saturn was not a uniform substance but of such a composition that one could have perceived a differentiation, a configuration. Later the organs became rounded into cell-like balls, only that cells are small and those were large—as if you took a mulberry or blackberry. You could not as yet have seen on Saturn, for the reflecting process threw all light that came from outside back again. Within this Saturn mass all was dark, only towards the end of its evolution was it somewhat illumined. A number of beings were present in the surrounding atmosphere of Saturn; not only you yourselves were active on your sense organs. For the soul of man was not yet so far developed as to be able to work alone, you worked in conjunction with other spiritual beings, under their guidance, so to speak.

Certain beings worked on Saturn as independently as modern man; they stood then at the human level. They could not be formed like modern man, for warmth was the only substance of Saturn. In respect of their intelligence, their ego-consciousness, however, they stood at the level of present man though they could form no physical body, no brain. Let us observe them somewhat closer. The present-day human being consists of four members: Physical body, Etheric body, Astral body and the Ego, and, prefigured in the ego, Spirit-Self, Life-Spirit and Spirit-Man (Manas, Budhi, Atma). The lowest, although of its kind the most perfect member on the Earth planet, is the physical body.

The next higher is the etheric body, then the astral body and the ego. Now there are also beings who have no physical body, whose lowest member is the etheric body. They have no need of the physical body in order to occupy themselves in our sense world; in compensation they have a member which is higher than our seventh.

Others have the astral body as their lowest member and in compensation a ninth, and again others who have our ego as lowest member, have in compensation a tenth member. When we consider the beings who have the ego as lowest member we must say that they consist of:

• Ego
• Spirit-Self
• Life-Spirit
• Spirit-Man.

Then come the eighth, ninth and tenth members, that which Christian esotericism calls the Divine Trinity:

• Holy Spirit
• Son or Word
• Father.

In theosophical literature one is accustomed to call these the three Logoi.

These beings, whose lowest member is the ego, are those who come into special consideration for us in the Saturn evolution. They were at the stage where humanity stands today. They could exercise their ego under the quite different conditions that I have described. They were the human beings of Saturn and the ancestors of our present humanity.

They irradiated the surface of Saturn with their ego-hood, their external nature, they were the implanters of ego-hood in the physical corporeality that was forming on the surface of Saturn.

Thus they made it their care that the physical body was prepared in such a way that it could later become the bearer of the ego. Only such a physical body as you have today, with feet, hands and head and the sense organs incorporated in it could be ego-bearer on the fourth stage, the Earth. To this end the nucleus of it had to be already implanted on Saturn. One also calls these ego-beings of Saturn, Spirits of Egoism. *[Later called by Dr. Steiner, Spirits of Personality.]

Egoism has a two-fold character; it is excellent and desirable or obnoxious and evil. If at that time on Saturn and on the succeeding planets the essential nature of egoism had not been again and again implanted, man would never have become an independent being who can say “I” to himself. Into your bodily nature there has been instilled ever since Saturn the sum of forces which stamps you as an independent being, cutting you off from all other beings. To this end had the Spirits of Egoism, the Asuras, to work.

Among them are to be found two kinds, apart from slight deviations. The one kind has elaborated egoism in a noble, self-reliant way, and has risen higher and higher in the perfection of the sense of freedom: that is the rightful independence of egoism. These spirits have guided mankind through all the successive planets; they have become the educators of men towards independence.

Now on each planet there are also Spirits who have remained behind in evolution, they have remained stationary and not wished to progress. You will recognise a law from this: If the most outstanding fall and commit the “great sin” of not advancing with evolution, then they become the very worst of all.

The noble sense of liberty has been reversed into wickedness, into its opposite. Those are the Spirits of Temptation, and they must be taken gravely into account; they lead to the evil side of egoism, even today they are still in our environment, these evil Spirits of Saturn. All that is bad draws its power from these Spirits.

When each planet has completed its evolution and becomes spiritual again, it is, so to speak, no longer in existence. It passes over into a condition of sleep in order to come forth once more. So too was it with Saturn. Its next incarnation is the Sun, a Sun which you would obtain if you were to mix together as in a cauldron all that is on the sun, the moon and the earth, together with all the terrestrial and spiritual beings. The Sun evolution is distinguished by the fact that the etheric body drew into the prepared physical body below. The Sun has a denser substantiality than Saturn, it is to be compared with the density of the present air. The human physical substance, your own body which you formed for yourselves, is to be seen on the Sun interpenetrated by the etheric body. You yourselves belonged to a body of air, as on Saturn to a body of warmth. Your etheric body was already down below, but your astral body with your ego was enveloped in the great general astral body of the Sun. And there you worked down into the physical and etheric bodies, just as today in sleep when your astral body is outside it works upon the physical and the etheric body. At that time you were elaborating the first rudiments of all that today are organs of growth, metabolism and reproduction. You were transforming the elements of the sense organs from Saturn, some of which maintained their character, while others were transformed into glands and organs of growth.

All organs of growth and organs of reproduction are sense organs taken hold of by the etheric body and transformed. When you compare the body of the Sun with Saturn you find a certain difference. Saturn was stiff like a reflecting surface, it rayed back everything that it received of taste, smell and all sense-perceptions. This was not so in the Sun. Whereas Saturn rayed back everything direct, without taking possession of it, the Sun permeated itself with it, and then rayed it back; being able to do so by virtue of having an etheric body. Its body, penetrated by an etheric body, did as the plant does today with the sunlight. The plant takes up the sunlight, permeates itself with it and then gives it back again. If it is put in some dark place, it loses its colour and languishes. There would be no green colouring matter without light. So it was with your own body on the Sun, it permeated itself with light and with other ingredients too, and as the plant sends back the light after having drawn strength from it, so did the Sun once upon a time ray back the light after having worked it over inwardly. But it not only permeated itself with the light, but with taste, scent, warmth, everything, and radiated it out again.

Hence your own body too was at the stage of the plant on the Sun. It had not the appearance of a plant in the modern sense, for this has only been formed on the Earth. What you bear within you as glands, organs of growth and reproduction, were upon the Sun as mountains and rocks are upon the Earth today. You worked upon them as one nowadays tends and cultivates a little garden. The Sun radiated back the ingredients of cosmic space, it shone in the loveliest colours, a wonderful tone rang forth, an exquisite aroma streamed out from it. The ancient Sun was a wonderful being in cosmic space. Thus at that time on the Sun men worked at their own substance like certain creatures, corals for instance, work from outside on their structure. This took place under the guidance of higher beings, for there were higher beings in the Sun's atmosphere.

We must concern ourselves with one special category who then stood at the level reached by men today. On Saturn we have the Spirits of Egoism who implanted the sense of freedom and self-reliance and stood at the human level. On the Sun it was other beings, who had as lowest member, not the ego but the astral body. They possessed astral body, ego, Spirit Self, Life Spirit and Spirit Man and the eighth member, named in Christian Esotericism “Holy Spirit,” and finally the ninth member, the Son, “the Word” in the sense of St. John's Gospel. They had not as yet the tenth member and instead of this they had a lower member, the astral body. These were the Spirits who were active on the Sun, they guided all astral activity. They differ from modern man inasmuch as man breathes air, since air is in the earthly environment; these Spirits, however, breathed warmth or fire.

The Sun was itself a kind of being of air, surrounded by that substance which had previously formed Saturn-fire, warmth. The part that had densified had formed the gaseous Sun, and what had not densified was a surging sea of fire. These beings could live on the Sun and inhale and exhale warmth, fire; they were therefore called the Spirits of Fire. They stood at the human level on the Sun and they worked in the service of humanity. One calls them Sun Spirits or Fire Spirits. Man at that time was at the stage of sleep-consciousness, the Sun-Fire Spirits had already the ego consciousness. Since then they too have developed further and ascended to higher degrees of consciousness. One calls them in Christian Esotericism Archangels. And the highest evolved Spirit Who was on the Sun as Fire Spirit, Who today is still active upon the Earth, with very highly evolved consciousness, this Sun or Fire Spirit is the Christ. In the same way the most evolved Saturn Spirit is the Father God.

Christian Esotericism knows that there was incarnated in the body of flesh and blood of Christ-Jesus precisely such a Sun-Fire Spirit, and indeed the highest, the Regent of the Sun Spirits. That He might come on to the Earth He had to make use of a physical body, He had to live under the same earthly conditions as man, in order to be able to manifest here.

Thus on the Sun we are concerned with a Sun-body, as it were, a body of the Sun planet with Ego-Spirits, who are Fire Spirits, and with a Regent of the Sun, the most highly evolved, the Christ. While the Earth was the Sun, this Spirit was the central Spirit of the Sun; when the Earth was Moon, He was more highly developed, but He remained with the Moon; when the Earth was Earth, He was very highly developed and remained with the Earth. He forms thus the highest planetary Spirit of the Earth. The Earth today is His Body as at that time the Sun was. Therefore you must take St. John's words literally, “Whoever eats my bread, treads me under foot.” For the Earth is the Body of Christ. And when men who eat bread, taken from the body of the earth, walk upon the earth, then they tread under foot the Body of Christ. Take these words quite literally, as all religious documents must be taken. Only one must first know the true meaning of the letters and then seek for the spirit.

One thing more. Not all beings within this Sun-mass came to the stage of evolution of which I have spoken to you. Many stayed behind at the stage of the Saturn existence. They could not receive into themselves what streamed in from cosmic space and send it back after receiving it; they had to send it back direct, they could not permeate themselves with it. These beings therefore appeared on the Sun as a kind of dark intermixture, as something that could not send out its own light. Since they were enclosed in the Sun-mass surrounded by a mass sending out its own light, they worked as dark places. We must therefore distinguish between those places in the Sun which radiated out into cosmic space what they had received, and those which could radiate out nothing. Thus they worked as dark wedges within the Sun-mass, they had learnt nothing in addition to what they had on Saturn. Just as in the human body you do not find glands and organs of growth everywhere, but the body is interspersed with dead parts which have been incorporated, so was the Sun interspersed with these dark wedges.

Our present sun is the descendant of the Earth-Sun-body; it has cast out the moon and the earth and has retained the most advanced part. What was present in the former Sun-body as relics of Saturn are still to be found in the present sun, as the so-called sunspots. They are the last vestiges of Saturn, which remain in the shining sun-mass as dark portions. Our occult wisdom discloses the hidden spiritual sources of physical facts. Physical science substantiates the physical causes of the sunspots through its astronomy and astrophysics; the spiritual causes, however, lie in that residue remaining from Saturn.

We now ask what kingdoms were there on Saturn? Only one kingdom, the last traces of which are contained in the present mineral. When we speak of man's passing through the mineral kingdom, we must not think of the present mineral. The last descendants of the Saturn mineral must far rather be seen in your eyes, ears and other sense organs. Those are the most physical, the most mineral parts of you. The apparatus of the eye is like a physical instrument and even continues unchanged for some time after death.

The single Saturn kingdom progressed on the Sun to a kind of plant existence. Man's own body confronts us there growing like a plant. What was left behind as Saturn kingdom was a kind of mineral kingdom of the Sun, which had the form of stunted sense organs which could not reach their goal. But all these beings on the Sun, these developing human bodies, had as yet no nervous system within them. That was incorporated for the first time on the Moon by the astral body. Plants too have no nervous system. It is an error of physical science when it ascribes one to them.

But the astral bodies, especially those that proceeded from the Fire Spirits, sent a kind of stream into the substance that was down below as physical and etheric bodies. These light streams divided in tree-like forms. Their last traces are to be found in densified form as the organ we call the Solar Plexus. This goes back to the ancient in-streaming on the Sun, densified to substance and hence the name Solar-plexus.

You must picture the bodies which you had on the Sun as if currents from above streamed into you, currents interlaced as a branching tree. Thus the Sun is represented in the numberless interlacings which are your solar-plexus. These branches were represented in German mythology as the World Ash, which, however, means very much besides.

Then the Sun passed into a sleep-condition and was transformed into what in occult science we call the Moon. In this we have to do with yet a third incarnation of the Earth, which will again introduce to us a directing Central Spirit.

As the highest Regent of Saturn, the Ego Spirit appears to us as the Father God, the highest God of the Sun, the Sun-God, as Christ, so will the Regent of the Moon-stage of the Earth appear to us as the Holy Spirit with His Hosts, which in Christian esotericism are called the Messengers of the Godhead, the Angels.

We have completed two Days of Creation, which in the esoteric language are called:

• Dies Saturni
• Dies Solis

To them we must add: Dies Lunae (the Moon-Day).

The existence of a directing Godhead of Saturn, Sun and Moon has always been known.

The words Dies = Day and Deus = God have the same origin, so that Dies may be translated either Day or Godhead. One can just as well say for Dies Solis Sun-Day or Sun-God and mean by both the Christ Spirit.

WE spoke yesterday about the various incarnations of our Planet, about the Saturn and Sun incarnations, and we will only briefly bring to mind that man on the Sun-planet, the forerunner of our Earth, was developed to the degree of having a physical body and an etheric body, that he had therefore risen to a kind of plant-existence. I have also told you how different this plant existence was from that which you know in the surrounding plant world today. We shall see that plants as they surround you today have only arisen on our planet Earth. We have also to a certain extent described how these human ancestors on the Sun, inasmuch as they had an etheric body, brought to expression in the physical body chiefly those organs which we know nowadays as the glandular organs of growth, reproduction and nutrition. All this was to be seen on the Sun as on our Earth we see rocks, stones and plants. There was in addition a kingdom that we can call a backward Saturn kingdom, which contained the elements of the later mineral. There is no question of mineral as we know it today being present on the Sun, but there were bodies which had not acquired the power of receiving an etheric body and which had therefore in a certain respect remained behind at the mineral stage that man had formerly passed through on Saturn. We must therefore speak of two kingdoms as being formed on the Sun. People have become accustomed in theosophical writings to say that man has gone through the mineral, the plant and the animal kingdoms. You see that is an inexact way of talking, the mineral kingdom on Saturn was quite differently formed. In its formations the first germs, the earliest indications of our sense organs were prefigured. Nor was there a plant kingdom on the Sun like the present one, but all that lives in man today as organs of growth was of a plant-like nature, i.e., all glandular organs; they were plant-like because they were permeated by an etheric body.

Now we must imagine that this Sun-existence passed through a kind of sleep condition, a darkening, a dormant period. You must not think, however, that the passing of a planet through a sleep-condition meant a sort of inactivity, a condition of nothingness. It is just as little inactive as the Devachan condition of man. The human Devachanic state is no inactive one; on the contrary, we have seen that man exists there in continuous activity, and co-operates in the development of our Earth in the most important way. It is only for the modern consciousness of man a kind of sleep state; for another consciousness, however, it appears as a much more active, more real condition. All these transition periods denote a passing through celestial, higher conditions in which important things for the planets are carried out. The theosophical expression for them is “Pralaya.”

We will now imagine that the Sun has passed through such a condition and that from the Sun there has developed the third stage of our Earth, called in occultism the Moon. If we had been able to observe this process, we should have been shown somewhat as follows: We should have seen in the course of millions of years the Sun existence change and disappear, and after further millions of years light up again after a twilight state. That is the beginning of the Moon Cycle.

When the Sun first lit up again there was no question of a division between Sun and Moon, they were still together as in the Sun period. And next there came about what one calls a recapitulation of the earlier conditions; what had taken place on Saturn and the Sun was recapitulated at a certain higher stage. Then a remarkable alteration took place in the condition of this newly emerged Sun. The Moon gathered itself into a globular mass apart from the Sun; two planets, or rather a fixed star and a planet arose from the old Sun system, a larger and a smaller body were formed: Sun and Moon.

The Moon of which we now speak contained not only what the present moon contains, but rather all the various substances and beings contained in the present earth and moon. If you were to stir all this together you would have that Moon of which we are speaking and which at that time had separated itself from the Sun.

The Sun became a fixed Star by reason of taking out the best substances together with the spiritual beings. As long as it was a planetary Sun it still contained all of this within itself. But since it now gave up to an independent planet everything that had hindered the beings in their higher development it became a Fixed Star. And now we have the cosmic scene before us of a higher evolved body as Fixed Star and moving round this in space a planet that is of lesser worth-the Moon-containing in itself the present moon and present earth.

This movement of the Moon round the Sun was quite different from the movement of our present earth. If you examine this you can distinguish two movements. First, the earth revolves round the Sun, and secondly round itself. Through the latter movement which takes place approximately 365 times in a year, arises, as you know, day and night, and through the former arise the four seasons. This, however, was not the case on the Old Moon. That Moon was in a certain respect a more polite body to its Sun than our earth is, for it always moved round the Sun in such a way as to show it the same side, it never turned its back upon it. While it passed once round the Sun it turned only once round itself Such a different kind of movement, however, had a great effect on the beings who were evolving on the planet.

Now I will describe to you the Moon planet itself. Here I must say, first of all, that the human being was again a little more advanced than on the Sun or Saturn. He had come so far as to consist not only of physical body and etheric body, but there was now the astral body in addition. We therefore now have a human being formed of physical body, etheric body, and astral body, but as yet no ego. The consequence was that the Moon human beings progressed to the third state of consciousness we have described, the picture consciousness, the last relic of which we have in the dream-picture-consciousness of man today. By virtue of the incorporation of the astral body into the other bodies, changes took place in these, and especially in the physical body. We have seen that on the Sun the glandular organs were the most highly developed part of the physical body, and that certain places were interpenetrated by currents which later hardened to the present solar-plexus. Through the work of the astral body upon the physical body on the Moon arose the first beginnings of the nervous system; the nerves attached themselves in a way similar to what you have today in the nerves of the spine.

Now consider one thing; man had as yet no independent. Ego, only the three other bodies were independent. This human ego was in the atmosphere surrounding the Moon, just as formerly the etheric body had been on Saturn and the astral body on the Sun, and from there this ego, embedded in its divine origin, worked upon the physical body. If we remember that at that time the ego still worked as a companion of divine beings, that it had not yet emancipated itself, fallen out from this divine spiritual essentiality, then we see that the ego in its path to earth has undergone in a certain way a kind of deterioration and in a certain way also an advance. An advance inasmuch as the ego has become independent, a deterioration, however, since it has now become exposed to all doubt, errors, wickedness and evil.

The egos worked from the divine-spiritual substance. If an ego works down today from the astral plane on to the physical body, it is a group-soul of the animals. The ego worked at that time into the three bodies from outside as these group-souls today work into the animals. It could, however, create higher bodies than those of the present animal kingdom since it worked from the divine substance. There were living beings on the Moon which in appearance and in their whole nature stood higher than the highest apes today, but not so high as the present man. There was an intermediate kingdom between present man and the animal kingdom. Then there were two more kingdoms, both of which had remained behind. One of these had not been capable of taking up the astral body after the Sun existence and had therefore remained at the stage in which the glandular organs were on the Sun. This second kingdom of the Moon stood between the present animals and the present plants; it was a kind of plant-animal. There exists today on earth no directly similar creature, we can only recognise rudiments of it. There was still a third kingdom, which had preserved the Saturn condition, even on the Sun; it stood between mineral and plant. Thus on the Moon we have three kingdoms: plant-mineral, animal-plant and man-animal.

The minerals of today on which we walk about did not exist on the Moon; there were not as yet what we call rocks, arable land, humus. The lowest kingdom stood between plant and mineral. The whole substance of the Moon consisted of this kingdom. The Moon surface somewhat resembled a peaty soil, on which there were also plants forming a kind of pulpy plant-mass. The Moon-beings went about on a vegetable-mineral mass of a pulp-like consistency. This was the state on the Moon during certain periods of its development-one could also compare it with a boiled lettuce. There were no rocks in the present sense, the nearest approach were certain formations occurring here and there which you can compare with the growths formed by the wood or the bark of certain trees. The Moon-mountains consisted of such lignification, such wooden masses of lignified plant-pulp. It was like a kind of aged plant grown dry. This was the earliest beginnings of the mineral kingdom and upon it flourished those plant-animals; they could make no independent movements, they were fixed to the ground, as the corals are today.

In our myths and sagas, in which lies deep wisdom given by initiates, a memory is preserved of this, and above all in the legend of the death of Baldur. The Germanic Sun-god or god of Light had once a dream in which his approaching death was foretold to him. That made the gods, the Asen, who loved him, very sad; they pondered over means of saving him. The Mother of the gods, Frigga, put all the beings of the earth on solemn oath that not one of them would ever kill Baldur; they all swore and so it seemed impossible that Baldur should ever fall a victim to death. On one occasion the gods were at play, and during the game they threw every possible sort of thing at Baldur without hurting him, they knew that he was invulnerable. Loki, the god of darkness, the opponent of the Asen, cogitated, however, on how to kill Baldur. Then he heard from Frigga that she had made all beings swear not to kill him. Quite outside, however, there was a plant, the mistletoe, which was unaffected, this she disclosed to him; she had administered no oath to it. The crafty Loki took the mistletoe, brought it to the blind god, Hödur, and he, not knowing what he did, killed Baldur with it. So the evil dream was fulfilled through the mistletoe. It has always played a special role in popular custom, something sinister, ghostly, was expressed through it. What was taught about the mistletoe in the old Trotten and Druid Mysteries passed over to the populace as legend and custom.

These are the facts: On the Moon there was this mineral-plant pulp and upon it flourished the plant-animals of the Moon. Now there were some who evolved further and reached a higher condition on the Earth; others, however, had stayed behind at the Moon stage, and as the Earth arose could only assume a stunted form, they had to preserve the habits they had on the Moon. On Earth they could only live as spongers, parasites, on a plant-like foundation. So the mistletoe lives on other trees, since it is a relic left behind of the old plant-animals of the Moon.

Baldur was the expression of what evolves further, of what brings light to the Earth; Loki, on the contrary, the representative of the dark forces, the backward forces, hates what has progressed, has gone on developing; therefore Loki is the opponent of Baldur. None of the creatures of Earth could undertake anything against Baldur, the god who gave light to the Earth, for they were his equals, they had undergone evolution. Only a being still at the Moon-stage and feeling itself united with the ancient god of darkness was capable of killing the god of light. The mistletoe is also a definite curative remedy, as are poisons in general. Thus do we find deep facts of cosmic wisdom in the old folklore and customs.

Now we call to mind the beings on Saturn who had the Ego as the outermost body, and remember that on the Sun there were such as had the astral body as their external sheath. On the Moon there were beings whose external sheath was the etheric body. They consisted of etheric body, astral body, ego, Spirit-self, Life-spirit and Spirit-man and of one member more, the eighth, of which we cannot yet speak in the case of man, the Holy Spirit. We could only have seen them as phantom-like beings in their etheric body; they had at that time the same degree of evolution as man today possesses. Christian esotericism calls them Angels. They are beings who today stand directly above man since they have evolved to the stage of the Holy Spirit; one also calls them Spirits of Twilight or the Lunar Pitris. The Spirits of Ego-hood on Saturn had as their Leader a Being whom man calls the Father-God. The Spirits of Fire on the Sun had as their Leader the Christ, or in the sense of St. John's Gospel, the Logos. On the Moon the Leader was the same Spirit as is known in Christianity as the Holy Ghost. Those beings who had passed through the human stage on the Moon had no need to descend as far as the physical body here on the Earth.

The planetary formations had become ever denser and denser. Old Saturn in its densest state had only a warmth consistency. The Sun in its densest state consisted of what we see today in gases, in air. You must, to be sure, picture these substances as somewhat denser than the present warmth-substance and the gases. And in the Moon-stage the gaseous substances of the Sun had so far densified that they produced that pulpy, thickish, fluid flowing mass of which all the beings, even the highest, the animal-men, consisted on the Moon. You have more or less this substance if you imagine the white of a hen's egg, somewhat thickened, and into this substance of the human being the nervous system was incorporated.

The Moon was surrounded by a kind of atmosphere formed quite differently from that of the Earth. We understand its character if we think of a passage in Goethe's Faust; it is where he wants to conjure up the spirits, he wants to make fire-air—air in which watery, mist-like substances are dissolved, which would then enable spirit beings to incorporate in it. This air permeated by watery substances (one calls it Fire-air, or Fire-mist) was breathed by the beings of the Moon. They had no lungs, even the highest beings breathed through something akin to gills, as present-day fishes do.

This fire-air, called “Ruach” in the Hebrew tradition, can actually be made manifest in a certain way. “Ruach” has been lost to modern man, the old alchemists could, however, set up the necessary conditions for it, and could bring elemental beings into their service by its means. This fire-mist was thus something fully known in the old alchemical times, and the farther back we go, the more power had man to produce it. Our forefathers on the Moon breathed fire-mist. It has evolved further, has differentiated itself into our present air and into whatever has arisen on the Earth under the influence of fire.

The smoke-like, steam-like Moon atmosphere, which had a certain degree of heat, was interpenetrated, at certain times more, at others less, by currents which hung down from the air somewhat like cords, and sank into the human bodies and permeated them. The human body on the Moon hung on a kind of strand, which extended into the atmosphere, as today the child in the maternal body hangs on the navel-cord. It was like a cosmic navel-cord and out of the fire-mist substances entered the bodies comparable to what man himself creates today with the blood. The “I,” however, was outside man and sent through these cords into the bodies something similar to blood, and this substance streamed in and out of them. The beings never came in contact with the Moon-surface, they hovered and circled around it, as if they were flowing and floating. The Moon men-animals moved as the present water animals move in water. It was the work of the angels, the Spirits of Twilight, to let these blood-juices flow into the human beings.

These very different conditions had another consequence. On the Moon a kind of blood-system began. From the cosmos there streamed in and out a substance resembling blood, as now the air streams in and out of the body, and there also arose for these Moon-men a capacity which only appears with the blood. This was the first sounding of inner tones for experiences of the soul. It is only when beings possess an astral body, that sensation arises, and they could express this sensation in tones, and indeed in a remarkable way. They were not definitely formed sounds, they could not have cried out with pain, there was no independence of giving vent to sound, of crying out, but it occurred simultaneously with certain experiences. At definite seasons there took place on the Moon what one could call a development of the propagation impulses, and the inner experiences of the beings at those times could be expressed in sound; otherwise they were silent. At a definite position of the Moon to the Sun, in a certain season, the Old Moon sounded forth into the cosmos. The beings upon it cried out their germinative power into the cosmos. We have relics of this preserved in the cries of certain animals, of the stag, for instance. The cry was more the precipitation of general processes, not of individual experiences which are voluntarily expressed. A cosmic event was finding its expression.

We must take all this as but approximate description, for we are bound to words which are coined for things only come into existence in our Earth period. We should first have to invent a language if we would express what is seen by the eye of the Seer. All the same these descriptions are important, for they are the first way of coming to the truth. Only through pictures, through imagination do we find the way to vision. We should make no abstract concepts, mechanical schemes, nor draw up diagrams of vibrations, but let pictures arise within us; that is the direct path, the first stage of knowledge. For as surely as man was present at that time with his forces, so true is it that if he pictures things to himself, this will guide him to the conditions in which he then existed.

After all the beings on the Moon had passed through their evolution and could ascend to higher stages, the time came when Moon and Sun again united, reverted to one body and so entered into Pralaya. And then after they had gone through this dormant state together, a new existence shone out, the earliest proclamation of our Earth-existence.

Now followed a short recapitulation of the first three conditions on a higher level. First the Saturn existence, then the Sun, and then the Moon once more split off and circled round the other body. But this Moon still had the Earth within it.

Then comes a further highly important change. All that is Earth threw out of itself the present moon. That means the worst substances and beings, the unserviceable, and these are contained in the present moon. All that was flowing watery substance in the Old Moon, is frozen on the present moon (that can be proved by physical means); and what was capable of developing further remained behind as Earth. Higher development takes place on the Earth through the separation of the Old Sun into these three bodies: Sun, Moon and Earth.

This separation happened millions of years ago, in the old Lemurian time. And from those ancient Moon-beings, which have been described as plant-mineral, plant-animals and animal-men have arisen the present mineral, the present plant, the present animal and the man who has become able to receive into himself the Ego which formerly hovered around him and was united with the Godhead. The union of the I with the human being took place after the separation of Sun, Moon and Earth, and from this point of time onwards Man has been capable of developing the red blood in himself, and of ascending to the level he has reached today.

WE have come in our studies to the point where the Earth has passed through its so-called Moon-stage. We have also seen that a kind of sleep-state of the whole system followed the Moon stage of the Earth. One must of course realise that all the beings which inhabit the planet share with it this transitional, intermediate state. During this time they pass through experiences differing from those of the actually external state of evolution. We will try to be clear as to how the beings have undergone various things in this transition between the Moon-stage of the Earth and the actual Earth evolution.

We have seen that three kinds of beings lived on the Moon, physical ancestors, so to say, of our present Nature-kingdoms. There existed a kind of plant-mineral, animal-plant and man-animal; man himself on this Old Moon was in a state of not yet developed ego-consciousness. So far man had not attained to an “I” dwelling within a body.

Now during this transitional period something very important came about in the spiritual part of man—if I may thus express it.

If we form a true picture of the Old Moon sphere, we could describe it as a being which itself possessed a sort of life, somewhat like a tree, upon which all manner of living things exist. The Moon was itself a kind of homogeneous plant-mineral. Its rocks were in fact only a hardening of the plant-mineral like mass, and its animal-plants grew out of the mass, while what we can call the men-animals circled around the Moon. We must at the same time be clear that the Ego-consciousness still lived more or less in the atmosphere of the Moon in the Fire-mist, that it was still a part, a member, of a higher being, in whom existed all the egos which today are to be found in bodies separated by the skin one from another. Thus as yet there were no human beings going about as today, equipped with ego consciousness. On the other hand, however, something else was much more fully developed than on the Earth.

You know that what is called Folk-soul, Race-soul, has become a somewhat abstract idea today. Many think nowadays that the individual soul of man that dwells in his body is the actual reality. And if one speaks of German, French, Russian National-souls, people look on that as more or less an abstraction, as a comprehensive concept, embracing the characteristics which the individual members of these nations possess. To the occultist this is not so at all. What one calls the Folk-soul, as the German, French, Russian Folk-soul, is to him an absolutely independent entity. It is only that in our present Earth-existence the Folk soul is purely a spiritual being, perceptible only to one who can ascend to the astral plane; there you could not deny it, for there it is present as an actual living being. You would encounter the Folk-soul there, as on the physical plane you encounter your friends.

On the Moon it would have still less occurred to you to deny this Group-soul, for at that time it had a still more real existence. It was the Folk-soul, the Race-soul, which guided the bloodstream down into the bodies, into those beings which circled round the Moon. It is the destiny of our age to deny the existence of such beings as possess an actual life on the astral plane, and are not perceptible here on the physical plane. And we are at the very height of this materialistic evolution which prefers to deny such beings as Folk-souls and Race-souls.

Recently among other things a very characteristic book has appeared, which has attracted a good deal of publicity. It is a book which has been praised and considered, with justice, to be a true expression of our abstract objective thinking, since it is written as out of the soul of modern man. Such a book had to be written sooner or later. It denies everything that cannot be seen with the eye or felt with the hands. It is a scandalous book from the standpoint of the occultist, a notable book, however, from the standpoint of present-day methods of thought! I refer to Mauthner's Critique of Language. In his book a clean sweep is made of everything which cannot be grasped with the hand. Our age had to produce such a book as a kind of necessity. That is not meant as criticism, it is only to point out the contrast between the occult mode of thought and the present time. You can find in it the exact opposite of all occult methods of thought, it is the most amazing product of a dying cultural stream of the present day, and from this point of view it is quite excellent.

You will understand that on this Old Moon a more common consciousness prevailed than here on Earth. On Earth a man feels himself as an individual, on the Moon this was not the case. On the Moon the Group-soul was active, which then appeared on the Earth in such an attenuated form as Folk-soul; hence the whole Moon-globe had a common consciousness in a high degree. This common consciousness on the Moon felt itself as feminine. And now you know that the Moon was irradiated by the Sun, and the Sun was experienced as the masculine. This is preserved in the old Egyptian myth, for instance, Moon as feminine-Isis; Sun Osiris, masculine. An ego-consciousness, however, enclosed in the human body was altogether lacking. That was contained in the Moon's atmosphere.

Now during the intermediate state from Moon to the Earth, various beings worked in from the atmosphere of the Moon, and made the human etheric body and human astral body ready to possess an ego-consciousness. Now what happened when the Sun again shone forth in which were still contained the Moon and the Earth? In the environment of this now newly awakened Sun-globe were the beings who today form your souls, and during the intermediate stage they had incorporated the ego consciousness into the astral and etheric bodies. As yet the physical body did not possess it, and this emerged at first as the man-animal as it had been on the Moon. Thus these two parts were no longer in harmony. On the Moon they had still harmonised. What had now descended into the astral and etheric bodies was no longer quite in harmony with what existed below as physical, and the consequence of this was that before a harmony could arise the earlier states of Saturn, Sun and Moon had to be recapitulated. Thus we have three recapitulations before our actual Earth could appear.

To begin with, the Saturn existence came forth with the physical bodies of the animal-men, but in a certain respect no longer as simple as they were on Saturn. At that time the sense organs existed as rudimentary germs; now the glandular and nerve organs were present in addition, but they were incapable of taking in what was above. A short recapitulation of the Saturn existence had to take place. The Spirits of Ego-hood and independence must work once more on the physical bodies, in order to implant in them the power of taking up the Ego. In the same way the Sun-state must be passed through, so that these physical bodies in respect of the organs formed on the Sun were capable of receiving an Ego. And in the same way the Moon condition was repeated in order to make the nervous system fitted for it. Thus there was first a kind of repetition of the Saturn stage. In this the beings who were earlier animal-men now wandered on the Earth like automata or a kind of machine. Then began the time when this repeated Saturn condition went over into the Sun condition; there these human bodies were like sleeping plants. Next entered the repetition of the Moon-state, where the Sun had already released itself. Everything remained behind that had earlier already detached itself as Moon. Once again then the whole Moon-cycle was repeated, except that now the capacity to receive an Ego was implanted into the beings.

This repetition of the Moon-cycle was for the Earth, if one may say so, an evil period of its evolution, for considered spiritually, the ego-hood had been implanted into the human body consisting of physical body, etheric body and astral body, but without the refining power of thought. During the time when the Sun had already withdrawn and the Earth had not yet cast out the Moon, man was in a condition in which his astral body was the bearer of the most savage lusts, for every bad force was implanted in him and there was no counterbalance. After the separation of the Sun there was a globe in which, if one wished to express it today, the human beings were still entirely group-souls, but of the most sensual order with the worst instincts.

During this passage through a veritable hell, and under the influence of the departed pure Sun forces (not only of the physical sun, but also of the Sun-beings, who had withdrawn to the Sun) the recapitulating Moon gradually matured so far that it could throw out the terrible instincts and powers, and retain on the Earth whatever was capable of evolving. With the departure of the present moon all those sensual forces went away; therefore in the present moon you have the remains, in its spiritual significance, of all the evil influences which were at that time present in the human realm; and therefore too the moon is looked upon as having a detrimental influence.

Thus it was everything capable of evolution that remained on the Earth after the separation of the Sun and the Moon.

Let us consider first the animal-men themselves. They were gradually matured far enough for the Ego to be incorporated Thus we now have wandering on the Earth the human being who consisted of four members (physical body, etheric body, astral body and ego). It is now for the first time that the earlier swimming, floating position changes and man begins gradually to arrive at the upright position. His spine, his spinal nerve-cord, became vertical, in contrast to the completely horizontal position which it had during the Moon period, and with this rise into an upright position went parallel the widening out of the mass of the spinal marrow into the brain; and yet another development ran parallel with it. For the floating, swimming motion which man had both in the Moon period and during the repetition of the Moon period when the Fire-mist forces were still present in the environment, he needed a kind of swimming bladder, and this was actually a part of man's composition, as is the case with the fishes of the present day. But now the Fire-mist (we have called it “Ruach”) was precipitated. This took place quite gradually and slowly. The air, to be sure, was still filled with thick vapour, but the worst was precipitated and with this began the time when from a gill-breather man became a lung-breather. The swimming bladder was transformed into lungs. Through this man became capable of receiving into himself the higher spiritual beings, namely, the first rudiments of that which stands above the Ego-Spirit-Self or Manas. This metamorphosis of the swimming bladder into the lungs is expressed in the Bible in the wonderful monumental words: “And God breathed into his nostrils the breath of life and man became a living soul.” Here is expressed what had taken place in the human being during millions of years. And all the beings which we have learnt to know, the plant-animals as well as the animal-men of the Moon and their descendants during the Moon period of the Earth, all of them as yet had not red blood. What they possessed resembled the blood of the present day lower creatures which is not yet red. Blood-like substance flowed in and out of them from above. In order to be able to harbour the red blood in themselves something else was necessary. We shall understand that when we know that until the casting out of the Moon in the evolution of our planet no part had been played by iron. Till then there was no iron on our planet, it received it when the planet Mars passed through our Earth, and so to say, left iron behind. Hence the influence of iron in the red blood is derived from Mars.

Legend has preserved this well by ascribing to Mars the qualities which iron brought to the blood—strong and warlike forces. Thus the influence which came in then with the change in the breathing process, was supported by the introduction of iron into our evolution. This was of the utmost importance in our terrestrial evolution. Under these influences the human organism was perfected to the point of beginning to purify and refine the bodies which it had earlier received on Saturn, Sun and Moon. It began to work first, of course, on the body which had been last received, the astral body, and this purification of the astral body constitutes our present civilisation.

If you could observe that human being, still in process of transforming the lungs and taking the first steps towards the development of red blood, you would find him very dissimilar to the present human form. He was so different that one really hesitates to describe man at that period, for it would appear grotesque to the present day materialistic thinker. He had more or less the development of an amphibian, a reptile, which was just beginning to breathe through lungs, and from the former floating, swimming motion was learning little by little to raise and support himself on the earth. When we say that man in the Lemurian Epoch had a mode of progression that alternated between a hop, scarcely to be called a step, and then a flight into the air, we have the nearest approach to some memory of it in the old Saurians. Nothing remains to be discovered by the geologist as solidification's or fossils, for the body was quite soft, it contained as yet no kind of bony structure.

And now how did the Earth appear, after having freed itself from the Moon? It had formerly been surrounded by fire-mists, as in a seething steaming vessel, and then by degrees the dense watery vapours withdrew. The Earth was now covered by a very thin hardened crust, beneath which lay a bubbling churning sea of fire, the remains of the fire-mist of the former atmosphere,. Then gradually tiny islands emerged, the first beginnings of our present mineral kingdom. Whereas on the Moon a plant-mineral kingdom still existed, there now appeared the earliest foundations of our modern rocks and stones in consequence of the hardening, mineralising of this mass. Earlier still the animal-plant kingdom had developed more or less to our present plant kingdom. And the beings on the Moon who were animal-men had divided into two groups, one of which had kept pace with evolution and taken on the human form. But there were some who had not advanced with evolution; these are the present higher animals, they had stayed behind at an earlier level and since they could not share in the advance, they fell back more and more. All our present mammals are relics of the Moon animal-men who stayed behind. You must therefore never imagine that the human being was ever such an animal as those existing on earth today. The bodies of those animals were not at that time capable of receiving the I, the Ego; they had remained with the group nature of the Moon. The last which had almost achieved the additional principle of the earth, but which nevertheless proved later on too weak to be the vehicle of an individual soul, are the apes, the present Ape species. They too, however, were never actual ancestors of mankind, but beings which had degenerated.

Thus in the old Lemurian Age, the Earth was a kind of fiery mass, in which the modern mineral was for the most part dissolved and fluid, as is iron in an iron-foundry, and out of this developed the first mineral island masses. Upon these there wandered, half hopping, half hovering, the forefathers of man. The Spirit-Self endeavoured little by little to gain possession of this human being.

So we must picture the ancient fiery period of the Earth as a time m which a last echo still lingered of the forces of the Moon, which then gradually disappeared. They were manifested in the mastery which the human will possessed over the substances and forces of nature. On the Moon, of course, man was still fully united with nature and the Group-soul moulded the conditions of human existence. That was now no longer the case, but there still continued a magical connection between human will and the forces of fire. If the human being had a mild character, then, through the will, he acted on the natural element of fire in a calming manner, and in this way more land could be deposited. The passionate man, on the other hand, worked with his will magically in such a way that the fire-masses became fierce and turbulent and tore up the thin earth crust. Now once more the whole savage, passionate power that was peculiar to man on the Moon and during the repetition of the Moon-period on the Earth burst forth in the newly arisen individual human souls. The passions had such an effect on the fiery masses that they became ungovernable; a great part of the land on which the Lemurians dwelt was destroyed, and only a small number of the inhabitants of Lemuria were preserved and could continue the human race.

All of you were living in those times; your souls are the very ones which saved themselves from the raging fiery mass of Lemuria. The portion of humanity which had been saved, migrated into the land which we know as Atlantis, and the main part of which stretched between the present Europe and America; from there the human race multiplied and spread. Gradually the Earth's atmosphere had so changed that every trace of the old “Ruach” had gone, and the air was only saturated by dense masses of vapour. The Germanic legend has preserved the memory of this in the Nivelheim or Nebelheim, a land that was permanently permeated by similar heavy clouds of mist (Nebelmist).

Now what had been working in from outside during the Lemurian Age? At first, in the Saturn period it was the beings which we call Spirits of Egoism, of the sense of independence. During the Sun, it was the Archangels, the Fire-Spirits: during the Moon those beings which were, so to speak, the good spirits of the Moon time, for which the Christian designation is Angel, and which are called in Theosophy “Spirits of Twilight.” We have designated the outstanding Leader of these spirits as the “Holy Spirit” or the “Holy Ghost,” the Regent of the Fire Spirits as the “Christ,” that of Saturn as the “Father God.”

Thus the last Who had been at work with His hosts was the Spirit named in Christianity “the Holy Spirit,” the Regent of the Moon-evolution, the Spirit who was still present during the Earth's repetition of the Moon-period. It was the same Spirit who had formed man from without, and who now sent a ray of his own essence, so to say, into the human being. We have to distinguish two kinds of spirits in the beginning of the Lemurian Age: the spirits who prepare the lower bodily nature, who implant the ego-consciousness, who fashion the human sheaths, and that Spirit who himself drew into man at the moment when the human being learnt to breathe physically.

Now if you think that everything which on Saturn formed a kind of fiery mass surrounded by a finer atmosphere, was gaseous on the Sun, and then on the Moon was surrounded by those masses of fire-mist, then you must regard the evolutionary process of the Earth as one of purification, even as the evolution of humanity itself is a purifying process. What one calls air today only gradually became free of all that filled it as a kind of steam and smoke. We must be clear that what separated itself out from the atmosphere are the substances from which all bodies have built themselves up. The air is the purest of what has remained behind, it is the best corporeal medium for the guiding Spirits of the Moon, whom one calls “Angel” in Christian terminology. Therefore in the purified air, in the air which had been refined, men felt the bodily nature of the new guiding Spirit of the Earth, the Spirit Who now was Leader, Jehovah. In the stirring of the wind men experienced that which led and guided the Earth. And so they lived over into the Atlantean times, on the continent which forms the present bed of the Atlantic Ocean, sensing in the breath which they drew, the bodily nature of the Godhead.

That magical influence which the human beings had upon the Fire-ocean, upon the processes of the Earth, gradually disappeared, but in the early Atlantean Age another connection remained instead. A man still possessed a certain magical power over the growth of plants. If he lifted his hand, which at that time had a quite different form, above a plant, he was able to bring it to rapid growth, through the influence of his will. He stood in intimate relation with the being of Nature. The whole life of the Atlantean was in accordance with Nature.

What today is called the power of synthesis, the intelligence, logical thinking, was not yet in existence. On the other hand man had developed other things to a high degree, memory, for instance, of the marvelous development of which we can nowadays form not the slightest idea. Man could not calculate, not even that 2 x 2 = 4, but he knew it out of his memory; on each occasion he remembered the previous experience. Another memory lingering into Atlantean times was that although a man no longer felt the Folk-soul directly within him as on the Moon yet he experienced the influence of the old Folk Souls, Race-souls. This influence was so strong that it would have been quite impossible in those times for anyone who belonged to one Race or Folk-soul ever to unite with one who belonged to another race. There was a deep antipathy between the peoples of the various Folk-souls, love only existed between those belonging to the same. We may say that the common blood which earlier in the Moon-period had been poured down from the Folk-soul was the basis of this kinship. And men remembered not only in some dim way, but quite clearly, the experiences of their forefathers, they felt members of the chain of ancestors just as you feel your hand to be a member of your organism. This feeling of kinship was a part of evolution inasmuch as in this transitionary period which we have been considering and which took place when the Sun withdrew and the Moon was cast out, another important event took place. It is connected with all that was proceeding on the Earth as a sort of hardening process. The mineral kingdom appeared and at the same time a similar hardening took place in the interior of human nature. Something more solid formed itself by degrees out of the soft mass, and hardened first to cartilage and then to bone. And not until this bony structure was formed did the human being begin to walk.

With the insertion of the skeleton another process ran parallel. In consequence of the advance of human evolution on the casting out of the Moon and the retention of only what was able to develop, two different forces arose in the beings inhabiting the Earth. The Sun and Moon were now outside and their influences affected the Earth from without. From this intermingling of the Sun-forces and the Moon-forces, which had previously been in the body of the Earth, but now streamed in from without, the sex-life made its appearance. For all the forces connected with sex come under the influence of the Sun and Moon.

The still united Sun, Moon and Earth of ancient times could from its activity be looked on as of feminine nature and this was fructified, so to say, by the forces of the Sun itself. The Sun experienced itself as male, the Moon as female. Now the Moon drew out, the forces of the two mingled. In a general way we can describe all the beings which arose up to the departure of the Moon as being of a feminine nature, for all the fructifying forces came from without, from the Sun-force. Only upon an Earth, which had cast out the Moon, so that the Sun shone upon quite a different cosmic body, could the former undifferentiated female divide into male and female. With the solidifying, bone-forming process, therefore, took place the differentiation of the sexes. And with this was given the possibility of perfecting the Ego in the right way.

THE process that I have described to you as the division of the sexes was of such a nature that the two sexes are to be thought of as still united in that animal-man of the Moon and also in his descendants in the Moon recapitulation of the Earth. Then there really took place a kind of cleavage of the human body. This cleavage came about through densification; not until a mineral kingdom had been separated out as it is today could the present human body arise, representing a single sex. The Earth and the human body had first to be solidified to the mineral nature as we know it. In the soft human bodies of the Moon and of the earlier periods of the Earth human beings were of dual-sex, male-female.

Now we must remind ourselves of the fact that Man in a certain respect has preserved a residue of the ancient dual sex inasmuch as in the present man the physical body is masculine, the etheric body feminine, and in the woman it is reversed; for the physical feminine body has a masculine etheric body. These facts open up an interesting insight into the soul life of the sexes; the capacity for sacrifice in the service of love displayed by the woman is connected with the masculinity of the etheric body, whereas the ambition of the man is explained when we realise the feminine nature of his etheric body. I have already said that separation into the human sexes has arisen from the intermingling of the forces sent to us from the sun and the moon. Now you must be clear that in the man the stronger influence on the etheric body emanates from the moon and the stronger influence on the physical body from the sun. In the woman the opposite is the case, the physical body is influenced by the forces of the moon and the etheric body by those of the sun.

The continual change of mineral substances in man's present body could not take place until the mineral realm had taken shape; before this there was quite a different form of nourishment. During the Sun-period of the Earth all plants were permeated by milky juices. Man's nourishment was then actually effected by his imbibing the milk-juices from the plants as today the child draws its nourishment from the mother. The plants which still contain milky juices are the last stragglers from that time when all the plants supplied these juices in abundance. It was not till a later time that nourishment took on its present form.

To understand the significance of the separation of the sexes we must be clear that upon the Moon and during its recapitulation on the Earth all the beings looked very much alike. Just as the cow has the same appearance as her “daughters,” as all other cows, since the Group-soul lies behind, so could men scarcely be distinguished from their forefathers, and this continued till long into the Atlantean Age. Whence arises the fact that human beings no longer resemble each other?

It comes from the rise of the two sexes. From the original dual sex-nature the tendency had continued in the female being to produce similarity in the descendants; in the male the influence worked differently, it tended to call forth variety, individualisation, and with the flowing of the male force into the female, dissimilarity was increasingly created. Thus it was through the male influence that the power of developing individuality came about.

The ancient dual sex had yet another peculiarity. If you had asked one of the old dwellers on the Moon about his experiences, he would have described them as identical with those of his earliest ancestors; everything lived on through the generations. The gradual rise of a consciousness that only extends from birth to death came about by the individualising of the human race, and at the same time arose the possibility of birth and death, as we know them today. For those ancient Moon beings with their floating, swimming motion, were suspended from the environment with which they were united by the “strings” conducting the blood. Thus if a being died it was not a death of the soul, it was only a dying off of a sort of limb, while the consciousness remained above. It was as if your hand, for instance, should wither on your body and a new hand grow in its place. So these human beings with their dim consciousness only experienced dying as a gradual withering of their bodies. These bodies dried up and new ones continually sprang forth; consciousness, however, was preserved through the consciousness of the group-soul, so that really a kind of immortality existed.

Then arose the present blood, which was created in the human body itself, and this went hand in hand with the rise of the two sexes. And with it the necessity of a remarkable process came about. The blood creates a continuous conflict between life and death, and a being who forms red blood within himself becomes the scene of a perpetual struggle, for red blood is continually consumed and changed into blue blood, into a substance of death. Together with man's individual transformation of the blood arose that darkening of the consciousness beyond birth and death. Now, for the first time, with the lighting up of the present consciousness, man lost the ancient dimly sensed immortality, so that the impossibility of looking beyond birth and death is intimately connected with the division of the sexes. And something else too is connected with this.

When man still possessed the Group-soul, existence went on from generation to generation, no interruption was caused through birth and death. Then this interruption appeared and with it the possibility of reincarnation. Earlier, the son was but a direct continuation of the father, the father of the grandfather, consciousness did not break off. Now there came a time when there was darkness beyond birth and death, and a sojourn in Kamaloca and Devachan first became possible. This interchange, this sojourn in higher worlds, could only come about at all after individualisation, after the expulsion of Sun and Moon. Only then appeared what today we call incarnation, and at the same time this intermediate state, which again will one day also come to an end.

Thus we have reached the period in which we have seen the earlier dual-sexed organism, representing a kind of group-soul, divide into a male and a female, so that the similar is reproduced through the female, what is varied and dissimilar through the male. We see in our humanity the feminine to be the principle which still preserves the old conditions of folk and race, and the masculine that which continually breaks through these conditions, splits them up and so individualises mankind. There is actually active in the human being an ancient feminine principle as group-soul and a new masculine principle as individualising element. It will come about that all connections of race and family stock will cease to exist, men will become more and more different from one another, interconnection will no longer depend on the common blood, but on what binds soul to soul. That is the course of human evolution.

In the first Atlantean races there still existed a strong bond of union and the first sub-races grouped themselves according to their colouring. This group-soul element we have still in the races of different colour. These differences will increasingly disappear as the individualising element gains the upper hand. A time will come when there will no longer be races of different colour; the difference between the races will have disappeared, but on the other hand there will be the greatest differences between individuals. The further we go back into ancient times the more we meet with the encroachment of the racial element; the true individualising principle begins as a whole only in later Atlantean times. Among the earlier Atlanteans members of one race actually experienced a deep antipathy for members of another race; the common blood caused the feeling of connection, of love; it was considered against morality to marry a member of another stock.

If, as seer, you wished to examine the connection between the etheric body and the physical body in the old Atlanteans you would make a remarkable discovery. Whereas in the man of today the etheric head is practically covered by the physical part of the head and only protrudes slightly beyond it, in the old Atlantean the etheric head projected far out beyond the physical head; in particular it projected powerfully in the region of the forehead. Now we must think of a point in the physical brain in the place between the eyebrows, only about a centimetre lower, and a second point in the etheric head which would correspond to this. In the Atlantean these two points were still far apart and evolution consisted precisely in the fact that they continually approached each other. In the fifth Atlantean period the point of the etheric head drew in to the physical brain and by reason of these two points coming together there developed what we possess to-day: calculation, counting, the capacity of judging, the power of forming ideas in general, intelligence. Formerly the Atlanteans had only an immensely developed memory, but as yet no logical intellect. Here we have the starting point for the consciousness of the “ego.” A self-reliant independence did not exist in the Atlantean before these two points coincided, on the other hand he could live in much more intimate contact with nature. His dwellings were put together by what was given by nature; he moulded the stones and bound them together with the growing trees. His dwellings were formed out of living nature, were really transformed natural objects. He lived in the little tribes that were still preserved through blood relationship, whilst a powerful authority was exercised by the strongest, who was the chieftain. Everything depended on authority, which however was exercised in a way peculiar to those times.

When man entered on the Atlantean Age, he could as yet utter no articulate speech; this was only developed during that period. A chieftain could not have given commands in speech, but on the other hand these men had the faculty of understanding the language of nature. Present day man has no idea of this, he must learn it again. Picture, for instance, a spring of water which reflects your image to you. As occultist a peculiar feeling emerges in your soul. You say—My image presses towards me out of this spring, to me this is a last token of how on old Saturn everything was reflected out into space. The memory of Saturn arises in the occultist when he beholds his reflection in the spring. And in the echo which the spoken sound gives back arises the recollection of how on Saturn all that resounded into cosmic space, came back as echo. Or you see a Fata Morgana a mirage in the air, in which the air seems to have taken up whatever pictures are imprinted in it and then reflects them again. As occultist you see here a memory of the Sun-period, when the gaseous Sun took in all that came to it from cosmic space, worked it over, and then let it stream back, giving it its own sun-nature at the same time. On the Sun planet you would have seen how things were prepared as Fata Morgana, as a kind of mirage within the gases of the Sun condition. Thus without being a magician one learns to grasp the world from many aspects and that is an important means towards developing into higher worlds. In ancient times man understood nature to a high degree.

There is a great difference between living in an atmosphere like the present and such as it was in Atlantis. The air was then saturated by immense vapour masses; sun and moon were surrounded by a gigantic rainbow halo. There was a time when the mist-masses were so dense that no eye could have seen the stars, when sun and moon were stiff darkened. Only gradually they became visible to man. This coming into sight of sun, moon and stars is magnificently described in records of the Creation. What is described there has really taken place, and much more besides.

The understanding of surrounding nature was still very vividly present in the Atlantean. All that sounds in the rippling of the spring, in the storm of winds, and is an inarticulate sound to you today, was heard by the Atlantean as a speech he understood. There were at that time no commandments, but the Spirit pierced through the vapour-drenched air and spoke to man. The Bible expresses this in the words “And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.” The human being heard the Spirit from surrounding objects; from sun, moon and stars the Spirit spoke to him and you find in those words—in the Bible a plain expression for what took place in man's environment.

Then came the time in which an especially advanced portion of the human race, who lived in a region which today is on the bed of the ocean in the neighbourhood of present Ireland, first experienced that definite union with the etheric body and thus an increase of the intelligence. This portion of humanity began to journey eastwards under the guidance of the most advanced leader while gradually immense volumes of water submerged the continent of Atlantis. The advanced portion of these peoples journeyed right into Asia, and there founded the centre of the civilisation that we call the Post-Atlantean Culture. From this centre civilisation radiated out; it proceeded from the groups of people who later moved farther to the east. There in Central Asia they founded in India the first civilisation, which still had an echo of the culture attained in Atlantis. The ancient Indian had not yet such a consciousness as we have today, but the capacity for it arose when these two points of the brain of which I have spoken coincided. Before this union there still lived a picture-consciousness in the Atlantean, through which he saw Spiritual beings. In the murmuring of the fountain he not only heard a clear language, but the Undine, who has her embodiment in the water, rose for him out of the spring: in the currents of air he saw Sylphs; in the flickering fire he saw the Salamanders. All this he saw and from it have arisen the myths and legends which have been preserved with most purity in the parts of Europe where there remained remnants of those Atlanteans who did not reach India. The Germanic Sagas and Myths are the relics of what was still seen by the old Atlanteans within the vapoury masses. The rivers, the Rhine, for instance, lived in the consciousness of these old Atlanteans as if the wisdom, which was in the mists of ancient Nivelheim had been cast down into their waters. This wisdom seemed to them to be in the rivers, it lived within them as the Rhine Nixies or similar beings.

So here in these regions of Europe lived echoes of the Atlantean culture, but over in India another arose, that still showed remembrances of that picture world. That world itself had sunk from sight, but the longing for what was revealed in it lived on in the Indian. If the Atlantean had heard the voice of Nature's wisdom, to the Indian there remained the longing for the oneness with Nature, and thus the character of this old Indian culture is shown in the desire to fall back into that time where all this was man's natural possession. The ancient Indian was a dreamer. To be sure, what we call reality lay spread all around him, but the world of the senses was “Maya” in his eyes. What the old Atlantean still saw as hovering spirits was what the Indian sought in his longing for the spiritual content of the world, for Brahma. And this kind of going back towards the old dream-like consciousness of the Atlantean has been preserved in the Oriental training to bring back this early consciousness.

Farther to the north we have the Medes and Persians, the original Persian civilisation. Whereas the Indian culture turns sharply away from reality, the Persian is aware that he must reckon with it. For the first time man appears as a worker, who knows that he is not merely to strive for knowledge with his spiritual forces, but that he is to use them for shaping the earth. At first the earth met him as a sort of hostile element which he must overcome, and this opposition was expressed in Ormuzd and Ahriman, the good and the bad divinity, and the conflict between them. Men wished more and more to let the spiritual world flow into the terrestrial world, but as yet they could recognise no law, no laws of nature within the outer world. The old Indian culture had in truth a knowledge of higher worlds, but not on the grounds of a natural science, since everything on the Earth was accounted Maya; the Persian learnt to know nature purely as a field of labour.

We then come to the Chaldean, the Babylonian and the Egyptian peoples. Here man learnt to recognise a law in nature itself. When he looked up to the stars he sought behind them not the gods alone, but he examined the laws of the stars and hence arose that wonderful science which we find among the Chaldeans. The Egyptian priest did not look on the physical as an opposing force, but he incorporated the spiritual which he found in geometry into his soil, his land; outer nature was recognised as conforming to law. The external star-knowledge was inwardly united in Chaldean-Babylonian-Egyptian wisdom with the knowledge of the gods who ensoul the stars. That was the third stage of cultural evolution.

It is only in the fourth stage of post-Atlantean evolution that man advances to the point of incorporating in civilisation that which he himself experiences as spiritual. This is the case in the Greco-Latin time. Here in the work of art, in moulded matter man imprints his own spirit into substance, whether in sculpture or in the drama. Here too we find the first beginnings of human city planning. These cities differed from those of Egypt in the pre-Grecian age. There in Egypt the priests looked up to the stars and sought their laws, and what took place in the heavens they reproduced in what they built. Thus their towers show the seven-story development which man first discovered in the heavenly bodies; so too do the Pyramids show definite cosmic proportions. We find the transition from priest-wisdom to the real human wisdom wonderfully expressed in early Roman history by the seven Kings of Rome. What are these seven kings?

We remember that the original history of Rome leads back to ancient Troy. Troy represents a last result of the ancient priestly communities who organised states by the laws of the stars. Now comes the transition to the fourth stage of culture. The ancient priest-wisdom is superseded by human cleverness, represented by the crafty Odysseus. Still more plainly is this shown in a picture which can only be rightly understood in this way and which represents how the priest-wisdom has to give way before the human power of judgment. The serpent can always be taken as symbol of human wisdom, and the Laocoon group depicts the overthrow of the priestly wisdom of ancient Troy through human cunning and human wisdom symbolised in the serpents.

Then by the directing authorities who work through millennia the events were outlined that had to happen and in accordance with which history must take its course. Those who stood at the foundation of Rome had already foreordained the sevenfold Roman culture as it stands written in the Sibylline Books. Think it out: you find in the names of the seven Roman kings reminiscences of the seven principles. That goes so far in fact that the fifth Roman king, the Etruscan, comes from without; he represents the principle of Manas, Spirit-Self, which binds the three lower with the three higher. The seven Roman kings represent the seven principles of human nature, spiritual connections are inscribed in them. Republican Rome is none other than the human wisdom, which replaced the ancient priestly wisdom. Thus did the fourth epoch grow within the third. Man sent forth what he had in his soul into the great works of art, into drama and jurisprudence. Formerly all justice was derived from the stars. The Romans became a nation of law-givers because there men created justice, “jus,” according to their own requirements.

We live ourselves in the fifth period. How does the meaning of the totality of evolution come to expression in it? The old authority has vanished, man becomes more and more dependent on his own inner nature, his external acts bear increasingly the stamp of his character. Racial ties lose their hold, man becomes more and more individualised. This is the kernel of the religion which says “He who doth not leave father and mother, brother and sister cannot be my disciple.” This means that all love which is founded on natural ties alone is to come to an end, human beings must stand before one another, and soul find soul.

We have the task of drawing down still further on to the physical plane that which flowed from the soul in Greco-Latin times. Man becomes in this way, a being who sinks deeper and deeper into materiality. If the Greek in his works of art has created an idealised image of his soul-life and poured it into the human form, if the Roman in his jurisprudence has created something that still further signifies personal requirements, then our age culminates in machines, which are solely a materialistic expression of mere personal human needs. Mankind sinks lower and lower from heaven, and this fifth period has descended deepest, is the most involved in matter. If the Greek in his creations has lifted man above man in his images (for Zeus represents man raised above himself), if you find still left in Roman jurisprudence something of man that goes out beyond himself (for the Roman placed more value on being a Roman citizen than on being a person and an individual) then in our period you find people who utilise spirit for the satisfying of their material needs. For what purpose is served by all machines, steamships, railways, all complicated inventions? The ancient Chaldean was accustomed to satisfy his need of food in the simplest way; today an immensity of wisdom, crystalised human wisdom, is expended on the stilling of hunger and thirst. We must not deceive ourselves about this. The wisdom that is so employed has descended below itself right into matter.

All that man had earlier drawn down from the spiritual realms had to descend below itself in order to be able to mount upwards again—and with this our age has received its mission. If in man of an earlier time there flowed blood which bound him with his tribe, today the love which still flowed in the earlier blood shows greater and greater cleavage; a love of a spiritual kind must take its place and then we can ascend again to spiritual realms. There is good reason for us to have come down from spiritual heights, for man must go through this descent in order to find the way up to spirituality out of his own strength. The mission of Spiritual Science is to show mankind this upward path.

We have followed the course of mankind as far as the time in which we ourselves stand; we must now show how it will evolve further, and how one who passes through an initiation can even today forestall a certain stage of humanity on his path of knowledge and wisdom.