The Rudolf Steiner Archive

13. Human Evolution — The Moon and Earth

[ 1 ] When we use a word to refer to the predecessor of our Earth, we say: The predecessor of our Earth is called “Moon,” “Luna.” When one says “Moon,” one must be clear that this refers to something entirely different from our present-day Moon and also from those planets that astronomy can discover at all. For these planets are all seen through the organs that human beings possess in their present state of consciousness. Now human beings see all those bodies that have entered the mineral kingdom and have become visible.

[ 2 ] When the occultist speaks of the mineral kingdom, he is not referring merely to stones, but to a very specific way of perceiving things that characterizes human consciousness today. The materialist claims that there is no such thing as a life force, but rather that matter consists solely of a combination of molecules and so on. The occultist distinguishes between a machine, in which the parts are moved in a simple manner, and an organism, which is animated in a complex way. But human beings are now organized in such a way that they can perceive only the mineral, the inanimate; that is why it is said today in occultism: “Human beings themselves live in the mineral kingdom.”

[ 3 ] If you study the [ear], you will find that it is a complex physical apparatus. Inside it is a keyboard, the organ of Corti. Certain vibrations cause a specific hair cell in the organ of Corti to vibrate, just like a string on a piano.

[ 4 ] The sum of all these complex physical mechanisms constitutes the physical human body. When one looks at a person, one is not merely looking at the physical body; one is also looking at that person’s feelings—though these feelings are invisible, they alter the physical body. One never has only the physical body before one; however—and this must be noted—it is only within the physical body that consciousness has awakened. And this must be explicitly stated: consciousness must still awaken in the other bodies. Consciousness is currently realized only on the physical plane.

[ 5 ] A second stage is that consciousness will also be realized in the plant kingdom. And then it follows that it will be realized in the animal kingdom. For now, humanity has only achieved a mineral-based understanding of the world. Following this, however, it will also have achieved a life-filled, plant-based understanding of the world, and then an animal-based understanding. Ultimately, we will have achieved a human understanding.

[ 6 ] Only now does humanity begin to recognize the mineral kingdom. He cannot yet perceive instincts, pleasure, and suffering in animals, nor can he yet perceive the power of growth in plants. Let us imagine the following: If we were to remove all material substance from a plant, we would no longer be able to perceive it—that is to say, we [still] perceive it only as a mineral. In the future, however, human beings will come to understand the true nature of plants. This understanding, however, is simultaneously linked to what these plants are capable of creating. At present, human beings can only build things using mechanical-mineral forces; they are working on the mineral structure of the Earth. It is the “Temple of the World” that human beings are now building out of the mineral realm.

[ 7 ] Now let’s do the following together: Let’s transport ourselves back to that distant point in the past when no human hand had yet touched anything on Earth, when the Earth had emerged from the hands of the gods—in other words, before anything had been made by human hands. That is the period when human beings had not yet touched anything belonging to the forces of the mineral kingdom.

[ 8 ] Back then, of course, everything was very different from today. If we look around now, we see that so much on Earth has been shaped by human hands and human effort. And now, after we have sufficiently imagined this [distant point in the past], let us transport ourselves to a certain final state of the Earth. Let us imagine this: Everything that was once entrusted to humankind [has] now been thoroughly worked through by them. In the beginning, the devas gave things their form, but in the end, everything will have been reshaped by human hands. When we think this through, we see that the creative mineral power is slipping more and more from the hands of the devas into the hands of humankind. In the ancient tradition, there were three aspects to this transformation. These aspects were called: wisdom, beauty, and virtue. The temple that will be built by human beings on Earth will be erected out of wisdom, beauty, and virtue. When this temple, erected by human beings, stands, younger beings will look up to what human beings have created there just as we now look up to the mineral world shaped by the devas.

[ 9 ] Let us therefore always bear in mind: These structures and machines were not built in vain. What we excavate from the earth today as crystal was once built by the Devas, just as we now build a cathedral. If we go all the way back into the past, we can see how, in the distant past, the entire mineral kingdom emerged from a chaotic mass.

[ 10 ] This is how it will be in the distant future as well: a seed-like state will remain from today’s cathedral—and even from today’s state—which will later sprout anew. We must bear this in mind, for this is how we move from one form of life into transformation. What we will perceive later is the transformation of the mineral kingdom. This transformation of the mineral kingdom is a capacity that is now gradually unfolding. Similarly, in later stages of development, human beings will learn to transform the plant kingdom; this will then represent a higher level of capacity.

[ 11 ] In the future, humans will, in a certain sense, be able to shape and build the plant kingdom just as they build churches today. These are aspects and perspectives that lead us into a real human future.

[ 12 ] Humankind will have evolved even further in an even more distant future, when it will create not only growing beings but also conscious beings—that is, when it will also create within the animal kingdom.

[ 13 ] And when, in the end, human beings will be able to bring themselves into being, they will consciously carry out at a higher level what they today perform only in the most sensory, mineral realm.

[ 14 ] The seed of that through which human beings will become creative, without sensuality—that is the word we utter today. Human beings began their present state of consciousness with their first breath. The human being’s state of consciousness will be complete when he can communicate to himself—through sound—the very same substance that he now imparts to thought. At present, he can communicate to the air only his thoughts, the innermost essence of the soul. But once he has ascended to image-consciousness, he will already be able to communicate the image to the air. In this later stage of development, it will be imagination existing within the word. By incorporating these images into the word, he will then create the word permeated by the image. If we can not only incorporate the [content of thought] into an object—such as a clock—but if we can also incorporate imagination into a word, then the image will come to life; what we create today as a clock will become a plant. And when humanity then learns to incorporate the highest, it will permeate the image with life itself—with animal life. Development will continue to advance, and ultimately humanity will reproduce itself on an even higher level. At the end of earthly development, the entire atmosphere will be permeated by humankind with the power of words themselves. Thus must humankind grow until it is capable of fully expressing itself within its environment. The initiate already anticipates this state today.

[ 15 ] Of course, even in Year One, the Earth cannot yet produce the human bodies that it will be capable of producing at the end of its development. At the end of Earth’s evolution, the bodies are ready to express what is called the Logos. The missionary who had already expressed this in a body such as we see today was Christ Jesus. What spiritually represents the ultimate goal of our human-earthly evolution was embodied by the Spirit in Christ Jesus at the beginning of our post-Christian evolution.

[ 16 ] We ask: How did the human spirit—which lives within us today simply because we breathe—exist before that? The Earth is the reincarnation of a previous planet. This previous incarnation of the Earth was “Luna,” the “Moon.” The distinctive feature of lunar existence is that our present mineral kingdom did not yet exist at that time. The Moon itself, as it was then, did not consist of mineral rocks or hardened minerals. It was like a vast living mass of plants; its entire being was still caught between the mineral and plant kingdoms. We must imagine that this plant-covered sphere was, in its densest parts, like the wood of trees. The rocks of the Moon were of a similar nature. What one walked on was not mineral soil. At most, one could compare it to a peat bog or to coal in its earliest stages of formation. From this lunar globe grew creatures that were half-animal and half-plant, and a third kingdom existed that stood between today’s animal and human kingdoms. These creatures that lived there on the Moon were precisely those that possessed a consciousness akin to dream consciousness. One can imagine the matter of which these beings were composed by considering the structure of today’s nervous tissue, the structure of the brain, and also the [internal] structure of crustaceans. Through the condensation of this matter, what is now enclosed within human beings came into being: the brain, the spinal cord, and the nerves. Everything that was able to live on the Moon lived freely [in harmony with its surroundings], in a gelatinous state. But on Earth, this had to be protected by a shell. The highest beings from the Moon who came over to Earth surrounded themselves here with a bony shell: crabs, turtles, beetles, and so on. In humans, too, this [gelatinous] substance was enclosed within a bony shell. All of this was extracted from the macrocosm by the bony shell. When this had been sufficiently prepared, the higher consciousness entered, and the descent of the Manasaputras took place.

[ 17 ] I can characterize even higher beings in the following way: The fact that human beings were endowed with an “I” stems, physically speaking, from their ability to breathe the air around them. What, then, did the beings on the Moon breathe? The further back we go in Earth’s evolution, the higher and higher the temperature becomes. In Atlantis, everything was still filled with mist; in Lemuria, everything was still filled with hot, fiery vapors. Thus, as we go further back, it becomes warmer and warmer.

[ 18 ] Heat appears to be that to which we are led back more and more. When air returns to its former state, this is called “heat” or “fire”; it is this that dissolves the air, so that it is no longer air. We therefore distinguish the following in our return: the solid, or earth; the liquid, or water; and heat, or fire. People on Earth today breathe air, the gaseous state. The Lemurian people were beings who breathed fire; that is why we call those beings “fire spirits.” Just as we must call people today “air spirits.” That is also why occult writings state that humans were first instructed by fire spirits.

[ 19 ] When human beings became human on Earth, the air could become their life. Life on Earth will consist in the fact that it unfolds more and more, that human beings undergo a downward evolution, and that they exhale carbon dioxide. The plant world is currently counterbalancing this. Nevertheless, with regard to today’s physical bodies—which must take in oxygen—it is certain that carbon dioxide will increase to such an extent that human beings, as physical beings, will perish as a result. It is part of the course of evolution that the physical realm is destroyed by its own forces. When this state is reached, the Earth will become “astral.” A darkening will follow—a Pralaya—before the physical Earth becomes astral. Before our Earth became physical, a similar process took place: The Moon’s atmosphere contained nitrogen, just as ours does [carbon], and nitrogen played the same role on the Moon then as [carbon] does on Earth today. The predominance of nitrogen at that time marked the beginning of the Pralaya, the lunar eclipse of that era.

[ 20 ] What remained are the remnants of the Moon’s final processes—on Earth, these are nitrogen compounds, specifically cyanide compounds. That is why these compounds are so destructive on Earth. They are remnants and are dangerous precisely because they were only normal on the Moon. One of the most potent poisons is cyanide, the compound of carbon and nitrogen. On the Moon, this meant roughly the same thing as the compound of carbon and oxygen does on Earth today. Everything that existed in one epoch must be utilized in a subsequent epoch. The human physical body was formed by the animal-like beings of the Moon, and the human spirit by the fire spirits that lived on the Moon. That is why the human being is a dual being. What was incarnated in fire on the Moon is incarnated in air on Earth.

[ 21 ] Where, then, is the medium of embodiment for the spirit that was once fiery matter? Warm blood did not yet exist in those days. We may ask ourselves: What produced the blood—and with it, the life of the passions? It was produced by the same fire-air that the beings on the Moon breathed; this fire-air of the Moon is found today in the blood of warm-blooded beings. The human spirit of today—the air spirit—has clothed itself in a physical body. What came over from the moon back then is today the brain, spinal cord, etc. But the organ that absorbed the fire will be transformed in the future into an [organ of cognition].

[ 22 ] This can only show us how deeply we must look into the transformation of matter in order to even begin to comprehend a metamorphosis such as the one that took place during the transition from the Earth’s predecessor, the Moon, to the Earth itself. If we went back even further, we would recognize that the being embodied in light was physical. And if we went back even further still, we would recognize that the being was embodied in sound—that is, was physical. But at that time, the human spirit was still entirely unconscious. Humanity once emerged from sound. Then it progressed through the embodiment in light. It is only at this fourth stage that the human being becomes conscious. At first, sound gives him direction; then the word, the Logos. Thus his innermost being speaks from within himself and becomes his new shaper. In the “I,” his original being comes into existence. The conscious emergence of the “I” is the Christ principle.

[ 23 ] If a being lives only in sound, it is in the first elemental realm; if it lives in light, it is in the second elemental realm. If it lives in fire, it is in the third elemental realm, and if it lives in air, it is in the mineral realm.

[ 24 ] If we were to ascend into the first elemental formation, we would enter a realm of flowing sound; then, upon descending, we would come to a realm permeated with flowing images of light; and then to a realm with flowing images of light permeated with fire; then we would enter a realm where forms take shape—the present mineral kingdom.