The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Lecture Thirteen

[ 1 ] Let us try today, in our consideration of human evolution, to trace our way back to the Logos who created our world, and to this end, let us retrace the steps of this evolution up to a certain point.

[ 2 ] The history of modern esoteric science dates back to the Stone Age, when humans lived in caves and knew of no weapons other than chipped stones. Their lives were simple, their horizons limited, and their thoughts focused solely on defending themselves and finding food.

[ 3 ] Esoteric science moves beyond this Stone Age to another epoch of human history: that of the people who inhabited the continent of Atlantis. These people differed from later generations of humanity even in their physical appearance. Prehistoric humans—as is well known—still had an underdeveloped frontal region of the skull. This is because the development of the frontal region proceeds in parallel with that of the brain and thought. The physical brain was once considerably smaller than the etheric portion, which extended beyond it on all sides. In the course of evolution, the proportions of the physical and etheric heads have drawn closer together. A specific point in the etheric brain, which today lies within the skull, was still outside it at that time. There was a point in the evolution of the Atlanteans—which spanned several million years—when this point retreated into the interior of the skull. This moment is of fundamental importance, for from the time when human beings began to think, to become aware of themselves, to say “I” to themselves, they also began to reason and calculate—things they had not been capable of before. In return, the early Atlanteans possessed a more reliable memory, one less prone to error. Their entire knowledge was based not on an understanding of the relationships between facts, but on the recollection of the facts themselves. They knew through memory that a particular event always led to a series of others, but they did not know the cause of these events and could not reflect on them. The concept of causality existed among them only in an embryonic stage.

[ 4 ] They combined this powerful force of memory with another, no less precious one: the power of the will. People today can no longer directly influence the life forces through their will. For example, they can no longer accelerate the growth of plants through their will. The Atlantean could do so; indeed, he drew an etheric force from the plants that he knew how to use. He did this instinctively, without the aid of the knowledge and precise methods that we today refer to as the spirit of science. As intellectual power, combined with deliberation, calculation, and thinking, developed in the Atlanteans, their instinctive and clairvoyant abilities diminished.

[ 5 ] If we go even further back in the history of the Atlanteans, we arrive at a very distant epoch when they became capable of expressing themselves through language—that is, through articulated sounds. This point in time corresponds to when humans learned to walk upright. For language can only emerge among beings with an upright posture. One must be able to stand upright in order to pronounce articulated sounds.

[ 6 ] Before the Atlantic continent and the great race of Atlanteans—from whom all the races of Europe and Asia descended—there was another continent and another human race that had sunk even deeper into animality: that of the Lemurians. Science regards them only as a hypothesis. Certain islands south of Asia and north of Australia nevertheless bear witness to them, for they are the metamorphosed remnants of the ancient Lemurian continent.

[ 7 ] The temperature during that era was significantly higher than it is today. The atmosphere was filled with vapor—a mixture of air and water—permeated by countless currents. There we encounter rudimentary human beings who breathe not through their mouths but through gills.

[ 8 ] In human evolution, organs are constantly undergoing transformation and changing their nature and function. Thus, primitive man walked on all fours and had neither articulated sounds for speech nor ears for hearing. However, in order to move through the half-liquid, half-gaseous element that surrounded him, he possessed an organ that served as a mechanism for floating on the water and swimming. When the elements separated and humans began to stand upright on solid ground, this organ transformed into lungs, its gills into ears, and its forelimbs into arms and hands—tools for free labor. Furthermore, humans acquired the ability to speak articulately.

[ 9 ] This transformation was of crucial importance for humanity. We read in Genesis: “Then the Lord God breathed into the man’s nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being.” This passage describes the moment in human evolution when the gills of human beings transformed into lungs and when they began to breathe the outside air. With the ability to breathe, they received an inner soul and, through it, the ability to sense themselves from within—the ability to gradually perceive how the “I” lived within the soul.

[ 10 ] Humans, breathing through their lungs, saw their blood grow stronger. Now souls—individualized by the “I” principle and standing higher than the group soul of animals—could incarnate within them and thus guide the entire process of evolution into its fully human, and later divine, phases. These souls could not have incarnated before the bodies began to breathe air. For air is a spiritual element. Thus, at that time, human beings literally breathed in the divine soul that came to them from heaven. The words of Genesis, understood in the context of the evolution of the human race, are therefore to be taken literally. To breathe is to become spiritual. This is the origin of the ancient yoga exercises. They are based on the rhythm of breathing and are intended to make the body permeable to the spirit inherent within it. Indeed, through breathing we connect with the world soul. The air we breathe is the physical garment of this higher soul, just as the flesh of our body is the garment for our lower being.

[ 11 ] These changes in the respiratory system mark the transition from the old consciousness, which merely reflected images, to the present consciousness, which receives its sensory perceptions from the body and thereby acquires its objective character. Imaginative, image-based consciousness could not represent an object on its own, but derived its inner content from a formative power inherent within it. The further back we go into humanity’s past, the more we see the human soul not within the person, but surrounding him or her. We arrive at a point where the organs of sensation exist only in embryonic form, and where human beings perceive external objects solely through attraction or repulsion, through sympathy or antipathy. This being, which is not yet a human being in the sense that we understand it—but merely a human embryo—directs its movements according to these attractions or repulsions. It has no reason yet, and the pineal gland, which was once an important organ, constitutes its entire brain on its own.

[ 12 ] The answer to all philosophical debates regarding the objectivity and reality of the world, as well as the refutation of purely subjectivist philosophies such as Berkeley’s, lies in the very fact of this visual consciousness. The universe and humanity are both subjective and objective. These two poles of being and life are necessary for evolution. The universal subject becomes the objective universe, and human beings first advance from the subjective to the objective through the gradually progressing nature of their physical bodies. Then they return from the objective to the subjective through the higher development of their soul (Manas), their life spirit (Budhi), and their spiritual self (Atma).

[ 13 ] The consciousness we have while dreaming is an atavistic remnant of our former visual consciousness.

[ 14 ] A distinctive feature of this visual awareness is that it is creative. Within its own essence, it creates forms and colors that do not exist in physical reality.

[ 15 ] Objective consciousness is analytical. Subjective consciousness is malleable; it possesses a magical power.

[ 16 ] We have thus seen how human objective and analytical consciousness followed subjective and malleable consciousness. The process by which the soul—which at first surrounded the human being like a cloud and subsequently permeated the physical body—can be compared to the developmental process of the snail, which first secretes its own shell from its own bodily substance and then withdraws into it. In the same way, the soul permeated the body that it had previously shaped and for which it had prepared the sense organs from the outside. The power of sight with which our eye is endowed today is the same power that once acted upon the eye from the outside to build it up. The reversal of the soul’s active force—which, having once acted from the outside, becomes an inwardly acting force—has always been denoted by a hieroglyph, namely two spirals moving in opposite directions. The first movement, inward, is expressed in one direction; the second, from the inside outward, is expressed in the other direction.

[ 17 ] This symbol—which represents the sign of Cancer in the zodiac—always marks the end of one direction and the beginning of a new one in the opposite direction.

[ 18 ] In the middle of the third earth period, the Lemurian period, we find the point at which the soul moves into the house it has built for itself and begins to animate the body from within. If we go back beyond this point, we are dealing merely with an astral humanity living on an astral Earth. In a phase even further back, we see humanity and the Earth only in a purely devachanic state. There, human beings no longer have visual consciousness; instead, they are permeated by cosmic thoughts.

[ 19 ] The further back we go in the parallel development of the Earth and humanity, the more we find both in a fluid and embryonic state, and the closer they are to the spiritual state. Today, having reached the lowest point of our downward evolution, the Earth and humankind have attained the highest degree of solidification and are on the verge of ascending once more to the spiritual state through the exercise of individual will.

[ 20 ] What, then, is the purpose of all this development? Where were these beings when, in their initial state, they were nothing more than seeds? Where did the human race originate? Who created it?

[ 21 ] The task now is to cross the threshold that reveals to us a level of existence and a power of revelation that transcends human and planetary life. This power is the Logos.

[ 22 ] How does all human and planetary life differ from the life of the Logos?

[ 23 ] At first glance, this question seems to require us to take a leap into the unknown, into a universe of a different order. And yet there are analogous phenomena in our world that allow us to comprehend—or at least sense—the creative power of the Logos.

[ 24 ] Let us assume that a human intelligence could encompass the sum total of everything accessible to it; that it possessed a systematic knowledge of all earthly and planetary phenomena. It could revive all forms of development. But it could not, by this ability alone, go back to the stage prior to the appearance of humankind and the planetary system in the universe. It would remain within the realm of what has been scientifically established by humankind; our intellectual capacity does not transcend this limit.

[ 25 ] But we can rise to a level of consciousness different from that which merely reproduces the experiences of the intellect. There are certain states of creative activity in which the human mind becomes a creator and can produce something new, something never before seen. Such is, for example, the mental state of the sculptor at the moment of conception, when he sees, in a flash before his mind’s eye, the form of a statue whose model he has never seen, but which he creates. Such is also the mental state of the poet, who conceives a work in a draft, in a creative vision of his mind.

[ 26 ] This creative power draws its inspiration not from an intellectual concept or idea, but from a spiritually inspired feeling. Let us consider the hen brooding over her egg. She is completely absorbed in the act of brooding and experiences a sense of well-being as she witnesses, as if in a dream, the hatching of the little feathered chick. This sense of well-being in creation is found at all stages of cosmic evolution, and everywhere it radiates a corresponding warmth. If one imagines cosmic intelligence as the world of thoughts accessible to the higher self (Manas), one immediately perceives this power of warmth that permeates the universe, emanating, as it were, from the creative source of all life (the life spirit: Budhi). And through it, one can sense this world of creative power that preceded our own and envelops it. One then ascends from Manas to Budhi and from Budhi to Atma.

[ 27 ] The word that kindles the “I” within human beings—the microcosm—is the third Logos.

[ 28 ] Imagine, then, the power of the higher Self within the human being—the Manas—extended throughout the entire universe like a source of heat that kindles life; and you arrive at the Second Logos, which kindles macrocosmic life and from which the human soul receives a reflection in its creative activities (Budhi).

[ 29 ] Their common source is the First Logos, the unfathomable Deity, the center of all manifestation.

[ 30 ] Throughout history, occultism has represented these three Logoi through the following symbols:

[ 31 ] They have been summarized in the number 7-7-7, the esoteric number of the three Logoi. The exoteric number is the product of these three sets of seven within the plan of evolution, namely 343.