The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Eleventh Lecture

[ 1 ] In our discussion, we have reached the point where the Earth went through its so-called lunar phase. We have also seen that this lunar phase of the Earth was followed by a kind of dormant state for the entire system. Of course, one must imagine this in such a way that all beings inhabiting such a planet undergo these transitional and intermediate states, so that during them they experience different things than they do during the actual external stage of development. Let us clarify how the beings experienced various things during this intermediate state between the Earth’s lunar development and its actual earthly development.

[ 2 ] We have seen that three kinds of beings lived on the Moon as a sort of physical precursor to our present kingdoms of nature. There lived a kind of plant-minerals, animal-plants, and human-animals. Human beings themselves were on this ancient Moon in a state of undeveloped self-consciousness. Thus, human beings had not yet reached the stage of a self dwelling within a body. During this intermediate state, something very important happened to what I might call the spiritual part of the human being.

[ 3 ] If we truly visualize the ancient lunar sphere, we can, in a certain sense, describe it as a being that possessed a kind of life of its own, much like a tree on which all manner of creatures live. The Moon itself was, after all, a kind of unified plant-mineral. Its rocks were merely a hardening of a kind of plant-mineral mass, and its animal-plants grew out of this mass, and what we might call human animals orbited around the Moon. At the same time, we must realize that everything that constituted the “I”-consciousness still lived, to a greater or lesser extent, in the Moon’s atmosphere within that fiery nebula; that it was still a part, a member, of a higher being in which all these “I’s” were contained—the same “I’s” that today exist within the body, separated from one another by the skin. So there were not yet people walking about endowed with an “I”-consciousness as we have today. Instead, something else was much more highly developed than on Earth.

[ 4 ] You know that today, on Earth, what is called the “national soul” or “racial soul” has become a rather abstract concept. Today, many believe that what is truly real is the individual human soul that dwells within the body, and when one speaks of German, French, or Russian national souls, people regard this as something more or less abstract—as a collective term, as the characteristics possessed by the individual members of these nations. For the occultist, this is not the case at all. For him, what is called the national soul—that is, the German, French, or Russian national soul—is something that exists entirely and absolutely independently. However, in our present earthly existence, this national soul exists only spiritually, perceptible only to those who can ascend to the astral plane. There you would not deny its existence, for there it is present as a truly living being. You would encounter the national soul there just as you encounter your friends on the physical plane.

[ 5 ] On the Moon, it would have occurred to you even less to deny the existence of this group soul, for at that time it had an even more real existence. That which flowed down through the bloodstream into the bodies of those beings who orbited the Moon was the national soul, the racial soul. It is the fate of our age to deny such entities, which have a real life on the astral plane and cannot be perceived here on the physical plane. And we are precisely at the pinnacle of this materialistic development, which seeks to deny such entities as national and racial souls.

[ 6 ] Among other things, a very distinctive book has recently been published that has been heavily promoted—a book that is rightly regarded and praised as a true expression of our abstract and concrete thinking, because it seems to have been written straight from the soul of modern man. Such a book was bound to be written someday. It denies everything that cannot be seen with the eyes or touched with the hands. From the occultist’s point of view, this book is scandalous; from the perspective of contemporary thought, however, it is an excellent book. It is Mauthner’s Critique of Language. This book has thoroughly done away with all things that cannot be grasped by hand. Our time had to produce such a book—it was a kind of necessity. This is not meant to be a criticism. It is merely meant to highlight the contrast between occult thinking and the modern age. In this book, you can discover the exact opposite of all occult thinking; it is the most marvelous product of a dying cultural current of the present, and from this standpoint, it is quite excellent.

[ 7 ] You will understand that on this ancient Moon there truly existed a kind of collective consciousness that was more widespread than here on Earth. On Earth, each individual feels isolated. That was not the case on the Moon. On the Moon, this group soul was alive; it then appeared on Earth in a diluted form as a national soul, so that the entire lunar sphere possessed a collective consciousness to a high degree. This collective consciousness on the Moon perceived itself as feminine. And now you know that this Moon was illuminated by the Sun. The sun was perceived as the masculine. This is reflected in ancient Egyptian mythology, for example, with the moon as Isis, feminine, and the sun as Osiris, masculine. However, the sense of self—which is contained within the human body—was entirely absent there. It was contained within the moon’s atmosphere.

[ 8 ] During that intermediate state, while the Moon was still connected to the Earth, various beings worked from within the Moon’s atmosphere in such a way that the human etheric body and the human astral body were made capable of receiving a sense of self. What happened, then, when this Sun shone forth again, with the Moon and Earth still within it? In the vicinity of this newly awakened solar sphere were the beings who today constitute your souls. Their role was such that, during the intermediate state, they had integrated the “I”-consciousness into the astral and etheric bodies. The physical body did not yet possess it; it initially emerged once more as a “human-animal,” just as it had been on the Moon. Thus, these two no longer harmonized with one another. On the Moon, they had still been in harmony. What had sunk into the astral and etheric bodies there no longer corresponded exactly with what was physically present below, and the consequence of this was that, before this harmony could be restored, the earlier states of Saturn, the Sun, and the Moon had to be repeated. Thus, we have three repetitions before our Earth actually came into being.

[ 9 ] First came the Saturn existence with the physical bodies of the animal-men, but in a certain respect no longer as simple as they had been on Saturn. At that time, the sense organs were in their embryonic stages; now the glandular and nervous organs had already been added, but they were incapable of receiving what was above. A brief repetition of the Saturn state had to occur. The spirits of individuality and independence had to work on the physical bodies once more in order to instill in them the capacity to receive the “I.” Likewise, the Solar stage had to be undergone so that these physical bodies, with regard to the organs that had developed on the Sun, would become capable of receiving an “I,” and likewise the Lunar stage, to make the nervous system suitable for this.

[ 10 ] So first there was a kind of repetition of the Saturn state. In this state, those beings who had formerly been human-animals now wandered about on Earth like automatons, like a kind of machine. Then came the time when this repeated Saturn state gave way to the Sun state. These human bodies were like sleeping plants. Then the repetition of the Lunar stage began, in which the Sun had already separated. Everything that had previously separated as the Moon remained behind. Thus, the entire Lunar cycle was repeated once more, except that the beings were endowed with the capacity to develop a sense of self.

[ 11 ] This repetition of the lunar cycle was, if one may say so, a dark period in the Earth’s evolution, for—from a spiritual perspective—the “I” had been implanted into the human body—which consisted only of the physical, etheric, and astral bodies—without the purifying power of thought. In the time when the Sun had already departed and the Earth had not yet cast out the Moon, human beings were in a state where their astral bodies were the vessels of the wildest desires, for all evil forces had been implanted within them and there was no counterbalance. To put it in modern terms, after the separation of the Sun, it was a mass in which human beings were still, to a certain extent, group souls, but of the most sensual kind, with the worst instincts.

[ 12 ] And so, through this passage through a veritable hell, under the influence of the purified Sun that had departed—not only the physical Sun, but also the solar beings who had withdrawn to the Sun— this recurring lunar planet gradually matured to the point where it could cast out the terrible instincts and forces, retaining on Earth only that which was capable of development. With the departure of today’s Moon, all these sensual forces vanished. Therefore, in the present Moon you have the remnant—including in its spiritual significance—of all the harmful influences that existed in the human world at that time; and that is also why this lunar existence carries a downward-drawing influence. Thus, what remained on Earth after the separation from the Sun and the Moon was that which was capable of development.

[ 13 ] Let us now first consider the animal-men themselves. They had gradually matured to the point where the “I” could be incorporated into them. So now we have the human being, consisting of four members—the physical body, the etheric body, the astral body, and the “I”—walking the earth. This is the first time that the earlier floating, suspended posture has changed, and human beings have begun, little by little, to assume an upright posture. Their spine—the nerve cord in their back—became upright, in contrast to the entirely horizontal posture they had maintained during the Lunar Age. And parallel to this straightening up was the expansion of the spinal cord toward the brain, and yet another development occurred in parallel with this. For the floating, swimming movement that human beings had both during the Lunar Period and during the repetition of the Lunar Period—when the forces of the fire mists were still present in the environment—they required a kind of swim bladder, and this was indeed present in human nature, just as it still is in fish today. Now the fire mists—we have called them Ruach—settled. This happened very gradually and slowly. The air was still filled with dense water vapor, of course, but the worst of it settled, and thus began the era when human beings transitioned from gill-breathers to lung-breathers. The swim bladder transformed into lungs. This enabled him to take in the higher spiritual beings within himself—namely, the first seed of that which stands above the “I,” the spiritual self or Manas.

[ 14 ] The Bible expresses this transformation of the swim bladder into the lungs with these marvelous, monumental words: “And God breathed into the man the breath of life, and he became a living soul.” This expresses what has been taking place within humankind over thousands of years. And all the beings we have come to know—both the plant-animals and the animal-humans of the Moon, as well as their descendants during Earth’s Lunar period—none of them yet possessed red blood. What they had was similar to the blood of today’s lower animals, which is not yet red. A blood-like substance flowed into and out of them from the outside. In order to be able to harbor red blood within themselves, something else was still necessary. We will understand this when we realize that, until the Moon was cast out, iron played no role in the evolution of our planet. Until then, there was no iron on our planet. It acquired it when the planet Mars passed through our Earth and, so to speak, left the iron behind. Hence, the influence of iron in red blood originates from Mars.

[ 15 ] Legend has preserved this, attributing to Mars the qualities that iron brought to the blood: great strength and a warrior spirit. Thus, the influence exerted by the respiratory process was supported by the introduction of iron into our organism. This was of the utmost importance for our earthly evolution. Under these influences, the human organism perfected itself to such an extent that one can say: Human beings began, starting from the “I,” to purify and refine the constituent elements of their being that they had previously received on Saturn, the Sun, and the Moon. Naturally, this work began first with the member that had been acquired most recently: the astral body. And this purification of our astral body is our culture.

[ 16 ] If you could observe this human being, who was still in the process of transforming into a lung, who was taking the first steps toward becoming red blood, you would find him very unlike our present human form. He was so different that one might truly take offense at describing this human being from that time, for to today’s materialistic thinker it would seem grotesque. He had roughly the developmental stage of an amphibian, a reptile just beginning to breathe through lungs, and from his earlier floating, swimming movements, he began to learn to slowly support himself on the earth. When we say that humans in the Lemurian Age moved in a manner that alternated between hopping, barely walking, and then rising into the air again, the only thing that might remind us of this is the ancient dinosaurs. Nothing of this has been preserved that a geologist could have found as hardened remains or fossils, for the human body was entirely soft; no bones had yet formed within it.

[ 17 ] What, then, did the Earth look like after it had freed itself from the Moon? Previously, it had been surrounded by a fiery mist, as if in a boiling, steaming cauldron, and then the dense water vapor gradually receded. Now it turned out that the Earth had only a very thin, hardened crust, beneath which lay this seething, bubbling sea of fire—the remnant of the fiery mist of the ancient atmosphere. Gradually, small islets emerged—the very beginnings of our present mineral kingdom. While a plant-mineral kingdom still existed on the Moon, the first rudiments of our present-day rocks and stones began to take shape through the hardening and mineralization of this mass. Even earlier, the animal-plant kingdom had developed into something resembling the present-day plant kingdom. And the beings on the Moon—who were human-like creatures—had divided into two groups. Some had kept pace with evolution and become human-like beings, but there were also those who had not undergone this evolution. These are the present-day higher animals. They had remained at an earlier stage, and because they could not keep up, they fell further and further behind. All the mammals and other such creatures we have today are remnants of these lunar human-animals that remained behind. You must therefore never imagine that human beings were ever animals like those found on Earth today. The bodies of these animals were not capable at that time of incorporating the “I”; they remained at the stage of the Moon’s group-soul nature. The last ones who, so to speak, almost managed to make the transition to Earth—but who later proved too weak to be inhabited by an individual soul—are the apes, the present-day ape species. But even they were never true ancestors of humanity; rather, they are degenerate beings.

[ 18 ] Thus, in the ancient Lemurian era, the Earth was a kind of fiery mass in which today’s minerals were largely dissolved and in a liquid state, much like iron in a steel mill today. From this, the first mineral island masses developed. On this mass, the ancestors of humankind moved about, half hopping, half floating. The spiritual self endeavored to gradually take possession of these human beings.

[ 19 ] We must therefore imagine the Earth’s ancient Age of Fire as a time in which, in a certain sense, a final echo still lingered of the forces of the Moon itself, which then gradually disappeared. These forces manifested themselves through the dominion that human will exercised over the substances and forces of nature. On the Moon, after all, human beings had still been completely connected to nature; there, the group soul was shaping human existence. Now this was no longer the case, but a magical connection still existed between human will and the forces of fire. If a person had a gentle character, their will would have the effect of calming the natural element of fire; as a result, more land could form. The passionate human, on the other hand, exerted a magical influence through his will, causing the masses of fire to become stormy and furious and to tear apart the thin crust of the Earth. Now all the wild, passionate force that had been inherent in human beings on the Moon and during the recurrence of the Lunar Age on Earth broke through once more in the newly formed individual human souls. The passions affected the fiery masses in such a way that they revolutionized them, and a large part of the land inhabited by the Lemurians was destroyed. Only a small portion of Lemuria’s inhabitants survived and carried on the human race.

[ 20 ] They were all already alive back then; their souls are, after all, the very same ones that had saved themselves from the stormy mass of fire in Lemuria. That part of humanity which had been saved moved to the land we know as Atlantis, which essentially stretched between present-day Europe and America. From there, the human race continued to multiply. Gradually, the Earth’s atmosphere had changed so much that all traces of the old smoke had dissipated, and the air was now saturated only by a massive mass of fog. Germanic legend has preserved the memory of this in Niflheim, or “Land of Mist”; this is a land that was constantly shrouded in such heavy mists.

[ 21 ] What, then, was creating from the outside all the way into the Lemurian epoch? First of all, during the Saturn epoch, these were the beings we call the spirits of egoism and the sense of independence. During the Solar Age, it was the archangels, the fire spirits; during the Lunar Age, it was those beings who were, so to speak, the good spirits of the Lunar Age. The Christian term for them is “angels”; Theosophy also refers to them as the “spirits of twilight.” We have designated the most outstanding leader of these spirits as the Holy Spirit, the ruler of the fire spirits as Christ, and the ruler of Saturn as the Father Spirit. The last one, then, who created with his host, was the Spirit whom Christianity calls the Holy Spirit, the Ruler of lunar evolution, the Spirit who was still present during the repetition of the Earth’s lunar period. It was this same Spirit who built from the outside and now, so to speak, sent a ray of his own being into human beings. We must distinguish between two kinds of spirits at the beginning of the Lemurian epoch: the spirits who prepare the lower physicality, implant the “I”-consciousness, and shape the human shells; and the spirit who entered into the human being itself at the very moment when that human being learned to breathe physically.

[ 22 ] If you now consider that everything on Saturn that still formed a kind of fiery mass—surrounded by a finer atmosphere—was gaseous on the Sun and was then surrounded on the Moon by those fiery nebular masses, then you must view the Earth’s evolutionary process as a purification, just as the evolution of humanity itself is a purification. What we call air today was only gradually purified of everything that filled it—a kind of smoke and vapor. We must be clear that what was separated out of the atmosphere consists of the substances from which all physical matter was built up. Air is the purest of what remains. It is the finest form of physical substance for the guiding spirits of the Moon, whom Christian tradition calls angels. Therefore, in the air—which had been purified and separated—humanity sensed the physical nature of the new guiding spirits of the Earth, the present guiding spirit, Jehovah. In the blowing of the wind, people sensed that which guided and directed the Earth. And so they lived on into the Atlantean era—whose continent forms the present-day bed of the Atlantic Ocean—feeling the physical nature of God in the breath they drew in.

[ 23 ] That magical influence which human beings had once exerted over the sea of fire and over the processes of the Earth gradually disappeared. In its place, another connection remained during the early Atlantean period. At that time, human beings still possessed a certain magical power over the growth of plants. When he raised his hand—which at that time had a completely different form—over a plant, he was able to cause it to grow rapidly through the power of his will. He was still in intimate connection with the beings of nature. The entire life of the Atlantean was in harmony with this coexistence with nature.

[ 24 ] What we today call the ability to make connections, intelligence, and logical thinking did not yet exist back then. On the other hand, humans had developed other abilities to a high degree—for example, memory, the extraordinary development of which we cannot even begin to imagine today. Humans could not perform arithmetic—not even that 2 times 2 equals 4—but they knew it from memory. Each time, they recalled a previous experience. It was also the case during the Atlantean era that, even though people no longer felt the national soul directly within themselves as they had on the Moon, they still sensed the influence of the ancient national and racial souls. It was so strong that back then it would have been utterly impossible for someone belonging to one race or national soul to ever unite with someone belonging to another race. There was a deep antipathy between members of different national souls. Only those within the same national soul loved one another. One might say that the common blood—which, after all, had flowed down from the national soul during the Lunar Age—was the basis of this sense of belonging, and people remembered the experiences of their ancestors not merely vaguely, but quite clearly. They felt themselves to be a link in the chain of ancestors through this common blood, just as you feel your hand to be a part of your organism. This sense of belonging was connected to evolution insofar as, at that time—during the transition we have been considering, which took place at the time of the Sun’s separation and the expulsion of the Moon—another significant process was unfolding. This is connected to everything that was taking place on Earth as a kind of hardening process. The mineral kingdom came into being, and at the same time, a similar hardening process was taking place within human nature. From the soft mass, a harder substance gradually emerged, hardening first into cartilage and then into bone, and it was only with the formation of this bony mass that human beings began to walk.

[ 25 ] And alongside this incorporation into the Earth’s mass, yet another process took place in parallel. As humanity continued to evolve through the ejection of the lunar mass from the Earth—leaving behind only that which was capable of further development—two types of forces emerged within the beings inhabiting the Earth. Now the Sun and the Moon were outside, and the forces of the Sun and the Moon therefore act upon the Earth from the outside. And from this mixture of solar and lunar forces—which had previously been within the Earth itself but now radiated in from the outside—arose what we call the advance toward sexual life. For all those forces that find expression in sexual life are under the influence of the solar and lunar forces.

[ 26 ] Everything that, in ancient times, when the Sun, Moon, and Earth were still united, manifested in a way that could be described as feminine was, so to speak, fertilized by the forces of the Sun itself. The Sun perceived itself as masculine, the Moon as feminine. Then the Moon withdrew; the forces of the two bodies mingled. In general, we can describe the entities that had come into being up until the Moon’s expulsion as a kind of feminine entity, for all fertilizing forces come from outside, from the power of the Sun. Only on an Earth that had expelled the Moon—so that the Sun now shone upon an entirely different body—could the ancient and undifferentiated feminine separate into masculine and feminine, so that with the process of hardening and bone formation, the transition to sexual differentiation took place. And with that, the possibility arose to develop the “I” in the proper way.