The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Third Lecture

[ 1 ] These Monday lectures aim to elevate more advanced Theosophists—that is, those who have long since imbued themselves with the Theosophical worldview and, more importantly, with the Theosophical way of thinking and mindset—to ever higher and higher levels of understanding. Therefore, if we truly pursue this goal in these lectures, it will become increasingly difficult for those who, so to speak, are lagging behind to keep up. They may still be able to follow intellectually, but it will become increasingly difficult to regard what is presented from the higher realms of Theosophy as something reasonable and sound. Consequently, especially for those who have only been here a short time, it will require a good deal of goodwill to follow these branch lectures with an understanding based on feeling and intuition. However, it must be emphasized time and again that we would not make any progress if we did not have the opportunity, in some context, to shed light on the higher realms of spiritual existence. That is what is to take place here in these lectures.

[ 2 ] In my last lecture, I gave you an overview of the evolution of our entire planetary system. This was preceded by a look at the planetary system itself, insofar as the individual planets are inhabited by all manner of beings who, in turn, exert an influence on our human body. Today’s presentation will follow on from these two previous considerations. We will broaden our perspective on the planetary system even further and, in doing so, come to understand many of the mysteries of our existence in the world from a spiritual point of view.

[ 3 ] If you consider any of the common depictions of the formation of our solar system—of which there are so many today—you are first led back to a kind of primordial nebula, a nebula-like, immense structure from which our Sun and the planets orbiting it have, so to speak, been expelled, and, as a rule, only physical forces are considered to be the driving forces behind this process of “squeezing out.” You know that this is called the Kant-Laplace theory—which has been modified many times since then—and you also know that those who have now reached the point in their understanding where they have grasped the gradual formation of the individual planets from the primordial nebula up to the state in which the planets, notably the Earth, are today—are very proud of this insight, and that they repeatedly emphasize how, in fact, it is a view quite out of step with our tremendous progress to speak of spiritual forces and spiritual beings in connection with this separation of the individual celestial bodies from the primordial nebula. They know that there are also popular books that describe such talk as the most backward and superstitious that could possibly exist. Now, the intellect of a theosophist would, of course, be sufficient to understand everything that is put forward in these fields in the correct way. But it extends a little further than that. It is clear to the theosophist that physical forces of attraction and repulsion, and so on, are not enough—that all sorts of other factors are at play as well. Today, Theosophy still has to put up with being denounced by mainstream official science—which one might perhaps also call “Antisophy”—as utter nonsense and terrible superstition. But we live in an age that, in a strange way, one might say, holds hope for the Theosophist. One might say that the theories, views, and insights that contemporary mainstream science derives from its own facts resemble small, gasping, dwarfish entities, panting and wheezing as they run after the facts from a great distance. For the facts of modern science are actually far ahead of what constitutes the “belief” of modern science. They are such that they continually yield new and fresh confirmations of theosophical truths. Of course, these are not recognized as such. I would just like to point out that there has often been talk here of the effect of the astral body during the night: how, during the day, the physical body and the etheric body become worn out, and how, during the night, it is the astral body that acts to restore and rebuild, removing the substances of fatigue. To express this statement in this form would be considered by today’s science as something still entirely unacceptable. But the facts speak for themselves: For example, when we read today in an American magazine that a researcher has put forward the theory that human sleep activity is an enveloping, restorative process, whereas, by contrast, activity during wakefulness is a depleting one, then you have yet another scientific fact behind which the theories of natural science trail along like little dwarfs who cannot keep up, whereas in the spiritual-scientific worldview you have the luminous, grand perspectives drawn from a spiritual worldview.

[ 4 ] When we examine the origin of our present solar system from a spiritual-scientific perspective, we have no reason whatsoever—any more than in other fields—to directly contradict what physical science asserts. For theosophy has no objection whatsoever to what physical science seeks to discern above all else—what eyes could have seen in the sequence of development. If, at the time of the primordial nebula, someone had placed a chair out into space, sat down on it, possessed a sufficiently long lifespan, and then watched as the individual spheres coalesced, he would have been able to see nothing else with his physical eyes than what physical science has established. But that would be just as if two people were standing before you and one slapped the other, and then an observer came along and said: “One of them felt intense anger toward the other, and that caused him to raise his hand, and that is how the other received his slap”; while the second would say: “You’re a fantasist; I saw no anger or passion—I only saw the hand move and deliver a blow; as a result, the other man received a slap.”—That is the external, materialistic description, the method employed by modern science. It does not contradict the spiritual investigation of the facts. Only those who believe that this materialistic description of the facts is the only one naturally feel, in their scientific superiority, far above everything that spiritual research has to offer. So what is called the modified Kant-Laplacean theory may well be regarded as an external event. But within this entire process of separation, this entire crystallization of the individual spheres of the world, spiritual forces and spiritual beings were at work.

[ 5 ] Today, the experimenter beautifully demonstrates how all of this can take place according to this Kant-Laplacean theory. All you need to do is take a relatively small oil droplet floating in water: It is very easy to attach a small cardboard circle to the surface of the water and insert a needle through the center. If you then rotate the needle quite quickly, small oil droplets break off, and this allows you to very clearly visualize a cosmic system on a small scale and demonstrate how a cosmic system has formed in space. But the experimenter forgets one thing in the process: namely, that he himself was there and made the necessary preparations, that he then spun the needle around, and that in the vast cosmos, what does not happen on its own in the small scale cannot happen on its own there either. Out there, it’s supposed to happen on its own! These things aren’t that hard to understand; but the correct physical principles have been so thoroughly eroded that those who do not want to see them really do not need to see them. So, spiritual forces and spiritual beings were at work in this entire process of planetary formation, and we will now learn a little more about them.

[ 6 ] I must remind you of the oft-repeated fact that our Earth, before it became “Earth,” went through earlier incarnations, other planetary states: the Saturn state, the Sun state, and the Moon state—and only after passing through these did it reach its present state as Earth. Now, vividly imagine before your soul the ancient Saturn, floating in space in the distant past, which was the first incarnation of our Earth. This Saturn, within its entire being, actually had nothing at all of what we see around us today as our plants, minerals, and animals. In the beginning, this Saturn consisted only of the very first rudiments of humanity. We speak of this ancient Saturn in no other way than as a conglomerate of human beings. At that time, the human being existed only in the initial germ of his physical body. This ancient Saturn was composed entirely of individual physical human bodies, much as a mulberry or a blackberry today is composed entirely of individual berries. And this ancient Saturn was surrounded—just as our Earth is today by air—by an atmosphere; but in comparison to what we know today as the atmosphere, it was spiritual. It was entirely of a spiritual nature, and within the course of Saturn’s development, humanity developed in its early stages. Then came a time when Saturn entered a state similar to that of a human today who, between death and a new birth, is in a devachanic state. This state into which a world body enters is called a Pralaya. Saturn thus passed through a kind of devachanic state and then reemerged—by re-entering a kind of outwardly perceptible existence—as the second planetary state of our Earth, the Sun. This solar state brought humanity further along. Certain beings who had remained behind now established themselves as a second kingdom on the Sun alongside the human kingdom, so that we now have two kingdoms. Then another devachanic state of the Sun—a Pralaya—occurs, and the entire planet transforms into the lunar state; and so it passes through another Pralaya until the Moon transitions into our Earth.

[ 7 ] When our Earth emerged from the purely spiritual, Devachanic state, when it first acquired a form of existence perceptible from the outside, it was not as it is today; rather, viewed from the outside, it could truly be conceived of as a sort of great primordial nebula, as described by external, physical science. However, we must imagine this primordial nebula as being vast—far larger than today’s Earth—and extending far beyond the outermost planets that currently belong to our solar system, extending well beyond Uranus. From a spiritual scientific perspective, we conceive of the matter in such a way that what we see emerging from a spiritual state is not merely a kind of physical primordial nebula. Anyone who describes what emerges from it as a kind of physical primordial nebula and nothing more is about as wise as a person who has seen another human being and, when asked what he saw, says: “I saw muscles attached to bones, and I saw blood!”—that is, someone who describes only the physical. For the primordial nebula contains a wealth of spiritual forces and spiritual beings. They are part of it, and what happens in the primordial nebula is a consequence of the actions of these spiritual beings. Everything the physicist describes is as if he were to place a chair out in outer space and observe the entire process from there. He really describes it just like that observer who denies the anger and passion that cause a slap and sees only the moving hand. In truth, what is happening there—the emergence of celestial bodies and spheres—is the work of spiritual beings; so that in the primordial nebula we see the garment, the outer manifestation, of a multitude of spiritual beings.

[ 8 ] There are spiritual beings there who are at various stages of development. These spiritual beings do not come from nothing; rather, they have a past—they have gone through the Saturn, Sun, and Moon eras. They have all gone through these stages, and now they are poised to apply what they have experienced in the form of actions—to put into practice what they learned on Saturn, the Sun, and the Moon. And they are at various levels of development. Among them are beings who, on ancient Saturn, had already reached the stage that human beings have reached today on Earth. These beings have already passed through their human stage on Saturn; they therefore stand significantly higher than human beings at the beginning of Earth’s evolution—they stand far above human beings. There are other beings who passed through their human stage on the Sun, and still others who did so on the Moon. Humanity is waiting to go through its human stage on Earth. So if we consider only this fourfold hierarchy of beings, we already have a multitude of different beings at various stages of development.

[ 9 ] We now refer to the beings who went through their human stage on the Sun as the “fire spirits.” However, you must not imagine that these fire spirits, who were human beings on the ancient Sun planet, looked outwardly like today’s human beings at that time. They went through their human stage in a different outward form. The ancient Sun planet had an extraordinarily fine, light matter—much lighter than our present-day matter. At that time, solid and liquid states did not yet exist; there was only the gaseous state, and the bodies of the Fire Spirits—despite having attained the human rank—were gaseous. The human stage in cosmic evolution can be experienced in a wide variety of forms. Only Earth humans experience it in the flesh on Earth. Those beings who held human rank on the Moon—and who were already elevated above humans even on the Moon—experienced it in a kind of watery state.

[ 10 ] These spirits, and a whole host of other spirits, were thus connected to that primordial nebula that lies at the origin of our solar system. For example, you can easily imagine that what began for human beings on Saturn began in some way for other beings on the Sun. Just as the first rudiments of the physical body began on Saturn, other beings followed on the Sun, just as new students keep arriving at school. Today, they have only progressed to the point where they are now physically embodied in our present-day animals. On the Moon, the beings that are present in today’s plants joined the process, and our present-day minerals did not appear until the Earth itself was formed. These, then, are the most recent companions in our evolution, whose pains and joys I described to you in a previous lecture. Thus, this primordial nebula contained not only advanced beings but also beings who had not yet reached the human stage.

[ 11 ] In addition to those I have just listed for you, there are beings whom we have described as having remained stagnant at certain stages of cosmic evolution. Let us take the fire spirits, for example. The fire spirits have already completed their human stage on the Sun. Now, on Earth, they are highly exalted beings, two stages beyond human beings. They have advanced so far that human beings will not be ready for such an existence—as the exalted Solar Spirits had it when Earth began its evolution—until they have ascended through the Jupiter and Venus stages to the volcanic stage. However, there are beings who have fallen behind—that is, those who could have reached the same level on the Sun as the fire spirits, but who—for certain reasons—were unable to develop to the full height that the fire spirits had attained when the Earth was at the beginning of its evolution.

[ 12 ] You all remember that at a certain stage in its development, right at the very beginning—and you can easily reconcile this with the theory of the primeval nebula—the Earth was still a single body together with the Sun and the Moon. So if you were to mix the three celestial bodies—the Earth, the Sun, and the Moon—together in a giant cosmic pot, you would get a body that once existed. Then came the time when the Sun withdrew, leaving behind the Earth and the Moon, and then came a time when the Moon, too, withdrew, and our Earth became what it is today: surrounded by the Sun on one side and the Moon on the other.

[ 13 ] Now let us ask ourselves: Why did it happen that three bodies emerged from a single body? You will easily understand why this happened if you consider that such highly developed beings existed within the primordial nebula—linked to the external existence of the primordial nebula—who stood two levels higher than human beings. They would have had no immediate place on a celestial body like our present-day Earth; they needed a dwelling place with entirely different characteristics. On the other hand, humanity in this stage of existence would, so to speak, have been consumed had it remained connected to the Sun. It needed a less intense, more tempered existence. Thus, through the action of the fire spirits, the Sun had to be lifted out of the Earth and made into their arena. This is not merely a physical event; rather, we must understand it as the very act of the fire spirits themselves. They extracted their dwelling place and all the substances they needed from the Earth and made the Sun their arena. By virtue of their nature, they are able to endure that immense speed in their development. If a human being were subjected to this immense speed of development, he would be old again almost as soon as he was young. All development would proceed at a breakneck pace. Only those beings who are already two levels higher than human beings can endure an existence such as that of the Sun. They have separated themselves from the Sun and left the Earth behind with the Moon.

[ 14 ] Now we can also answer the question of why the Moon had to separate from the Earth. If the Moon had remained connected to the Earth, then human beings on Earth would not have been able to fulfill their existence either. The Moon had to be cast out; for it would have mummified the entire development of humankind. Human beings would not have undergone such rapid development as they would have if the Sun had remained. They would not have aged as quickly, but they would have become ossified, withered into mummies; their development would have been so slow that they would have become mummified. In order to achieve precisely the degree of development that is beneficial to humankind, the Moon, with its forces and its subordinate beings, had to be expelled. That is why the Moon is also associated with those beings whom I have described as remaining at a single stage throughout their lives—a stage that today on Earth is roughly equivalent to that of a seven-year-old child. Since they undergo a life span similar to that of a human being up to the age of seven, during which only the physical body develops, they required a setting such as the Moon. If you consider the fact that not only were these various beings connected to the primordial nebula, but also a whole series of beings at the most diverse stages of development, then you will understand that it was not only these celestial bodies—such as the Earth, the Sun, and the Moon—that emerged from the primordial nebula, but also the other celestial bodies; and indeed, they all coalesced because settings had to be created for the corresponding stages of development of the various beings. Thus, there were beings who, in the beginning, when the Earth’s evolution began, were scarcely suited to participate in further evolution—beings who were still so young in their overall development that any further step would have led to their ruin. They had to be given, so to speak, a setting in which they could preserve their complete youthfulness. All other realms exist to provide dwellings for those who are already further along. For the beings who came into being very late during the Lunar era—and who had therefore remained at a very early stage of development—a realm had to be formed that consequently has only a tenuous connection to our earthly existence: the celestial body we call Uranus was thus formed. This has become a realm for those beings who were forced to remain at a very backward stage of development.

[ 15 ] Then the process continued. Everything in our solar system, apart from Uranus, is now contained within a primordial mass. Greek mythology calls what existed before Uranus took shape “Chaos.” Now Uranus has taken shape; the rest, so to speak, has remained in Chaos. Associated with this are beings who, in their development at that time, were precisely at the stage that we humans were at when our Earth passed through the Saturn stage. And for those who, precisely because they were at this stage—because they had only just begun their existence—could not participate in everything that came later, a special realm called “Saturn” was created. Thus, a second celestial body, Saturn—which you can still see in the heavens today—split off. It came into being because there were beings at the stage that human beings had occupied at the time of Earth’s Saturn state. So while this Saturn emerged as a separate celestial body, everything else that belongs to our present-day planetary system already existed alongside it. Even the Earth, with all its beings, was still contained within this primordial mass. Only Uranus and Saturn were already outside of it.

[ 16 ] The next thing that happened was that another planet split off, one that was destined to become the setting for a certain stage of development. This is now “Jupiter,” the third planet to split off from the nebular mass that, for us, is actually the Earth. While Jupiter and the other planets we already know are out there, the Sun and the Moon are still united with the Earth. These planets were in fact separated from the chaos when the Earth still contained what is now also in our Sun, when our Earth was still completely one with the Sun and the Moon. Back then, when Jupiter separated, the precursors of today’s humanity gradually emerged—that is, today’s human beings emerged once again, just as a new plant sprouts from a seed. These human seeds had gradually formed during the ancient Saturn state, during the ancient Sun state, and during the ancient Moon state. Now—while the Sun was still connected to the Earth—these human seeds emerged once more.

[ 17 ] However, human beings could not have continued to develop in this way; they could not have sustained this pace while the Earth was still united with the Sun. And now something happens that we can understand well once we realize that those beings we have referred to as “fire spirits” are withdrawing their sphere of activity from the Earth. The Sun pushes its way out of the Earth, and we now have the Sun, and then the Earth and the Moon together. During this time, in some way—which need not be described in detail here, as that would lead too far afield—“Mars” remained as a realm for certain beings; it then actually passes through the Earth and the Moon as the process continues, and as it passes through, it leaves behind in the Earth and the Moon what we know today as iron. Therefore, it is also the source of everything that is deposited as iron in living beings—that is, in the blood. Now someone might say: Iron is everywhere, even in the Sun and so on. — That is not really surprising, for just as other bodies were present in the primordial nebula, so too was Mars present everywhere within it with the iron it left behind; it is also present in all the other planets! Here, too, we have the fact that scientists today are already providing remarkable evidence that things are as described here by the teachings of spiritual science. You will recall that I once explained to you how one symbolically transitions from the green plant sap—chlorophyll—to human blood. Plants as such came into being before this Mars passage took place and have retained their characteristics. Then, in the beings that are today more highly organized than plants, iron became incorporated—the iron that fills the red blood. It is entirely consistent with these spiritual-scientific facts that it was recently discovered in a Bern laboratory that blood cannot be compared to chlorophyll. This is precisely because it was incorporated later. We must not imagine that blood depends, so to speak, on the substance of the chemical element “iron.” I say this specifically because someone might argue that one cannot speak of any connection between chlorophyll and blood at all. Today, science is discovering that blood is attributable to the element “iron,” whereas chlorophyll contains no iron at all. Yet this is entirely in harmony with what spiritual science has to say; it is simply a matter of viewing things in the proper light.

[ 18 ] Now, for reasons we have already mentioned, the “Moon” separates itself, so that we are left with the Earth on its own and today’s Moon as its satellite. All beings that are essentially of a higher order than human beings—and whom we have called the fire spirits—are drawn to the Sun. However, there are certain beings who have not risen high enough to truly endure life on the Sun. Understand what kind of beings these are: they are beings who are far superior to human beings, yet who have not progressed far enough to live on the Sun, as the fire spirits do. Scenes had to be created for these beings. None of the other realms would have suited them; for those are intended for beings of a different nature, who have by no means attained the—albeit still considerable—age of those beings who, while they may be counted among the fire spirits, have not yet fully completed the cosmic course. Essentially, there were two kinds of beings who had been left behind; and for them, two special habitats were created when two other planets split off from the Sun: “Mercury” and “Venus.” Mercury and Venus are two planets that split off from the Sun to serve as habitats for those fire spirits who are far above human existence but who could not have endured life on the Sun. Thus, Mercury, located near the Sun, serves as a realm for those beings who could not have lived on the Sun alongside the fire spirits, and Venus serves as a realm for beings who, in a certain respect, had lagged behind the Mercury beings but who still stood far above human beings.

[ 19 ] Thus, for inner reasons—through spiritually active forces—you have seen these various celestial bodies emerge from the primordial nebula. You have been able to deduce from this that, if one sticks solely to the physical realm, things do indeed unfold as modern science tells us; but the point is to truly understand the spiritual reasons why things turned out this way. Within the primordial nebula, the beings created for themselves the dwellings in which they could live. Now, these various beings, who coexisted harmoniously, so to speak, before everything had yet split apart, did not remain disconnected from one another, but rather interacted with one another. Of particular interest is the influence of the Mercury and Venus beings on Earth. Transport yourselves back to the time when the Sun was just separating from the Earth, the Moon was separating, and humanity began its existence in its present form. Humanity attained this existence in its present form because one of the solar spirits consented—if I may put it that way—to forgo its future existence on the Sun and instead to unite with the Moon. This gave rise to a sublime ruler from the Moon. The Moon was otherwise inhabited by lower beings, but one of the solar spirits united with the lunar existence. This solar spirit, who united with the Moon—and who is thus, in the cosmic order, a displaced solar spirit—is, as a divine being, as a spiritual being, “Yahweh” or “Jehovar, the Ruler of the Moon.” We will understand why this happened when we consider the following reflection.

[ 20 ] We have seen that if the Sun had remained connected to the Earth, humankind would have been consumed by the rapid pace of evolution; if only the Moon were to exert its forces, humankind would be mummified. It was precisely through the harmony of the forces of the Sun and the Moon that the balance arose which sustains humanity at its present pace of development. When the Earth had come over from the old Moon, human beings had their physical body from Saturn, their etheric body from the Sun, and their astral body from the Moon. But because human beings had these three bodies, and now the seed with the three bodies was sprouting, they took on a completely different form. You would be astonished if I were to describe it to you; for the form that human beings have today arose very slowly and gradually from the time of the separation from the Moon. But the inferior, low-grade forces of the Moon could not have given human beings their present form. They could have given him a form, but an inferior one. If the forces of the Moon had remained connected to the Earth, they would have kept human beings fixed in one form. From this you can already see that the forces that give form must emanate from the Moon, while the forces that continually transform the form emanate from the Sun. But in order for human beings to attain their present form, a formative agent had to act from the Moon. There was simply no other way. This is how the development of the “I”-human began in those days. The fourth member of the human being begins to take shape, and Yahweh gives human beings the seed of a form such that they can become bearers of the “I.”

[ 21 ] However, human beings are not yet capable of performing the work I have spoken to you about. I have told you that human beings, starting from their “I,” first transform their astral body, then their etheric body, and then their physical body. Human beings can only undertake this process gradually. Just as a child today still needs teachers, so too did human beings—once they were ready to become “I-beings”—need a stimulus on our Earth in order to progress; and there were two such stimulators for them. You can deduce from the entire course of cosmic evolution where they came from.

[ 22 ] The beings closest to human beings were the Venus and Mercury beings. Until human beings were able, at the end of the Atlantean epoch, to make their first tentative attempts to influence the three bodies independently from their own “I”—for this was only possible at the end of the Atlantean epoch—they had to have “teachers” who continued to exert their influence far beyond that Atlantean epoch. And these teachers were the entities active on Venus and Mercury. But these beings should not be conceived of as teachers are today; rather, you must imagine that the Venus beings are those who endowed human beings with their intellectual faculties. Outwardly, human beings knew nothing at all that these Venusian beings were working upon them, just as they knew nothing that certain beings from the Moon were influencing them in terms of their outward form. Just as I have shown you how the various humors act upon human beings, so did the forces of these beings act upon human beings until they were able to develop their bodies independently. What we find today in human beings as intelligence was imparted to them by the spirits who remained on Venus as fire spirits of a lower order. In addition, there were other teachers who were in fact consciously perceived as such by the first clairvoyant human beings: the teachers of the great mysteries in ancient times. In ancient times, there were not only those all-encompassing influences of the Venus spirits, which acted more or less upon all of humanity, but there were also mystery sites where the most advanced human beings of that era received spiritual instruction from higher beings—the fire spirits. In the mysteries, the sublime fire spirits of Mercury themselves taught. There they appeared at first, if we may say so, in a spiritual embodiment and were the teachers of the first initiates. Just as the first initiates became the teachers of the great masses of people, so the Mercury beings acted as the teachers of the first initiates. In this way, you can see at the same time how perceptibly the beings of other celestial bodies influence human beings; but these influences are of a very complex nature. You can see this from the following:

[ 23 ] You will recall from my Theosophy that it is only a rough classification when we say that the human being consists of the physical body, the etheric body, the astral body, the “I,” the spiritual self, the life spirit, and the spiritual man. You know that the more accurate classification is this: physical body, etheric body, astral body; and that we then distinguish what the “I” merges into as the soul of sensation, the soul of intellect or emotion, and the soul of consciousness; and that within these we first find the spiritual self or Manas, then the life spirit or Buddhi, and finally the spiritual man or Atman. The soul aspect of the human being thus appears as the sensory soul, the intellectual soul, and the conscious soul. If we trace the development of the human being on Earth, we can also say: It first develops into the three components brought over from the Moon, with the soul of sensation added; then the soul of understanding arises; and the soul of consciousness, strictly speaking, does not arise until toward the end of the Atlantean epoch, when human beings first learned to say “I” to themselves. Only then can human beings learn to work consciously from within on the members of their being. So when we divide the human being into body, soul, and spirit, we must in turn divide the soul into the soul of feeling, the soul of understanding, and the soul of consciousness. These develop only gradually; the soul of consciousness cannot yet exert any influence, for it arises last. Thus, these aspects must also be stimulated from the outside. Here, once again, beings from outside are at work; specifically, Mars, with its beings, acts upon the feeling soul. When the intellectual soul is to emerge, Mercury has already been separated and, with its beings, acts upon the formation of the intellectual soul, while Jupiter—which has long been present—acts upon the formation of the consciousness soul.

[ 24 ] Thus, in the human soul, you have the activity of the three planetary bodies: the influence of Mars in the feeling soul, of Mercury in the intellectual soul, and of Jupiter in the conscious soul; and as the spiritual self is drawn into the conscious soul, Venus and her beings are at work. For the first initiates, Mercury is also active again, so that the Mercury beings carry out a twofold activity: first, one that is entirely unconscious to the human being, as they develop his intellectual soul; then they are the first teachers of the initiates, in which case they act in a fully conscious manner. The Mercury beings thus always have a dual activity, much like some rural teachers who must instruct the children and also cultivate the fields assigned to them. In the same way, the Mercury beings must develop the intellectual soul and, in addition, serve as the great teachers of the great initiates. You can also grasp all these things purely logically.

[ 25 ] Now you might ask why Jupiter, of all planets, influences the soul of consciousness, since it is such a backward planet. But these matters are not explored through logical reasoning, but rather by investigating the facts of the spiritual worlds. You would indeed see that the consciousness soul is stirred by the Jupiter beings, who are assisted on the other side by backward Venus beings. In cosmic processes, things must not be viewed in an external, schematic way; rather, one must realize that once a planet has fulfilled one task, its beings can later fulfill another. During the time of the second human race, the Jupiter beings contributed to the formation of the etheric body; then they themselves moved on a bit, and when humanity had progressed to the point where its consciousness soul could develop, they had to intervene again and help develop that consciousness soul. Thus, the forces at work in space interact with one another in the most manifold ways, and one cannot by any means make a schematic transition from one to the other.

[ 26 ] So you see how the physicist, when he looks out into outer space, sees only the purely external bodies of spiritual organisms, and how spiritual science then leads us into the spiritual depths that are the very cause of what the physicist sees. I would like to say: we have not succumbed to the delusion that befalls the person who takes the spinning top and forgets that he himself is turning it. We have sought out the beings themselves who shaped the material world into what it is. We have not succumbed to the illusion that, when we are not there, the whole thing continues to spin; rather, we have sought out the “spinner”—the one who stands behind it as the truly spiritually active being—so that we can increasingly find full harmony between what spiritual science says and what external science discovers. However, you can never deduce from the facts of external science what spiritual science says. At most, you will arrive at an analogy. If, on the other hand, the spiritual facts are discovered through occult means, then—setting aside what external science has yet to discover—they will always correspond with what the physicist has to say. Thus, the theosophist will always be able to hold his own against the physicist. He knows very well that when anything happens in the physical realm, it may well be exactly as the physicist describes it. But there is still, in addition, the spiritual process. This does not prevent some scientists, who feel highly superior, from regarding the theosophist as a fool or something even worse. But Theosophy can calmly stand by and watch. In just fifty years, things will be quite different; for the continued existence of purely materialistic science would be very detrimental to the well-being and health of humanity—if things were to remain exactly as they are today—were it not for spiritual science counteracting this trend.