The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Sixth Lecture

[ 1 ] The nature of our topic requires that we proceed in a very peculiar way—that we approach our goal, so to speak, in a circular manner, drawing ever-tighter circles from the periphery in order to reach what we seek to achieve. Therefore, it may seem at first as if our considerations lack an internal structure. But it is precisely by approaching the inner from the outer in this gradual manner that we will arrive at a true understanding of the matter.

[ 2 ] The day before yesterday, we took our reflections so far that we encountered the spirits of form—the Exusiai, or, as they are called in Christian esotericism, the Powers—as the actual rulers of human existence on Earth. This is the essence of the matter: that in the course of our earthly evolution, these spirits—who stand on such a sublime level that at a certain point they no longer needed the Earth as their own stage—were at work within both the material and the soul realms. We have seen how they drew the finest forces and substances out of the Earth and made our Sun the stage for their own evolution. Furthermore, we have considered how one of the greatest spirits separated from this realm—from his solar companions—and sacrificed himself entirely. This is the very same being who, from that time onward, remained connected to the lunar forces and who is designated as Jehovah in the biblical record. We must therefore imagine that throughout the entire period when the Sun was still connected to the Earth, high, exalted spirits were also connected to earthly existence; that then the most exalted spirits separated themselves, and that one of the companions of these exalted powers remained behind, remaining connected to the Earth until the next great cosmic event—the separation of the Moon from the Earth. And since that time, the lunar forces acting from without have contained what we call the outflow, the work of Jehovah. Thus, acting upon our Earth from without, on the one hand were the high solar spirits and, on the other, Jehovah with his host—the spirits serving him—and through their combined action they now governed the earthly development of humanity, which we must now examine more closely.

[ 3 ] What does this mean: that the spirits of form are the true rulers of earthly existence? Were these spirits of form not already active during the earlier stages of our planet’s development? During the Saturn, Sun, and Moon eras? Yes, they were indeed active even earlier, but their sphere of activity was different from that on Earth. We will understand this if we simply consider the facts that have already been presented to us. On Saturn, after all, only the first rudimentary form of the physical body existed; neither the etheric body nor the astral body had yet been infused into it. Of course, these spirits of form—one of whom is Jehovah—were already at work back then; but, if we may put it in simple terms, they did not have such a prepared ground for their activity there. It was only when, on the Sun, the spirits of wisdom bestowed the etheric body and, on the Moon, the spirits of movement bestowed the astral body that those beings we call the Powers found a human being who was ready. For it was only to a human being who already possessed a physical, etheric, and astral body within himself that they could give what we know today as the human form. At no earlier stage of development was this form—as you can observe it in yourselves today—present; there were preparatory stages on the Moon, the Sun, and Saturn, and everything first had to undergo a certain development before humanity could be raised to the noble human form. If we ask why the spirits of form could not intervene on Saturn, we must answer: because the embryonic structures of the physical body formed there were, so to speak, still too young; a certain state of maturity had to be reached first. And this state of maturity did not set in until our Earth stood on the threshold of that development I spoke to you about, when I described how the Earth, together with the Sun, formed a kind of fine, substantial world body and then continued to progress in its development. By then, the spirits of form were already at work, slowly and gradually shaping the human body until it could finally attain the human form.

[ 4 ] We can point to a point in time when this shaping of the human form reached a certain conclusion, when, so to speak, the human form was essentially complete. In the early days of the Atlantean period, this was not yet the case. If we go back to the early period following the massive catastrophe that swept away ancient Atlantis, we find our ancestors in a state very different from our own today. It is not until approximately the middle of the Atlantean epoch that we reach the point where human beings had, for the most part, attained the human form as we know it today. Before that, human beings were by no means as solid as they were afterward; rather, their entire physical constitution—if we may put it that way—was softer. In the early Atlantean period, we find human beings composed of soft matter that lacked the hardness of modern bones and was not even as firm as cartilage. Human beings, so to speak, were still floating about in the air, which was still entirely filled with and permeated by dense waters; they were a kind of aquatic creature, much like certain animals today that can hardly be distinguished from water. The potential for skeletal structure was already present in the forces at that time, but it had not yet hardened. This was the time when a completely different relationship still existed between the higher and lower members of the human being. Let us recall once more that today, when a person sleeps, they leave their physical and etheric bodies in bed, while the astral body and the ego are outside. Since today the etheric body is roughly similar in shape and size to the physical body, when a person leaves the physical body with their astral body, they very soon emerge from the etheric body as well. This was not the case in the early Atlantean period. At that time, the etheric body protruded beyond the physical body on all sides, particularly at the head. This protrusion meant that the astral body, even after it had already stepped out of the physical body, remained connected to the etheric body. When the astral body steps out of the physical body in modern humans, it has left the etheric body at the very moment it leaves the physical body. And the consequence of this connection between the astral body and the etheric body—which in the past persisted even after the physical body had been left—was that at night, human beings did not experience such darkness and unconsciousness around and within themselves as is the case today. Back then, when they were outside their physical bodies, they could perceive soul-and-spirit beings through a twilight form of clairvoyance. It is the case that when you imagine falling asleep and your astral body stepping out of the physical body, your gaze then turns away from the physical world, and instead a world populated by soul-spiritual beings comes into view. Such a person, however, had no need for a solid physical body or a solid skeletal system; for because his physical body was soft, he was also more agile.

[ 5 ] And this brings us to something that was certainly once a reality for the clairvoyant consciousness, however abhorrent it may be to today’s materialistic consciousness: In the early Atlantean era, human beings had great power over the form of their bodies. Just imagine: if a person back then wanted a limb—which later became a hand, to put it crudely—to look different, for example, to be longer, then he could actually stretch it elastically; he could not only move all his limbs but also stretch them elastically; he could, so to speak, inflate himself. That was entirely possible back then, however much it may seem repugnant to today’s materialistically minded human being; they could stretch out and lengthen their fingers considerably; and this was especially true if we go even further back, to the Lemurian epoch. And now you will see how two things come together. When did human beings lose the ability to stretch out, extend, and contract their limbs? When the spirits of form had finished shaping the physical forms. As long as human beings had not yet fully acquired the physical form that was to remain with them, they could still change their shape, guided by other spirits. So if we go back to times that lie beyond the Atlantean epoch, we find that the human form is not yet complete, that human beings have a form that is constantly undergoing metamorphosis. And we must be clear that there eventually came a point when the spirits of form had completed everything they initially needed to do to shape the human form in the image of their own; for they did, after all, pour their own form into it.

[ 6 ] Let us now assume—and we shall see what events brought this about—that certain human beings, so to speak, could not have waited until the point in time when the spirits of form had completed their work: then these beings would have become fixed at some earlier stage; they would, as it were, have ossified in their form; they would have retained an earlier form. But the crucial point was precisely that this being, who was to become a human, retained its form and shape in a flexible state until the normal time for the fixed form could arrive. Let us consider a point in time shortly before that—in reality, however, it lies far in the past, for we are dealing with long periods of time. At that time, the outer nature of the human being was such that it still needed the forces that were shaping it, transforming it, and refining it. Let us now suppose that, through events we will come to know later, certain human beings had detached themselves from the form-giving forces that were constantly at work; they would have fallen away, so that they were no longer completely permeated by the form-giving forces as before: then these human beings would have remained at an earlier stage. This is indeed what happened, and in these beings—who detached themselves too early, who are indeed closest to us but who did not allow the Spirits of Form to work upon them long enough—in these beings we find the apes. They could not wait; they did not remain long enough in the bosom of the divine beings we call the Spirits of Form. And what we have now described regarding the apes occurred time and again during earthly existence for various beings; time and again, beings fell behind and became rigid.

[ 7 ] There you have the entire range of today’s animals. But if you ask: Does any human being descend from such animal forms? — the answer is: No! — Human beings remained, so to speak, above the surface of the Earth in the pure elements and only became more dense when the time was right for them. The biblical account beautifully captures this moment—when humanity descended to Earth from pure spiritual heights without having undergone earthly densification—in the story of Paradise. Despite all research, Paradise is not located on the Earth’s surface at all, but in the sphere surrounding the Earth. Humanity only descended from Paradise to Earth later, after having attained its complete form.

[ 8 ] But let us now consider what should have happened in the middle of the Atlantean epoch, back when these spirits of form had finished shaping the physical body. At that point, human beings, with their senses—which had by then also reached maturity—should have looked out into their surroundings and should first have lived in harmony with their external physical environment. Before that, everything in the physical environment had existed with indistinct contours. Only then would the time have come when human beings should have entered into a relationship with the outer world, so to speak, in a normal way. At that point, human beings would have learned to distinguish themselves from their surroundings, and they would have learned to say “I” to themselves, for one can only say “I” to oneself when one can distinguish oneself from other things. Human beings would have learned this at that point. At that time, they would have possessed a physical body that they could have called a fitting vehicle for their “I.”

[ 9 ] However, we have already mentioned how, at every stage of the world’s development, certain beings have fallen behind. Not all entities have reached the stage where they could have acted in the manner just described, nor have all the entities we have called the spirits of form or the powers. And it is precisely these lagging entities that play a crucial role in human development on Earth.

[ 10 ] We have already considered that, in addition to the exalted beings who work from the Sun and the Moon, there are others who occupy an intermediate stage—a stage between human beings and the high spirits of the Sun and Moon—and whose sphere of activity is Mercury and Venus, those celestial bodies scattered between the Sun and the Earth. Just as the solar spirits had reached their normal stage of development and struck exactly the right moment to act in the proper way, so those beings who stood between the Earth and the solar spirits did not find that moment in the same way; and because they were not following the normal course of development, they intervened at a different time. And now let us consider what resulted from this.

[ 11 ] Let us once again consider human evolution as it has unfolded. Let us once again picture the physical body, the etheric body, the astral body, and the “I.” Now we know that the ego is called upon to transform the other members of the human being, that it must begin by gradually bringing the astral body under its control and dominion; this means nothing other than that the human being masters his passions and instincts. Thus the time had come when the “I” was to emerge in the human being in the normal way, when it was to work upon the astral body; little by little, the astral body was to be transformed, and the spiritual self was to be developed. When the exalted powers intervened in the middle of the Atlantean epoch, the first opportunity for such a transformation arose. Now we will understand what a remarkable task the lagging beings had to undertake. They were not yet advanced enough to support human beings in the development of their spiritual self. The consequence of this was that they acted upon the astral body, which had not yet progressed to the level of the “I.” And they had been acting upon it even before that. Thus, in the development of humanity on Earth, there is a certain period during which the astral body—which has not yet developed up to the “I”—is influenced by these backward spiritual beings. You will understand this even better if you recall that on the Moon, human beings had physical, etheric, and astral bodies, and that the forces at that time normally acted upon the astral body. Now, those who had developed normally were now influencing the “I,” while the others, who had lagged behind, continued to influence the astral body according to their old lunar habits. Thus, before human beings had developed their “I,” these lagging-behind entities—who were, however, far superior to human beings—were influencing their astral bodies. We call them the Luciferic beings, after their principal representative, their leader. Two kinds of beings thus influenced human beings: those normally acting spirits we spoke of last time, and these Luciferic beings, who, so to speak, had not yet advanced to the point of acting upon the ego, and who had already been working on the human astral body beforehand. And in this way, the latter also held back human beings in their development. Had such beings not influenced human beings, then by the middle of the Atlantean epoch they would have been far enough along that the exalted powers would have been able to influence their “I.”

[ 12 ] Now we may ask: Can what these backward spirits have done to human beings be described, in a trivial sense, as something bad, compared to what the sublime powers have done to them? No, not at all. If we consider the fact that can be verified by clairvoyant observation, we find that they have in reality even accelerated human development. Humanity would have had to wait until the very last moment to develop certain abilities, whereas through this, it acquired them earlier. Thus, through the Luciferic beings, humanity received certain spiritual abilities before the time intended for them and was thereby raised to a certain spiritual level. This is not a bad thing; rather, as strange as it may seem, it is even something that, in a higher sense, signifies an infinitely wise guidance in the further development of humanity. For by acquiring certain abilities at a lower stage—abilities that were otherwise intended for him only in the middle of the Atlantean epoch—humanity approached these abilities in a completely different, self-confident, and free manner. Humanity would have been led by the hand until the middle of the Atlantean epoch had these backward-remaining beings not intervened. How, then, should we interpret their lagging behind? At first glance, one might easily interpret it as though they had been left behind, just as a student is held back in high school. But those spirits were not left behind because of their sluggishness; rather, the reason for their remaining behind was their willingness to make a sacrifice. They sacrificed themselves in order to give humanity the opportunity to receive the gift of the spirits of form in a higher, freer way. We have a long period of human development during which, through these Luciferic beings, humanity received the beginnings of language, of thought—particularly of conceptual memory—and the seeds of art and science. Without this, since humans would otherwise have possessed only instinctive activity, they would never have attained any of this. However, this also meant that something else—which would otherwise have been independent of human beings through the guidance of the Spirits of Form—was now placed within their power and control: human beings were exposed to good and evil; they were thereby exposed to the risk of straying from the right path. Without the intervention of the Luciferic beings, he would never have been exposed to good and evil, but his freedom would also have been lost. By advancing a portion of evolution into a prehistoric era, these beings have thereby granted human beings freedom. We all carry within us the seed of the activity of these Luciferic spirits.

[ 13 ] We must therefore say: In the middle of the Atlantean epoch, the spirits of form descended—those spirits who had completed their development to such an extent that they could bestow upon human beings what they themselves possessed. It was only during this epoch that human beings would have attained the full germ of the “I,” had these spirits alone been active. But the Luciferic beings had been active from an earlier point onward; they accelerated evolution by a significant degree—pushing it upward in one direction and downward in the other. As a result, something else, something important, came to pass. Had progress taken place without the Luciferic beings, then by the middle of the Atlantean epoch, humanity would have attained a certain state, but without the possibility of freedom. Without his own merit, he would have become ripe to receive the gift of the Spirits of Form. Since, however, the Luciferic beings had made him ripe earlier, a certain deterioration had occurred in the other direction, and as a result, not all the powers of the Spirits of Form, not all the higher solar forces, could act upon him at that point in time. This implies something important. Had humanity, without freedom—and thus also without its own merit—merely arrived in the middle of the Atlantean period as if guided by a higher spiritual instinct, it would have possessed the maturity necessary for that principle we call the Christ principle to have descended to Earth even then; in that case, the Christ would have appeared already at that time. But as it was, human beings were endowed with freedom; as a result, they were forced down below their instinctive, normal stage of development, and the consequence was that they now had to mature through their own efforts: so that they could receive the Christ principle at the same time after the Luciferic beings had intervened. We must be clear that the descent and work of Christ were delayed by the intervention of the Luciferic beings. As a result, however, human beings were also in a more mature state when Christ descended.

[ 14 ] Thus we see that it is these beings who have made humankind what it is today, who have prepared it for the great moment of the descent of the Christ principle. They said to themselves, as it were: If we leave humanity such that it lives through the Atlantean era solely by instinct, then it will also receive the Christ Principle instinctively; then it will not be free, nor will it have matured in freedom. We sacrifice ourselves and develop certain abilities and qualities within him, thereby delaying the moment when he can come face to face with Christ.—The Luciferic entities began their work exactly as long before the middle of the Atlantean era as Christ appeared after that point.

[ 15 ] If we now ask: What was the extent of those forces that human beings were already able to receive in the middle of the Atlantean epoch? — we must answer: It was something that could only approach human beings from the outside, and they could not yet be present with their own soul. Therefore, everything that came to human beings from the forces that were already active earlier was such that it did not flow from the innermost being of the human being: they followed something external; they obeyed laws. Just as the animal must follow the laws implanted within it, entirely instinctively, so Jehovah gave laws to human beings. He gave them the Law, which was then also externally realized through Moses and the prophets. In the meantime, however, they matured to the point of receiving within themselves the drive and impulse toward what they were to do. And so we see that, without human intervention, their order on earth is prepared by the forces. Where, then, do these forces act? They operate primarily where, to put it simply, blood speaks: in procreation and in everything connected with it. There, in ancient times, we have gods and national spirits; we have group spirits; and within the groups, they create through the order of laws. There, those who are related by blood love one another, and they love one another because love is implanted through the laws of nature. And the further back we go, the more we find that all of this regards itself as belonging together, that all of this loves one another—those in whom love has been implanted through the laws of nature, through external formative forces. The Jehovah principle operated within the same bloodline; hence the sense of belonging. Through this kinship—which is connected to the blood—Jehovah lived and created order and harmony. And those who opposed him, who directed their strongest attacks against the principle of blood kinship, were the Luciferic entities. They always seek to place the human being at the center of his own personality; they seek to tear him away from his blood kinship until the time when Christ comes and places him entirely at the pinnacle of his personality by imparting his innermost power, making wisdom and grace the innermost impulse of his being. And this is what the Luciferic entities have been preparing for over long, long ages. Humanity only became ripe for what these Luciferic entities intended when Christ descended. Those who professed such views knew full well what they were saying when they uttered the statement: “Christus verus Luciferus”—Christ is the true Lucifer. —This is an esoteric statement.

[ 16 ] And so we see that, in fact, two principles were constantly at work in that ancient era we call the pre-Christian era: one principle that binds people through blood ties, and another that separates them, seeking to place each individual at the pinnacle of his or her own personality. And we can now see how the whole of humanity is shaped under the influence of these two principles.

[ 17 ] Let us imagine a certain stage of human development in the Atlantean era, when human beings were already moving toward the later hardening of their skeletal bodies. I must put this in layman’s terms here. The guiding spirits, for their part, had to ensure that the bones did not harden too quickly. During the Atlantean evolution, the skeletal system had to remain sufficiently malleable for a certain period so that it could be reshaped. But we know that beings were left behind at every stage. Thus, quite late on, groups of humans were left behind because their skeletal system hardened too early. Here the principles worked in such a way that the principle of form won a decisive victory by preserving a group of humans in the form they had. What was the inevitable consequence of this? One can indeed harden or hold back something on Earth, but the entire course of Earth’s evolution moves beyond it, so that what is artificially held back eventually encounters later times to which it no longer fits. There came times when the air had become more purified of water, when climatic conditions had changed; what had remained stagnant no longer fit into this new reality. Such groups of people, in whom the skeletal system had, so to speak, developed too much, were then left behind as a degenerate human race. They could no longer adapt to the conditions of the post-Atlantean era; and the last remnants of them are the American Indians. They were degenerate. - And there are also those who have remained behind not only because their skeletal system hardened too early, but also because the system underlying their nutrition—which is governed by the forces of the etheric body—has hardened prematurely, whereas the skeletal system is governed by the forces of the physical body. The last remnants of that group of people in whom the nutritional system has hardened constitute the black race today. And then there are those people who have degenerated because their nervous system hardened at too early a stage and did not remain supple long enough to become fit for higher thought; the last remnants of this group are the Malay race. That is why you find in them certain drives and instincts, certain inclinations toward sensual instincts. And finally, we have those people in whom, at a certain stage, the “I”—in the blood, in the outward expression of the “I”—has become hardened, if we may put it that way. These people, who—to put it symbolically—are thus hardened in the blood, have their final offshoots in the peoples of the Mongolian race. But those people who kept the elements just mentioned so malleable that they did not remain at any stage of hardening but were able to develop further and further, so that they even transcended the closed “I”—this group of people migrated from a point in Earth’s evolution, to which we have already alluded, in the Atlantic Ocean, near present-day Ireland, to the regions that now constitute Europe and Asia.

[ 18 ] And we discover the following curious fact: We find that there are actual waves of emigration originating from the Atlantic continent. And we will now examine this in greater detail than has been done previously in other contexts. These waves consisted of people whose skeletal systems had become rigid, and whose last stragglers were encountered at the time of the discovery of the American continent. Then there were groups that went to Africa, and others that went to Asia. The latter were those we have referred to as the Mongolian race. The last to emigrate were those people who lived near what is now Ireland, and who had remained the most adaptable the longest—who, so to speak, had remained in paradise the longest. They migrated from west to east, leaving behind certain peoples throughout the entire expanse of the European continent. The most advanced among them migrated to Asia and intermingled there in various ways with those who had arrived by other routes.

[ 19 ] And now let us imagine a time not so long ago, when a certain—albeit very dim—clairvoyance still existed, and the initiates still wielded great influence. If there was an awareness of these circumstances among people, how must that have manifested itself? Let us suppose that in ancient Greece they encountered peoples who had become hardened in their ways; then, further south, they found another race, born of intermingling, which had become hardened in an even earlier state: for this was indeed the case in the Greek consciousness. When the Greek looked back on the course of development leading up to his own time, he said to himself: I look toward Africa, where I find, as early as the Egyptian period, people who were already advanced, upon whom earlier cultural epochs—the Babylonian, the Chaldean—had already exerted their influence. But even earlier, there had been a population on this soil that possessed a strong element of hardening with regard to qualities that descend into the lower realm, into the principle of nourishment. And another stage had formed later, when they encountered the Asian migrants. And joining them were those who had remained the most malleable for the longest time. Now, in his sculptural depictions of the gods, the Greek idealized what he knew about human development and what he regarded as the result of divinely active forces. He knew that at a very early stage, some human beings had become hardened, while others had retained their softness and suppleness. Then he looked at himself. Although he had fallen behind in certain respects, he belonged to those who had remained supple and malleable the longest. We see all of this wonderfully enshrined in Greek sculptural art. Anyone who studies it with a deeper gaze will find three distinct types of gods:

[ 20 ] 1. the Zeus type, which includes the entire circle of gods grouped around Zeus;

[ 21 ] 2. a type that was later associated with the Zeus type, but which existed in the Greek consciousness in a completely different form: in the form of Hermes or Mercury. Look at the hair style of the Zeus type and, in contrast, the ringleted, curly hair of Mercury, as well as the shape of the eyes and the position of the ears; you will soon see that the Greeks intended to express something different with it, even though it was later depicted in such a way that it was classified as part of the Zeus type;

[ 22 ] 3. The Faun type. This type belongs to an even more ancient humanity, and it differs clearly from the Mercury type.

[ 23 ] There we have what the Greek sought to express in his own way. What lay to his south was represented by the faun type. He associated what lay to the east with the Hermes type, and what he himself was—what one might call his own type, the race that founded the Aryan tribe—he expressed in the sublime, ideal Zeus type.

[ 24 ] Anyone who wishes to see can observe in all forms how subtly the Greeks adapted what lives in the outer form to the inner creative forces. I would like to illustrate, using just one small example, how refined the Greek artists were in their endeavor to express great worldviews through artistic form. Let us imagine for a moment that Asian type captured in the figure of Hermes: Because this type has remained at the level of the lower human forces, it gives the impression that the forces responsible for shaping its face operate, so to speak, in the lower regions of the human being. In contrast, the forces inherent to the Greek type itself operate in higher regions; you can see this above all in Zeus’s majestic brow.

[ 25 ] We see that the distinctive consciousness of the Greeks influenced even the sculptural form, and we realize that we can only understand what was created in the course of this development if we trace the active forces all the way to the very way in which the artists shaped the eyes. Here we see not only the Greek artist’s keen observation, but also how, through the specific shaping of what he created, he realized in the outer form what the inner formative forces had shaped. We recognize how, in the individual figures of Greek art—in the figures of mythology—the process of racial formation has been preserved, and how in this art, even in small details such as the eye, the spiritually active forces are captured in a unique way.