The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Second Lecture

[ 1 ] Yesterday we attempted to bring into focus certain connections in the conditions of life—and specifically in the spiritual conditions—of the so-called post-Atlantean epoch. We have seen how the first cultural epoch of this era will be repeated in the last, the seventh cultural epoch; how Persian culture will be repeated in the sixth cultural epoch; and how the cultural epoch that will occupy us in the coming days—the Egyptian one—is repeated in our own lives and destinies, in the fifth cultural epoch. Of the fourth cultural epoch, the Greco-Latin era, we were able to say that it has retained an exceptional position, that it does not undergo a repetition. In this way, we have been able to sketch out mysterious connections within the cultures of the post-Atlantean era, which followed the era of Atlantis—the Atlantis that perished as a result of massive water catastrophes. This era following Atlantis, too, will come to an end.

[ 2 ] At the end of our fifth great epoch—the post-Atlantean—catastrophes will also follow that will have effects similar to those at the end of the Atlantean epoch. The seventh culture of the fifth epoch will come to an end through a war of all against all. These were interesting connections that were hinted at in certain repetitions which, if we trace them more closely, will shed deep light on our inner life.

[ 3 ] Today, in order to lay a foundation for ourselves, we must allow other images to arise in our mind’s eye. We will let our gaze wander far out into the evolution of our Earth and see that these vast horizons must be of the utmost personal interest to us.

[ 4 ] Let me begin with just one reminder: a warning against formulaic repetitions. When, in the field of occultism, there is talk of such repetitions—such as: the first cultural epoch repeats itself in the seventh, the third in the fifth—then it is easy for someone with a knack for combining ideas to want to apply such patterns to other contexts as well. One might believe that this is possible, and in fact, in many books on theosophy, all sorts of nonsense is perpetrated as a result. A stern warning must therefore be issued that it is not such combinations that are decisive, but solely insight—spiritual insight—otherwise one will go astray. We must warn against such combinations. What we can read in the spiritual world can indeed be understood through logic, but not discovered. It can only be experienced through direct experience.

[ 5 ] If we wish to understand the cultural epochs more thoroughly, we must gain an overview of the very formation of the Earth, as it appears to the thinker who can direct his spiritual gaze toward the events of the distant past.

[ 6 ] If we look far back in the history of the Earth’s development, we can conclude that our Earth did not always look the way it does today. It did not have the solid mineral foundation it has today; the mineral kingdom was not as it is today; nor did it support the same plants and animals as today; and human beings did not have physical bodies as they do today—humans had no skeletal system. All of this developed only later. The further back we look, the closer we come to a state that, had we been able to observe it from the far reaches of the universe, we would have seen only as a nebula—a fine, ethereal cloud. This nebula would, however, have been much larger than our present-day Earth, for it would have extended all the way to the farthest reaches of our solar system’s outermost planets and beyond. All of this would have comprised a vast nebular mass, containing not only the material from which our Earth formed, but also all the planets, including the Sun itself. And if we had been able to examine this nebular mass more closely—assuming the observer could have approached it—it would have appeared to us as if it were composed entirely of fine, ethereal points. When we look at a swarm of mosquitoes from a distance, it appears to us as a cloud; up close, however, we see the individual creatures. That is roughly how we would have seen the mass of the Earth in the distant past, which at that time was not material in our sense, but had condensed to an ethereal state. This formation of the Earth thus consisted of individual etheric points, but something very special was connected to these etheric points. However, if we maintain that the human eye could have seen these points, it would not have perceived them in the same way that a clairvoyant would have seen them—and indeed still sees them today when looking back. Let us illustrate this with a comparison.

[ 7 ] Let’s take a seed from a rose—a wild rose—a fully developed seed. What does the observer see? He sees a very small object, and unless he has learned what a wild rose seed looks like, he will never be able to figure out that a dog rose can grow from it. They would never guess that from the mere shape of the seed. But someone gifted with a certain clairvoyant ability will be able to experience the following: The seed will gradually disappear from their view, but a flower-like form will appear before their clairvoyant eye, growing spiritually out of the seed. It stands before the clairvoyant gaze, a real form that can only be perceived in the spirit. This form is the archetype of what will later grow from the seed. Now, we would be mistaken if we believed that this image were entirely identical to the plant that corresponds to the seed. It is not at all the same. It is a wondrous figure of light, revealing currents and intricate formations within itself, and one could say that what later grows out of the seed is merely a shadow of this wondrous spiritual figure of light that the clairvoyant can see within the seed. Let us hold on to this image of how the clairvoyant sees the archetype of the plant, and now let us look back again at our primordial earth, at the individual etheric points.

[ 8 ] If now the clairvoyant, just as in the previous example, were to confront such an ethereal speck of the primordial substance, a figure of light would emerge for him from this ethereal speck—in much the same way as from a seed—a magnificent figure that does not actually exist, but lies dormant within this speck. And what is it, then, that the seer can perceive as a figure when looking back at this primordial earth atom? What is it that grows out of it? It is a figure that is, in turn, different—as different as the archetype of the plant is from the physical plant—from the physical human being: it is the archetype of today’s human form. At that time, the human form slumbered spiritually within the etheric speck of dust, and the entire development of the Earth was necessary so that what rested there could evolve into the human being of today. Many, many things were necessary for this, just as many things are necessary for the seed—just as the seed must be sown in the earth, and just as the sun must send its warming rays to it so that it may develop into a plant. And we will gradually come to understand how this became human when we realize everything that has happened in the meantime.

[ 9 ] In the distant past, all the planets were connected to our Earth. However, let us first consider the Sun, the Moon, and the Earth, which are of particular interest to us even today. Back then, our Sun, our Moon, and our Earth were not alone either, but were together. If we were to mix these three present-day celestial bodies together like a porridge in a great cosmic cauldron, and imagine them as a single cosmic body, we would obtain what the Earth was in its primordial state, namely: Sun plus Earth plus Moon. Naturally, human beings could only live there in a spiritual state. At that time, human beings could only live in this state because what is now in the Sun was also connected to the Earth. And it took a long, long time for the cosmic body—our Earth, Sun, and Moon—to still contain within itself and remain united with all the beings and forces associated with it. In those times, human beings existed only spiritually within the primordial atom of humanity. This only changed during the period when something quite significant took place in the evolution of our world—namely, when the Sun separated as an independent body, leaving behind the Earth and the Moon. Now what was once a unity has become a duality: two celestial bodies—the Sun on the one hand, and the Earth and the Moon on the other. Why did this happen?

[ 10 ] Everything that happens, of course, has a profound meaning, which we will understand when we look back and realize that not only humans lived on Earth at that time, but that other spiritual beings were also connected to them—beings who, although not perceptible to the physical eye, were nonetheless present, just as real as humans and other physical beings. For example, beings connected to our world—living in the Earth’s sphere—are referred to in Christian esotericism as angels, or Angeloi. We can best imagine these beings by considering that such a being stands at the stage that humanity will reach when the Earth has completed its evolution. Today, these beings have already reached the stage that humanity will attain at the end of its earthly evolution. The archangels, Archangeloi, or fire spirits occupy an even higher level—beings we can perceive when we direct our spiritual gaze toward the affairs of entire peoples. These affairs are guided by beings called archangels or Archangeloi. An even higher class of beings is called the Primordial Principles, or Archai, or the Spirits of Personality, and we encounter them when we let our gaze roam over entire eras and many peoples, their relationships and contrasts, and contemplate what is commonly called the “spirit of the age.” If, for example, we consider our own time, it is guided by higher beings known as the Primordial Principles or Archai. Then there are even higher beings, known in Christian esotericism as Powers, Exusiai, or Spirits of Form. Thus, countless beings are connected to our Earth, linking themselves to human beings, as it were, in a kind of hierarchical ladder.

[ 11 ] If we begin with the mineral and move upward from the mineral to the plant, from the plant to the “animal,” and then to the human being, the human being is the highest physical being; the others, however, are just as present—they are among us and permeate us. At the beginning of our Earth’s development—which we have just discussed—when the Earth emerges, as it were, as a primordial nebula from the bosom of eternity, all such beings are connected to the Earth, and it would become apparent to the clairvoyant how, at the same time as the human form, other beings also permeate that image. These are the beings mentioned above and beings of an even higher order, such as the Powers, the Principalities, the Thrones, the Cherubim, and then the Seraphim. These are all beings who were intimately connected with that mighty etheric dust, but they stand at different stages of development. There are some who possess a sublimity of which human beings have no inkling, yet there are also beings who are closer to human beings. Because such entities stood at different levels, they could not undergo their evolution in the same way as human beings; a dwelling place had to be created for them. Among the higher beings were some who would have lost a great deal had they remained connected to the lower beings. Therefore, they separated themselves. They extracted the finest substances from the mist and established their dwelling place in the sun. There they formed their heaven; there they found the proper pace for their evolution. Had they remained in the lower substances they left behind on Earth, they would not have been able to continue their development. That would have been an obstacle, like a lead weight, in their development. From this we see how what happens materially—such as the division of the world’s substance—does not occur merely due to physical causes, but through the forces of the beings who require a dwelling place for their evolution; it happens because they must build their world-home. We must emphasize that spiritual causes underlie this.

[ 12 ] Thus, humanity remained behind on Earth and the Moon, along with higher beings of the lowest hierarchy—such as angels, archangels, and beings who stood lower than humanity itself. Only a single powerful being—who was actually already ready to journey to the realm of the Sun—sacrificed himself and went along with the Earth and the Moon. It is the being who was later called Yahweh or Jehovah. He left the Sun and then became the ruler of affairs on Earth and the Moon. Thus, we have two dwelling places: the Sun with the most exalted beings, under the leadership of a particularly high, exalted being whom the Gnostics, for example, tried to conceive of under the name Pleroma. We should imagine this being as the ruler of the Sun. Yahweh is the ruler of the Earth and the Moon. Let us emphasize this point in particular: the noblest, most exalted spirits departed with the Sun and left the Earth and the Moon behind. The Moon had not yet been separated; it was still inside the Earth. How, then, can one perceive this cosmic process of the Sun’s separation from the Earth? Above all, one must perceive the Sun, with its inhabitants, as the most noble, purest, and most sublime entity that had previously been connected to the Earth; and then one must perceive what the Earth and Moon together constitute as that which, in contrast, has developed into the lower realm. The state at that time was even lower than that of our present-day Earth. The Earth, in turn, stands higher, for a later point in time arrived when the Earth cast off the Moon and, with it, its coarser substances, with which human beings could not have developed any further. The Earth had to cast out the Moon.

[ 13 ] But before that, our Earth had gone through its darkest, most terrifying period; during that time, what possessed noble potential for development had fallen under the sway of terrible, truly terrible forces, and it was only by enduring the worst conditions of existence on the Moon that humanity was able to progress.

[ 14 ] We must sense that there is a principle of light, a principle of sublimity—the principle of the Sun—that stands in opposition to the principle of darkness, the principle of the Moon. If one had looked at the Sun with clairvoyant eyes—the Sun that had emerged at that time—one would have seen the beings who wished to inhabit it. But one would have perceived something else as well. What had emerged as the sun would not only have revealed itself as a community of spiritual beings; nor would it have appeared in an ethereal form, for that belonged to the coarser realm: it would have appeared as something astral, like a powerful aura of light. What one would have perceived as the principle of light would have been seen as a luminous aura in the cosmos. However, because the Earth had allowed this light to escape, it would suddenly have appeared condensed, though not yet solidly mineral. A good and an evil, a light and a dark principle stood in opposition to one another at that time.

[ 15 ] Now let's see what the Earth looked like before it ejected the Moon. It would be completely wrong to imagine it as our Earth today. The core of the Earth back then was a fiery, seething mass. This core would have appeared as a fiery core, but it was surrounded by mighty forces of water—though not like the water we know today, for it also contained metals in liquid form. Amid all of this was humankind, but in a completely different form.

[ 16 ] That is what the Earth was like back then, when it separated the Moon from itself. Above all, there was no air on Earth at that time; it simply wasn’t there. The beings that existed back then did not need air at all; they had a completely different respiratory system. Human beings had become a kind of fish-amphibian. But they were composed of very soft, liquid matter. What they drew into themselves was not air, but rather what was contained in the water. That is roughly what the Earth looked like at that time. We must conceive of that time as a period when the Earth was at a lower level than our present-day Earth. It had to be that way. Otherwise, humankind would never have been able to find the right pace and the means for its development had the Sun and Moon not separated from the Earth. With the Sun still within the Earth, everything would have happened too quickly; but with the forces now at work on the Moon, everything would have proceeded far too slowly. As the Moon emerged from the Earth amid mighty catastrophes, what might be called the separation of an air envelope from the water element gradually took shape. The air at that time was by no means the air of today; rather, it still contained all manner of vapors. But the being that was gradually taking shape at that time was merely a rudimentary form of what would become modern humanity. We will have to describe all of this in greater detail.

[ 17 ] Thus, we have come to know humankind in three different contexts. First, in the context where it coexisted with the Earth, the Sun, the Moon, and all higher beings within a single cosmic body. To the clairvoyant eye, it would appear as we have described. Then we can observe him under quite unfavorable conditions on Earth and the Moon. Had he remained in this state, he would have become a very malicious, a terribly wild being. When the Sun separated, we saw the contrast between the Sun on one side and the Moon and Earth on the other. The Sun shone as the great, mighty solar aura in space, in all its radiant glory. On the other side remained the Earth and the Moon with all the sinister forces that also drew down the nobler elements within human beings. Thus the twofold structure came into being. And then comes the threefold structure. The Sun remains what it is, but the Earth separates from the Moon; the coarsest substances emerge; while humanity remains behind on Earth.

[ 18 ] When looking back on the third epoch, human beings perceive these forces as a threefold principle. They ask themselves: Where do these forces come from? — In the first epoch, human beings were still connected to all the higher forces of the Sun. The forces that developed in the second epoch then went out with the Moon. Humanity experienced this as a kind of redemption, yet they also retained the memory of the first epoch, when they were still united with the solar beings. Humanity had come to know longing; they felt like the prodigal son. And through the forces that had departed with the Sun and the Moon—through these very forces—they could feel themselves to be children of the Sun and the Moon.

[ 19 ] Thus our Earth evolves from unity to duality, and finally to trinity: Sun, Earth, Moon. The time when the Moon split off, when humanity first gained the opportunity to evolve, is known as the Lemurian Age. And after massive fire catastrophes had brought the Lemurian era to a close, a new phase gradually set in on our Earth that could give rise to the conditions that would later develop in ancient Atlantis. The very first traces of land began to emerge from the vast waters. This occurred long after the Moon had separated from the Earth. But it was only through this separation that the Earth was able to develop in this way. In Atlantis, human beings were still quite different from what they are today—we will touch on this later—but by the Atlantean era, they had already reached a stage where they moved about as a soft, so to speak, floating mass and animated the atmosphere. Only very gradually did the skeletal system develop. It was not until around the middle of the Atlantean epoch that human beings had reached a stage where they resembled our present-day form to some extent. But in Atlantis, human beings possessed a clairvoyant consciousness, and our present-day consciousness did not develop until much later; if we wish to understand the people of that time, we must keep this clairvoyant consciousness of that era in mind. We can best understand it by comparing it with our present-day consciousness.

[ 20 ] Today, from morning until evening, human beings perceive the world through their senses. Through their sensory activity, they constantly take in visual and auditory impressions. With the onset of night, however, this sensory world sinks into a sea of unconsciousness for human beings. For the occultist, however, this is not actually a state of unconsciousness, but merely a lower degree of consciousness. Let us now realize that today human beings have a dual consciousness: a clear daytime consciousness and a sleep or dream consciousness. This was not the case in the early days of Atlantis.

[ 21 ] Let us consider the alternation between wakefulness and sleep during this early period. At that time, too, human beings would, for a certain period, sink into their physical bodies, but they did not perceive objects with the sharp contours we do today. If we imagine, for example, walking out into a thick winter fog and seeing the streetlights in the evening as if surrounded by a halo of light, we have a rough idea of the Atlanteans’ perception of objects. For people back then, everything was surrounded by such a fog; everything was as if shrouded in it. That was the view during the day. At night, a completely different scene presented itself. But the night vision was not the same as it is today either. When the Atlantean stepped out of his body, he did not sink into unconsciousness, but found himself in a world of divine-spiritual beings—of I-beings—whom he perceived around him as his companions. Just as true as it is that people today do not see these beings during the night, so true is it that in those times they were immersed in a sea of spirituality, in which they did indeed perceive the divine beings. By day he was a companion of the lower realms; by night he was a companion of the higher beings. Thus did human beings live in a state of spiritual consciousness, albeit a dim one; even though they lacked self-awareness, they lived among these divine-spiritual beings.

[ 22 ] Now let us trace the four periods in the evolution of our Earth. First, we will examine the period when the Sun and Moon were still connected to the Earth. We will visualize this period in our minds. We must tell ourselves: the beings of this Earth are, in truth, pure, ideal beings, and human beings exist only as etheric bodies, visible only to the spiritual eye. Then we come to the second period. We see the Sun as a body in its own right, visible as an aura, and the Moon and Earth together as a world of evil. Then we come to a third period: the Moon also separates from the Earth, and the forces resulting from this trinity act upon the Earth. And then we come to a fourth period. By then, the human being is already a being in the physical world, which appears to him as a mist; in sleep, he is still a companion of divine beings. This is the period that concludes with massive water catastrophes—the time of Atlantis.

[ 23 ] And now let’s take it a step further and turn to the human being of the post-Atlantean era. As I said, this human being has evolved over many millennia. We first encounter him in the early cultural epochs of the post-Atlantean era: the Proto-Indian, Proto-Persian, Egyptian-Chaldean-Babylonian, and Greek-Latin cultures, as well as in our fifth culture. What, above all, had humankind lost? He had lost one thing that we can imagine when we keep the description of Atlantis in mind.

[ 24 ] Let us try to imagine the state of sleep experienced by the Atlanteans. Back then, human beings were still companions of the spiritual realm, of the gods; they perceived a spiritual world—truly perceived it. Human beings had lost that after the Atlantean catastrophe. Nighttime darkness spread around him. In its place came a brightening of daytime consciousness and the development of the “I.” Humanity had achieved all this, but the old gods had vanished from their lives; they were now only memories, and everything the soul had experienced in the early post-Atlantean era was merely a memory—a memory of their former interaction with these divine beings.

[ 25 ] Now we know that souls remain the same, that they reincarnate. Just as in the ancient times of Atlantis our souls were already present, already dwelling within bodies, so too were these souls present at the time of the separation of the Moon and the Sun from the Earth, and were already there in the very earliest times. Humanity was already there in the etheric dust. And now the five cultural epochs of the post-Atlantean era, in their worldviews and in their religions, are nothing other than memories of the Earth’s ancient epochs.

[ 26 ] The first, the primordial Indian period, gave rise to a religion that appears like an inner radiance, like an inner echo of the thoughts and feelings of the very earliest period, when the sun and moon were still connected to the earth, when those sublime beings of the sun still dwelt upon the earth. We can imagine that a sublime concept must have been awakened there. And the spirit that united with all the angels and archangels, with all the spirits, high gods, and beings in the Earth’s first state—the primordial mist—was summarized by Indian consciousness under a lofty individuality, under the name Brahm, Brahma. In the spirit, the first cultural epoch of the post-Atlantean era repeated what had happened. It is nothing other than a repetition of the first earthly epoch in inner contemplation.

[ 27 ] Now let us turn our attention to the second cultural period. In the principle of light and darkness, we find the religious consciousness of the proto-Persian cultural period. There, the great initiates placed two entities—one of which they saw personified in the sun, the other in the moon—in opposition to one another. Ahura Mazdao, the aura of light, Ormuzd, is the being whom the Persians worshiped as the supreme God; Ahriman is the evil spirit, the representative of all the beings that inhabited the Earth and the Moon. The religion of the Persians is a remnant of the second Earth epoch.

[ 28 ] And in the third cultural epoch, human beings had to say to themselves: Within me are the forces of the sun and the moon; I am a son of the sun and a son of the moon. All the forces of the sun and the moon present themselves as father and mother. If, in primeval times, we have unity as in the Indian worldview, and duality—reflected in the religion of the Persians—following the separation of the Sun, then we find the trinity, as it existed in the third Earth epoch after the separation of the Sun and the Moon, laid down in the religious views of the Egyptians, Chaldeans, Assyrians, and Babylonians. The trinity appears in all religious views of the third epoch, and in Egyptian religion it is represented by Osiris, Isis, and Horus.

[ 29 ] But the memory of what human beings had experienced in their consciousness during the fourth Earth epoch—the Atlantean epoch—as companions of the gods, emerges during the Greco-Latin cultural period. The gods of the Greeks are nothing other than memories of the gods with whom human beings were companions during the Atlantean epoch—the gods whom they had beheld spiritually and clairvoyantly as ethereal figures when they had stepped out of their physical bodies at night. Just as truly as human beings see external objects today, so truly did they see Zeus, Athena, and so on back then. To them, these were real beings. What the Atlanteans experienced and felt in their clairvoyant state reappeared for the people of the fourth post-Atlantean cultural period in the pantheon. And just as the Egyptian era was a remembrance of the Triad from the Lemurian era, so too did the experiences of Atlantis remain as a remembrance in the Greek hierarchy of gods. In Greece, as elsewhere in Europe, these were once again the same gods that the Atlanteans had seen, only under different names. These names were not invented; they are names for the same beings who walked alongside human beings when they stepped out of their physical bodies during the Atlantean era.

[ 30 ] Thus we see how the epochs of cosmic events find their symbolic expression in the religious views of the various post-Atlantean cultural periods. What took place during the “sleep” of the Atlantean era was revived in the fourth cultural period. We are now in the fifth post-Atlantean epoch. What can we recall now? The first cultural epoch—the ancient Indians—could conceive of the first Earth epoch; the Persians, the second, the principle of good and evil. The ancient Egyptians conceived of the third epoch in its triad. The Greek, Old Germanic, and Roman cultural periods each had their own Olympus. They recalled the divine figures of Atlantis. Then came the more recent era, the fifth period. What can it remember?

[ 31 ] Nothing at all! — That is why, during this period, the godless age was able to take hold in so many respects, and why this fifth period must look not to the past but to the future. The fifth epoch must look to the future, where all the gods must rise again. This reunion with the gods was prepared during the time when the Christ-force broke forth—the only force powerful enough to restore a divine consciousness to humankind. The images of the gods in the fifth period cannot be mere memories; the people of the fifth period must look ahead—only then will life become spiritual once more. Consciousness must take on an apocalyptic character in the fifth period of the post-Atlantean epoch.

[ 32 ] Let us recall that yesterday we examined the connections between the various cultures of the post-Atlantean era. Today we have seen how cosmic events are reflected in the religious views of these cultures.

[ 33 ] Our fifth era stands at the very center of the world; therefore, it must look ahead. First, Christ must be fully understood in our time, for our souls are deeply interwoven with mysterious connections. We will see how the recurrence of the Egyptian era in our fifth cultural period will provide us with a point of connection, showing us how we can truly move into the future.