The Rudolf Steiner Archive

15. The Structure and Transformations of the Physical Human Body

[ 1 ] Today, following on from yesterday’s examination of human evolution within certain narrow limits, we want to go back to the long-past epochs of evolution and consider what is connected with them. Before we discuss the fact of reincarnation in this context—which we could address immediately afterward—and before we explore the questions of human destiny and the law of karma, let us go back even further in time and let our gaze wander over vast periods of human evolution.

[ 2 ] Modern human beings appear to us as a composite of the physical body, the etheric body, the astral body, and the “I”—the bearer of the “I” and of true independence. It is not the “I” or the astral body that are the most perfect parts of the human being because they are spiritually higher, but rather the physical body. It is the most perfect part of the human being, a structure composed of the most marvelous details. What a marvelous structure this human physical body is! The astral body, while more spiritual, is less perfect; it is the bearer of joy and pain, of instinct, desire, and passion. Why, then, is the physical body more perfect? Consider the human physical heart. What a marvelous structure it is, enduring all manner of assaults throughout one’s entire life! And the same is true of all the other organs of the physical body: wisdom speaks through them. And how does the astral body fare in relation to this heart? It by no means always behaves wisely. The astral body craves the means of pleasure for the sake of pleasure itself and thereby continually abuses the physical body; it constantly launches attacks on the physical heart, and the heart resists it. Why? Because the formation of the physical body took place much earlier in the past than that of the other bodies. The physical human body is the oldest part of the human being, and therefore also the most perfect. A host of perfect beings have already worked on it. Everything that is physical, everything that is sensory, has developed out of the spirit; it has worked its way down from the spirit to its physical form. The first thing that existed of the human being in the physical world was the rudiment of the human physical body. At that time, there was still no rudiment of the etheric body, the astral body, or the I-bearer in the physical world.

[ 3 ] Everything in the world is in a state of evolution—not only human beings, but also a planet like our Earth. Just as with human beings, our Earth has also undergone other planetary incarnations. We call the first of these Saturn, the second the Sun, and the third the Moon. Here we must set aside the Moon as we know it today; it is merely a remnant, a leftover, a dreg of the ancient Moon.

[ 4 ] Let us now examine why, since ancient times, our Moon has been called “Moon.” In doing so, we must remember that the naming practices of the ancient occultists were by no means arbitrary, but rather deeply significant. The name given to a thing or a being was always organically linked to what that being was meant to express. The previous planetary state of our Earth was thus the ancient “Moon”; the one before that was the ancient “Sun,” not today’s Sun; the latter is like a memory of that ancient Sun. First, we come to that celestial body to which it is [still] possible today, for the time being, to look back using occult methods: it is “Saturn,” the ancient Saturn, of which we have spoken often before. I would now like to give you a brief outline of this ancient Saturn and its development. In doing so, let us first clarify what, in the occultist’s view, are the fundamental elements of our external world. In ancient occultism, a distinction was made between the four elements: earth, water, air, and fire or heat. For today’s physicist, this no longer makes much sense; what modern science calls an “element” no longer corresponds exactly to what the occultist understands by the term. The modern term “state of aggregation” is roughly synonymous with “element.” The occultist calls anything that is solid at present-day temperatures on Earth “earthly” or “solid”: a quartz crystal, for example, is “earth” for the occultist under present-day temperature conditions. Everything liquid—including liquid metals and so on—is “water” to him; everything gaseous is called “air.” And what modern physicists regard as one of the three states of matter—fire—is, for the occultist, the fourth element. I am well aware that it is a true abomination to science to regard fire not merely as a state but as something on an equal footing with earth, water, and air. In occultism, one may boldly imagine that heat is something of an even finer substance than the other three: earth, water, and air. You would have found no earth, water, or air on Saturn; only heat or fire was present. If you had been able to observe this back then with clairvoyant vision—by placing a chair in outer space and watching Saturn’s evolution—you would have been able to perceive only through the sense of heat, and at first it was merely spiritual warmth. Of all the beings that are on Earth today, only the human being existed on Saturn; there was no mineral, plant, or animal kingdom there. Under today’s conditions, the human being needs the three kingdoms for its constitution; in that former state, it did not need them. The entire human being existed, so to speak, only as a formation of warmth. Nothing, nothing else of the human being was there. Now imagine removing from modern humans everything you perceive physically about them—even the air they breathe—and leaving nothing of them except what flows through them today as their blood warmth, but shaped as if you were sketching the circulatory system today: only such human beings existed on ancient Saturn, nothing else. For the occultist, a celestial body is nothing more than a composition of beings. Even the Earth is nothing other than a composition of mineral, plant, animal, and human beings.

[ 5 ] The consciousness of the ancient Saturnians was already in the process of development. It was dull but all-encompassing. Today’s clear, waking consciousness has only become possible on Earth. The people on ancient Saturn had a very peculiar, dull state of consciousness. You know that a person is already unconscious while asleep. Well, take the plant—just the physical plant, without the beings hidden behind it—and there you have a state of sleep that is even deeper, a dreamless sleep. The plant is a deeply sleeping being. And now imagine a state of sleep that is even deeper, even more dull—the deep trance consciousness—and there you have Saturn consciousness. I will describe it to you by depicting a kind of abnormal condition of our time—that of a being who has remained in conditions that were normal in the past but are now abnormal—using an observed example: A girl who, until the age of eighteen, had never touched alcohol, was tempted by an event to quickly down a few glasses of red wine. Due to the particular constitution of her organism, this had such a profound effect that she was as good as dead. She was then given a pencil, and she began to draw all sorts of things and wrote names next to them. She had no idea what she was doing. She was like a machine; she had no life, no consciousness. If you were to compare what this girl drew with what is written in theosophical books about planets and what is described today as the structure of the universe and so on, you would find that what this girl drew, while certainly a very peculiar cosmology, does correspond in some respects to occult cosmology. She was in a state deeper than ordinary sleep. In this state, the being is capable of going far, far beyond the Earth, beyond the limits of its dull consciousness, and of expressing cosmic realities. The occultist knows that such a consciousness exists within the physical stone: dull and all-encompassing, stone without the corresponding “I’s,” and that if the stone could express itself in this way, it would do so similarly. This consciousness encompasses vast realms, yet it is dull. Such was the consciousness of human beings on ancient Saturn.

[ 6 ] Saturn itself is a being that is unconscious of itself—or, to put it more accurately, possessed a lower form of consciousness that can be described as follows: it bore within itself a mirror image of the entire cosmos and would have been capable of depicting it. To understand this, we must consider something else. So while human beings found on Saturn the place where the first rudiments of their physical bodies could form, Saturn was at the same time the stage upon which other beings could also develop—beings who today stand far, far above human beings. Let us clarify this with a statement made by an Egyptian sage to a Greek. He said: “You Greeks, you remain nothing but big children. You know nothing of the greatest mystery of all—that gods were once human beings!”—These beings no longer need to enter physical existence.

[ 7 ] On ancient Saturn, therefore, human beings were like a kind of mineral; they also possessed a consciousness like that of a mineral. However, beings who are now far above the human stage have dwelt within the human body. These are the Primordial Beginnings, or Archai, or Spirits of Personality. They passed through their human stage on Saturn. They were not human beings as we are today; they merely used the physical human body to confront the world, to experience their stage of humanity, and to attain self-consciousness. These exalted beings thus possessed self-consciousness on Saturn, and they used the human body as a sort of chariot, which served as their physical dwelling on their behalf. Certain beings permeated the human physical body at that time and imbued it with their characteristics, and to this humanity today owes two things. First, the capacity for an “I-bearer” to ever take root within it; it was these spirits of personality who, at that time, gave the human body the form that emanated from their personality. Second, however, they also gave human beings the possibility of developing selfishness. Through the influence of the spirits of personality, the human body received—as if in a germ—the capacity to develop as a free personality, but at the same time also the capacity to cultivate selfishness and egotism within itself. It would take not just a lecture or a series of lectures, but years, if I were to describe all the details to you here. We can therefore only consider stages or levels; specifically, let us conceive of seven such levels in Saturn’s development, each of which differs from the others.

[ 8 ] In the first stage, you must imagine that there was still no physical heat, but that it was only just beginning to take shape. Only the spiritual existed; spiritual warmth was present, and it was not until the middle of the Saturn evolution that the physical human body—formed from physical heat substance—came into being. This human heat body then dissolves again at the end of the Saturn evolution. We have seven stages: three preliminary stages, a physical heat stage, and three descending stages, and each of these seven stages has seven subdivisions, which we will omit here but to which we will return when discussing Earth’s evolution. Contemporary theosophical books refer to them as rounds and globes.

[ 9 ] But now let us ask: Where did the substance come from that formed the human body? It was high spiritual beings who allowed their own essence to flow forth, letting it trickle down as the substance for the physical human body: it was the Spirits of Will, or the Thrones, who made the sacrifice of allowing their own essence to flow forth. Thus, on Saturn we have the Spirits of Will, or the Thrones, who provide the substance for the human body; then the Spirits of Personality, who inhabit it during its human stage; and the human being itself as the physical seed. The development on Saturn proceeds in such a way that we must imagine a beginning, a climax, and a ebb. Afterward, the whole process passes through a pralaya. We can think of the process as being somewhat like that of a plant. The seed is placed in the earth, decays, and carries the form over into a new existence. Just as there is an intermediate state—a hidden state—between the first and second plants, so it is with the planet. This state is called Pralaya. The only difference is that the plant then produces a repetition similar to the old one, whereas the planet has by then attained a higher stage of development. Its path is spiral, just as it is for human beings. Indian theosophy calls the visible state of the planet a Manvantara. For the plant, this is its development above the earth. In the same way, the planets pass through a manifest existence and a hidden existence. The latter is called a “world sleep.”

[ 10 ] After Saturn’s cosmic slumber, when it emerged from the darkness once more in a new transformed form, it was the old Sun that now arose. The difference between Saturn and the Sun is that, in their intermediate states, Saturn’s thermal substance had condensed into an air- or gas-like state. The Sun retains the heat, but it develops something else in addition—air—so that we now have both heat and air on the Sun. And one more thing: light appears on the Sun. Saturn consisted of dark heat; the second planet, the Sun, consists of light—the gas burns—heat ether, and air. Through Saturn, the potential for the physical human body was introduced into evolution once and for all. Now, on the Sun, something new is added. As if poured in by spiritual beings, the etheric body is now present within this substance: the second planetary stage, in which the human being has now attained the status of a plant. Life is within it. Through this incorporation of the etheric body, however, the human physical body has also changed. It no longer retains the egg-like form of the Saturn era, but becomes internally structured. It is now a vibrating egg of warmth that glows and dims in formations of light and has indentations. The etheric body now works upon the physical body.

[ 11 ] While on Saturn the Thrones poured forth the substance of the physical body from within themselves, it is now other entities that pour forth this substance as their great sacrifice: these are the Spirits of Wisdom, called Dominions or Kyriotetes. The Thrones made the greater sacrifice. Had they not laid the foundation, the Spirits of Wisdom would not have been able to begin their work.

[ 12 ] On the Sun, beings have now once again passed through their human stage of development. These are the archangels, or fire spirits, known as Archangeloi in Christian esotericism. They inhabited the human body on behalf of others and thus attained their sense of self.

[ 13 ] There is something to be mentioned here that deserves attention. If Saturn had emerged as the Sun immediately after the Pralaya, human bodies would not have been able to incorporate the etheric body. The new planet, the Sun, therefore had to first undergo a brief repetition of Saturn. The beings had to, as it were, take on their old form again.

[ 14 ] What other beings were there on this Sun? There were certain spirits of personality who had not become human on Saturn, who had not succeeded in attaining self-consciousness on Saturn. They had to make up for this on the Sun. They now had to make up for this on the Sun, and thus remained at the same level as their counterparts on Saturn. Consequently, on the Sun they could, so to speak, dwell only in a shell—a mineral body without an etheric body, one that was not permeated by an etheric body. Thus, on the Sun, a form had to arise once more that consisted solely of the physical body. There were thus lower forms alongside those consisting of a physical and etheric body, and these are the predecessors of our present-day animals. On the Sun, then, we have two kingdoms: a human kingdom and the kingdom of beings who were at the stage of Saturn’s development on the Sun—the animal kingdom. We have two kingdoms on the Sun: a human kingdom and an animal kingdom. The descendants of the latter are today’s higher animals.

[ 15 ] Now the sun, too, merges once more into a kind of cosmic night and is reborn in a third state of transformation as the old moon, which is initially capable of repeating the earlier states, to which the watery substance is added. During this separation, what constitutes heat and light departs with the sun. The higher beings also depart along with the subtle essences. That which has become watery emerges as the Moon and grows denser and denser, becoming a kind of satellite. On the Moon, then, we have heat, light, and water. Human beings have their etheric or light body, just as they do on the Sun; what is new on the Moon is that which we can describe as sound. To help you visualize this better, I will give you an example. Think of a metal plate covered with dust that is stroked with a violin bow: the dust arranges itself into specific patterns—the sound figures described by physicists. What we recognize today as sound is the physical manifestation of sound. The water on the Moon was permeated by sound and was thereby set into a regular motion. As a result, the physical bodies of beings on the Moon undergo an inner experience; limbs form within the physical form—for example, the liver—but this, in turn, passes away again. It is a process of forming and dissolving organs, an experience in figures and rhythms. This matures the bodies so they can absorb the astral substance. Such an impact of the primordial tone upon the watery substance is what the Bible expresses: God ordained everything according to measure, number, and weight. The essential, the new aspect of the Moon’s development is thus the inner tremor that strikes into the physical matter. You must imagine the ancient Moon as permeated by this inner tremor, ordered in a regular numerical rhythm. Earlier, on Saturn, it was heat-like formations that constituted the human body; later, on the ancient Sun, it was air-like formations, appearing like a mirage, akin to a Fata Morgana. On the Moon, however, the substance is watery, undulating, set in motion by an inner tremor. Internal, transforming structures arose through these tremors; the human body was permeated by them. You must conceive of this as a transient process of becoming and passing away: thus, a liver or a lung was formed in the human body and then dissolved again. Such, then, were the conditions on the ancient Moon. The Bible expresses this as follows: God once ordained everything according to number, measure, and weight. - This refers to the inner upheaval. Within the Old Moon, the earlier structures of the human body now begin to form once more; the physical and etheric bodies are formed again. Why? Because on the Old Moon, the repetition of Saturn and the Sun takes place first; only then did the actual Old Moon come into being. Into the physical human body—which now contained the watery element on the one hand and, on the other, was permeated by the primordial tone and the etheric body through the inner upheaval—the spirits of movement, called powers or dynamis, now infuse the human astral body. Just as the spirits of will on Saturn and the spirits of wisdom on the Sun make sacrifices, so too do they now sacrifice the human astral body from their own substance. Thus, the Earth is in a state of continuous, progressive development, as is the human being who inhabits it.

[ 16 ] Thus you have seen the physical body develop on Saturn. Through the three transformations—Saturn, Sun, Moon—it has now reached the third stage of perfection. This human physical body then comes even closer to its present form on the Moon. However, the further development that was necessary for its astral body—which humanity could not have attained on Earth—would not have been possible had a separation not taken place at a specific point in time. A fundamental substance of the planet, the ancient Moon, remains behind, and a portion breaks away, which then surrounds this fundamental substance, orbiting the body formed by it. Now we have, first, Saturn; second, the Sun; and third, the Moon. The finest of the substances and beings has now separated into a fundamental body. It emerges from it as the Sun in our Earth era and ranks higher than a planet; it becomes a fixed star. And another body separates from it, which remains a planet. Today’s Sun, too, only recently became a Sun; it was once a planet. If you were to mix today’s Sun, today’s Moon, and our Earth together in a large pot—combining their substances and essences—you would have the ancient Sun; if you mixed the Earth and the Moon together, you would have the ancient Moon.

[ 17 ] In the course of human evolution, our Sun thus separates from the planet Earth. Along with it, the finest substances and beings depart from the Earth. Accompanying the Sun is the aqueous element, which becomes denser and denser. The dense forms are the bearers of the beings that inhabit the old Moon; human beings now choose a place of seclusion for themselves. A fixed star, a sun, always comes into being through a kind of advancement of a planet. During this development of humanity, it was not only humans who were present and had developed to the point of having integrated the three bodies—the physical body, the etheric body, and the astral body. There were also beings who had been left behind.

[ 18 ] The beings who had gone through their human stage on the Moon were the angels, called “Angeloi” in Christian esotericism and “lunar Pitris” in India. These beings had a different consciousness than people do today. However, there were also other beings on the ancient Moon. There were certain archangels who had remained behind on the Sun and now had to make up for their stage of humanity on the Moon; there were also beings who had only just reached the stage of spirits of personality—that is, the Saturn stage of humanity—on the ancient Moon.

[ 19 ] The archangels who had remained on the Sun formed beings with human bodies that possessed only a physical body and an etheric body. This then became a kingdom among human beings, a kingdom that continued on Earth as the animal kingdom; they are the precursors of the physical bodies of today’s animal world. And those beings on the Moon that had only a physical body are the precursors of today’s plant kingdom. Thus, there was a human, an animal, and a plant kingdom on the ancient Moon. On Saturn there was only a human kingdom; on the Sun, a human and an animal kingdom; and on the Moon, we even have a human, an animal, and a plant kingdom. The mineral kingdom is the last of the kingdoms to have emerged in the entire course of cosmic evolution. The human kingdom is the oldest in the evolution of humanity; it already existed before there was an Earth. On Earth, in addition to its three bodies, it receives the fourth member of its being, the bearer of the “I.”