The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Third Lecture

[ 1 ] We have shown the soul where one arrives who applies the methods of human development to the supersensible worlds. We have pointed out that there is a certain stage of development through which what otherwise appears to us in the outer world as heat, air, water, and so on, begins to come alive and be imbued with spirit. We have said that this can be called “immersing oneself” into the world of the elemental spirits. I ask those who have been engaged in spiritual science for some time to weigh every word that is spoken carefully and to bear in mind that the words are used not approximately, but with complete precision. I did not say “elemental spirits,” but rather “spirits of the elements”; and we are always speaking only of whatever is specifically mentioned in the passage in question.

[ 2 ] Our task today will be to familiarize ourselves with some of the peculiarities that present themselves to the observer of the higher worlds. First and foremost, it should be noted that as we ascend into the supersensible realm, our ordinary world—which we experience through our sense organs—is joined by other worlds, of which two will be mentioned here, worlds that lie beyond those which can be perceived by the senses and comprehended by the intellect. We shall mention a few distinctive characteristics that may point to the differences between our ordinary world and the two worlds immediately above it. The next world, which lies hidden behind our world, is, as you all know, called the astral world, and the one that lies even deeper behind this one we usually refer to, in accordance with our linguistic usage, as the spiritual world. One could also refer to the astral world as the “land of souls” or the “world of souls,” and the other as the “land of spirits” or the “spiritual world.” If we wish to point out one of the many differences that will be important to us for our subsequent considerations, we can say: In our physical world, one of the most comprehensive laws is that of arising and passing away. Everywhere in our physical world we find the alternation of birth and death, of coming into being and passing away. Look wherever you will in our physical world; even among its highest beings, you will find the characteristic that they are born and die within the physical world. Any apparent permanence within the physical world merely gives humans the illusion of what belongs to the lower kingdoms of nature: the dead kingdom of stone. But even that is only apparent. If one were to extend the observation of the mineral world over long periods of time, one would see that the law of arising and passing away applies there as well.

[ 3 ] For the observer of the astral world, what stands out above all else is that—just as the processes of coming into being and passing away are central to the physical world—the defining characteristic of this astral world is its capacity for transformation, its metamorphosis. And here, what I am about to say connects with a point that was already made yesterday and that will occupy us in ever more concrete ways in the most diverse of ways. In the astral world, we are dealing with fluid forms—forms that transform into one another in such a way that they can be one thing one moment and another the next. Even the human astral body—which is, after all, the aspect of the astral world closest to us—surrounds and swirls around the physical body like a kind of aura—visible to the clairvoyant—and possesses the characteristic of a constant capacity for transformation. At almost every moment, what envelops and permeates the human being as an astral-auric cloud is different, depending on whether the person develops higher or lower impulses within themselves, experiences wilder, more tempestuous, or calmer passions, or harbors this or that thought. Depending on whether the person has this or that impulse of will, the most diverse formations and inclusions appear in this astral-auric cloud; and since a person continually allows this or that thought to arise and subside in their soul life, this cloud can be depicted at every moment as something different in terms of color and form, even though a certain basic character—let us say a certain basic color—in the astral aura of every person remains, corresponding to their more or less enduring character trait. Thus, we already find within the human astral body that which is in a state of transformation. Yesterday it was pointed out that the same beings who first appear to a person when they experience the astral realm as something visible can then, as they advance toward enlightenment and the astral becomes discernible to them, appear to them—depending on their own preparation—as either good or evil. So great is the capacity for transformation of that which does not descend to the physical plane for the beholder, but remains in the regions of the higher worlds and descends only as far as the astral plane—it can transform from good to evil, from light to darkness. Thus, we have metamorphosis, the capacity for transformation, as a characteristic of this world.

[ 4 ] In the true spiritual world, we encounter a form of permanence—albeit only relative—a continuity. Therefore, for example, the innermost essence of a human being, if it wishes to preserve itself, if it wishes to endure from one incarnation to the next, must pass through the spiritual world, because only this world possesses the characteristic of duration—which, while not eternal, is nonetheless relative in a certain sense.

[ 5 ] Coming into being and passing away are thus the most fundamental characteristics of the physical world; transformation from one form to another is a characteristic of the astral world; permanence is a characteristic of the spiritual world. First of all, we must be clear that the materials used to construct the human being are drawn from these worlds, that the human being is built from these worlds. The physical world is initially before him; he works his way up into the other worlds through what is called “initiation,” that is, through preparation and development toward supersensory perception. Only then does he come to know what is hidden from him in the ordinary world, yet which exists just as much as that ordinary world.

[ 6 ] Now we must familiarize ourselves with something else. We have said that, for example, in the element of fire or heat, at a certain stage of development, we encounter something living—something that lives through the fire—or, with regard to air, something that lives through the air. In ordinary life, the situation is such that every time an outer covering, an outer garment, or an expression appears for a certain being, that being itself withdraws into a higher world from human perception. In the physical world, a person comes to know physical fire. Because they come to know physical fire—the expression of certain spiritual beings that reign within the fire—in the physical world, they must ascend from the physical world to higher worlds in order to come to know these beings themselves. One never finds in the same world those entities whose origin and source of a phenomenon lie in another world. That which is the cause and source of fire, for example, can only be found by ascending from the physical world to the next higher one, because the entities in question send their expression down into the lower world while retaining their very essence in the higher world. This applies not only to the phenomena that, so to speak, confront us on the outer surface of the physical world. The spirits of fire, the spirits of air, water, and earth—they conceal themselves from the physical world and dwell in the higher worlds because they send their expressions down into the physical world. But this applies not only to what confronts us outside of ourselves, but to everything that lives within us first and foremost in the physical world. For us, this world is inhabited not only by the phenomena of the external world—not only by the world rich in colors and sounds, filled with smells and tastes—but it is also where our feelings, our sensations, and our thoughts first and foremost live. Everything that a human being is here in this embodiment, in this incarnation, lives in the physical world, whatever it may be. We must be clear about this. Thus, every feeling we experience between birth and death, every thought we form, every idea, and so on, is a manifestation of the physical world. And just as behind the outer phenomena—colors, sounds, smells, and so on—or, as we say in spiritual science, behind fire, air, water, and so on, there are divine-spiritual beings, so too do divine-spiritual beings exist behind our sensations, our feelings, and our entire soul life. Our entire soul world has divine-spiritual beings behind it. And what we usually experience as our “I,” as our “self,” within the physical world—that is not yet our true self; that is not yet what we call our higher self. Our higher self exists in a supersensible world; it lives behind our feelings and sensations. Therefore, in the true sense, this higher self is only experienced through development into the supersensible worlds. There it reveals itself in a form quite different from that in the physical world.

[ 7 ] I would like to use a specific example to illustrate how a person’s physical self—which lives in the physical world—relates to their higher self, and I would like to apply this to our current circumstances, for anyone who looks into the spiritual worlds knows that these things change over time. For example, someone who has wronged another person may experience within themselves what is called a pang of conscience. This brings us to those peculiar soul experiences that are usually summarized under the term “conscience.” You all know that in everyday life, the word “conscience” refers to a kind of inner voice that drives a person to make amends for the wrong they have committed. Most people will rarely take the time in their entire lives to reflect on the nature of this conscience; they simply stop at telling themselves: Conscience is something one feels. One has an inner feeling that one must make amends for wrongs committed; it torments one’s soul if such wrongs have not been rectified. For human beings in the physical world, the conscience is, first and foremost, an inner experience, an experience of the soul. If you ask a spiritual researcher how this works, they must make the following observation: they must observe the person who has committed a wrong in relation to their life in the astral world. Now, the person who experiences inner pangs of conscience is, to the spiritual researcher, surrounded by strange astral figures that are not otherwise present unless pangs of conscience dwell in the soul. Everything that, so to speak, stirs within the conscience—and is merely sensed by the soul living in the physical world—manifests to spiritual observation as certain figures that swarm around the person and inhabit their environment. And when we ask ourselves: How does the emergence of these figures manifest itself from the perspective of spiritual research? The following explanation presents itself: Let us assume that someone has committed such a wrong; then, from the thoughts that brought about the wrong, other thought-forms are formed—metamorphoses of the first. Everything a person thinks, senses, and feels lives, after all, in their astral aura as a form—a form of thought, sensation, or emotion. One can visualize a thought that is—let’s say—clear as a sharply defined thought form, as if hovering around the person; likewise, a wild or frenzied thought, or this or that passion, through tangled forms. These are all forms that surround the human being. Now, when a person commits an injustice against another, he thinks and feels this or that. These thought- or feeling-forms then emerge from him and are present in the surroundings; but they do not remain mere thought-forms—this is the essential and important point. They do not remain something that has been separated from the human being, but rather they draw nourishment from certain worlds. Just as the wind rushes into a hollow space that presents itself to it, so do certain beings from very specific worlds—we will speak of this later—rush into these thought-forms that are expelled through pangs of conscience, and the person’s own thought-forms are then filled with a substantial essence from these worlds. Through his thought-forms, the human being has given rise to the presence of other entities in his environment. These entities are, in truth, the source of the torment of remorse. If they were not there, remorse would not torment him. Only at the moment when the human being unconsciously senses these entities does the gnawing and consuming nature of a guilty conscience begin.

[ 8 ] You can now see from this example that spiritual observation deals with a reality quite different from that of non-spiritual observation. For the latter, conscience is merely an inner experience; for spiritual observation, conscience is a sum of entities surrounding the human being—a spiritual-astral reality around him. Why, then, does a person not see in ordinary life those entities I have just described to you—which arise when certain spiritual entities envelop themselves in his own thoughts as if in skins, as if in bellows? Precisely for the same reason that, for example, they do not see spirits of fire. In the physical world, they see physical fire; hidden behind the physical fire is what is spiritual in fire; and they must first look through the fire and up into higher worlds if they wish to see the spiritual in fire. Likewise, a person must look through the conscience spiritually if they wish to become acquainted with spirits of the conscience, if they wish to make the acquaintance of those tormenting beings who initially dwell on the astral plane and who came into being in the manner I have described to you.

[ 9 ] Now, those who have been following the facts mentioned in my various lectures and lecture series might draw a conclusion here—one that I myself will now draw. As you know, human spiritual life has changed over the course of long periods of time. You are all familiar with this fact from my various lectures. You know that when we describe today what we call human consciousness, the result is something different from the consciousness, say, for example, of the ancient Indians in the first cultural epoch of the post-Atlantean era; that this consciousness was different, particularly in the Atlantean era. You all know that human consciousness has evolved from a dull, primordial clairvoyance into today’s clear, waking consciousness of the physical world. The further back we go in evolution, the more we find that people possessed a primordial clairvoyance, a certain primitive form of clairvoyance. We need not go back very far—only a relatively small number of millennia—to find numerous peoples who did not merely see physical fire, but were able to look through this physical fire to the elemental spirits of fire. Gradually, the realization has developed in human consciousness that, as it were, a higher world has withdrawn from humanity, and that humanity has been restricted to the physical world. But this applies not only to the external world—to the tapestry of the sensory world spread out around us—but also to the life of the human soul as it manifests in the physical realm. Now you can draw the conclusion: If you name a phenomenon such as conscience and claim that today’s spiritual researchers perceive astral-spiritual forms around human beings in connection with what is called conscience, then the ancestors of today’s human beings must have seen these astral-spiritual forms; since they were clairvoyant, they must also have seen what today’s spiritual researchers perceive. - Well, just as fire conceals the spirits of fire, so too does the human conscience—that inner voice, as we call it—initially conceal the world I have just described, the world of the tormenting and gnawing spirits of conscience. Thus, in ancient times, people must have seen what I have just described as an astral phenomenon. But the condition for this would have been that people back then had not yet possessed an inner conscience, that it had not yet developed—that is, what we today call the soul phenomenon of conscience would not have existed among our ancestors; instead, our ancestors would have seen what today only the spiritual researcher perceives in the astral sheath, whereas today, since people perceive the inner voice of conscience, this inner voice conceals from them the outer spirits—let us say, the spirits of conscience.

[ 10 ] I deliberately cited this example because it makes the point so clear it’s as if you could touch it with your own hands. One can pinpoint the exact moment—historically speaking—when the transition took place from people’s perception of the external spirits of conscience to the awakening of the inner voice of conscience. For you need only reflect on Aeschylus’s Oresteia and compare it with the same subject matter as treated by the Greek tragedian Euripides, who lived only a short time afterward. There, in a transition spanning just a few decades from Aeschylus to Euripides, you will find the fulfillment and confirmation of what I have told you. Consider Aeschylus’s Oresteia; bring to mind what roughly takes place there! Agamemnon returns home after the war. He is murdered by his adulterous wife. His son Orestes, who had been away, returns home and takes revenge on his mother. He avenges his father’s death because even the voice of one of the revered gods himself urges him to do so; he takes revenge in accordance with the prevailing public sentiment of the time. The people say, in fact, that it is right that he acted this way; he has merely carried out what is just. He, however, sees the Erinyes—the goddesses of vengeance—approaching him as a consequence of the matricide. The Erinyes, the goddesses of vengeance in mythology, are nothing other than the figurative embodiment of what I have just described to you as a fact of spiritual observation. And now try to examine this older drama to see if there is anything in it that you could describe with the modern word “conscience”; not even a single word existed in earlier times for what we call “conscience”—and, as researchers can demonstrate, there is no word for it in any language of antiquity. But now compare the same subject in the work of the poet who dealt with the same material a few decades later—Euripides. There you no longer find the Furies or the Erinyes; there you already find the human being who hears the inner voice of conscience. In the meantime—and this is plain to see—the development of conscience takes place. Previously, throughout the course of human evolution, clairvoyant perception was so strong that people experienced the feeling of having committed a wrong deed quite differently than they did later. What did a person in earlier times feel when he had committed a wrong deed? The clairvoyant eye was still awake; he saw what I have described in his surroundings—in Greece they called them the Erinyes. And what kind of feeling arose within them now, since they constantly had this vision of the Erinyes before them? A feeling arose that was entirely in keeping with the characteristics of the astral world—the feeling of transforming, of metamorphosing, the figures they saw around them. The astral world is characterized by the capacity for transformation. When a person has atoned for a bad deed and transformed it into a good one, then the Erinyes of mythology are transformed into the benevolent Eumenides. Here you have the capacity for transformation. So there was something that a person experienced in such a way that he said to himself: I have committed a bad deed; what is visible in the astral world is terrible; this must be transformed; I must do what brings about the metamorphosis. It was a correspondence between human action and what was in the surroundings. There was still nothing there of what constitutes the inner voice of conscience.

[ 11 ] Everything in the world, including the inner life of the soul, evolves. So, too, has that which we call conscience evolved. And anyone who were to go back millennia and seek, in earlier times, what today lives in the soul as a natural phenomenon would be mistaken. And it is even the case that, in the specific area where this is to take place, things change quite rapidly. Just as a plant grows from leaf to leaf and then, as if in a leap, transitions to flowering, so it is in spiritual development. The foolish saying that nature makes no leaps is untrue; nature is constantly making leaps. At decisive points, leaps occur continuously. Just as there is a leap in the plant from the green leaf to the flower, so too can we observe such leaps in spiritual life: over centuries, over millennia, things develop slowly and gradually; but then it happens as rapidly as it did with conscience here in the period falling within the fifth century B.C., so that an earlier tragedian does not yet incorporate anything into his drama of conscience, whereas the one coming a few decades after him incorporates it for the first time and then also has a word for what we today call conscience. Linked to this, in turn, is the fact that it is precisely the clairvoyant observation of the spirits of conscience—the Erinyes—that disappears for human beings. These spiritual beings are such that our inner experience of conscience stands before them, just as the outer expression of fire stands before the spirits of fire.

[ 12 ] Thus we see that, so to speak, we arrive at a shore of experience in the physical world by following two paths. One of these directions is this: when we look at the tapestry of the sensory world around us and the phenomena of the world of colors and forms outside, we reach the boundary where, we might say, the outer spiritual beings begin. But even when we turn inward, when we observe the phenomena of conscience, memory, and the life of feeling, will, and thought, we must first observe something quite similar within these phenomena—just as we observe fire, air, water, and earth. These things stand in the way and obscure what lies spiritually behind them. When conscience asserted itself as a voice in the human soul, as an inner experience in the physical world, it stood before the world of the Erinyes, the Furies, and concealed them from human observation. Only when one views the historical life of humanity from this inner perspective does it become understandable. People understand nothing of what has happened unless they can observe the process of becoming and development in the light of spiritual facts. So we have, so to speak, spiritual beings that lie behind the red and blue, behind sound, behind external smells, and so on—beings that live out there in the world that surrounds us and that are veiled, as it were, by what we see and hear and comprehend through our intellect. But we also have such beings that lie behind what we call the life of the soul and the life of the mind. The question is therefore justified: How do these two spiritual realms relate to one another?

[ 13 ] If we want to understand this, we must once again bring to mind certain things that are already familiar to you. You all know that human nature is divided into four parts—the physical body, the etheric body, the astral body, and the I—and that this fourfold nature of the human being can be traced back to the entire process of human origin and development. We know that the human being, when viewed as a whole, did not begin on Earth, but that other incarnations preceded this one on Earth. We look back from Earth to a previous incarnation of it, which we call the ancient Moon; we look further back to an even earlier incarnation of Earth, the ancient Sun, and even further back to ancient Saturn. We say: before our Earth came into being, there was in the world an ancient planetary formation that we call the Old Saturn. At that time, the very first rudiment of our present physical body arose on it; on the Old Sun, the etheric body was added, and on the Old Moon, the astral body. It was only on Earth that the “I” became integrated into this previously threefold human nature, so that we owe the seed of our physical body to the ancient Saturn, the seed of our etheric body to the ancient Sun, the seed of our astral body to the ancient Moon, and the seed of our “I” to the Earth. However, we already know from various lectures that this evolution did not proceed in such a simple manner—that is, that Saturn simply existed first, then transformed into the Sun, from which the Moon arose, and from the Moon the Earth—but rather we know that this evolution has a much more complex character. If we first say to ourselves: Saturn was there, it transformed into the ancient Sun, and the Sun into the Moon—if we stick to this for now, because it is approximately correct for our purposes—then we must not stop at the development of the Moon itself, which immediately preceded our Earth. I have drawn your attention to the fact that, at the time of the Moon’s evolution, a separation occurred between the Earth and the Sun—the Earth was the Moon at that time—in other words, between the Moon and the Sun. While we speak of Saturn and the Sun as undivided bodies, we must say of the Moon’s evolution: the single body splits into two bodies, so that for a time the old Moon and the old Sun existed simultaneously. Then the two united again, passed through an intermediate state, and reappeared as the Earth’s development. And during the earliest stage of the Earth’s development, the substances and beings that are now in the Sun and the Moon were united with the Earth itself; it was only at a later time that what now lives in the Sun separated from the Earth. At first, the Earth remained behind with what is now the Moon. At a later time, the Moon split off from the Earth, and the Earth remained between the Sun and the Moon. These three bodies were thus originally one; the Sun and the Moon only later emerged from the Earth.

[ 14 ] Now let us ask ourselves: What is the purpose of this separation in spiritual life? Let us set aside the first separation that occurred during the ancient Lunar Age and consider only those separations that took place during the actual development of the Earth. Just as certain beings find their development on our Earth, so too do other beings find their development on the Sun and through the Moon. Beings who could not have found their path on Earth—because they were at a different stage of development than human beings—separated themselves from the Earth along with the Sun; they did not, so to speak, continue with Earth’s development, but had to carry on their development in a setting apart from Earth—namely, on the Sun—so that at the moment of the Sun’s separation from Earth, we are faced with the fact that humanity was left behind on Earth as a being that required the conditions of Earth’s development for its own evolution. Other beings, however, who could not continue their development on Earth, separated the substances they needed and established their dwelling place on the Sun. They then exerted their influence on Earth from the Sun. For just as the physical rays of the Sun fall upon the Earth, illuminating and warming it, so do the deeds and effects of the spirits of the Sun radiate down upon our Earth. The physical rays of the sun are merely the outer, corporeal expression of the deeds of the spiritual beings of the sun. That was the meaning of the separation of the sun.

[ 15 ] So what, then, was the purpose of the separation of the Moon? If the Sun had remained connected to the Earth, the beings who later dwelt on the Sun would have been able to thrive, but humankind never would have been able to. Humanity would not have been able to keep pace with the rate of development of the solar beings; it would have had to develop much more rapidly had the solar beings not left the Earth and exerted a weaker influence from the outside. Thus, the rate of development on Earth was slowed by the Sun’s separation. But this was still not the rate of development appropriate for human beings; it was too slow. Humanity would have become hardened, mummified, if the Moon—which was still connected to the Earth at that time—had remained connected to it. Humanity would not have developed into the being it is today, consisting of the outer physical body and the inner life of spirit and soul, but would instead have become hardened and mummified. Because the Moon was connected to the Earth, there was a tendency within the Earth to, so to speak, harden, dry out, and lignify both humankind and the Earth itself. The Earth would gradually have become a cosmic body from which human forms would have emerged like dead mummies. The Moon had to be separated from the Earth. This made it possible to maintain precisely the right pace of development. What was too slow could be accelerated. Thus, human beings became what corresponds to their nature; whereas, had the Sun remained with the Earth, they would have been stimulated toward an outer life and an outer activity that they could not have endured. If the Moon had remained with the Earth, human beings would not have been stimulated at all; they would have withered away, and the possibility of coming to life would have been taken from them. The stimulation that human beings received through the life of the Sun was an external one. The Sun would have had a stimulating effect on all human life, though at too rapid a pace. Just as the Sun acts from the outside to stimulate the life of the flowers of the field, so too would human beings—had the Sun remained connected to the Earth—have been stimulated from the outside to all feeling, thinking, and willing, but in such a rapid manner that they would, so to speak, have been burned up in the physical and spiritual fire of the Sun. But the stimulating force acting from the outside had departed, had moved away, and had thus been weakened in its effect. At first, however, it was too weak due to the Earth’s own hardening tendencies, and a part of these hardening tendencies had to be brought out in the form of the Moon. Through this, a new, life-giving principle entered into the Earth’s evolution and into human beings, and this principle had a stimulating effect that was exactly the opposite of that of the Sun. While the Sun’s stimulation acts from the outside, what now enters acts from within, giving life. Everything that constitutes soul life in the physical world, as it is experienced on Earth, could only develop because humanity was saved from this hardening, from this mummification, by the Moon’s departure. All inner life, all inner activity, everything that can be described as feelings, sensations, conscience, and thoughts—all these inner sources of life—asserted themselves from within through the separation of the Moon from the Earth; otherwise, they would have dried up in human nature and remained dormant.

[ 16 ] So ask the one who surveys our cosmos with a spiritual gaze: Where does the ability come from that allows us to perceive anything external, to look at or see anything—that inspires human beings to look? You must tell yourself: From what is physically or spiritually present in the sun. But ask: Where do the grounds for inner experience come from—the grounds for thinking, the grounds for feeling, the grounds, for example, for conscience, and so on? Then you must look up gratefully toward the Moon and say to yourself: Thanks to the beings who have drawn its substances from the substance of the Earth. The Moon’s substances in the Earth would have prevented the inner activity of the soul life.

[ 17 ] However, we must not seek the reasons for the world’s development solely in human beings, but also, in a certain sense, in the spiritual beings that belong to the higher worlds. It was not only good for humankind that the sun and the moon separated from it, but it was also good for those beings who were connected to humankind in their development at that time. Spiritual beings separated from the Earth along with the Sun and made the Sun their dwelling place. Just as human beings could not have developed if the Sun had remained connected to the Earth, so too could these beings not have developed on Earth if the separation had not taken place. They were able to develop only by drawing into the Sun the substances that had previously been united with the Earth. There, far from the hardening substances of the Earth, they were able to find the conditions necessary for their development. Thus we look up to the beings developing in the Sun and say: Up there dwell those beings who needed their Sun for their development just as we needed the Earth for ours. They would, so to speak, have perished had they remained connected to the Earth. But now that everything has unfolded as described, these spiritual beings have been able to send their beneficent influences down to Earth—that is, to develop themselves in such a way as to assist the beings of Earth from the outside in the appropriate manner. The sun spirits would not have been helpers to Earth if they had remained on it. It was only after the sun’s separation from Earth that the beings there gradually attained the stages at which they could become helpers to Earth. When the spiritual researcher looks out in his observation toward the light and the things of the external world, he can say to himself at a certain stage of his development: Behind what physically appears to me as color or sound are the beings we can regard as solar beings. But the way the solar beings appear to us today in spiritual contemplation is only how they have come to be. Following this process of becoming, they appear to us as the high, the higher spiritual beings—those who meet us when we look out from the sensory world.

[ 18 ] And now we ask ourselves: Who was responsible for bringing about the other possible course of development—the one that provided the inner impetus which dispelled the hardening in human beings? There must have been beings who, at the appropriate moment, extracted the lunar substance from the earthly substance. So if we want to express this—I would say—in popular, perhaps even trivial terms, we can say: There must have been spiritual beings who, at a certain point in the Earth’s development, said to one another: We have now observed the development of the Earth—the Earth, which initially existed as a single being in outer space, consisting of the Sun, the Moon, and the Earth. Three were united as one. — Then they saw that there were other beings who could not make progress if they remained connected to the Earth. They saw how the solar spirits separated the Sun, how they went forth from the Earth and found their path forward in another realm. Then they saw that humanity would now harden and become rigid, and that humanity would not become what it was meant to be. Therefore, they said to themselves: We must not leave it at what the Sun Spirits have done; we must do something else; we must now protect the Earth from hardening. Now they intervened and separated the Moon from the Earth. This was an act carried out by beings who, in a certain sense, were higher than the Sun Spirits. The latter, when the Sun was still one with the Earth, had to say to themselves: “We can no longer find any possibility for development on Earth; we need another arena.” — These other beings, however, were able to say to themselves: “We will also find our way forward on Earth.” - They allowed the sun spirits to depart with the Sun and remained connected to the Earth themselves. But because they remained connected to the Earth, they were given the opportunity, at a certain point in time, to become saviors of human evolution by drawing the Moon out of the Earth. In a certain sense, therefore, these were higher beings than the Sun Spirits. They could calmly say: “Let the hardening of the Earth come upon us; let us not go with the Sun Spirits, but let us reserve ourselves instead to perform an act that the Sun Spirits cannot do—namely, to draw the Moon out of the Earth.” - There were, then, beings who could perform an act that, while separating a relatively inferior substance from the Earth—whereas the Sun Spirits took the nobler substance—demonstrated their greater power by becoming the restraints and masters of that which was inferior. For the stronger one is not the one who rules over the good and perhaps makes them a little better, but rather the one who succeeds in transforming the evil into the good.

[ 19 ] We see, then, that after the separation from the Sun, spiritual beings intervened in Earth’s evolution, and a lofty, significant deed was reserved for them. These beings are just as much behind the phenomena of our soul life as the spirits of the Sun are behind the phenomena of our external observations. When you look through your eyes, listen through your ears, and comprehend external things through your intellect, you can say: Behind everything I see, hear, and comprehend with my intellect lie those beings who have their true home on the Sun, who live in the Sun, and who separated themselves when the Sun separated from the Earth. — But if one looks back into one’s own inner being, if one turns one’s gaze to what is called thinking, feeling, and willing—to sensation and conscience—one sees the inner life that has become possible because certain spiritual beings had set themselves aside and then separated the Moon from the Earth. In their realm they possess everything that lies behind the phenomena of soul life. And just as it is true that when the spiritual researcher looks beyond the physical fire and perceives its spirits, he truly sees a spirit whose proper domain is the Sun, so too, when he looks beyond the conscience, he sees the spirits of conscience, who belong to those who extracted the lunar substance from the Earth. From there come the spiritual beings who, as if slipping into a skin, enter the thought-forms associated with a bad deed. Whatever their value may be, the spirits that hover around human beings as beings of conscience come from the lunar realm and belong to a spiritual realm that, in a certain sense, is more powerful and superior to the solar realm.

[ 20 ] From the entire nature of the presentation I have given you today, you can surmise that these beings, who stand behind our soul phenomena, actually belong to a realm that is superior to the spiritual realm that lies behind the outer Maya. We have a twofold Maya: the outer Maya of the sensory world and the inner Maya of the soul life. Behind the former stand those spiritual beings whose center is in the Sun; behind the Maya of our inner life stand the others, who belong to a more powerful, more comprehensive realm. Anyone who spiritually surveys these things can know that the spiritual beings behind the outer sensory world come from an entirely different source than the spiritual beings behind feelings and sensations, behind the conscience. These beings, which correspond to the conscience, for example, are called the Erinyes in Greek mythology. And just take a look at this mythology—how true it is when it says: Orestes hears from the gods who reign there that he has performed a good deed, but other beings—namely the Erinyes—approach him, and the mythology conveys the sense that these are older beings than those belonging to the realm of Zeus; they assert themselves as avengers even where the outer gods of the solar realm—the realm of Zeus—allow and permit the deed. Thus, human beings are confronted by beings of an older spiritual lineage who, as it were, intervene correctively in what he undertakes, guided and directed by the beings who have separated themselves from the Sun. Here we see a wonderful example of how mythology and the wisdom traditions of the ancient peoples reflect to us what spiritual observation can now perceive in a different way.

[ 21 ] Take everything I have told you today—we will go into greater detail in the upcoming lectures—and you will find various questions that arise for you personally, like matters of conscience, in connection with the topic discussed. Some things may remain unclear to you today because, in a certain sense, we have regarded the beings who intervened during the separation of the Moon as more powerful than the beings of the solar realm; this will become clear, for you will see how relative things are in the higher worlds. But there is one thing I ask you to accept today, almost as a question. We have seen that the Earth would have hardened and become woody had the separation of the Moon not taken place; that the life of the soul has retained its inner vitality because certain powerful beings cast the Moon out of the Earth.

[ 22 ] Such developments do not happen all at once; they occur gradually. Even the beneficial effects emanating from the sun did not make themselves felt all at once; they were not suddenly present in their fullness, but rather made themselves felt gradually. And now I ask you to consider that at a certain point in the Earth’s evolution, a spiritual being who had previously been connected to the sun—whom we call the Christ Being—descended from the sun to Earth during the lifetime of Jesus of Nazareth and united with the Earth. The Christ Being entered the body of Jesus of Nazareth. Here we are faced with a most peculiar phenomenon. You must not—and the next lecture will make this clear—place this phenomenon in the same context as everything else we have discussed today. We have said: after the separation of the Sun from the Earth, the Earth would have hardened if the Moon had not been cast out of it; human beings would have mummified. — This applies to a large part of earthly life, but it does not apply to all of earthly life. Despite the separation of the sun and the moon, something subject to decay would have remained on Earth had the Christ event not taken place. If the separation of the Moon made inner soul life possible, then the impetus—the renewed impetus for this inner soul life—came once again from the Sun through Christ, who descended from it. What Christ brought to Earth would, had Christ not come, have remained a spiritually dead product, a spiritual mummy.

[ 23 ] What does the spiritual researcher perceive when he looks back at the time that preceded the Christ event? Something most peculiar presents itself to him. When the spiritual eye looks back to ancient times, the outer form of the Earth, as it presents itself to the physical senses—which is, after all, merely Maya—disappears, and in its place appears something that could be compared to the form of a human being, but only to that—the form of a human being. To the spiritual gaze, the Earth—I say explicitly the Earth—is transformed from its outer form of Maya into the earthly form of a human being who has spread his arms in the shape of a cross, though in this form he is both male and female. The spiritual researcher sees the Earth of the time before Christ descended in the shape of a cross, specifically as a human being. We are reminded here of the wondrous words of Plato, who derived from the Mysteries the idea that the world soul is crucified on the cross of the world body. This is nothing other than a depiction of the phenomenon that presents itself to the spiritual gaze. Christ died on the cross; and through this, the Earth passed from mere form into life. For the time before Christ, the Earth appears to the spiritual gaze as a mere form; for the post-Christian era, the Earth appears as having been newly enlivened by the Christ principle. Thus, when the Christ principle entered the Earth, something similar to the separation of the Moon took place; life entered into something that would otherwise have remained a form. Viewed correctly, all of ancient times pointed toward the Christ event. Just as people today point to the Christ as a being who entered human evolution at a specific point in time, so the initiates of the pre-Christian era always pointed out that the Christ would come; and they pointed to what pointed toward the Christ—what, as it were, foreshadowed the Christ. Nothing foreshadowed the Christ more than that mighty vision that presented itself to the spiritual gaze under certain conditions, when the earth in its physical form vanished and the spiritual eye beheld the world soul crucified upon the world body. In ancient Indian times, the sages recounted that at the moment when their clairvoyant vision opened, they then found, deep, deep beneath the mountains of the Earth, near the center of the Earth, a cross upon which hung a human figure of both male and female, with the symbol of the Sun inscribed on the right side, the symbol of the Moon on the left side, and the lands and individual sea and land formations of the Earth depicted on the rest of the body. This was a clairvoyant vision that the ancient sages of India had of that figure who was waiting for our Earth to be enlivened by the Christ principle. And by pointing to the most important prophetic foreshadowing of the Christ event, these ancient sages of India proved that, where they looked more deeply, they could say: The Christ will come, for that which points to him is already there. — That is why the oldest wisdom, when it ascends to the highest regions, is prophecy; it looks toward something that will come in the future. Everything that lies in the future is an effect of the present. But what occurs in the future as something spiritually significant can already hint at its existence to the spiritual gaze in the present. The Christ event was not foreshadowed in some outwardly abstract way; rather, it was foreshadowed for the spiritual gaze by the fact that, prior to the life of Christ—which united with the life of the Earth at a specific point in time—the form, the shape of the world soul presented itself on the cross of the world body. The wisdom of all ages reveals itself in inner harmony when one considers things to their very core. Thus, building on what has been discussed, we must examine the wisdom of the various ages and strive to shed light upon them, so that they may appear in their true form.