The Rudolf Steiner Archive

28. The Occult Planetary Conditions and the Evolution of the Earth

[ 1 ] It will be necessary to provide some background on the entire development of the world system. First, let us consider the current solar system, as we see it spread out before us in space. Looking back at the current manvantara of this system’s evolution, we find the various celestial bodies in increasingly spiritualized states, eventually reaching a phase in which all the bodies of our solar system—including the present Sun and the present Earth—form a single world sphere whose circumference extends as far as Saturn. In the occult sense, this world sphere is called Earth, and the Sun is located within it. In the course of development, the individual planets differentiate and separate from this original sphere. Through a contraction of this original body, Uranus is the first to break away; afterward, Neptune enters our system, though it appears to have come from another system. Everything else then contracts again, and Saturn, Jupiter, and Mars break away, each time following a preceding contraction.

[ 2 ] What remains is a mass containing our Earth and our Sun in an undifferentiated state. In this phase, the Earth undergoes its first period of development, the so-called Polar Period; the second is the Hyperborean Period. During this period, the Sun breaks away from the Earth, followed by Mercury, Venus, and so on—which are the present-day planets. The Hyperborean period is characterized by the etheric, and the Polar period by the astral. Then comes the Lemurian period for the Earth, during which the human physical body develops and the present Moon separates from the Earth, enabling the three members of the human being—physical body, etheric body, astral body—to receive the “I” within themselves. This is followed by the Atlantean period, then the post-Atlantean period—our own period—and so on.

[ 3 ] Now let us return to the undifferentiated state—that is, before Saturn’s separation. This phase was preceded by a Pralaya; before this Pralaya, there was another Manvantara in which the Earth and the Moon were united. This phase of our Earth with the Moon is the lunar state of our Earth. The Sun had already been separated, but the planets were arranged differently than during our present Manvantara, and at that time, human beings had only the physical, etheric, and astral bodies.

[ 4 ] If we go back even further, we arrive at another undifferentiated phase—that is, another Pralaya—preceded by another Manvantara, in which the Sun, Moon, and Earth formed a single whole. The Sun and Earth were not separate; they formed a single whole, and the other planets were distributed quite differently than they are now: This is the Earth’s solar state. Today’s Sun is scarcely a part of the Sun of that time. Back then, it was in the planetary state, and now it is at the solar stage. A planet can become a Sun when it separates the coarser and lower constituents from itself. This phase of the Manvantara is the solar incarnation (of the Earth), during which human beings had only the physical and etheric bodies.

[ 5 ] If we now go back to another undifferentiated state— that is, to another Pralaya, we arrive at another Manvantara in which there was no differentiation whatsoever between the Sun and the planets, but only a single subtle mass extending to the orbit of Saturn; and this is the Earth’s Saturn state, in which human beings possessed only a physical body consisting solely of heat and perceptible in space only as heat.

[ 6 ] For the occultist (researcher of the occult), heat is not merely a specific vibration of matter, but an essential aggregate in and of itself. On the Sun, the physical body is air; on the Moon, water; on Earth, flesh. During the current Manvantara, Saturn first separated, followed by Jupiter as a repetition of the solar incarnation; thereafter, Mars broke away, resulting in a repetition of the lunar state. Venus and Mercury are precursors of the future phase. And people who are ahead of the masses belong to the Mercury evolution. The various chains are merely phases of a single chain.

[ 7 ] The few initiates of the Lemurian period came from the ancient Manvantara of the Moon. They belonged to a completely different humanity and followed a different course of evolution. It is not until the Atlantean period that we find initiates who belong to our own humanity.