Anthroposophical Guidelines

What is Revealed when between Death and a New Birth, One Looks Back into Previous Lives - Part 1

In the previous contemplation human life in its entirety was followed with emphasis on successive earth lives. The other viewpoint, which can shed more light on what the previous one reveals, is the contemplation of successive lives between death and a new birth. It also shows that the substance of these lives (as they are now) only goes back to a certain point of time in the earth’s evolution. This substance is determined by the fact that one carries through the portal of death the inner force of selfconsciousness acquired during his earth life. It enables him to stand as a complete individuality amidst the divine-spiritual Beings.

During a preceding period this was not the case. At that time man was still not very advanced in the development of his self-consciousness. The forces acquired on earth were not sufficient to disconnect him from the divine-spiritual world and to have an individual existence between death and a new birth. This doesn’t mean that man found himself in the divine-spiritual Beings, rather within their sphere of activity, to the extent that his will was essentially their will, and not his own.

Before that period, another existed in which when looking back at it one does not find man as he is in his contemporary soul-constitution, but in the world of divine-spiritual Beings, in which man existed in a germinal stage. Those Beings are the Primal Forces, (Archai).

Therefore when tracing back the life path of one individual, not one divine-spiritual Being is encountered, but all who belong to that hierarchy. The will that man shall come into being lives in these divine-spiritual Beings. All of them participate in the will that each human individual shall come into being. The cosmic objective of their choirlike cooperation is the genesis of the human form. For man still lived without form in the divine-spiritual world.

It may seem odd that the whole choir of divine-spiritual Beings should work for one human being. However, even earlier the Exusiai, Dynameis, Kyriotetes, Throne, Cherubim and Seraphim hierarchies worked in this way during the [ancient] Moon, Sun and Saturn stages in order than man could come into being.

What originated earlier on Saturn, Sun and Moon, a kind of pre-human, did not possess a unified form. Pre-humans existed who were organized more according to the limbs system, others more according to the breast system, again others who were organized according to the head system. They were really human beings; they are described here as pre-humans in order to differentiate them from the later stages when the balanced confluence of all the systems appeared in the human form. The differentiation of those pre-humans goes much further. One can speak of heart-people, lung-people, and so on.

The Primal Forces hierarchy considered that its mission was to integrate those pre-humans - whose soul-lives still corresponded to their one-sided forms - into the general human form. They took over humanity from the hands of the Exusiai, who had already in thought created a unity from human multiplicity. However, for the Exusiai this unity was still an ideal form, a cosmic thought form. The Archai shaped the etheric form, but in such a way that it contained the forces for the development of the physical form.

Observation of these occurrences reveals something wonderful - that the human being is the ideal and the objective of the gods. But this observation cannot be the source of vanity and pride. For each can only take credit for what he has made of himself in his earth life with self-consciousness. And this, expressed cosmically, is little compared to what the gods have achieved from the macrocosm - which they are - as the basis for his selfhood as microcosm - which he is.

The divine-spiritual Beings face each other in the cosmos. The visible expression of this stance is the shape of the star-filled sky. They wanted to create as a unity in humanity what they are all together.

In order to correctly understand what the hierarchy of the Archai accomplished in their choir when they created the human form one must realize that there is a great difference between this form and the human physical body. The physical body is composed of physical-chemical processes. These take place in contemporary man within his human form. But the form itself is spiritual through and through. To perceive with our physical senses in the physical world something spiritual as the human form should be a solemn experience. For someone who can see spiritually, this means seeing in the human form a true imagination that has descended to the physical world. If one wishes to see imaginations, he must pass over from the physical word to the next-lying spiritual one. Then he will realize how the human form is related to these imaginations.

When observing life between death and a new birth, human spiritual vision finds the genesis of the human form as the first period. At the same time the deep relationship between man and the hierarchy of the Archai is revealed. In this period one can have an inkling of the difference between earth life and life between death and a new birth. Namely the hierarchy of the Archai works creating the human form in rhythmical epochs. During one period it directs the thoughts which guide the individual wills more towards the outer-earthy cosmos. During another one it looks down upon the earth. And from the concurrence of what comes from the outer-earthly cosmos and what is stimulated from the earth, the human form is structured, which constitutes the expression of the fact that man is simultaneously an earthly and an outer-earthly cosmic being.

The human form, described here as the creation of the hierarchy of the Archai, embraces not merely man’s the external outline and the surface formation as determined by the skin, but also the formation of forces in his posture, in his capacity for movement corresponding to earthly conditions and in the capacity to use his body as the expression of his inner self.

That man can insert himself with upright posture in the earth’s gravity, that he can freely move with equilibrium in this gravity, that he can wrest his arms and hands from gravity and use them freely - this and much more that is surely within him but is nevertheless formative: all this man owes to the creative acts of the hierarchy of the Archai. All this was prepared in the life between death and a new birth, which one can also call this period. Preparations were made so that in the third period, in our present time, man himself has the capacity during his life between death and a new birth to work on this formation for his earthly existence.

Goetheanum, at the New Year, 1925

147. Life between death and a new birth also indicates three periods. In the first man lives entirely in the hierarchy of the Archai. His future human form for [use in] the physical world is prepared by them.
148. The Archai prepare the human being in order that he can later develop his free self-consciousness; for this [self-consciousness] can only be developed in beings who, through the form thus created, and from an inner impulse of the soul, embody it.
149. This shows how the kernel of human attributes and forces which manifest themselves in our time were predisposed during ages long past, and how the microcosm grows out of the macrocosm.