LECTURE 3
Some
questions may have arisen in many souls towards the end of
yesterday's lecture about the so-called lowest realm of the
hierarchies. And this is only natural, for according to modern ideas,
much of what has been said must appear doubtful and inexplicable, but
the following lectures will throw light on many points. One thing
must be made clear to-day to enable you to gain the proper
orientation of mind to deal appropriately with the subject. Someone
might ask for instance: ‘Even if through thinking and
concentrating over a stone, you really do raise a bewitched spirit
out of it, after having set that spirit free, what remains in the
stone? Is the being still in it, and what happens to the stone?’
Another may follow me and go through the same process, what comes of
it? This question might arise in many minds. As I have said before;
some of these questions will be answered in these lectures; but if
the understanding of them has to depend only upon such qualifications
for thinking as the Earth gives to man, these questions cannot really
be grasped at all. For everything is veiled upon earth, everything is
covered by Maya, and human thought sees things quite differently from
what they are in reality, but it is not the fault of the facts, that
these questions remain unanswered. The questions are put in the wrong
way, but in time we shall find the standard by which we can put our
questions correctly. Things change essentially for us when the whole
matter does not remain so veiled in illusion. Upon the earth all
things are, so to speak, jumbled together, and through this the
thoughts of man are continually led astray. We get a clearer idea of
things when we go back into more ancient times. Just as man passes
from one incarnation to another, one metamorphosis to another, so all
the beings in the universe pass through reincarnations, from the
smallest to the greatest, even such a being as our earth — a
planetary being — passes through reincarnation. Our earth did
not appear at first as earth; it passed through a different
condition. This has always been much spoken of in anthroposophical
circles. Just as man in this life is the reincarnation of a previous
life, so the earth is also the reincarnation of another planet which
was its forerunner. We call that former planet Moon, but we do not
mean by it our present moon which is only a part, a residue of the
ancient moon, we mean a former condition of the earth, which existed
once upon a time and then passed through a spiritual state called
Pralaya, in the same way as man passes through a spiritual condition
after death. Just as man reincarnates, so this lunar planet is a
reincarnation. That which we have characterised as the lunar
planetary condition, was the reincarnation of a still earlier
planetary condition, which we call Sun. This is not the sun of
to-day, but quite a different being; it was the reincarnation of the
first planet to which we look back when speaking of incarnations of
our Earth, — the very ancient Saturn. Thus we have four
successive incarnations; Saturn, Sun, Moon, Earth.
We have also often said that each planetary condition has a special
task. What is the task of our earth? It is to make human existence
possible for man as man. All the activities of the earth are such
that through them man may become an I-being, an Ego being. This was
not the case in the former conditions it has passed through. Man has
only become human, in the present sense of the word, on earth. The
former planetary conditions, which the earth has passed through had a
similar task. Other beings became human on those other planets, and now
stand at a higher stage than man. Perhaps you will remember in my book
Christianity as Mystical Fact
that an Egyptian Sage gave
to Solon the Greek a remarkable hint regarding the truth of the
Mysteries; he told him, that it was a truth of very great importance,
that the gods were once men. This was one of those truths which the
pupil of the Mysteries had to accept in ancient times, that the gods
who to-day are above in the spiritual height, were not always gods,
but that they had risen to those heights, and also that they were
once men and had once passed through the human stage. A dangerous
truth, because as a natural consequence the pupil of the Mysteries
drew the inference that he too would become a god some day. It was
also possible for man to say to himself: ‘A man can only become
a god when he is ripe for it and if he imagines for one moment that
he is a god before he is ready for it, he will not be a god, but a
fool.’ And. so two roads are open to man; to live in patience,
as Dionysius says, till the time of his deification, or else to
imagine himself already a god before the time. The one road leads in
truth to deification, the other one leads to folly, to madness.
Misunderstandings often arise about the sayings of the ancients, for
at the present day one differentiates no longer between the various
degrees of divine beings. The Egyptian Sage who spoke of the gods did
not mean only one degree of the gods, but he meant the whole sequence
of spiritual divine beings. Dionysius the Areopagite and the Western
sages have always differentiated between those different degrees of
divine spiritual beings. It is the same thing whether to speak of
angels or of Dhyan-Chohans, for those who realise the unity of cosmic
wisdom knew that these were merely different names for one and the
same thing, but in this realm we must also know how to differentiate.
The beings, who are the first to be invisible and who stand
immediately above man, are called Angels in Christian esotericism,
Angeloi, messengers of the divine spirit-world. Those who stand yet
one degree higher, therefore two stages higher than man, are called
Archangels, Archangeloi, also spirits of fire. Those who stand still
higher than the Archangels, when they pass through their normal
development, are called the Spirits of Personality, Archai, or
Primeval Beginnings. Thus we have three degrees of beings who stand
above man. These three degrees of spiritual beings have all passed
through the human stage; once they were all men. The beings who are
Angels to-day, if one considers it from the point of view of
universal time, were human not so very long ago, for they were men
upon the old Moon; and just as you, because of earthly conditions,
inhabit the earth as men, so did the Angels inhabit the Moon during
their human stage. The Archangels passed through their human stage on
the Sun, and the Archai, or spirits of personality did the same on
ancient Saturn. These beings have risen by degrees from their human
stage, they are higher beings to-day, in higher grades of hierarchies
than man. If we reckon the sequence of degrees in the kingdoms of the
world in a spiritual sense we arrive at the following: On the Earth
we have the visible mineral kingdom, the vegetable and animal
kingdom, the human kingdom, and then we pass into the invisible, into
the kingdom of Angels, the Archangels or Spirits of Fire, the Archai
or Spirits of Personality. Whilst these beings in accordance with
their own inner nature were progressing and developing, rising from
man to divinity, or to messengers of the divine (the correct
description of those beings), whilst they were thus rising in their
evolution, the conditions of the planet, on which and for the sake of
which they lived, gradually changed. If we look back at ancient
Saturn on which the Archai or Spirits of Personality passed through
their human stage, we find it very different from our earth.
Yesterday, we spoke of the four elements which we distinguished on
earth, as earth, water, air, fire. The three first elements did not
exist as yet upon ancient Saturn. Of the four there was only fire, or
warmth, on Saturn. The materialistic philosopher of to-day will say:
‘But warmth can only come about, only be perceived by means of
external objects; there are warm bodies, warm water etc., but warmth
cannot exist of itself.’ That is the materialistic
philosopher's belief but it is not true. If you could have
observed ancient Saturn with your present-day senses what would you
have found?
Let us take it as an hypothesis that you might have flown through
universal space to ancient Saturn. You would have seen nothing where
the ancient Saturn used to be; one thing only you would have felt and
that was warmth.
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If you had flown through the body of ancient Saturn, you would have
felt as if you had flown through a heated baking oven. You could not
have drawn a breath of air, you could not have swum, for there was
neither air nor water, you could not have stood, for there was no
earth. Your hand could not have touched anything, for there was a
mere ball of warmth. The whole of ancient Saturn consisted only of
warmth. In its first metamorphosis our earth's existence began
as a planet of warmth, and thus you can see how right ancient
Herakleitos of Ephesus was when he said: ‘Everything has come
from fire.’ Yes, indeed! As the earth is nothing but
ancient Saturn transmuted, so everything on earth has been created
out of fire. Herakleitos knew of this truth from the ancient
Mysteries, and he hints at this when he says that the book in which
he wrote of this was dedicated to the Goddess of Ephesus and that he
placed it on the altar there, meaning that he was conscious of owing
the knowledge of this truth to the Mysteries of Ephesus where the
teaching of primeval Saturnian fire was proclaimed in all its purity.
You can see now that those beings we call Archai, Primal-Beings or
Spirits of Personality, passed through their human stage in quite
different conditions from the man of to-day. Man can at present
receive into the bodily constitution of his bone and blood system,
solids, liquids and gases. The man of Saturn, the Spirit of
Personality, had to build his body out of warmth. I told you
yesterday that warmth has, so to speak, two sides to it. One side is
what we can feel inwardly, as inner warmth; we feel that we are
either cold or warm without having to touch our surroundings, as in
the case when we contact the solid element; but we can also feel
warmth outwardly, when we grasp a warm object. The peculiarity of the
Saturn evolution is that it gradually passed from this inner warmth,
which could be felt only inwardly, to the external warmth, to a
warmth which, towards the end of its evolution, became more and more
external, more realisable from outside. If you had undertaken your
voyage through space during the first stage of the Saturn evolution,
you would not have felt any warmth on your skin, but you would have
felt yourself warm inside; you would have said, ‘I feel
comfortably warm.’ Something resembling what you would call
soul's warmth to-day, could have been felt by you if you had
made this voyage during the very first stages of ancient Saturn. You
can imagine the experience you would have had, if you consider the
following: You know that there is a difference for you when you look
at something red or at something blue. Red gives a warm feeling; and
blue gives you a feeling of cold. Imagine that the feeling, which is
liberated in the human soul by the impression of something red, did
not exist as yet, but you might have felt something warm and
comfortable. Towards the end of the Saturn evolution you would have
felt not only inner warmth, but also as if warmth came towards you
from outside. The inner warmth would have gradually changed to warmth
which was outwardly realised. This is the way Saturn has developed;
from an inner soul's warmth it changed to a warmth which was
realised outwardly, to that which we call external warmth, or fire.
One might say: ‘Just as a child grows up to manhood and has
many different experiences so did the Spirits of Personality grow up
on ancient Saturn; first they felt themselves inwardly warm,
comfortably warm, then gradually they felt this warmth being
exteriorised, made real, yes, we might even say incarnated.’
What happened then? If you want to imagine it you must represent it
to yourselves thus: At first we have the inner warming process of the
globe of Saturn. It is then first possible for the Spirits of
Personality to incarnate. Whilst they are incarnating that which we
call external warmth is produced. If you had undertaken your voyage
during the later stages of Saturn you could have differentiated outer
impressions of warmth and also of cold. And if you made a drawing of
the self contained bodies of warmth you would find nothing but eggs
of warmth clustering on the surface of Saturn, forming its outer
crust. If you could have seen it from outside, it would have looked
like a blackberry or raspberry. What were these eggs? They were the
bodies of the Spirits of Personality, and it was precisely through
their inner warmth that the Spirits of Personality built the external
warmth of these Saturn eggs. It might be truly said of this
condition: The Spirits brooded over the warmth, they actually brought
forth the first fire bodies. If we may so express it: within that
region of warmth, the external eggs of warmth coagulated from out
their inner warmth. Out of universal space the first fire bodies were
hatched. The Spirits of Personality, or Archai (they are also called
Asuras) were incarnated in these fire bodies. Saturn only consisted
of that element of fire.
During the Saturn evolution it was possible for the Spirits of
Personality to transmute external warmth into inner warmth. The
process was not stiff or hard, but was one of inner movement. In
fact, the Spirits of Personality were continually producing these
eggs of warmth and letting them dissolve again. And now we shall be
able to imagine the process more exactly. Let us suppose that you
made that journey over and over again; you would have noticed that
there were times when there was no outer warmth to be felt, only that
inner feeling of comfort; then again times when those eggs of warmth
appeared. You would have realised something like a breathing of the
whole being of ancient Saturn, but it was a breathing of fire. You
would have thought: ‘Sometimes I am within this ancient Saturn
in such a way that I feel that all external warmth has turned inward,
has withdrawn and I experience only that feeling of inner comfort.’
And you would have said: ‘Now Saturn has in-breathed all the
warmth.’ And coming back another time and finding all those
eggs of warmth you would have said: ‘Now Saturn has breathed
out his inner warmth, all is external fire.’ You must
understand that the ancient Holy Rishis gave this idea to their
pupils; they transported themselves in spirit back to the times of
ancient Saturn, and made their pupils realise how a whole planet was
able to produce something that resembled an expansion and contraction
in breathing. They evoked in their pupils the conception that fire
when it flows out forms countless bodies of warmth and when the fire
is sucked in, it becomes the inner Self, an Ego, of the Spirits of
Personality. Therefore, they compared the life of this planet to an
in and out-breathing, but on ancient Saturn it was only a breathing
of fire. Air as yet did not exist.
Now let us suppose that all those Spirits of Personality on ancient
Saturn had remained at the stage of their normal evolution and had
continually inhaled and exhaled warmth. They would have accomplished
their regular Saturn evolution and the consequence would have been
that in the course of time all would have been withdrawn again into
inner warmth, and Saturn as an external planet of fire would have
been received again into the spiritual realms of the World. This
might have happened. We should then never have had the Sun, Moon, and
Earth conditions, for then all that had been breathed forth would
have returned to inner warmth, would have been received again into
the spiritual world. I shall now make use of a trivial expression
which will make this more comprehensible. It pleased certain of those
Spirits of Personality better to draw in again only a part of that
exhaled warmth; it pleased them to leave some of it behind, so that
when inhaling, some of those Saturn eggs did not disappear
completely, but remained. Thus two states or conditions developed
gradually on Saturn: inner warmth, and along side of it outer warmth
incarnated in the Saturn eggs. Not all of it was drawn in. The
Spirits of Personality left some of that out-breathed warmth to take
care of itself, as it were; they left it outside. Now why did they do
that? They had to do it; if they had not they would never have become
men on Saturn. What does it mean to become men? It means to attain
consciousness of self. You cannot do this unless you can
differentiate yourself as ‘I’ from what is outside you.
Only through this are you an ‘I,’ an ego: there, you say,
is the flowering branch, here am I. I differentiate myself as ‘I’
from the objects around me. The Spirits of Personality would have
allowed their ‘I’ merely to dream out eternally if they
had not left something outside that could offer resistance to them.
‘There is another outside of me, I differentiate myself from
the element of warmth which has been made objective.’ The
Spirit of Personality, became Egos, attained consciousness of self,
through having pushed a part of the Saturn essence outside into an
existence of merely outer warmth. They said to themselves: I must
allow something to stream out of me, and leave it outside, so that I
am able to differentiate myself, so that my self-consciousness may be
lit by that external element. Thus they created another kingdom near
to them, created a mirrored image of their inner life in that outward
life. Thus it came about that when the life of Saturn had run its
course, the Spirits of Personality were not in a position to allow
Saturn to disappear. This would have happened if they had inhaled all
the fire; but they could not breathe in again that which they had
exhaled out of themselves. The field which had offered them the
possibility of gaining consciousness of self had to be left to
itself. No condition of Pralaya could have arisen for Saturn through
the Spirits of Personality alone. Higher spirits had to come into
action in order to dissolve Saturn so that a Pralaya, or state of
transition, of disappearance and of sleep might take place. Higher
spirits, the Thrones, of which we will only give the name at present,
had to dissolve all this, so that, as the life of Saturn reached its
end, the following process was carried out. The Spirits of
Personality had attained self-consciousness, had breathed in again a
part of the warmth, had realised the Self as the centre of their
being, and left behind them a lower kingdom. Now entered the kingdom
of the Thrones and dissolved that which had been left behind, and
Saturn entered into a sort of planetary night. Then arose the
planetary morning. Everything had to wake up again through laws which
we shall learn later. If the whole of Saturn had disappeared through
the inbreathing of the whole warmth, there could have been no
awakening, for the whole of Saturn would have been taken up into the
spiritual world. The Thrones could now for a season dissolve that
which the Spirits of Personality had left behind, those eggs of
warmth, but they could do so only for a time. These had to be given
over as it were to a lower existence for their further development.
Through this a planetary morning dawned; the second metamorphosis of
Saturn — the Sun condition!
What was it that actually came to life in this new Sun-condition? The
Spirits of Personality having now self-consciousness passed to it
from ancient Saturn after the planetary condition of sleep; they were
no longer required to pass through any similar condition to that
which they had already passed through: they had breathed out certain
eggs of warmth which had emerged again gradually, and differentiated
themselves from the general mass; the consequence was that the
Spirits of Personality were bound to that part of themselves which
they had formerly left behind. If they had taken everything with them
into the spiritual world they would not have been tied to the Sun,
they would not have needed to come down again but they had to do so,
because they had left behind them a part of their own essence, their
own being. They had to concern themselves with it; it drew them
downwards into a new planetary existence. This was the Destiny of
Saturn, world-Karma, cosmic Karma. Because the Spirits of Personality
on ancient Saturn had not taken everything into themselves, they had
prepared that Karma for themselves which obliged them to return. They
found down below as an heirloom from ancient Saturn what they
themselves had brought to pass. What happened when the Spirits of
Personality now took up the Karma which they had created? That
happened which I explained yesterday. The warmth divided itself, into
light on one side, and into smoke on the other. In the reborn Saturn
(the Sun) the eggs of warmth reappeared as gas air, or smoke, as we
have called it on one side; and on the other side appeared light,
because the warmth returned, so to speak, in a higher condition.
Inwardly in the transformed Saturn there was smoke, gas, air, and on
the other side light! If traveling through space you had now reached
the place where this ancient Sun was, you would have perceived from
afar that which had formed itself into light, because behind it was
smoke. If not the light itself, you would yet have perceived a
shining ball, just a you perceived a ball of warmth on Saturn. You
would have encountered a shining ball and if you had come in touch
with its surface, if you had penetrated that ball, you would have
felt not only warmth but wind, air, gas, streaming from all sides.
Thus your ball of warmth has transformed itself into a shining orb; a
sun has come into being. One is fully justified in calling it a sun;
the orbs that are suns to-day are now passing through this same
process, inwardly they are masses of streaming gas, and on the other
side they cause that gas to turn into light; they shed abroad light
through space. Thus, light was really first formed in the
transmutations of our earth, light appeared then for the first time.
In the warmth of ancient Saturn, the Spirits of Personality had first
the possibility of becoming human; in the light which now streamed
from the Sun those beings of the spiritual hierarchies, whom we call
Archangels, or Archangeloi could become human. In fact, if you could
have approached the Sun then, not only as a man of to-day but as a
clairvoyant man, you would not only have perceived light streaming
from it — not light only — but also the actions of the
Archangels would have streamed towards you with the light. But the
Archangels had brought with them something in exchange as it were.
The ancient Spirits of Personality had found on Saturn, pure warmth.
The Archangels, who were first able to become human on the Sun, found
there gas or smoke, also. What had they to do in order to secure a
footing on the Sun, to establish a dwelling-place there? They formed
their own souls, they wove their inner being, their soul-bodies out
of warmth into light, and they joined to these soul-bodies the gas
that was there, an external body. As you have to-day a body and a
soul, so the Archangels as men had an inner life of warmth which
rayed forth light, and an outer physical body which consisted of gas
and air. As the man of to-day has a body consisting of earth, water,
air and fire, so did those Archangels consist of air, and inwardly
they consisted of light. The fire element they, of course, brought
over with them: for this was the element which developed into smoke
and light. The whole of their being consisted of light, warmth or
fire and smoke or air. By means of the light they let their shining
force stream out into universal space; by means of fire they lived
their inner life, they experienced the comfort of warmth. Through the
life they led in their gas bodies they lived in the Sun planet
itself. They could now differentiate their own body of gas from the
general substance of the Sun planet. They jostled against each other,
and through this contact developed a kind of consciousness of self.
This self-consciousness Archangels could develop further and further
only because it pleased the Archangels better, if one may so express
it, to dwell in their bodies of gas and smoke, or at any rate to
leave them in the general Sun substance. For these Archangels during
alternating conditions of the ancient Sun, had inhaled all the gas,
all the smoke which was around them, they had taken it into
themselves. We have now a process of real breathing. You would have
felt those currents of gas on the ancient Sun as a process of
breathing. You would have found there certain conditions, when there
was an absolute stillness and you would have thought that the
Archangels had now breathed in all the gas. Then the Archangels began
to breathe it out again, inner currents began to flow and at the same
time light came forth. The interchange of conditions on the Sun was
as follows: the Archangels inhaled gas and stillness followed,
darkness also — it was the Suns night ... They exhaled and
the Sun was filled with streams of smoke, at the same time it sent
forth its light outwards — it was the Sun's day. Thus
there was a process of real breathing of the whole body of the Sun.
Exhalation: — the Sun's day, illumination of the
surrounding world. Inhalation: — the Sun's night,
oncoming darkness in the world. You have here the description also of
the difference between the ancient Sun and the sun of to-day. Our
present sun shines always, and darkness is produced only when some
object is placed in front of its light. This was different with the
ancient Sun. It had in itself the power to produce the interchanges
of light and darkness, illumination and obscurity, for that was its
process of exhalation and inhalation. Let us now vividly imagine how
one would see those happenings externally. Let us take the condition
of exhalation. Light is then shed around, but at the same time the
Sun is filled with smoke. These forms and currents of smoke are like
regularly recurrent pictures, they are imprinted on the substance of
the Sun with every exhalation. That which formerly was only
egg-shaped, the eggs of warmth, changed into all sorts of regular
images. Quite distinct smoke pictures with an inner life and inner
regularity were produced. If I may use the expression: the eggs were
hatched. That was really to what this solidifying process might be
compared. Just as the chicken comes out of the eggs, so were those
eggs of warmth split in two, and regular forms came out of them,
figures of smoke which were the densest bodies of the Archangels.
They inhabited the Sun in bodies of gas, smoke, and air. Thus they
moved about as men on the Sun. We have now the spiritual idea of a
fixed star, of a sun world, which is a sun through its own power,
which can produce the interchange of day and night by its own power.
Like an exhalation and inhalation it produces the interchange of
light and darkness. For at that time the Sun was a sort of fixed
star. Everything in our universal space that shines of itself sends
out into that space together with light the life of spiritual
messengers, the Archangels. What, then, have the primal Archai, the
Spirits of Personality, accomplished through their own evolution,
what have they established? It is mainly through them that the Sun
appeared. While otherwise only a Saturn existence would have appeared
in evolution», while otherwise only the Archai, who had filled
Saturn with warmth, would have existed, now, because the Archai had
surrendered the external eggs of warmth, Saturn was transformed into
Sun, on which the Archangels found it possible to pass through their
human stage. They were the heralds who announced to the world: ‘The
Primal Beginnings or the Spirits of Personality, were our
forerunners. As messengers, we proclaim to the universe in rays of
light, the former existence of Saturn, of warmth-filled Saturn. We
are the messengers, the heralds of the Archai.’ Angel means
Messenger, Archai means the Beginnings. The Archangels were nothing
else than the heralds of the deeds of the Primal Beginnings or Archai
of former times. Therefore, they are called Angels of the Beginnings,
‘Archai-Angels’ which, in English, has become Archangels.
These Archangels were the men of the Sun.
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