A Picture of Earth-Evolution in the Future
Rudolf
Steiner
A Lecture given at Dornach on May 13, 1921
[From a shorthand report, unrevised by the lecturer.
Published by permission of the Rudolf Steiner-Nachlassverwaltung, Dornach,
Switzerland.]
This is a time when a great deal of attention, ranging
from serious science to science-fiction, is being devoted to “outer space.”
There is speculation on various levels about visitants from other worlds.
Behind it all there may be an instinctive feeling — true in itself though often
distorted in expression — that the apparent isolation of man on earth is not
final; that man is not alone in the universe. We are therefore reprinting here
a lecture (first published in English in the quarterly, “Anthroposophy,” for
Easter, 1933, and long out of print) in which Rudolf Steiner spoke, briefly and
enigmatically, of the need to recognise and welcome certain beings, “not of the
human order,” who since the seventies of the last century have been descending
from cosmic spheres into the realm of earth-existence, bringing with them “the
substance and content of Spiritual Science.” — The Editors.
THE lectures I have given recently on the nature of
colours [Three lectures on
Das Wesen der Farben,
given at Dornach on May 6 – 8, 1921. Published in English as a book
entitled “Colour” (new edition in preparation).] may have helped to show you that we can begin to
understand man in his real being only when we relate him to the whole
universe. If we ask: What is man in his true nature? — then
we must learn to look upwards from the Earth to what is beyond the Earth. This
is a capacity of which our own time particularly stands in need. The human
intellect has become more and more shadowy, and as a result of the developments
which took place in the nineteenth century, it is no longer rooted in reality.
This unmistakably indicates that it is high time for man to discover how he can
receive new impulses into his life of soul, and we will turn our attention
today to certain great cosmic events with which we are already familiar from
other points of view.
Most of you will have read the book
An Outline of Occult Science,
and will have realised that one of the great events in earthly
evolution was the separation of the moon from the earth. The moon as we see
today, shining towards us from cosmic space, was once united with the earth. It
then separated from the earth and now circles around it as its satellite. We
know what incisive changes in the whole sweep of evolution are connected with
this separation of the moon from the earth. We must go far back in time, before
the Atlantean deluge, to find the epoch when the moon departed from the body of
the earth.
Today we will confine our attention to what came to pass on earth in
connection with the being of man, and with the kingdoms of Nature around him,
as a consequence of the separation of the moon from the earth. From the
lectures on colours we have learnt that minerals — that is to say, the coloured
mineral substances — actually derive their different hues from this
relationship of the moon to the earth. Recognition of this fact enables us to
make these cosmic events part of an artistic conception of existence. But other
matters of the greatest significance come into consideration here. Man's being
is the product of preceding metamorphoses of earth-existence — namely, the
Saturn, Sun and Moon periods of evolution, during which no mineral kingdom
existed. The mineral kingdom as we know it today came into being for the first
time during the Earth period. Mineral substance, therefore, became part of
man's being only during this Earth period. During the stages of Saturn, old
Sun and old Moon, man had nothing mineral within him at all. Nor was his
constitution adapted for existence upon the earth. By his very nature he was a
being of the cosmos. Before the separation of the moon, and before the mineral
substances with their many colours came into being, man was not adapted for
earthly existence.
Let me put it in this way. It was a very real question for
the Spiritual Beings who guide earthly evolution as to what must happen to man.
Should he be sent down to the earth or be left to pass his existence in a realm
beyond the earth? It can be said with truth that the separation of the moon,
with the consequent changes in the earth and in the being of man, was the
outcome of a decision on the part of the Spiritual Beings who guide and direct
the evolution of humanity. It was because this coarse moon-substance was sent
out of the earth that man's organism developed in such a way as to make it
possible for him to become an earthly being. Through this event — through the
separation of the moon and the incorporation of the mineral kingdom into the
earth — man has become an earthly being, existing in the sphere of earthly
gravity. Without earthly gravity, he could never have become a being capable of
freedom. Before the separation of the moon he was not, in the real sense a
personality. He was able to become a personality because of the concentration
of the forces that were to build his body. And this concentration of forces was
the result of the separation of the moon and the incorporation of the mineral
kingdom into earthly existence. Man became a personality, and freedom was
henceforward placed within his reach.
The evolution of man upon the earth since
the separation of the moon has proceeded through many different stages. And we
may say that if nothing else had happened except this departure of the moon
from the earth, it would still have been possible for man to draw out of his
organism, out of his body and soul, pictures such as arose in ancient,
clairvoyant vision. Nor was man deprived of this faculty by the separation of
the moon. He still envisaged the world in pictures, and if nothing else had
happened, he would be living in a world of pictures to this day. But evolution
went on. Man did not remain fettered to the earth. He received an impulse for
evolution in the other direction — an impulse which actually reached its climax
in the nineteenth century.
Even when long ages ago the human being, as ‘metabolic
man,’ became subject to the force of earthly gravity, he was adapted as ‘head
man’ for a cosmic existence. In effect, the intellect began to evolve. The old
clairvoyant pictures densified into the forms of intellectual consciousness, as
it was until the epoch of the fourth century after Christ. It was then for the
first time that the human intellect began to grow shadowy. This process has
been increasingly rapid since the fifteenth century, and today, although the
intellect is an altogether spiritual faculty in man, its existence is not
rooted in reality. It has only a picture-existence. When the man of today
thinks merely with his intellect and faculty of reason, his thoughts are not
rooted in reality at all. More and more they move about in a shadowy existence
which reached its climax during the nineteenth century. And today man is
altogether devoid of the sense for reality. He lives within a spiritual
element, but is at the same time a materialist. His thoughts — which are spiritual
but yet merely shadow-thoughts — are directed entirely to material existence.
Thus the second great process or event was that man became more spiritual. But
the spiritual substance once derived from matter no longer ensouls him. His
nature has become more spiritual, but with his spiritual faculties he thinks
only about material existence.
You know that the moon will one day
reunite with the earth. By the astronomers and geologists, who live in a world
of abstractions, this reunion of the moon with the earth is placed thousands
and thousands of years ahead. But this is mere illusion. In reality it is by no
means so very far distant. Humanity as such is becoming younger and younger.
Human beings are coming to a point when their development of body and soul will
proceed only up to a certain age in life. At the time of the death of Christ,
of the Event of Golgotha, human beings in general were capable of development
in body and in soul until the 33rd year of life. Today this development is
possible until the 27th year. In the fourth millennium a time will come when
men will be capable of development only until the 21st year. In the seventh
millennium the bodily nature will be capable of development only until the 14th
year of life. Women will then become barren. An entirely different form of
earthly life will ensue. This is the epoch when the moon will again approach
the earth and become part of it.
It is high time for man to turn his attention
to such mighty events of the realm of existence beyond the earth. He must not
go on dreaming, vaguely and in the abstract, of some form of Divinity, but he
must begin to be alive to the great happenings that are connected with his
evolution. He must know what it means to say that the moon once left the earth
and will enter the earth again.
Just as the separation of the moon was a
decisive event, so too will be its re-entry. It is true that as human beings we
shall still be inhabiting the earth, although birth will no longer take place
in the ordinary way. We shall be connected with the earth by other means than
through birth. We shall, however, have evolved in a certain respect by that
time. And we must learn to connect what is happening today — I mean the fact
that the intellect is becoming more and more shadowy — with what will one day
be a great event in earthly evolution — the re-entry of the moon into the
substance of the earth.
If the intellect continues to become even
more spectral than it is already, if men never resolve to receive into their
being what can now flow to them from spiritual worlds, then they will
inevitably be absorbed into the shadowy grey-ness of their intellectual life.
What is this shadowy intellect? It cannot
understand the real nature and being of man. The mineral world is the only
realm which the shadowy human intellect is to a certain degree capable of
understanding. Even the life of the plant remains enigmatical; still more so
the life of the animal; while human life is altogether beyond the grasp of the
mind. And so man goes on his way, evolving pictures of existence which in
reality are nothing but a great world-question. His intellect cannot begin to
grasp the real nature of plant or animal, and least of all that of the human
being. This state of things will continue if man fails to listen to what is
being given to him in the form of new Imaginations, in which cosmic existence
is pictured to him. The living wisdom that Spiritual Science is able to impart
must be received into his shadowy, intellectual concepts and thoughts, for only
so can the shadow-pictures of the intellect be quickened to life.
This quickening to life of the shadow-pictures of the intellect is not only a human
but a cosmic event. You will remember the passage in the book
Occult Science
dealing with the time when the human souls ascended to the planets and
afterwards descended once more to earth-existence. I spoke of how the Mars-men,
the Jupiter-men and the others descended again to earth. Now an event of great
significance came to pass at the end of the seventies of last century. It is an
event that can be described only in the light of facts which are revealed to us
in the spiritual world. Whereas in the days of old Atlantis human beings came
down to the earth from Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, and so on — that is to say, beings
of soul were drawn into the realm of earth-existence — since the end of the
seventies of last century, other Beings — not of the human order — have been
descending to the earth for the purposes of their further development. From
cosmic realms beyond the earth they come down to the earth and enter into a
definite relationship with human beings. Since the eighties of the nineteenth
century, super-earthly Beings have been seeking to enter the sphere of
earth-existence. Just as the Vulcan-men were the last to come down to the earth
so now Vulcan Beings are actually coming into the realm of earthly existence.
Super-earthly Beings are already here, and the fact that we are able to have a
connected body of Spiritual Science at all today is due to the circumstance
that Beings from beyond the earth are bringing the messages from the spiritual
world down into earth-existence.
But, speaking generally, what is the
attitude adopted by the human race? The human race is behaving, if I may put it
so very shabbily to these Beings who are appearing from the cosmos and coming
down — slowly and by degrees, it is true — to the earth. The human race does not
concern itself with them; it ignores their existence. And it is this which will
plunge the earth into tragic conditions, for in the course of the next
centuries more and more Spiritual Beings will be among us — Beings whose
language we ought to understand. And this is possible only if we try to grasp
what comes from them: namely, the substance and content of Spiritual Science.
They want to give it to us and they want us to act in the sense of Spiritual
Science. Their desire is that Spiritual Science shall be translated into social
behaviour and action on the earth.
I repeat, then, that since the last third of
the nineteenth century Spiritual Beings from the cosmos have been coming into
our own sphere of existence. Their home is the sphere lying between the moon
and Mercury, but they are already pressing forward into the realm of
earth-existence and seeking to gain a foothold there. And they will be able to
find it if human beings are imbued with the thought of their existence. This
can also be expressed as I expressed it just now, by saying that our shadowy
intellect must be quickened to life by the pictures of Spiritual Science. We
are speaking of concrete fact when we say: Spiritual Beings are seeking to come
down into earth-existence and ought to be willingly received. Catastrophe after
catastrophe must ensue, and earthly life will fall at length into social chaos,
if opposition is maintained in human existence to the advent of these Beings.
They desire nothing else than to be the advance-guards of what will happen to
earth-existence when the moon is once again united with the earth.
Today people may consider it comparatively harmless to elaborate only those automatic,
lifeless thoughts which arise in connection with the mineral world and the
mineral nature of plant, animal and man. Materialists revel in such thoughts
which are — well — thoughts and nothing more. But try to imagine what will
happen if men go on unfolding no other kinds of thoughts until the time is
reached in the eighth millennium for the moon-existence to unite again with the
earth. These Beings of whom I have spoken will gradually come down to the
earth. Vulcan Beings, ‘Supermen’ of Vulcan, ‘Supermen’ of Venus, of Mercury, of
the Sun, will unite with this earth-existence. But if human beings persist in
nothing but opposition to them, earth-existence will pass over into chaos in
the course of the next few thousand years.
It will be quite possible for the
men of earth, if they so wish, to develop a more and more automatic form of
intellect — but that can also happen amid conditions of barbarism. Full and
complete manhood, however, cannot come to expression in such a form of
intellect, and men will have no relationship to the Beings who would fain come
towards them in earth-existence. And all those Beings of whom men have such an
erroneous conception because the shadowy intellect can only grasp the mineral
nature, the crudely material nature in the minerals, plants and animals, nay
even in the human kingdom itself — all these thoughts which have no reality
will in a trice become substantial realities when the moon unites again with
the earth. And from the earth there will spring forth a terrible brood of
beings, a brood of automata of an order of existence lying between the mineral
and the plant kingdoms, and possessed of an overwhelming power of intellect.
This swarm will seize upon the earth, will spread over the earth like a network
of ghastly, spider-like creatures, of an order lower than that of
plant-existence, but possessed of overpowering wisdom. These spidery creatures
will be all interlocked with one another, and in their outward movements they
will imitate the thoughts that men have spun out of the shadowy intellect that
has not allowed itself to be quickened by the new form of Imaginative Knowledge
by Spiritual Science. All the thoughts that lack substance and reality will
then be endowed with being.
The earth will be surrounded — as it is now with
air and as it sometimes is with swarms of locusts — with a brood of terrible
spider-like creatures, half-mineral, half-plant, interweaving with masterly
intelligence, it is true, but with intensely evil intent. And in so far as man
has not allowed his shadowy intellectual concepts to be quickened to life, his
existence will be united not with the Beings who have been trying to descend
since the last third of the nineteenth century, but with this ghastly brood of half-mineral,
half-plantlike creatures. He will have to live together with these spider-like
creatures and to continue his cosmic existence within the order of evolution
into which this brood will then enter.
This is a destiny that is very
emphatically part of human evolution upon the earth, and it is quite well known
today by many of those who try to hold humanity back from the knowledge of
Spiritual Science. For there are men who are actually conscious allies of this
process of the entanglement of earth-existence. We must no longer allow
ourselves to be shocked by descriptions of this kind. Such facts are the
background of what is often said today by people who out of old traditions
still have some consciousness of these things and who then see fit to surround
them with a veil of mystery. But it is not right any longer for the process of
the earthly evolution of humanity to be veiled in mystery. However great the
resistance, these things must be said, for, as I constantly repeat, the
acceptance or rejection of spiritual-scientific knowledge is a grave matter for
all mankind.
I have been speaking today of a matter upon which we cannot form a
lukewarm judgment, for it is part and parcel of the very texture of cosmic
existence. The issue at stake is whether human beings will resolve in the
present epoch to make themselves worthy to receive what the good Spirits who
want to unite with men are bringing down from the cosmos, or whether men intend
to seek their future cosmic existence within the tangled, spider-brood of their
own shadowy thoughts. It is not enough today to speak in abstract terms of the
need for Spiritual Science. The only thing to do is actually to show how
thoughts become realities. Dreadfully abstract theories are hurled at men
today, such, for example, as “Thoughts become things,” or similar phrases.
Abstract statements of this kind altogether fail to convey the full and
concrete reality. And the concrete reality is that the intellectual thoughts
evolved inwardly by men today will in time to come creep over the earth like a
spider's web wherein human beings will be enmeshed, if they will not reach out
to a world lying beyond and above their shadowy thoughts and concepts.
We must learn to take in deepest earnestness such matters as were indicated at the
conclusion of my lectures on the nature of colours, when I said that the
science of colour must be lifted out of the realm of abstract physics into a
region where the creative fantasy and feeling of the artist who understands the
real nature of colour go hand-in-hand with a perception of the world illumined
by Spiritual Science. We have seen how the nature of colour can be understood,
how that which modern physics, with its unimaginative charts, casts down into
the Ahrimanic world, can be lifted into the sphere of art, so that there can be
established a theory of colours — remote, it is true, from the tenets of modern
science, but able to provide a true foundation for artistic creation, if man
will only receive it into his being.
And there is another thought, too, that
must be taken very seriously. What do we find today all over the civilised
world? Young students go into the hospitals or to universities to study
science, and the constitution of the human being is explained to them. By
studying the corpse they learn about the bones and the rest of the organism. By
a series of abstract thoughts they are supposed to be able to acquaint
themselves with the nature of man's being. But in this way it is only possible
to learn something about the mineral part of the human organism. With this kind
of science we can only learn about the part of man's being which has a
significance from the time of the separation of the moon until its return, when
the shadowy thoughts of modern times will become spidery creatures having a
concrete existence.
A form of knowledge must develop which produces quite a
different conception of the being of man, and it can be developed only by
raising science to the level of artistic perception. We shall realise then that
science as it is today is capable of grasping only the mineral nature, whether
in the mineral kingdom itself or in the kingdoms of plant, animal and man. Even
when applied to the plant kingdom, science must become a form of art, and still
more so in the case of the animal kingdom. To think that the form and structure
of an animal can be understood by the means employed by anatomists and
physiologists is nonsense. And so long as we fail to realise that it is
nonsense, the shadowy intellect cannot be transformed into a living, spiritual
comprehension of the world. What is taught to young students today in so
abstract a form in the universities must be transformed and must lead to a
really artistic conception of the world. For the world of Nature itself creates
as an artist. And until we realise that Nature is a world of creative art which
can be understood only through artistic feeling, no healing will come into our
picture of the world.
In the torture-chambers of mediaeval castles, people were
shut into what was called the ‘iron virgin,’ where they were slowly spiked with
iron teeth. This was a physical and more tangible procedure than that to which
students in our day have to submit when they are taught anatomy and physiology
and are told that in this way they are acquiring knowledge of the nature of man
— but fundamentally it is the same kind of procedure. All that can be
understood of the nature of man by such methods derives from an attitude of
mind which is not unlike the attitude of those who were not averse from
applying tortures in the Middle Ages. Students learn about the human being as
he is when he has been dismembered — they are taught only about the mineral
structure in man, about that part of his being which will one day be woven into
the network of spider-like creatures extending over the earth.
It is a hard destiny that power should lie in the hands of men who regard the truest
thoughts as absurdities and who scorn the impulses that are most inwardly and
intimately bound up with the well-being of human evolution, with the whole
mission of humanity in the world. It is a tragic state of things and we dare
not shut our eyes to it. For it is only by realising the depth of such a
tragedy that men will be brought to the point of resolving, each in his own
place, to help the shadowy intellect to admit the spiritual world that is
coming down from above in order that this intellect may be made fit for the
conditions of future times. It is not right for the shadowy intellect to be
driven down into an order of existence lower than that of the plants, into the
brood of spidery creatures that will spread over the earth. Man's being needs
to have reached a higher level of existence when, in the eighth millennium,
women will become barren and the moon will unite once again with the earth. The
earthly must then remain behind, with man directing and controlling it from
outside like an object which he need not carry over with him into cosmic
existence. Man must so prepare himself that he need not be involved in what
must inevitably develop upon the surface of the earth in this way.
From pre-earthly existence man has descended to this earthly life. His birth from
woman began with the departure of the moon, but this physical form of birth is
only a passing episode in the great sweep of cosmic evolution and will be
replaced by another. It is the phase which was destined to bring to man the
feeling and consciousness of freedom, the self-completeness of individuality
and personality. It is a phase by no means to be undervalued. It was necessary
in the whole cosmic process, but it must not remain forever unchanged. Man must
not give way to the easy course of assuming the existence of an abstract God,
but bring himself to look concretely at things that are connected with his
evolution. For his being of soul-and-spirit can only be inwardly stimulated
when he really understands the nature of the concrete realities connected with
the great epoch towards which his successive earthly lives are leading him.
That is what a true Spiritual Science tells us today. The human will is
threatened with being deprived of spiritual impulses and with becoming involved
in the spidery web that will creep over the earth. There are men in existence
who imagine that they will gain their ends by promoting their own spiritual development
and leaving the rest of their fellow-beings in a state of ignorance. But the
vast majority live in complete unawareness of the terrible destiny that awaits
them if they lend themselves to what an ancient form of spiritual knowledge
called the “sixteen paths to corruption.” For just as there are many ways in
which the shadowy intellect may be directed to the impulses and knowledge
coming from the spiritual world, so naturally there are many ways in which
varieties of the shadowy intellect will be able to unite with the spider-beings
who will spin their web over the earth in times to come. Intellect will then be
objectivised in the very limbs and tentacles of these spidery creatures, who in
all their wonderful inter-weavings and caduceus-like convolutions will present
an amazing network of intricate forms.
It is only by developing an inner
understanding for what is truly artistic that man will be able to understand
the realm that is higher than mineral existence — that realm of which we see an
expression in the actual shaping and form of the surfaces of things in the
world.
Goethe's theory of metamorphosis was a
most significant discovery. The pedants of his day regarded it as dilettantism,
and the same opinion prevails today. But in Goethe, clarity of insight and
intelligence was combined with a faculty of vision which perceived Nature
herself as an active expression of artistic creation. In connection with the
animal world, Goethe only reached the point of applying this principle of
metamorphosis to the forms of the vertebras and cranial bones. But the process
whereby the forms of a previous existence are transformed, whereby the body of
the earlier life is transformed into the head of the subsequent life — it is
only by an inner understanding of this wonderfully artistic transformation of
the radial bones into the spherical that we can truly perceive the difference
between the head and the rest of the human structure. Without this insight we
cannot perceive the inner, organic connection between the head and the rest of
the human body.
But this is a form of art which is at the same time science.
Whenever science fails to become art, it degenerates into sophistry a form of
knowledge that hurls mankind into calamity so far as his cosmic existence is
concerned. We see, therefore, how a true Spiritual Science points to the
necessity for artistic insight and perception. This faculty was already alive
in Goethe's soul and comes to expression in his hymn in prose, entitled Nature,
written about the year 1780, and beginning: “Nature! We are surrounded and
embraced by her ...” The ideas are woven together so wonderfully that the hymn
is like the expression of a yearning to receive the Spirit from the cosmic All.
It can be said with truth that the
development of the thoughts contained in Goethe's hymn to Nature would provide
a dwelling-place for the Beings who would fain come down from the cosmos to the
earth. But the barren conceptions of physiology and biology, the systematising
of plant-life and the theories that were evolved during the nineteenth century
— all the thoughts which, as I showed in the lectures on colour, have really
nothing to do with the true nature of the plants — can awaken no real
knowledge, nor can they get anywhere near the being of man. Hence the body of
knowledge that is regarded today as science is essentially a product of
Ahriman, leading man on towards earthly destruction and preventing him from
entering the sphere which the Beings from beyond the earth have been trying to
place within his reach since the last third of the nineteenth century.
To cultivate Spiritual Science is no abstract pursuit. To cultivate Spiritual
Science means to open the doors to those influences from beyond the earth which
have been seeking to come down to the earth since the last third of the
nineteenth century. The cultivation of Spiritual Science is in very truth a
cosmic event of which we ought to be fully conscious.
And so we survey the whole span of time
from the separation until the return of the moon. The moon which, as we say,
reflects the sunlight back to us, is in truth deeply connected with our
existence. It separated itself from the earth in order that man might become a
free being. But this period of time must be utilised by man in such a way that
he does not prepare the material which, with the re-entry of the moon into the
earth-sphere, would combine with the moon-substance to produce that new kingdom
of which I have tried to give you a graphic picture.
Now and then there arises
in human beings of our time a kind of foreboding of what will come about in the
future. I do not know what meaning has been read into the chapter in
Thus Spake Zarathustra,
where Nietzsche writes of the ‘ugliest man’ in the ‘valley of
death.’ It is a tragic and moving passage. Nietzsche, of course, had no
concrete perception of the valley of death into which existence will be
transformed when the spidery brood of which I have spoken spreads over the
earth. Nevertheless, in the picture of this valley of death in Nietzsche's imagination
there was a subconscious vision of the future, and within this valley of death
he placed the figure of the ‘ugliest man.’ It was a kind of foreboding of what
will happen if men continue to cultivate shadowy thoughts. For their destiny
then will be that in hideous shape they will be caught up by the forces of the
moon-existence as it comes down into the sphere of the earth and will become one
with the brood of spidery creatures of which I have been speaking.
What purpose
would be served by keeping these things secret today, as many people desire? To
keep them secret would be to throw sand into the eyes of men. Much of what is
spread over the world today under the name of spiritual teaching is nothing but
a process of throwing sand into men's eyes so that no single event in history
can be understood for what it really is. How many people realise today that
events of fundamental and incisive importance are taking place? I have already
spoken of these things. But how few are prepared really to enter into them!
People prefer to shut their eyes to what is happening and to think that, after
all, the events are not really of such great significance. Nevertheless, the
signs of the times are unmistakable and must be understood.
This was what I wished to say in regard to the way in which the being of man upon the
earth is connected with the cosmos.