Lecture IV
The Hierarchies and the Nature of the Rainbow
When I wrote my
Occult Science,
I was compelled to bring the
evolution of the earth somewhat into line with present-day ideas. In
the twelfth and thirteenth centuries one could have put it
differently. For instance, in a certain chapter of this
Occult Science
the following might then have been found. One would have
spoken otherwise of those beings whom one can describe as the beings
of the first hierarchy: Seraphim, Cherubim, Thrones. One would have
called the Seraphim those beings who make no differentiation between
subject and object, who would not say: there are objects outside
myself, but: the world is, and I am the world and the world is
I — who know of their own existence only by means of an experience,
of which man has a weak idea when some experience carries him away in
glowing rapture.
It is in fact sometimes difficult to explain to modern people what a
glowing rapture is, for it was even understood better at the beginning
of the nineteenth century than it is now. It still happened then that
some poem or other, by this or that poet, was read, and the people
acted through rapture — forgive my saying so, but it was so — as
if they were mad! So much were they moved, so much were they suffused
with warmth.
Nowadays people are frozen just when one thinks they should be
enraptured. And this rapture of the soul — which was experienced
particularly in Central and Eastern Europe, — if raised as a unifying
element into the consciousness gives one an idea of the inner life of
the Seraphim.
And we have to imagine the consciousness-element of the Cherubim as a
completely purified element in the consciousness, full of light, so
that thought becomes directly light, and illumines everything; and the
element of the Thrones as bearing up the world in grace.
One would then have said: the choir of Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones
act together, in such a way that the thrones constitute a nucleus, and
the Cherubim radiate their own luminous nature from it. The Seraphim
cover the whole in a mantle of rapture, which streams out into all
space.
But these are all beings: in the midst of the Thrones, round them the
Cherubim, and in the periphery, the Seraphim. They are beings which
mutually interplay and act and think and will and feel. And if a being
possessing the necessary susceptibility had traveled through space
where the thrones and Cherubim and Seraphim had thus formed a center,
he would have felt warmth in different degrees and in different
places; now higher, now lower warmth, but yet in a spiritual and
psychic way; in such a way, however, that the psychic experience is at
the same time a physical experience in our senses. Thus, when the
being feels the warmth psychically, there really is present what you
feel when you are in a heated room.
Such a union of the begins of the First Hierarchy did exist once upon
a time in the universe. And this formed the system and existence of
the “Saturnian Age.” Warmth is just the expression of these
beings. The warmth is nothing in itself, it is only the evidence that
these beings exist.
I should like to use a simile here which may perhaps help as an
explanation. Suppose you are fond of somebody, you find his presence
warms you. Suppose further there comes another man who has no heart at
all and says: that person doesn't interest me in the least; I am
interested only in the warmth which he spreads around. He does not say
he is interested in the warmth the other sheds, but that nothing but
the warmth interests him. He is talking nonsense, of course, for when
the person who radiates warmth has gone, the warmth has gone also. It
is there only when the person is there. In itself it is nothing. The
person must be there for the warmth to be there.
Thus Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones must be there; otherwise warmth is
not there either. It is merely the revelation of the Seraphim,
Cherubim and Thrones.
Now at the time of which I speak, what I have just described to you
did in actual fact exist. When one spoke of the element of warmth one
was understood to mean really Cherubim, Seraphim and Thrones. That was
the Saturnian Age.
Then one went further and said that only this highest hierarchy, the
Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones, has the might and the power to produce
something of this kind in the Cosmos. And only by reason of the fact
that this was done at the beginning of a terrestrial creation could
evolution proceed. The Sun, as it were, of the Seraphim, Cherubim and
Thrones was able to a certain extent to direct the course of it. And
this happened in such a way that the Beings produced by the Seraphim,
Cherubim and Thrones, the Beings of the Second Hierarchy — the
Kyriotetes, Exusiai and Dynamis — now surged into this space
created and warmed in this Saturnian life by the Seraphim, Cherubim
and Thrones. Thus the younger — of course, the cosmically
younger — Beings entered in; and theirs was the next influence.
Whereas the Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones revealed themselves in the
element of warmth, the Beings of the Second Hierarchy were seen in the
element of light. The Saturnian element is dark, but warm, and within
the dark and gloomy world of the Saturnian existence arises light,
precisely the thing that can appear through the sons of the Second
Hierarchy , through the Exusiai, Dynamis and Kyriotetes.
This is the case because the entry of the Second Hierarchy represents an inward illumination, which is connected with a densification of warmth. Air comes forth from the pure warmth-element, and in the revelation of the light we have the entry of the Second Hierarchy.
But you must get this clear: Actually Beings press in. Light is
present for a Being with the necessary powers of perception. Light is
what distinguishes the paths of these Beings. Under certain
circumstances when light appears somewhere, there also appears shadow,
darkness, dark shadow. So shadow also arose through the entry of the
Second Hierarchy in the form of light. What was this shadow? The air.
And actually till the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries it was known
what the air is. Today one knows only that the air consists of oxygen
and nitrogen, etc. which means no more than if one says, for instance,
that a watch is made of glass and silver — whereby nothing whatever
is said about the watch. Similarly nothing whatever is said about the
air as a cosmic phenomenon when you say it consists of oxygen and
nitrogen. But a great deal is said if one knows that from the cosmic
point of view air is the shadow of the light. So that with the entry
of the Second Hierarchy into the Saturnian warmth, one actually has in
fact the entry of light, and its shadow, air. And where that happens
is Sun. In the thirteenth and twelfth centuries one would really have
had to talk in this manner.
The further stages of development are now conducted by the sons of the
Third Hierarchy, the Archai, Archangels and Angels. These Beings bring
into the luminous element with its shadow of air, introduced by the
Second Hierarchy, another element resembling our desire, our urge to
acquire something, our longing to have something.
Hence it came about that, let us say, an Archai or Archangel-Being
entered and found an element of light, or rather, a place of light. In
this place it felt, by reason of its sensitiveness to light, the urge
towards and desire for darkness. The Angel-Being carried the light
into the darkness, or an Angel-Being carried the darkness into the
light. These Beings became the intermediaries, the messengers between
light and darkness.
The result was that what formerly shone only in light, an trailed
behind it, its shadow, the somber, airy darkness, now began to gleam
in all colours, that light appeared in darkness, and darkness in light.
It was the Third Hierarchy which conjured forth colour from out of
light and darkness.
Observe, you have here something as it were historically documented to
put before your souls. In the time of Aristotle one still
knew — supposing one had pondered within the Mysteries on the
origin of colours — that the Beings of the Third Hierarchy had to do
with this. Wherefore Aristotle expressed in his Colour-Harmony that
colour was a combined effect of Light and Darkness. But this spiritual
element was lost — that the First Hierarchy was responsible for
warmth, the Second for light and its shadow, the air, and the Third or
the shining forth of colour in a world continuity. And there remained
nothing but the unfortunate Newtonian theory of Colour, over which the
initiated have smiled up to the eighteenth century, and which then
became an article of faith with those who were just expert physicists.
In order to speak in the sense of this Newtonian theory, it is really
necessary for one to have no knowledge at all of the spiritual world.
And if one is still inwardly spurred by the spiritual world, as was
the case with Goethe, one is utterly opposed to it. One states what is
correct as Goethe did, then one storms dreadfully. Goethe was never so
furious as on the occasion when he castigated Newton; he was simply
furious about the wretched nonsense.
We cannot understand such things today, simply because anyone who does
not recognize the Newtonian teaching concerning colour is looked upon
by the physicists as a fool. But it was not really the case that
Goethe stood quite alone in his own time. He alone uttered these
things, but even at the end of the eighteenth century the learned knew
perfectly well that the origin of colour lay in the spiritual world.
Air is the shadow of light. Just as when light radiates and, under
certain circumstances, gives rise to deep shadow, so, if colour is
present, and this colour works as a reality in the airy element, not
merely as a reflection, not merely as a reflex-colour, but as a
Reality; then the fluid, watery element arises from out of the real
colour element. As air is the shadow of light, in cosmic thought, so
water is the reflection, the creation of the element of colour in the
Cosmos.
You will say you don't understand this. But just try to grasp the real
meaning of colour. Red — well — do you believe that red in its
real nature is only the neutral surface on generally regards it?
Surely Red is something which attacks one. I have often discussed it.
Red makes one want to run away; it pushes one back. Violet-blue one
wants to pursue; it continually evades one, and gets ever darker and
darker. Everything lives in colours. They are a world of their own, and
the psychic element feels in the colour-world the necessity for
movement, if it follows colours with psychic experience.
Today man stares at the rainbow. If one looks at it with the slightest
imagination, one sees elemental beings active in it. They are revealed
in remarkable phenomena. In the yellow certain of them are seen
continually emerging from the rainbow, and moving across to the green.
The moment they reach the underneath of the green, they are attracted
to and disappear in it, to emerge on the other side. The whole rainbow
reveals to an imaginative observer an outpouring and a disappearance
of the spiritual. It reveals in fact something like a spiritual waltz.
At the same time one notices that as these spiritual beings emerge in
red-yellow, they do it with an extraordinary apprehension; and as they
enter into the blue-violet, they do it with an unconquerable courage.
When you look at the red-yellow, you see streams of fear, and when you
look at the blue-violet you have the feeling that there is the seat of
all courage and valor.
Now imagine we have the rainbow in section. Then these being emerge in
the red-yellow and disappear in the blue-violet; here apprehension,
here courage, which disappears again. There the rainbow becomes dense
and you can imagine the watery element arises from it. Spiritual
beings exist in this watery element which are really a kind of copy of
the beings of the Third Hierarchy.
One can say that in approaching the learned men of the eleventh,
twelfth and thirteenth centuries, one must understand such things in
this way. You cannot understand Albertus Magnus if you read him with
modern knowledge, you must read him with the knowledge that such
spiritual things were a reality to him and then only will you
understand the meaning of his words and expressions.
In this way therefore air and water appear as a reflection of the
Hierarchies. The Second Hierarchy enters in the form of light, the
Third in the form of colour. But in order to enable this to be
established, the lunar existence is created.
And now comes the Fourth Hierarchy. I am speaking now with the thought
of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Now the Fourth Hierarchy. We
never speak of it; but in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries one
spoke freely of it. What is this Fourth Hierarchy? It is man himself.
But formerly one did not understand by it the remarkably odd being
with two legs and the tendency to decay that wanders about the world
now; for then the human being of the present day appeared to the
scholar as an unusual kind of being. They spoke of primeval man before
the Fall, who existed in such a form as to have as much power over the
earth as Angeloi, Archangeloi and so on, had over the lunar existence;
the Second Hierarchy over the solar existence; the First Hierarchy
over the Saturnian existence. They spoke of man in his original
terrestrial existence, and as the Fourth Hierarchy. And with this
Fourth Hierarchy came — as a gift form the higher Hierarchies of
something they first possessed, and preserved, and did not themselves
require — Life. And life came into the colourful world which
I have been sketchily describing to you.
You will ask — But didn't things live before this? The answer you
can learn from man himself. Your ego and your astral body have not
life, but they exist all the same. The spiritual, the soul, does not
require life. Life begins only with your etheric body; and this is
something in the nature of an outer wrapping. It is thus that life
appears only after the lunar existence, with the terrestrial
existence, in that stage of evolution which belongs to our earth. The
iridescent world became alive. It is not only then that Angeloi,
Archangeloi, etc., felt a desire to bring light into darkness and
darkness into light and so called forth the play of colours in the
planets, but also they desired to experience this play of colour
inwardly, and make it inward; to feel weakness and lassitude when
darkness inwardly dominates over light, and activity when light
dominates over darkness. For what happens when you r un? When you run
it means that light dominates over the darkness in you; when you sit
and are idle, the reverse happens. It is the effect of colour in the
soul, the effect of colour iridescence. The iridescence of colour,
permeated and shot with life, appeared with the coming of man, the
Fourth Hierarchy. And at this moment of cosmic growth the forces which
became active in the iridescence of colour began to form outlines.
Life, which rounded off, smoothed and shaped the colours, called forth
the hard crystal form; and we are in the terrestrial epoch.
Such things as I have now explained to you were really the axioms of
those medieval alchemists, occultists, Rosicrucians, etc., who, though
scarcely mentioned today in history, flourished from the ninth and
tenth up to the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and whose
stragglers, always regarded as oddities, existed into the eighteenth
century and even into the beginning of the nineteenth. Only then were
these things entirely covered up. The philosophical attitude to life
of the time led to the following phenomenon:
Suppose I have here a human being. I cease to have any interest in
him, merely take off his clothes and hang them on a clothes-dummy with
a knob at the top like a head, and thereafter take no more interest in
the human being. I say to myself further: That is the human being,
what does it matter to me that anything can be put into these clothes;
the dummy is, as far as I am concerned, the human being. So it was
with the elements of Nature. People are no longer interested that
behind warmth of fire is the First Hierarchy, behind light and air is
the Second, behind the so-called chemical ether, colour-ether, etc. and
water is the Third, behind life and the earth is the Fourth, or Man.
Out with the clothes-horse and hang the clothes on it! That is the
first Act. The second begins then with the school of Kant!~ Here
begins Kantianism, here one begins, having the clothes-horse with the
clothes on it, to philosophize concerning what “the thing in
itself” of these clothes might be. And the conclusion is that one
cannot recognize “the thing in itself” of the clothes. Very
perspicacious! Naturally, if you have removed the man first, you can
philosophize about the clothes, and this leads to a very pretty
speculation: the clothes-horse is there all right, and the clothes
hanging on it, so one speculates either in the Kantian
fashion — one cannot recognize “the thing in
itself” — or in the manner of Helmholtz, saying: these clothes
cannot surely have form. There must be crowds of tiny whirling specks
of dust, or atoms, in them, which by their movement preserve the
clothes in their form.
Yes, this is the turn that later thought has taken. But it is
abstract, and shadowy. All the same it is the kind of thought in which
we live today; out of it we fashion the whole of our Natural
Scientific principles. And when we deny that we think in terms of
atoms, we are doing it all the more. For it will be a long time before
it is admitted that it is unnecessary to weave a Dance of the Atoms
into it, rather than simply to replace man into his clothes. But that
is just what the resuscitation of Spiritual Science must attempt.
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