Occult Science: An Outline

by Rudolf Steiner

The physical body’s existence is impossible without the entire physical environment. The whole Earth must be as it is, if human physical bodies are to be present on it. In truth, this human body is but a portion of the planet Earth, and in a wider sense of the whole physical universe. In this respect it is as the finger is to the human body as a whole. Separate the finger from the hand—it cannot remain a finger; it will shrink and wither. Such too would be the fate of the human body if severed from the body of which it is a member—from the life-conditions with which the Earth provides it.

He feels it as in the sense-world he would feel his own speech or song; yet in the spiritual world he is aware that the sounds, even while proceeding from himself, are in reality the manifestation of other beings, pouring themselves into the world through him.

All that is life in the sense-world is the oceanic region of the spiritual world. To the eye of sense, life appears in its effects—in plants and animals and human beings. To the eye of the spirit, life is a flowing essence, like seas and rivers pervading Spiritland.

The thoughts man apprehends within the manifest world are but a shadow of the real thought-being, living in the land of spirits. One should imagine the thought, such as it is in a human being, lifted out of him and as an active being endowed with an inner life of its own.

The prevailing element of the fifth region may be likened to the light of the physical world. It is none other than Wisdom, manifested in its pristine, archetypal form. Beings belong to that region who pour Wisdom into their environment, even as the sun sheds light upon physical creatures. Whatsoever the Wisdom shines upon is revealed in its true significance for the spiritual world, just as a physical creature reveals its colour when the light is shining on it.

The material evolves out of the spiritual; until then, the spiritual alone existed. By the exercise of spiritual observation we perceive the spiritual, and note how, as time goes on, it partially condenses, so to speak, to the material. We watch this taking place and, but that the process is on a higher level, it is very much as though we might be looking at a vessel filled with water where by a finely regulated cooling process lumps of ice were gradually taking shape. We see the ice condense out of what was water through and through. Similarly, by spiritual observation we can trace how the material things, events and entities condense, as it were, out of a previous existence that was spiritual through and through.

As the child of three is present beside the man of 50, so are present beside the alive and waking man of Earth the corpse, the man asleep, and the dreaming man.

The single cosmic entity that Saturn was before has thus become two. Henceforth the Sun has a second heavenly body in its environment, representing a kind of rebirth of Saturn—as it were, a new Saturn.

Think of Saturns warmth as the emergence of quanta and the formation of physics habits. The sun stage is a new mode of this reality, where light appears.

the ever-changing feelings become so transformed that there emerges in the human being what we may regard as a first sign of wish and craving. He strives for a repetition of what gave enjoyment, and seeks to avoid what roused a feeling of antipathy. Since however the Spirits of Form do not communicate their own nature to the human being but only cause their forces to pour in and out of him, this craving is without inwardness or independence. It is guided by the Spirits of Form, and gives the impression of being purely instinctive.

Saturn the physical body of the human being was a body of warmth; on Sun there was a condensation to the gaseous condition, to ‘air’. Now, in Moon evolution, when the astral is poured in, the moment is reached when the physical attains a further stage of condensation. It comes into a condition comparable to that of a liquid in our time. This new state may be designated ‘water’, meaning however not our present water but any liquid form of existence.

Saturn was formed out of the body of the Spirits of Will (Thrones). From the Saturn substance rayed back into cosmic space all that was experienced in consciousness by the spirit-beings in its environment. And through the events that followed, this raying-back gradually awoke to independent life. Such is the essence of all evolution. Independent being is first separated out from the life of the environment, then the environment engraves itself—as it were, by reflection—upon the separated being, and then the latter evolves further, independently.

If, therefore, nothing else had happened, the situation in the cosmos would have been as follows. There would have been a Sun body, where spiritual beings well adapted to its nature had their experiences in the elements of warmth and air. Over against it would have been a Moon body, wherein other beings were evolving, living a life of warmth and air and water.

All phases are condensations of intent. Every phase sets the stage for the emergence of fine and more differentiated beings. The early Saturn phase would be the first angelic triad, expressing as the axiomatic quanta. The second phase brings the second triad of angels in to focus or emergence, expressing the forms and habits of gasses and pre waters and light. The third of moon is the passing field of the third triad, more differentiating within the patterns and fields, allowing the formation of matter that holds memory and can be compacted to respond to fields and emerging individual being. All these phases creating the conditions that allow the human being to respond and react to the intent and activity of the angels. While they are our brothers, they are weaving in their bodies the fabric of creation, the fabric of which our physical bodies are twists, condensations, that allow the inner lapping fields to provide the free size for a soul to b awake.

we have to imagine the whole ground and body of the Moon consisting of this plant-mineral substance, just as the earth today consists of rocks and stones, arable soil, etc. As here and there rocks protrude from the earth today, so in the Moon mass, harder portions also were embedded. These might be likened to forms made of hard wood or of horn. Moreover, as plants today spring from the mineral soil, so was the ground of the Moon bedecked, and also penetrated, by a second kingdom, consisting of a kind of plant-animal. The substance of this kingdom was softer than the ground and more mobile in itself. It spread over the lower kingdom like a turgid sea. And as for man himself, he might be described as animal-man. He had in his nature the constituents of the two other kingdoms;

as in Sun evolution there was a bond of attraction between the backward Saturn kingdom and the Spirits of Personality on the new Saturn, so in like manner bonds of attraction now arise between the several heavenly bodies and the corresponding Moon-beings. It would lead us much too far afield to trace here in detail all the heavenly bodies that emerged. Let it suffice to have pointed out the reason why, as time went on, from the single heavenly body which arose as Saturn at the beginning of human evolution a whole number of heavenly bodies detached themselves, one after another.

In the Sun time the human being abandoned himself to the enjoyment of a kind of Sun-life. He was lifted away from his own life and lived more spiritually. We can do no more than attempt an approximate and comparative description of what he then experienced. He felt as if the very forces of the universe, as if all their influences were streaming in upon him, throbbing through his being. He felt intoxicated by the cosmic harmonies in which his life participated. At such times his astral body was in a way freed from the physical, and with it part of the life-body too was drawn away; and this entity of astral body and life-body was like a delicate and wonderful musical instrument, upon the chords of which the cosmic Mysteries resounded.

Before this moment in his evolution, man had no independence in relation to the spiritual world. He did not in that world feel himself as a separate, single being, but as membered into the sublime organism composed of higher beings above him. Now, however, the ‘I’ experience on Earth began to work on into the spiritual world; there, too, man began to feel himself as a single unit.

The mineral kingdom of the Earth also arose by being thrust out from the evolution of mankind. Its structures represent what was still left in a hardened condition when the Moon was separated from the Earth. The soul-nature that felt drawn to these structures was of a kind which, having remained at the Saturn stage, was fitted to create only physical forms.

evolution. In Biblical tradition the time before the entry of the luciferic beings is referred to as the time of Paradise, and the descent onto the Earth—man’s entanglement in the world of the senses—as the expulsion from Paradise.)

In the far distant past of which we are here speaking, the physical form and figure of man was as yet very different from what it is today. It was still to a great extent the expression of qualities of soul. The human being was of a finer, softer materiality than he afterwards became. Where his members are now quite rigid, they were plastic, soft and pliable. A man more filled with soul and spirit was of gentle build, mobile, expressive. One who was less spiritually developed had coarser bodily forms, immobile, not so plastic. Improvement in the life of the soul tended to draw man’s members together; such a man would remain small in stature. Backwardness of soul, entanglement in sensuality, came to expression in gigantic bodily proportions. While man was still in his period of growth, the body took shape according to what was growing in the soul—and this to an extent which must seem fabulous, indeed quite fantastic, to present-day ideas. Depravity of passion, or of instinct or desire brought with it a monstrous enlargement of the material in man. The present human form has arisen by the contraction, condensation and rigidification of Atlantean man.

When man received impressions from supersensible worlds in olden time, they felt like forces influencing and impelling him from an external spiritual world—a world in which he himself was not. Evolution, leading on into the new era, will have wrought a change. Man will now feel these impressions as emanating from a world into which he himself is growing—a world in which he too will have his place, ever more as time goes on.