Supplements to Member Lectures

GA 246 — 8 December 1907, Stuttgart

9. The Serpent and Fish Symbols

We often find the fish symbol in the catacombs, and it is called the monogram of Christ-Jesus, and often this symbol is connected with the serpent symbol. This is used in a wide variety of meanings.

If we look at the development of man in connection with the development of other beings, then we find minerals, plants and animals in the world. It is easily understood as if what is spread around us as minerals, as inanimate objects, are the oldest products of development; plants are younger, animals even younger, but humans are the youngest. But this is not the case. From an occult point of view, minerals are the very youngest; plants are older and animals even older - but the oldest, the firstborn in development, is man. Admittedly, this assertion will appear grotesque and paradoxical in the face of materialistic natural science, but it is nevertheless true. Natural science, on the other hand, would claim that before [plants] existed, [minerals] must have existed; animal life is only possible when plants are present; and even man could only enter the world when other beings had already preceded him. These are cheap objections to which we will return later; now we want to present the facts as they really are.

The inanimate is formed from the living! Let us take coal as an example. These were once plant beings that covered the ground in vast fern forests in the distant past. They died and covered themselves with soil and transformed themselves over the course of time in such a way that what used to be a living entity - a plant - now appears to us in the rock, in the coal. Here we have things quite open: coal, the lifeless, has formed from the living. Those who look back with an occult eye know that this applies not only to hard coal, but to all rocks. The most solid rocks - granite, mica schist, gneiss, clay slate - are all solidified plant matter. Gneiss, which consists of feldspar and quartz mica, was once a plant; this can be proven from the plant parts that remained behind and formed like mica.

There you have the sense of the matter, that the living is the original; everything lifeless has formed from the living; is the fossilized corpse of the living. With every step we take across the earth, we walk over nothing but solidified living beings. In the distant past, we find no minerals, no plants, no animals on our planet, only the human kingdom. However, if we understand the same as it is today, it would be easy to argue that these people could not have fed themselves without the other kingdoms. But man at that time did not need food. He was of a spiritual nature and being; he was spirit before he became matter.

When we study man today, he consists of the physical body, the etheric body, the astral body and the ego. When he lies down to rest in the evening, only the physical body with the etheric body remains in bed; out of these two rises the astral body with the ego and the other higher members of human nature. The astral body and the ego are in their home in the night. What is today the astral body is the starting point for the human being, who once consisted of astral substance according to his essence. At the beginning of our development on earth, long before the Lemurian period, man was an astral being. Just as you are today in sleep, you once were. For what are the etheric and physical bodies? They are condensations of the astral body. You can visualize this correctly if you imagine the following picture: You have a quantity of water, some of which condenses into ice. Then you have water and the ice within it - the ice is water, only in a different form. In the same way, the etheric and physical bodies are nothing other than the astral body in condensed form. The development of the human being consisted in the fact that the astral body first condensed into the etheric body and then into the physical body. One would have to say that if one could dissolve the physical body: It dissolves again into the astral substance.

At that time, as an astral being, man needed no nourishment, not even when the astral body condensed into the etheric body. Only when man condensed into the physical body did he need nourishment.

When we now speak of man as the firstling, we mean man in his astral state. Now think back to the distant past, when human beings condensed as astral entities. That was the first stage of human development. The human being in his astral state gives up a part to his etheric body.

This is an old time we are talking about here, at that time the earth was in the state of Saturn. But this is repeated at the beginning of the earth's development. Think of many such entities of an astral nature, they partially condense and continue on their way.

With others, the following happens: Imagine that when the water begins to turn to ice, very small balls of ice form in it - imagine that with a certain number the balls of ice fall out, with others they remain inside. The development progresses, and that which has not fallen out will grow, but that which has fallen out cannot grow. That's how it would go in the water reservoir!

Now think of the astral people instead of this picture; with them the physical has just begun to be an astral lump. From time to time, after a certain development, the lumps have fallen out; therefore the lumps remain at the stage they had reached when they fell out - but those who remain connected with the astral can develop further. Man really was once such a being of an astral-etheric nature, and his physical was like a little lump. - A number of them have developed further, a number have fallen out and cannot develop further. These are the smallest living beings of the most imperfect kind, the monerals.

At a certain stage the worms then separated themselves in the same way, at a certain stage the fish, at a certain stage the amphibians and so on, until at a stage in the Atlantean period the mammals separated themselves. When we speak of apes, we know - today the brutal concept of man's descent from them has been dropped - that apes are said to have descended from those primordial creatures from which man developed to his present state. Spiritual science says: The apes represent the degenerated entity that wants to hold on to an old form and has therefore degenerated ... The ape is like a kind of shame for man, showing him where the corruption of intentions can lead.

If we go back to the simplest living beings, which consist of only one cell, they are related to man. Man was the ancestor of all beings in the distant past: The simplest living beings branched off the earliest, and as long as man has evolved upwards, they have evolved downwards.

Man went on and on; he took all the animals out of himself and continued to transform the physical body to its present perfection. Thus, in fact, in the most ancient times, the animals separated themselves from the human formation as astral beings - the coarser astral substance, as it were. Later still, the plants separated from the animals, and still later the minerals separated from the plants. The principle is: the lower can form from the higher by falling away. All the beings around us are waste products of human development, human brothers who have fallen behind, fallen out of development and remained behind at a certain stage.

If we look at development in this way, then the relationship between man and his environment and the development of this environment out of man becomes clear. There is nothing objectionable about it; it becomes understandable how we can call man the firstborn on earth, for he is the most highly developed being and has left all other beings behind in his development.

Now, however, there are many other secrets underlying the earth's development. We know that the earth was once Saturn, then the sun, then the moon. When we look at Saturn's development, we must imagine that man was initially an astral being. However, he lived in a different form than the human astral body is today. Imagine that the entire society that is listening here has fallen asleep, the astral bodies rise up, they float above. Now, however, they do not remain isolated, but merge into one another, blur into one another; one merges into the other and passes through the other. When Saturn's development began, nothing else was present but these astral entities - they condense and receive influxes from the etheric.

In the orbit of Saturn we first have the entire human astral bodies like a mass, everything is inside, just as it is inside water, which later forms into ice. In the center of this astral mass is a large hollow sphere. Now first the etheric condenses out of the astral, then the physical - that settles first, but it was much thinner than air is today: we call the substance of which it consists heat - or occultly: fire. The physicist does not regard it as a substance, but only as a property, but it is the fourth state for occultism. This is what the physical body of man at that time consisted of. The whole of Saturn is a conglomerate of these first human bodies; there is no other being on Saturn. - There is also no greater density of state on Saturn than the one just described.

After the Pralaya, the development continues up to the sun. On the sun we first also have the astral body of man, it condenses to the etheric body and also condenses to the physical, but this physical does not remain heat matter, but becomes airy, gaseous, so that at first these air bodies separate out and compose the sun; above them are the etheric body and the astral body, but now these air bodies are able to gradually absorb the etheric body into themselves. The aerial bodies of these human bodies are interwoven with the etheric body, just as the plant of today is also interwoven with the etheric body. The whole sun consists of a conglomerate of air people, cloud people, who change in the same way as clouds. They are permeated by the etheric body.

The astral body still remains above. Everything that is human sleeps a blissful sleep on the sun. The sun is composed of this sleeping human race and something else. Only a part of the whole of Saturn's substance has been able to transform itself in such a way that it could absorb the etheric body; other parts have remained behind in the position of being mere physical matter. This forms a retarded realm. So that we now have on the sun: the advancing human kingdom and another kingdom - beings who have advanced to the sun stage and those who have remained at the Saturn stage.

On the moon not only the etheric body enters the physical human body, but also the astral body. There we have the state that we occultly call water, liquid. Spring-like is the state of the physical on the moon.

Some beings have also fallen back there, remained behind on the solar level. These and those from the Saturn stage thus form three realms.

You see so clearly how these things are formed - this makes it clear at the same time how complicated the development is.

We have the human being on the Sun to such an extent that he has the value of a plant today: he has a physical and an etheric body. By evolving towards the moon, he incorporated himself into the astral body and attained the level of the animal.

Now, however, there was not only man in the line of development, but higher beings who were connected with the development of man. These were beings who were so highly developed that they no longer needed to descend to physical formation.

On the moon, the airy solar body became swelling, it acquired structure. The beings that stood far higher than the human being never needed to descend to the body if they did not wish to do so voluntarily; this is why the sun separated from our earthly development in the first place. Sun, moon and earth were one body at the beginning of our development.

In the course of development, the best substances and beings emerge, those who did not need to descend further than the condensation of the gas. They were able to remain stinging and use this gaseous body as their physical body. Man could not have endured this, he would have spiritualized himself too quickly.

When the sun had gone, the earth was still united with the moon - it had too bad substances in it. If the earth had remained united with it, man would have stood still, he would have become solid, mummy-like. The moon principle is the principle of solidification. - Continuously active life is the solar being; the lunar being gives solid form. The right balance on earth exists when solar and lunar forces radiate onto it from outside.

If we could consider the state in which the human body was when the sun had just departed, it was not yet a human body, not a mammalian body, not an amphibian body - what remained were merely bodies at the level of today's fish.

This was the harvest that the earth had retained after the sun had departed. - The clairvoyant could have seen the solar beings that had departed, celestial beings standing at the level of man; what remained for the earth was a harvest of bodies at the level of fish. Had the sun remained united with the earth, they would have remained aerial; the moment the element of life departed, they became fish. Those beings whose regent is the Christ had departed with the sun - all solar beings must serve the one to whom they belong, their leader; the Christ - he is the regent of the sun. Therefore the fish on earth shows us the height of development at which the earth was when the Christ principle was still connected with the earth. This is preserved in the body of the fish, which is why the fish symbol is the monogram of the Christ.

Then came a time of the earth's development that we can describe as turbid. The earth was united with the solidifying principle, the moon, after the sun of life had separated - everything would have taken on solid forms. Then those forms were formed - terrible amphibians, the plesiosaurus, the ichthyosaurus - all those dragon-like shapes. If the earth had remained together with the moon, everything corporeal would have developed into such terrible forms of a solidified nature. We must realize that the earth could only have reached the height of the corporeality of those amphibians, the serpents, if the moon had remained with the earth.

There were beings who, if they had completed everything correctly, would have gone to the sun as Elohim. But they had remained at the level of the lunar beings and were therefore in firm contact with the moon. They have the special interest of the lunar being to close in on itself. These beings, whose main endeavor was to preserve the lunar forces on earth, took part in relation to the body as long as man was on the level of the amphibian, the serpent. Hence the snake is their symbol.

At that time, death was implanted in man. It did not exist before. Such beings do not die, they take on other forms, like clouds, but their consciousness remains. What we call death, the shedding of physical form, did not exist. But the departure of the moon was the snatching away of a complete death, for if the moon had remained united with the earth, then man would have become like a mummy, like a dead, statue-like being, there would have been nothing but dead men.

Man is snatched from this death by the fact that the moon is set apart. If the sun had remained with the earth, there would have been no incarnation, because the solar forces would have spiritualized man too quickly. If the lunar forces had remained, there could have been no incarnation for the opposite reason. The human being would then have come into being once and become firmer and firmer; everything would have gone into the bones. The balance is brought about by the separation of sun and moon.

Man owes this implantation of the present death to the lunar forces, the forces that lead man to sensory perception. Man received this through the lunar forces, the serpentine being [...]. The fish being does not perceive as humans do. The fish perceives clairvoyantly, with the aura. All beings in the water are clairvoyants, clairaudients. - Death is not implanted in them, the group soul, the soul is immortal, the individual entities exchange information. Only with the implantation of the red blood and the blue blood, the substance of death, does death occur. With this comes the ability to see all around: Man's eyes are opened. The serpent tells us that the eyes have been opened. This is how the snake and fish symbols emerged from the development of the world. The serpent is the right symbol for death, but also for the being that brought external sensual perception and science into the world.

Saturn was first a flame of fire, within it the bodies of men. The sun was gaseous. The moon was a sea of water, within which the bodies were the denser enclosures. The earth first becomes more and more solid. It has the tendency to imprint forms into matter. If we look at the moon water in the occult sense - not like the naive physicist who only sees water in water - then we see: It is permeated by forces in all directions. They condense in some places, bodies are formed; the moon water contains a thousand possibilities to condense into all kinds of bodies.

When we go back to ancient Atlantis, which is covered by heavy masses of fog, we find human bodies that are not yet particularly dense. Although they already had structure, they were gelatinous with the bone structure inside, but still soft, as if we had polyps in our skin today. Surrounded by masses of water and inside these gelatinous humans. What is in the human being today, the soul, was not yet there. The old Atlantean [did not] think, did not combine, nature around him did that; the springs, the trees told him something.

Wisdom was poured out in the waters, there it had its substantial body. What spread in the waters was iodine, the substance that makes it possible to say: “The Spirit of God brooded over the waters.” We have this iodine in sea plants today. When the waters fell, they took on wisdom, they took on iodine. Iodine is present in the thyroid gland in the human body; if it is taken away from a person, he becomes degenerate. Thus all substances are bodies for the spiritual. The naive physicist has no idea of this! Water is matter for a spirituality in it, and the spirit can transform itself into bodies at any time. In iodine there is a body for a certain form of wisdom that man absorbs, that enters him from outside. Worlds are always preparing themselves, new worlds are forming.

When we look at ice flowers, where the spirit of water works, we see the first attempts of Jupiter's formation, how beings will emerge from matter in the future. The occultist looks at them with awe; the ice flowers at the window reveal to him the forces that are within the water. These are the seeds of future bodies that will become beings. If you could look back at the moon, you would see your own bodies forming in the same way as you see the ice flowers forming at your window today.

This is what gives the right feeling from the depths of world development when such things are looked at with awe. If we look at a crystal form today, that was once a plant being, these are all beings that man has left behind, and man's mission is to redeem them again.

The forms that are around us have emerged from the human being. And the ice flowers are the harbingers of living forms of the future. Everything around us is alive, and we live into the world development in our sensations and feelings when we seek out the spirit of the world, which has sensation and feeling in itself. Intuition is the great mother of the perception of the world becoming! The laws of the world become entities with which we make friends by connecting with them higher and higher.