The Human Being as Body, Soul and Spirit

GA 347 — 27 September 1922, Dornach

IX. The Dawn of Time

Last time I talked to you about the moon flying out of the earth and how that is connected to life on earth in the first place. I can already imagine that you will have many questions. We can deal with them next Saturday. Think about some of them by then. But today I still have a few things to discuss. Some questions may arise.

We have said: As long as the moon was inside the earth, what can be called the reproductive power of animal beings was quite different than later, after the moon had flown out. I have told you that in the time when the moon was still inside the earth, the moon gave the earth those forces that are, so to speak, maternal forces, feminine forces. So we can imagine that there was a time when the moon was still inside the earth. I will sketch this out for you very schematically. Figur 1 Figur 2 Figur 3 Figure 4

When the moon was still inside the earth, it was not in the center, but a little to the outside (see drawing, left). If you look at the Earth today, you will also notice that on one side, more towards where Australia is located, there is a lot of water on the Earth, while on the side where Europe and Asia are located, there is a lot of land. So the Earth actually does not have land and water equally distributed, but the Earth is such that on one side it actually has the most land and on the other side the most water. So the material on Earth is not evenly distributed (see drawing $.149, right). It was also not evenly distributed when the moon was still inside the Earth. The moon was just lying on the side where the Earth has the inclination to be heavy. Of course, if there is a solid material, it is heavy there. So I have to draw it the way I have marked it there with white chalk.

Now you have to imagine that at that time fertilization took place in such a way that the moon, which was inside the earth, gave these giant creatures the strength to, so to speak, provide reproductive material. You can't say that back then the animals would have laid real eggs. These giant oysters were actually just a slimy mass themselves, and they just secreted a piece of themselves. So that such a gigantic oyster, as I described to you last time, which could originally have been as large as the whole of France, had a mighty shell on which one could have walked around, and towards the interior of the earth a mass of slime. The lunar forces worked on this slime, and a piece of it was secreted. That then swam further into the earth. And when the sun shone on it again – I have explained this to you vividly using the example of the dog – an egg shell was formed, and because this egg shell was formed, the slimy mass of the oyster was again inclined to secrete a piece of itself, and then a new animal could arise. So the female forces came from the moon, which was in the earth, and the male forces from the sun, which shone on the earth from the outside. Now, gentlemen, I am describing a very specific time, the time when the moon was still inside the earth.

Now you have to imagine the following. Today, when the moon is outside, outside the earth, it has a completely different effect. You also know that when carbonic acid is inside a person – I told you this last time – it has a completely different effect than when it is outside, where it is a poison. If you recall animal reproduction today, you must say: the animals have to produce eggs, and these eggs must then be fertilized in some way. So what the moon used to give when it was inside the earth is now in the animals. The animals have these lunar forces within them.

And the moon also gives forces from the outside. I told you last time: even poets know that the moon gives forces to the earth. But these are forces that stimulate the imagination, that make you more alive inside. These are forces that no longer affect reproduction, but that radiate in from the outside and can no longer effect reproduction at all.

So you have to imagine it: what the moon was able to give the earth when it was still inside, these reproductive powers, the animals have appropriated them, inherited them, and now they plant them from one animal to another. So when you look at the eggs of the animals, you have to say to yourself: the lunar forces are inside. But those lunar forces are still inside that worked when the moon was still in the earth. Today the moon can no longer do much other than stimulate the head. So today the moon works on the head. But in those days it worked precisely on reproduction. You see, that is a considerable difference. It makes a big difference whether something is inside the earth or outside of it.

Reproduction is a very strange thing. But again, we have to say that all understanding of nature depends on understanding reproduction. Because through it, the individual animals and the individual plants still arise today. If it were not for reproduction, everything would have died long ago. If you want to understand anything about nature, you have to understand reproduction. But reproduction is something peculiar on earth.

Just imagine: the elephant has the peculiarity of only being able to produce a single young at around fifteen or sixteen years of age. Take an oyster, on the other hand; it is a small, slimy animal. If you imagine this as being huge, you will have roughly the same creatures that I showed you for that time. So, you can learn something from an oyster. But the oyster is not like the elephant, which has to wait so many years to produce a young one. A single oyster can produce a million oysters in a year. So an oyster has a different relationship to reproduction than an elephant.

Now, gentlemen, another interesting animal is the aphid. You know that it occurs on the leaves of trees and can be found as a rather harmful population of the plant world. People suffer a lot from it. An aphid is, as you know, much smaller than an elephant, but it can produce several thousand million offspring in just a few weeks – a single aphid! An elephant, for example, needs about fifteen or sixteen years to produce a single offspring, but the aphid can reproduce in just a few weeks to produce several million from a single individual.

And then there are tiny animals called vortices. If you look at them through a microscope, they are just a tiny lump of mucus, and they have a thread that they wriggle along. They are very interesting animals, but they consist only of a tiny lump of mucus, like if you took a thread out of an oyster, and they swim around like that. These little Vorticelles are now able to produce a hundred and forty trillion offspring in four days – a single one! – so many zeros would be needed to write it on the blackboard. The only thing that can compete with that now is Russian currency!

So you see, there is a considerable difference in reproductive capacity between an elephant, which has to wait fifteen or sixteen years to produce a single young, and such a small Vorticella, which in four days multiplies to such an extent that one hundred and forty trillion offspring grow.

So you see, there are really very significant natural secrets here. And there is a very interesting French tale, which on the surface doesn't have much to do with it, but inwardly it does. There was an important French poet — his name was Racine. And this Racine, it took him seven years to write a play like “Athalie”. So he wrote a play like 'Athalie' in seven years. And in his time there was another poet who was terribly proud compared to Racine and said: Racine needs seven years to write a play; I write seven plays in one year! And so he came up with a fable, a story, and this story, this fable goes: the pig and the lion were once arguing; and the pig, who was proud, said to the lion: I have seven young ones every year, but you, lion, you only produce one in a year. — Then the lion said: Yes, but the only one is a lion, and your seven are pigs. And with that, didn't Racine want to brush the poet aside. He didn't exactly want to tell him that his plays were pigs, but he compared them, because he said: Well, you do seven plays like that every year, but in seven years I do one Athalie – which is world-famous today.

You see, you can say: Even in a fable like that, in a story like that, there is something to be said for taking fifteen or sixteen years, like an elephant, to have a young one, rather than being a Vorticelle, which reproduces in four days to have a hundred and forty trillion young. People already talk a lot about the fact that rabbits have so many young; if they only started talking about the Vorticelle – it's impossible to imagine such a reproductive capacity!

Now, we have to find out why such tiny animals produce so many young, while it takes an elephant so long.

Now I have told you: the sun is the actual basis for fertilization. So, even today, we still need the sun for fertilization. And I have also told you: if there is a heavenly body outside, like the moon, it only affects the head at most, but no longer affects the abdominal organs, so no longer directly affects the reproductive powers. Today, the reproductive powers must be inherited from one being to another. But, gentlemen, in a certain sense, what happens in today's reproduction is still dependent on the moon. And I will explain this to you in the following way, by going back to the sun again.

You see, we have to ask ourselves: Why does an elephant need fifteen or sixteen years to develop its reproductive ability to the point where it can have a calf? Now you all know that the elephant is a pachyderm, and because it is a pachyderm, it takes so long. A thick skin allows the sun's forces to pass through it less strongly than if you were a plant louse and were very soft and the sun's forces could get in everywhere. So the elephant's low fertility is actually related to its thick skin.

You can also tell by the fact that Think back to those huge floating oysters. Yes, a second oyster would never come into being if it only depended on the sun shining on that scale armor, on that thick skin! But this oyster, as I told you, releases a little mucus; the mucus does not yet have an oyster shell, so the sun can come upon it. And by drying the mucus and thereby creating a new oyster, it has a fertilizing effect on that oyster. Yes, when the sun's rays come from the outside, gentlemen, they can only create shells. How is it that the forces of the sun can still have a fertilizing effect?

You see, we have to look at something else to help you understand how the story actually fits together. You may know that when the farmers have harvested the potatoes, they dig quite deep pits and put the potatoes in them. Then they cover the pits again. And then later, when the winter is over, they dig up the potatoes from these pits again, because they have remained good in there. If they had simply kept the potatoes in the cellar, they would have perished. They stay quite good in there.

Where does this actually come from? It is a very interesting thing. The farmers don't know much about it. But, gentlemen, if you were a potato yourself and were buried in this pit, you would actually feel extremely good in there, if you didn't need something to eat. You see, the warmth of the sun in summer remains in there, and what the sun shines on the earth in summer, that draws more and more downwards. And if you dig into the earth in January, the warmth of the sun and all the other solar forces from summer are still there at a depth of one and a half meters.

That is the strange thing. In summer, the sun is out and warms from the outside, and in winter, the sun's power moves down and can be found further down. But it cannot go very deep down; it flows back up again. If you were a potato and were lying down there, you would be quite comfortable; you wouldn't need to heat up, because first of all there is still the warmth from the summer inside, and secondly it comes up quite warmly from below because the solar forces radiate back again. And these potatoes are actually terribly comfortable. It is only there that they really enjoy the sun. In summer they don't get much of the sun, it's even unpleasant for them. If they had heads, they would get headaches when the sun shines on them; it is actually unpleasant for the potatoes. But in winter, when they are buried in the earth, they can really enjoy the sun.

From this you can see that the sun does not only work when it shines on something, but it continues to work when its energy is absorbed and stopped by something.

Yes, gentlemen, now a peculiarity occurs. I have told you: When a body is outside the earth, it has a killing effect, either - like carbonic acid - like a poison, or like the sun here, which produces dandruff when it shines on it; it hardens the living being on which it shines. But in winter, it is not true that the sun works from the outside; it works from inside the earth. There it leaves its strength behind, working in the interior of the earth. And there it also renews the reproductive forces in the interior of the earth, so that the reproductive forces today, in our time, also come from the sun, but not from direct sunlight, but from what remains in the earth and then radiates back in winter.

It is a very interesting thing. It is just like when we breathe in carbon dioxide: then it is a poison. But when the carbon dioxide is inside our body and goes through the blood, we need it. Because if we had no carbon, we would have nothing at all inside us. We need it inside; then it is beneficial; from the outside it is a poison. Sunlight from the outside causes peeling in animals; sunlight absorbed from within and reflected back generates life and makes the animals capable of reproduction.

But, gentlemen, now imagine that you are not a potato but an elephant. You would have an awfully thick skin and would only let a little of the warmth that the earth has from the sun in. That is why it would take you an awfully long time to produce an elephant calf if you were an elephant. But imagine you were a plant louse or an oyster; in that oyster you would be just a mass of mucus near the earth's surface. The elephant is not such a mass of mucus. The elephant is closed off on all sides by its skin, so it lets this warmth, which comes from below, into itself only very slowly.

Now, you see, it is like this: animals like aphids, which also live close to the ground and on plants, have no thick skin at all; they can absorb what evaporates from the earth with the spring with terrible ease, so their reproductive powers are always quickly refreshed. And the vortices even more so, because they live in the water and water retains the warmth of the sun much more intensely, so that the stored solar warmth in the vortices produces the hundred and forty billion at the right season; that is, when they have absorbed enough of what the warmth of the sun is in the water, they can reproduce themselves terribly quickly. So we can say: Today, the Earth gives its beings the ability to reproduce by storing the forces of the sun within itself during the winter.

Now let us move on from there to the plants. You see, with plants it is like this: you know that plants also reproduce through so-called cuttings. So when a plant grows out of the earth, you can cut a cutting somewhere. You have to cut it out properly, then you can plant it and it will grow into a plant. Certain plants reproduce in this way. Where does that come from? The reason why plants have the power to reproduce even through a piece of themselves is because they have the seed in the earth during the winter. That is a very important thing for plants. If you want to somehow encourage plants to grow properly, it is the case, isn't it, that they actually have to be in the ground during the winter. They have to grow out of the ground at all. There are summer fruits, and we could talk about them later. But in the main, the plants have to develop their seeds in the soil, and then they can grow. Sometimes you can also make bulbous plants grow in water, but you have to take special measures for that, don't you. In nature, it is mainly the case that plants have to be placed in the soil and have to get their strength to grow from there.

What happens, gentlemen, when a seed is placed in the earth? There this seed is really placed in the beneficence of absorbing these forces given by the sun to the earth. The plant seed, in particular, really absorbs these forces that come from the sun into the earth.

With animals, it is much more difficult. Those animals that are actually in the earth, such as earthworms and the like, also easily absorb this power. That is why they all reproduce very prolifically, all the animals that are either very close to the earth or in the earth. Worms are also such that they have an awful lot of offspring, and for example just such worms, which unfortunately can also get into the human intestines, produce an awful lot of offspring, and man must constantly exert his own powers so that these worms do not produce an awful lot of offspring. So that if you have worms inside you, you have to use almost all your vital forces to kill these horror stories that you have inside you.

Yes, but plants are able to grow out of the ground (see drawing); down there is the root, then they grow out of the ground, and then they have the leaves, then they develop the flowers and new seeds. But, gentlemen, you know very well that when the flower begins to develop, the plant no longer grows upwards. That is very interesting. The seed of the plant, the germ, is placed in the soil; the stalk grows out of it, leaves, green leaves, and then the flower comes. There the growth is stopped, and the plant now quickly produces the seed. If it did not produce the seed quickly, the sun would use all its strength on these petals, which would be infertile. The plant would get a huge, beautiful flower at the top, with many colors, but the seed would not be able to develop. The plant finally gathers all its strength to produce the seed quickly.

You see, the sun that comes from outside has the peculiarity of making plants beautiful. When we find beautiful plants in the meadow, it is the external sun with its rays that brings out these beautiful colors. But it would make the plants die with it, just as it makes the oyster die with the oyster shell, dries up.

That is why you can see this all over the world. You can see this effect of the sun particularly well when you come to hot, equatorial regions; there all the birds are in the most wonderful colors. That is the effect of the external sun. These feathers are all beautifully colored, but they no longer contain any life force. The life force is most dead in the feathers.

And so it is with the plant. When it grows out of the ground, it has abundant life force. Then it loses more and more of it and in the end it has to gather all its strength; it still puts the very little bit of life force into the seed. And the sun makes beautiful leaves, colorful flowers, but in doing so it kills the plant. There is nothing of reproductive capacity in the colored petals.

But what does the plant do when its seed is placed in the earth? It does not just allow itself to be placed in the earth, but it brings forth growth in the leaves; it brings that forth. If I draw something green, the forces of the sun, that is, warmth, light and so on, develop it. So the forces of the sun rise up in the plant. The plant takes these with it in the seed, while the solar forces that come from outside kill the plant, so that a very beautiful flower arises. But in the middle of it all there is still the seed, which comes from the solar warmth stored up in the middle of winter. The seed does not come from this year's sun. That is just a misconception. The beautiful blossom comes from this year's sun; but the seed comes from the solar warmth of the previous year, which still has the strength that the sun first gave to the earth. The plant carries this through its entire body.

This would not be so easy for animals. The animal depends on the fact that this solar warmth comes more from outside, more from the earth, and is only refreshed. This is because the animal does not absorb the forces of the sun as directly as the plant. But the plant carries the warmth of the previous year's sun through its own body up to the seed in the flower, which has accumulated in the earth.

If you look at this story correctly – it is extraordinarily interesting, wonderfully interesting – then you say to yourself: plants and animals reproduce. They could not reproduce if the sun did not work. If there were no sun, they could not reproduce. But the sun, which is out there in the sky, apart from the earth, it is precisely what kills the ability to reproduce. It is the same as with carbonic acid: when we inhale carbonic acid, it kills us; when we have it inside us, it invigorates us. When the earth receives the sun's rays from outside, its animals and plants are killed; when the earth can give the animals and plants from its interior what is in the sun, they are invigorated and stimulated to reproduce. You can see that in plants; they develop seeds capable of reproduction only from the power of the sun, which they take with them from before, from the previous summer. What makes the plant beautiful this year comes from this year's sun. It is like that in general: the inner life grows from the past, and one becomes beautiful through the present,

Now, gentlemen, the elephant with its thick skin, but the little warmth from the earth and the little sun inside, which he gets from the earth, would be of little use to him, because he is a pachyderm. These forces do not pass through him so easily. He must have stored up a great deal of his own semen from earlier. He has stored up lunar forces. He needs them, of course, for maternal, for female reproduction. He has stored them up. The moon has emerged from the earth, and the animals that reproduce have the lunar forces within them.

You see, there is something that must be taken into account. Of course, someone could come and say: There is such a stupid fellow who says about the former, the earlier lunar forces, that such old forces still live in the eggs, in the reproductive forces. This stupid fellow claims that the present reproductive forces are from the past. – I would simply say to that person: Have you never seen that something that is alive now has something in it that is from the past? – I would show him a boy who looks so much like his father that he is, as they say, the spitting image. Yes, if you then go back – the father could even have already died; someone could have known the father when the father himself was a boy as small as the boy is now, and the person in question could say: Yes, the boy is the spitting image of his father. – But he looks just like him, the way the father was when he himself was a little boy. What you saw there thirty or forty years ago is still in the little boy now! The forces of the past are always still in what lives in the present. And so it is with the reproductive forces. What is in the present comes from the past.

You know, it was considered a particularly strong superstition that the moon should affect the weather. Well, there is also a great deal of superstition in that. But once upon a time there were two scholars in Germany, at the University of Leipzig, one of whom – his name was Fechner – said to himself: perhaps there is a grain of truth in this superstition that the moon affects the weather. So he made a note of what the weather was like at full moon and what the weather was like at new moon, and found that There is a difference; it rains more when the moon is full than when it is new. That is what he found out. You don't have to believe that yet. Such notes are not very convincing. In real science, you have to work much, much more precisely. But he did say that you just have to continue such investigations and see if it doesn't come out that the moon affects the weather.

Now at the same University of Leipzig was another man who thought he was much cleverer – Schleiden was his name. He said: Now even my colleagues are starting to talk about the moon having an effect on the weather. Gosh, that's not true, we have to fight against that with all our might! – Then the Fechner said: Well, the dispute will remain between us men, but we also have women. – You see, that was still in earlier times. When the two university professors lived in Leipzig, the university professors' wives still had an old custom in the city. They put their troughs, their vats, in the rain to get water to wash in. They collected it because water was not easy to come by in old Leipzig. There were no water pipes back then. So Professor Fechner said: Yes, our wives should sort this out. Professor Schleiden and Professor Fechner should do it this way: so that they always get the same amount of rainwater, Professor Schleiden can put out her troughs at the new moon, and my wife can put out her troughs at the full moon! — He said to himself: according to my calculations, she will then get the most rainwater.

Well, you see, the women didn't go along with it. They didn't want to go along with their husbands' science. They couldn't be convinced at all. So it came about in a curious way that a person, even when science is in the form of a man, does not believe in it, like Mrs. Schleiden, and does not say to herself: I get just as much water at the new moon as at the full moon. Instead, she wanted to put out her watering troughs even at the full moon, despite her husband's terrible ranting against Fechner.

That is something that proves nothing. But, you see, it is strange that even today, high and low tides are still connected with the sun and moon. So that one can say: tides occur quite differently during one quarter of the moon than during any other quarter of the moon. That is connected. But, gentlemen, it does not happen because the moon shines on the sea somewhere and that causes a flood, but that is an old story.

When the moon was still inside the earth, it developed its powers and caused the tides. And the earth still has these remnants of the forces themselves, through which the tide arises. No wonder, the earth is already doing it independently. Today it is a superstition to believe that the moon has an effect on the earth. But it once had an effect on the earth when it was still inside, when everything still had an effect on the earth; and the earth is still in this context inside. That is why it determines the tides. But that is only seemingly the case. Just as I look at my watch, I also say: it throws me out at ten o'clock to the hall. — So today the phases of the moon coincide with the tides, because once they were interdependent.

And so it is with the reproductive powers, insofar as they depend on the moon, insofar as they are feminine. And so it is with the reproductive powers, insofar as they depend on the sun, that is, they come from the solar power that is inside the earth.

But all the animals that reproduce so prolifically, up to the trillions, that is, those that can use these solar forces stored up by the sun through the earth, are lower animals. The higher animals and humans have these reproductive powers protected within. Some of the solar power still comes in and constantly refreshes these powers. Without this refreshment, they would not be there either. But from what solar power is inside the earth today, they would not be able to have their reproductive powers properly.

The plant can have them because it carries what lives in the earth from winter into summer through its own body. The plant has the reproductive power from the previous year.

But the elephant cannot have them from the previous year. It has it from a time millions of years ago, and it has it in its reproductive seed, which it in turn inherits from the elephant father to the elephant son. There it is inside. But from what time does it have it inside! Well, just as the plant has the reproductive power of the previous year within it, so the elephant has the reproductive power of millions of years within it. That is why the plant and the lower animals can reproduce from it, because they can still use the power stored up by the earth. These are tremendously strong reproductive powers. Those animals that depend on storing very ancient forces within themselves can only reproduce weakly.

But let us now go back to the time when there were such giant oysters: No sooner had such an oyster reached the point of being illuminated by the sun than it lost its inner strength and could only use the one that came from the earth. But it could still use it because the oyster was open at the bottom. When this oyster was as large as present-day France, it was open at the bottom and could absorb the earth forces that came from the sun. When these animals had then transformed themselves into megatheriums, into ichthyosaurs, when the sun shone on them from above, and they were no longer open from below, they were dependent on the reproductive power that they had within themselves, which was at most refreshed by the sun.

Yes, gentlemen, there must have been a time when animals acquired reproductive powers that they could not get when the sun shines from outside. There must have been a time when the sun was inside the earth, when not just a little of the sun's energy came into the earth, which remains in the earth in winter, for example, for the potatoes; but there was a time when the whole sun was inside the earth.

Now you will say: But the physicists say that the sun is so terribly hot, and if the sun were inside the earth, it would have burned everything. — Yes, gentlemen, you only know that from the physicists. But the physicists would be extremely astonished if they could see what the sun really looks like. If they could build a balloon and go up there, they would not find that the sun is so hot, but the sun is full of life forces, and it develops heat as the sun's rays pass through air and everything. That's where it develops heat first. So when the sun was once inside the earth, it was full of life forces. It could not only give the little life force that it can give today, but when the sun was once inside the earth, these living beings, animals and plants that were there at the time, could get enough of what the sun gave them, because the sun was inside the earth itself. But then these oysters did not develop any shells either, but were just slime.

And now imagine: there was the Earth, the Moon in it, the Sun was inside the Earth, oysters developed that had no shells, but were slime. Mucus formed; it smeared off, separated, and an oyster formed again, and again an oyster formed, and so on. But they were so huge that they could not be distinguished from each other. They were adjacent to each other. What must the earth have looked like back then? It was similar to our brain, where the cells also lie next to each other. There, too, one cell lies next to the other; only that they die, whereas in the past, when the sun was inside the earth, oyster cells, huge cells, were one next to the other, and the sun developed its powers, which it was constantly developing because it was inside the earth. Yes, gentlemen, now consider this: there was the earth (see drawing), here a giant oyster, there another giant oyster, again one, all such giant slime balls next to each other, and they were always reproducing. And today's oysters reproduce so quickly that they can have a million offspring in a short time; the oysters of that time reproduced even more quickly. Gosh, no sooner had the old oyster arrived than the young were already there, and they had young of their own and so on. The old ones had to dissolve again. If someone had looked at it from the outside, how this huge lump of earth was there like a big brain, of course much softer, much slimier than a brain today, how a giant oyster reproduced so quickly - but each one could have had a million offspring again - he would have seen: everyone had to defend themselves against the others because they bumped into each other. And if someone had come, an especially curious one, and had watched from a foreign star, he would have seen: There below, floating in space, is a giant body, but it is all life, constantly producing life, not just consisting of millions of nested oysters, but constantly reproducing. And what would he have seen? Exactly the same thing – only on a gigantic scale – as can be seen today when a human being's tiny egg is examined in the early stages! There, too, it is only a very small-scale process. There are also these small cell mucus vesicles that multiply rapidly.

166 otherwise the human being would not be able to reach his size in the first few weeks in which he is carried. The cells are so small that they have to multiply very quickly. If you had looked at the earth at that time, you would have seen the image of the earth: a giant animal, and within it the forces of the sun and the moon, in the whole earth inside.

You see, I have now shown you how to go back to the time of the earth's development when the earth, sun and moon were still one body. But, gentlemen, I would like to say: in Faust, if you have read or ever read it, Gretchen, who is sixteen years old, says to Faust when he is explaining his religion: “The pastor also says something like that; but it is a little different.” So you could also say: “Yes, the professors also say something like that, but it is a little different.” You say: “Once the sun was one body with the earth and the moon.” — That's what they say; because they say, isn't it: This sun, it was a giant body; then it turned, and then the earth split off as it turned. Then the earth turned further, and then the moon split off again. —- So basically, they also say that all three were once one body.

Then people come and say: That can be proved; it is already being proved to schoolchildren. It can be demonstrated terribly nicely. You take a small drop of oil – which floats on water – and then you take a sheet of card and cut out a small circle, push a pin through the top; afterwards you put it into the water and turn the head of the pin. The little oltröpfelchen split off and go around like that. There you have it, they say, there you see it: that happened once in the world! There was a huge gas ball in the world, just gas; but the story turned, and it was mobile. And then the outer things were just split off, our earth from the sun, just as these oltröpfchen were split off. They can prove that in school. And the children, who believe in authority, say: It happened quite naturally; there was once a huge ball of gas that was rotating, and that's how the planets were split off. We saw it ourselves, how the droplets were split off.

But now you must also ask the children: Did you see the schoolmaster up there turning the pinhead? So you have to imagine a giant schoolmaster who turned the gas ball at that time, otherwise the planets would not have been able to split off! — The giant schoolmaster - in the Middle Ages he was depicted: that was the Lord God with the long beard. That was the giant schoolmaster, and these people forget him.

But it is no explanation to assume a giant gas ball that rotates, and that could only rotate if a giant world schoolmaster had once existed. That is no explanation. But, gentlemen, it is an explanation when you come to the conclusion that the sun and the moon were connected to the earth and that it moved itself. That could move. A ball of gas cannot move by itself. But what I have explained to you here could move. In those days it did not need a world school master, but it was alive in itself. The Earth was once a living being, and indeed one such as a seed is today, and it contained the Sun and the Moon. The Sun and the Moon emerged from the Earth, leaving their inheritance behind, so that today the germinating power, protected in the maternal and paternal bodies of the human being, these powers, which once could come directly from the Sun, still reproduce and today develop the animals, the seeds and eggs in themselves, carry the ancient solar power in their egg and seminal fluids, carry it within themselves as an inheritance from ancient times, from the times when the earth itself still had the sun and moon within it.

You see, that is a real explanation, and only if you understand it that way can you really understand. Then you realize that there was once a time when the moon flew out and the earth flew out of the sun with the moon. We will discuss this matter further next Saturday at nine o'clock. It will still be a bit difficult, but nevertheless I believe that history looks like this so that you can understand it.