The Human Being as Body, Soul and Spirit

GA 347 — 30 September 1922, Dornach

X. Adam Kadmon in Lemuria

Question: I was very surprised by the idea that the sun was inside the earth; I have never heard of anything like that before. As I understood the last lectures, the earth was nothing more than the human being, and that animals actually descended from all this. How do you explain this in contrast to the idea that humans descend from apes?

Dr. Steiner: I am very pleased that you asked this question, because we can make a lot of progress by answering it.

If you take today's human head as it is, what do you find about this human head? First of all, from the outside inwards, you will find this human head covered from top to bottom by a fairly hard, bony shell. Yes, gentlemen, if you take this bony shell, which is thin in relation to the whole head, and compare it with what you find, for example, when you go into the Jura mountains, you will find a very remarkable similarity. You see, the bony skullcap is essentially made of very similar components to the calcium deposits, the calcium crust that you find when you go into the Jura Mountains.

Now, you generally find such deposits on the earth's surface. Of course, in these limestone deposits, you couldn't exactly grow fruit very well. But that can be done in a layer that doesn't consist of limestone, but rather of arable soil, and that is laid over the limestone soil.

Now, gentlemen, you will have already realized: When one speaks of nature, one must touch on everything. And you know, of course, that the human head, at least on the outside, is also covered with a skin that even sheds scales, so that the skin lies over the calcareous skullcap, over the external skull. If one studies this skin in turn, it bears a great similarity to what field soil is. The hair grows in the scalp. The hair, in turn, bears a great similarity to what grows as plants out of the soil. If you draw it schematically, pictorially, we can actually say: at certain points on the earth, there is a lime deposit on top; above that is the soil, and plants grow out of the soil. In humans, we have this calcareous shell on the outside, with skin over it, and hair grows out of the skin.

Now you remember something else. So, curiously enough, I can draw something similar when I draw the earth or the human head. But now you remember that I told you something else. I told you that if you go deeper into the earth and study what is there deeper in the earth, you will find remains of ancient creatures, of ancient animals and plants in the earth. I have told you what these animals and plants used to look like. Ichthyosaurs, plesiosaurs, and so on, were quite large creatures. But if we now go into the inside of the human head, what did I tell you? I told you: the white blood corpuscles swim in the blood, and these are actually also small animals. Inside the human head, these small animals are constantly dying, are, so to speak, half dead, and are only brought back to life at night, but they are on the way to dying. And the further you get into the head, the more the head dies. Under the skullcap, between the brain and the outer bone, is a kind of dead skin. So that when you go into the head, you also find something that is dying.

So we can say: When a person dies, and you take his head apart afterward – which is what science does, of course, since it doesn't like to deal with living people, but rather with dead people on the dissection table – yes, gentlemen, there you have these dead brain cells, which are actually fossilized blood cells, and on the outside the hard shell. In this respect, the story is very similar to the earth. So we cannot say anything other than: when we enter the actual brain through this hard cerebral membrane - it is even called the 'hard cerebral membrane' because it is already completely dead - we see petrification all the time. On earth, these petrifications can be found everywhere. If we look at the earth today, we can see that it resembles a dead human head. It is, of course, only smaller. The earth is larger, so everything looks different. The earth resembles a dead human head. So anyone who studies the earth today must actually say to themselves: the earth is an enormous human skull, and one that has died.

Now, gentlemen, you will never be able to imagine that something can have died if it has not previously lived. That is not true. Only science claims that. But I think you would consider yourself stupid if you found a dead human head somewhere and said: It just formed out of matter. You will never say that, but you will say: This thing that looks like this must once have belonged to a living person, it must once have been alive; because what is dead must once have been alive. So that if someone reflects on it rationally, if he studies the earth today and finds a dead human head, he must naturally imagine – otherwise he would simply be, I would say, stupid – that it once lived, that the earth was once a living human head, that it lived in the universe, as man lives on earth today.

Now, the human head, it could not live, could not possibly live if it did not get its blood from the human body. The human head alone, it can only be shown for fun. When I was a little boy and lived in the village, sometimes such wandering troupes would set up and put up a booth. When you walked by, someone would always come out: Ladies and gentlemen, please enter, the show is about to begin! Here you can see a living, talking human head!” They showed a living, talking human head. You know, that's done with all kinds of mirrors so that you don't see the body, only the head. But otherwise, of course, there is not only the head, but it must receive its blood and everything that nourishes it from the human body. So the earth must once have been such that it could have nourished itself from outer space. Yes, could one also give reasons for the earth really having once been something like a human being and being able to nourish itself from outer space?

Much thought has been given to how it actually came about that the sun - I showed this recently - was once connected to the earth. But that was a long time ago. Since that time, the sun has been outside the earth and gives the earth light and warmth. Even the warmth that is inside the earth itself comes from the sun, it just remains stored in the winter. Now we can calculate exactly how much heat the sun gives off each year. It is a great deal, and physicists have done just such calculations. There are millions and millions of calories. But, gentlemen, when doing this calculation, the physicists were really frightened, because although they found out how much heat the sun emits each year, they also found out that if this were correct, the sun would have cooled down long ago and we would all have frozen to death. So the calculation is done correctly, but it is still wrong. That happens. You can calculate, something can be calculated in the most beautiful way, but the calculation is still wrong, precisely because it is so beautiful.

Now there was a physicist, a Swabian, named Julius Robert Mayer, who actually had some very interesting ideas in the mid-19th century. This Julius Robert Mayer, who lived in Heilbronn in Württemberg, was a doctor and made his discoveries in a similar way to Darwin on his trip around the world, namely by making very interesting observations during a trip to southern Asia, on the islands there, how human blood looks different due to the influence of heat than in somewhat colder areas, and he came to interesting facts through these observations. He then summarized these observations and wrote them down in a very short essay. He sent it to the most important German scientific journal of the time. That was in 1841. And this scientific journal sent the essay back to him because the people said: This is all insignificant stuff, amateurish, stupid. Today, the same people, that is, their successors, of course, see it as one of the greatest discoveries of the 19th century!

But the editors of the “Annalen für Physik und Chemie” (Poggendorff's “Annals of Physics and Chemistry”), which was the most famous German scientific journal at the time, not only sent this essay back to Julius Robert Mayer, but they also locked him up in an insane asylum! Because he was really very enthusiastic about his science - it's not quite right, but he was very enthusiastic about his science - he behaved a little differently than other people - after all, they didn't exactly know the same things as he did - and his fellow doctors and other doctors noticed this, and that's why he was put in an insane asylum! So you come up with a scientific discovery that comes from a person who was locked up in an insane asylum for it. If you come to Heilbronn in Swabia today, you will find a monument to Julius Robert Mayer on the most important square there. But that was done afterwards! It's just an example of how people deal with people who have such thoughts in their heads.

Now, you see, this Julius Robert Mayer, who thought about this influence that he knew from heat on the blood, also thought about how the sun can produce heat. The others just calculate how much it gives off. But Julius Robert Mayer also asked himself: Yes, where does it all come from? — What does physics do? One would like to say that physics calculates in the same way as one would calculate with a human being: he once ate and now he is full, but in addition, something is stored in his own fat and muscles. If he can't eat anymore, he takes it from his fat and muscles. And he can live like that for forty or sixty days, but afterwards he dies if he doesn't get anything to eat. The physicists have also calculated what the sun produces every day after it has miraculously generated this heat. How it ate at that time was not considered, but in any case, it was calculated how much it produces.

But where it gets that from, that was asked by Julius Robert Mayer. And he found out that every year so many celestial bodies fly into the sun that are like comets. You see, that is the food of the sun. But if we look up at the sun today, we can see that it has a good stomach, it eats an enormous number of comets every year. Just as we consume our Mitrag's meal and thereby develop our warmth, so the sun develops warmth by eating comets into its good stomach.

Now, gentlemen, that means: When the comets have already been completely fragmented and are falling down, they are indeed hard iron cores, but only the iron falls down. Man also has iron in his blood. If a man were to dissolve somewhere and only the iron were to fall down, people would probably say: There is something up there that has been glowing, and it is made of iron. Because the meteorites into which comets disintegrate consist of iron, it is said that comets are made of iron. But that is nonsense, just as it would be nonsense to believe that a person is made of iron because they have iron in their blood and you would find a very small lump of iron there. That is just how meteorites are found; they are disintegrated comets. Comets are something quite different; comets are alive! And the sun is alive too, it has a stomach, and not only eats comets but feeds itself just as we do. There is iron in our stomachs too. When you eat spinach, you don't realize that it contains a lot of iron, in general, of course. Nevertheless, it is good to advise people with anemia to eat a lot of spinach, because it helps their blood absorb iron much better than if you simply put iron into their stomachs, which usually passes through the intestines.

If the comets were only made of iron and fell into the sun, you should just see how it all comes out again! You would see a completely different process. You would probably have to build a giant toilet in space if that were the case! Of course, the situation is quite different. Comets are only made up of a small percentage of iron; but the sun eats them.

Now think back to the time when the Earth itself once had the Sun inside it. Then the Sun did the same as it does now, alone; then it also devoured comets. And now you have the reason why this giant head, which is the Earth, was able to live: because the Sun provided its nourishment. As long as the Sun was with the Earth, the Earth fed from the Universe through the Sun, just as we now feed from the Earth through our nourishment system.

So it was already taken care of that the earth, when the sun was still with her, could feed herself. Of course, you have to imagine that the sun is much bigger than the earth, and that therefore the sun, while it was inside the earth, was actually not inside the earth, but the earth was inside the sun. So you have to imagine it like this (see diagram $. 176), that at that time the sun was here, the earth was inside it and inside the earth, in turn, was the moon. So: sun, in the sun the earth and in the earth the moon. In a sense, it was the other way around than with humans. But with humans it only appears that they have a small stomach; the small stomach alone could not do much. The small stomach that man has – we will talk about this later – is related to the outside world everywhere. Actually, man is inside the earth, just as the earth was once inside the sun. And the actual earth's stomach was then the center of the sun. If that is the sun (see drawing), that is the earth, then the stomach was here (in the middle), and the sun just pulled these comets in from everywhere and then handed them over to the stomach, so that the digestion of the earth did happen inside the earth after all.

Now you can say again: This is contradicted by the fact that the human head does not digest itself. — That is quite right. But history has also changed. The human head does digest a little, after all. You see, I have described to you: When we eat food, it first comes to the tongue, to the palate. There they are first mixed with saliva containing ptyalin, and then they go down the gullet. But not all food goes down the gullet, for basically the human being is a column of water — everything is soft, only the solid parts are stored away — so that some of the food is absorbed in the mouth in the head. Direct nourishment goes from the palate into the head. That is how it is. You can see that things are not as crude as one usually believes, you can see that simply by comparing. You cannot expose a human egg to the air to hatch it externally. You can do that with a bird's egg. It is exposed to the air and first hatched on the outside. It is the same, of course, with the human head, in a similar way. The human head today could not nourish itself from the little nourishment it gets from the palate. But the earth was organized differently. It had a stomach within it, which was also a mouth, and it nourished itself entirely from this mouth. So we can say: As long as the sun was connected to the earth, this huge being had the possibility to nourish itself from the universe.

But now I have told you: if you study the earth today, it is like a dead human head. Yes, a dead human head, but it must have lived once. So the earth must have lived once. It nourished itself through the sun.

Now, gentlemen, I will tell you something else. You see, if you look at the human germ in the womb at a certain time, that is, after fertilization, I mean two, three, four weeks after fertilization, this human germ looks extraordinarily interesting. First of all, in the mother's body, all around the mother's body, which is called the uterus, there is a membrane that has many blood vessels. And the blood vessels that are inside the mother's body are not there, of course, when a child is not being carried. These blood vessels are connected to the other blood vessels that the mother has. They go into the blood vessels everywhere. So the mother has connected this sphere to her own blood system (see drawing) and while the blood usually circulates in the body, the blood also flows into this sphere, only into the outer sphere.

Now, gentlemen, inside this sphere you will find all the organs. For example, there is an organ that looks like a sack, and next to it there is another one that is a smaller sack. These blood vessels also continue into these sacks, which are not there at all when the mother is not carrying a child, because the whole sphere is then missing; these veins also continue into it. So we can say: These veins go in everywhere and everything I have drawn for you so far is there when the child develops in the first few weeks; it is there and the child hangs on to it very small, tiny, here. It hangs on to it very tiny!

And strangely enough, if I were to draw you a large picture of the child now, as it is in the near future, I would have to draw it like this: the child is almost just a head, with the rest of it tiny. You can see that I have drawn two little stumps like that, which will later become the arms. The legs are almost non-existent. But instead, these two pockets that I have drawn sit on the child, and the blood vessels go into these two pockets. And these blood vessels bring nourishment, and the head is nourished. A stomach is not there yet, and neither is a heart. The child does not have its own blood circulation in the first few weeks. The child is just a head. And that grows and grows gradually so that it becomes human-like in the second or third month, that the other organs are added. But the child is still nourished from the outside, from that which is there as pockets. And then food is stored all around (it is drawn). But blood is supplied. The child cannot breathe yet, it only gets air indirectly through the mother. The child is actually a human head, and the other organs are not yet of much use to it. It cannot do anything with the lungs. It cannot do anything with the stomach. It cannot eat yet; so it must get all its nourishment only in such a way that its head is nourished. It cannot breathe yet. It does not yet have a nose either. The organs are developing, but it cannot use them yet. So the child in the mother's womb is a head; only everything is soft. The later brain is terribly soft in here, very soft and terribly alive, very much alive. And if you could take a giant microscope and look straight at a child's head, which for all I care is from the second or third week after fertilization, it would look quite similar to what I told you about the earth as it once was, when the ichthyosaurs and plesiosaurs and so on waddled around. It would look very similar, only different in size.

So that one can say: Where can we find a picture of the Earth as it once was, today? In the human head, when the human head is still unborn and exists as a germ. This human head is namely a clear image of the Earth.

And everything that needs to be there, these pockets on the body, what is around it, is thrown off as the so-called afterbirth after it has become very brittle, and the person remains, is born. So from what is thrown off as the afterbirth, you actually get the nourishment as a child in the womb – the afterbirth consists of the shredded blood vessels. These so-called allantois and amnion – these shredded organs – are extremely important to us while we are in our mother's womb, because they replace the stomach and respiratory organs. But when we no longer need them, when we are born, can breathe and eat for ourselves, they are thrown off as afterbirth.

Now, gentlemen, when you look at something like the one I have drawn for you, all you have to do is imagine: There would be the universe, here would be the Earth, and in there the human head and all around, very fine, the sun (see drawing $. 177). And now comes birth, that is, what was once there ceases. The sun and the moon fly out, and the birth of the Earth is there. The Earth must help itself.

There are two things that can be described. First of all, I could describe to you the earth as it once looked like – there were ichthyosaurs, plesiosaurs and so on. But now I could just as easily describe the human germ. Everything is smaller, but I would have to say the same thing. So today you could say: the earth was once the germ of a giant human.

It is extremely interesting that in earlier times people knew more than later people in a remarkable way - we will talk about that later. The later people have mostly learned from the misunderstood Hebrew document, from the misunderstood Old Testament, and they imagined, not true: there was the earth and somewhere the paradise, and there is the finished Adam in the paradise as a little nipper. This idea that people have formed from the misunderstood Old Testament is about as accurate as if someone today were to imagine: Man does not come from the little thing that is there from the allantois and amnion sacs, from this skin and so on - man does not come from that, but all that is a thing in itself; but in the mother's womb there is a tiny flea, and from this little flea comes man. That's about it when you imagine: The Earth was there, Adam and Eve lived on it like fleas, and afterwards the human race. This is precisely what has arisen from a misunderstanding of the Old Testament, whereas those who knew something in ancient times did not speak of Adam, but of Adam Kadmon. And Adam Kadmon is something other than Adam. He is this giant head that the Earth once was. And that is a natural conception. This Adam Kadmon only became an earth flea when people could no longer imagine that a human head could become as large as the earth, when they no longer believed in it, and so they formed the abnormal conception, as if it were there for fun, that the whole nine months in the mother's body go by, and that the human being is born from this motherly sphere.

In reality, we have to imagine that man was once the whole earth – the whole earth. And the Earth was much more alive. But, gentlemen, it is no different; you see, if I draw you the Earth today, it is a dead being, just as the human head is dying, and if we go back to this human head, which is in the mother's womb, it is alive through and through. It is as the Earth once was. And the Earth died today. But once it was alive through and through.

You see, if people could hold everything that science provides together, they would come up with many things. Science is all right, but the people who administer today's science cannot do much with science. If someone looks at the earth's surface today, they have to say: It's like a dead human head. We are actually walking on a dead body that must have lived once. I have told you that; but I will also tell you everything that follows from it.

Now, during my youth in Vienna, there was a very famous geologist, that is, a student of the earth. He wrote a great book: “The Face of the Earth.” It says that today, when we walk over the soil of Bohemia or Westphalia, we walk over dead things. That was once alive. - Science already suspects the details, but it cannot put the things together. What I am telling you does not contradict science anywhere. You can find confirmation of it everywhere if you follow the scientific evidence. But the scientists themselves cannot get out of it, which follows from the facts.

So we really come to say: the Earth was once a giant human. That's what it was. And it died, and today we walk around on the dead Earth.

Now, you see, there are important questions left over, two important questions raised by Mr. Burle's question. One is this: if we go back, we see that the Earth was a giant. Where did the animals come from? And the second question is: the Earth was a giant. How did it come about that man is now such a small flea on the Earth? How did it come about that he became so small? These two questions are indeed important questions.

The first one is actually not that difficult to answer; you just have to answer it not out of all kinds of fantastic gimmicks, but you have to answer it out of the facts.

Gentlemen, what do you think would happen if a woman died during pregnancy, while the story inside still looks like I have drawn it on the board, and you dissect out the ball that contains the things that fall away with the afterbirth and the embryo that would later become a human being is inside, let us assume that we take all of this out and do not put it in alcohol, in which it would be preserved, but instead we leave it lying around somewhere, especially where it is damp, and we go back to it after some time. What do you think we would see? Yes, gentlemen, if we were to go there again after some time and then start cutting it up, all sorts of creatures would run out; all sorts of little critters would run out. The entire human head, which was alive in the mother's womb, dies. And as it dies - we only need to cut it open to see it - all sorts of creatures run out.

Yes, gentlemen, just imagine that the Earth was once a human head like this in outer space and died. Are you surprised that all kinds of creatures came out of it? They still do today. If you take that into consideration, you have the origin of animals. You can still observe that today.

That is the one question. We will talk more about how the individual animal forms came about. But in principle, you have to assume that the animals must be there. I can only touch on this question today; I will answer it in detail later.

Now the other question remains: Why is man such a little shrimp today? Well, there you have to take everything you can know. First, you can ask: Yes, but once a human being lived in space, who died and is now Earth. Did he not give birth? Did he not reproduce? — There is no need to go into this question any further; if it did multiply, then the others in space were called to do so at that time. So we need not be interested until a certain point of multiplication occurs.

Yes, gentlemen, if you still follow how a small cell multiplies today, it is like this at first (see drawing), then it is like this, then two come from it. Then each becomes two; that's already four. And so the whole human body is built up, so that in the end it consists of nothing but small individual critters living in the blood and dead in the head, all coming from a single cell. Thus, from a part of the original earth, just as today man is not only born out of a whole human being, but out of a part of a human being - today's earth came into being. The only question is: why can't they get out anymore? Because the Earth is no longer connected to the universe in the same way as it was when the Sun was inside it. Now all these beings remain inside. They were illuminated from the outside by the Sun when the Sun went out, whereas before it was inside. — You have to take everything you can know.

Gentlemen, but perhaps you know that dogs, which generally speaking are a certain size, below which they do not go, but can be bred to be so small that they are sometimes almost no larger than large rats. If you give the dogs alcohol to drink, for example, they stay small – it depends on what affects the being and how big it becomes –; however, these dogs become terribly nervous.

It was really the case – even if the whole world was not full of alcohol – that the effects of the substances had become quite different when the sun had left the earth. When it was still in the earth, there was a completely different effect than later, when the sun was out. And while man was at first as big as the earth itself, he became small through this huge effect. But that was fortunate for him, because when he was still as big as the earth, all the others who were born had to fly out into space. We will hear later what happened to them. Now they could stay inside the earth because they can walk around on the earth together. And now, instead of one person, the human race came into being because people remained small.

Yes, gentlemen, it is true: we all descend from one man! That is, after all, understandable, isn't it. But this one man was not a little earth flea, as people are now, but he was the earth itself. When the sun came out, the earth died on one side, and the animals crept out, as they still do when something dies. And on the other side, the forces remained. Only now they were not stimulated from within by the sun, but from without, and man became small and could become many people.

So the fact that the sun works from the outside makes people small. You can easily understand that. Just imagine that the Earth is this small (I will draw the Earth very small now) and in the past the Sun was where the Earth was inside, so all the forces radiated out from there, and when the Earth moved, the Sun always moved with it; they were one and the same (see illustration on the left). Now that the sun is outside, the story is like this: there is the sun and there is the earth, which goes around the sun. When the earth is there, it receives these rays; when it is there, it receives those rays (drawing on the right). They only ever see a small section of rays on plate 9. When the sun is outside, the earth receives only a few rays. When the sun was still inside the earth, the whole effect of the sun still came from within. No wonder that when the sun orbits in this way, it can illuminate a person at every single point on the earth, whereas before, when it was inside and had to radiate from the center, it could only illuminate one person. When the sun began to work from the periphery, it reduced the size of the human being.

It is really interesting that not only the Asian scholars, when the Old Testament had long been misunderstood and interpreted as it was later interpreted, still spoke of the Adam Kadmon, who is actually a human being who is the whole earth, but the ancestors of the present-day Central European people, who are everywhere, in Switzerland, in Germany, they had a legend that said: The Earth was once a giant human, the giant Ymir. And the Earth was fertilized.

So they talked about the earth in the same way that we have to talk about a human being today. And of course this was no longer understood later on, because the place of these indeed pictorial, correct images from legends – they are terribly true – because the place of these true images was taken by the false Latin interpretation of the Old Testament. So the ancient Germans here in Europe – it was figurative, as if they had dreamt, but the dream was much more correct than later, when the Old Testament was misunderstood and instead of speaking of the whole earth, of the Adam Kadmon, one spoke of the little Adam – still had an old, albeit merely dream-like, figurative science.

Yes, you get a huge respect for what has been eradicated, old, but only dream-like pictorial science. But it was there, and it has been eradicated. It does not need to be surprised. In a certain time this general extermination just came. And if I were to tell you what once existed, for example, in Asia Minor, in the Near East, in North Africa, in Southern Europe, in Greece, Italy – yes, gentlemen, in the 1st, 2nd, 3rd century, when Christianity already existed, you could find strange statues everywhere in Asia or Africa when you walked in the fields; they were everywhere. And in these statues, people who could not yet read or write expressed what it once was like on Earth. From these statues one could have studied what it once was like on Earth. It was in the form, as expressed in the sculpture, that the Earth was once a living being.

And then people just got this rage, this anger, and in a short time everything that was present in such statues was simply taken away. A huge amount was destroyed, from which a huge amount could have been taken. What is still found today of ancient monuments is the least important, because in the first centuries, people knew well which was the more important. That was shaved off.

So it is true that humanity once had wonderful knowledge; but they just dreamt it, these people. And you see, it is an extraordinarily interesting fact that people once actually dreamt on Earth instead of reflecting, as they have to do today. They actually did it more at night than during the day. Because everything you learn from the older wisdom of people is interspersed with the fact that you can see that these people observed a lot at night. The shepherds in the fields observed a lot at night. And this old wisdom was present among the Germans, among the Germanic peoples, in that they spoke of a giant human. And later there was still a giant human. Man really did not suddenly become smaller. And in the end he became just as people are now.

From this point, gentlemen, we will continue our discussion when I am able to visit you again. Such a question always provides the stimulus to talk about a great deal. I must now travel to Germany again, to Stuttgart. After that, we can continue our discussion. In the meantime, prepare some very nice questions. I will then tell you when the next hour will be.