Self-Knowledge and God-Knowledge I

GA 90a — 22 February 1904, Berlin

XVIII. The Mosaic Creation Story and the Rounds

I have tried to reconcile the theosophical view of rounds and races, as stated in the “Ancient Wisdom”, with the Bible, and have suggested that the Genesis, the presentation of the Mosaic creation document, is to be taken in a truly literal sense, and that one then fully obtains the theosophical view. It should be noted that the true, great religious documents receive their original and real meaning through Theosophy.

To give an idea of what the Mosaic creation document means, I would like to repeat again: we have to distinguish seven rounds and in each round seven races. In the first round we have the archetypes of the mineral kingdom, in the second round the archetypes of the plant kingdom, in the third round the archetypes of the animal kingdom, in the fourth round the archetypes of man. When our present fourth round is over, the archetypes of man will have been formed. We have not even reached the archetypes yet. When our round is over, we will have expressed the human archetypes. The mineral kingdom will have already reached its completion in the round. It will dissolve again, regress. In the next round, the fifth, the plant kingdom will find its completion, in the sixth the animal kingdom, and in the seventh round the human kingdom.

In the seventh round, humanity will be the complete image of the deity in earthly development. What the deity was at the beginning, humanity will be at the end of the seventh round. The deity will have completed its task and will then rest. Nirvana will have been achieved. It will be able to hand over its task to the Masters and to the Master Lodges, to the Brotherhoods, which will then have developed into the complete image. This is described to us in the Biblical record.

The seven days of Creation signify in the esoteric sense seven rounds, so that the first chapter is to be understood in the following way.

In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth, and the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said, Let there be light: and there was light. And God saw the light, that it was good: Then God divided the light from the darkness and called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day. [Genesis 1:1-5]

I ask you to visualize exactly what I have described as the first round was. It was initially a reddish, brightly glowing sphere that then went through various stages of development to become a violet sphere, then disappeared into the pralaya, only to emerge again as a red sphere. The first day is thus complete. During this round, the archetypes of the mineral kingdom were formed.

Now the second round begins.

And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters. And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament: and it was so. And God called the firmament Heaven. And the evening and the morning were the second day.

God said, “Let there be a vault between the waters to separate water from water.” Before the mineral kingdom came into being, there could be no firmament. The waters represent spiritual substances. These did not separate from each other until the archetypes of the mineral kingdom had been formed, so that chunks now appeared in them. Then God made the vault and separated the water under the vault from the water above it. God called them heaven and earth. Only the mineral kingdom was pushed into the earthly, the other was still heavenly.

And God said: Let the waters under the heavens be gathered together into separate places, so that the dry land may be seen. And God called the dry land Earth, and the gathering of the waters he called the Sea. And God saw that it was good. And God said, “Let the earth bring forth grass, and herb yielding seed, and the fruit tree yielding fruit whose seed is in itself, and upon the earth:” And it was so. The earth brought forth grass, and herb yielding seed after his kind, and the tree yielding fruit, whose seed was in itself, after his kind: and God saw that it was good. And the evening and the morning were the third day. And God said, “Let there be lights in the expanse of the heavens to separate the day from the night, and let them serve as signs to mark seasons and days and years, and let them be lights in the expanse of the heavens to give light on the earth. And it was so. God made two great lights—the greater light to govern the day and the lesser light to govern the night. He also made the stars. And God set them in the firmament of the heaven, to give light on the earth: and they did so. And God saw the light, that it was good. And the evening and the morning were the fourth day.

Here it is emphasized that the completion of the mineral kingdom comes on the fourth day. In the fifth round, the plant kingdom will reach its completion. That is yet to come. Now the mineral kingdom will reach its completion. In the fifth round, the plant kingdom will reach its completion. This is expressed by saying: the plant idea will reach its completion. Everything that is now connected with the peculiar life that is in the mineral kingdom will be fully expressed in the fifth round. In the fifth round the mineral kingdom will gradually dissolve, and man will have a completely different relationship to the environment. The plant idea will have been realized. The relationship to the mineral kingdom will no longer be there, so that instead of being surrounded by a world of minerals, in the fifth round we will be surrounded by a world of plants. Everything that man leaves behind today will then be a plant product. There will be no more minerals; then human beings will live in the plant nature as they now live in the mineral nature. Man will be master over the plant kingdom; he will have dominion over the plant kingdom. This is how Genesis expresses it:

And God said, “Let the waters swarm with swarms of living creatures, and let birds fly above the earth in all directions under the open heavens.” So God created the great whales and every living creature that moves with which the water swarms, according to their kinds, and every winged bird according to its kind. And God saw that it was good. And God blessed them, saying: Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the water in the seas, and the birds shall multiply on the earth. And there was evening, and there was morning – the fifth day.

In the sixth round, we are dealing with the complete dissolution of the plant kingdom. A high, living animal thought has been realized, so that a difference between living and non-living will no longer exist. One will only live among the living. There will be no element at all as a medium; there will only be animal-like living entities. In the sixth round, everything related to sexual reproduction has long since disappeared; in the sixth round, we are only dealing with living things. Reincarnation ceases in the middle of the fifth round.

And God said, Let the earth bring forth the living creature after his kind, cattle, and creeping thing, and beast of the earth after his kind: and it was so. And God made the beast of the earth after his kind, and cattle after their kind, and every thing that creepeth upon the earth after his kind: and God saw that it was good. And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth. And God saw that it was good. And God said, “Let us make man in our image, in the image of ourselves; let them be masters of the fish of the sea, the birds of the air, the cattle, and all the earth and all the creatures that creep on the earth.” So God created man in his image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. God blessed them and said to them: Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the air, and over every living thing that moves upon the earth. God said: See, I have given you every plant yielding seed that is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree with seed in its fruit. These shall be for food for you and for all the beasts of the earth, for all the birds of the air and for all the creatures that move along the ground; I have given you every green plant for food. And it was so. God saw all that He had made, and behold, it was very good. And there was evening, and there was morning—the sixth day. [Genesis 1:24-31]

Everything culminated in animal existence. After the fourth round, the mineral; after the fifth round, the plant; after the sixth round, the animal. In the seventh round, everything had passed into the human. God created man as man and woman, no longer bisexual, but unisexual, and so God rested on the seventh day.

That is the story of the seven rounds. The first three days are over, the fourth day is the present round, and the last three are yet to come. The second chapter presents the story of the fourth round as such. Specifically, the fourth round shows how heaven and earth came into being, that they were created by God, who made heaven and earth and so on. Man was not yet there when the plant was made.

Then came the description of the fourth round. We had the red ball first, which then turns orange, yellow, and turns into a fog. Now the fog turns into the physical. God breathed a living soul into man after he had made him out of the clod of earth - the first two races. And the Lord God planted a garden in Eden, and put the man he had made there. This is the man who is still asexual. We are still very much in the first two races.

Previously, the plant and animal kingdoms were not so strictly separated. Man had a continuation that merged into the plant world. Then the plant world separated and then the animal kingdom. Even during our fourth round, there was a time - at the very beginning, when the first animals had split off - when humans were still connected to the center of the earth, similar to certain aquatic plants that hang from a long stem. Originally, men were plants, in the days when they had not yet descended into animality. They were still more plant-men, men who had not yet set the plant kingdom free from themselves.

Such a man was called Adam Kadmon. The man who still contains the plant and animal kingdoms within himself, and only later expels them, is Adam Kadmon. Then, in a new verse, on the one hand we have the Tree of Life and on the other hand an increase of consciousness, the Tree of Knowledge.

The Lord God formed man - Adam - out of dust from the earth and breathed the breath of life into his nostrils. So man was a living soul. And the Lord God planted a garden in Eden, in the east; and there he put the man whom he had formed. And out of the ground the Lord God caused to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight and good for food, with the tree of life in the middle of the garden, and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. And a river went out of Eden to water the garden; and from there it was divided into four heads. [...] And the Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to tend and keep it. And the Lord God commanded the man, saying, “You may eat from every tree of the garden; but you shall not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for in the day that you eat from it you shall surely die.” [Genesis 2:7-17]

Verse 16: Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat: but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die.

Now the incarnation begins. The incarnation begins at the moment when Kama-Manas enters. That was in the middle of the third race, and it ends in the middle of the fourth race of the fifth round. Then the text also describes the individual races. But it describes the fourth race in particular.

Among the original Turanians, a kind of betrayal of the deeper secrets occurred. The priests allowed themselves to teach people what were priestly secrets. The soul of man is expressed as the feminine. The incarnated will is the masculine. The soul, the feminine. The initiated priests have now united with the human soul and handed over the secrets to it. This was in the fourth race of the Atlanteans. This betrayal is described in the sixth chapter of Genesis.

But when men began to multiply, the sons of God saw the daughters of men that they were fair; and they took them wives of all which were fair [Genesis 6:1-2]...

... for they are flesh. Now God decides on the downfall, the flood, the downfall of Atlantis. That Noah took a pair of each animal into the ark is based on a real event. It shows how theosophy is becoming infinitely relevant to our culture. Not so long ago, Darwinism and the history of creation were still at a different point of view than they are today. In recent years, science has undergone important transformations. It was thought that animals develop through the struggle for existence and through selection; the imperfect perish, the perfect remain. Naturalists are already talking about the powerlessness of the struggle for existence. De Vries, the Dutch naturalist, has shown that the so-called mutation plays the greatest role in the descent of living beings. It has been found that living beings, when placed in different living conditions, quickly develop into completely different forms. You have to put them in completely different living conditions, that is the only real method of producing new species. It is mutation that causes new breeds to emerge. This does not happen gradually, but in leaps. The tomato, for example, emerged rapidly from a plant that did not have the red fruit. It originated in one place and then spread throughout the earth. All other forms of reproduction and development are secondary to mutation.

Now, science wonders: how could mutation once play such a major role? The Atlanteans knew the secrets of the germination power of seeds well enough to accumulate it, even to use it as a driving force. But they also understood how to cross the seeds of animals and bring forth new forms. What lives on Earth now has come about through conscious methods of crossbreeding, through actual cultivation, so that humans have actually created the animal species. From the few animal species, the Atlanteans created the entire living animal world. It is rooted in human nature that he who possesses greatness is inclined to abuse it.

A few specimens were selected from the animals and taken to the Gobi Desert - an ark. The rest perished. This is the basis of the story of the flood. The aberration of the Atlanteans, the segregation of the animals that arose from the mistakes of the Atlanteans, and the rescue of the same with the pure priests in the Gobi Desert. We must now ask: Who bred the races? Theosophy answers: the Atlanteans. But time is also pressing. The wheat, for example, came directly from a world body, from Venus. So we have to make a connection here between science and theosophy. [...]

After man had enjoyed knowledge, he had to die, he could no longer live, he could not at the same time also enjoy the side of life.