Self-Knowledge and God-Knowledge I

GA 90a — 12 October 1904, Berlin

LXI. The Early Chapters of Genesis

If you want to understand the beginning of the Bible, you have to know what things refer to. We have spoken of the Hyperboreans. That was not a race so dense that it could not have been reached. - Air beings. Therefore, we need not be surprised if they have left no signs of remembrance, no bones and so on. Only what was physically hardy could leave remains. What takes place in the first chapter of Genesis is even higher than the Hyperborean time. Only up to the astral, above all physical.

Let us review the seven rounds: only the fourth round has produced people like the present ones; the archetype of such a human being was created who could realize himself within the mineral kingdom. Before that, he had gone through the elemental realms.

1. Round plant kingdom
2. Round animal kingdom
3. Round human kingdom

So that one cannot actually say of the present round that man is in the image of God. It is only in the seventh round that he will be God-like in his human nature. Only the physical body has attained perfection. Further development is again the attainment of earlier stages, but in a higher form. Man became physical as he is today when he got warm blood.

We must make a clear distinction between warm- and cold-blooded animals. Fish have no passions. Man has also gone through the state of cold-bloodedness. The Lemurian race were cold-blooded until the appearance of sexuality. We must reach this state again in a higher form. Christianity strives to regain this state of cold-bloodedness. It wants to curb and ennoble the passions. The esotericist says that Christians are Pisces, who overcome everything that comes from warm-bloodedness.

The astral body will only be complete in the next round. When our fourth round has passed, the mineral will no longer be there. Man will not be tied to the ground; he has also developed out of the form of moving in the air: hence the symbol of the eagle. During the sixth round, he absorbs the plant world. Humans and animals will divide in the absorption of the plant world. Animals will process the tendrils; humans the seed power.

In the seventh round, man is then present as the image of God.

So in the first round, only the first elementary realm is present; the mineral kingdom begins.

What makes an object perceptible is the mineral kingdom; man needs higher organs to see beyond the physical; he must develop new senses. During the first four rounds, the world was visible because it gradually developed the mineral. The moment the mineral kingdom flashes, the world shines. Before that, it would have been completely lightless. At first, this light was dark red; everything that is to develop later is still present in the darkness. Everything that was preparing to become mineral earth was light. Everything else that came over from the moon was darkness, with the exception of the mineral. Everything that is light is now the sun, everything that is darkness is the moon.

Heaven is all spiritual. Waters are that from which the earth was formed, its astral basic germ. When we now look at the mineral kingdom, we cannot distinguish one stone from another; nothing is separate. It was only in the second round that individual beings were singled out; this is indicated by the fact that the spiritual was separated from the physical. If the image of the spiritual did not remain, a plant could not be recreated. The stone remains, needs no separation. The

plant needs it; this is the task of the second round. “Waters are the beings, the unified. The division lies in the separation of the spiritual from the physical.

They were plants that we would call sponges or algae today; not what we would call herbs today. They have a different nature, but they are plant-like beings. Especially those that do not yet have the correct green color.

During the third round, everything that not only takes life from the ground but also carries life forward is created. The difference between seed-bearing plants and sponges. The sponge still takes life from the general nature. When we look at the animal's astral body during the third round, it is something quite unfinished, it is merely the mineral ground that is being prepared. The animal has a plant nature, it reproduces and has an astral nature of feeling, it feels. But what concerns us here is only the mineral imprint. So what is created during the third round is the mineral imprint, and it consists of the fact that it has a plant body that carries seeds. The Genesis writer describes only what has remained of plants and animals, the solid shell; he omits the ethereal and astral. – Snail in its shell as an example. He describes what carries seeds.

During the fourth round, the mineral continues to develop to the point where it can become a shell for plants, animals and humans. In the third round, animals could not see the moon and stars because they were not yet mineral; now they will.

What has come from the lunar condenses as a moon body; the sun is condensed light.

We have not yet come to the end of the fourth day, because the round has not expired. What happens later? The birds are the future astral bodies of humans; winged animals are cherubs and angels. This multiplication is not a sexual multiplication.

The sixth round: one must think of the process as having been elevated into the mental realm, where everything becomes pure. God gives plants to man for food: absorption of the plant kingdom. Everything that is now an animal will then, as it were, be summoned into its astral body. The lion first strives towards his kind, he is not yet in his kind. Only in the sixth round will each animal be in its kind; then their earthly development will cease and a higher one will begin. Only now is man the ruler: he must be able to rule magically. Then man will be male-female again. All herbs and tendrils to the animals.

Heaven, the highest spiritual realm, is also completed. God can only rest when man is also complete. The later states are always repetitions of the earlier ones. For our fourth state, we can also imagine that we find the future hinted at in the present. A derived sense is possible because each following one on a higher level repeats the previous one: the first three days of creation correspond to the first three rounds. The four last days of creation on the Arupa-, Rupa-, astral and etheric-physical phase of the earth up to the time in the Lemurian race.

The real original meaning: seven rounds and taken in the most spiritual sense. But then a derived one [gap in the transcript]

because each following one at a higher level repeats the previous one.

Very few knew what the Genesis meant; the point in time when it was first set down in writing coincides with the beginnings of Christianity. Philon Judaeus of Alexandria was the first to give something as we have taken it today. The time when an esoteric teaching was first entrusted to a book coincides with the time when the mystery was overcome. Those who were initiated experienced the sacrificial death of the god in the mysteries, and if they were initiated higher, their own sacrificial death. What had previously been experienced by the individual in the crypt was carried out into the world arena. What was previously only experienced by those who saw was now to be shared with those who believed. While Philo, as far as possible, published the esoteric for the first time, Christianity presents it as a mystical fact. History is made of what was previously experienced only in the mysteries.

This is the central cosmic significance of Christianity and its founder. Everything that came before points to it, everything that came after rejects it. What happened earlier in the mysteries was like a prophecy. Therefore, Christianity is a fulfillment. “I have not come to destroy, but to fulfill.”

The second chapter of Genesis begins where, in our present round, the physical state occurs. In the etheric state, animals and plants did not yet exist, because man is actually the first. The polar race is still etheric, but already physical. As man develops from the etheric human being, who is still male-female, animals and plants arise as waste products. In the beginning, man had all the qualities that are now distributed among the other plants and the animals: the rage of the lion, the cunning of the fox. So the middle of the Lemurian period is an important point in time for all beings. Beings with warm blood did not exist earlier.

Now, the seven days of creation are the seven rounds; the conditions that preceded our physical ones can also / gap in transcript ]

the fourth round begins / gap in transcript ]

In the Egyptian mysteries it was recorded that the seven days are seven rounds. Our own physical development is described in the second chapter. Now the seventh day is meant only with regard to mineral-physical development.

The etheric was there, and in the etheric, like fog figures, people separated out – etheric double bodies.

The lower Indian yogi tries to achieve psychic experiences by changing the breathing process. A body in which the carbonic acid is active is not capable of harboring spiritual things, but it can harbor psychic things. Those who hold the carbonic acid in them longer than is the case in the normal process become more plant-like as a result. The psyche and soul have passed over and now take possession of the etheric body they find, shaped by the gods of form; union of the soul with the dust of the earth, physical mineral etheric body. All matter that is today separated into two celestial spheres is united in the etheric sea. In the center between the present Earth and the Moon was the ether sphere; in it was united what later separated, daughter spheres are from the mother sphere, which is referred to as “Paradiso”. Only through this did the Earth become ripe to attain physical density, through which man has become so. So indeed Paradise existed, from which man was expelled.

Only now, after the separation, do plants develop. Man could not develop further if he did not give up certain parts that became plants. “If they had not chosen a lower existence, I would not have developed higher,” man must tell himself.

The whole of evolution arises from taking and giving. Evil also arises from this, which only lies in time and must be balanced out later. The corresponding good is created for the evil in later time; this is how development comes about.

Now everything that man needs was available on earth. All the life force that man does not need is in the plants; in the middle of the tree of life, what he needs, the life force. It is man's own prana, purified for him by giving up some of it.

The sympathetic nervous system spreads like a tree in his body. Nothing can arise in the universe without its counterpart appearing. Man must now find his complement in the other tree, in the polaric: spinal cord and brain. In addition to mere prana, his organs for knowledge are developing. The human spirits were able to connect with him and take up residence in the tree of knowledge. We will skip the four currents this time.

[Gap in the transcript] you will die. All life that existed until now did not know what we call birth and death today. What was physical was immortal. In order to create an organ for the spirit, [gap in the transcript] a duality was created. The abundance of the human spirit was like a large amount of liquid in relation to a vessel that cannot hold it; the series of lives are the various vessels. It is natural that man, when faced with the choice, should either retain his immortality in the lower realms or purchase it through many lives.

In order for man to turn to the spiritual, it is necessary that birth and death arise. Because the spirit has many facets, it is important that man comes into different situations. The diversity of characteristics would not be achieved and different destinies would not arise if the mother only gave birth to a daughter without the means of sexuality; only now did the mixture come and with it the diversity: the diversity among people and thus the possibility of creating the most diverse destinies. Sexual reproduction is a necessary counterpart to birth and death.

In hermaphrodites, only the characteristics of the ancestor can be inherited; for entirely new characteristics to arise, the mixture of two must be added. Amphimixis is the necessary correlate of birth and death. In the period when humans acquired bones, that is, a mineral basic structure, humans divided into men and women; the Persian Genesis still contains the meaning well.

At this moment, with the physical evolution of man, all warm-blooded creatures arise - “hm entsprechend” means “of the same nature”. In the wake of man, the animals arose.

The sleep into which Adam falls: Before that, man was a physical being into which the spirit was driven from the outside; now what used to come from the outside must sprout within, must break out. Consciousness from the outside can only become inner by man crossing a threshold. He sleeps over.

With the becoming male and female of the human being, the work on the physical plane begins at the same time. Now he is dependent on himself. He used to be connected to higher matter and the spirit.

And now they realize that they are naked. What has now come is matter, because before that it was finer matter in which the sense organs had not yet been formed. Seeing was only possible once eyes had been formed. The moment when the spiritual organs of prehistoric times became sense organs was the moment when man became a special being. He saw himself in his selfhood.