IX. The Earth's Passage Through Its Former Planetary Conditions

Upon the Moon, the astral body was added in a similar manner. Everything astral first existed in the surroundings; the Fire Spirits had an astral body as their lowest member. The Beings upon the Sun resembled plants; for instance, they could not move from their fixed places. Although the whole body of the Sun was gaseous, you must imagine air-strata of greater density which were the bodies of these human plants. But now the astral body of man was added; this gave rise to the first foundation of a nervous system. The kingdom which had reached the plant stage of development upon the Sun, passed over to the animal stage, to a stage resembling that of animals. The physical ancestors of man upon the Moon thus possessed three bodies: the physical body, the etheric body and the astral body, yet they greatly surpassed the most highly developed apes of our planet; they were human animals which no biology can describe, an intermediate kingdom between man and animal. Our present vegetable, animal and mineral kingdoms only developed later, but even as there were human animals; so we must admit the existence of an intermediate kingdom between plant and animal; plants with a kind of sentient capacity, plants which literally squeaked if one touched them. These plant-animals could never have grown upon a mineral soil, such as the present soil of the Earth; in fact, this mineral soil did not exist upon the Moon. Its mass did not consist of the present rocky substances, not even of loose soil. Comparatively speaking, the Moon's foundation consisted of a mass resembling a mash of cooked spinach or salad, and in it a kind of mineral plant, The whole foundation of the Moon was therefore of vegetable nature. A peat bed of to-day would resemble the kingdom which existed at that time as an intermediate kingdom between our plants and minerals. There were no rocks, and anyone walking over the ground would have walked over such a peaty ground or vegetable foundation, and analogously you may think of rocks in the form of woodened portions within this mass.