Lecture VI

If you go back to a time long before the great catastrophe swept Atlantis away we find our ancestors in a condition very different from our own. It was only about the middle of the Atlantean epoch that man received a form essentially the same as he has today. Before then his material parts were softer. We find man consisting of a soft substance having no trace of his present hard bones, nothing even so solid as cartilage. He swam in the air, which was still permeated by dense fluid; he was a kind of water being, such as certain medusae are today that can hardly be distinguished from the surrounding water. At that time the forces of man's bone structure were organized, but the bones themselves had not hardened, and the connection between the higher and the lower principles of man was very different to what it is now.