4. The Hierarchical Beings of our Solar System and the Kingdoms of the Earth

Turning back once more to Saturn, we can say that it consisted exclusively of human beings. There was no animal, plant, or mineral kingdom. The whole sphere was composed of the earliest human germs in much the same form as a blackberry is made up of tiny individual berries; and everything that pertained to Saturn surrounded it and acted upon it from the environment. If we now ask, Whence came that which gave man this first impulse, on old Saturn, for his physical body, we can say in a certain sense that it derived from two sources. In the first instance, higher spiritual beings poured forth their own substance: a momentous sacrifice occurred on old Saturn, and the beings that achieved it are called Thrones in the sense of Christian esotericism. Human thinking or even human clairvoyance may scarcely presume to contemplate the august evolution the Thrones had to undergo before being able to sacrifice that which could form the germinal indication of the human physical body.