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

Then the Thrones were joined by another kind of beings, ranking lower than Thrones, whom we call the Spirits of Personality, or the Principalities— Archai in Christian esotericism. These Spirits of Personality worked over, as it were, what had flowed from the Thrones; and through the collaboration of these two kinds of beings the first inception of the human physical body came into being. This work continued over a long period of time. Then, as mentioned yesterday, a cosmic night, or world devachan, intervened, and there came about the second embodiment of the earth, the Sun phase. Human beings emerged again, and other spiritual beings appeared on the scene: the Spirits of Fire, or Archangels, as they are known in Christian esotericism, and the Spirits of Wisdom, or Kyriotetes. These were mainly concerned with the further development of what reappeared as the human physical body. Now it was the turn of the Kyriotetes—the Dominions, or Spirits of Wisdom—to sacrifice their substantiality; and what we call the etheric body flowed into the physical body. This etheric body was then worked upon by the Spirits of Fire, or Archangels, in collaboration with the Spirits of Personality; and thereby man became a being of the rank of a plant. We may say that on Saturn the human being had the status of a mineral, for our minerals have only a physical body, and so had the man of Saturn; hence he lived a mineral existence. On the Sun he had the status of a plant, for he had a physical and an etheric body.