I. The Whitsun Mystery and its Connection with the Ascension

As already said, this is now known even to ordinary materialistic geology. Anthroposophy must add to this knowledge the fact that the earth has been involved in this process of decline ever since the middle of the Atlantean epoch. Moreover, in the earth must be included everything that belongs to it: the plants, the animals, and, above all, physical man. Physical man is part and parcel of the earth. In that the earth is involved in a process of decline, so too is the human physical body. Expressed differently, in more esoteric terms, this signifies that by the middle of the Atlantean epoch, everything that was first laid down in a germinal condition in the warmth-body of the “Saturn” evolution had reached completion. The human physical body actually reached completion by the middle of the Atlantean epoch, and since then the path of its evolution has been one of decline.