10. The Chthonic and the Eleusinian Mysteries and the Transition from Plato to Aristotle

Then the pupil was told the following.—‘The Father of the whole World stands there before you. In Saturn He carries lead, in Jupiter tin, in Mars iron—iron which is closely connected also with the Earth, but in a quite different condition; in the Sun He carries radiant gold, in Venus the radiantly streaming copper, in Mercury the radiant quicksilver, and in the Moon the radiant silver. You yourself bear within you only so much of the metals as you were able to assimilate from the planetary conditions through which the the Earth passed in earlier times. In its present condition you can assimilate only the iron. But as an earthly human being you are not complete. The Father who stands before you shows you in the metals that which today cannot exist within you as coming from the Earth but which you have to receive from the Cosmos; and in this you have another part of your being. For only when you look upon yourself as a human being who has lived through the planetary transformations of the Earth—only then are you really a complete human being. You stand here on Earth as a part only of man. The other part of you the Father carries around His head and in His arms; he bears it for you. That which stands here on Earth together with that which He carries forms the real ‘you’. You stand on the Earth, but the Earth was not always as it is today. If the Earth had always been as it is today, you could not be on it as a human being. For the Earth today carries within it, even though in a dead condition, the lead of Saturn, the tin of Jupiter, the iron of Mars (in that other state), the gold of Sun, the silver of Moon, the copper of Venus, and the quicksilver of Mercury. It carries all these things within it. But the condition in which the Earth carries these metals within it today is no more than a memory of the condition in which, once upon a time, silver lived during the Old Moon-existence of the Earth, or gold during the Sun-existence of the Earth, or lead during the Saturn-existence of the Earth. That which you see today in the dense metallic ores of lead, tin, iron, copper, silver, quicksilver— with the exception of the iron as you know it, which is not essentially earthly but belongs to Mars—all these metals, which you now see in dense, concentrated form, once poured from the Cosmos into the Earth in quite different conditions. The metals, as you know them today on the Earth, are the corpses of what they once were; they have remained as the corpse of the metal substance and metal nature which played a part on the Earth in her ancient form—during the Old Saturn period, and later on in a different stage during the Old Moon period. Tin played a part, together with gold, during the Old Sun period of the Earth, in an altogether different condition. And when you behold this condition in the spirit, then this statue becomes for you, in what meets you today, a true “Father statue”.’