Thirteenth Lecture

If we want to characterize human beings, we can generally say that today their physical bodies are highly rigid, while their etheric bodies are still easily movable. The etheric body therefore still forms itself according to what the human being is like inwardly. So it has greater significance, even a certain reality, when, for example, someone becomes angry and their face takes on a slightly hyena-like appearance, their etheric body already becoming more hyena-like. The etheric body is still capable of metamorphosis; the etheric body still has something that allows it to be transformed. But it is also on the way to rigidity, just like the physical body. Just as the physical body has taken on fixed forms from the Atlantean period to our fifth post-Atlantean period, so too will the etheric body take on more rigid, fixed forms from the fifth to the sixth post-Atlantean period, and the result of this will be — as I have indicated in various lectures — that this etheric body, which with its forms enters back into the physical body, will assert itself very strongly. We are in the fifth period of the first post-Atlantean epoch, then comes the sixth and then the seventh period; so in the sixth and seventh periods this etheric body will have a great influence on the physical body in its rigidity, it will make the physical body its faithful image.