Isis and Madonna

Now when we trace man back through all the changes of time we find that the further we go back to ever more imperfect physical forms the more we meet with man's origin as a soul spiritual being. We have often gone back to an age of human evolution when the being we now call man had as yet no kind of physical existence and was securely sheltered within an existence of spirit and soul. Attention has repeatedly been drawn to how, in the sense of spiritual science we look upon the material form, man's physical body, as a densification of a being who was once only spirit and soul. This being of spirit and soul has been densified, as it were, to present-day man, as water is solidified into ice. This picture has often been made use of, when it is said: Let us imagine a quantity of water condensed to ice so that finally we are left with a certain amount of water together with the part that is changed into ice. Here we have an image of man's origin. In the man who was once just soul and spirit there existed as yet nothing of the physical, material bodily nature today perceptible to the eyes and tangible for the hands. Man becomes gradually ever more physical, until he comes to his present physical form. The age to which orthodox science can look back reveals indeed man in the physical form we see today. But spiritual science looks back into a primordial past when man was born out of the spiritual world and was still of a spirit and soul nature. When we contemplate the soul of man today we can say that the soul element in him is the last remnant, so to speak, of the spiritual and soul nature that once was his. We look at the inner nature of man, learning to know his spiritual and soul being, and come to realize that as he is in his inner being, so he was once long ago when he was born out of the womb of the spiritual world. This being of soul is sheathed from outside in the lower elements of the sense world, but he can be purified and cleansed, can raise himself to a perception free of the senses, thereby regaining the spirituality out of which he was born. This is the process of spiritual knowledge that passes through purification. Thus in spirit we gaze into man's being of soul, and speaking not merely in imagery but with reality say: Knowing this soul being in its truth, we perceive that the being is not of this world. In the background of this soul being we see a divine spiritual world out of which he was born.