34. The Beginning and the End of the Earth
GA 68b/1907-12-16/p047
·1907-12-16
·
English
MediumMedium alignmentSome paragraph re-numbering between this translation and the German original — the locus may slip by a paragraph or two.
Record: listeners' notes. Written from listeners' notes, summaries, or memory rather than a shorthand transcript. The wording is the note-taker's as much as Steiner's: weigh a single striking phrase here far more cautiously than the same phrase in a stenographic volume, and do not rest an argument on one word. Evidence: «Da keine professionellen Stenogramme vorliegen, handelt es sich oftmals um notizenhaft festgehaltene Zusammenfassungen oder Berichte.» (Since no professional shorthand transcripts exist, these are often summaries or reports kept in the form of notes.). The publisher's description of the volume, as mirrored on AnthroWiki (GA 68b). The translation is the maintainer's, not a published one.
In the beginning, the entire Earth was like a mulberry (made up of individual berries), composed of spiritual beings. From the astral, the physical first separated like ice balls from water. Some retained the astral [and only formed the physical at a higher level]; for others, what initially separated from the astral substance remained at the first level. The moners [Haeckel's were not there earlier than the spiritual man and] were the first attempt of man to form a physical body of man. Where the first physical rudiments of a physical body fell out of the astral, there the moners formed. But the astral bodies, with the inclusion of the physical, developed higher. Only what fell out of the astral did not advance.
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