XVII. The Rational Mind the Gift of Lucifer and its Future Transformation into a New Kind of Clairvoyance

GA 97/1906-04-29/p003 ·1906-04-29 · English High

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: «Notizen von einunddreißig Einzelvorträgen mit sechs Fragenbeantwortungen» (Notes of thirty-one single lectures with six question-answerings). Rudolf Steiner Verlag Gesamtverzeichnis 2022, volume subtitle. The translation is the maintainer's, not a published one.

Today we'll consider the functions ascribed to some spiritual entities known as luciferic spirits. We'll find that they have some strange connections with humanity. Our starting point shall be the fact that the science of thinking, of reflection, goes back no further than 800 or 900 years before Christ. Anyone who studies the history of philosophy knows that it began with Thales,[^1] who lived in about 600 BC and once predicted a solar eclipse on the basis of his nature studies. This was something highly unusual at the time. The philosophy of western logic only came with Aristotle. Before that no doctrine existed about thinking, for thinking itself, abstract rational thinking, only began to dawn in 600 - 800 BC. Seeds of it were already there in the Atlantean race. We do, of course, know that the Chaldeans, ancient Egyptians and other Orientals knew astronomy, but this came from the deeper roots of clairvoyance.

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Cite: GA 97/1906-04-29/p003 · edition English