Steiner's third earthly epoch, when the moon separated from the Earth, the sexes divided, and the I first descended into a hardening human body.
Lemuria is Rudolf Steiner's name for the third earthly epoch of human evolution, set between the Hyperborean age and Atlantis. Steiner read it from the Akashic Records and described it in GA 11, Cosmic Memory. In this epoch the moon separated from the Earth, the human form divided into the two sexes, and the I first descended into a body that was beginning to harden.
In Steiner's Own Words
For Lemuria was greatly troubled by storms. The earth had not then reached its later density. The thin soil was everywhere undermined by volcanic forces bursting forth in smaller or greater streams. Mighty volcanoes were found nearly everywhere, and continually exercised a devastating activity. In all their arrangements men were accustomed to take this fiery agency into consideration. They even turned the fire to advantage in respect of their works and enterprises. It was the activity of volcanic fire that also brought about the ruin of the Lemurian continent.
What it Means Today
Waldorf teachers since 1919 have worked with Lemuria not as a continent on a map but as a stage of consciousness the child re-lives. In the first three years of life the small child learns to stand, to speak, and to think, in that order, and Steiner identified this triple gesture as the recapitulation of what humanity passed through during the Lemurian epoch. The body is still plastic. The will is the strongest force. Memory is barely there. The child, like the Lemurian, imitates the world directly and is shaped by what surrounds it, long before reflection or abstraction can take hold.
For a Waldorf early-childhood educator this turns Lemuria into a practical compass. If the child of two is the Lemurian, the educator's task is to surround that child with worthy gestures, rhythmic activity, and unhurried natural materials, because the child is taking the environment in through the limbs and the breath, not through explanation. Anthroposophic biography work extends the same logic further along the life course, treating the Lemurian recapitulation as a key to why early-childhood injuries to the will go so deep and why honest physical work, later in life, often heals what no amount of thinking can reach.
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