The seven seals of the Book of Revelation, interpreted by Steiner as cosmic-evolutionary stages corresponding to the seven planetary periods of Earth's spiritual evolution.
The spiritual seals are the seven seals of Revelation 5 through 8 as Rudolf Steiner reread them: a clairvoyant record, not a political prophecy. Each seal corresponds to a future civilization on Earth, and together they sit inside the wider arc of cosmic evolution that carries our planet through the Saturn, Sun, Moon, Earth, Jupiter, Venus, and Vulcan stages.
In Steiner's Own Words
Thus you see how the present-day humanity will pass into the new epoch beyond the War of All against All, just as that root-race of the Atlanteans lived over into our epoch and founded our civilizations. After the great War of All against All humanity will develop in seven consecutive stages. We have already seen how that which is said concerning the opening of the seven seals in the Apocalypse of John gives us the character of the seven consecutive civilizations after the great war. ... Just as the epoch after the great War of All against All is characterized by the seven seals, because the seer can only see it to-day from the astral world, so by the sounding of the trumpets is characterized the stage of civilization which follows.
What it Means Today
Steiner's contribution to Apocalypse exegesis was to treat Revelation as a spiritual-scientific document rather than a coded political tract. In the twelve lectures of GA 104, delivered in Nuremberg in June 1908, he reads the sealed book that the Lamb opens (Revelation 5 to 8) as a record of where Earth evolution is going, not where Rome had been. Each seal, when broken, releases the inner picture of one future culture-epoch on Earth. The seven seals together describe a whole post-catastrophe era of human development. The seven trumpets that follow them describe the next era, and the bowls of wrath the one after that.
This anchors the seals inside Steiner's larger cosmology. Earth itself moves through seven planetary incarnations (Ancient Saturn, Ancient Sun, Ancient Moon, present Earth, Future Jupiter, Future Venus, Future Vulcan), and our current Earth condition is the fourth. The Christian Community priests who carry Steiner's apocalyptic stream into liturgical work, ordained from 1922 forward in conversation with him, still read the seals in this way: as a map of becoming, opened by the Christ-impulse, addressed to anyone willing to take spiritual responsibility for what the next epoch will look like.
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