Cosmic Evolution: Planets & Epochs

The first of seven post-Atlantean cultural epochs in Steiner's cosmology, c. 7227 BCE to 5067 BCE, led by the seven Holy Rishis through dreaming-clairvoyant consciousness.

The second post-Atlantean cultural epoch (c. 5067 BCE to 2907 BCE), led by Zarathustra, in which humanity learned to work with the sense-world under the polarity of Ahura Mazda and Ahriman.

Atlantis is Steiner's fourth earthly epoch in which the etheric body still organised the body from outside, language and writing began, and the I-organisation slowly individuated.

Steiner's teaching that the winged ancestors of birds, saturated with silicic acid on Old Moon, became the organs through which the living earth perceived itself.

Chaos is the seed-bearing spiritual ground from which the Cosmos condensed, and which still works in the world as the source of everything genuinely new.

The fifth post-Atlantean cultural epoch (1413 to 3573 CE), in which the human I awakens to itself as a free cognitive agent.

The genuinely new soul-content the human I creates from no prior cause, Steiner's third world-process beside evolution and involution.

Steiner read the Eleusinian mother and daughter as soul-faculties: Demeter the etheric nature-forces, Persephone the old clairvoyance later drawn down into the soul.

Devolution is Steiner's counter-pole to evolution: the regressive stream of development that holds the human organism back, dimming organic vitality so that consciousness can light up.

In Steiner's reading, Dionysos is the Greek macrocosmic representative of the ego-forces, the divine counterpart of the human I working into earthly life.

Steiner's teaching that Earth now seeds the far-future Vulcan world, exactly as Old Saturn once seeded the Earth we inhabit.

The third post-Atlantean cultural age, c. 2907 BCE to 747 BCE, when the Sentient Soul awoke through Egyptian mystery-religion and Chaldean star-wisdom.

Future Jupiter is the fifth planetary condition in which humanity attains Spirit-Self consciousness as a collective faculty.

The sixth planetary stage in Steiner's cosmology, on which humanity attains Life-Spirit as a shared species-faculty.

The seventh and final planetary condition in Steiner's cosmology, the stage at which humanity attains Spirit-Man (Atma).

The fourth post-Atlantean cultural epoch (c. 747 BCE to 1413 CE) in which the Intellectual Soul awoke and the Mystery of Golgotha occurred.

Steiner's reading of Genesis 1:1 heaven and earth as two simultaneous cosmic conditions, the spiritual outstreaming and the elemental residue, not a sky placed above a ground.

The Ephesian philosopher of eternal becoming whom Steiner reads as a deeply initiated voice of the Greek Mysteries, for whom life and death are one.

The second of seven earthly epochs in Steiner's cosmology, when humanity first acquired its etheric germ within a warmth-filled air existence.

Beings carrying an excess of lunar wisdom who cannot incarnate in human bodies, so they clothe themselves in human thinking instead.

The mature Spirit of Form who withdrew with the Moon and from there gives the human being its fixed bodily form, Steiner's reading of the Biblical Yahweh.

In Steiner's anthroposophy, the Dark Age of roughly 5,000 years (3101 BC to 1899 AD) when direct spiritual vision was withdrawn so the human I could awaken.

Steiner's teaching that souls connected by karma descend toward earthquake and volcano regions to meet their destiny, while the eruptions themselves are earth-karma.

Lemuria is Steiner's third earthly epoch in which the moon separated from the Earth, sex differentiation arose, and the I first descended into hardening bodies.

In Steiner's cosmology, longing is the actual force that draws the descending soul into a body, first gathering cosmic ether, then uniting with the physical germ.

Steiner's teaching that physical matter is spiritual form burst and broken into pieces, a heap of ruins of the spirit fallen into space.

The geometries of Lobachevsky and Riemann, which Steiner read as proof that rigorous human thinking presses beyond the space of the senses by its own inner strength.

Old Moon is the third planetary condition in which the astral body germ joined the physical and etheric, with the water element arising.

Old Saturn is the first of seven planetary conditions, composed of pure warmth, in which the physical body germ of the human being first arose.

Old Sun is the second planetary condition in which the etheric body germ joined the physical, with air and light elements arising.

Steiner's reading of inherited sin as a heritable disposition passed through the astral bodies of parents at conception, not a stain of personal guilt.

The inaugurator of the Greek Mysteries, a supersensible being joined to an earthly personality, whose sacrifice prepared Greece for the Christ Event.

The Jewish-Alexandrian Logos mystic Steiner reads as the bridge from Greek mystery wisdom to Johannine Christianity, an initiation philosophy awaiting the deed that Christ enacts.

Steiner's view that Plato was an initiate who set the wisdom of the Greek Mysteries into the open language of philosophy.

The first earthly epoch in Steiner's cosmology, when humanity existed as warmth bodies in a recapitulation of Old Saturn, before Hyperborean, Lemurian, and Atlantean.

The fifth great earthly epoch in Steiner's cosmology, the 15,120-year arc following Atlantis that contains seven cultural sub-epochs from Ancient Indian to a future seventh culture.

Steiner's teaching that a soul may return for a brief childhood incarnation to form one member left unfinished, chiefly the feeling life, then depart.

Spiritual beings who form the astral body of the earth and direct all rhythmic recurrence in nature, from day and night to the turning seasons.

Two Greek sagas Steiner read as initiation records: the quest for the Golden Fleece recovers lost Atlantean wisdom, and Odysseus charts the soul's passage into the cunning intellect.

The fading daughter-voice of Hebrew inspiration, a feebler successor to the prophets that, for Jesus of Nazareth, became the voice revealing humanity's severance from the divine.

Steiner's teaching that the physical, etheric, and astral bodies, together with the I, are seeds of the four realms of the coming Jupiter world.

Steiner's extension of Goethe's metamorphosis: if skull bones are transformed vertebrae, the brain is the transformed and complicated form of a simple spinal nerve structure.

Steiner's teaching that feeling, desire, and will absorb the mineral, plant, and animal kingdoms across the Earth, Jupiter, and Venus stages, leaving only the human kingdom on Vulcan.

Steiner's paired name for two successive planetary conditions: the Old Moon perfected wisdom in the body, the Earth asks each person to bring forth love.

Steiner's account of the Moon splitting away from a still living Earth, an exit that let the mineral kingdom, and death, arise for the first time.

The dreamlike after-resonance of the world before birth that early humanity still felt in pictures, and lost as the sense of I grew strong.

Destructive elemental beings the gods employ to bring about human birth and death, and who since the eighteenth century have served technology, industry, and commerce.

The first supersensible region a clairvoyant soul enters on crossing the threshold, the etheric body's native realm, where nothing keeps fixed form and thoughts become living beings.

The three preparatory stages of life, thought-seed, force, and form, that precede the mineral kingdom in each round of Steiner's cosmic evolution.

Steiner's prophecy that after the year 5700 human beings will cease incarnating through physical parents, relating to the earth instead as spirit and soul in the elements.

Steiner's account of how priests experienced transubstantiation through four successive bodies: physical, etheric, astral, and now the conscious I.

Steiner's teaching that the power behind all reproduction sits in the moon, which once worked inside the earth and now works on it from outside.

The lost primordial name of the human I, which in ancient times could not be spoken aloud without stunning all who heard it.

Steiner's occult map of nine concentric earth layers, whose lower strata are bound up with human evil and discharge in volcanoes and earthquakes.

The Manasaputras are the higher beings whose descent gave the human being manas, buddhi and atma, once the body had hardened enough to hold them.

The folk-task by which the Hebrew stream was held back to receive the Law from without, born the idea of guilt, and readied a body for the Christ.

Steiner's reading of the ancient Hebrew Jahve-religion as a Moon-religion that reflected the coming Christ, as moonlight reflects the light of the Sun.

Steiner read the twelve labours of Heracles as the typified path of the mystery candidate, twelve trials dramatizing the soul's purification.

Steiner's term for the darkness that meets the soul after death, the mirror-opposite of earth's faint ego-light, which once hid the spiritual sun-guide.

Steiner's reading of the chained fire-bringer as the occult biography of fifth-root-race humanity, bound to matter and freed by the initiate.

Steiner's reading of Pythagoras' school as a mystery community whose number-teaching and music of the spheres encode initiation knowledge, not abstract mathematics.

The tidal rise and fall of cerebrospinal fluid with every breath, which Steiner named the outer bodily carrier of the life of feeling.

Steiner's reading of the Genesis days as the re-emergence of Old Saturn, Old Sun and Old Moon, each day a stage of elemental densification at Earth's dawn.

Steiner's image for birth and death as an apparent boundary: like the old vault of heaven, a limit of our seeing, not of life itself.

Steiner's esoteric reading of the Sinai Decalogue as the schooling through which the I AM force of Jahve entered the Hebrew people by Moses.

Steiner's threefold creative ground: a sacrificial First Logos, a reflected Second Logos of universal life, and a Third Logos of awakened consciousness.

Steiner's account of incarnation as three successive fertilizations: one physical, one doubled on the astral plane, and one when the self enters the prepared brain.

Steiner read Madách's 1861 dramatic poem as a reincarnation drama: Lucifer makes Adam dream nine future embodiments, a world run on natural law alone.

The Genesis polarity Steiner read as humanity eating of knowledge while life was withheld, the two streams meeting again at Golgotha.

Steiner read the saga of Troy as the mythic record of priestly rulership giving way to worldly kingship and the waking intellect of the Greeks.

The World of Archetypal Images (Urbilderwelt) is the fourth and highest macrocosmic world in Steiner's Vienna lectures, the source of the forces that build organs of clairvoyant perception.

Steiner's reading of the Genesis 1:2 void as a chaotic surging of heat, air, and water at the threshold of the Earth condition.

Steiner's name for renewal by shedding and rejuvenation on the Old Moon, before birth and death, of which the bird moult is the last trace.

World-Memory is Steiner's name for the record of cosmic evolution inscribed in the human organism, read inwardly once the mirror of ordinary memory is pierced.