*ast* The Ancient Earth

[Lunesoleil]

On this day of the Moon, satellite of the "Earth," I continue with the one in which, in the heliocentric zodiac, the "Earth" is always in conjunction; the Moon and the Sun are at the center! I pick up the book "Occult Science" by Rudolf Steiner in the chapter "Cosmic Evolution and the Human Being," and this time I will make you travel into a previous dimension of the world! The evolution of the Earth continues. Its progress manifests itself again through a condensation. The aqueous substance integrates into the terrestrial body so that it is now made up of three elements: fire, air, and water. Previously, an important event took place. From the Earth of air and fire, an autonomous star detached itself, which, in its subsequent evolution, will become the current Sun.

Until then, Earth and Sun were one. After the Sun has freed itself, the Earth first retains everything that currently exists on our Moon and on it. This emancipation from the Sun occurs because certain higher entities, due to their own evolution and what they must do for the Earth, can no longer bear matter that has condensed to a liquid state. They take from the terrestrial mass, common to all, only the substances usable for them and gradually leave the Earth to create for themselves a new dwelling place on the Sun. It is therefore from the Sun, from the outside, that they will act upon the Earth. Man, on the other hand, needs, for his future development, a place where matter will condense even further.

The incorporation of the aqueous substance into the body of the Earth is accompanied by a transformation of man himself. Not only does fire penetrate him and air swirl around him, but the liquid substance inserts itself into his physical body. At the same time, his enteric body changes. Henceforth, man perceives it as a subtle body of light. Previously, the human being felt currents of heat coming from the Earth rising toward him and the air impregnating him in the form of sounds; now the liquid element passes through his body of air and fire; this flow and ebb gives him the impression of a light that intensifies and diminishes. But his soul has also transformed. To the drafts of the souls of sensitivity and understanding has been added that of the soul of consciousness.

The "Angels" act in the liquid element. They are also the true creators of light. For man it is as if they appeared to him in the light. Some higher entities that were previously in the body of the Earth itself now act on it from the Sun. As a result, all activities affecting the Earth are changing. A man, chained to the Earth, could no longer feel the effects of solar beings within himself if his soul were perpetually turned towards the Earth. From which his physical body is drawn. A change in the states of consciousness then occurs in the human being. At certain times the solar beings tear the human soul from its physical body, so that man is sometimes purely soul within the solar beings, sometimes bound to his body and subject to earthly influences. When he is in his physical body, the currents of heat rise to him. The waters come out of him and then enter him.

When he is outside of his body, his soul is traversed by images of higher entities within which it finds itself. At this stage of its evolution, the Earth goes through two experiences. In one, it can enchant human souls with its substances and clothe them with bodies; in the other, the souls escape it and only the bodies remain with it. With human beings, it is in a state of sleep. It is perfectly accurate to say that in this infinitely distant past, the Earth experiences the alternation of day and night. (From a physico-spatial point of view, this is manifested in the fact that under the reciprocal action of earthly beings and solar entities, the Earth moves in relation to the Sun, which gives rise to this alternation of day and night. It is the day when the earthly face on which man evolves is turned toward the Sun; it is night, therefore, the time during which man leads a purely psychic existence, when this face turns away from the Sun. One should not, however, think that at such a distant time, the rotation of the Earth around the Sun was already similar to what it is today. The conditions were then all different; it is, however, useful to sense from now that the movements of the stars occur under the effect of the relationships that the spiritual beings who inhabit them have with each other. It is causes of a psycho-spiritual order that bring the stars to occupy certain positions, to perform certain movements, so that spiritual states can express themselves on the physical plane.

If one were to observe the Earth during its night phase, it would have an appearance similar to that of a corpse. For it is made largely of decomposing human bodies; as for the souls, they experience another form of existence. The aqueous and aerial organic formations of which human bodies were composed wither and dissolve into the earthly mass. Only remains, like a puny-looking germ, the part of the human body that was formed from the beginning of terrestrial evolution by the combined action of fire and the human soul, and which then became increasingly dense. What is said here about the day phase and the night phase should not be imagined as being too similar to what the current Earth designates by these terms. When the day begins again and the Earth once more receives the direct influence of the Sun, human souls enter the realm of psychic life. They come into contact with these germs and make them grow, so that they take on an external form that is like a copy of the psychic era of man. A sort of subtle fertilization occurs between this human soul and the bodily germ. The souls thus incarnated begin to attract the aerial and liquid masses again in order to incorporate them into their bodies. The bodily organism exhales and inhales air: this is the first outline of the future respiratory process. Water is also absorbed and then expelled: this is the beginning of the future process of nutrition. However, these phenomena are not yet perceived as external. A kind of external perception by the soul occurs only during the fertilization we have described.

Through its contact with the germ that the Earth presents to it, the soul has the vague feeling of awakening to physical existence. It perceives something that can be expressed as follows: 'this is my form.' And this feeling, which is like the dawn of the sense of Self, fills the soul throughout the time of its union with the physical body. As for the process of air aspiration, the soul experiences it as purely psychic and spiritual, therefore of an imaginative nature. It appears to it in the form of sound images that arise and vanish; they shape the germ in the process of organization. The soul feels surrounded on all sides by sounds; it senses that it is modeling its body according to the forces of these sounds. At this stage of evolution, human forms are constituted that, in the current state of consciousness, could not exist in any external world. Composed of a very delicate substance, they give rise to forms in the manner of plants, of flowers that are internally mobile and resemble flowers that whirl around. And the blissful feeling of this creation of forms fills the human being during his earthly life. The absorption of the liquid parts is felt by the soul as a supply of strength, as an inner consolidation. Outwardly, this presents itself as a growth of the physical organism. When the direct action of the Sun declines, the soul also loses the strength necessary to master these phenomena. They are gradually eliminated. Only the parts that allow the germ we characterized above to mature persist. Man himself abandons his body and returns to his form of spiritual existence. (Since not all parts of the Earth's mass are used for the construction of human bodies, one should not imagine that, during its nocturnal phase, the Earth is composed solely of decomposed corpses and human germs waiting to be revived. All of this is deposited in other formations drawn from the substances of the Earth. We will see later what these formations entail).

The process of condensation of the terrestrial substance continues. To the aqueous element is added the solid that can be called 'earthly.' From then on, man also begins to incorporate this earthly element into his body during his life on Earth. From the beginning of this incorporation, the forces that the soul brings from its incorporeal period no longer have the same power as before. Previously, the soul shaped a body of fire, air, and water according to the sounds that resounded around it and the luminous images that surrounded it. With regard to the solidified form, the soul is powerless. Other forces then intervene in its formation. In what remains of the human being when the soul flees from the body, there is not only a germ to which the soul gives life again upon returning, but a formation that also contains within it this vivifying force. When it departs, the soul does not merely leave a copy of itself on Earth, but it implants into this copy a part of its life-giving force. When she reappears on Earth, she can no longer, by herself, bring this copy back to life; this stimulation must take place within the very copy itself. The spiritual beings who act from the Sun on the Earth then maintain the vivifying force in the human body even when the man himself is no longer on the Earth. During its incarnation, the soul does not only perceive the sound and light images that surround it and within which it feels the beings superior to it; by being penetrated by the earthly element, it experiences the influence of these even higher spirits who have established themselves on the Sun. Until then, man felt related to the beings of psychic and spiritual nature to whom he was united when he was outside his body. His "I" presents itself to him during his incarnation in the same way as what surrounded him during that time.
At that time, there were on Earth autonomous copies of the psychic and spiritual human being. Compared to current human bodies, these were formations of a finer substance, because earthly particles mingled with them only in the least dense state; they were roughly similar to what a person perceives when their sense of smell conveys the finely dispersed substances of an object.

The human bodies were like shadows. Being spread across the entire Earth, they were subject to influences that varied depending on the regions of the globe. Whereas in the past, bodily copies resembled the psychic being that animated them, and were therefore more or less the same all over the Earth, now diversity is being introduced among human forces. Thus, what will later become the diversity of races is being prepared.With the emancipation of the physical man, the previously close bond that united the earthly human being with the world of the soul and spirit is loosened to some extent. From now on, when the soul leaves the body, the latter experiences, in a way, an extension of life. If evolution had continued in this manner, the Earth would have hardened under the influence of its solid element. Supersensible knowledge that observes the conditions of that time notes that human bodies were increasingly hardening when abandoned by their souls. After some time, human souls returning to the Earth would not have been able to find usable materials to which they could unite. All substances useful to man would have eventually filled the Earth with fossil waste from incarnations.

Then an event occurred that gave the entire evolution a new direction. Everything that could contribute to a lasting hardening in the solid substance of the Earth was eliminated. Our current moon separated from the Earth. Everything that had previously contributed to building durable forms on Earth then had an indirect and weaker effect from the Moon. The higher entities on whom this creation of forms depended had decided to exercise their influence, no longer from within, but from outside the Earth. As a result, a differentiation was established in the human bodily configuration that can be considered the beginning of a separation into male and female sexes. The human formations made of subtle matters that had previously inhabited the Earth gave birth to a new human formation, their offspring, through the cooperation of two forces within them, that of the germ and that which enlivens. Now these offshoots transform. In one of these groups of offshoots, it was the germinating force of the psychic and spiritual element that predominated; in the other, it was the vivifying germinating force. This was the consequence of the fact that, with the departure of the Moon, the earthly element had seen its power weaken. The reciprocal action of the two forces became more delicate than before, because it occurred within a single body. It resulted that the human offshoot was also more tender, more subtle. It descended to the Earth in a state of lesser density and gradually absorbed the more solid particles. This restored to the human soul returning to the Earth the possibility of uniting once again with a body. It no longer animated it from the outside, since this vivification occurred on the Earth itself. But she inhabited it and brought it to develop. A certain limit was nevertheless imposed on this growth. As a result of the Moon's withdrawal, the human body had become malleable for a time; but the more it developed on Earth, the more the hardening forces regained control. Eventually, the soul participated only weakly in the structuring of the body; it decomposed while the soul rose toward a psychic and spiritual existence. One can observe how the forces gradually assimilated by the human being during the Saturn, solar, and lunar evolutions contribute to his development while the Earth is being formed […]

You will not be surprised after this excerpt on the formation of the Earth following the formation of the Moon that the two share a common astrological link; from the Earth, the Moon is visible according to its phases. It was essential that I share this episode on the "Earth" after having presented the ancient Moon, the ancient Sun, and the ancient Saturn. You will notice that I made no cuts in the excerpt I shared, where the Earth is abundantly mentioned, unlike in previous articles!

The ancient Saturn
The ancient Sun
The ancient Moon