Primeval Teachers of Humanity

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The primeval teachers of humanity, the lunar primeval teachers, were angelic beings who lived on earth in ancient times as teachers of humanity. However, they did not work in physical bodies, but only descended to the etheric body. Later they withdrew, strictly closed off from the rest of the universe, into the interior of the moon as into a fortress (Lit.:GA 228, p. 15) and now work as lunar beings in this lunar fortress.

The Lunar Teachers as Educators of Humanity

The primordial teachers of humanity "have given to humanity the original great wisdoms which are preserved only in echo even in such creations as the Vedas and the Vedanta philosophy." (Lit.:GA 239, p. 130)

These are beings who had already completed part of their human development on the Old Moon, but - unlike the regularly advanced Angels - still had to complete some things during the Earth's development.

„And those beings who at that time [note: on the Old Moon] had already gone through their humanity in part, who had only some of this humanity still to complete during their existence on Earth, these are precisely those individualities of whom I have spoken as the great wise primordial teachers of humanity on Earth, who are today on the lunar colony.“ (Lit.:GA 232, p. 131)

Their remaining behind is to be understood as an act of sacrifice in the service of the development of humanity (Lit.:GA 121, p. 43). In the past they populated the earth as a kind of second, ethereally existing human race.

„These primeval teachers of humanity were not dwelling in a physical human body, they only embodied themselves in an etheric body, and the intercourse with them was somewhat different than it is between physical human beings. These teachers wandered about the earth in an etheric body. The man to whom they became guides felt their nearness in his soul. He felt something enter his soul that was like an inspiration, like an inner illumination of truths, also of views. They taught in a spiritual way. But at that time of the development of the earth, a distinction was made between people who could be seen and people who could not be seen. One did not claim to want to see people whom one could not see, for one had the gift of receiving the teachings from them, even if one did not see them. One heard these teachings coming from within the soul and one said to oneself: If these teachings come, then a great original teacher of humanity has approached me. - And one did not have external views of these original teachers; one met them in spiritual vision. We did not shake hands with them physically, but we met them and felt something like a spiritual handshake.“ (Lit.:GA 239, p. 139)

„When man went through a far distant epoch in his development on earth - I will describe it more precisely later - a very old epoch, which naturally lies before the historical epoch, man was also on earth in the company of spiritual beings who were not directly connected with the earth itself, but were also connected with the cosmos in their earthly life. One can say that divine teachers, not earthly teachers, were the heads of the mysteries and taught earthly people.

These teachers for the most ancient times did not assume a solid, dense, fleshy physical body, but worked on men in their etheric bodies. So that the most ancient teachers of men in the mysteries, the supreme teachers, those whose servants were only the physically embodied men, were etherically divine teachers. These Beings were co-inhabitants of the earth among men in an older epoch of human evolution. So that we can really say in all real sense: There was an ancient epoch in the development of the earthly world in which divine-spiritual beings dwelt on earth with men, who did not show themselves when one, well, I will say, went for a walk, but who showed themselves when one was introduced in the right way to these divine-spiritual beings by the temple servants in the mysteries. They only showed themselves in the mysteries, but there they showed themselves. And through these mysteries they became co-inhabitants of men on earth.“ (Lit.:GA 227, p. 233ff)

The primeval wisdom as an organic growth force

The primeval teachers did not give their wisdom as external knowledge, but they worked directly in the growth forces of the etheric body. When the primeval teachers withdrew into the lunar fortress, the lunar forces condensed into the reproductive forces on the one hand, and on the other hand they diluted into the mind, which became more and more abstract.

„We have often heard how, when one goes back in earthly evolution, one comes to old times where people not only had that instinctive wisdom of which I have already spoken today, but where they had as teachers beings who never assumed a physical body, higher spiritual beings and such beings who only assumed an etheric body, whose teaching in relation to the people consisted in the fact that these beings did not speak to the people as we speak today, but that they inwardly imparted wisdom to the people, as it were implanted it in the etheric body. People knew that these higher beings were there, just as we know that some physical teacher or the like is there, but they also knew that these beings were around people in a spiritual existence. It is to this teaching of higher spiritual beings that everything can be traced back which is recognised even in the Catholic Church as the original wisdom of mankind, that original wisdom which once existed, of which even the Vedas and the noble Vedanta philosophy are only shadowy reflections [...].

But it was a completely different knowledge than the one we have today. It was a knowledge that was organic power in man, that was related to the power of growth and so on. So this primordial wisdom was of a completely different character, and what happened there with regard to this primordial wisdom I can only illustrate by means of a comparison. Imagine that I first pour some kind of liquid into a glass and then put salt into it. I dissolve the salt so that I have a cloudy liquid, then I do something so that the salt precipitates at the bottom as sediment and the solution liquid remains at the top, then the solution liquid is purer and lighter at the top and the sediment is denser at the bottom. If I now want to describe what has permeated mankind during the time of the ancient primal wisdom, it is a mixture of the spiritually pure and the physically animal. When we think today, we believe that these abstract thoughts rule and weave without being anything in us, and that breathing and blood circulation, for example, are something in themselves. But this was all one thing for primitive man in the earlier times on earth: he had to breathe, and his blood circulated in him, and he wanted in the circulation of blood. Then man's thinking moved upwards towards the head and became purer, like the thinner liquid in the glass at the top, and the sediment, so to speak, formed at the bottom.

That was at the time when the primeval teachers withdrew more and more from the earth, when this primeval wisdom was no longer given in this old way. And where did these primeval teachers retreat to? We find them again in this lunar fortress! Therein they are and lead their further existence. And on earth the dregs remained, namely the present kind of reproductive forces. These reproductive forces were not yet there in their present form when the primordial wisdom existed on earth; they have only become so, as it were, as the dregs. I do not mean to say that they are something bad, but in this context they are the dregs. And that which is, as it were, the solution fluid above, is today our abstract wisdom. So that we see how, with the development of humanity, on the one hand the more spiritual, in the abstract sense, comes up, and how, on the other, the coarser animal things arise as dregs. In this way one gradually gets an idea of the spiritual content of the moon.“ (Lit.:GA 223, p. 140ff)

„This mystery of the moon is one of the deepest secrets of the ancient mystery system. For what the moon contains within itself is, so to speak, the primeval wisdom. But that which the moon is able to radiate back out of all the universe is that which forms the sum of forces which sustain our animal world on earth, namely those which are connected with the sexuality of the animal world, which also sustain the animal-physical in man and are connected with the physical-sensual sexuality of man. So that the lower nature of man is a creature of that which the moon radiates, and that which is highest, which once possessed the earth, is inwardly sheltered in the lunar fortress.“ (Lit.:GA 228, p. 17)

Retreat into the lunar fortress

Later, then, the primeval teachers retreated to the lunar sphere and are still effective there today.

„These high leading powers and the other lunar population were once here on earth, have withdrawn from the earth to the moon, however, in a time that already goes back more than fifteen thousand years. Before that, the moon also looked physically different. It did not simply send down the sunlight on the earth, but mixed its own being into this sunlight.“ (Lit.:GA 228, p. 73)

„The spiritual entities which inhabit this interior of the moon are entities which in the strictest sense shut themselves off from the rest of the universe. They live as in the lunar fortress.“ (Lit.:GA 228, p. 15)

„And those Beings who at that time had already gone through their humanity in part, who had only some of this humanity still to complete during their existence on earth, these are precisely those individualities of whom I have spoken as the great wise primal teachers of humanity on earth, who are today on the lunar colony.“ (Lit.:GA 232, p. 131)

„These beings have since withdrawn from the earth, have migrated from the earth to the moon and now live as in a cosmic fortress, imperceptible to earthly existence, in the interior of lunar existence. So that when we look at the interior of the lunar existence, we have to regard this interior as the assembly of those beings who were once the great teachers of men on earth in their etheric body. And in fact we should never look up to the moon in any other way than by saying to ourselves: There are gathered together those who were once the teachers on earth. For for the people on earth, what comes from the moon is not what lives in it, but only what it radiates back from the rest of the cosmos. As it radiates back the light, so the moon also radiates back all cosmic effects.

So, looking towards the moon, we see the light, and this most clearly; but of course it is not the only part, it is even the least part. We see a mirror of the cosmic effects, we do not see what lives inside the moon. Inside the moon lives that which once lived on earth. And it is only in his existence immediately after death, in the soul world, that man again comes under the influence of these beings who were once on earth. And it is they who, with the judgement of the previous world, have a corrective effect after death on what man has done on earth. So that after death, in our present epoch on earth, man again comes into a relationship with those beings who once educated and taught him as divine-spiritual beings on earth within the whole of humanity. The moon must therefore be regarded spiritually as a cosmic fortress into which those Beings have withdrawn who were once with man, and to whom we again come into a relationship immediately after we begin our wanderings through the world of the soul after death.“ (Lit.:GA 227, p. 233ff)

Freedom

By retreating into the interior of the moon they gave man the possibility of freedom.

„Why have these lunar beings withdrawn, why do they work in secret? - Yes, when they were still on earth, they suggested a tremendous wisdom to man. Had they remained on earth, they would have continued to suggest this wisdom to men, but men would never have been able to enter the age of freedom.“ (Lit.:GA 228, p. 35)

„These lunar beings, with whom, as I have described, we have so much to do after death, they gave mankind that primordial wisdom which has just faded away in our age, which actually only lasted somewhat more intensively until the 3rd or 4th century after Christ, was then present in tradition, but then faded away completely. I have often explained how people would not have been able to attain their freedom if the great and powerful wisdom of these original teachers had remained with them. Well, it has faded away. Something else has taken its place: abstract thinking. Man today thinks in terms which actually no longer have much to do with the spiritual world.“ (Lit.:GA 236, p. 159f)

Meeting the Primeval Teachers in the Lunar Sphere

After Death - Kamaloka and Karma Formation

Man meets the primeval teachers of humanity again today when he enters the lunar sphere after death during the kamaloka. Here they create the foundation, the first seed for human karma.

„A few days after death we do not feel ourselves living on the earthly body, but we feel as if this earthly body were enlarged to where the moon orbits around the earth. We feel ourselves on an enlarged earth, and we do not feel the moon as only one body, but we feel the whole sphere as one, the lunar orbit only as the end of the sphere; the earth simply enlarged as to the lunar sphere and become spiritual. We are in the lunar sphere, and in this lunar sphere we remain for a long time after death. There, however, we first come together again with those spiritual beings who were the great primeval teachers at the beginning of man's existence on earth. The first beings whom we meet, so to speak, in the cosmos after our death are these first primordial teachers of man; into their sphere we come again.“ (Lit.:GA 239, p. 131)

„From this experience after death, which we undergo in the sphere of the great primordial teachers of humanity, the first germ of karma is formed. There we form the intention: what we have done must be compensated for by ourselves.“ (Lit.:GA 239, p. 134f)

„These primeval teachers, as I have said, changed the scene of their activity from the earth to the moon and now, since everything in the universe is connected, they have a great task in the context of the whole world activity. And it is they who have a great deal to do with karma, with the formation of karma in man. For an important element in the formation of karma is that which we can observe when man after death, having laid aside his etheric body after a few days, then lives back - not his waking life, but his sleeping life. So when man has passed through the gate of death, there is at first a bright retrospect in a mighty tableau of what man has gone through in life. But this is a figurative looking back. After a few days the etheric body dissolves into the general ether of the world, and then this retrospect slowly fades away. But then a real looking back begins.

It is not true that our life during our earthly existence passes in such a way that, even if we regard it as a unity in memory, this is of course a deception; for life does not pass as a unity, but we always experience conscious day, unconscious night, conscious day, unconscious night, and so on. When man then remembers back, he forgets that the nights are always in between. During these nights much happens with the soul, with the astral body and with the I, but the human being knows nothing about it. What goes on there, what the human being unconsciously lives through during his life on earth, he lives through in such a way that after death time really appears to him to be receding; he then lives through the nights in full consciousness.

That is why he experiences this decline, because one sleeps away about one third of one's life, even in one third of one's lifetime. So when one has reached the age of sixty, he has slept away about twenty years, and he then experiences this decline in about twenty years. Then it goes into the actual spiritual realm, and the human being then lives in a different way.“ (Lit.:GA 236, p. 155f)

„The images one experiences, the way one stands inside this experience, is an extraordinarily intense one, not a dreamlike one at all, but an extraordinarily intense one. And one actually experiences everything in such a way that one experiences it, I would like to say, from the point of view of a kind of photographic negative. So if you have inflicted suffering on someone during your life on earth, you have experienced the infliction of this suffering of your own accord during your life on earth. You have experienced and done that which emanates from you during your life on earth. But when you live back then, you do not experience what you experienced during your life on earth, but as if by slipping into the other, what the other experienced, to whom you inflicted the thing [...]

So that indeed the human being, when he makes this decline, says to himself: Oh, this is extraordinarily impressive what I am experiencing! And no impression on earth actually has such a powerful effect as the impressions of this backward life after death in the third part of the lifetime. So that in this time you actually experience the whole karmic fulfilment of what you have done in life itself; you experience all this from the standpoint of the other. So you experience the whole karmic fulfilment of your life, only not yet as an earth life - you will do that in the next life - but you experience it, even if it is not so intense in relation to the doing as it will be later in the earth life, you experience it with reference to the impression even more strongly than could be the case in any earth life [...]

Now one can well imagine that a dream which a sixty-year-old has for twenty years after earth-life continues continuously; but it is not a dream, it is a quite energetic, intense experience. And where does that come from? You see, it comes from the fact that at the moment when man has passed through the gate of death, when he has laid aside his etheric body, at this moment when he begins this return journey after death, these lunar dwellers immediately approach him, and it is they who drive into him with their old magic power, with the world substance of his images, drive into his experience.

You see, what happens, if I may use a comparison, is just like when I paint a picture. First of all, I only paint a picture - that doesn't hurt anyone unless it's too horrible, and then it's only a moral impression - so it doesn't hurt anyone. But imagine that I were to paint three of you here in one picture, and that by imbuing the picture with a magical power, these three would emerge from the picture and immediately carry out whatever they were up to against someone here. They would appear more intense, more powerful, more active than anthroposophists are used to appearing. That is how it is. The whole experience is connected with a tremendous activity, because these lunar beings penetrate with their whole being the images that are being experienced, I would like to say they penetrate and saturate them with a "superbeing".

So that we pass through the region of these lunar beings after death. Through this, however, that which we experience in this way as the compensation for our own deeds, as I have just described it, becomes quite powerfully fixed in the world ether.“ (Lit.:GA 236, p. 157)

Difficulties on entering the lunar sphere

„If people are too attached to earthly things, they may even find it difficult to enter this region where the lunar beings are. Then the following occurs, which I would like to characterise in something like this: Think of the earth as being here (see drawing, white) and the moon as being there (red). Now it is the case that the lunar effects, which are actually the reflected effects of the sun, have an effect just so far into the earth, then they cease to have an effect (yellow). The effects of the moon do not go very far into the earth, but just as far as the roots of the plants spread in the earth. The lunar effects do not actually go down below the plant root layer - and that is a very thin layer.

Moon effects in the earth
Moon effects in the earth

And it is actually only a small shell up here where the lunar effects are held. Solar effects go deep into the earth. From the sun's warmth during the summer, the warmth is still preserved; if you put the potatoes in pits, you still have the effect during the winter. A great deal of the sun's influence enters the earth, and of the moon's influence only as far as the root of the plant - a thin layer. But it can happen that after death, when human beings are to enter the lunar region, the soul world, and yet cannot quite get on with the lunar beings, they are banished by this thin layer of lunar effects, which then, as it were, smoke up out of the earth, and then actually wander about there for a real sensible-supersensible perception like a kind of ghost, like the after-effects of man.

The legends and poems that exist about such things are certainly based on realities. In order to be able to judge such things, one must be completely free of superstition, proceed critically everywhere, take only those things everywhere that can be examined.“ (Lit.:GA 236, p. 167ff)

Before the new birth - talents and gifts

We meet the lunar teachers again when we enter the lunar sphere again during the descent to a new birth. There they impress upon us what talents and gifts we need for our future life on earth.

„In this pre-earthly existence we still have a lot to do with these old comrades of our earthly existence. We descend, so to speak, from the spiritual worlds into our earthly existence by passing through the sphere of the moon, by passing through the moon existence. And just as these lunar beings were once deeply determining for us human beings here on earth, so they are still determining for earthly people today, in that they imprint on the human I and the human astral body that which is then transferred into the physical body when the human being becomes a physical earthly human being.

It is not true that one cannot decide to be a talent, nor to be a genius. One cannot even decide to be a good person without further ado. Nevertheless, there are talents, there are geniuses, there are good people by birth, so to speak. This is something that the intellect cannot do, something that is connected with the inner deep being of the human being, of which he brings a good part with him by entering through birth from a pre-earthly existence into the earthly. To imprint this on his I and his astral body, what then shoots into his blood, so to speak, into his nerves as a talent, as a gift, as the will to good or evil, to imprint this on him, that is the task of the moon beings when man passes through the lunar sphere in his pre-earthly existence.“ (Lit.:GA 240, p. 16f)

The 12 Bodhisattvas as Successors of the Primeval Teachers

The successors of the lunar primeval teachers are the twelve Bodhisattvas. In earlier times, they enabled people to ascend from the lunar sphere to the solar sphere after death. But this is no longer possible today. Today man needs the Christ as a guide into the solar sphere.

„We have seen that in the most ancient epoch of mankind those beings lived here on earth who then entrenched themselves in the cosmic lunar fortress, as if they had withdrawn. The beings themselves, therefore, are those with whom man only attains a relationship after death. But there have remained successors of these beings who have appeared on earth from time to time in the older subsequent epochs of humanity. In the Orient, these beings were called Bodhisattvas. They may have appeared embodied in the human body, but they were still the descendants of those beings who then entrenched themselves in the moon. So that the life of the Bodhisattvas actually flows in communion with the beings living in the cosmic lunar fortress. There lie the sources of their power, there lie the sources of their thoughts. And it was they who were then guides for mankind, who made the transition possible for them through what they taught them on earth, so that when they came to the end of the lunar region, mankind had the power to pass over into the solar region.

We shall now see in the next lectures how this has just become impossible in the course of the evolution of mankind on earth, and how the Christ Being had to come down from the Sun Being itself in order to accomplish the Mystery of Golgotha, so that man, through his Christ Teaching, through the teaching of the Mystery of Golgotha on earth, might receive the strong power to gain the transition from the soul world into the spirit land, from the moon region into the sun region.“ (Lit.:GA 227, p. 237f)

Black Magic and Lunar Beings

→ Main article: Black magic

Among the lunar beings, who were the primeval teachers of mankind before the separation of the moon, there are "more imperfect" ones who take a burning interest in certain expressions or emanations of man and develop their efficacy in them. These emanations of the human being are connected with the four elements or with the different kinds of ether. There are therefore seven types of such radiations:

1. movements radiated by the human being 2. skin radiations of the liquid 3. skin radiations of the aeriform 4. heat radiation 5. light radiation 6. chemical force radiation (black magic)

7. vital radiation.

„243“ (Lit.:GA 150)

In themselves these effects are quite positive, especially the effects of the life ether; only the forces of the chemical ether can be misused for black magic purposes.

„For, you see, all the forces, all the impulses of the present epoch must hasten towards the use of vital radiation on earth. But it is extremely obvious that one enters into that which lies between this vital radiation and all the other radiations which one would so like to have: black magic. People would so much like to make visible what is expressed in the movements - we shall have to speak of this - to make visible what is present in the exhalation and so on, what is present in the radiation of light. All this is related in a certain sense to something good, to that which can actually only be good, because the Michael Age is dawning among men.

But between all this lies black magic, which must be kept off if the good, the right ways of supersensible research, and not the evil, wrong ways of supersensible research, are to be taken.“ (Lit.:GA 243, p. 150)

Through black magic, those lunar forces are brought to activity that remained in the earth after the separation of the moon:

„All these things then lead to direct black magic, where work is done with the spiritual hidden in the earthly. With what spiritual? Well, I have told you, and you can read this in my "Occult Science", that once the moon was connected with the earth. But the moon did not take many forces with it, not all that belonged to it. Many have remained in the earth and now permeate minerals, plants and animals. They are still there today, these lunar forces. So if one works with lunar forces here on earth, forces that do not actually belong to the normal mineral, plant, animal and human forces, then one can enter directly into the area with these lunar forces in an unseemly way, in which one comes together with the beings who, as elementary beings, learn many things from the lunar beings, but learn in a way, as I have indicated to you, that does not belong in our world. And so the black magician works on the one hand with the lunar forces that are still here on earth. But by working in this way, he comes into contact with elementary forces which directly, one might say, by kibitzing, watching as at a game of halma or chess, by kibitzing at what is going on in the right way between man and the lunar beings, learn to come as close as possible to the physical world; they either look in or enter this physical world too. But the ordinary man, for whom all this remains in the subconscious, has nothing to do with them. The black magician who works with the lunar forces, who has the lunar forces everywhere in his retorts, in his vessels and incenses, is surrounded by these forces.

A good person can learn a lot from these black magicians. In the first part of his Faust, Goethe portrayed this being surrounded, which borders quite alarmingly on black magic. Through the use of these lunar forces, man enters the region where beings who have entered into the service of the lunar forces are ready to have intercourse with man. And there arise the centres of black magic, where magicians co-operate with lunar forces, with spirits who have placed themselves directly in the service, but in an evil service, of the lunar forces. The fact that many things have been worked in this direction in the course of the last few centuries has created a dubious atmosphere on earth. And this precarious atmosphere is there. Many such forces are whirring and weaving about, arising from a combination of human activity with lunar ingredients and lunar dynamics with elementary beings who are in the service of unseemly lunar forces. This precarious atmosphere, it's there. And this is the region which is just now working strongly against what is to come out of the solar region in the Michael Age, and which is to take special account of the vital radiation in the pure soul-spiritual.“ (Lit.:GA 243, p. 154f)

Today's black magic initiates live, mostly unrecognised, under the mask of a bourgeois profession, in our midst. Often only the upper ranks know about each other. The practitioners of black magic recruit new members by arousing curiosity in (pernicious) occultism and by having the new aspirants participate in orgiastic rituals in the form of "black masses". During these rituals, the new aspirants take a vow of silence, the breach of which is punishable by death.

Literature
References to the work of Rudolf Steiner follow Rudolf Steiner's Collected Works (CW or GA), Rudolf Steiner Verlag, Dornach/Switzerland, unless otherwise stated.
Email: verlag@steinerverlag.com URL: www.steinerverlag.com.
Index to the Complete Works of Rudolf Steiner - Aelzina Books
A complete list by Volume Number and a full list of known English translations you may also find at Rudolf Steiner's Collected Works
Rudolf Steiner Archive - The largest online collection of Rudolf Steiner's books, lectures and articles in English.
Rudolf Steiner Audio - Recorded and Read by Dale Brunsvold
steinerbooks.org - Anthroposophic Press Inc. (USA)
Rudolf Steiner Handbook - Christian Karl's proven standard work for orientation in Rudolf Steiner's Collected Works for free download as PDF.
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