Polar epoch

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Polaris, the polar epoch, also called the first root race[1] according to obsolete theosophical tradition, is the first of the seven main ages into which the actual physical earth evolution, the 4th form state of the entire Earth evolution, is divided[2]. The name of this developmental epoch is derived from the fact that these original Earth conditions of the polar time were preserved for the longest time around the "North Pole". However, this was a huge nebulous gaseous structure that still encompassed the entire planetary system and also contained the Sun and the other nascent planets. The polar age was followed by the hyperborean age, in which only the Earth separated from the Sun as an independent celestial body and condensed to a liquid state (Lit.:GA 106, p. 69ff). According to a statement by Rudolf Steiner, which has, however, only been handed down inadequately, Polaris falls into the time of the "primitive form", in which the first "primeval mountains" were formed (Lit.:GA 300a, p. 107). On the present geologic time scale, this would correspond to the time from the beginning of the Hadean 4,600 million years ago until about the middle of the Archean.All references to time here are only for comparison with the present state of external research and are to be taken with great caution, as Rudolf Steiner also clearly points out.[3]The time of Polaris is the time of the first "primitive mountains". The Sun had not yet reached its full luminosity at that time. From an astrophysical point of view, the nuclear fusion process, the so-called hydrogen burning, probably only began in the hyperborean epoch after the Earth and the other planets had split off.

At the end of the third round of Earth's evolution, the whole Earth had passed into a purely spiritual existence, into a so-called small Pralaya. Now, at the beginning of the fourth round, it first descended again to the astral state of form. Man had then brought with him from the earlier states of evolution the physical body, the etheric body and the astral body. All this now first appeared in astral form. Man was therefore a being with physical, etheric and astral laws, which, however, existed in purely spiritual form, and the whole globe, shining in the astral light, which now formed, consisted exclusively of these astral human formations.

„Everything that exists of the human being in this period still has its astral form. In order to understand this state of man, special attention should be paid to the fact that man has within him a physical body, a life body and an astral body, but that both the physical and the life body do not exist in physical and etheric form, but in astral form. What makes the physical body physical is not its physical form, but the fact that, although it has the astral form, it still has the physical laws within it. It is a being with physical laws in a spiritual form. The same is true of the life body.“ (Lit.:GA 13, p. 220f)

„If we look far back within this becoming of the Earth, we can tell ourselves that our Earth did not always look as it does today. It did not have the solid mineral ground as it does today, the mineral kingdom was not as it is today, nor did it bear such plants and animals as it does today, and man was not in a fleshly body as he is today, man had no bone system. All that was formed later. The further back we look, the more we approach a state which, if we had been able to look at it from the farthest reaches of the world, we would have seen only like a mist, like a fine, ethereal cloud. This nebula would have been much larger than our present Earth, for it would have reached into the farthest reaches of the outermost planets of our solar system and beyond. All of this would have comprised a far-reaching nebular mass, in which not only that from which our Earth was formed, but all the planets, even the Sun itself, were in it. And if we had been able to examine this nebulous mass more closely - provided the observer had been able to approach it - it would have looked to us as if it had been composed of nothing but fine ethereal points. When we look at a swarm of mosquitoes from a distance, it appears to us like a cloud, but close up we see the individual animals. In this way we would have seen the mass of the Earth in the distant past, which at that time was not material in our sense, but was condensed to an ethereal state. This formation of the Earth thus consisted of individual etheric points, but something very special was connected with these etheric points [...].

When the clairvoyant ... confronted himself with such an etheric dust point of the primordial substance, he would see a figure of light growing out of this etheric grain of dust in a similar way to the grain of seed, a splendid figure which is not actually there, which rests dormant in this grain of dust. And what is it then that the seer can see as a figure, looking back on this primordial earth atom? What is it that grows out of it? It is a form that is again different - as different as the archetype of the plant from the sensuous plant - from the physical human being: It is the archetype of the human form of today [...]

In the distant past all the planets were connected with our Earth. However, let us first consider the Sun, the Moon and the Earth, which are of particular interest to us today. Our Sun, our Moon and our Earth were not alone at that time, but were together. If we were to stir these three present-day bodies together as if to form a porridge in a large world pot, and if we were to think of it as a world body, we would get what the Earth was in its original state, namely: Sun plus Earth plus Moon. Of course, then man could only live in a spiritual state.“ (Lit.:GA 106, p. 24ff)

„The soul or astral ancestors of man were placed in the fine or etheric Earth. They absorbed the fine matter as it were - like a sponge, to speak crudely. By thus permeating themselves with matter, they formed etheric bodies. These had an elongated elliptical shape, but limbs and other organs to be formed later were already predisposed by delicate shadings of the material. The whole process in this mass, however, was a purely physical-chemical one; only it was regulated and controlled by the soul. - When such a mass of matter had reached a certain size, it split into two, each of which was similar to the structure from which it had arisen, and in which the same effects took place as in the other. - Each of these new entities was again as endowed with a soul as the mother being. This was due to the fact that not only a certain number of human souls entered the earthly scene, but, as it were, a soul-tree which could let innumerable individual souls emerge from its common root. Just as a plant sprouts again and again from innumerable seeds, so does the life of the soul in the countless shoots that resulted from the continuing divisions. (However, from the beginning there was a limited number of soul types, which will be discussed later. But within these types the development proceeded in the way described. Each kind of soul sprouted innumerable shoots.)“ (Lit.:GA 11, p. 101f)

Then, in the midst of this soul-form, a physical-etheric fire-form condensed, as it had similarly existed on Old Saturn in its densest state. The Earth, consisting of the human formations, thus gradually entered into the physical state of form. This fire form was interwoven and differentiated by the effects of the most varied spiritual entities, whereby the human entities still remained almost entirely in the uncondensed astral environment of the Earth. Only at one point did they touch the physical-etheric fire-earth with their egg-shaped soul-form, which thereby appeared to be surrounded by the warmth of life. Like the acorn fruit in its cup, the human soul form rested in this fire structure. And the outer warmth aroused inner life in the human being, in that the astral form, in which the etheric body had hitherto existed, condensed into the life ether. Into the astral body was thus integrated the sentient soul. And the Archai worked in the fire and in the sentient soul. At that time, the human being consisted of the sentient soul, the astral body, an etheric body woven from life ether and a physical body of fire.

Sun, Moon, Earth and all other planets still formed a common etheric celestial body that could not yet be sensually perceived. The fire earth now condensed further into the state of air. It resembled a mist of fine etheric germinal points, each of which carried the spiritual archetype of the human form, which appears to the seer as a splendid figure of light. The whole structure was surrounded by the spiritual atmosphere that carried the future human souls. There was still no physical reproduction and multiplication of the etheric human germs, but they were increasingly shaped by the spiritual forces working from the surrounding area.

Of the 9 layers of the earth's interior, only the three innermost layers (from today's point of view, the 7th, 8th and 9th layers) have now formed (Lit.:GA 94, p. 108). These three innermost layers are the earth mirror, which transforms all qualities into their opposite; further, the splinterer, through which everything appears fragmented and multiplied to infinity; and finally, the earth core, which becomes the seat of the earth brain and the earth spirit and which Dante described in his "Divine Comedy" as an ice hell. The very strongest anti-moral forces are concentrated in these three layers. Here arises the abode of the retarded Archai, the Asuras, who become the strongest antagonist forces. The strongest anti-moral forces, which are concentrated in the earth's core, are at the same time closely connected with the centre of destruction within the human being. Here matter is thrown into chaos and dissolved. This centre of destruction, which is spread over the whole human organism but has its bodily centre in the centre of gravity of the human being in the metabolic region, is normally not accessible to consciousness, because it lies beyond the memory mirror. At present, however, these forces are pushing more and more to the surface. Strict moral self-education must therefore in future increasingly ensure that these forces do not penetrate to the outside and thereby become a terrible source of evil, even black magic.

At that time, the human body consisted of a fine gas body in the form of a kind of flower crown, through which light shone. Spiritually, the human being was still completely rooted in the higher spiritual beings; his own consciousness resembled that of a plant, it was still a pure sleep consciousness. Externally, these human formations were still not visible and there was also no external light at that time. Just as warmth had ignited the inner life in man, so the air surrounding him now excited the spiritual tone in him. A part of the life ether condensed into sound ether. The formations were now sounding in their etheric bodies and were divided into seven types according to their fundamental tone. At the same time, the astral body was joined by the first disposition of the intellectual or mental soul. The Archangels worked in the air and in the intellectual soul.

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.
  1. ↑ The term root race derives from the terminology used at that time by the Theosophical Society and was later no longer used by Rudolf Steiner, as was the term subrace. Steiner repeatedly pointed out that the term "race" is actually no longer justified in the post-Atlantean time, since now it is no longer the physical but the soul-spiritual development that comes to the fore. The division of humanity into races will gradually be completely overcome and is already meaningless for the spiritual development of man.
  2. ↑ The actual Earth evolution begins in the fourth and middle of the seven so-called Rounds, during which Earth existence unfolds. In the first three rounds, earlier states of embodiment of the Earth, namely the Old Saturn, the Old Sun and the Old Moon, were repeated in an abbreviated form in order to make the fruits of these earlier forms of existence ripe for the Earth evolution itself. The Earth evolution, the fourth round, will be followed by three more rounds in which future new embodiments of the Earth will be, in a sense, foreshadowed.
  3. ↑ Abstract concepts of time, detached from things, are not meaningful for the contemplation of nature. Rather, one must rely on the intrinsic time of the system under consideration. For example, the Earth year or the Platonic year can only serve as a reference since the separation of the Sun, Earth and Moon. Intrinsic time is rooted in the essence of a living, developing wholeness and expresses itself through the processes that take place in it periodically in an orderly sequence and thereby constantly metamorphose. All living beings and all living systems, such as our earth, the entire planetary system and the cosmos as a whole, are such wholes and each has its own specific time. There is no absolute time deducted from things. Time measurements can therefore not be related to them, but consist in comparing different proper times with each other.

    „And this brings me to the fact that basically every entity that may be regarded at all as a totality actually carries its time within itself. I can consider a piece [of an] inorganic body for itself, but not a leaf, because it only has a part in the tree. In my observation, therefore, I must take into consideration what is a total system closed in on itself, what is a totality. But every totality that I look at in this way has time in it as something immanent. So that I can't really have much to spare for the abstract time that is still outside every thing and exists [alongside] the time immanent in every thing or process. When I consider the time that is to go from beginning to end, it seems to me just as when someone forms the abstract concept for the individual horse. The individual horses are there in the external spatial reality, but in order to get the concept, I have to attribute something else to it. It is the same with time. The question: Is time in itself variable or not? - has no real content, because every total system has its [own] time in its immanent being, and its [own] course of speed. The course of velocity of the inorganic or of the process of life leads back to this immanent time...

    In geology we describe one period after another, as if it were a reality. It is not. It is only a reality with the whole of the Earth, in the same way that an organism is a reality, where I must not tear out one thing. Instead of relating our processes to coordinate axis systems, it would be more important to relate them to their own inner reality, then we would arrive at totality systems. And then we would have to come back to a kind of monadism.“ (Lit.:GA 324a, p. 144)

    Moreover, developmental epochs do not simply follow each other, but overlap in wide areas. As a rule, the beginning of the following epoch is already indicated in the middle of the preceding one and continues to have an effect until the middle of the next one.

    Cf. also (Lit.: Bosse 2002, p 38ff and table p. 57)

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