Table of Contents

1. Current (5^th) Postatlantean Epoch
2. Current Fifth Cultural Age
3. Transition between 4th and 14th century
4. Future Oriphiel Age
5. Sixth Cultural Age
6. Seventh Cultural Age
7. War of All Against All
8. Earthquakes and Emergence Continent Sixth Epoch
9. Sixth Epoch

Reference Illustration

1. Current (5^th) Postatlantean Epoch

Source: https://anthroposophy.eu/Current_Postatlantean_epoch

We are currently living in the fifth Aryan or Postatlantean epoch that follows the Polarian, Hyperborean, Lemurian and Atlantean epochs. It consists of seven cultural ages (Schema FMC00.047 below), we are current in the fifth cultural age.

The fifth epoch is the lowest point of Man's physical descent, and represents a turning point in Man's consciousness:

• from an atavistic clairvoyance and guidance by the spirits of the third hierarchy
• to a free human being, set free from that guidance, and able and expected to consciously develop based on free will.

This is related to the development of the threefold 'I' consisting of sentient, intellectual and consciousness soul.

The main event of this epoch is the Mystery of Golgotha which is central to the evolution of mankind and Earth.

Introduction to Christ and the Mystery of Golgotha

Source: https://anthroposophy.eu/Introduction_to_Christ_and_the_Mystery_of_Golgotha

It is wise to start with the end in mind. What is the importance of Christ Impulse and the Mystery of Golgotha?

It is impossible to give a short answer or executive summary type synopsis, because the bandwidth of meaning that can be conveyed with some words is just insufficient. Nevertheless we can try some densely written 'bullet points', each statement as a pyramidion to the whole pyramid of meaning below (which these words cannot convey).

• The Mystery of Golgotha is a unique event in the evolution of the Earth and the solar system, for humanity and the whole of the cosmos. The highest divine being, a God, worked his way down the spiritual hierarchies; to live in Man and join the Earth and the destiny of all of mankind on the planet, until the end of the world.
• The Mystery of Golgotha represents the start of a new beginning, whereby humanity will evolve to the 10th spiritual hierarchy of the 'Spirits of Freedom and Love'. It is the start of the spiritualization impulse for humanity and the earth, the letting go of the physical, towards future versions of planet Earth where humanity will become spiritual beings of true selfless Love.
• The Mystery of Golgotha is a fructification of the Earth and Mankind with the Christ Impulse. The Christ Impulse is like an invisible power that works slowly, like a flower that opens but on a cosmic timescale of millenia and more, and instigates a new brotherly love between all human beings. Growing unselfishness and reducing egotism. Its impact is on a timescale that reaches beyond the evolutionary stage of the current planet Earth, but will become ever more important in the next cultural age, the next epoch, and the next future version of our planet.
• Implications of the Christ Impulse are also the redeeming of all sins and errors our souls and spirits have incurred in the past ages (since what is known as 'the fall of Man') through the purification of our soul and spirit, thereby surpassing the death of the physical body as we know it. This is known as the resurrection.

The above has been a subject of the teachings in the Mystery Centres for millenia. Though the depth of such important cosmic event of divine nature is beyond our intellectual understanding and current mundane consciousness, and requires a higher state of supersensible consciousness, still the ancient wisdom teachings can be studied through modern spiritual science.

This site offers guidance and support for the individual in-depth self study and contemplation by the earnest student. The above perspectives, and many more, are approached structurally through study modules that allow one to build one's understanding gradually and in stages.

Continued Study:
https://anthroposophy.eu/Christ_and_the_Mystery_of_Golgotha
and
https://anthroposophy.eu/Christ_-_base_study_modules_1_to_7.

A major change took place with the Transition between the 4th and 14th century with the loss of Logos and handover of Spirits of Form (SoF) to Archai.

The main developmental goal for Mankind in this epoch is the development of the spirit-self (Schema FMC00.130), and within that tasks and challenges for the various cultural ages (1917-11-19-GA178)

• fourth cultural age: birth & death, realize that through the Christ something carries us across death
• current fifth cultural age: come to grips with the problem of evil
• sixth cultural age: continous contemplation of the spiritual

The 'seed material' from this epoch for the next great Sixth epoch will be taken from the Sixth 'russian' cultural age following the (anglo-german) Current fifth cultural age, just as the seed material for our current epoch was taken from the fifth Atlantean age or subrace. See also Schema FMC00.169A on Overlapping evolutionary periods.

Aspects

• In the current fifth epoch, the revelation from above, the guidance of the soul from above (as in the Lemurian and Atlantean epochs), is gradually being withdrawn, so that Man is left to go his own way and become his own leader. (1904-11-11-GA093)
  • Man is set totally free from direct angelic guidance since the 15th century onwards and the age of the consciousness soul, and the withdrawal of the logos. See Transition between the 4th and 14th century
  • The Manu of the Sixth epoch (leading bodhisattva, see White Lodge) will for the first time be a real brother to his fellow men, whereas all earlier Manus were superhuman, divine beings of a kind.
• evolutionary trends
  • as we evolve from the fifth into the sixth and then into the seventh epoch, the ancient connection of race and blood will be increasingly lost (1907-06-05-GA099)

End transition

• The Reunion of Moon with Earth will take place in the fifth epoch, around the seventh millenium.
• End of this epoch and destruction of its culture by the War of all against all
• probably already starting much before, Earthquakes and emergence continent sixth epoch

Christ aspects

Extensive coverage of all aspects of the Christ Impulse is in the 21 Study Modules. See especially Modules 2 (and 3).

• the appearance of Christ in the etheric, the appearance of natureal clairvoyance, in the period starting 1933 but growing stronger for 2500 years
  • Christ took form as an angel and lived invisibly in the sphere around the Earth, however suffered an extinction of consciousness (or 'second crucifixion') as an angelic being on the etheric plane due to the onset of materialistic thinking over some nineteen centuries. This however leads to the awakening of etheric clairvoyance in the consciousness of Man.
  • the faculties to be expected
  • paramount importance of gaining understanding of MoG through spiritual science
  • other aspects
    • link with Vidar
    • new elementals

• The relationship Man can have or develop with the Christ will evolve in future cultural ages. There is a connection between the impulses of the different cultural ages and the soul life of Man, and he forces that flow into man and become active within him will come from ever higher worlds or planes.
  • fourth <-> life of perception
  • Current fifth cultural age <-> thinking, intellectuality (eg hence abstract sciences), in second half:; Christ will be seen clairvoyantly in his etheric form
  • Sixth cultural age ('russian') <-> feeling life of the soul, Christ will appear 'to a number of human beings' as a form of light in lower spirit land
  • seventh ('american') <-> spirit world <-> age of morality .. a number of human beings will 'perceive the Christ revealing Himself from higher Devachan in His true I that surpasses all human egos in inconceivable greatness, and with such splendour that It can bestow on man the highest possible moral impulses.

Illustrations

Cultural ages and archangelic periods

Schema FMC00.047 below gives a tabular overview of the cultural ages for the current Postatlantean or Aryan epoch.

Schema FMC00.239 shows the archangelic rulers of approx 354 periods for the current cultural age (plus and minus a cultural age). See also Spiritual hierarchies and their eigenperiods for more info on the 354 period. Rudolf Steiner uses this period to describe the nature of current Michael age and the future Oriphiel age.

Schema FMC00.130 provides a simple tabular overview of evolution and the developmental goal per planetary stage (and Condition of Consciousness) - and epoch (taking into account Conditions of Life and Form). For the current fifth epoch on Earth that developmental target is spirit self (or manas), for the sixth it is life spirit (or budhi), and for the seventh it is spirit man (or atma). Only a limited cohort of the population will reach those targets in each epoch. The seed cohort for the next epoch is selected taking into account the developmental goal for the next epoch.

Evolution of consciousness: clairvoyance, wisdom and morality

Schema FMC00.013 below stacks a number of views and original illustrations that have been calibrated to a single horizontal time line.

It depicts the fact that in the current epoch the old form of natural or atavistic clairvoyance ('guided by spiritual beings') slowly ebbed away, and a new form of consciousness is forming and will further develop in the remaining cultural ages into a new independant form of clairvoyance.

The table under the blackboard drawing illustrations shows:

• the grey cultural ages on top along the horizontal time dimension (the blue is the current, the yellow pointer showing our current century)
• with underneath the typical level of clairvoyance, into which plane or world of consciousness
• at the bottom, an illustration to show that 'like a curtain fell' over the old clairvoyance and connectness with the spiritual world (this is the only part of the picture not calibrated to the time scale, it should be more extended)
• the blackboard drawing from GA191 shows: the old mixture of wisdom and morality is impacted by the central MoG event (in orange) .. and after a period of impact after consciousness soul (see also the GA343 drawing for this delay) .. a new future lies ahead with a different connectedness, clairvoyance and brotherly love that is developing.

Schema FMC00.052 shows the dephased Christ solar impulse in red (dephased versus the cultural ages and timing of the regular hierarchies, called lunar/stellar astronomy). See Schema FMC00.052A for the original BBD (blackboard drawings). The timebar shows an interesting correlation between these impulses and two key periods for humanity: the first the next future Oriphiel age which will be a hardship test for humanity, and then the period in the next sixth cultural age where we have the Michael age and the impulse of the Maitreya Buddha .. a key period for the cohort of human beings that will provide the foundation for the next great Sixth epoch.

These two key periods are put in perspective to show - in yellow bars - the fact that "the fifth and sixth cultural ages are decisive" (1910-GA013), as "only a third of the population reaches the developmental goal at the end of the fifth epoch" (1904-10-24-GA090A).

To overlay schemas with a similar time-chart layout as below, see also:

• Schema FMC00.013 on this page, which uses the same layout
• Schema FMC00.167 on Transition between 4th and 14th century

.

Relationship with Christ

Schema FMC00.082 shows (projecting into schema FMC00.047), the evolving relationship Man will have (or be able to develop) with the Christ

Schema FMC00.081 gives an overview of some of the expected faculties related to the appearance of 'Christ in the etheric' due to the arising new clairvoyance. As depicted in the GA191 BBD (see above) this clairvoyance will be a mixture of wisdom with moral consciousness, hence the elements related to karma in the table below. See also Christ Module 19 - experiencing the Christ

Lecture coverage and references

Future cultural ages are covered in 1911-11-04-GA130 and 1911-11-18-GA130, see schema above.

The Abraham - Moses - Solomon ages are sketched in 1910-03-06-GA118 as a way to present the future mirrored versions with a renewal of a new kind of clairvoyance.

The decisive fifth and sixth cultural ages

1910-GA013 contains this paragraph to keep above our beds not to waste the precious time of our life and use this incarnation to the full extent possible.

However, only human beings embodying souls that have become all that they could under the influence of the Greco-Latin cultural age and the subsequent fifth, sixth, and seventh ages of Postatlantean evolution will be able to cope with these reconfigured earthly circumstances. The inner nature of these souls will correspond to what the Earth has then become. Other souls will have to remain behind at this stage, although earlier they could still have chosen to create the prerequisites for participation in it.

The souls mature enough to face the conditions that will exist after the next great upheaval will be the ones who succeeded in imbuing supersensible knowledge with their own forces of intellect and feeling at the transition from the fifth to the sixth cultural ages in the post-Atlantean epoch. The fifth and sixth periods are the decisive ones, so to speak.

In the seventh cultural age, although the souls who have achieved the goal of the sixth will continue to develop accordingly, the changed circumstances in their surroundings will provide little opportunity for the others to make up for lost time. The next opportunity will present itself only in the distant future.

Discussion

The 1911-11-04-GA130 and 1911-11-18-GA130 references are consistent with what is described in 1910-03-06-GA118 in a different way, and underlying are the schemas that provide the base foundation. Man's soul life evolves per cultural age, guided as it is by a different Archai (Spirit of the Age). Because we are now, in the fifth cultural age, in an age of intellectuality, it is rather logical to present spiritual science and free (non-sensory) thinking as a way to the Christ (as is explicitly done in 1911-11-04-GA130). It is important though to grow into a feeling connection and not a purely dry intellectual. This is a preparation for the etheric clairvoyance that will become ever more clearly in the next three thousand years (1911-11-18-GA130). See also

Schema 47 - see extended version ao with update from unpublished lecture 1904-11-11

Notes

• Observe that the GA130 quotes explicitly mention 'a number of human beings', so definitely not the whole of humanity.

For research

The period for Christ's appearance in the etheric may seemingly vary with lecture references, as different phrasings put difference focus or nuances eg 1910-01-15-GA117A (approx 500 years from 1899 to 2500).

2. Current Fifth Cultural Age

Source: https://anthroposophy.eu/

The current cultural age describes a period between 1413 and 3573 characterized by the German and Anglo cultures, it is the fifth cultural age in the Current Postatlantean epoch (above).

Aspects

• development of the consciousness soul, see Development of the I
• Transition between 4th and 14th century (below)
• task to come to grips with evil as an impulse in world evolution (1917-11-19-GA178), see a.o.
  • rise of the the adverse powers of opposition: Ahrimanic (untruthfullness, materialism, Mammon .. ), Asuric (black magic, pornography, ..)
  • Future Oriphiel age (below) as a heft cleansing period central in the fifth cultural age
• spiritual guidance of Mankind by angels (GA015), an intellectual age focused on thinking (1911-11-10-GA130) see Schema FMC00.047 on Current Postatlantean epoch (above)

Inspirational quotes

1918-01-08-GA180 (SWCC)

.. on the one hand that we are now living in the materialistic age, to which is added abstraction in the sense we have come to know it, namely estrangement from reality; furthermore, all that must break into our age catastrophically is connected with this divorce from reality.

On the other hand, however, it may also be said that compared with the other cultural ages in this epoch, our current fifth period is in a certain respect the greatest age, one that brings most of all to humanity, one that harbours within it immense possibilities for the evolution and existence of mankind.

...

In this fifth postatlantean age Man has the greatest possibility of making himself spiritual. No age has been so favourable to spirituality as this fifth cultural age. Courage must only be found to drive the money-changers out of the Temple. Courage must be found to confront with the real, abstractions and things estranged from reality, to set against them full reality and therewith the spiritual reality.

Illustrations

Schema FMC00.239 shows the archangelic rulers of approx 354 periods for the current cultural age (plus and minus a cultural age).

See also Spiritual hierarchies and their eigenperiods for more info on the 354 period. Rudolf Steiner uses this period to describe the nature of current Michael age and the Future Oriphiel age.

FMC00.239.jpg

Lecture coverage and references

1907-06-05-GA099 (SWCC)

Thus you see that with the densification of man in the cosmos is connected a descent into the world of matter. And another force is connected with it which could never have developed without it: — egoism. Egoism has a good and a bad side. It is the foundation of human independence and freedom, but in its reverse aspect the foundation too of all that is bad and evil. But man had to go through this force of egoism if he was to learn to do good of his own freewill. Through the forces which had guided him previously, he would always have been impelled to the good; it had, however, to be possible for him to go his own way. Just as he has descended he must now ascend again to spirituality; and as the descent is linked with the predominance of egoism so does the ascent depend on men's selflessness, their feeling of sympathy for one another, becoming stronger and stronger.

Mankind has evolved through various epochs, first through the old Indian, then the Persian, the Egyptian-Chaldean-Babylonian, the Greco-Latin to the present Fifth epoch. And this will be replaced by a sixth. And as human evolution is working towards this, it is working at the same time at the overcoming of the principle which has been strongest since the time when the etheric body united with the point in the brain of which I spoke to you yesterday. That was the time of the fall into the deepest egoism.

Man was also egotistic in his earlier evolution, but it was then in a different way. The egoism which enters so deeply into the soul as in our present age is inseparable from the predominating materialism; a spiritual age will denote the overcoming of this egoism. Therefore Christianity and all movements imbued with genuine religious life have worked consciously towards breaking through all the old blood-ties.

1917-11-19-GA178 (SWCC)

I have mentioned in the course of these studies that every cultural age in the Postatlantean age has its particular task. I have characterized in general the task of the fifth cultural age, indicating that it is humanity's task in this period to come to grips with evil as an impulse in the evolution of the world.

We have frequently discussed what this means. It cannot be otherwise than that forces that appear at the wrong place appear as evil. They can be conquered for humanity, however, through the exertions of human beings in the current fifth cultural age, so that with these forces of evil something good for the future of the evolution of the whole world is in the position to unfold.

For this reason, the task for the fifth Postatlantean period is a particularly difficult one. As you see, a great many temptations face humanity. When the powers of evil gradually appear, it is natural that Man is more likely under the circumstances to give in to this evil in all realms, rather than taking up the struggle to allow what appears to him as evil to be put in the service of the good in world evolution.

Yet this must happen: the evil must to a certain degree be placed at the service of the good in world evolution. Without this, it would be impossible to enter the sixth cultural age, which will have a completely different task. It will have the task of allowing humanity to live above all in a continuous contemplation of the spiritual world, of spiritual impulses, in spite of the fact that it is still connected with the earth.

Just this task in the fifth cultural age, that of opposing evil, is connected with the new possibility of a certain kind of personal darkening for humanity.

3. Transition between 4th and 14th century

Source: https://anthroposophy.eu/Transition_between_4th_and_14th_century

Throughout his many lectures, Rudolf Steiner often makes reference to specific points in time of the last millennium: to the 4^th century, also to the period of 14-15^th century, then to the 8-9^th century, and also to specific years such as 869, 1250, 1413.

Schema FMC00.167 below provides an overview of how they relate in the transition of the new age of the consciousness soul, but the transition and handover from the Spirits of Form to the Archai should also be considered in view of:

• Schema FMC00.302 (below) and
• the model presented by Schema FMC00.276 on Overview of solar system evolution.

See also the 1912-06-20-GA133 quote on The two halves of an evolutionary cycle

.. something quite definite will come about during the second half of the period of Earth-evolution into which we have now passed ... towards the end of a planetary age it is always the case that the being of central importance — and on the Earth this is Man — is left free, so that the qualities with which he was originally endowed may pass more freely into his own hands.

Aspects

• the concept of the 'cosmic storm' by the first hierarchy H1 in first third of the 15^th century (1924-07-28-GA237)

Loss of Logos

Steiner often refers to the 4^th century as the 'loss of Logos' (see 1921-04-09-GA204) and as the moment that the Spirits of Form (SoF) handed over to the Archai, the SoF being the key hierarchy for the evolution of Mankind on this planet Earth. What happens is a 'passing-the-baton' or 'changing of the guards' from one hierarchy in development who has 'done the job' to the next one starting its next thread of evolution.

Upto the 4^th century, the most wise and advanced men still had a level of consciousness in which 'the word' had two aspects:

• the current 'word' concept we still have today when we speak: the abstract conceptual content of the word
• but also at the same time, the ancient Word concept: 'the experience of the idea spiritually and full of content', 'the resounding of the word (and in it the being of the world) in man's inner being'

These two were once one integral whole, and between 4^th century BC and 4^th century AD there was a transition process by which the conceptual content separated. In this period Man's soul experience changed such that humanity slowly moved to an orientation of abstract concepts, ideas .. and a diminuishing dull sensation of the spiritual world (being pushed down into subsconsciousness). Hence humanity was left with abstract thought concepts in current thinking and language.

The implications are far-reaching: ancient communications and writings are now no longer 'readable', that is: the full richness of what was contained has become unaccessible to mankind of today.The Gospels are an example, but also other ancient texts such as the Sefer Yetzirah. When we say that Hebrew and Sanskrit are examples of symbolic languages, we should not interpret that every character or word was a symbol the way we think of it abstractly .. these languages contained the full spiritual reality in the words spoken, due to the type of human consciousness at those times. This gradually disappeared and stopped.

Handover Spirits of Form to Archai

The lecture of 1923-03-16-GA283 painstakingly explains the process of what happened once more, of course differently and (IMHO) clearer:

The evolution of humanity now approached the fourth century A.D. In the super-sensible world, thought brought about an extremely significant event; namely, the Exusiai — the forces or beings of form — gave their thought forces up to the Archai, to the primal forces or primal beginnings. (See diagram above) The primal beginnings, or Archai, took over the task formerly executed by the Exusiai. Such things happen in the super-sensible world. This was a particularly sublime and significant cosmic event.

From that time on, the Exusiai, the form beings, retained only the task of regulating the outer sense perceptions, therefore ruling with the particular cosmic forces over everything existing in the world of colors, tones, and so forth.

Concerning the age that now dawned after the fourth century A.D. a person who can discern these matters must say that he beholds how the world-dominating thoughts are passed on to the Archai, the primal beginnings, how what eyes see and what ears hear, the manifold world phenomena engaged in perpetual metamorphosis, are the tapestry woven by the Exusiai.

They formerly bestowed the thoughts on human beings; they now give human beings their sense impressions, while the primal beginnings bestow the thoughts on human beings.

Such things are prepared in humanity through whole epochs of time and are connected with fundamental changes in human souls. I said that this super-sensible event took place in the fourth century A.D., but this is only an approximation, a mean point in time, as it were.

This transference of a spiritual task took place over a long period of time. It had been prepared already in pre-Christian times and was completed only in the twelfth, thirteenth, and fourteenth centuries A.D. The fourth century is just the mean century, which is mentioned so as to pinpoint something definite in the historical development of humanity.

This is also the point of time in humanity's evolution when the view of the super-sensible world began to vanish completely for man. The consciousness of the soul ceased to see supersensibly, to perceive, because this human soul surrendered itself to the earth. You perhaps will understand this more clearly if we shed light on it from yet another angle.

What is really implied here? What am I trying to point out so intensely?

It is the fact that human beings feel themselves more and more in their individuality. As the world of thoughts passes from the form beings to the primal beginnings, from the Exusiai to the Archai, man increasingly senses the thoughts in his own being, because the Archai live one level nearer man than the Exusiai.

In this lecture Steiner goes further than covering the impact on human consciousness experience (which he did in the lectures above), he also goes on to explain the implications on a historical level in Europe which are a reflection of what's happening in the spiritual reality of the different hierarchies .. appreciating that during each evolutionary process there are – like in a Gauss curve for a normal distribution of properties over a population – some that make it in a 'normal development', but there also the ones that evolve slower and those that evolve faster. The non-normally developed then cause complicated dynamics which underlie the very complex plethora of historical events and developments between people.

Illustrations

Schema FMC00.167 provides a two millenia overview of the cultural age of the intellectual soul, with focus on the preparations and overflow into the consciousness soul.

In Rudolf Steiner lectures, key dates come back of the 4th century, the 9th century, the year 1250, and the first part of the 15th century. All these are related as shown in the green and blue bars on top, showing a gradual process centered around the 'kick-in' point of the 4th century, but starting 5 centuries earlier and having its effect until 5 centuries later (darker blue).

This is the period of handover of SoF to archai, the great curtain was now finally let down over the ancient atavistic clairvoyance and old wisdom (see eg old knowledge phase out, upto the School of Chartres).

At the same time it is also a new beginning of a form of new thinking of which Scotus Eriugena was a very early post, which saw its rising with scholasticism, and that really 'hit' the whole of humanity from the 15th century onwards. This gave rise to the new autonomeous thinking by Man, and the development of mineral science. Around 1250 is when the SoF weave the consciousness soul, and in the first third of the 15th century the first hierarchy, in some sort of 'cosmic thunderstorm', 'hard-codes the wiring' into Man's physical system, the sense-nerve subsystem.

The above chart is focused on the transition of the consciousness soul, it does not show the new Michael era starting 1879 and the new form of clairvoyance that appears from 20-21st century onwards (see Christ in the etheric). It also does not show the counter-events of the two Thirty Years Wars, the first from 1618-1648 countering the Rosecrucian impulse, and the second from 1914-1945 to counter the Michael impulse and distort the German-Slavic cultural and spiritual developments.

.

Schema FMC00.028 illustrates 'the descent of the cosmic intelligence, coming down to Earth' with the BBD drawing and explanation from the Karmic Relationship lecture. Compare timing with Schema FMC00.167.

Schema FMC00.356 illustrates in the most pictorial form the essence of Man becoming free in the second half of Earth evolution. With the transfer from the SoF to the Archai, Man was left free and disconnected on Earth .. but they have to now make the connection again with the spiritual world.

Compare also with for example:

• Schema FMC00.393 (on Reverse ritual) on Communicating over spiritual science
• Schema FMC00.380 on Parsifal

Schema FMC00.013: The above picture of Schema FMC00.167 fits into another of FMC00.013 below that zooms out to the whole Current Postatlantean epoch, also representing the 'lowest' fourth cultural age. It positions well that we are, even after five centuries, still at in the first half of the developing fifth cultural age. The fifth and sixth cultural ages are decisive ( see 1910-GA013 quote on the Current Postatlantean epoch, as well as Schema FMC00.169A on Overlapping evolutionary periods.

Schema FMC00.302 takes an ingoing perspective of the conditions of life and form in which to understand the seven epochs in this CoLF or Condition of Life and Form. See Earth rounds perspective as well as the Schemas on Three dimensions of Evolution.

Also compare this with Overlapping evolutionary periods that goes into the fact we should not see this as strict periods with a start and end, but rather concurrent developments that overlap and flow into one another.

This Schema helps to position the transition between the SoF and Archai.

Lecture coverage and references

Coverage overview

There are three main lectures to initialize one's study of this topic:

• 1921-04-09-GA204 (loss of Logos)
• 1923-03-16-GA283 (handover SoF to Archai)
• 1923-03-17-GA222

A second time he explains this in depth is in March 1923.

impact of transition between the 4th century and the year 1250

• 4th century: loss of Logos, handover of SoF to Archai
  • see 1923-03-17-GA222, 1923-03-18-GA222 , and 1918-12-28-GA187
  • but also 1922-04-13-GA211, 1924-08-21-GA240
  • and in GA237: 1924-08-08-GA237, 1924-07-28-GA237, 1924-08-01-GA237
• the year 1250:
  • 1910-12-31-GA126, 1911-06-GA015
• as well as the importance of the 8-9th century and the year 869
  • 1924-08-27-GA240

1921-GA204 contains several lectures that cover more on the 4^th century changes

1921-06-03-GA204

Indeed, it is true that since the beginning of the fifteenth century we live even more in the resting Godhead than did Scotus Erigena. This Godhead awaits our attainment of Imagination and Inspiration through our own efforts. Then we will be able to recognize the world around us as a spiritual world. We will perceive that we are indeed in a spiritual world that has thrown off the earthly one. This deity awaits our realization that we are living after the end of the world and that we have arrived in the New Jerusalem. It is indeed a strange spiritual destiny for human beings that they dwell in the spiritual world and neither know it nor wish to know it.

1923-03-GA222 starts on 15^th century changes with earlier lecture already in L2

The day afterwards he continues on this.

Now as a sidenote, this is a nice illustration how things stand today with regards to Steiner's lectures. The topic covered and the natural flow is separated books apart in contemporary publishing: the first lecture of 1923-03-16 is in GA283, the second in GA222. Although understandeable, a major problem with the GA/CW (gesamtausgabe/collected works) approach showing that Steiner's lectures really deserve a digital hypertext medium and not a sequential book publishing approach over 300+ books. Just a suggestion for the person in charge of the CW project.

Lecture extracts

1922-04-13-GA211

1923-03-17-GA222

In this lecture Steiner goes further than covering the impact on human consciousness experience, but goes on to explain the implications on a historical level in Europe which are a reflection of what's happening in the spiritual reality of the different hierarchies .. appreciating that during each evolutionary process there are – like in a Gauss curve for a normal distribution of properties over a population – some that make it in a 'normal development', but there also the ones that evolve slower and those that evolve faster. The non-normally developed then cause complicated dynamics which underlie the very complex plethora of historical events and developments between people.

By referring to the 4th century A.D. as a point in world history that we have for some time now recognized as very significant, I tried in the lecture yesterday to show that we can fully understand the evolution of humanity only when we keep in mind not only what takes place openly on the stage of history but also what is going on behind the scenes. I told you yesterday that the 4th century of our era is to be regarded approximately as the middle point of the period during which the Spirits of Form, the Exousiai, were handing over the cosmic thoughts to the Archai, the Primal Powers of Principalities. The process lasted for several hundreds of years. And with this transference is connected the fact — because man has become dependent in his thoughts upon quite different spiritual Beings — that his relation to his thoughts is not at all the same as it was in earlier times.

1923-03-18-GA222

Now the cleavage cannot be healed by what is today called civilization. It can be healed only an the basis of a spiritual world-outlook sought by way of Anthroposophy.

Man comes to realize the existence of Archai who have now received the task in the cosmos of linking the thoughts of man — which now arise in isolation in the soul — to the world-processes in due arrangement.

In a grand and impressive way man again finds the foundation for the moral world-order.

How does he find it? He could not become free if he were incapable of feeling: You unfold your thoughts out of your own individuality; you are yourself the elaborator of your thoughts.

But this at once implies that we have wrested our thoughts away from the cosmos. In ancient times it was like this:

If I draw the ocean of cosmic thoughts (yellow) and man diagrammatically (red), then I must indicate what passed into each man as his share of the world of cosmic thoughts.

He clung to the world of cosmic thoughts — it came down into him. That this could take place was due to the action of the Spirits of Form.

In the course of evolution this has changed.

We have here the ocean of cosmic thoughts (yellow) but the rulership of it has passed to the Archai.

If I indicate individual men (below, red), their thoughts (editor: yellow) are detached; they are no longer connected with the cosmic thoughts.

This is inevitable, for man could never be a free being if he did not wrest his world of thoughts away from the cosmos. He must wrest his thoughts away in order to become a free being .. but then they must be linked again with the cosmos.

What is necessary, then, is that the rulership of these thoughts — which are not a direct concern of human life (green) but of the cosmos — should be exercised by the Archai, the Spirits of Personality.

But now, if we turn to the moral aspect of these thoughts we shall say to ourselves:

When we enter the spiritual world — either through the gate of death or in the Earth's future or whenever it may be — when we enter the spiritual world we shall meet the Spirits of Personality, the Archai. We shall then be able to perceive what it has been possible for them to do with our thoughts which, to begin with, for the sake of our freedom were isolated within ourselves. We shall then recognize our worth and dignity as men from what the Spirits of Personality have been able to do with our thoughts. And cosmic thought turns directly into moral sensibility, moral impulsion.

Moral impulsion can arise anywhere today from Anthroposophy if rightly grasped — only it must be grasped by the whole being of man.

If we grasp this thought, the thought of responsibility to the normally evolving Archai, if we truly grasp our spiritual function in the cosmos,

then we shall also find the place that rightly belongs to us in our epoch; we shall be true men of our time.

And then   we shall look in the right way at what, indeed, is forever around us: not a world of sense alone but also a spiritual world. We shall regard the Archai as the spiritual Beings to whom man must be responsible if, as a member of humanity, he is to undergo his evolution rightly in the course of earthly time.

We shall realize that in the present age what was once the necessary world-order is still opposed by all that has remained from those Spirits of Form who are still intent upon ruling over the cosmic thoughts in the old way. And this is the most important concern of civilization in our time.

The deeper talks of man today consist in this: through a right attitude to the Archai, the Spirits of Personality, to become truly free so that he may also adopt the right attitude to the Spirits of Form who today are not within their rights when they strive to exercise rulership over the cosmic thoughts as formerly, but were once the legitimate rulers. On the one hand we shall find what makes life in the world difficult, but we shall also find everywhere ways out of these difficulties. Only we must seek for these ways as free individuals. For if we have no will to achieve a free development of thoughts, what could the Archai possibly make of us?

What is important in our age is that man should have the resolute will to be a free being. In most cases he still does not will it and so has to accommodate himself to the idea. It is still difficult today for a man to wish to be a free being. What would please him most would be to wish what he likes and that the right Spirits would be there to carry out his wishes in an invisible, super-sensible way. Then he would perhaps feel free, feel his dignity as man! We need only wait for one or two incarnations — not such a very long time, until about the year 2800 or 3000 — and then in our next incarnation, when looking back on the earlier one, we should never be able to excuse ourselves if we had confused human freedom with the furtherance of human comfort by indulgent Gods !

Today man does exactly this — he confuses freedom and indulgence of benevolent Gods with his love of ease and his wishes for comfort. There are still many people today who wish that there were benevolent Gods to carry out their wishes without much assistance from themselves. But as I said, we need only wait for the year 2800 or 3000 and in a subsequent incarnation we shall thoroughly despise such an attitude. Today, if we develop a truly moral attitude of mind this must be allied with a certain moral strength, with a genuine desire for freedom — inner freedom in the first place; outer freedom will soon follow in the right form if the will for inner freedom is present. But to this end it is essential to perceive exactly where the unauthorized Spirits of Form are active.

Well, they are active everywhere. I could imagine — the human intellect has such a strongly Luciferic tendency — that there may be people who say: Yes, it would certainly be much more sensible for the divine ordering of the world if these backward Spirits of Form were not causing havoc, indeed if they were not there at all ! I advise individuals who think like this also to consider as sensible people whether they could nourish themselves without at the same time filling their intestines with unpleasant substances. The one process is simply not possible without the other. Similarly it is not possible in the world for the things upon which the greatness and dignity of man depend to exist without their correlates.

1918-12-28-GA187

discusses the change in soul constitution in pre-Christian times and afterwards

Some time ago I pointed to the objective fact underlying this whole evolution. I pointed out that if we ask what impulses, what forces are active in the evolution of the earth and the evolution of humanity, we learn that certain divine- spiritual Beings are active whom the Bible calls the Creators, the Elohim. (One could just as well take their title from another source.) We call them the Spirits of Form. I have shown, however, from various points of view that these Spirits of Form have to a certain extent — if I may use a trivial expression — finished playing their role on behalf of the most important concerns of mankind, and that other spiritual beings have taken it over.

Anyone with sufficient feeling for this fact that presents itself to supersensible research, namely, that the time- honored Gods, or God, must now be replaced in human consciousness by other impulses, will realize that indeed very much has happened in the evolution of mankind, even during historical times. Such an inner transformation of the whole human consciousness as is now taking place, and which will become more and more apparent, has certainly never occurred within historical times. As you know, I am not inclined to agree with the oft-repeated phrase: we live in a time of transition. I have often remarked that anyone can say of any time that one lives in an age of transition; and if he fancies the notion, he can consider the transition he has in mind the most important in world evolution. That is not the meaning intended in what I have said. Any time is a time of transition, but the important thing is to know what is in transition, what is undergoing metamorphosis. From other points of view other transitions may have been more significant; but for the inner soul-life of man the transition to which I am now referring, directed toward our immediate future, is the one most fraught with meaning of any in historical times.

…

Now we may ask what really underlies this splitting of the human entity into two-poles: the conceptual life, which has become a mere reflection of images; and the will-life, which has been forced down into realms of unconsciousness where it is asleep? The underlying cause is this, that in the historical evolution of humanity the impulse for freedom is struggling upward in the development of the human being. Even freedom, dear friends, is a product of evolution! Earlier times were not ready to awaken humanity to a real impulse for freedom.

This present time in which we live can be characterized on the one hand as I have just indicated: by the fact that the Spirits of Personality are replacing the Spirits of Form. Subjectively the struggling forth from the human soul of the impulse for freedom accompanies this outer, objective fact of evolution. Whatever course events may be taking externally, however chaotic all outer happenings may become, still at the same time we have in the present and the near future the struggle of the human being, in this very age of the consciousness soul (in which we have been living since the fifteenth century) the struggle of the human being to win through to an experience of the impulse for freedom. An understanding of this impulse is being sought by modern humanity, and will be sought more and more.

But this impulse can only break out of the human soul if the soul is capable of it. In earlier times freedom in its full range was not possible, for the simple reason that before the age of the consciousness soul every impulse was instinctive. Man cannot be free if he can only take into his consciousness what plays in from an instinctively conscious reality. Modern science still reckons on this absence of freedom, on inner necessity, because it is ignorant of the fact that in our consciousness as it is developed today, in the only kind of consciousness that can be developed through modern science, no real impulses can exist. (The contemporary scientific concepts show this reflection-consciousness to the highest degree.) Nothing exists in our consciousness that springs from some reality of our own body, soul, or spirit. Reality exists in it, to be sure — especially if we develop what in my The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity I have called pure thought — but it only exists in reflection. As soon as you find yourself within a reality, you are impelled by it, for reality is something; even if it acts upon you quite feebly, it is an element of necessity, it constrains you, and you must follow it. This is not the case when a reflection works upon your soul, for a reflection contains no activity, no force; it is a mere image that does not urge the soul or compel it. In this age in which the consciousness tends to have reflections, the impulse for freedom can be developed at the same time. By anything else a man would be urged to do something; but when his conscious conceptions are images and nothing but images, which reflect a reality but are not the reality, there is no reality to oppress him. He is able in this age to develop his impulse for freedom. This is a mysterious fact that underlies the life of our present time. That people have become materialists in this age can be traced to their feeling, when they contemplate their inner life, that they find no reality there, only images. And, of course, everything else is sought in the sense-world. It is true that we can find no reality, either spiritual or physical, within our soul; we find only images. This was not always so; it is only true for our age. Our age is suited to develop materialism because it has become nonsensical to say, "I think, therefore I am." We should say, ''I think, therefore I am not." That means that my thoughts are only images. In the act of conceiving myself in thinking, I am not, I am only an image. This being-an-image, however, is what gives me the possibility of developing freedom.

This is another fact revealed by outer phenomena to those who survey life, may I say, according to certain leitmotivs; but its truth will only be fully revealed when we again take up initiation science, true spiritual science. You must realize, however, that today whenever people are active in philosophic or scientific pursuits, they are living very much on concepts inherited from an earlier time.

This can be seen very clearly in one of the contrasting phenomena we were considering. You can observe how the secret-society ideas of the English-speaking peoples have spread over the earth; and you will find that in these secret societies what is ancient is emphasized with a certain partiality. The more the age of any rite or dogma in this realm can be played up, the more — pardon the expression — they lick their fingers with pleasure. And when someone wants especially to captivate people with some sort of occult science, he at least announces that it is Rosicrucian, or even Egyptian — but surely old; it must be something or other old. That corresponds pretty well to the fact that in those societies knowledge that has been obtained in the immediate present is not cultivated. (Some direct research is carried on, to be sure, but only according to the rules of ancient, antiquated occult science.) On the contrary, anything such as we do here — spiritual science acquired by working directly out of the impulses of the present — anything of this sort is opposed with might and main. Opposition to anything modern is the fixed tradition of these extreme phenomena. And — leaving aside Goetheanism, which is something entirely new — if one considers thoughtfully the customary, trivial natural science and its mode of conception, one knows that all the real concepts with which it works, even all ideas (not the single laws of nature, but the forms of the laws of nature) are, fundamentally, inherited concepts. The experiments contain something new, the observations also; but the concepts are new in no sense whatever: they are inherited. And when we call the attention of one or another scientist to this fact, they become really indignant, fearfully angry, and they deny this source of their concepts.

Whence, then, comes modern thought that fancies itself so enlightened? My dear friends, it is merely the child of an ancient religion! To be sure, the religious conceptions have been discarded. People no longer believe in Zeus or in Jahve — many not even in Christ — but the mode of thought from the age when Zeus, Jahve, Osiris, Ormuzd, were believed in, the manner of human thinking has remained. It is applied today to oxygen, hydrogen, electrons, ions, Herzian waves; the object makes no difference, the mode of thought is the same. Only through spiritual science can a new kind of thinking be employed for the supersensible world and for this world as well. As I have often said, Goethe provided an elementary beginning in natural science with his morphology, which consequently is also combatted by the antiquated views. With his physics too Goethe created a beginning, but the fruitfulness of that beginning is still hardly recognized. Thus people work with what is left over — which, of course, is comprehensible. For in an age when the consciousness is filled, not with elements of reality, but with only reflected images, it is unable, if it is thrown entirely on its own resources as ordinary, everyday consciousness, to acquire much in the way of content.

On the other hand, how were the religious conceptions acquired? It is childish to suppose that the ancient theologians thought up the contents of the Old Testament, or more recent theologians those of the New Testament, in the way present-day philosophers turn out their inherited concepts. That is a childish way of thinking. What stands in the Old Testament and the New Testament, and in the other religious books of the various peoples, came from supersensible visions, but only from the very ancient supersensible visions. It was all revealed through supersensible knowledge; and as the revelations were accepted from the supersensible world, the thought-forms were accepted too. So that today a good zoologist or a good surgeon is — unconsciously — using the thought-forms, the kind of concepts, that the seer of the Old Testament or New Testament had gained in his way by his own effort. And from the visions he obtained, the seer also developed his mode of forming concepts. Naturally it angers people today when we say to them: Even though you are zoologists, or physiologists, and certainly work in a different field, you are nevertheless using the thought-forms that originated from the visions of the ancient prophets or the evangelists. In the course of the last four hundred years, since the rise of Copernicanism and Galileism, very few new concepts have been acquired, and still less concept-forms of any sort, or trends of thought. The little that has been gained is precisely what provides the foundation for again finding supersensible paths of knowledge — through the real, anthroposophically oriented science of the spirit. Therefore, as early as the eighties of the last century I indicated clearly in my introduction to Goethe's Morphology — and I had the words printed in italics — that I considered Goethe the Kepler and Copernicus of organic science. I intended in this way to point out the path that leads directly into supersensible realms, and that starts from the good elementary foundation which he created. Thus the kind of thoughts that continue to haunt human heads today came from ancient vision, that is, from atavistic supersensible perception. During this entire evolution of human consciousness the Creators of old, the Spirits of Form, were active; they revealed themselves to the supersensible consciousness. Now it is no longer these Spirits who are revealed to one who stands within the modern life of spirit: it is the Spirits of Personality.

You may ask, what is the difference? This is shown precisely in initiation science. The modern spiritual scientist is still someone very strange to the popular consciousness, even to the general scientific consciousness, because the latter contains only a spark of Galileism, Copernicanism and Goetheanism, and even that in very elementary form, for it is still commonly dominated by the mode of thought of the ancient seers. It was the Spirits of Form who had furnished the ancient visions, who then brought to life in man the conceptions that were active in the ancient religions and even in Christianity up to the present time. These Spirits of Form, whom we call Creators, manifested themselves, to begin with, in imaginations that arose in man involuntarily. That was their initial mode of revelation; then out of the imaginations grew the conceptions of all the ancient religions. You know that imagination is the first stage of supersensible knowledge, then comes inspiration, and then intuition. All those who wanted to reach supersensible knowledge in the ancient sense started from imaginations; they had to find their way to the Spirits of Form.

Today the way has to be found to the Spirits of Personality. Here, then, is a tremendous difference. For the Spirits of Personality do not give imaginations to whoever wants them: a man must work them out himself; he must go to meet the Spirits of Personality. It was not necessary to go to meet the Spirits of Form. Formerly a man could be what one may call favored by divine grace, because the Spirits of Form gave him their imaginations in the form of visions. Many still seek this path today, because it is easier — but it is only attainable now in a pathological condition. Mankind has evolved, and what was psychological in earlier times is pathological now. Everything in the nature of visions, everything that depends upon involuntary imaginations, is pathological in our time and pushes a man down below his normal level. What is demanded today of anyone who wishes to push forward to initiation science, or actually to initiate vision, is that he shall develop his imaginations in full consciousness. For the Spirits of Personality will not give him imaginations; he must bring the imaginations to them. And something else occurs today. When you develop, when you elaborate valid imaginations, then you meet the Spirits of Personality on your supersensible path of knowledge, and you find the power to verify your imaginations, to bring them to objectivity for yourself.

The most elementary course for the spiritual researcher today will usually be to seek imaginations from the soundest results of modern knowledge. I have pointed out that modern science is the best preparation for spiritual research, because it offers the possibility of rising to fruitful pictorial concepts, especially if it is carried on in the Goethean sense. Of course anyone can invent images that are merely fantastic; one can patch together all sorts of stuff into arbitrary imaginations. The images one makes must first be verified by the approach of the Spirits of Personality bringing inspirations and intuitions. These are really received from the Spirits of Personality. One knows with certainty that one is in communication with those Spirits, who reveal themselves to present-day humanity from remote depths of spirit; but they will remain unproductive for one unless one brings a language to them. They keep the imaginations for themselves. Earlier, the Spirits of Form placed imaginations before a person who had supersensible vision; but the Spirits of Personality keep them in their possession, and one must come to an understanding with those Spirits — just as one would with another human being with whom one should be having thoughts in common and interchange of these thoughts. One should have free converse in the same way with the Spirits of Personality. The entire inner structure of spiritual life has been changed. The involuntary character which was the basis of the ancient revelations has been transformed into an impulse which is experienced in free activity. Someone who is not superficial, who wants to find out what really can occur, will become aware as he follows world events today (perhaps at first from something quite superficial) that a new world-plan is seeking to be realized, that behind outer events something is trying to take place spiritually. This may be sensed from world- happenings, but thoughts about it are still very vague.

Especially in social life many people may have the feeling that something is trying to be realized, something wills to happen. But if one wishes to understand what it is that wills to occur, he must approach it with something that only he himself can bring to it. What I have indicated as one kind of social impulse that is needed — but only one kind, because it is not a program, but reality — has been learnt in this way. I can say, therefore, that it is not something thought out, or fashioned from some ideal (what is called an ideal today), but it is a conception of something that presses to be realized, and that will be realized. One can only put it into concepts if one has first acquired the ability to form imaginations, and then has had them verified, proved, confirmed by the Spirits of Personality who are weaving the new world-plan.

This present-day development demands of us that we strip away all that is out of date in current science, and really find our way into new thought-forms, so that in them we may reach not antiquated visions, but imaginations built up with all our will, which we may then offer to the objective process of the spiritual world and receive back verified. This is so completely, so radically different from all earlier methods of gaining supersensible knowledge that the numerous individuals who depend upon the earlier methods resist it with all their might. For something is demanded of persons seeking to gain supersensible knowledge, something that is radical, primal, elementary, that intends to penetrate to sources, something that must be reconciled with all that is, consciously or unconsciously, antiquated. That is the reason why the spiritual science presented here attaches so little value to all that is traditional. These traditional things are certainly worthy of respect, but the fact remains that we stand at the turning-point of human evolution; and we must fully recognize that the traditional is obsolete, and that something new must be won. Hence, in a spiritual science that takes today's conditions into account, there can be no thought of faith in the old sense, nor any inclination toward the so-called Master Builder of all worlds. For both pertain only to external consciousness. When one attains a consciousness that is outside the body and outside the course of life, that is really in the spiritual world, then will and conceptions flow together again into one reality. And what was mere architecture, mere form—lifeless forms and lifeless symbols—receives inner life. Empty, obscure faith becomes knowledge, concrete self-transforming knowledge. The two unite and become a living thing. This is what must be experienced by humanity. The ancient symbols and ancient rites must be felt to be out of date. The whole earlier mode of thought must be felt as something antiquated; and the rigid forms in that mode of thought must be given life.

Just think how much use is still made today of those antiquated concepts! Certainly something useful can be done with them in many fields; but humanity would become stiff and paralyzed and withered if our antiquated ideas did not yield to something else, something containing inner life. We can no longer continue to work under the symbol of world-architecture, with rigid forms, traditional symbols, traditional dogmas. Something must bring mankind and the world together, and it must be a spontaneous, living thing.

At the beginning of our Christian era, for example, it was not yet true even of Christianity that its development was founded on something living. I have often called attention to the fact that those who first wrote about Christianity did so from the standpoint of the ancient Egypto-Chaldean science. Even the dates were not historically established. Festival dates, for instance, were determined astrologically, also the dates of the birth and death of Christ Jesus. The whole Apocalypse rests on astrology. The latter was alive in ancient times, but today it is dead, it is simply mathematical reckoning. It will only come to life again when things are comprehended with living insight: when, for instance, the birth-year of Christ Jesus is not figured out by the stars, but is seen with the vision that can be gained today in the way described. With that, things come to life. There is no life today in a calculation that determines whether some star is in opposition or in conjunction with another, and so on; but there is life when the nature of the opposition is experienced, when this is experienced livingly, inwardly — not simply externally through mathematics. In saying this, no particular objection is intended to external mathematics; it can even shed light on many things — darkness on many things, too! — but it has nothing to do with humanity's real, immediate necessity. Nor can these things be perpetuated in the old way; they would bring nothing but aridity and paralysis to the development of mankind. Of course, in judging such things people are influenced by the thought that although they themselves need not become seers — for just healthy commonsense can grasp spiritual science — yet even this kind of thinking can only be acquired with effort, while on the other hand they can easily adopt the ancient traditions and methods, and still more easily believe the church dogmas.

Now we come to a fact that we have treated repeatedly from various points of view: namely, the change that is taking place in the constitution of the human soul. It indicates on the one hand the streaming forth of the revelation of the Spirits of Personality; on the other hand, it indicates the liberation within the depths of men's souls of the impulse for freedom—a fact reflected now so urgently in the great demands mankind is raising. Today's social demands can only be understood if one is able to perceive this evolution in the constitution of the human soul. Call to mind a remark I made yesterday: that people are beginning — at least beginning, I said — to sense their true ego when they come in contact with other people. The man of old understood "Know thou thyself!" in the external world. For supersensible cognition it is different; but the man of ancient times, when speaking of his ego, had something real in the external world, the world in which the human being lives with his ordinary consciousness between birth and death. Modern man has only a reflection of his true ego; but something of his true ego shines into him when he comes in contact with other people. Another person who is connected with him karmically, or in any other way, gives him something real. To express it radically: it is characteristic of human beings of our present age to be inwardly hollow — and we should acknowledge it. If we practice life-retrospection honestly and faithfully, we find that the influences other people have had upon us are much more important than what we ourselves have supposedly acquired. Present-day man, of himself, gains extraordinarily little unless he obtains knowledge from supersensible sources. He need not be clairvoyant. A person is driven to daily social intercourse because actually he is only real in someone else, in his relation to another person. As we approach the sixth post-Atlantean epoch, of which embryonic impulses are now present in Russia, this fact will become so potent that a current axiom will be: No happiness is possible for one individual without the happiness of all — just as a single organ in man can only function if the whole functions. In the future this will be recognized as an axiom simply because it will be a fact of consciousness. We are still far from it — you may make your minds easy! — for a long time to come you will be able to consider your own personal happiness even though it may be built upon much human misery. But that is the direction in which humanity is developing. It is simply a fact, as when a man has a cold he must cough. He finds that unpleasant. Just so, a few thousand years from now, there will be unpleasant soul-conditions aroused when a man wishes as an individual to have any sort of happiness in the world without its being shared by others. This interdependence of mankind is inherent in human evolution, and is making itself felt today in the social demands. This is simply the direction in which the human soul is developing.

1924-07-28-GA237

Cosmic Intelligence raining down -> spiritual storm 1^st H in first third 15^th century

1924-08-01-GA237

descent Cosmic Intelligence into men

Remember that with the 9th century A.D. the great crisis was accomplished: the Cosmic Intelligence came down among earthly men.

1924-08-08-GA237

1924-08-21-GA240

Discussion

Change in worldview following the new faculty in 14-15th century

Mineral science

Here is described what is underlying the 'enlightenment' in the 14-15^th century. Not the Age of Enlightenment from our history books, but the change in worldview of how man thinks about his place in the cosmos. This worldview was based on the new consciousness with a focus on the mineral physical, hence the term mineral science used on this site for this worldview. Consider the following names to realize what a revolutionary period and step-change this was for humanity, just the dawn of it for that matter:

• Gutenberg (1397-1468), Da Vinci (1452-1519)
• Copernicus (1473-1543), Galilei (1564-1642), Kepler (1571-1630)
• Mercator (1512-1594), Vesalius (1514-1564), Lippershey (1570-1619) en Janssen (1585-1632), Descartes (1596-1650)

A new way of sharing information, a new model of the solar system, new ways to investigate the earth, the human body, the invention of telescope and microscope.

As mentioned this period of about 200 years was the early dawn, and foundation for what was to follow, the likes of Newton (1643-1727), Spinoza (1632-1677), Pascal (1632-1662), and others.

See more: Mineral science#Historical development

Spiritual science

For an overview of an impulse of the 16th century, see: Jacob Boehme#Note .5B1.5D - Historical perspective - waves and counterwaves

to be put in the broader context sketched on Sources of spiritual science#The new age .281400 to 1750.29

4. Future Oriphiel Age

Source: https://anthroposophy.eu/Future_Oriphiel_age

"Oriphiel is the one who must come to shake humankind, to jolt it through terrifying suffering, awakening it to its true vocation."

The current Michael age [*] is timed approx. between the years 1881 and 2235. It is followed by the Oriphiel age between approx. 2235 and 2589.

Initiates like Rudolf Steiner and Beinsa Douno made very explicit warnings to humanity regarding this 'dark age' period of the 23th to 25th century.

Note [*]: see Schema FMC00.239 below. For more on the archangel reigned time periods of approx. 354 years, as already described in the middle ages by d'Abano and Trithemius, see Spiritual hierarchies and their eigenperiods.

Aspects

• divine love will appear in the form of divine wrath, and will
  • stop the harmful effects of the materialistic arrangements (that are in our materialistic consciousness age) by destroying them
  • produce a separation into good and evil races
• the dark age is described with oa:
  • a war in which over 500 million people will die, and all communications, railroads, telegraphs, telephones will be disrupted for over a 100 years causing complete isolation before the relations between peoples to be restored .. there will be famine, chill, pestilence (Beinsa Douno)
  • terrible epidemics and strange nervous diseases; children could be born with a ruined nervous system (Rudolf Steiner)
• from the middle of the Oriphiel age (2400) onwards, Christ will work from the physical plane into men and will reveal himself on the physical plane in etheric form (re: 1913-03-05-GA152). See further: Christ in the future cultural ages and next epochs
• preparation of a cohort or host of human beings for those difficult times; through the study of spiritual science and initiation - see link with Christian Rosenkreutz, and Q00.006 - spiritual events at various points in life
• in terms of purification
  • the cleansing in the Oriphiel age can be regarded a forebode for the transition to the sixth cultural age
  • for the later major transition towards the sixth epoch - see also Earthquakes and emergence continent sixth epoch

Illustrations

Schema FMC00.239 shows the archangelic rulers of approx 354 periods for the current cultural age (plus and minus a cultural age). Rudolf Steiner uses this period to describe the nature of current Michael age and the future Oriphiel age.

Lecture coverage and references

Rudolf Steiner:

Something quite similar to a birth took place on the astral plane in 1879. What had slowly ripened since the 14^th century could now be carried into the world in a freer way, even though only for a few people. For Gabriel's rule was followed by that of the archangel Michael. He's the radiant sun that lets esoteric wisdom shine out into a small host of people. Materialism is included in the divine plan of creation and it has a purpose in the whole world. But the time has now come for the esoteric sun to shine brightly under Michael's radiant direction. For materialism's dark forces are increasing.

Michael's radiant rule will be followed by a dark, terrible age that starts about 2300.

Together with Michael, a dark God has begun his rule — the God Mammon. For occultism Mammon isn't just the God of money. He's the leader of all base, black forces. And his hosts attack men's bodies and souls to corrode and ruin them. There's a lot of talk about bacterial today, and they influence a lot of things. In future they'll increase in a terrifying way, and many human bodies will waste away from terrible diseases and plagues. The brand of sin will be stamped on men's bodies for all to see. Another archangel — Oriphiel — will rule then. He must come to shake men up to their true vocation through terrible tortures. So that this can happen in the right way a small group of people must be prepared today to spread esoteric life in the black age 400–600 years from now. [DL editor: 2307-2507]

One under Michael's rule who feels the urge to participate in spiritual life is called upon to serve archangel Michael and to learn under him so that someday he'll be mature enough to also serve the terrible Oriphiel in the right way. A sacrifice is demanded from those who want to dedicate themselves to a higher life. One should only want to receive spiritual life and experience an awakening if one later wants to use this to put oneself, one's will and everything one has in the service of mankind only.

In four to six centuries the small group of men who are being prepared today will serve the God Oriphiel so that mankind can be saved. If in that age men wanted to be spiritual leaders who hadn't been prepared to stand fast in all storms and to resist Mammon's hosts, they wouldn't be able to serve the God Oriphiel in the right way, and mankind would not be lifted out of their misery. So in order to do it we must work very earnestly now to fulfill our tasks then.

But when dark powers rage most terribly, the brightest light also shines. Oriphiel has ruled before. That was the time when Christ appeared on earth. Bad powers of degeneration and decadence were ruling everywhere on earth then. And the human race could only be shaken higher by terrible means. Oriphiel is called the archangel of wrath, who purifies mankind with a strong hand.

The story in the Bible where Christ swings a scourge to chase the money changers out of the temple has a deep meaning. Back when things were darkest on earth, Christ appeared as the savior of mankind. Oriphiel's reign ended 109 years after Christ's appearance, and he was replaced by Anael. Then came Zachariel, then Raphael; Samael ruled during the Renaissance and Gabriel from the 16^th century until 1879. Then Michael began to rule, and circa 2300 Oriphiel, the terrible archangel of wrath, will be ruling things. And as once before, spiritual light will shine into darkness brightly and radiantly. Christ will appear again on earth, although in a different form than before. We're called upon to receive him and to serve him.

1906-11-01-GA266

• Asuras remain behind on Old Saturn.
• Satanic fire spirits on Old Sun. The regent of fire spirits is Christ.
• Luciferic spirits fell behind on Old Moon.

and

• Lucifer was at work in the Lemurian epoch, could be included in earth evolution, and worked as a liberator by giving men independence and enthusiasm for wisdom.
• Satanic Gods of hindrances began their work in the Atlantean epoch.
• Asuras are starting to work in the Postatlantean epoch. They're the worst of the three and they mainly work into sexual life in the physical body. The many sexual aberrations today are to be ascribed to this strong influx.

All forces of hindrances try to hold onto currently existing things that are still imperfect, carry them out and intensify them.

Lucifers gave independence, egoity with egoism. Egoism, error and animal love are the first expressions of egoity, wisdom and highest spiritual love. We must bring about the respective transformations.

The separation of the sexes took place in the third root race, it'll be overcome in the sixth root race; this must be prepared for in the sixth sub-race. Man's productive forces are becoming transformed. The productive force as such is the most sacred thing that we have, because it's directly divine. The more divine what we pull into the dirt is, the greater the sin. Later on the heart and larynx will be the productive organs in us.

Just as the Word became flesh in Christ Jesus, so the flesh must become word when Christendom becomes perfected. That's the mystery of the Holy Grail, the holy love lance, the fertilizing sunlight that'll unite with Eva again. Rosicrucians' occult brotherhood is the seminary in which a human material must be educated for the coming age.

A particularly bright light must always arise in especially dark times. Christ was born in the Oriphiel age. When Oriphiel rules again the spiritual light that was brought by Christian Rosenkreutz and is now being spread must have generated a host of clairvoyant men who are pioneers working consciously towards a goal. This will produce a separation into good and evil races.

The fifth root race will perish through evil. Good and evil are still relatively undifferentiated and it's hard to see who's evil or good behind the flesh. When the forces of the masters and of the men who join them with their whole strength and will, and when the forces of the Gods of hindrances, Mammon, Satan, Asuras and their human followers intervene ever more mightily into human life and earth evolution, then good will develop into a divine good, and evil into a terrible Antichrist. Then every one of us needs world helpers and all the strength that he can only gain through the overcoming of suffering and evil. It's the aim of Theosophy and Rosicrucianism to summon men to this battle via such knowledge and to give them peace in the battle.

1907-12-05-GA266

The Age of Michael began in 1879. After that comes the Age of Oriphiel, when great conflicts will rage among human beings. Therefore a tiny handful of human beings is now being prepared to keep the torch of spiritual knowledge alight in that sombre epoch

Anyone who feels an urge to participate in spiritual life under Michael's guidance is called to serve Michael and learn from him. This is the preparation for service under Oriphiel's terrifying rule. Sacrifice will be required of those who want to consecrate themselves to the spiritual life. The willingness to put oneself at the service of humanity is the necessary prerequisite from anyone who seeks to receive the spiritual life.

In four to six hundred years the handful of human beings who are now preparing themselves will be put in the service of Oriphiel, so that humanity can be saved. If the people who assume the leadership then have not prepared for it by holding their own against the troops of Mammon, they will not be able to play the role assigned them under Oriphiel. Then humanity will not be raised from its misery. Therefore, we must set to work now with the utmost seriousness.

But it is when the darkest forces are at their most violent that the brightest light also shines. Oriphiel has assumed the leadership in the past. The last time was when Christ appeared upon the earth, a period when the worst rottenness and decadence reigned all over the earth. It took terrible sufferings then for the human race to be jolted forward. Oriphiel has been called the Archangel of Anger, who purifies humanity with a strong hand.

The story of Christ's cracking his whip at the money-changers in the Temple has deep meaning in it. At this darkest of times in human history, Christ appeared to save humanity.

1908-08-09-GA266

And it's very necessary that we be instructed in this way. For since 1879 we've entered a new stage of human evolution. Gabriel worked on the development of a new organ in man's brain by regulating human births (1525–1879). A 16^th century man would not have understood our present theosophy.

It's up to archangel Michael to stimulate men to use their newly acquired organ, that degenerates if a man doesn't use it.

Such a man comes under the influence of Michael's opponent, Mammon or Beelzebub. This is the God of hindrances, who wants to prevent men from making progress. The bacteria that arise under his influence can give rise to terrible epidemics and strange nervous diseases; children could be born with a ruined nervous system. After Michael's reign comes Oriphiel who gives the divine wrath that should only be used by highly developed people. Jesus drives the merchants out of the temple.

1911-02-12-GA266

Since November, 1879, a few men have become mature enough to take in theosophical teachings, but it's only a small host, whereas other moderns are till unable to acquire the teachings, consider them to be fantastic ideas and dreams or even get angry about them.When people who prove to be receptive for theosophical teachings let the latter work upon them, their etheric body begins to oscillate slightly. .. For we only have another 400 years or so to give these teachings in a theosophical form to all men. So that everyone will have an opportunity those who resisted them now will be born again in the next four centuries. A suitable number of men must be present then who represent theosophy in the right way.

or a longer extract

Since November, 1879, a few men have become mature enough to take in theosophical teachings, but it's only a small host, whereas other moderns are till unable to acquire the teachings, consider them to be fantastic ideas and dreams or even get angry about them. When people who prove to be receptive for theosophical teachings let the latter work upon them, their etheric body begins to oscillate slightly. Whereas someone who loses himself in external things gets an expanded and rarified etheric body. When such a person hears some spiritual teachings it's as if the wind were blowing through a cleft in the etheric body, which announced itself in him as fear, but appears outwardly as doubt. Such a man only notices the doubts, but they're the expression of fear and anxiety that have moved into his rarified etheric body as into a vacuum and have become noticeable there as doubt. We can't help a man who behaves in a rejective manner. It's better not to bother him with theosophy. But wherever an opportunity rises we should quietly let theosophical ideas flow in according to the principle "steady dripping hollows the tone."

For we only have another 400 years or so to give these teachings in a theosophical form to all men. So that everyone will have an opportunity those who resisted them now will be born again in the next four centuries. A suitable number of men must be present then who represent theosophy in the right way.

Men could only tread the inner path for a long time before the event of Golgotha. Men who went out into the macrocosm in ancient India would have become lost in it as in darkness and emptiness, because their inner members had a different relationship to each other then. This kind of union with God existed until medieval times, because man changes but slowly. Mystics like Eckhart, Tauler and Molinos teach us the inner path an describe it exactly. Miguel de Molinos speaks of five stages of immersion He says that we must turn away from all creatures that corresponds to the forces of our etheric body, from our talents that correspond to the astral body, and from our ego that coincides with our fourth part and that we must merge with God.

But it gradually became necessary for men to tread the inner and outer paths simultaneously, and that's why the Rosicrucian, esoteric schools that taught both ways rose in the 11th and 12th centuries.

1924-08-08-GA237 - see more on Q00.006 - spiritual events at various points in life

.. that which goes on externally, which the astronomers describe, is after all only the outer side. You know that approximately every 11 years we have a period of Sun-spots, when in the shining of the Sun upon the earth certain places are darkened, covered with spots or blotches. This was not always so. In very ancient times the Sun shone down as a uniform disc of light. There were no Sun-spots. Moreover, after some thousands of years the Sun will have very many more spots than it has today. The Sun is growing ever more spotted. This again is the outer manifestation of the fact that the Michael Power, the Cosmic Power of Intelligence is still decreasing. In the increase of the Sun-spots in the course of Cosmic Evolution is revealed the Sun's decay; the Sun within the cosmos grows increasingly dim and old. And at the appearance of a sufficiently large number of Sun-spots, the other Planetary Intelligences recognised that they would now no longer be ruled by the Sun. They resolved no longer to allow the earth to be dependent on the Sun, but to make it dependent henceforth on the entire cosmos directly. This took place through the planetary Counsels of the Archangels. Notably under the leadership of Oriphiel, this emancipation of the Planetary Intelligences from the Sun-Intelligence took place. It was a complete separation of Cosmic Powers that had hitherto belonged together. The Sun-Intelligence of Michael and the Planetary Intelligences gradually came into cosmic opposition one with another.

1924-09-19-GA346

Pouring out of the vials of divine wrath

Now the fact is that this is one stream in the universe, and it is important to us as human beings, but it is only one stream. If we look at the age of materialism since the 15th, 16th, 17th centuries, at the climax of materialism during the 40's of the 19th century and at the development of materialism afterwards with everything that people think and do and with all the terribly destructive forces that have been raging in humanity since the middle of the 19th century, although many people haven't even really noticed them yet, — we can well imagine that divine love which unfolds in light weaves above all of this.

However, if you take some very clean water, some absolutely crystal clear water and dip a dirty sponge in it and squeeze it, and let the water run out again, you will see that it is cloudy and dirty. You have let the dirty sponge suck up the crystal clear water and you have squeezed it out again and it has become dirty water. The crystal clear, pure water can't help it that it flows out as dirty water when one squeezes the sponge. And the divine love that is springing up in pure light can't help it that it is being absorbed by the age of materialism, by a sponge that is permeated by impurities and that it thereby becomes something quite different when it reemerges. So when crystal clear water is absorbed by a dirty sponge it becomes cloudy, undrinkable water, and by analogy we can imagine that when divine love that appears in light is sucked up by all the evil ingredients that are latently or openly raging in humanity, it becomes divine wrath.

The secret of the next age is that divine love will appear in the form of divine wrath through what happens in humanity. It will appear in the form of the divine wrath that will stop the harmful effects of the materialistic arrangements that are arising in our materialistic, consciousness age by destroying them. Proceeding from what appears to the Apocalypticer in pictures, he speaks of the pouring out of the vials of wrath in the next age. That is something that was expressed in the mysteries in a sentence that had a terribly shocking effect upon the neophytes: Divine love appears in the form of divine wrath in the sphere of human illusions.

…

Looked at from a real and true point of view, the divine wrath that is poured out over men is still a manifestation of divine love, and that is why the sentence was formulated in the way that I gave it.

If divine love would become weak and if it would seemingly take pity on men in this age, it would be no real compassion, for it would ignore the necessary consequences of human thoughts and actions. That would be very loveless, for then humanity would become corrupt. The deleterious things that men did and that would have an unspeakably harmful effect on further human evolution can only be eliminated by the outpouring of divine wrath, which is a metamorphosis of divine love. This sentence in the manuscripts is so old that it is often stated in its oriental form in Europe, so that one says: In the region of maya divine love becomes manifest as divine wrath. Here again one can see how completely the Apocalypse is taken from the really active ingredients in the world. The deeper one goes into it the more one realizes that one can really rely on this Apocalypse; although that is a rather trivial way of putting it. It is basically something that tells priests what is happening in the course of human and world evolution. It was originally given to priests as the really esoteric part of Christianity in addition to the other part that was exoteric.

1933-01-15-BD, here follows a maybe not so good translation of Beinsa Douno in 1933

Christ came to Earth on a great mission. He wanted to show the European peoples of that day, what to do and how to behave. Everything the Christ preached during his time, referred to the current times. He said to all peoples: you will come to a great crisis. If you want to escape this crisis, the only solution is in what I am preaching. If you apply My doctrine, you will be redeemed from a great catastrophe, but if you fail to follow My doctrine, the catastrophe is unavoidable.

Now you're in trouble for the sole reason that you have left everything to Got and you're just saying: "When Christ comes, He'll fix everything". Christ came, but what did he fix? The way people perceive fixing things, He fixed nothing. He came and the Roman Empire crucified him. Then Christ came again in 1914, but 6 million people died. He said to them: "Do not fight!", But they did not listen to Him. [editor: WW1]. He will come again during the next war. People get ready and if there's a new war, about 50 million people will die. [WW2]. And if, even then does not force some sense into them, there will be another war, even more fierce, in which 550 million people will die. [WW3 to come]. This is not what I want, but I'm just saying that human thoughts, feelings and behavior, give rise to that war, in which at least 50 million people will die. [WW2]. And if that does not make them cleverer, a more vicious war will then start. [WW3].

After that there will be no wars, because it will result in such a wonder that people has never expected. All the communications, railroads, telegraphs, telephones will be disrupted and it will take at least 100 years, for the relations between peoples to be restored. Until then they will be completely isolated. This is not my prophecy, but of the prophets around the world – those in England, America, Germany, China, Japan, everywhere they prophesy what will happen.

If peoples do not humble themselves, there will be famine, chill, great earthquakes, pestilence and only after that they will humble themselves, i.e. such fearsome things will happen, that will make them humble themselves. But because of the chosen ones, the suffering will be discontinued. Those, who are chosen, support life.

Beinsa Douno also speaks of the great earthquake

5. Sixth Cultural Age

Source: https://anthroposophy.eu/Sixth_cultural_age

The next cultural age after the current fifth anglo-german (timed approx from 1413 to 3570) is called the sixth 'russian' or 'slavic' cultural age, timed approx. to the period between the years 3570 and 5070. It is the most important age of the Current Postatlantean epoch, where humanity will blossom to the development of this epoch, and a seed cohort of souls of this sixth cultural age will be the basis for the next great Sixth epoch(below).

Aspects

Evolutionary

• It is the most important cultural age of the current epoch, in which part of humanity will reach the maturity required for the 'epoch sample' that will be the seed material for the next great Sixth epoch (see schema FMC00.169A and FMC00.169, and for a broader context also FMC00.233 and FMC00.168).
• It will be preceded by mighty cataclysms and physical catastrophes.
• In the Book of Revelation, this cultural age maps to the church of Philadelphia ref. 3,7-13

Man

• The developmental target for humanity in this evolutionary period will be to have developed the Spirit-Self, and a special relationship with the lower spirit world, see eg Schema FMC00.047.
• The soul will only be able to develop in the physical body upto the age of 21 (at the start) and 14 years (at the end) of this cultural age (Schema FMC00.232).
• the Kundalini fire will acquire great influence and act as a force on what lives in the human heart (1904-10-28-GA092)
• the level of clairvoyance will consist of revelation in images
  • the revelations of Maid of Orleans, in the form of images, are given as an example for the sixth cultural age (1910-12-28-GA126)

Location

• Geographically the center of cultural development will lie in western asia and the slav(on)ic or russian culture. See FMC00.211 and the according lectures for background on how this center moves across earth's geography along with the developmental stage of humanity.
• the Grail atmosphere and spirit is linked to the russian geography and folk soul (characteristics such as piety) - "To the Russian people has been assigned the mission to develop the essential reality of the Grail as a religious system up to the time of the sixth Postatlantean age, so that it may then become a cultural ferment for the whole world." (1918-11-03-GA185)

Culture, science, and spirituality

• this sixth cultural age which will be radically different and as spiritual as our current fifth has been material.
• the individuality known as Jeshu ben Pandira will rise from Bodhisattva to a Buddha and be the teacher of Christianity in a totally new way as the Earth "will be bathed in a moral-ether atmosphere"(1911-10-01-GA130 and 1911-12-03-GA130 below, for more see 1911-11-04-GA123 on the Bodhisattva page)
  • about some 3000 years after 1911 would mean around 4900
• this age will know the true Christianity (not the one of the current or past cultural ages), centered around the sacred Golden Triangle (or Man's higher triad, consisting of Spirit-Man, Spirit-Self or atma, buddhi and manas) and the knowledge of reincarnation and karma, united with Christianity (again). A symbol will no longer be the crucified Son of God, but the cross encircled by roses (re Symbol of rose cross).
• Mechanical science will become spiritually creative.

Lecture coverage and references

1904-10-28-GA092

(SWCC)

At the beginning of the sixth epoch an influence will have developed, not in higher spheres, but in the sphere of the present-day conscious mind; in the fifth epoch this influence is still in its infancy, but it is nevertheless already developing. It is something which emanates from the musical element. For the fifth epoch music will be not merely art, but the means of expression for quite other things than the purely artistic. Here is something that points to the influence of a specific principle on the physical plane. The most significant impulse by those directly initiated in the fifth epoch will, to begin with, be given solely in the sphere of music. What has to flow in is not astral, but it is something of great significance in the sphere of the mental life of the fifth epoch. It is something that the human intelligence will come to recognise as important, something which has been called the Kundalini fire. It is a force which today still slumbers in man, but which will gradually gain more and more importance. Today it already has a great importance upon what we perceive through the sense of hearing. During the further development in the sixth cultural age of the fifth epoch the Kundalini fire will acquire great influence on what lives in the human heart. The human heart will really have this fire. At first this seems to be mere symbolism but man will then really be permeated by a force which will live in his heart, so that during the sixth epoch he will no longer make a distinction between his own well-being and the well-being of the whole. So deeply will man be permeated by the Kundalini fire! He will follow the principle of love as his own innermost nature.

Note: the expression 'Kundalini fire' is used by Rudolf Steiner in the first edition of his book Knowledge of the Higher Worlds. In later editions he replaced the term by another term which is translated in the 1937 English edition as "the spiritual perceptive force in the organ of the heart".

1904-11-04-GA093

(for more expanded quote and additional background, see topic of the Molten Sea)

To begin with, Christianity is bound up with the purely materialistic culture of the fourth and fifth ages, and the true Christianity of the future, which possesses the secret of the Molten Sea and the Golden Triangle, only exists secretly. This Christianity has another symbol — no longer that of the crucified Son of God, but the Cross encircled by roses.

This will become the symbol of the new Christianity of the sixth Postatlantean cultural age. Out of the Mystery of the Brotherhood of the Rose Cross will arise the Christianity of the sixth cultural age, which will recognise the significance of the Molten Sea and the Golden Triangle.

...

The Molten Sea is what is created when the appropriate amounts of water and molten metal are cast. The three apprentices do it wrongly, and the casting is destroyed, but when the mysteries of fire are revealed to Hiram by Tubal-Cain, he is thereby enabled to unite water and fire in the proper way. This brings the Molten Sea into being. This is what the secret of the Rosicrucians is. It is brought about when the water of calm wisdom is united with the fire of the astral world, with the fire of passion and desire.

A union must be brought about which is 'of bronze', that is to say, is lasting and durable. It must endure into the next epoch, when the secret of the sacred Golden Triangle is added to it; the secret of Atma, Buddhi and Manas. This Triangle, with all which it entails, will form the content of the renewed Christianity of the sixth cultural age. That is being prepared by the Rosicrucians and then

what is symbolised by the Molten Sea will be united with a knowledge of reincarnation and karma. That is the new occult teaching which will be united again with Christianity. The higher self of man, composed of Atma, Buddhi and Manas, will become an open secret when the man of the sixth epoch has become ripe enough to receive it.

1906-06-14-GA094

Our fifth cultural age will be followed by another sixth age that will see the development of brotherhood among men, clairvoyance and creative power.

What will Christianity be in the sixth cultural age? To the priest in the Mysteries before Christ, there was harmony between science and faith. Science and faith were one and the same. When he looked up to the heavens, the priest knew that the soul was a drop of water from the celestial ocean, led down to Earth by the great streams of life flowing through space. Now that the attention of men is wholly directed to the physical world, faith has need of a refuge, of religion. Hence the separation between science and faith. Faith in the Person of Christ, of the God-Man on Earth has temporarily replaced Occult Science and the Mysteries of antiquity. But in the sixth age, these two streams will again unite.

Mechanical science will become spiritually creative. This will be Gnosis-spiritual consciousness.

This sixth cultural age which will be radically different from our own, will be preceded by mighty cataclysms. It will be as spiritual as ours has been material. But the transformation can only be brought about by physical catastrophes.

1910-GA013 (OES)

It is already possible now to begin to discover the thread that will bind the two sides of the human breast - material culture and life in the spiritual world - together again.

• On the one hand, this requires that we understand the results of spiritual perception;
• on the other, that we recognize the manifestations of the spirit in our observations of and experiences in the world of the senses.

The sixth cultural epoch will fully develop the harmony between these two things.

1911-10-01-GA130

Then will come the time when the earth passes into conditions which, as in so much else, are only described in the great definitions of Oriental occultism, Oriental mysticism. The moral atmosphere will by then have gathered considerable strength. For many thousands of years Oriental mysticism has spoken of this moment in time, and since the coming of Gautama Buddha it has spoken especially strongly about that future condition when the Earth will be bathed in a 'moral-ether-atmosphere'. Ever since the time of the ancient Rishis it was the great hope of Oriental mysticism that this moral impulse would come to the Earth from Vishva-Karman or, as Zarathustra proclaimed, from Ahura Mazdao. Oriental mysticism thus foresaw that this moral impulse, this moral atmosphere, would come to the Earth from the being we call the Christ. It was upon Him, upon Christ, that the hopes of Oriental mysticism were set.

Oriental mystics were able to picture the consequences of that event but not the actual form it would take. They could picture that within a period of 5,000 years after the great Buddha achieved Enlightenment, pure Akashic forms, bathed in fire, lit by the sun, would appear in the wake of one Who could not be recognized through Oriental mysticism. A wonderful picture in very truth: that something would come to make it possible for the Sons of Fire and of Light to move about the moral atmosphere of the earth, not in physically embodied form but as pure Akashic forms within the earth's moral atmosphere. Five thousand years after Gautama Buddha's Enlightenment, so it was said, the teacher will also be there to make known to human beings what these wonderful forms are, these pure forms of Fire and Light. This teacher — the Maitreya Buddha — will appear 3000 years after our time and will be able to teach people about the Christ impulse.

Oriental mysticism thus unites with the Christian knowledge of the West to form a beautiful unity. It will also be disclosed that he who will appear 3000 years after our time as the Maitreya Buddha will have incarnated again and again on the Earth as a Bodhisattva, as the successor of Gautama Buddha. One of his incarnations was that of Jeshu ben Pandira, who lived a hundred years before the beginning of our era. The being who incarnated in Jeshu ben Pandira is the same one who will one day become the Maitreya Buddha and who from century to century returns ever and again in a body of flesh, not yet as Buddha himself but as Bodhisattva. Even in our age there proceeds from him who later will be the Maitreya Buddha the most significant teachings concerning the Christ being and the Sons of Fire — the Agnishvattas — of Indian mysticism.

1911-12-03-GA130

Our age will be followed by one in which the need for love will cast its light. Love in the sixth cultural age will show itself in a very different form - different even from that which can be called Christian love. Slowly we draw nearer to that age; and by making those in the Anthroposophical Movement familiar with the mysteries of the cosmos, with the nature of the various individualities both on the physical plane and on the higher planes, we try to kindle love for everything in existence. This is not done so much by talking of love, as by feeling that what is able to kindle love in the soul is prepared for the sixth age by Anthroposophy. Through Anthroposophy the forces of love are specially aroused in the whole human soul, and that is prepared which a man needs for gradually acquiring a true understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha. For it is indeed true that the Mystery of Golgotha came to pass; and the Gospels have evoked something which yesterday was likened to how children learn to speak. But the deepest lesson - the mission of earthly love in its connection with the Mystery of Golgotha - has not yet been grasped. Full understanding of this will be possible only in the sixth Postatlantean cultural age, when people grow to realise more and more that the foundations for it are actually within them, and out of their innermost being - in other words, out of love - do what should be done. Then the guidance of the Commandments will have been outlived and the stage reached that is described in Goethe's words: "Duty — when one loves the commands one gives to oneself."

When forces wake in our souls which impel us to do what we should through love alone, we then discover in us something that must gradually become widespread in the sixth cultural age.

Then in a man's nature quite special forces of the etheric body will make themselves known.

To understand what it is that must come about increasingly in this way, we have to consider it from two sides.

• One side has certainly not come yet and is only dreamt of by the most advanced in spirit; it is a well-defined relation between custom, morals, ethics and the understanding, intellectuality. Today a man may be to a certain extent a rascal, yet at the same time intelligent and clever. He may even use his very cleverness to further his knavery. At present it is not required of people to combine their intelligence with an equal degree of morality. To all that we have been anticipating for the future this must be added - that as we advance, it will no longer be possible for these two qualities of the human soul to be kept apart, or to exist in unequal measure. A man who, according to the reckoning-up of his previous incarnation, has become particularly intelligent without being moral, will in his new incarnation possess only a stunted intelligence. Thus, to have equal amounts of intelligence and morality in future incarnations he will be obliged, as a consequence of universal cosmic law, to enter his new incarnation with an intelligence that is crippled, so that immorality and stupidity coincide. For immorality has a crippling effect upon intelligence. In other words, we are approaching the age when morality and what has now been described for the sixth Postatlantean age as the shining into the I-soul of the love-forces of the etheric body, point essentially to forces having to do with harmonising those of intelligence and morality. That is the one side to be considered.
• The other side is that it is solely through harmony of this kind, between morality, custom, and intelligence, that the whole depth of the Mystery of Golgotha is to be grasped.
  • This will come about only through the individuality who before Christ-Jesus came to earth prepared men for that Mystery, developing in his successive incarnations ever greater powers as teacher of the greatest of all earthly events. This individuality, whom in his rank as Bodhisatva we call the successor of Gautama Buddha, was incarnated in the personality living about a hundred years before Christ under the name of Jeshu ben Pandira. Among his many students was one who had at that time already, in a certain sense, written down a prophetic version of the Matthew Gospel, and this, after the Mystery of Golgotha had been enacted, needed only to be given a new form.
  • There have been, and will continue to be, frequent incorporations of the individuality who appeared as Jeshu ben Pandira, until he rises from the rank of Bodhisatva to that of Buddha. According to our reckoning of time this will be in about 3,000 years, when a sufficient number of people will possess the above-mentioned faculties, and when, in the course of a remarkable incarnation of the individual who was once Jeshu ben Pandira, this great teacher of mankind will have become able to act as interpreter of the Mystery of Golgotha in a very different way from what is possible today. It is true that even today a seer into the supersensible worlds can gain some idea of what is to happen then; but the ordinary earthly organisation of man cannot yet provide a physical body capable of doing what that teacher will be able to do approximately 3,000 years hence. There is, as yet, no human language through which verbal teaching could exert the magical effects that will spring from the words of that great teacher of humanity. His words will flow directly to men's hearts, into their souls, like a healing medicine; nothing in those words will be merely theoretical. At the same time the teaching will contain - to an extent far greater than it is possible to conceive today - a magical moral force carrying to hearts and souls a full conviction of the eternal, deeply significant brotherhood of intellect and morality.
  • This great teacher, who will be able to give to men ripe for it the profoundest instruction concerning the nature of the Mystery of Golgotha, will fulfil what Oriental prophets have always said — that the true successor of Buddha would be, for all mankind, the greatest teacher of the good. For that reason he has been called in oriental tradition the Maitreya Buddha. His task will be to enlighten human beings concerning the Mystery of Golgotha, and for this he will draw ideas and words of the deepest significance from the very language he will use. No human language today can evoke any conception of it. His words will imprint into men's souls directly, magically, the nature of the Mystery of Golgotha. Hence in this connection also we are approaching what we may call the future moral age of man; in a certain sense we could designate it as a coming Golden Age.

Even today, however, speaking from the ground of Anthroposophy, we point in full consciousness to what is destined to come about — how the Christ will gradually reveal Himself to ever-higher powers in human beings, and how the teachers, who up to now have taught only individual peoples and individual men, will become the interpreters of the great Christ-event for all who are willing to listen. And we can point out how, through the dawning of the age of love, conditions for the age of morality are prepared.

1915-02-13-GA174B

is an important lecture to read in full, because it puts in a broad context the quote below (often dragged out of context, by only a few phrases translated - see extracts below), and the impulse between the fifth and sixth cultural age (with reference to the significance of the 30 years war between 1914-44).

The task of the future sixth cultural age will be to grasp the spirit again in the environment of the physical, more in the elemental world. The transition to this cannot take place without a violent struggle between white and coloured mankind in many regions, which will be foreshadowed in earlier events. We stand here before something colossal.

and again

These things cannot happen in the world without the most violent struggle.

White mankind is still on the path of absorbing spirit more deeply into its essence. Yellow mankind is on the path of preserving the period when the spirit was kept away from the body, when the spirit could only be sought outside of the physical human being.

But the result will have to be that [mankind's next step upwards] cannot happen differently than as a violent fight between white mankind and colored mankind in the most varied areas. And world history will consist of the events that will lead to these battles between white and colored mankind until the great fight between white and colored mankind has been brought about. Future events are frequently reflected in previous events. You see, we stand before something so colossal that, if we regard it through the diverse perceptions of spiritual science, we will in the future recognize it as a necessary occurrence.

or, translated direct from the German:

In the sixth cultural epoch of the post-Atlantean period, the task will be to recognize the spirit above all as something more floating in the environment, so to speak, than directly in itself, to recognize the spirit more in the elementary world, because this sixth cultural epoch has the task of preparing the knowledge of the spirit in the physical environment. This cannot be easily achieved without saving up old atavistic forces that recognize the spirit in its purely elementary life.

But without the fiercest fights, these things in the world do not go off.

White humanity is still on the way to taking the spirit deeper and deeper into its own being. Yellow humanity is on the way to preserving those ages in which the spirit is kept far from the body, in which the spirit is sought outside the human-physical organization, only there. But this must lead to the fact that the transition from the fifth cultural epoch to the sixth cultural epoch cannot take place otherwise than as a fierce struggle of white humanity with colored humanity in the most diverse fields. And what precedes these struggles, which will take place between white and colored humanity, will occupy world history until the great struggles between white and colored humanity are fought. Future events are often reflected in previous events. For when we look at what we have acquired through the most diverse considerations in the spiritual scientific sense, we are faced with something colossal, which we can see as necessary in the future.

Since we have on the one hand, a part of humanity with the mission of introducing the Spirit into physical life in such a way that the Spirit permeates every single thing in physical life. And on the other hand, we have a part of humanity with the need, so to speak, to take over the descending evolution now. This cannot happen otherwise than when that which really professes to penetrate the physical with the spiritual produces cultural impulses, produces living impulses which are permanent for the Earth, which cannot disappear from the Earth again.

1915-06-15-GA159

Within the womb, as it were, of the ancient Indian epoch, that of ancient Persia was prepared; within the ancient Persian culture, that of the Egypto-Chaldean epoch was prepared, and so on. Our fifth post-Atlantean epoch must prepare the coming sixth epoch of culture.

Our task in spiritual science is not only to acquire spiritual treasure for ourselves, for the eternal life of the soul, but to prepare what will constitute the content, the specific external work of the sixth epoch of culture. Thus it has been in each of the post-Atlantean epochs. The centers of the mysteries were the places in which the form of external life belonging to the next epoch of culture was prepared. The mysteries were associations of human beings among whom other things were cultivated than those cultivated in the outer world. The ancient Indian epoch was concerned with the cultivation of the human etheric body, the ancient Persian epoch with the cultivation of the astral body, the Egypto-Chaldean with that of the sentient soul, the Greco-Latin with that of the intellectual or mind soul. Our own epoch, throughout its duration, will develop and unfold the consciousness or spiritual soul. But what will give to external culture in the sixth epoch its content and character, must be prepared in advance. Many characteristics of the sixth epoch of culture will be entirely different from those of our age. Three characteristic traits can be mentioned, of which we must realize that they should be carried in our hearts for the sixth epoch of culture and that it is our task to prepare them for this sixth epoch.

Three key characteristics

• There is lacking in human society nowadays a quality that, in the sixth epoch, will be a characteristic of those men who reach the goal of that epoch, and have not fallen short of it. It is a quality that will not, of course, be found among those who in the sixth epoch have still remained at the stage of savages or barbarians. One of the most significant characteristics of men living on the earth at the peak of culture in the sixth epoch, will be a certain moral quality. Little of this quality is perceptible in modern humanity. A man today must be delicately organized for his soul to feel pain when he sees other human beings in the world in less happy circumstances than his own. It is true that more delicately organized natures feel pain at the suffering that is so widespread in the world, but this can only be said of the people who are particularly sensitive. In the sixth epoch, the most highly cultured will not only feel pain such as is caused today by the sight of poverty, suffering and misery in the world, but such individuals will experience the suffering of another human being as their own suffering. If they see a hungry man they will feel the hunger right down into the physical, so acutely indeed that the hunger of the other man will be unendurable to them. The moral characteristic indicated here is that, unlike conditions in the fifth epoch, in the sixth epoch the well-being of the individual will depend entirely upon the well-being of the whole. Just as nowadays the well-being of a single human limb depends upon the health of the whole body, and when the whole body is not healthy the single limb is not up to doing its work, so in the sixth epoch a common consciousness will lay hold of the then civilized humanity and in a far higher degree than a limb feels the health of the whole body, the individual will feel the suffering, the need, the poverty or the wealth of the whole. This is the first preeminently moral trait that will characterize the cultured humanity of the sixth epoch.

• A second fundamental characteristic will be that everything we call the fruits of belief today will depend to a far, far higher degree than is the case today, upon the single individuality. Spiritual science expresses this by saying that in every sphere of religion in the sixth epoch, complete freedom of thought and a longing for it will so lay hold of men that what a man likes to believe, what religious convictions he holds, will rest wholly within the power of his own individuality. Collective beliefs that exist in so many forms today among the various communities will no longer influence those who constitute the civilized portion of humanity in the sixth epoch of culture. Everyone will feel that complete freedom of thought in the domain of religion is a fundamental right of the human being.

• The third characteristic will be that men in the sixth epoch will only be considered to have real knowledge when they recognize the spiritual, when they know that the spiritual pervades the world and that human souls must unite with the spiritual. What is known as science today with its materialistic trend will certainly not be honored by the name of science in the sixth post-Atlantean epoch. It will be regarded as antiquated superstition, able to pass muster only among those who have remained behind at the stage of the superseded fifth post-Atlantean epoch. Today we regard it as superstition when, let us say, a savage holds the view that no limb ought to be separated from his body at death because this would make it impossible for him to enter the spiritual world as a whole man. Such a man still connects the idea of immortality with pure materialism, with the belief that an impress of his whole form must pass into the spiritual world. He thinks materialistically but believes in immortality. We, today, knowing from spiritual science that the spiritual has to be separated from the body and that only the spiritual passes into the super-sensible world, regard such materialistic beliefs in immortality as superstition. Similarly, in the sixth epoch all materialistic beliefs including science, too, will be regarded as antiquated superstition. Men as a matter of course will accept as science only such forms of knowledge as are based upon the spiritual, upon pneumatology.

The whole purpose of spiritual science is to prepare in this sense for the sixth epoch of culture. We try to cultivate spiritual science in order to overcome materialism, to prepare the kind of science that must exist in that epoch. We found communities of human beings within which there must be no dogmatic beliefs or any tendency to accept teaching simply because it emanates from one person or another. We found communities of human beings in which everything, without exception, must be built upon the soul's free assent to the teachings. Herein we prepare what spiritual science calls freedom of thought. By coming together in friendly associations for the purpose of cultivating spiritual science, we prepare the culture, the civilization of the sixth post-Atlantean epoch.

...

In the sixth cultural age the spirit self must be developed within the souls of men, just as now the consciousness soul is being developed. The nature of spirit self is that it must pre-suppose the existence in human souls of the three characteristics of which I have spoken:

• social life in which brotherliness prevails,
• freedom of thought, and
• pneumatology.

These three characteristics are essential in a community of human beings within which the spirit self is to develop as the consciousness soul develops in the souls of the fifth epoch.

[Link with groups and associations working on spiritual science is made in this whole lecture, read in full]

We may therefore picture to ourselves that by uniting in brotherliness in working groups, something hovers invisibly over our work, something that is like the child of the forces of the spirit self - the spirit self that is nurtured by the beings of the higher hierarchies in order that it may stream down into our souls when they are again on earth in the sixth cultural age. In our groups we perform work that streams upward to those forces that are being prepared for the spirit self.

1916-03-18-GA174b

talks about the tasks for the sixt cultural age, and the russian human being

1918-11-03-GA185

On account of its ethnographical and ethnic situation, Central Europe is not disposed to accept the Christ impulse as something self-evident; it had to be imposed artificially. And so we have an intervention of the current of the Grail radiating in the direction of Europe — a Grail current that is not limited therefore to the folk element.

...

And paradoxical as it may seem today the Grail atmosphere is found today in Russia. And the future role that the Russian soul will play in the sixth Postatlantean epoch depends upon this unconquerable spirit of the Grail in the Russian people.

So much for the one side. Let us now consider the other side. Here we have those who regard the Christ impulse neither as an inspiration, as in the East, nor as a living force transmitted by tradition and the Scriptures, but as something rational. It is in this form that it spread within the Lodges and their ramifications. (In the diagram I indicate this by the colour green.) Later it became politicized in the West and is the last offshoot of the Arthurian current. And just as the Christ impulse in the Russian people is continued in the Grail quest and irradiates all men of good will in the West, so the other current penetrates into all members of the People of the Church and takes on the particular colouring of Jesuitism. That the Jesuits are the sworn enemy of that which emanates from the Lodges is not important: anyone and anything can be the declared enemy of the outlook of the Lodges. It is a historical fact that the Jesuits have not only infiltrated the Lodges, that high-ranking Jesuits are in contact with the high dignitaries of the Lodges, but that both, though active in different peoples, have a common root, though the one gave birth to the Papacy, the other to freedom, rationalism, to the Aufklärung. I have now given you a kind of picture of what may be called the working of the evolution of the Consciousness Soul. I described to you earlier the three stages of evolution proceeding from the East to the West which are based on the ethnic element. That they assumed the form of Aufklärung in the West, as a consequence of interaction, is due to the fact that every individual is involved in the evolution of the Consciousness Soul.

...

Consider from this point of view the evolution of mankind in the course of the fifth Postatlantean epoch. First, the people of the Christ in the East with its fundamental impulse: Christ is spirit. It is in the nature of this people to give to the world through Russianism, as if with elemental force and from historical necessity, that for which the West of Europe could only have prepared the ground.

To the Russian people as such has been assigned the mission to develop the essential reality of the Grail as a religious system up to the time of the sixth Postatlantean age, so that it may then become a cultural ferment for the whole world. Small wonder then that when this impulse encounters the other impulses the latter assume strange forms.

What are these other impulses? Christ is king and Christ is teacher. One can scarcely call 'Christ is Teacher' an impulse, for, as I have already said, the Russian soul does not really understand what it means, does not understand that one can teach Christianity and not experience it in one's soul. But as for the conception 'Christ is King' — it is inseparable from the Russian people. And we now see the clash between two things which never had the slightest affinity, the clash between the impulse 'Christ is Spirit' and Czarism, an oriental caricature of the principle which seeks to establish temporal sovereignty in the domain of religion. 'Christ is King and the Czar is his representative' — here we have the association of the Western element manifested in Czarism with something that is completely alien to Czarism, something that, through the agency of the Russian folk soul, permeates the sentient life of the Russian people.

A characteristic feature of external physical reality is that those things which inwardly are often least related to each other must rub off on each other externally. Czarism and Russianism have always been strangers to each other, they never had anything in common. Those who understand the Russian nature, especially its piety, must have found the attitude to the elimination of Czarism as something self-evident when the time was ripe. But remember that this conception 'Christ is Spirit' touches the deepest springs of our being, that it is related to the highest expression of the Consciousness Soul and that, whilst socialism is smouldering beneath the surface, it collides with that which dwells in the Sentient Soul. Small wonder then that the expansion of socialism in Eastern Europe assumes forms that are totally incomprehensible: a chaotic interplay of the culture of the Consciousness Soul and the culture of the Sentient Soul.

1919-01-01-GA187

It is worthy of notice that in eastern Europe we find the seeds of what really belongs to the next age.

Beinsa Douno is regarded as the herald of the great Sixth epoch and the next slavic or russian cultural age.

6. Seventh Cultural Age

Source: https://anthroposophy.eu/Seventh_cultural_age

The next cultural age after the sixth 'russian' cultural age (timed approx from 1413 to 3570), is called the seventh or 'american' cultural age and is timed approx. to the period between the years 5070 and 7200. It will be a lagging culture and an age of chaos, with humanity near its collapse, and it will end the current epoch through the 'War of all against all'. Humanity will be divided according to differences in intellect and morals; on this basis a spiritualized caste system will again appear (1908-08-16-GA105). At the end of the epoch, only about a third of humanity will have attained its goal, a second third is lagging behind and will only attain this later, and one third will completely fall away from evolution (1904-10-24-GA092).

The Earth will be changing dramatically, similar to what happened at the end of the Atlantean epoch, see Earthquakes and emergence continent sixth epoch. Furthermore, this is the time of the anticipated reunion of Earth with the Moon, after the Separation of Moon in the Lemurian epoch. (eg 1921-05-13-GA204 below)

Aspects

Evolutionary

• in the seventh cultural age, the changed circumstances in their surroundings will provide little opportunity for the souls that have not developed in the decisive fifth and sixth cultural ages. The next opportunity will present itself only in the distant future.
• This cultural age will conclude the current Postatlantean epoch with the 'War of all against all'
• In the Book of Revelation, this cultural age maps to the church of Laodicea ref. 3,14-22
• may be the time of the reunion of the Moon with the Earth

Man

• The developmental target for humanity in this evolutionary period will be to have developed the Spirit-Self, and a special relationship with the lower spirit world, see eg Schemas FMC00.047.
• The soul will only be able to develop in the physical body upto the age of 21 (at the start) and 14 years (at the end) of this cultural age (Schema FMC00.232).
• the Kundalini fire will acquire great influence and act as a force on what lives in the human heart (1904-10-28-GA092, see also Mystery of the Heart)

Location

• Geographically the center of cultural development will lie in America, See FMC00.211 and the according lectures for background on how this center moves across earth's geography along with the developmental stage of humanity.

Culture, science, and spirituality

• will be an age of chaos, with humanity near its collapse (1904-10-28-GA092)
• this will be a lagging culture, compared to the Sixth cultural age; similar to the sixth and seventh ages or subraces in the Atlantean epoch
• major discoveries about the forces of nature, and the fact that the atom is coagulated electricity, will bring Man to control unseen forces - which will also play a role in the destruction of Earth through the War of all against all (1904-12-23-GA093)
• following the principle of remembrance: the seventh cultural age will repeat that which arose in the first, and humanity will be divided according to differences in intellect and morals; on this basis a spiritualized caste system will again appear (1908-08-16-GA105)
  

Lecture coverage and references

1904-10-24-GA092  

Not all reach the goal. A third part (of humanity) falls away completely from evolution. We have therefore one third which will attain the goal, one third which lags behind, and one third which does not reach the goal and falls completely away. One third attains its goal, a second third will only later attain its goal, making together two thirds; and at the end of the Fifth Root Race, only one third of those who began evolution will have reached the necessary stage of development.

1904-10-28-GA092 (SWCC) - see also quote from same lecture in Sixth cultural age

In the seventh cultural age of the fifth epoch the whole of mankind will be in a real chaos, for the root-race will then be near to its collapse. But a small number of people will become the true sons of the Kundalini fire, and will be permeated with its full power. They will provide the material, they will pass it on to the leaders of those who will develop man further. Thus is the fifth root-race directed to the heights which kindle the divine fire; thus is kindled out of inmost depths with holy fervour the divine principle which no longer separates man from man, but evokes brotherliness as far as the human understanding reaches. And thus far shall brotherliness be quickened in our own epoch and root-race and in the next. This fire will live in single individuals; and in those who are initiated in the course of the fifth epoch there already lives a spark of this divine fire which is the capacity for brotherliness and will put an end to separation.

1906-06-14-GA094

This seventh cultural age will be the end of the Postatlantean civilisations and conditions of earthly life will be entirely different from those we know. At the end of the seventh age there will be a revolution of the elements analogous to that which put an end to Atlantis, and the subsequent eras will know a spirituality prepared by the two preceding Postatlantean cultural ages.

unknown

We have often spoken reverently of all that in the first Postatlantean epoch, the great and holy teachers of mankind brought to that part of the earth, where later the Indian civilisation was developed. We have remarked how the soul cannot but look up from below to the lofty spiritual teachings that came into the world at that time, through certain human individualities who still bore within them all the inward greatness of those men who in Atlantean times had direct communion, which was no longer possible in later epochs of mankind, with the divine spiritual worlds. We have pointed out how the heritage of Atlantean wisdom, now accessible to the occultist alone .. So, if man looks up to the old wisdom and remembers above all what has often been mentioned here, namely, that only in the seventh and last epochs of the Postatlantean age will mankind again reach the point of drawing up out of the darkness of life the understanding of what once lived at the beginning of Postatlantean times and gave the impulse for human evolution — if we consider that mankind must mature to the last epoch before it can feel and experience in itself what at that time was felt and experienced, then only shall we get a sense of how exalted must have been the initiation principle that gave the impulse to the ancient, holy, spiritual culture of mankind.

1908-08-16-GA105 - caste system remembrance

Humanity will be differentiated in the future even more than in the past; it will be divided into categories, but not in an arbitrary way; from their own spiritual inner capacities men will come to know that they must work together for the whole body corporate.

There will be categories and classes however fiercely class-war may rage today, among those who do not develop egoism but accept the spiritual life and evolve toward what is good a time will come when men will organize themselves voluntarily. They will say: One must do this, the other must do that. Division of work even to the smallest detail will take place; work will be so organized that a holder of this or that position will not find it necessary to impose his authority on others. All authority will be voluntarily recognized, so that in a small portion of humanity we shall again have divisions in the seventh age, which will recall the principle of castes, but in such a way that no one will feel forced into any caste, but each will say: I must undertake a part of the work of humanity, and leave another part to another — both will be equally recognized.

Humanity will be divided according to differences in intellect and morals; on this basis a spiritualized caste system will again appear. Led, as it were, through a secret channel, the seventh age will repeat that which arose prophetically in the first. The third, the Egyptian age, is connected in the same way with our own. Little as it may appear to a superficial view, all that was laid down during the Egyptian age re-appears in the present one. Most of the people living on the earth today were incarnated formerly in Egyptian bodies and experienced an Egyptian environment; having lived through other intermediate incarnations, they are now again on earth, and, in accordance with the laws we have indicated, they unconsciously remember what they experienced in Egypt.

More on the caste system in India on 1912-05-29-GA155

See the link with the creation of a new center based on ideals and morality, see 'a new center gets created' on Christ Module 7 - Cosmic dimension

1909-GA13 (OES)

When the seventh cultural period has run its course .. the Earth will be struck by an upheaval comparable to the one that took place between the Atlantean and Postatlantean ages.

After this, evolution will continue under transformed earthly circumstances through seven more time periods.

...

However, only human beings embodying souls that have become all that they could under the influence of the Greco-Latin cultural period and the subsequent fifth, sixth, and seventh periods of Postatlantean evolution will be able to cope with these reconfigured earthly circumstances.

...

Other souls will have to remain behind at this stage, although earlier they could still have chosen to create the prerequisites for participation in it. The souls mature enough to face the conditions that will exist after the next great upheaval will be the ones who succeeded in imbuing supersensible knowledge with their own forces of intellect and feeling at the transition from the fifth to the sixth Postatlantean period.

The fifth and sixth periods are the decisive ones.

In the seventh period, although the souls who have achieved the goal of the sixth will continue to develop accordingly, the changed circumstances in their surroundings will provide little opportunity for the others to make up for lost time. The next opportunity will present itself only in the distant future.

1911-12-03-GA130

Then will come the last cultural age, during which human souls will receive the reflection of what we call hope; when, strengthened through the force flowing from the Mystery of Golgotha and from the age of morality, men will take into themselves forces of hope. This is the most important gift they need in order to face the next catastrophe and to begin a new life, just as was done in this present Postatlantean age.

When in the final Postatlantean age our external culture, with its tendency to calculation, will have come to a climax, bringing no feeling of satisfaction but leaving those who have not developed the spiritual within them to confront their culture in utter desolation - then out of spirituality the seed of hope will be sown, and in the next period of human evolution this will grow to maturity. If the spirit is denied all possibility of imparting to men's souls what it can give, and what the Anthroposophical Movement has the will to convey, this external culture might for a short while be able to hold its own. Ultimately, however, people would ask themselves what they had gained and say:

“We have wireless installations - undreamt of by our ancestors - to transmit our thoughts all over the earth, and what good does it do us?

The most trivial, unproductive thoughts are sent hither and thither, and human ingenuity has to be strained to the utmost to enable us to transport from some far distant region, by means of all kinds of perfected appliances, something for us to eat; or to travel at high speeds round the globe.

But in our heads there is nothing worth sending from place to place, for our thoughts are cheerless; moreover, since we have had our present means of communication, they have become even more cheerless than when they were conveyed in the old snail-like fashion.”

In short, despair and desolation are all that our civilisation can spread over the earth. But, in the last cultural age, souls who have accepted the spiritual in life will have become enriched, as if on the ruins of the external life of culture. Their surety that this acceptance of the spiritual has not been in vain will be the strong force of hope within them - hope that after a great catastrophe a new age will come for human beings, when there will appear in external life, in a new culture, what has already been prepared spiritually within the soul.

Thus, if we permeate our whole being with Spiritual Science, we advance step by step, in full consciousness, from our age of Faith, through the age of Love and that of Hope [editor: fifth, sixth and seventh cultural ages] to what we can see approaching us as the highest, truest, most beautiful, of all human souls

1915-02-13-GA174B - see also Sixth cultural age, points to why the fifth cultural age is so important

For what follows as the sixth, as the seventh cultural epoch, must live spiritually from the creations of the fifth, must absorb the creations of the fifth cultural epoch. The fifth cultural epoch has the task of deepening the external idealistic life to the spiritual life. But that which is thus conquered by idealism as a spiritual life must be accepted later, must live on. For in the East one will not have the strength to produce one's own spiritual life productively, but only to absorb into oneself what has been produced.

This is how history must play out, that a spiritual culture is created by the present humanity, which carries the actual cultural impulses within itself, which is the actual historical succession of the fifth culture, and that this culture is processed by what follows.

1921-05-13-GA204

At the time of the death of Christ, of the Event of Golgotha, human beings in general were capable of development in body and in soul until the 33rd year of life.  Today this development is possible until the 27th year.  In the fourth millennium a time will come when men will be capable of development only until the 21st year.

In the seventh millennium the bodily nature will be capable of development only until the 14th year of life. Women will then become barren. An entirely different form of earthly life will ensue. This is the epoch when the moon will again approach the earth and become part of it.

He must know what it means to say that the moon once left the earth and will enter the earth again. Just as the separation of the moon was a decisive event, so too will be its re-entry. It is true that as human beings we shall still be inhabiting the earth, although birth will no longer take place in the ordinary way.

We shall be connected with the earth by other means than through birth. We shall, however, have evolved in a certain respect by that time. And we must learn to connect what is happening today - I mean the fact that the intellect is becoming more and more shadowy - with what will one day be a great event in earthly evolution: the re-entry of the Moon into the substance of the Earth.

7. War of All Against All

Source: https://anthroposophy.eu/War_of_all_against_all

The great 'War of all against all' is the term for the future catastrophy that will end the current Postatlantean epoch. The term comes from the Book of Revelation.

The 'War of all against all' will be caused by egotism, evil and mutual strife. Egotism is the fundamental power in the soul, and this line of evolution will descend ever deeper. When it arrives at the bottom everyone will rage against everyone else and the fifth race will find its destruction in conflict between selfish, egoistic powers.

In the seventh cultural age, mankind will make discoveries about the physical forces of nature, to take hold of 'great and mighty forces' that will in the end 'turn the whole earth-globe into a kind of [self-functioning] live electric mass'.

The war of all against all will be a war of classes of souls who no longer understand one another, a war much worse than war of the present-day with weapons and difficult for present-day consciousness to understand.

A small group of men will develop selflessness and the power of Budhi or Life-Spirit through the force of thought, in order to carry over Budhi into the new civilisation. In a way 'that cannot be discussed, the tiny handful will be protected and preserved'.

For humanity this catastrophy will mean the transition to the next great Sixth epoch, which will take place on a new continent and very different earthly conditions, see also Earthquakes and emergence continent sixth epoch.

Aspects

• the foundation of discord is the human 'I' that gives Man his independence and his inner freedom, it is a sharp two-edged sword that leads on the one hand to the highest and on the other hand to the lowest (1908-06-25-GA104)
• besides the above positioning of the war of all against all at the end of the current fifth epoch, Rudolf Steiner also uses the term for a much more short term projection at the end of the 20th century (1921-08-06-GA206)
• the term 'Bellum omnium contra omnes', Latin meaning 'the war of all against all', is used by Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) in his books De Cive (1642) and Leviathan (1651).

Lecture coverage and references

1904-12-23-GA093

All progress is the result of involution and evolution. Involution is the in-taking, evolution the yield, the out-giving. All states and conditions of world-existence alternate between these two processes. When you see, hear, smell or taste, you breathe nature into yourselves. The act of sight does not pass away without leaving a trace behind. The eye itself perishes, the object seen — that too perishes; but what you have experienced in the act of sight, remains. It will not be difficult for you to realise that in certain epochs it is necessary to make such things understood.

We are going forward to an age when, as I indicated recently, men will understand what the atom is, in reality. It will be realised, and by the public mind too, that the atom is nothing but coagulated electricity. The thought itself is composed of the same substance. Before the end of the fifth epoch of culture, science will have reached the stage where man will be able to penetrate into the atom itself. When the similarity of substance between the thought and the atom is once comprehended, the way to get hold of the forces contained in the atom will soon be discovered and then nothing will be inaccessible to certain methods of working. A man standing here, let us say, will be able by pressing a button concealed in his pocket, to explode some object at a great distance, say in Hamburg. Just as by setting up a wave-movement here and causing it to take a particular form at some other place, wireless telegraphy is possible, so what I have just indicated will be within man's power when the occult truth that thought and atom consist of the same substance is put into practical application.

It is impossible to conceive what might happen in such circumstances if mankind has not, by then, reached selflessness. The attainment of selflessness alone will enable humanity to be kept from the brink of destruction. The downfall of our present epoch will be caused by lack of morality.

The Lemurian epoch was destroyed by fire, the Atlantean by water; our epoch and its civilisation will be destroyed by the War of All against All, by evil. Human beings will destroy each other in mutual strife. And the terrible thing — more desperately tragic than other catastrophes — will be that the blame will lie with human beings themselves.

A tiny handful of men will make good and thus insure their survival in the sixth epoch of civilisation. This tiny handful will have attained selflessness. The others will develop every imaginable skill and subtlety in the manipulation and use of the physical forces of nature, but without the essential degree of selflessness.

In the seventh epoch of civilisation, this War of All against All will break out in the most terrible form. Great and mighty forces will be let loose by the discoveries, turning the whole earth-globe into a kind of [self-functioning] live electric mass. In a way that cannot be discussed, the tiny handful will be protected and preserved.

and a second translation

It is impossible to conceive what might happen in such circumstances if mankind has not by then reached selflessness. Only through the attainment of selflessness will it be possible to preserve mankind from the brink of destruction. The downfall of post-Atlantean culture will be caused by the lack of morality. The Lemurian race was destroyed by fire, the Atlantean by water; ours will be destroyed by the War of All against All, [by?] evil, through the struggle of men with one another. Humanity will destroy itself in mutual strife. And the despairing thing — more desperately tragic than other catastrophes — will be that the blame will lie with human beings themselves.

A tiny handful of men will save themselves and pass over into the sixth epoch. This tiny handful will have developed complete selflessness. The others will make use of every [imaginable] skill and subtlety in the penetration and conquest of the physical forces of Nature, but without attaining the essential degree of selflessness . They will start the War of All against All, and that will be the cause of the destruction of our civilisation.

In the seventh post-Atlantean cultural epoch, to be precise, this War of All against All will break out, in the most terrible way. Great and mighty forces will ensue from discoveries that will turn the entire globe into a kind of self-functioning electrical apparatus. The tiny handful will be protected in a way that cannot be discussed.

1907-03-07-GA097

Mighty flames of fire destroyed ancient Lemuria, and mighty floods ancient Atlantis. Our civilisation will also perish, through the war of all against all. This is what we must face. Our fifth root-race will perish, because egoism will reach its highest pitch. But at the same time, a small group of men will develop the power of Budhi, of the Life-Spirit, through the force of thought, in order to carry over Budhi into the new civilisation. Everything that is productive in the striving human being will grow stronger and stronger, until his personality reaches the summit of freedom. At present, every individual must discover in himself a kind of guiding spirit in the soul's inner depths: — This is Budhi, the power of the Life spirit. Were we to approach the future by taking up the cultural impulses as in earlier epochs, we should face the disintegration of humanity.

What do we see now at the present time?

Everyone wants to be his own master: Egoism, selfishness have been pushed to the extreme. A time will come when no other authority will be recognised except one which men recognise freely, whose power is based upon free confidence.

• The Mysteries which were founded upon the power of the spirit, are called the MYSTERIES OF THE SPIRIT;
• the Mysteries of the future, which will have trust as their foundation, are called the MYSTERIES OF THE FATHER.

These will mark the end of our civilisation. The new impulse of the power of confidence must come, otherwise we approach human disintegration, a universal cult of the I and of egoism.

• In the times of the Mysteries of the Spirit, which were founded upon the rightful power, authority and might of the Spirit, there were certain wise men who possessed wisdom, and only the soul who passed through difficult probations could be initiated by them.
• In future, we approach the Mysteries of the Father, and we must strive more and more that each single human being should attain wisdom.

Will this counter-act egoism and the threatening disintegration? Yes! For only when we reach the highest wisdom, in which there are no differences, no personal opinion and no personal standpoint, but ONE VIEW only, will men agree. If they were to remain as they are at present, following their different standpoints, they would become more and more disunited. The highest wisdom always produces a unanimous view among all men. Real wisdom is ONE, and it unites men again, whilst leaving them as free as possible, without any coercive authority. Just as the members of the great White Brotherhood are always in harmony with one another and with humanity, so all men will one day be one, through this wisdom. Only this wisdom can establish the true idea of brotherhood. Spiritual science therefore has only one task: to bring this idea to men, by developing now the Spirit-Self and later on the Life-Spirit. The great goal of the spiritual-scientific movement is to make it possible for man to attain freedom and true wisdom; its mission is to let this truth and wisdom flow into men.

The modern movement of spiritual science began with the most elementary teachings. Many important things have been revealed in the years which have passed since the founding of this movement, and much that is even more important will be revealed. The work of the spiritual-scientific movement, is therefore to allow a gradual flowing out of wisdom of the great White Brotherhood that had its origin in Atlantis. Such work has always been prepared for through long periods of time. The whole activity of the great founders of religions was a preparation for the ONE great event, for the appearance of Christ-Jesus.

1907-05-08-GA104A

At that time there will be human beings who are Christ filled, who have been sealed; in the ages of future spirituality the opening up, the breaking of the seals of human souls will take place. That the five wise virgins have oil burning in their lamps, that the bridegroom finds illuminated souls, signifies that a portion of humanity will have revealed to it the mystery that is still today closed to humankind. The book with the seven seals will be deciphered for a portion of humankind. The writer of the Apocalypse, John, wants through signs to point to this time, wants to proclaim prophetically this age. In one sentence we read: “And a great sign appeared in heaven ...” (Rev. 12:1) That means we are dealing in the Apocalypse with signs representing the great phases of the evolution of humanity. We must then decipher these signs. We remember that our present fifth root race was preceded by the Atlantean race, which was destroyed by a flood. What will destroy the fifth race? The fifth race has a special task: the development of egotism. This egotism will, at the same time, create what causes the downfall of the fifth root race. A small part of humankind will live toward the sixth main race; a larger part will not yet have found the light within. Because egotism is the fundamental power in the soul, the war of all against all will rage within this larger part of humanity. As the Lemurian race found its end through the power of fire, the Atlantean through water, so will the fifth race find its destruction in conflict between selfish, egoistic powers in the war of all against all. This line of evolution will descend deeper and deeper; when it arrives at the bottom everyone will rage against everyone else. A small part of humankind will escape this, just as a small part escaped during the destruction of the Atlantean race. It is up to every individual to find a connection to the spiritual life in order to be one of those to go over into the sixth root race. Mighty revolutions stand before humankind; they are described in the Apocalypse

1908-08-14-GA105

The Lemurian epoch came to an end through great fire catastrophes; the Atlantean through mighty catastrophes of ice and water; our epoch will come to an end through other forces, through a mighty increase of egoism in human nature, and, on account of this, through the war of all against all. Only those who turn to a spiritual life will survive the catastrophe, which, in this case, means the war of all against all, just as only a small group of people escaped from the catastrophes of Lemuria and Atlantis. The war of all against all will be still more terrible for those involved in it than were those of fire and water, however terrible we may picture them to have been. Those who are now turning towards a spiritual life should feel it their duty to do all that is possible to rescue the good seed of our age and carry it over into the sixth age, which will follow the present one. This age is made up of great subdivisions; the ancient Indian, the Persian, the Egyptian, the Greco-Latin, and the present one, which will be followed by the sixth and the seventh right on to the time of the war of all against all.

1908-06-25-GA104 quote A

We have said repeatedly that our epoch will end, when the seventh age has passed away, by the War of All against All, but this war must really be pictured quite differently from the way we have been accustomed to think of war. We must bear in mind the foundation, the real cause of this war. This foundation or cause is the increase of egoism, of self-seeking and selfishness on the part of Man. And we have now progressed so far in our considerations that we have seen what a sharp two-edged sword this 'I' of man is. He who does not fully realize that this I is a two-edged sword will scarcely be able to grasp the entire meaning of the evolution of humanity and the world. On the one hand this I is the cause that Man hardens within himself, and that he desires to draw into the service of his I his inner capacities and all the other objects at his disposal. This I is the cause of Man's directing all his wishes to the satisfaction of this I as such. Its striving to draw to itself as its own possession a part of the Earth which belongs to all, to drive away all the other I's from its realm, to fight them, to be at war with them, is one side of the I.

quote B

But on the other hand we must not forget that the I is at the same time that which gives man his independence and his inner freedom, which in the truest sense of the word elevates him. His dignity is founded in this I, it is the basis of the divine in Man.

.. Thus the I will be the pledge for the highest goal of Man. But at the same time, if it does not discover love, if it hardens within itself, it is the tempter that plunges him into the abyss.

For it is that which separates men from one another which brings them to the great War of All against All, not only to the war of nation against nation (for the conception of a nation will then no longer have the significance it possesses to-day) but to the war of each single person against every other person in every branch of life; to the war of class against class, of caste against caste and sex against sex.

Thus in every field of life the I will become the apple of discord; and hence we may say that it can lead on the one hand to the highest and on the other hand to the lowest. For this reason it is a sharp two-edged sword.

1909-05-11-GA104A

The war of all against all will be an expression of the egotism that is always growing stronger, the egotism conjured forth by humanity today as the I is and will always become, stronger and stronger. That will be the end of the last Postatlantean culture. This catastrophe will also have its mission, its usefulness in the ascent of the entire human race. However, the great war of all against all will be something much worse than war of the present-day with weapons. It will be a war of souls, of souls who no longer understand one another, a war of the classes. This future catastrophe is difficult for present-day consciousness to understand.

The Atlanteans were magicians. As we today use the powers asleep in coal, so the Atlantean used the forces in plant seeds. The forces in the seeds served them in their technology, in their industry.

There is a mysterious connection between these forces. As long as the Atlanteans used the seed forces properly, they were in harmony with the working of the forces of the air and water. However, from the middle of the Atlantean age onward, the Atlantean magicians increasingly approached their moral fall; and in the mysteries of the black occult schools these magical forces were misused in a terrible way. They were placed in the service of the most horrible egotism. In this way the powers of air and water were increasingly excited which finally had to result in the mighty Atlantean water catastrophe. Today, those who know the secret of the use of these forces know full well that the use of such forces in our time means that powers of black magic are at work. Magic must never be made to serve when selfish purposes are involved. Hence, the employment of seed forces is not permitted today even to serve white magic.

On the other hand, in Lemurian times the seed forces of the animals were used. But everywhere that the growth forces of animals are misused, horrendous forces of fire, the vulcanic element, are awakened.

Today these things are not so obvious. Today the feeling for one's self, the overwhelming egohood of people has brought about the drying up, the desolation of those regions of the earth that have developed this egotism to the greatest extent. It is absolutely true that this war of all against all is being prepared on the surface of the earth because a connection exists between the egotistical withering of the soul's forces and the paralyzation of the earth's productive powers. The Nordic myth of the Twilight of the Gods also tells us this.

We must understand the difference between the evolution of souls and the evolution of bodies. From epoch to epoch human souls find themselves again and again in different bodies. These souls will one day see the strife that will reign among the human souls who will be born in the last Postatlantean age. This experience will be a lesson for them and will help to free them from egotism. Then they will be able to grow into an era where they will have the fruits of selfhood but without its disadvantages.

An age will come with clairvoyant conditions similar to those prevailing in the Atlantean epoch, but with this difference: human beings will have a free consciousness of self. We will then have learned, in these seven cultures of the Postatlantean age, what can be achieved in the physical world. This self-perception or consciousness of self can only awaken in a physical body; but the human being must again subjugate the physical body. After the war of all against all, we will have achieved a stage of evolution where we live in a bodily nature in such a way that we are no longer slaves of our physical bodies.

The impulse for this development comes from the Christ principle. Christ even falls right in the middle between the age of the Atlantean catastrophe and the war of all against all. On the one hand we can thank the descent into matter for our consciousness of self within our physical bodily nature. On the other hand, we thank the Christ event for our ability to ascend with the achievements of the physical world. We thank the Christ principle for our ability to ascend to universal brotherly love, to the universal love of humanity, since we will again unite in groups with love for one another.

If we look back to the time of the original group souls of Atlantis and then into the future we see these four group souls appearing again. The lamb will stand in the middle as a sign for the love that will unite people who will then be living in a bodily nature that is less dense.

But this state must be prepared today through the setting aside of a small group that will carry brotherly love into the future. Therefore, a stream has arisen in our time that will lead to brotherly love through real spiritual knowledge. Humankind will not attain brotherly love through preaching but rather through knowledge. Preachers who constantly speak of love achieve nothing. But if people are given wisdom, knowledge of evolution, in such a way that it becomes life in the soul, then humanity will arrive at love. The soul can attain this when it is warmed by wisdom. Then it can radiate love.

For this reason the masters of wisdom and harmony of feelings have formed this stream for the raying forth of love into humanity and for the influx of wisdom into humanity. Humankind, rushing toward the war of all against all, will then find the fruit of the theosophical movement in an understanding of peace — while all around it, the nature of humankind will have everywhere led into strife those who have not heard the call of the master of wisdom and harmony of feelings on the basis of the Christ impulse in the fourth age.

1909-05-17-GA104A

A seer such as the writer of the apocalypse can already see the future evolution of humanity in the astral world. What will enter into evolution after the war of all against all is already being prepared. Those human beings called to carry evolution into the future, beyond the war of all against all, are already being prepared through the wisdom taught in Theosophy. In far-reaching ways, the spiritual stream of wisdom will become increasingly effective.

...

Let us look at the human being after the war of all against all. We can think of him or her as someone with radiant, good features and a noble benevolent expression. This will become the fate of those who have taken in spiritual impulses at the right time. All moral, intellectual, and spiritual forces will, in the future, confront us visibly in the external features of a human being. What is taken in today will be sealed into souls. After the seventh cultural age, after the war of all against all, they will be unsealed.

1921-08-06-GA206

as related to worldview or world conception, see also extract on: Worldview#1921-08-06-GA206

When this lecture is read in full, it connects to:

• Contemporary worldview war
• Fall and redemption - original sin and grace#Topic 1 - What is going on in the world today.3F

... as human beings, we may be soundly materialistic within our life of thoughts. This is possible, for the nineteenth century has proved it. The nineteenth century has also proved the justification of materialism; for it has led to a positive knowledge of the material world, which is an image of the spiritual world. We may be materialists with our head ... but in that case we do not control our dreaming life of feeling, nor our sleeping life of the will. These become spiritually inclined, particularly the life of the will.

It is interesting to observe, from a spiritual-scientific standpoint, what takes place in that case.

...

What lives in a corporeal form within the sentient part of man? Rhythm: the circulation of the blood, the breathing rhythm, and so forth. What lives within the volitive part of man? The metabolic processes.

Let us study, to begin with, these metabolic processes. While the head is skillfully engaged in elaborating material things and material phenomena into a materialistic science, the metabolic part of man, which takes hold of the complete human structure, works out the very opposite world-picture; it elaborates a thoroughly spiritualistic world-picture, which the materialists, in particular, bear within them unconsciously. But within the metabolic part of man, this influences the instincts and the passions. There it produces the very opposite of what it would produce if it were to claim the whole human being. When it permeates the instincts, ahrimanic powers get hold of it, and then it is not active in a divine-spiritual sense, but it is active in an ahrimanic-spiritual sense. It then leads the instincts to the highest degree of egoism. It develops the instincts in such a way that the human being then merely makes claims and demands; he is not led to social instincts, to social feelings, and so forth. Particularly the individual side becomes an egoistic element of the instincts.

This has been formed, if I may use this expression, below the surface of the materialistic civilisation; this has appeared in the world-historical events, and this is now evident. What has developed below the surface, as a germ, what has arisen in the depths of man's volitive part, where spirituality has seized the instincts, this now appears in the world-historical events. If the development were to continue in this consistent way, we would reach, at the end of the twentieth century, the war of all against all; particularly in that sphere of the evolution of the earth in which the so-called civilisation has unfolded. We may already see what has thus developed, we may see it raying out from the East and asserting itself over a great part of the Earth. This is an inner connection. We should be able to see it. In an outward symptomatic form, it reflects itself in what I have already explained, in what others have also remarked.

...

In other words: If we allow things to take their course, in the manner in which they have taken their course under the influence of the world-conception which has arisen in the nineteenth century and in the form in which we can understand it, if we allow things to take this course, we shall face the war of all against all, at the end of the twentieth century. No matter what beautiful speeches may be held, no matter how much science may progress, we would inevitably have to face this war of all against all. We would see the gradual development of a type of humanity devoid of every kind of social instinct, but which would talk all the more of social questions.

Discussion

Notes

Regarding the statement in 1904-12-23-GA093 above

In the seventh epoch of civilisation, this War of All against All will break out in the most terrible form. Great and mighty forces will be let loose by the discoveries, turning the whole earth-globe into a kind of [self-functioning] live electric mass.

and a second translation

In the seventh post-Atlantean cultural epoch, to be precise, this War of All against All will break out, in the most terrible way. Great and mighty forces will ensue from discoveries that will turn the entire globe into a kind of self-functioning electrical apparatus.

.. it can be noted that Rudolf Steiner does go into this image in various other lectures, example of which below (when covering the 'Mothers' and the forces such as electricity as an impulse remaining of Old Moon).

.

1917-11-02-GA273

Now you can imagine that all these premontions of mighty connections did not arise before Faust merely as theories, but he felt himself obliged to seek out — to enter right into these impulses. Knowledge of this force was first of all given to those being initiated into the Greek Mysteries, this force together with the two other Mothers. The Greeks held all that was connected with electricity in secret in the Mysteries. And herein is where lies the decadence of the future of the Earth — of which I have already spoken from another point of view — that these forces will be made public. One of these forces has already become so during the fifth post-Atlantean age: electricity. The others will be known about in the decadence of the sixth and seventh ages.

8. Earthquakes and Emergence Continent Sixth Epoch

Source: https://anthroposophy.eu/Earthquakes_and_emergence_continent_sixth_epoch

The continents of the third Lemurian epoch and the fourth Atlantean epoch were destroyed, and at each occasion a new continent appeared as the start of a new epoch and 'root race'.

Regarding the transition between fourth and fifth epochs:

• The ice ages and flood were not a 'one off' disruptive event, but spanned a long period, see eg FMC00.214B and FMC00.214C on Atlantean epoch for maps on how this changed the face of the Earth. For perspective, see also Schema FMC00.263 on Zodiac clock.
• Migrations already started in the fifth age of that epoch, see Schema FMC00.205 on the Atlantean epoch. This was the basis 'sample' for the next epoch, see Schema FMC00.169A on Overlapping evolutionary periods.

The transition towards the sixth epoch can be timed to start in the next sixth cultural age, but a forebode will already be the cleaning in the Future Oriphiel age of the current fifth cultural age.

Whereas Lemuria submerged due to fire, and Atlantis due to water, the current Postatlantean epoch will be destroyed through the so-called 'War of all against all'. See also the Discussion on Nostradamus

Illustrations

Schema FMC00.239 shows the archangelic rulers of approx 354 periods for the current cultural age (plus and minus a cultural age). See also Spiritual hierarchies and their eigenperiods for more info on the 354 period. Rudolf Steiner uses this period to describe the nature of current Michael age and the Future Oriphiel age.

Lecture coverage and references

Beinsa Douno on the great global quake (taken from 'The second coming', published 2013) (SWCC)

[the Sun at the basis for major changes on Earth, see also 1910-12-31-GA126 below on the impact of the SoF and the previous ice age]

.. a new age is beginning on Earth, of which modern spiritual science says that a new wave is coming from the Sun. This wave affects human minds.

They say such a large spot will appear on the Sun, that it will be visible with unarmed eye. That spot will cause a great magnetic wave, which will shake the Earth. That wave is coming to do well. It depends on the angle it hits the Earth. If the strike comes in a right angle, the Earth will bounce, without being affected. If the strike comes at a different angle, a sharp angle, the Earth will be slightly affected. This will be like a massage for it, without causing any calamities. The strike will be felt everywhere as a new impulse. This wave is alive, intelligent, it will change people's lives.

One day such an earthquake will come, that the earth will jump up one meter.

I say to all today's people not to build high buildings, because earth's crust will undergo great bending and nothing will remain of those residences. The houses, which will be built in the future should only be a of one and a half floors, and not very solid, because otherwise they will be broken.

The great global quake which will put an end to God's Wrath, will last 45 days. An earthquake is coming to Europe, which will start from the north, it will shake all Europe in such a way, that it will be remembered for thousands of years.

There's an explanation of the reason for that earthquake. The Old Testament says: "Beware that your deeds and thoughts don't become so bad, that the Earth can't stand you anymore".

Several quakes will come, each of them more terrible than the other, everybody should pray and escape out of town before the earthquake. Some distress must fall upon Europe in order to make people think.

These things have been foreseen, foretold a thousand years ago. The Earth is transforming and that is why distress will come, which are years of trials. The believers, when they see these things, should know that the day of their salvation is near.

If people cannot adopt Christ in another way, then punishment will come upon them, such that the world has never seen. Let me quote the Scripture: "They will say to the mountains: "Fall upon us!" And to the dead they will say: "Come out, you dead, so that we, the living, may come in".

The Sun directs the transformation of the Earth, which place should go up, and which place should sink.

This Earth will be transformed, this current world will sink, new continents will be created and there will be new air.

• Through the earthquakes a part of the Mediterranean will sink, as well as its shores. Today Macedonia and the Aegean Region are already sinking gradually. The Mediterranean Sea will merge with the Caspian Sea.
• The Balkan Peninsula will gradually sink. The Mediterranean will get close to the Rhodopa mountains and therefore it is useless for Bulgaria to fight for egress on the Aegean Sea, it will come on its own. Some sea-side towns and cities will be submerged. An inner city will become a port.
• The Mediterranean used to be land, which then sank under the sea, and Bulgaria used to be a sea. There, at the Mediterranean Sea, Greece, the lower places will be under the sea. The lower places in Western Europe, will be under the sea. And the Bulgarian then will not wear a fur cap, the Englishman won't be an Englishman anymore.
• In Asia a lot of large lakes will be formed.

All the mountains on the Balkan Peninsula are lowering, and after several thousand years they will become valleys, fields. Where the current fields are, new mountains will appear. In other words: the soil, which was under water, will get above the water and become fields for cultivation, and the soil, which was above water, will go under water.

Then the human lives will be improved. And the Scripture says: "The mountains will be made low", i.e. the unfavorable living conditions will become favorable.

The great French visionary Nostradamus says that England and Italy will be submerged.

An earthquake is coming, and if it comes, it is supposed that the Baltic Sea will connect to the Mediterranean Sea. This earthquake will cause a great sinking of the soil. These are transformations. A new continent is being built in the Great Ocean — a new continent is needed for each race.

That continent will be covered with the best springs and it will have mountainous relief. For a mounting to be raise several thousand meters, what pressure is needed by some forces! Wouldn't that affect Europe and Asia? The Scripture says: "The Earth will shake like a drunk man".

Parts of France, Belgium, Greece will be submerged. Sahara will be flooded — it will become a sea, around which cultures will evolve. The climatic conditions will change.

The magnetic wave that is coming, can burn the entire crust of the Earth. The spiritual people will immediately adjust to the new conditions, and the worldly people and the materialists will wander, will run around the Earth, and won't be able to find rest.

Now Sahara is one of the bad places for living, but one day it can be flooded by the Mediterranean and become a good place. The Europeans will be able to live at the outskirts of Africa.

Everything changes, for example the frozen Siberia has a future, because the climate there will get warmer.

The northern countries are going southwards, there it will get warmer from day to day, the climate will change. And when that happens to a sufficient degree, the fruits will also be very good. The borders of chill will move further to the north. If heat comes suddenly, a catastrophe will happen, due to the rapid melting of the ice, located at the North Pole and thus the warming of the climate in Europe will take place gradually. Earth's axis will also be changed. The world will pass through great screening, it will pass through fire. The world is now in destiny. This is a century, dedicated to the binding of evil and liberating good.

The whole Europe is shifting towards the equator and after several thousand years Bulgaria will be there. Everything will change, man will be purified, what is unnecessary will vanish and one day, when you come, if you are told that you are in a form or position as the current ones, you'll be offended.

Europe is moving towards the Equator and this results in sifts, earthquakes. All people are extremely afraid of earthquakes, because they have been scared thousands of times so far. Another reason for the earthquake is the constant ascending of the bottom of the Great Ocean, where a new continent is being formed for the sixth race.

Now a transformation of Earth's matter is taking place. Immense magnetic flows come from the Sun, which lift continents and tone them. This Earth is sinful, full of filth, it has to be purged.

Only the great forests of America, where no human has ever set his foot, will remain.

• Africa is a part of a large continent, which was submerged. Black magic is a culture of that black race, which was submerged, because of its sins. These are the Lemurians.
• Atlantis is of the yellow race.
• Now is the time of the white race, the fifth, and it will be submerged as well, to make room for the sixth race.

The Atlanteans were a race of feelings, and the white race is a race of intellect. An entire continent will be submerged so the world is saved.

An enormous continent will come out of the Great Ocean, and the current Europe will remain as an island — the island of the white.

The Great Ocean is preparing for a future culture. You will be transferred to the new continent, which will raise in the Great Ocean. Some lands will be submerged.

You must be interested in the oceans, because they provide opportunities, conditions for your development. They are the virgin soil, which is being prepared for the future culture. The water of the Great Ocean, for example, will flood some of the modern day continents, and a large part of the people, now living on Earth will move to its ground.

"Is it possible that the Lord moves us from Europe to the ground of the Great Ocean, in a completely new environment?"

There is nothing impossible in that. As you have left Heaven and came down on Earth, thus you will emigrate from Europe. This is nothing but migration. Once you were in Heaven, had joyful time with the Son's of God, but after that you left Heaven and started wandering. Once people lived in the Promised Land, but then they left it and have been wandering for a thousand years. So people have come out of an enormous earth into the cosmos and have come to the Earth to work and study.

There will be a new race of people, not like the current ones, but when you look at them, they will be illuminated.

Those, who will inhabit the new continent, will be of the sixth race. Then a part of the mammals will be incarnated as humans on the Earth, they have stopped in one place and will once again commence their development. In these conditions, the monkeys, which are vegetarian and have stayed to live in the forests, when the time comes to incarnate as people, will start over their development — then they will have the necessary conditions to be elevated. If they enter among the current race, they will learn to eat meat; today they lose physically but preserve themselves spiritually.

The great spiritual warm wave that is coming to this world, breaks ice and turns it into water. After a thousand of years not only people will change, but wolves will also stop eating sheep. They will be disgusted with meat and will only use vegetal food.

The new continent, which will arise from the bottom of the Pacific Ocean, will be the continent of the sixth race. Siberia will connect to the new continent and form an integral part thereof.

Discussion

Note - Climatological changes and the end of the fifth epoch

Epochs of evolution are concluded with a major catastrophe for humanity whereby the face of the Earth changes and the continents are redrawn. The past continents where the cultures of the Lemurian epoch and Atlantean epoch were predominantly based, or centered, disappeared from the Earth.

This hangs together with the influence of the Spirits of Form, as explained by Rudolf Steiner in o.a. 1910-12-31-GA126 (see quote coverage on Atlantean epoch, in the context of the ice age and catastrophe that ended the atlantean epoch). It was further explored by Elisabeth Vreede And Gunther Wachsmuth how this is related by certain zodiacal influences that change in time due the procession of the equinoxes- see also on Zodiac clock (eg Schema FMC00.263)

9. Sixth Epoch

Source: https://anthroposophy.eu/Sixth_epoch

The sixth epoch in the current Condition of Form and Life of the Earth planetary stage follows our Current Postatlantean epoch, and is the one that 'crowns' the whole period of the seven epochs. Just as the Atlantean epoch had a very different Earth and humanity, so will this also be the case after the 'war of all against all' that will conclude the fifth and Current Postatlantean epoch. Humanity will be spiritualized - see Man's transformation and spiritualization, as a division between the good and spiritualized and lower evil part of humanity becomes a reality. The 'sample' of humanity that will be used as the basis to form this next race and epoch will be taken from the next cultural age, the 'russian' cultural age between approx. the years 3500 and 5000.

The sixth epoch will be characterized by brotherly love, the essence of the Christ Impulse which will have blossomed and come into fruition in that epoch. And just as the sixth cultural age will contain a selected 'cohort', a small piece of the population that contains the characteristics for the next sixth epoch .. so too will the sixth epoch already give us a preliminary outlook on what is to come in the next planetary stage Future Jupiter.

Aspects

Man

• soul
  • Man will no longer make a distinction between his own well-being and the well-being of the whole, through a force that will live in his heart, a Kundalini force that will grow and developed in the next sixth cultural age of the current fifth epoch (1904-10-28-GA092)
  • memory: Man will have remembrance of previous life (and realize that Christ himself is present in the power of memory) see 1914-03-07-GA152 on Walking Speaking Thinking for the development of a new fourth faculty (o.a. Schema FMC00.092)
• spiritual faculties
  • Man will hear the sound of the spheres (1904-11-02-GA089, note: this maps to the clairvoyant faculty of Intuition into the higher spirit world)
  • It will become possible, and then only gradually, for the human body to receive into itself the Christ Principle from childhood onwards without years of preparation (1904-12-30)
• physiologically
  • good and evil will contrast very differently: the outer physiognomy will directly mirror one's karma (1904-11-11-GA093); and the rigidity of the etheric body will have a great influence upon the physical body. The physical body will become a faithful copy of the etheric and 'stamp' this to a moral physiognomy (1915-10-31-GA254 and 1915-11-07-GA254). This will lead to a division in good and evil races, in two 'subraces' (190X-XX-XX-GA097 and 1908-06-21-GA104 and 1910-GA013)
    • a noble and beautiful subrace: noble character also expressed in their gestures and the movements of their hands.
    • decadent men developing downwards "horribly ugly, animal-like, sensual, vicious, far more horror-provoking than our present humanity". and "They will show the evil passions, impulses and instincts hostile to the spiritual in an ugly, unintelligent, evil-looking countenance. In their gestures and hand-movements, in everything they do, they will present an outer image of the ugliness un their soul."
  • in the middle of the sixth epoch
    • in the middle of the sixth epoch, Man will not penetrate the physical world as deeply as currently and casts off the uni-sexuality and becomes hermaphrodite (1905-03-30-GA053)
    • every single person will reach the point of becoming an immortal spirit through the resurrection of the etheric body, free of death and of the physical (1905-06-05-GA093)
  • for Man's future form in sixth and seventh epoch - formation of new organs and second spinal column, see Man past and future
  • Man will structurally function quite differently as today, as Man will:
    • acquire more influence over his physical corporeality (bring about the future form of his body) and 'live above his earthly portion'
    • will be able to draw his etheric body out of his physical body at will, and make sure of his denser part below on earth from outside like an instrument. Man will no longer bear his body about and live within it, but will float above it, the body will itself have become rarefied and finer. (1907-06-05-GA099)

Culture, leadership, continent

• at the time of the sixth epoch, Christianity will be expressed in its most complete form (1904-11-11-GA093)
• how the Sixth epoch will run its course in the various subages
  • is expressed symbolically in the Book of Revelation, and commented upon explicitly by Rudolf Steiner in various lectures, see the Schema FMC00.401 on D00.004 - Book of Revelation
• the connection with Manicheism, currently a preparatory stream, preparing the form for true Christianity in the sixth epoch; the sixth epoch will have "the task of drawing evil back into the continuing stream of evolution through kindness" and "communities who foster peace, love and passive resistance" (1904-11-11-GA093)
• a sufficient numbers of human souls will possess enough inner strength to make fruitful use of the forces of the Moon after the Reunion of the Moon: the good part of humankind will learn to use these Moon forces to transform the evil part so that it can participate in further evolution as a distinct earthly kingdom (1910-GA013)
• leadership of mankind for the first time by a fully human Manu, "a Man, and the most advanced among men" whereas before they were and are supersensible Individualities who developed on other planets (1904-10-07-GA093, 1904-10-28-GA092)
• Men will sing the praises of a fleshless diet, for it will then be an ancient memory that the ancestors in olden days actually ate flesh. (1915-11-07-GA254)

Father impulse

• Rudolf Steiner's drawing in Schema FMC00.185 (see below) talks about the important third impulse in Man's transformation and spiritualization
  • the nature of this Father impulse is discussed on Mysteries of the Spirit, the Son and the Father#.5B2.5D - About the Father impulse
  • in the sixth age of the Sixth epoch, the Book of Revelation makes mention of a cohort of souls that will have spiritualized to the degree that they make up the new unified group soul of humanity, see Mystical Lamb (oa FMC00.384). This cohort is constituted from twelve subgroups and referred to in the Book of Revelation as the '144.000', as discussed on the discussion page D00.004 - Book of Revelation.

Earth, kingdoms, continent

• transition to new emerging continent - see Earthquakes and emergence continent sixth epoch
• the outer face of the Earth itself will have changed much (1915-11-07-GA254)
• certain species of animals will have disappeared from the Earth: especially those which have acquired the most inflexible forms; also those animals which are nowadays consumed as food, will have died out. (1915-11-07-GA254)
• an important 'cosmic' event of meteorite rain that will have an effect on the spiritualization of the most advanced souls, see point c) in the Discussion section on Mysteries of the Spirit, the Son and the Father#.5B2.5D - About the Father impulse

Other

• how the world will look"What the materialistic world-conception [worldview of mineral science] describes regarding Man is not a fallacy only; it would/will become actual fact if this world-conception were to gain the day". (for an explanation see the lecture: 1915-11-07-GA254)
• festival of Pentecost as a pointer towards the sixth epoch
• the Reunion of Moon is timed approximately for the end of the current fifth epoch or the start of the Sixth epoch, and this will have a major impact (oa on procreation as birth will no longer take place in the ordinary way)
• although it can be suggested and speculated the Reunion of the Sun could already happen at the end of the Sixth epoch, the various sources on the topic page time it to the Seventh epoch

Illustrations

Schema FMC00.169A shows the selection from one epoch that forms the basis or 'seed material' for a new start in the next epoch.

Schema FMC00.092 sketches the natural timeline of anticipated development of the throat chakra. Note the link with the twelve subraces or cultural ages represented by the twelve apostles, that end with the second cultural age of the sixth epoch. 1906-10-04-GA091 describes this exact period for the Christ to come fully into power and humanity starts to understand Christ. See also: Development of chakras

Schema FMC00.185 is a drawing by Rudolf Steiner in a letter to Marie von Sivers (GA262).

Regarding the Father impulse, see Mysteries of the Spirit, the Son and the Father#.5B2.5D - About the Father impulse

Schema FMC00.402 is taken from D00.004 - Book of Revelation (more info on that page) as an illustration of the Sixth epoch being the epoch where the Christ Impulse comes to full fruition, as in "Christianity will be expressed in its most complete form" (1904-11-11-GA093)

The divine being with a bow on the white horse is the son of God, who will come as a king (hence wearing a crown) to bring the revelation of what is in the book of the seven seals (see the two right illustrations). The horse with raised forefoot (see illustrations) will step with the forefoot on a snake, representing all of the lower nature that falls off. The upper right picture illustrates Rudolf Steiner's words.

Lecture coverage and references

1904-10-07-GA093

It is only during the fifth epoch that the development is beginning to take place of such Manus as are akin to ourselves; who have risen, as it were, from the ranks of humanity. We have men, therefore, who are already great masters and advanced leaders of humanity, and we have those who are striving to become such. In the fifth epoch we have chelas and masters who have experienced all that can be undergone by human beings only since the middle of the Lemurian epoch.

One of these great masters who are leaders of the fifth epoch is predestined to take over the leadership of the sixth epoch. The sixth epoch will be the first great epoch to have as its Manu one who is a brother to earthly man.

The earlier masters, the Manus from other worlds, are handing over their leadership to a fellow human being.

1904-10-28-GA092 (SWCC)

In the course of our fifth epoch and the time between the end of the Atlantean and the beginning of the next Sixth epoch, an advance in human evolution of the highest importance will be made. The Leaders of mankind, their Manus, will arise in mankind itself.

None of the great leaders who brought men forward, who gave them their important impulses during the earlier epochs (or 'root races'), went through their own evolution entirely on the earth. They underwent it in part on other planets, and thus they brought from other worlds the great impulses they had to give to the earth. The Manus of the Lemurian and Atlantean epochs, as well as the Manu of our current fifth epoch, are supersensible individualities, who underwent the sublime schooling which enabled them to become the leaders of mankind, on other planets.

But during the current fifth epoch (and root race), highly developed human individualities have trained themselves so that from the sixth epoch onward, they will be capable of becoming the Leaders of mankind. The Leader of the Sixth Root Race, in particular, will be a man as we are, only one of the most advanced, indeed the most advanced among men.

He will be a being who began his development when incarnation started, approximately in the middle of Lemuria, one who has always been a man among men, only he was able to advance more rapidly, and one who has gone through every stage of human evolution. This will be the fundamental characteristic of the Manus of the sixth epochs. Such beings have to undergo all kinds of Initiation, to be initiated again and again. Hence the fifth epoch from its outset has always had Initiates, men who were so initiated as to enable them to walk their own freely willed path. This was not the case during the Lemurian nor even in Atlantean epoch. In both the Lemurian and Atlantean epochs, those who helped mankind forward, those who ruled and guided mankind, those who were political leaders and leaders of great religious communities, were under the influence of and directly dependent upon higher beings, beings who had gone through their own development on other planets.

It is not until the fifth root race that mankind is left free. Then we have Initiates who have a connection with higher beings, but to whom such comprehensive guidance is not given. More and more freedom is allowed to the Initiates of the fifth epoch in matters of detail. Guidance is given along general lines, not only to the Initiates but to those who are stimulated by them. Impulses are given to them but yet in such a way that it is out of their own spirituality that they have to carry things out.

...

At the beginning of the sixth epoch an influence will have developed, not in higher spheres, but in the sphere of the present-day conscious mind; in the fifth epoch this influence is still in its infancy, but it is nevertheless already developing. It is something which emanates from the musical element. For the fifth epoch music will be not merely art, but the means of expression for quite other things than the purely artistic. Here is something that points to the influence of a specific principle on the physical plane.

The most significant impulse by those directly initiated in the fifth epoch will, to begin with, be given solely in the sphere of music. What has to flow in is not astral, but it is something of great significance in the sphere of the mental life of the fifth epoch. It is something that the human intelligence will come to recognise as important, something which has been called the Kundalini fire. It is a force which today still slumbers in man, but which will gradually gain more and more importance. Today it already has a great importance upon what we perceive through the sense of hearing. During the further development in the sixth cultural age of the fifth epoch the Kundalini fire will acquire great influence on what lives in the human heart. The human heart will really have this fire. At first this seems to be mere symbolism but man will then really be permeated by a force which will live in his heart, so that during the sixth epoch he will no longer make a distinction between his own well-being and the well-being of the whole. So deeply will man be permeated by the Kundalini fire! He will follow the principle of love as his own innermost nature.

1904-11-02-GA089

[Man in the Polarian epoch] ... had only this one sense, to perceive the movement of the ether matter, just as later on, in the 6th epoch the human being will hear the 'trumpets' (re Book of Revelation), that is, the sounds of the spheres.

1904-11-11-GA093 makes the connection of Manicheism as a preparatory stream, preparing the form for true Christianity in the sixth epoch

What are Mani's intentions, what is the meaning of his statement that he is the Paraclete, the Spirit, the Son of the Widow? It means no less than that he intends to prepare for the time in which the men of the sixth Root Race will be guided out of their own being, by their own soul's light, to overcome outward forms and convert them to spirit.

Mani's intention is to create a spiritual current which goes beyond the Rosicrucian current, which leads further than Rosicrucianism. This current of Mani's will flow over to the sixth Root Race and has been in preparation since the founding of Christianity. It is just at the time of the sixth Root Race that Christianity will be expressed in its most complete form. Its time will truly have come. The inner Christian life, as such, overcomes every form, it is propagated by external Christianity and lives in all forms of the various confessions. Whoever seeks Christian life will always find it. It creates forms and destroys forms in various religious systems. It does not depend upon a search for conformity in the outward forms in which it is expressed, but it depends upon experiencing the inner life stream which is always current under the surface.

What is still waiting to be made is a form for the life of the sixth Root Race. That must be created beforehand, it has to be there so that Christian life can be poured into it. This form has to be prepared by human beings who create an Organisation, a form, so that the true Christian life of the sixth Root Race can find its place therein. And this external form of society must derive from the intention which Mani has fostered, from the small group whom Mani has prepared. That must be the outer form of Organisation, the congregation in which the spark of Christianity will first be truly kindled.

From this you will be able to conclude that Manicheism will endeavour, first and foremost, to preserve purity in outer life; for its aim is to produce human beings who will provide an adequate vessel in the future. That is why such great stress was laid on absolute purity of mind and of life.

The Cathars were a sect which rose like a meteor in the twelfth century. They called themselves Cathars because 'cathar' means 'pure one'. They strove for purity in their way of life and in their moral attitude. They had to seek catharsis (purification) both inwardly and outwardly in order to form a community which would provide a pure vessel. That is what Manicheism was striving for. It was less a question in Manicheism of the cultivation of the inner life — for life will flow onwards through other channels — but rather the cultivation of the external form of life.

What is to come about during the sixth Root Race: Good and evil will then contrast very differently from the way that they do today. What will be evident to all mankind in the fifth Round — that the outer physiognomy which each one acquires will directly mirror what Karma has made out of him — that will express itself spiritually in the sixth Root Race like a prelude to this event. Among those on whom Karma has bestowed an excess of evil, it will become particularly evident on a spiritual level. On the one hand there will be human beings possessing mighty inner forces of good, who will be gifted with great love and goodness; but, on the other hand, the opposite will also be seen. Evil will be present as a disposition without any disguise in a great many people, no longer cloaked or hidden from view. The evil ones will extol evil as something of particular worth. A glimmering of this delight in evil and the demonic pertaining to the sixth Root Race is already in evidence in certain men of genius. The unalloyed evil must be cast out of the stream of world evolution like dross. It will be relegated to the eighth sphere. Today we stand immediately at the threshold of a time when good must consciously come to terms with evil.

The sixth Root Race will have the task of drawing evil back into the continuing stream of evolution through kindness. Then a spiritual current will have been born which does not oppose evil, even though it manifests in the world in its demonic form. The consciousness will have been established in the successors to the 'Sons of the Widow' that evil must be included again in evolution and be overcome, not by strife, but only through charitableness. It is the task of the Manichean spiritual stream forcefully to prepare for this. This spiritual stream will not die out, it will make its appearance in many forms. It appears in forms which many can call to mind but which need not be mentioned today. If it were to function merely in the cultivation of an inner mood of soul, this current would not achieve what it should do. It must express itself in the founding of communities which, above all, will look upon peace, love and passive resistance to evil as their standard of behaviour and will seek to spread this view. For they must create a receptacle, a form, for the life which will continue to exist even without their presence.

1904-12-30

Not until the Sixth epoch will it become possible, and then only gradually, for the human body to receive into itself the Christ Principle from childhood onwards. Only then, in the Sixth Root Race, will mankind have reached such maturity that the body will not need years of preparation but will be able from the beginning, to receive the Christ Principle ..

.. In the Sixth Root Race it will be possible for a man to place his body at the disposal of a sublime Being, as did Jesus of Nazareth when Christianity was founded. ..

.. The task of Christianity is fulfilled in the Sixth Root Race, when material existence will be fraught with sacramentalism and sacramental deeds.

1905-03-30-GA053

the principal race which follows ours has substantially different qualities. In the middle of that period it produces a human race which does not penetrate the physical world as deeply as ours and which casts off the uni-sexuality and becomes hermaphrodite

1905-06-05-GA093 makes the link with Pentecost

When the sun separated itself from the earth, the Word became entombed in the earth. It will be resurrected again when the earth has advanced as far as the Sixth epoch. Man will raise this Word from the dead, out of the earth; but first the spirit must live in him that will enable the Word to strike a chord in him. This was attained by the apostles at Pentecost.

In Light on the Path we find the words: 'Acquire knowledge and you will have speech.' Speech comes with true knowledge, which descends like the tongues of fire on the apostles at holy Pentecost.

When the inner Word comes, that is akin to the holy divine Word, and that sinks down into everything etheric, so as to make it come alive, then man will no longer speak out of himself but out of the divine Spirit. He is then the messenger of the Godhead and proclaims the inner Word of Godhead of his own free will.

Thus did the inner Word become alive in the apostles; thus did it spread its influence outwards from them. They proclaimed the fiery Word and were aware of their role as the messengers of the Godhead. Therefore the Holy Spirit hovered over them in the form of fiery tongues. They prepare humanity to receive the Logos. The great initiate, Christ Jesus, went on in advance. The Holy Spirit followed, fertilising the astral bodies so that they would become ripe for making their etheric bodies immortal. Once this has happened, then the Christ Principle will be drawn into humanity. This is what the initiates too had in mind when they said, somewhat as Heraclitus did: If, in escaping from the earthly, you ascend to free ether, with faith in immortality, you become an immortal spirit, free of death and of the physical.

Every single person will reach this point in the middle of the Sixth epoch. Today man is still vulnerable to death, in that his etheric body has still not attained immortality. Christianity contains the secret of how man can gradually develop himself towards the resurrection of the etheric body. This is where the third great festival is connected with the other two Christian festivals.

190X-XX-XX-GA097 (extract to be completed)

The Sixth epoch will see

• quite another race, noble and beautiful,
• in contrast to the thrown off [i.e., retrograde humans, bad souls], decadence which will be a race of men, horribly ugly, animal-like, sensual, vicious, far more horror-provoking than our present humanity, because these will go on developing downwards.

1907-06-05-GA099 contains an outlook which is not specifically timed but well relevant for the future races.

[referring to earlier epochs .. ] .. the effect of this influence was that the human being could work much more creatively on his body. At the same time the body was also more soft and yielding. There was a time when you could not merely stretch out your hand, when you could not only point with the finger, but when you could send your will into your hand, and so form it that you could thrust out the fingers as continuations. There was a time when the foot was not yet permanent but could be extended as a continuation when man needed it. Thus through the pictures which he received from the surrounding world man shaped his own body.

Today in our material age this moulding is unimaginably slow, but a time will come again when it will proceed more rapidly. In the future man will again acquire more influence over his physical corporeality. We shall see when we consider Initiation by what means he gains this influence; although he may not reach it in one life, yet he will be able to do much for the next incarnation.

Thus it is man himself who will bring about the future form of his body. Inasmuch as the human being becomes softer and softer, inasmuch as he separates himself from the hard parts, he is approaching his future. An age comes when man will live above his earthly portion as it were, as in time gone by.

This condition, which is comparable to your present sleep-condition, will then be replaced by another when the human being will be able to draw his etheric body out of his physical body at will. It will be as if the denser part of man were here below on earth and the human being will make use of it from outside like an instrument. Man will no longer bear his body about and live within it, but will float above it, the body will itself have become rarefied and finer. That seems a fantastic idea today, but one can be distinctly aware of it from spiritual laws just as one reckons future eclipses of the sun and moon from the laws of astronomy.

1908-06-21-GA104 presents a pre-look into the division in good and evil races on Future Jupiter

We must distinguish between soul-development and race-development. No soul is undeservedly obliged to remain in an old body, no soul will undeservedly remain in a body belonging to our age. Those who hear the voice which calls them to progress will survive the great period of destruction — the War of All against All — and appear in new bodies which will be quite different from those of the present day.

For it is very short-sighted if one thinks of the Atlantean bodies of men as being like the present bodies. In the course of thousands of years the external physiognomy changes and after the great War of All against All Man will have quite a different form. Today he is so formed that in a certain sense he can conceal the good and evil in his nature. The human physiognomy already betrays a good deal, it is true, and one who understands this will be able to read much from the features. But it is still possible today for a scoundrel to smile most graciously with the must innocent man and or taken for an honest man; the reverse is also possible; the good impulses in the soul may remain unrecognized. It is possible for all that exists in the soul as cleverness and stupidity, as beauty and ugliness, to hide itself behind the general physiognomy possessed by this or that rare. This will no longer be the case in the epoch following the great War of All against All. Upon the forehead and in the whole physiognomy it will be written whether the person is good or evil. He will show in his face what is contained in his inmost soul. What a roan has developed within himself, whether he has exercised good or evil impulses, will be written on his forehead.

After the great War of All against All there will be two kinds of human beings.

• Those who had previously tried to follow the call to the spiritual life, who cultivated the spiritualizing and ennobling of their inner spiritual life, will show this inward life on their faces and express it in their gestures and the movements of their hands.
• And those who have turned away from the spiritual life, represented by the community of Laodicea, who were lukewarm, neither warm nor cold, will pass into the following epoch as those who retard human evolution, who preserve the backward forces of evolution which have been left behind. They will show the evil passions, impulses and instincts hostile to the spiritual in an ugly, unintelligent, evil-looking countenance. In their gestures and hand-movements, in everything they do, they will present an outer image of the ugliness un their soul.

Just as humanity has separated into races and communities, in the future it will divide into two great streams, the good and the evil. And what is in their souls will be outwardly manifest, they will no longer be able to hide it.

1910-GA013 - In OeS the Reunion of Moon with Earth and Sun is described but not timed explicitly

There will come a time when both the Earth and humanity have made such progress in evolution that the forces and beings that had to separate from the Earth during Lemurian times to enable earthly beings to continue to progress will be able to reunite with the Earth.

At that time, the Moon will reconnect with the Earth. This will happen because sufficient numbers of human souls possess enough inner strength to make these Moon forces fruitful for further evolution.

This will take place at a time when

• another development that has turned toward evil will be taking place
• alongside the high level of development reached by the appropriate number of human souls.

Souls whose development has been delayed will have accumulated so much error, ugliness, and evil in their karma that they temporarily form a distinct union of evil and aberrant human beings who vehemently oppose the community of good human beings.

In the course of its development, the good portion of humankind will learn to use the Moon forces to transform the evil part so that it can participate in further evolution as a distinct earthly kingdom.

Through the work of 'the good part of humanity', the Earth, then reunited with the Moon, will become able to reunite with the Sun after a certain period of evolution, and also with the other planets. After an interim stage that resembles a sojourn in a higher world, the Earth will transform itself into the Future Jupiter state.

1915-06-15-GA159 is about preparing for the sixth cultural age, it is added here because as the first sentence points out it is prepartion for the next great sixth epoch. The next cultural age will be the one to create the seeds for that next epoch. (SWCC)

Three characteristic traits we can carry in our hearts for the next sixth cultural age, as it is our task to prepare them for the sixth epoch.

1/ There is lacking in human society nowadays a quality that, in the sixth cultural age, will be a characteristic of those men who reach the goal of that age, and have not fallen short of it. It is a quality that will not be found among those who will have still remained at the stage of savages or barbarians.

One of the most significant characteristics of men living on the earth at the peak of culture in the sixth epoch, will be a certain moral quality. Little of this quality is perceptible in modern humanity. A man today must be delicately organized for his soul to feel pain when he sees other human beings in the world in less happy circumstances than his own. It is true that more delicately organized natures feel pain at the suffering that is so widespread in the world, but this can only be said of the people who are particularly sensitive.

In the sixth age, the most highly cultured will not only feel pain such as is caused today by the sight of poverty, suffering and misery in the world, but such individuals will experience the suffering of another human being as their own suffering. If they see a hungry man they will feel the hunger right down into the physical, so acutely indeed that the hunger of the other man will be unendurable to them.

The moral characteristic indicated here is that in the sixth age the well-being of the individual will depend entirely upon the well-being of the whole. Just as nowadays the well-being of a single human limb depends upon the health of the whole body, and when the whole body is not healthy the single limb is not up to doing its work, so in the sixth age a common consciousness will lay hold of the then civilized humanity and in a far higher degree than a limb feels the health of the whole body, the individual will feel the suffering, the need, the poverty or the wealth of the whole. This is the first preeminently moral trait that will characterize the cultured humanity of the sixth epoch.

2/ A second fundamental characteristic will be that everything we call the fruits of belief today will depend to a far, far higher degree than is the case today, upon the single individuality. Spiritual science expresses this by saying that in every sphere of religion in the sixth age, complete freedom of thought and a longing for it will so lay hold of men that what a man likes to believe, what religious convictions he holds, will rest wholly within the power of his own individuality. Collective beliefs that exist in so many forms today among the various communities will no longer influence those who constitute the civilized portion of humanity in the sixth cultural age. Everyone will feel that complete freedom of thought in the domain of religion is a fundamental right of the human being.

3/ The third characteristic will be that men in the sixth age will only be considered to have real knowledge when they recognize the spiritual, when they know that the spiritual pervades the world and that human souls must unite with the spiritual.

What is known as science today with its materialistic trend will certainly not be honored by the name of science in the sixth Postatlantean cultural age. It will be regarded as antiquated superstition, able to pass muster only among those who have remained behind at the stage of the superseded fifth cultural age.

Today we regard it as superstition when, let us say, a savage holds the view that no limb ought to be separated from his body at death because this would make it impossible for him to enter the spiritual world as a whole man. Such a man still connects the idea of immortality with pure materialism, with the belief that an impress of his whole form must pass into the spiritual world. He thinks materialistically but believes in immortality. We, today, knowing from spiritual science that the spiritual has to be separated from the body and that only the spiritual passes into the supersensible world, regard such materialistic beliefs in immortality as superstition.  Similarly, in the sixth cultural age all materialistic beliefs including science will be regarded as antiquated superstition.

Men as a matter of course will accept as science only such forms of knowledge as are based upon the spiritual, upon pneumatology.

The whole purpose of spiritual science is to prepare in this sense for the sixth cultural age. We try to cultivate spiritual science in order to overcome materialism, to prepare the kind of science that must exist in that age. We found communities of human beings within which there must be no dogmatic beliefs or any tendency to accept teaching simply because it emanates from one person or another. We found communities of human beings in which everything, without exception, must be built upon the soul's free assent to the teachings.

Herein we prepare what spiritual science calls freedom of thought. By coming together in friendly associations for the purpose of cultivating spiritual science, we prepare the culture, the civilization of the sixth cultural age.

But we must look still more deeply into the course of human evolution if we are fully to understand the real tasks of our associations and groups.

1915-10-31-GA254

During the sixth and seventh epochs, the rigidity of the etheric body will have a great influence upon the physical body and the physical body will become a faithful copy of the etheric. This will give rise to serious and important results. During the sixth cultural age of the Postatlantean evolution of the earth, the human beings will therefore be born with specially marked bodies, which will express their inner moral qualities. We shall then be meeting someone and we shall know what his moral constitution is like, for his outward appearance shall reveal it. In future, the MORAL physiognomy will be particularly conspicuous, whereas all those marks which now characterize the human physiognomy will be far less conspicuous.

1915-11-07-GA254 continues and complements the above description for the sixth and seventh cultural ages (SWCC)

the etheric body too will acquire firmer forms .. and as it passes with its fixed forms into the physical body, will assert itself very strongly.

... in these sixth and seventh epochs, the etheric body with its inflexibility will exercise a very strong influence upon the physical, and will make the physical body into a faithful image of itself.

This has momentous consequences: in the sixth epoch of post-Atlantean evolution, men will be born with bodies quite definitely expressing their inner, moral qualities. A man's moral qualities will be recognised from his actual appearance. The moral physiognomy will then be very strongly in evidence ..

In its external aspect, the surrounding world too will be much changed in this sixth epoch. Particularly those animals which are nowadays consumed as food, will have died out. Men will sing the praises of a fleshless diet, for it will then be an ancient memory that the ancestors in olden days actually ate flesh. It is not the case that all animals will die out, but only certain species of animals — especially those which have acquired the most inflexible forms will have disappeared from the earth. — So the outer face of the earth itself will have changed.

and goes on to describe that

We are actually tending in the direction of bringing the theories of the materialistic world-conception to fulfilment. They are not reality as yet — but that is the direction towards which we are tending...

... The materialistic world-conception may not be true, but for all that it contains an inner truth. Of this inner truth it can be said: What the materialistic world-conception describes regarding man would become actual fact if this world-conception were to gain the day. And it lies with men by means of a different world-conception, to prevent this materialism from being victorious. The matter is not so simple as to enable it to be said that the materialistic world-conception is false; the point is that it lies in the hands of men to gain the victory over it through deeds, not through feeble thoughts of refutation.

... This materialistic world-conception is not a fallacy only, it is conspiracy against the Spirit.

Beinsa Douno lectured extensively on the sixth epoch

The new era is that of the sixth race. Your predestination is to prepare yourself for it, to welcome it and to live it. The sixth race will build itself around the idea of Fraternity. There will be no more conflicts of personal interests; the single aspiration of each one will be to conform himself to the Law of Love. The sixth race will be that of Love. A new continent will be formed for it. It will emerge from the Pacific, so that the Most High can finally establish His place on this planet ..

... The wave of the sixth race is coming .. its members will be a transition between angels and humans .. they will be visionaries. It is the race of Love, which will impose the Kingdom of God on Earth. ..

... The main core of the sixth race will consist of the White Brothers who will come from above, but of course there will also be members also from today's people, but only the prepared ones. The elected people of all nations will get through to the sixth race and than we'll be able to speak of brotherhood and Love. ..

... So far man can only use 5 senses and the sixth race will have a sixth sense, and there are 6 more latent senses. When man fully completes his evolution, all his 12 senses will be developed to perfection.

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