"Descent into the Depths of the Earth" by Judith von Halle

"I am the way, the truth, and the life; no one comes unto the Father except through me." — John 14:6

"The descent through the earth layers by the spiritual pupil on his path of initiation follows in the footsteps of the Representative of Humanity. The latter penetrated the depts of the earth for humanity at the turning point of time. The Trinitarian being of God sent the Son God into a mortal human body out of inexpressible love for humanity, so that, by passing through death, He could penetrate into the realm of earth. Through this penetration of the earth realm, both the human race and the earth itself were to be given two seeds of redemption: on the one hand, the 'renewal' of the 'phantom' of the human body implanted in us as potential on Saturn--in other words the archetype of the physical body cleansed of the destructive influences of the adversaries; the resurrection body through which the human spirit could be prevented from succumbing to the death of matter. And on the other, the seed for the earth to become a future sun, through the fact that the Christ Sun left His cosmic dwelling and descended to the very core of the earth body.

The mission of the divine Son therefore lay in enabling the human being and the earth to evolve together in a reciprocal and mutually attuned way, so that the spiritualization of human nature goes hand in hand with spiritualization of the earth body. In future, therefore, the human being will be able to develop further in his physically spiritualized form on a correspondingly spiritualized earth body. Our further--which means higher--evolution, and with it the transformation of the earth, have been assigned to our free will since the Mystery of Golgotha. That this higher evolution can occur at all is due to Christ's sacrifice.

Yet in order to transform and enliven both the earth body and our own physical nature, the Christ being had to permeate all the layers of the earth and reach its innermost core, its center point. The deeper one descends into the earth, the further one returns to the deposits of its past evolution--or, rather, to the primal sources of its creation. This means that at the core of the earth the deposits from Saturn evolution can be found. As the Saturn state of our earth planet arose, the seed of the earth body was planted; equally, on Old Saturn, the germ of the physical human body was created. To transform and renew both these, the Christ being thererfore had to penetrate to the very core of the earth."



--Judith von Halle, Descent into the Depths of the Earth on the Anthroposophic Path of Schooling, pp. 72-75

Illustration: http://counselling-soniahomrich.blogspot.com/2014/07/anna-may-von-richter-rychter-grail.html