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| The Fifth Seal: Anthropos-Sophia |
Rudolf Steiner, September 13, 1907:
"Today, man has a physical body, an etheric body, an astral body, and an ego. When the ego works upon the astral body, ennobling it intellectually, morally, and spiritually, then the astral body becomes the spirit self or manas. That has as of now hardly begun, but when in the future it will have been completed, when man will have transformed his whole astral body, then will his astral body become physically luminous. Just as the seed holds the whole plant within it, so does your astral body hold within it the seed of light. This will stream out into the world of space, its development and continuing formation effected by man as he ever more purifies and ennobles his astral body. Our Earth will transform itself into other planets. Today it is dark. Were one to observe it from space, then one would see that it appears bright only through the reflected light of the Sun. Someday, however, it will be luminous, luminous through the fact that human beings will then have transformed their whole astral bodies. The totality of astral bodies will stream out as light into world space, as it was also at the time of the Old Sun. It had higher beings at their human stage, and these beings had luminous astral bodies. The Bible, quite correctly, calls these beings Spirits of Light or Elohim.
What does a man work into his astral body? What we call goodness and common sense. If you observe a savage who is still on the level of a cannibal, blindly following his passions, you must say of him that he stands lower than the animals because the animal still has no understanding, no consciousness of his deeds. Man, however, even the lowest, already has an ego. The more highly educated person can be distinguished from the savage through the fact that he has already worked on his astral body. Certain passions he has so understood that he says to himself, “This one I may follow, this other I may not follow.” Certain urges and passions he fashions to more refined configurations, which he calls his ideal. He forms moral concepts. All these are transformations of his astral body. The savage cannot do arithmetic or make judgments. This property man has acquired through work on his astral body from incarnation to incarnation. What develops, as man gradually ennobles his present imperfect form to become that being of light of whom we spoke, is called the assimilation of wisdom. The more wisdom the astral body contains, the more luminous it will be. The Elohim, those beings who dwelt on the Sun, were wholly permeated with wisdom. Just as our souls relate to our bodies, so wisdom relates itself to light that streams out into cosmic space. You see, the relation between light and wisdom is not an image that has been contrived. It is based on fact. It is a truth. Thus is it to be explained that religious documents speak of light as a symbol of wisdom."
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Wisdom: The Virgin Mother
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Rudolf Steiner, September 16, 1907:
"Then the times approach in which great changes will occur in the cosmos. When the human being will have drawn the Sun power near, the Sun will again be united with the Earth. The human being will become a Sun-being and, through the power of the Sun, will give birth to a Sun; hence we see the woman who bears the Sun. At that point, humanity will be so moral, so ethical, that all the ruinous powers that lie in the lower human nature will be overcome. This is portrayed by the beast with seven heads and ten horns. At the feet of the Sun-woman is the Moon, which contains all the bad substances that the Earth could not use and which it has cast out. All the magic powers that the Moon still exerts upon the Earth today will be overcome. When human beings are united with the Sun, they will have overcome the Moon."
