Rileybrad's Blog

“With the beginning of the critical analysis of the Bible and the rise of Darwinism in the nineteenth century, Christendom has been torn asunder on the issue of the origin of the human being. “Progressives,” Christians as well as others, and scientists have accepted its descent from the ape, while fundamentalists and anti-intellectuals have insisted on the doctrine of creationism. So the battle in the Scopes trial early in this century rages even today in school systems across the country. It would appear that we are at a most critical fork in the road both in our attempt to understand evolution and in our hope of reconciling the widely divergent views of it in science and religion.”

“The seven stone, four-foot tall female roamed forests 4.4 million years ago – a million years before the previous oldest discovered fossil.

“Her skeleton promises to fill in gaps about how we became human and evolved from apes. It has already reversed some common assumptions of evolution.”

[Throws up a skull.]

Ham. That skull had a tongue in it, and could sing once. How the knave jowls it to the ground, as if it were Cain’s jaw-bone, that did the first murder! It might be the pate of a politician, which this ass now o’erreaches; one that would circumvent God, might it not?
Hor. It might, my lord.
Ham. Or of a courtier, which could say, “Good morrow, sweet lord! How dost thou, good lord?” This might be my lord such-a-one, that prais’d my lord such-a-one’s horse, when he meant to beg it; might it not?
Hor. Ay, my lord.
Ham. Why, e’en so; and now my Lady Worm’s; chapless, and knock’d about the mazzard with a sexton’s spade. Here’s fine revolution, if we had the trick to see’t. Did these bones cost no more the breeding, but to play at loggats with’em? Mine ache to think on ’t”.

There are methods to understand the intersection where humanity or what we call actual humans intersected and integrated the spiritual faculties of human with the material substance of flesh and bone. With Ardi, we would love to imagine her as the great mother, the dreaming ancient ancestor to man, from her, man or humanity slowly gained their uprightness and then we would have to enjoy the treasure of the group soul of Ardi mothering and dreaming over the future human race that would eventually come forth and speak and think and understand and converse with the Angels.

All of this brought about in endless scholarly texts and National Geographic specials because we found remains of something that was once alive and lived in the same stream of evolution as humanity. Yes we know where this is going, Ardi celebrated like all those who have gone before her as the first Eve. Joining the infamous ranks of all the primal remains of the earliest upright mothers of humanity who had cradled and suckled and nursed infants and saw in dreams ancient and primal, the coming of the human race but had no tongue to express it.

“It is relatively complete in that it preserves head, hands, feet, and some critical parts in between.”

“Until the discovery of Ardi, the earliest well-known stage of human evolution was Australopithecus, the small-brained, fully bipedal “ape man” that lived between four million and one million years ago.

“The most famous Australopithecus fossil is the 3.2-million-year-old “Lucy,” found in 1974 about 45 miles north of where Ardi would later be discovered.

“Lucy was described as the “mother of man” and the missing link between humans and chimps. Before Ardi, she was thought to be the oldest fossil of a human ancestor that walked on two legs.”

Or we will have to start to grow up and start to consider how the path of the spirituality of humanity was carefully refined and that the stones, plants and animals over the entire earth were all released and started their evolutions prior to when the faculties and forces were available for the consciousness that would ultimately arise to support the form and stature of humanity.

It is hard to fathom that each Angel had volunteered out of the vast starry heavens to help plant the seed of each human destiny and slowly harvest each life through hundreds of incarnations until that human being was ready itself, as Buddha did, to outgrow the need for a physical body while able to use all it’s higher faculties. It is hard to fathom that the Angels had a destiny before humanity appeared and that our true animal status and progress had evolved under the supervision and conflicts of how the Angels evolved and had gone through their human phase before we even had consciousness.  How the mighty forces of our nervous system and 12 cranial nerves and astral bodies were set to the working of the mighty constellations and that each unfolding future human was the highest product of the evolution of the Angels in contributing and preparing for the appearance of material humanity ready to arise and go through their brutal and potent human phase, just as the Angels had before us.

It dumbfounds us that we can prattle with bones and inflate theories to be forced down the throats of future Anthropologists, when we can’t fathom that humanity, and the arrival of humanity had been prepared and that part of the immense evolution of the Angels, one phase above humanity,( NOW, right now the Angels are here as quiet nurturing giants one stage above each individual human being, next to us, with us, no matter how alone we feel) had also to go through their own vast human phase and struggle to contribute something profound for the future creation of Mankind.

The Angels had to endure a long, long development and their developments were a long struggle as ours are. They had to bring creation, not only their own, but the lower forms of creation, which included humanity, forward. All Beings in the hierarchy of beings, and in the lower range, below man, the animals, the plants and the stones, will all pass through their human phases as are we, and it ain’t pretty and it wasn’t pretty for the Angels either. They call this period before Man, A War in Heaven.

In other words, that which we designate, our human nervous system, is a unique upgrade that has in it everything that would make humanity a wholeness of TWELVEFOLDNESS and represent the ongoing work of the gods themselves, so that the human sense apparatus should be constructed from the Finished Formation of the model of the mighty Constellations and each, each human being coming off the assembly line would be endowed with TWELVE CRANIAL NERVES and an interior brain capacity that would have an inner eye, a pineal gland, and that each human child would arise in the material world with their own navigational map of THINKING capacities that were stamped with the [click link for “K-Pax” astral star world clip] individual time lock of the stars, form fitted to the individual spiritual capacities of the brain and heart or rather the soul and spirit that would grow into them.

You must never link such a vision as the Annunciation, where an Angel being visits a young girl named Mary, and connect in your thoughts that the Angels were participating in some of the greatest events, background and behind the scenes events, planning the time and moment of birth and nurturing and protecting their charges. You must never entertain the idea that Joan of Arc saw and worked with the great Archangel Michael, because there is no room, no room in your education to plot the course of how stone, plant, animal, human, Angel and Archangel are all part of the model of Creation and that humanity is made in the Image and working system of the divine and that Nature itself reveals the rising waves of creation.

Finally you must never consider that humanity will go through a struggle, our current embattled human phase, long and painful, where we will contribute to the higher unfolding of creation by lifting the lower beings that are waiting in animal, plant and stone. Our education, our standard models of education today do not permit you to think it all through and be enriched, focused and confident that we are not accidents and that the universe we live in is not an accident.

Even to understand how that inner I AM and the Twelve Cranial Nerves that we carry around with us as thought fields of intuition, are drawn up with the Sun Being, Christ, the Immortal, who gathered to him twelve different disciples as faculties and thousands of souls who have carried out the intuitions and systems of the divine into matter and thinking and culture, because the Christ was in essence the King of Angels and our Twelve Cranial Nerves are just a micro system to the intimate and magnificent system that Christ needed to hold the Sun Forces of his immense Love, radiating out into soul space, the way that HE had, as the Sun Being radiated out from the Twelve Constellations before HE became merged with Jesus, is a hack job with either university centered materialism or dogmatic and falsified creationism.  And the community of Angels beheld the revelation of Christ with deeper understanding than humanity knew.

We presume to follow back in time, a point where we  leap with excitement because we think we have discovered the link to our own human riddle. Our own ancestor Ardi. We are related closer to the Angels than to Ardi but that taxes the thinking ability of the stooges who presume to act as cheerleaders for gross materialism. The latest in a long line of over hyped hysterical discoveries is poor Ardi’s long foreclosed and exited bones. Ardi is a point where everyone now turns their full attention to examine if humanity, that carries an I AM that incarnates through time and whose Angel, our individual Angels, that have harvested and carried our immortal beings through hundreds of incarnations through time, shall we stand up and cheer and celebrate the soul evolution of finding the vacated bones of Ardi?

In terms of reincarnation, where is she now? How has her dream like consciousness or as we cleverly imagine, the same consciousness then as we have now evolved? Oh obviously we chortle, we can look down our noses at old Ardi because we are so highly clever today, we appear more evolved don’t we?  Are we so immensely thick witted that we cannot see how our design was in the making earlier and that we as humanity did not grow from a lower stunted capacity and stumble along and develop full blown higher capacities. It was pre-designed into our make-up. We were hard-wired for higher capacities, this was not accident of evolution, none of it was.  Meaning, yes there was an Evolution of Consciousness and an Evolution of Soul faculties and an Evolution of Body and Spirit faculties including the most striking advance the Christ Event at the mid-point of all this so called Evolution occurring on the Earth.

No there is an evolution of consciousness even from what might have been dim, dawning, ancient visionary consciousness. Something akin to Stanley Kubrick’s wet dream of the opening of “2001 a Space Odyssey”. How far back do we wish to go to experience the vague tribal dream consciousness of animal/human forms? How do you and our supposedly generous materialistic science wish to play this new Ardi card? What opportunities does Ardi present to expand our insights into the Evolution of humanity and lay one more brick on the tower of scientific Babel that is the Darwinian theory? Will it reach to the stars, is it thinkable and usable? When the Angels were in their human phase were we the troublesome animals that needed to be aligned with the divine?

Will humanity celebrate the Evolution of Consciousness, seek out the changes in the soul constitution of human beings as they have progressed through time?  Will they be able to rightly assess the current Information and Intellectual culture we are so proud of and place it within the context of the vast sweeping developments that include both Angels and Humanity?  Yes they can. Will they? Most will avoid thinking it through until well past the end of their sorry intellectual lifetimes of silly chatter. We are entrenched and comfortable with beliefs that cannot be squared with reality.

Well lets get right to the point, materialistic Anthropology, like dunces, like donkeys, wish to keep our thinking bottled up in a certain sphere of grave digging for secrets of humanity. Hamlet indeed had lived; Alexander the Great  lived; Aristotle has lived; Plato has lived; Hypatia has lived; Joan of Arc has lived; St. John known as Lazarus has lived; Mary Magdalene has lived; Mary mother of Jesus has lived; Jesus/Zarathustra has lived; Hitler has lived; Harry Truman has lived; Mark Twain has lived; Goethe has lived; Francis Bacon has lived; Darwin has lived; and consciousness and the individual I Am of all of us as well, have developed and moved forward in time.

The human form has been a special project of the gods. Naturally the lumbering scientific soul can’t imagine that our own human consciousness is evolving toward a higher field of cosmic intelligence. Angelic Consciousness can easily look as Spielberg’s “A.I.” or as winged spirits whose winged shoulders reflect our stunted shoulder blades, are for the higher beings a model that surrounds the human heart, of a vast musical listening organ for collecting potential intuitions and synchronistic destiny events, that surround us and can be used to allow changes to arise in our hearts. Our Angels cover a vast panorama of destiny patterns and the musical structure of each human biography and integrate star moments and Time planning in the incarnation of every human being. Their job description is vaster and wider than our pea-brained shrunken memories, yet they weave intimately in our every breath and pulse beat.

That indeed for the Angelic Community, the unfolding of the seed of higher intelligence is in our human hearts as a thinking force that will out grow the chest cavity and change into a being, beyond material measurements, just as Angels and our Evolution of Consciousness can hardly be measured by the clumsy failed intuitions we are forced to think with if we get a university education today. The only thing measured are our current I.Q.’s and how much we adhere to the dogmas of materialism and how much we fail to approach the vast understanding of our ancestors and how our human forms and our Consciousness have truly evolved.

Ah but for all intents and purposes everyone wants you to hold fast to the thought that man is certainly animal. So little in the form of higher aspects appear and so little is studied or taken seriously. Any concrete connections to a phase above the human being that humanity can attain to is overshadowed by the density of the argument of how we carry all the animal instinctual baggage of karmic weights and all the species of the animal kingdom around with us, so that any attempt to look into the human being and see how it carries the immortal incarnating system in it’s nature, is merely brushed aside for the hopes that the riddle of man can be anchored to the instinctive remains of the beasts of the earth.  And the struggle to lift creation upwards again will certainly be humanities payback to creation, for creation going through travail waiting for the awakening of humanity.

Yet indeed humanity does carry the whole stone, plant and animal kingdoms as part of its vast and intimate connections to the Earth. Yet we would be hard pressed to examine Ardi’s ancient bones in order to unriddle that which grows upwards into the Divine.

The following visualization will probably help clarify the complex concept:

Let us imagine that the ‘essence of human’ is present, The I AM, the faculties and forces that the Angels had worked and preserved descends slowly in a large vast sealed field of cosmic forces, like the circle and a balloon floating slowly towards it’s destined intersection with matter and forms already prepared, yet full of all the complexity of soul that the Angels had bequeathed to humanity. Forms from the hexagonal crystal and bee honeycomb to the five star flowers, butterflies and insects to hoofs, paws and claws becoming hands, four chambered hearts, fish fins that are stunted hands and shoulder bladed wings of birds, without hands and bats whose fleshy fingers and arms have become wings, are all prepared ahead of the arrival of the delicate baby who has no instant animal skills or abilities but is the refined wholeness of the whole.

And we can picture these mighty form forces slowly coming towards an intersection with the material developments already in preparation and progress below.  There is a visible Darwinian and Evolutionary line that is developing and these forms from stones, plants, animals, have come down in formative stages ahead of humanity in preparation for the immense mystery of the coming Formative Being, the coming I AM of Man.

Such a mighty chain of creation had to be prepared before it could link up and many lower forms had to arise in ever greater complexity before the arrival of the HUMAN, just as Darwin had insisted. However this does not mean that humans arose and grew out of these lower forms but rather these earlier forms were shed from the descending complex system of bones, complex lymph glands and vast nature forces of plants that are, even today, potent healers and poisons that become the specialized forces of  insects, snakes and animal skills. They each with their own specialized forms are given a special spot in the chain of creation.

Humanity waited until the times of specialization-the descent of the animal kingdom—were over before descending into mineral form, though vestiges of all animals remain in human nature (which is the meaning of Noah’s taking a pair of all animals into the ark, the post-Atlantean human body [see Gen 6,19-7,3]; it is also implicit in the “wild beasts” in Christ’s temptation experience [Mk 1,13]9).

Nowhere have I found these principles, as they apply to human evolution, more ably expressed than in Hermann Poppelbaum’s Man and Animal (MAA), published in 1931. Poppelbaum  (CLICK LINK) was already a capable biological scientist when he had a fateful meeting with Rudolf Steiner in 1921 and a whole new world conception opened to him. A portion of his expression of it follows:

During the Azoic era the solid mineral matter of the earth is separated off for the first time. But it can only be taken up by those beings who are most backward in evolution; hastening ahead of the others, they “embody” themselves in the new substantiality. Thus the minerals appear as the first solidified kingdom on the earth. The remaining kingdoms, though already existent in rich variety and even at this stage divided into plant and animal and differentiated into types [he is here elaborating Gen 1,9-25, all of which existed in etheric form before taking on substantiality beginning with Gen 2,4b], still resist solidification. Their archetypes have remained behind hitherto in the more plastic elementary kingdoms; now, as they begin little by little to incorporate the solid elements, they take form as those organisms which belong to the great order of invertebrates. These were previously already differentiated as to their essential being, and their separation into types was an accomplished fact before the mineralization of their bodily form set in [“according to their kind”-Gen 1,11,12,21,24,25]. And here we have the answer to one of the great riddles of paleontology:—the plasticity of the ancestral forms and the lack of true intermediate forms able to relate the chief types in the geological records. The ancestral forms did indeed exist in bodily shape,—but they were of the finer substantiality which Rudolf Steiner has described as belonging to pre-earthly conditions, composed of the elements of warmth, air and water, without as yet having absorbed any solid matter. This supplies the reason for that mutability which has up to now completely baffled research. At the same time, we see why no impressions nor remains of them could be left in the earth’s crust. . . . The germs of the future human body are among those forms which resist densification.

Poppelbaum  (CLICK LINK) goes on through the various geologic ages describing the evolution of the Earth and its inhabiting kingdoms. But running as a thread through it all is the plasticity that exists in the succeeding stages until those stages take on materiality. Thereupon they become imprisoned in their form, and what takes place in that form thereafter is a higher specialization and imprisonment. The animal is thus far more efficient in its speciality than the human being. But the human being remained plastic until the last, unspecialized, and could thus, at the “right time,” take on materiality in a form that would permit it to receive self-awareness, “the I Am.”Time and time again,” Poppelbaum says, “on the long path of evolution it has been this quality of remaining plastic which has made steady advance possible for man.”

But Man was to be all this, yet thinking, speaking and neither fixed into one talent from birth, not fixed into one attribute, but able to be all things, the entire compendium of nature was to be reserved and filtered of limitations for the most refined best, reserved by the higher beings, so that all of the nature forces were drawn earlier into specialized forms. Each individual human being was to carry it’s own limitations but not limitation imposed upon it from without, but rather carried as it’s limitations, potentials and skills from within.

Humanity was to be the bearer of Soul, and Spirit and our design was the shining crystallization and distillation of all of creations work.  Man was to step into the Tenth Hierarchy, one stage below the Angels, and he would have the cognitive forces, the delicacy and the strength to eventually consolidate and grow in Freedom out of his animality.  Darwin was close, but the model I am presenting is visually far more accurate. There are far more accurate studies that show the full unfolding but your teachers and professors are too cowardly, too materialistic and too stubborn to think it through and offer further research. They themselves would be required to consider the Science of the Spirit in relation to their pet theories on materialism.

Our majestic ‘human essence’,  the rare and unique model we are presenting needs to develop in certain definite directions of refinement before the balloon lands  or intersects on earth with the immortal model that represents humanity. And long before humanity finally arrives, the specialized forces of hexagonal crystal, plants with wondrous virtues and star forces that may heal or poison have already appeared in specialized animal and nature forms.

When we take the crystal with it’s interior hexagonal structural field of light, and we see how the plant inverts and turns inside out from the crystal forms, so that we see how the plants now seek the outer light once more, but with soft sensitive light geometry open to the sun, and these plants are spread out as vegetation and blossoms and fruits, so we are able to understand the dynamic that reverses the entire plant kingdom and insect kingdom and shifts it, as it is spread out before us in space and is turned inside out once again.

Again as the animal arrives, once more the system is spread out and inverted from the outer plants to the various internalized animal forms and inner organs that have bony skeletal systems, lymphatic systems like the plant and nervous systems, still not able to learn with the tongue and thoughts of Angels. But the animals are finished, done, complete turned in reverse from the specialized forces of the plants, the animals are imprisoned in their limitations, their finished skill sets, while humanity arrives after having all the limiting forces and specialized forces shed so it arrives with only it’s inner slate of unknown spiritual capacities. We can recognize this in the vulnerability of a new born baby.

Babies arrive before us completely vulnerable with no skill sets. Human babies arrive with the starry glow of heaven still in their eyes and we cannot determine what mystery and what powers they have brought with them or if life will allow them to develop at all.

The balloon floats closer to the earth and the pathway of the child from the divine into human form is a descent into matter and form. There is indeed a stairway to heaven and a stairway, stage by stage down from heaven into the material world where the star child enters the watery sensory deprivation tank of the womb.

In the mighty model of evolution the moment of landing for humanity is constantly postponed because elements  and parts of this majestic human essence of all that we are separates off and lands in the visible Darwinian revelation of the unfolding of species. But each human being is an I Am, a Species unto itself.  Each human being and Angel carry with it the ever developing education and perfection through incarnation after incarnation and connected in all by the immortal forces of the I Am and the Anatomical Miracle we call the bodily forces that now carry the Immortal essence through ages of time and reincarnates ever and again in different learning settings, but is always itself, it’s own, it is a species and an individual unto itself wearing the uniform code design of Human. And calling itself I. No other creature can call itself I for each human is a species unto itself.

Many elements are successively emitted in the Evolutionary preliminary chain of being: starting with the minerals, then plants, invertebrates, fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds, mammals, primates and finally humans. There are two parallel levels on this development: the spiritual essence (= the balloon model that is descending to intersect with matter, forms and the earth) and the physical instrument, the Human Sitar that is played by the divine, Man as Symphony of the entire Creative Word appears.

The hardened forms evolve each in their own earthly way. When the plants and animals have arrived on the earth, is when the process begins Darwin calls ‘Evolution’. Steiner and Poppelbaum complete what Darwin brought. Neither Poppelbaum or Rudolf Steiner exclude Darwin’s theory and the model we offer does not exclude the brilliant evolutionary observations that Darwin has made either.

But humanity has a vast invisible family from which it has been designed and this is the part that plays itself out in humanity and human beings that is the Image of God.  Even though the hexagonal, and star forms run through nature, stones, plants and animals, The Tenth Hierarchy, humanity appears and only slowly cloths itself in the deliberately modified forms that had arrived before and prepared the way for the coming of that which shall remember and shall think, speak and know the wisdom of Angels and of Men.

The existing animal forms are the result of centuries of  limiting and acute specialization. Every animal is a specialist Under these early human forms we reckon the Peking Man (360.000 BC), the Pithecanthropus (100.000 BC) and Neanderthals (75.000 BC). The current man comes not from these precursors and certainly not from the ape men, nor from Ardi, as it could become clear if we didn’t limit our thinking to such stale materialism that is taught instead of the merging wonder of how Spirit shaped matter and integrated it into vast categories of beings and types that are laid out before us in the book of Nature Herself. Our blunt education prevents us from reading the brilliance in the book of nature herself. We want to laugh at the monkey’s because we don’t want to feel the shame of our Angels.

When all these precursors of humanity arrived in the visible world, using the imagery of the descending balloon containing the higher, reserved forces of the vulnerable unknown human essence, there was only one form left. The shocking reality is that this latter form occurs and slips down gradually into the visible world around 50,000 BC. This is what is finally unveiled in what we call the arrival of the homo sapiens.

According to Rudolf Steiner, these first human forms were as thin as the scent of a flower. The materializing process continues now with direct intervention from the forming of Seven different planetary forces that run through the great mystery of Atlantis itself, which finally lands and disturbs the foundations of the world enough that shattering volcanoes and earthquakes bring about the sinking of the Seven Atlantean Mystery Centers and the Great Flood that is depicted in Noah legends cover over the isles that once received the finished forms of humanity.

“With the Atlantean epoch begins the history and pre-history of man. This was the time, first of the oracle and later in the post-Atlantean epoch, of the mystery centers; from which all civilization comes forth. The post-Atlantean sub-epochs, of which ours is the fifth, have it as their task to develop, from the original clairvoyance of man, clear objective consciousness, and from the tribe-bound will of early times to evolve the free activity of self-conscious individuality.

“In the reluctance, so to speak, of Atlantean (Tertiary) man to proceed to mineralization, we perceive the secret of the absence of older traces of man in the geological record, and of their sudden appearance in the Diluvial (Glacial) periods. This solves the darkest problem of evolution, one which has presented extraordinary difficulties to Natural Science and provided the opponents of the theory of evolution with a welcome argument.

“In the later Atlantean Epoch then, when the descending spiritual and soul powers of man united with the ascending physical vehicle, the spiritual and the physical processes of evolution come into contact. The human “I” is now received as a kernel into the matured sheath of the body.Before this the bodily development was only a kind of shadow of the soul and spiritual kingdom; now the two halves have united to form a single process.”

Slowly the physical body materializes down to cartilage. Then there is a hardening till the current hardness we carry is achieved. If you think back in time, keeping in mind that the bones were still soft, fossil remains of humanities true ancestors may never be found. Cartilage, or soft material, now has been lost and didn’t fossilize as harder, denser bodies and forms that we found, have.

The anthroposophical evolution model, drawn by Hermann Poppelbaum, as it appeared in Mensch und Tier (1928).

Firstly finding old bones is very similar to Hamlet’s astonishment, and sarcasm when one of the greatest heroes of the Earth, Alexander the Great, was known to have walked the Earth and Hamlet supposes to Horatio, what if we had found his old bones. Suppose we found Christ’s old bones. Suppose we found Julius Caesar’s old bones. We can go to grave upon grave and dig up all the bones we wish, or all the Ardi’s we can find in Ethiopia or Africa and declare, that these bones tell us nothing about the soul structure that the Angels cared for, that existed in the higher being of the human who wore those old bones at one time. Those bones were laid to rest and the soul has moved on.

>We have here the most graphic portrayal of the principle “the first shall be last, and the last shall be first.” The first (earthly being) in the spiritual world was the human being, who came last into materiality, while the first into materiality (the mineral kingdom) will be the last ultimately redeemed (spiritualized) from the material world (cf. Rom 8,19-23). In no true sense can the human being be said to have evolved from any of the lower kingdoms. The converging lines in Poppelbaum’s diagram result from the active agency of the descending “I Am,” being at one and the same time both the germinal human soul and the descending Christ (the “image” and “likeness”). While all of the three lower kingdoms are in some way reflected in the human being’s makeup,both physical and sensate, those elements remained plastic in the human so as not to predominate or entrap, but to be mastered and purified by the human being over time as it seeks on Earth the perfection of its own “I Am,” its merging with and into the higher “I AM” of Christ.

“Kranich, a paleontologist and biologist as well as anthroposophist, shows in his Thinking Beyond Darwin (TBD) how the Goethean idea of the archetypal form must be applied, and how it emerges from the workings of the soul, the “I AM.” He threads the process through the transitions from class to class, from fish to amphibian, from amphibian to reptile, from reptile to mammal, and from mammal to human. The “I AM” is always there in the course of physical evolution, pulling the form forward until the time is right for the “I AM” to enter. Kranich’s work is highly cognate to Poppelbaum’s, and in fact he says near the end, “I could conclude our considerations at this point with the reference to Poppelbaum and Kipp, were it not for several new aspects that have emerged in the foregoing discussion” (relative to the “main trunk of vertebrate phylogeny”).

The Soul and Spirit are carried by our Angels, upwards into the vast stars, from a contracted vessel of flesh and bone, who thought, dreamt and spoke or grunted, as a dense concentrated center. But after death, the soul and the precise systems of the universe take our time of death as a mark point and we are entered into the mighty gates of the starry clock of heaven with it’s life and memories, it’s experiences, it’s Life Tableau, Life Review. Our jam packed lives are reviewed in wisdom filled beauty by the Angelic world who stands one stage above humanity. Each human being has an Angel that celebrates and harvests the life we have just lived. And so what if it was Ardi or Alexander the great, the bones will tell us very little about the soul who wore those bones. Such insights are part of the Evolution of Human Intelligence into a higher faculty.

Rudolf Steiner and Spiritual Anthropology 101

“If we go back from the point in Atlantis when the Europeans and North American Indians were still united with one another, we arrive at a period when the human body was still comparatively soft, of jelly-like substance. There again we see beings branch off and stand still. These bodies develop further, but in a descending line; and out of them originate the apes. We cannot say that man originates from the ape, but both, man and ape, spring from a form which was common to both but was quite different in shape from either the present ape or the present man. The branching off took place at the point where it was possible for this original form to ascend on the one hand and to descend on the other and become a caricature of man. We will only follow the theory of the origin of species as far as is necessary to find the connection with what has been said in former lectures.

Among the old Atlanteans the etheric body was still partly outside the physical body. To-day the astral body is still outside the physical body during sleep; it is only during sleep, therefore, that man is now able to conquer the tiredness of the physical body, because his astral body is then outside the physical body and is thus able to work upon it. Further influences on the physical body are now no longer possible, but remnants of these influences can still be seen in such phenomena as reddening with shame, growing pale with fear and terror, etc. But the further we go back in the Atlantean Epoch and the more the etheric body was outside the physical body, the more was it in a position to transform and mould the physical body. The mastery of the etheric body over the physical was so complete in former times because the physical was much more mobile and plastic then it is now. At a period in human evolution when the physical body only had the first beginnings of the bony skeleton; the power of the etheric body over the physical body was so great that man was able to lengthen an arm or a hand at will, or to stretch forth fingers out of them at will, etc. This seems absurd to the man of the present day. It would be quite incorrect to think of the Lemurian man as being like the present man. The Lemurian did not walk about on his legs like a man of the present day; he was more or less a being of the air, and all the organs which are now possessed by the man of the present day were then only germinal or rudimentary. He was able to change his shape, to metamorphose himself. It is quite a mistake to imagine that the Lemurians were similar to the men of the present day, more uncouth, perhaps, but still similar.

In the Atlantean Epoch, also, the human body could still be moulded and its form changed from within by the will. This, as we have already said, was because the etheric body was still partly outside the physical body. The etheric body, therefore, worked upon the outer form, and the beings which did not work in the right way on their body have developed into the animals we now call apes. That was the way in which these caricatures of the present human beings originated; they originated from us, not we from them. We may now enquire: why did the apes split off; why did a part stop at a lower stage as soulless beings (we mean the higher soul, not the astral body)? Man adapted himself to the body, but the apes were unable to do this; their physical body hardened, whereas man was able to keep his physical body soft and plastic.

We have to imagine man at the beginning of earthly evolution in a delicate etheric body, which he continually remoulded and transformed. A clairvoyant would have perceived men at that time in the form of a globe. The accompanying sketch will help to explain the genealogical tree of evolution. It was fairly late in the Atlantean Epoch when the species of animals branched off which later became the present apes. Earlier in the: Atlantean Epoch certain higher animals branched off; and in the earliest times of Atlantis certain lower mammals. At that time man was at that stage of evolution of a mammal, but mammals stopped at this stage while man developed further. In still earlier times man was at the stage of a reptile. His body was quite different from the body of a present reptile; but the corporeal development of the reptile has degenerated. Man developed as inner members further; but the reptile stopped; it is a backward brother of man. The creatures which later became the birds, branched off still earlier, and earlier than that, man was at the stage represented by the fish at the present time. At that time there was on the Earth nothing higher than complicated fish-forms. In primeval times man was at the stage of the invertebrates, and in the very oldest times there branched off, and have come down in this form to our times, the unicellular beings Haeckel calls Menere, which are brothers of man who branched off in the most ancient times. If we were to elaborate this genealogical tree of man, it would coincide with the one Haeckel describes in his works. We might take over Haeckel’s genealogical tree without further ado; the only difference is that Haeckel starts with the development of the lowest animal forms and then carries the development up to man; whereas we see men already in the very first form and consider the animal kingdom only as a branching off at different stages, — at degenerated human beings. Man is actually the firstborn of the Earth; he has developed himself further in a straight line and has left the other beings behind at the various stages.

If we observe the time when the birds and reptiles branched off, we see that at that time there were actually physical human forms which looked like the later birds and some which looked like the later reptiles. The seer can look back into that distant time when the spiritual being of man had not yet taken possession of his body; he sees the group-soul of man which floats round the bird-like body. At this point those spiritual beings stop, who had no need to descend to the physical plane, and after they had come down to this stage of evolution in the physical world, they developed up again to the spiritual. These are the beings of the astral plane (the world of the Holy Spirit) which kept the air as their kingdom, just as man takes possession of the physical earth as his kingdom. We must conceive of these beings also in the form of the bird, if they are to make themselves physically visible. Hence the writer of St. John’s Gospel had to represent the Holy Spirit who descended into the spiritual soul of Jesus and filled it as the Spirit Self, under the symbol of a dove. When we consider this symbol in connection with the evolution of humanity it proves to be very profound.”

GODHEAD	Father Son Holy Ghost
FIRST HIERARCHY	Seraphim Cherabim Thrones or Spirits of Will
SECOND HIERARCHY	Spirits of Motion Spirits of Wisdom Spirits of Form, Creators
THIRD HIERARCHY	Spirits of the Age (Zietgeist) Archangels (Spirits of Races) Angels (Guiding spirits)
	Man Animals Plants Minerals

Prithee, Horatio, tell me one thing.
Hor. What ’s that, my lord?
Ham. Dost thou think Alexander look’d o’ this fashion i’ the earth?
Hor. E’en so.
Ham. And smelt so? Pah! [Puts down the skull.]
Hor. E’en so, my lord.
Ham. To what base uses we may return, Horatio! Why may not imagination trace the noble dust of Alexander, till he find it stopping a bung-hole?
Hor. ”Twere to consider too curiously, to consider so.
Ham. No, faith, not a jot; but to follow him thither with modesty enough and likelihood to lead it; as thus: Alexander died, Alexander was buried, Alexander returneth into dust, the dust is earth, of earth we make loam, and why of that loam whereto he was converted might they not stop a beer-barrel?
Imperial CÆsar, dead and turn’d to clay,
Might stop a hole to keep the wind away.
O, that that earth, which kept the world in awe,
Should patch a wall to expel the winter’s flaw!

German Version

As an Addendum to our studies (click link here) we can view the watered down thinking of human interest stories on our theme. Actual precise thinking into humanity as the Tenth Hierarchy fails to merge the two streams. The stream of the spirit with the stream of matter. Humanity prefers sentimental clumsy thinking to precise insights.

ADDENDUM 1

Rigorous Science of Earth Geology (Click Link) and Earth continental studies that reveal how the Earth and the human Embryo are visibly intertwined. My own interest in these geology and embryology studies arose from observing the correlation between the 46 degrees of the Earth spin that vacillates between Vega and the North Star and the 46 human cell split, when the cell divides it divides at 46 chromosomes which than hits the number 23 to each cell. Earth and Embryo, continents and spiritual moral foundations are divinely and literally intertwined. This masterful Geological work by S. Eva Nessenius can be studied here (Click Link)