In cosmogenesis, the macro-cosmic universe and a micro-cosmic human being come into existence together. The first half of the Earth’s seven incarnations is called the Mars Period while the second half is called the Mercury Period. We have now passed the mid-point and are in the second half of Earth’s Incarnations. The three previous Incarnation of the Earth are called by spiritual scientists: Old Saturn, Old Sun, Old Moon, and now we are in the our current Incarnation of the Earth which contains the metamorphosed kingdoms of mineral, plant, animal, and now human.
The Cosmos is the universe understood as divine order. Genesis is a picture of the beginning of that order. Cosmogenesis is similar to anthropogenesis. The tenth hierarchy of humanity arrives last. Humans are the donations of the higher ranks of the spiritual hierarchy. Creation can be imagined as a double biography: the life of a cosmos and the life of the human being who is meant to wake up in that cosmos and recognize it.
In the overall evolution of Earth, the first half is called Mars and the second half is called Mercury. These names do not refer to the planets currently assigned those names. These are ‘periods of time’ that resemble the nature of Mars and Mercury. Also, it is important to understand that misinformation has been inserted over time to confuse the uninitiated. For instance, Venus and Mercury have traded names and glyphs for centuries in astronomy, in astrology, and in the notebooks of alchemists; some call the swap an occult blind, some a memory of cometary confusion. Whenever those two names appear you should pause and ask which planet or planetary force is actually being referred to.
A cosmology that cannot correct itself becomes another ‘settled science’ temporary theory. The people who catch the mistakes are part of the great work that know that the cosmos and humanity are one being sharing forces, ethers, and levels of consciousness.
Rudolf Steiner gave the seven incarnations of our world the names Old Saturn, Old Sun, Old Moon, Earth, and then the future worlds of Future Jupiter, Future Venus, and Future Vulcan. The names can confuse a new reader, especially when they collide with the planets now visible in the night sky.
There are seven great days of manifestation, or the seven days of creation mentioned in the Book of Genesis. Between them there is a pralaya, a resting period where all that “was” is dissolved into an amorphous condition of potential creativity that builds and metamorphoses the previous stages of growth into a higher evolution building upon the prior donations of spiritual beings through heterochrony and layers of the various dimensions.
A pralaya is not a shrug and not a hole in the story. It is a type of spiritual cocoon. Our earlier essays on the etheric body pointed out that without sleep the spiritual hierarchy cannot repair the flesh; a human being who will not sleep dies from starving his etheric life body which is renewed in sleep. Basically, the cosmos is subject to the same laws of sleep and renewal as humanity.
We often see in nature that whatever was alive must die and retreat into the interior world and dissolve into a amorphous condition that looks like soup or dark water which can be reconstituted into the form the being worn previously or might wear in the future.
In creation, the Holy Trinity designs the Divine Plan before the first dimension of warmth appears. Warmth ether was the first created substance, often called the “First Mover.” The Seraphim received the donation, the Cherubim make of it a celestial harmony, while the beings called the Thrones are the first to step down into mater, a density they do not prefer and we called warmth that arises from motion that leads to pre-matter (proto-matter). That stepping down process is what Aristotle’s last category was trying to name when it spoke of ‘passion’ or ‘suffering’: not a complaint, but a type of donation, the love that consents to become less spacious so that something not yet born can have a place. This is a spiritual donation, sacrifice, and gift.
The path of initiation and spiritual development is basically the same process of creation that has been accelerated in evolution. We will all eventually go through this process whether or not we ‘sign up’ for a Mystery School initiation or not; unless you take the other path and devolve yourself through vice. Great master beings are able to speed up the process of evolution and embody the characteristics of future humanity flowing from the realms of Future Jupiter, Future Venus, and Future Vulcan.
Moral Imagination, Moral Inspiration, and Moral Intuition are not ornaments hung on an otherwise finished person, they are the three steps of spiritual initiation relating to the future conditions of the human being and the cosmos.
They are capacities that belong to later worlds, arriving now because the past is not finished and the future does not wait for a linear timeline to manifest to those who work hard to receive the future capacities of human development.
No matter how current human beings attempt to “picture” their future capacities, they are truly beyond sense perception or thoughts derived through the material world. Even the true motion of the solar system in our time is inconceivable to limited human intelligence. One must go beyond, far beyond, altogether far beyond, just as the Buddha indicated, to find our true nature in the greater cosmos. Humans are not limited to the Earth, nor are they physical matter and they must, in fact, transcend them to find their true, higher self.
In the first incarnation of the “Earth”, the spiritual manifestation reached as far as the current Saturn-sphere. What existed there was warmth, and the Thrones donated that warmth ether so that the Archai could live out their human season inside it. After the sleep of pralaya that followed, what returned was smaller. Jupiter marked the new rim of manifestation. The planet we now call Saturn remained as a boundary and a memory, but not exactly as the same body you can point to now.
Between the current Jupiter-sphere and the current Mars-sphere there was a “War in Heaven” and a planet that tried to crystalize into the Earth too soon exploded and became the asteroid belt we see now. This planet was referred to as Marduk. The asteroid belt is left as the scar of evolution that tried to become solid too soon.
The planets you see from your backyard are not leftovers from those ages. What persisted were stewards of the stations—resonances, harmonics, forces, and beings. Matter, as we know it, came much later as a precipitation and condensation. The Moon itself was once in the Earth’s core, a hard substance that had materialized and was too eager to wait for evolution and was thus extruded from the Earth so that early crystallization would not affect the Earth the way it shattered the planet Marduk.
The first half of Earth’s incarnation still carried a Mars-nature. It is bound to the outer planets and to the past, and it had the unsettled quality of a body that has not yet chosen a single orbit, much like a comet. The Mystery of Golgotha, in the Fifth Post-Atlantean Age, was when the second half of Earth evolution began when the birth of the human “I AM” ego consciousness was donated by Christ. During the second half of Earth evolution, called Mercury, thinking begins to stand apart, true freedom is born, and the possibility of reconnecting with the cosmos through the human conscience, rather than by trance, becomes available to humanity.
Earth’s personal mystery to solve, among the seven great mysteries, is the Mystery of Birth and Death. If that riddle were actually solved and understood, the immortality of the “I AM” would become a fact not a belief, and the way back toward the source would already be under our feet. The heavens would open before us and welcome us as the ‘prodigal son.’
Earth itself lives through seven stages, seven lives, and we are in the fourth. The old theosophists called these stages ‘globes’ and ‘root-races’, which has confused generations of researchers. We shall enumerate them according to the teachings of spiritual science.
Polaria was the First Period when the Sun and Earth had not yet become two. Hyperborea, the Second Period was when the drawing-out of the Sun happened, which was remembered in the north as the land of Apollo with endless summertime. During the Third Period called Lemuria, the extrusion of the Moon happened. The Fourth Period was called Atlantis, and it is still traceable if you are willing to research the kinship of languages and the flora and fauna found across the world. There is also the stubborn fact that pyramid cities are found throughout the entire world that were inspired by the pyramids of Atlantis. Then comes the Post-Atlantean Age (Fifth Period) we now live in. There is still a Sixth and a Seventh Period still ahead which are named the Slavo-Russian Period (Sixth) and the American Period (Seventh).
Inside our Fifth Period there are again seven ages, each lasting about two thousand one hundred and sixty years: the Ancient Indian, the Ancient Persian, the Egyptian-Chaldean-Babylonian, the Greco-Roman, and our own Anglo-Germanic age, which began in 1415. Creating diagrams and charts of these realities may not help one understand the nature and character of each age. Charts freeze what must be kept mobile. Our imagination has to cradle these ideas the way a musician holds a measure inside a movement that is inside a major work. They may be complicated notes in a symphony, but the composition of the Divine Plan needs to be seen from a higher perspective to give humanity an idea of where they came from and where they are going.
On Old Saturn, the Archai (Time Spirits) were the humans of that world. On the Old Sun the Archangels lived their human season. On the Old Moon the angels did. We are the humans of current Earth. If the path holds, we become Angels on the Future Jupiter world, as angels evolve into the next rank above them. There can also be a devolution for humans into animal group-souls.
The choice of evolution or devolution is a human decision that must be made in total freedom without compulsion from the spiritual world.
Our current First Rank of the spiritual hierarchy (Seraphim, Cherubim, Thrones) already existed before the great day of manifestation began. The Second Rank of the spiritual hierarchy (Wisdom, Movement, Form) was carried over from a prior solar system. The Thrones, the Spirits of Wisdom, Spirits of Motion, and the Spirits of Form donated willpower, wisdom, movement, and form, to create human beings. The Third Rank of the spiritual hierarchy (Archai, Archangels, Angels) works in human thinking, feeling, and willpower. The Heavenly Virtues are their climate. The human material world consists of the donations of the higher hierarchies over three prior Incarnation of the Earth. They take on this suffering so that a new rank of the spiritual hierarchy might come to birth. Humanity is called the Tenth Hierarchy, below the nine higher hierarchies.
There is an old Rosicrucian exercise that Rudolf Steiner taught wherein you imagine a point expanding in every direction until it becomes a sphere whose surface is made of an infinite amount of plane surfaces conjoining in a sphere at infinity. At infinity, the planes fall back to the center from whence they came. The heart does this exact movement continuously. The great day of the world, the Platonic Year, derived from the precession of the equinox, follows this pattern also. Angelic forces meet as planes and make a structure that has nothing to do with a ‘fantasy angel’ in a white tunic with a golden halo. People who have witnessed this mysterious process of nature often think they have met an alien or an angel.
Aristotle’s ten categories are offered as an alphabet of the material world that is similar to the ranks of the spiritual hierarchy. Aristotle calls them: substance, quantity, quality, relation, and then the tangle of space, time, doing, having, position, and passion—or suffering. At the top of that ladder is the category called “Being” (‘Substance’ ion the list below) that donates all the categories below it. We believe the category should be named Love, not Being. What looks like creation from nothingness is actually creation from a group of spiritual beings who consented to contract into the smallness of the Earth, our little world.
We must treat the cosmological condition of ‘pralaya’ as almost sacred and holy, just as we should treat the conditions of consciousness called sleep and death. Do not consider our nightly sleep, our nightly backward review of the day, the efforts of our spiritual practice, or any other moments of rest as failures just because they involve “doing nothing.” They are crucial parts of the rhythm of life that must grow, rest, and grow again. The ancients called these conditions: birth, death, and rebirth.
The task of this half of the Earth Incarnation (Mercury) is to develop the free human “I AM” that can find its way back home to heaven where consciousness and conscience where born through the gift of Christ.
Cosmogenesis is anthropogenesis spoken in larger terms, and the human being is the exact replica of the cosmos — the microcosm of the macrocosm. Or as the Egyptian Mystery wisdom taught: “As within, so without: as above, so below: as the universe, so the soul.”
The world is in its fourth life, or incarnation, and also in the fifth stage of that life, and now is currently in the fifth cultural age on that stage. All is right with the Divine Plan once you understand these cosmic and human cycles. You are the being the cosmos was created for, whom the Thrones first consented to warm, the Beings of Wisdom consented to enlighten, the Archai consented to bring into linear time, the Archangel sing to, and the Angels speak to. What is asked in return of human beings is not a completed, perfected condition of consciousness. That will come in time through the guidance of the spiritual hierarchy. What is asked is that thinking, feeling, and willing are developed into moral virtues so that the ranks of the spiritual hierarchies, who donated their gifts throughout the Incarnation of the Earth, can recognize in the human being something of their own higher nature and call it back to its original source.
Learn more in Dr. Gabriel’s book on this topic. It’s always good to have printed books in your spiritual library. Find on Amazon at https://www.amazon.com/dp/1963709055
Our Spirit 