Esoteric Evolution - 21

The Serpent in Paradise

The Garden of Eden

From previous chapters

The serpent

The presence of evil in Paradise

The role and significance of evil

The fall into sin and the impact of evil in Lemuria

The sacrifice of the negative forces

How angels became fallen angels

Sources

The eras of development of the Earth:

The Bible tells us that the Lord God, after his six-day work of creation and his day of rest on the seventh day, formed the human being. He formed him from dust, breathed the breath of life into him, and thus made him a living being (Genesis 2:7). Next, the Lord God built a garden in the East, in Eden, and put the human being into it. Genesis tells us that in the middle of that garden, besides other trees, there stood two special trees, the Tree of Life and the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil.

Then it describes how the river Pishon with its branches runs through the garden.

Genesis 2:15 describes that the human being is put into the Garden of Eden to till it and keep it. But he was given one condition: the human being was allowed to eat from all the trees in the garden, but not of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. "for in the day that you eat of it you shall die," said the Lord God.

Then Genesis describes the creation of the woman (Genesis 2:18-25).

In previous chapters about the creation process in Genesis, it has become clear that "the Lord God" means "Yahweh-Elohim," the Eloah who remained connected with the moon part of the Earth and from there worked creatively onto the Earth. It is important to realize that human beings of flesh and blood, as we know them now, did then not yet exist. In early Lemuria, they only possessed a watery, still developing physical body. The etheric body and astral body too were still being built.

It was in this constellation that Yahweh-Elohim breathed the breath of life into the human being. With this, the precursor of the human being received the first beginnings of his own I. Thanks to this gift we human beings, millions of years later, are able to develop self-awareness, I-consciousness.

In those early times in Lemuria the becoming human beings were still androgynous, female and male in one. The separation of the sexes had not yet taken place. That only happened when the Bible speaks of the creation of woman, in Genesis 2:18-25. At that point, the first beginning of the separation into two sexes occurred, i.e. into separate men and women.

And then in Genesis 3:1 there suddenly appears the serpent, the subtlest of all animals. He addresses the woman and asks her whether it is true that she and her man are not allowed to eat from any tree in the garden. The woman answers that they are allowed to eat from all the trees, except the fruits of the tree that stands in the middle. "If we do that, we will die." The serpent expresses his doubts about God's statement and says: "You will not die. For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil."

The woman looks again at the delicious fruits and finds it an alluring idea that she can gain intelligence and wisdom that way. Therefore, she picks a few fruits and eats of them. She also gives some to her husband and he also eats them. At that moment, something happens. The eyes of both of them are opened, and they see that they are naked (Genesis 3:7).

Thereupon, the Lord God calls them to account, condemns them, and sends them away out of the Garden of Eden, Paradise. To prevent them from returning and also eating from the Tree of Life, "at the east of the Garden of Eden he placed the cherubim, and a flaming sword which turned every way, to guard the way to the Tree of Life." (Genesis 3:24).

The event in Paradise, the fall into sin and the removal of the human being out of the proximity of the divine occupies people's minds even today. Why did it happen? Why was the serpent there that seduced the human being to turn against the commandments? But also, why did the Lord God allow this to happen? And finally, the big question: Why was in that harmonious, paradisal original condition evil already present and even active?

Jan Breugel the Elder - Paradise and the Fall, oil on panel - c. 1615

To these questions conventional theology has even today not yet been able to give satisfactory answers. In this and the next chapters, we will see how Rudolf Steiner, as spiritual-scientific investigator, explains this event in Paradise out of esoteric Christianity. Perhaps that will help us. To be able to understand his contribution we first have to consider the question: What is the significance of the presence of evil in the world? That is the subject of this chapter.

Rudolf Steiner spoke and wrote a lot about the forces of evil and the way they work in the world. He explained that we should view the presence and the working of evil in and through us in the perspective of human evolution.

The idea is that we humans should inwardly become more and more free, and that out of that condition of inner freedom we rise to higher levels of consciousness, morality, and existence. However, the paradox lies in the fact that we can only achieve that spiritual growth with the help of the forces of evil. Why is that so?

Growth of consciousness takes place between poles, in this case between the forces of good and evil. Only by experiencing both good and evil, and undergoing them in body and soul, do we humans inwardly wake up. Inwardly waking up means that we become conscious of the effects of the working of good forces, but also of those of evil.

How do they work into us, into others, and into the world? Only if we, through our own experience and reflection, become conscious of what both good and evil bring about, can we make conscious steps into the spiritual realm. For then, based on the insights we have obtained, we are able to make conscious distinctions between what is good and what is evil, and on that basis make choices and act on them.

Thus, we gradually develop the ability to make conscious choices in given situations.

Through this choice potential as well as by the fact that life again and again puts us in situations where we have to choose between good and evil, by trial and error we not only become more and more awake and conscious, but we can gradually also become more and more free. For you become free if, out of the insights you gain through your inner, spiritual self, you consciously make the right choice between good and evil. Not because some authority or religious rule imposes it on you, but because you, motivated, consciously want it yourself. And because you act out of the truth and healthy judgment of your own inner spirit.

The goal of the process of our becoming truly human is that we become free and conscious and that we, living out of our inner spirit, perceive, feel, and make decisions. That is the aim of our entire evolutionary development. Sometime in the future, when we will have reached a high spiritual level out of inwardly conscious morality and freedom, we will then become the tenth hierarchy of creative spiritual beings.

The tenth hierarchy is the hierarchy that follows after that of the angels.¹⁾ That is the great perspective and the high goal we humans have in view. And it is from this perspective, says esoteric Christianity, that we have to view the presence of evil in the world and in our own lives, and have to learn to deal with it.

We return to the situation in the Garden of Eden, Paradise. Now it has possibly become a little more evident why in that heavenly sphere, in the proximity of the Lord God, evil was already present in the form of the serpent.

In his lecture cycle about Genesis²⁾ Rudolf Steiner shows that the story of the fall in Genesis is an allegorical picture of the impact of evil on the inner human being during Lemuria, and thus also on human evolution. The serpent is the symbol of Lucifer, who is also called Devil, or Diabolo. Lucifer is the first of three powers of evil that put the human being to the test on their way. His working into the human being began halfway through Lemuria.

The second power, Ahriman, also called Satan, has acted in the inner human being since Atlantis. The Asuras, named after their leader Asur or Sorat, the third power, have been acting in humanity since post-Atlantean times. One creates the conditions for the impact of the other.³⁾

Lucifer versus The Lord - Zich Mihály 1887

Incredible as it may sound, as spiritual powers they received the task from the highest divine leadership to form a counterweight to the forces of good for the benefit of consciousness development of humanity.⁴⁾ That explains why evil was already present in Paradise. Their task to form a counterweight is the reason why as negative forces they are also called "adversary forces."

Rudolf Steiner tells us that these forces of evil once belonged to the "good" heavenly hierarchies. This means that they were spiritual beings who were in the service of light and progress. They were part of the third hierarchy, which consists of the Angels, Archangels, and Archai.

Lucifer once belonged to the Angels, Ahriman to the Archangels, and the Asuras to the Archai or Spirits of Personality. In order to fulfill their role in human evolution, they detached themselves and became more and more forces of evil.

With this they made as spiritual beings the sacrifice of renouncing a normal development of spiritual beings of their rank. Thanks to this sacrifice, we human beings received the possibility to develop the space and freedom we need for our further evolution.

Sometime in the distant future, when we humans have brought our inner spirit to greater heights with the help of the Christ power, we will help those spiritual beings who became evil for our sake to become free again and liberate them from the task they were given.

In one of his lectures, Rudolf Steiner describes what had to happen so that certain spiritual beings could break their connection with the heavenly hierarchies and become forces of evil. Because he describes this so impressively and because this is of importance to understand our subject, something more about it follows here.

The spiritual beings of light who belong to the third hierarchy of divine beings, he said, have no autonomous inner life such as is the case today with human beings. Their inner being and consciousness are completely filled with the contents, truths, and morality of the higher spiritual worlds, the higher spiritual hierarchies.

They experience themselves in the life that shines down on them from lofty heights, in that continuous spiritual revelation. Because they are so completely filled with this high spiritual substance, the angels live in a sphere of absolute truth - yes, their being is truth. Lies and untruth do not exist in their worlds.⁵⁾

And yet, it happened that in this high spiritual sphere, at a certain moment after the "commandment" of the high divine leadership, a number of beings of the third hierarchy felt the urge to be no longer dependent on the instreaming and revelation of the hierarchical beings above them. What they wanted was their own life, their own inner world that was no longer completely filled with the beings of the higher hierarchies. They wanted to have an autonomous inner life of their own.

What they were looking for was a feeling of strength, of independence, and of freedom relative to the rest of the spiritual world.

To achieve that, something unheard of had to occur in those worlds. As angelic beings they had to proceed to deny their own nature and to separate themselves from the beings of the higher hierarchies, in order to build their own inner world out of that separated spiritual substance. And that is what they did.

As a result of this deed there arose beside the spirits of the third hierarchy, the (good) angels, a second category of spiritual beings, the Luciferic beings. Because they became isolated from the instreaming revelation of the hierarchical beings above them, their consciousness was darkened. The result was that they no longer lived in the sphere of truth of the angelic world. Untruth and lies arose in them. In this way, they gradually became "fallen angels" and forces of evil.

Shut out of the heavenly hierarchies, they turned in the far distant past - even before the Earth existed - in the phase of Old Moon, to the human being. By connecting with human beings, they try to develop further and increase and spread their own strength and power. With that goal they entered through Lucifer into the inner human being through the astral body. This happened around the time when the I was slowly added to the human corporeality by Yahweh-Elohim. There is therefore a profound connection between the two events.

In the next chapter more about the backgrounds to the fall into sin.

7. Seventh era

2. Hyperborea

6. Sixth era

5. Post-Atlantean era

4. Atlantis

Rudolf Steiner, Spiritual Hierarchies and the Physical World, GA 110, lecture of April 18, 1909, evening.
Rudolf Steiner, Genesis, Secrets of Creation, GA 122, lecture of August 24, 1910.
Rudolf Steiner, Spiritual-Scientific Enquiries into the Nature of the Human Being, GA 107, lecture of December 8, 1908.
See note 1.
Rudolf Steiner, Spiritual Beings in the Heavenly Bodies and in the Kingdoms of Nature, GA 136, lecture of April 8, 1912.

For English translations see www.rsarchive.org.