Thermal Beings

It was revealed to the visionary and theosophist Rudolf Steiner (I86I-I92;) that this planet, before it was the earth we now know, passed through a solar stage, and before that through a Saturnian stage. Man today is composed of a physical body,of an ethereal body, of an astral body, and of an ego; at the start of the Saturnian period he was a physical body only. This body was neither visible nor tangible, since at that time there were on earth neither solids nor liquids nor gases. There were only states of heat, thermal forms, defining in cosmic space regular and irregular figures; each man, each being, was an organism made of changing temperatures. According to the testimony of Steiner, mankind during the Saturnian period was a blind, deaf, and insensitive multitude of articulated states of heat and cold. ‘To the investigator, heat is but a substance still subtler than a gas,’ we read in one page of Steiner’s Die GeheimwissenschaftimUmriss (Outline of Occult Science). Before the solar stage, fire spirits, or archangels, animated the bodies of those ‘men’, who began to glow and shine.

Did Steiner dream these things? Did he dream them because they had occurred ages earlier? What is undeniable is that they are far stranger than the demiurges, serpents, and bulls of other cosmogonies.