Translations:Benutzer:Arian/Klett-Mini-Test/1660/en

With regard to the sequence of the sub-solar planets — Moon, Mercury and Venus — Rudolf Steiner draws, from out of his spiritual research, upon the ancient wisdom of the Mysteries. This holds equally for the characterisation of their macrocosmic spheres of working in the vertical orientation of the «agricultural individuality». Here the sequence runs from the earth downward into the depths: Mars, Jupiter, Saturn — and upward into the heights: Moon, Mercury, Venus, Sun. This primal wisdom, cultivated in the Mysteries and bound together with remnants of instinctive clairvoyance in human beings, faded into resonance in the world-picture of Ptolemy. In this world-picture — as in the one prevailing today, which goes back to Copernicus — the evolution of consciousness of humanity is mirrored. In the post-Atlantean cultural epochs of the ancient Indian and ancient Persian periods, a «heaven-consciousness» still lived in human beings as remnant. It was extinguished, and with the awakening to self-consciousness in the present it became the object-fixed earth-consciousness. The human beings of those early times still experienced the planetary spheres as filled with the deeds of the spiritual hierarchies who had taken the planets as their dwelling-place.