Silica and lime – Reading 2
“Such a spiritual vision, however, concerning the primeval conditions of the Earth and of mankind was attained by the pupils of Ephesus, when they identified themselves with the divine image [of Artemis]; they beheld and understood how formerly what surrounds the Earth today as atmosphere was not as it now is; surrounding the Earth, in the place where the atmosphere is today, was an extraordinarily fine albumen, a volatile, fluid albuminous substance. And they saw how everything that lived on the Earth required for its own genesis the forces of this volatile, fluid albuminous substance, that was spread over the Earth, and how everything lived in it. They saw too how that which was in a certain sense already within this substance – finely distributed but everywhere with a tendency to crystallisation – how that which was present in a finely distributed condition as silicic acid was in reality a kind of sense- organ for the Earth and could take up into itself from all sides the Imaginations and influences from the surrounding cosmos. And thus in the silicic acid contained in the earthly albuminous atmosphere were everywhere Imaginations, concretely, externally present.
These Imaginations had the form of gigantic, plant-like organisms, and out of that which was so to speak, ‘imagined’ into the Earth in this way, there developed later, through the absorption of the atmospheric substance, – the plant; everything that is of a plant-like nature. At first it was in the environment of the Earth, in the volatile, fluid form; only later did it sink down into the soil and become what is known to us as the plant.
Besides the silicic acid, there was imbedded also in this albumen-atmosphere another substance, lime, in a finely divided condition. Again, out of the lime substance, under the influence of the congelation of the albumen there arose the animal kingdom. And the human being felt himself with all this. He felt one with the whole Earth. He lived in that which formed itself as plant in the Earth through Imagination, he lived too in that which was developing on Earth as animal, in the way I have described. Each single human being felt himself spread out over the whole Earth, felt himself one with the Earth. So that the human beings were all – as I have described it for the Platonic teachings in my book Christianity as Mystical Fact, in reference to the human capacity for ideas – were all each within the other.”
R. Steiner, World History in the Light of Anthroposophy, Lecture 3, 26 December 1923, CW233