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The Rudolf Steiner Archive

a project of Steiner Online Library, a public charity

Awareness - Life - Form
GA 89

The Christ as the macrocosmic human being in reverse

From a letter to Marie von Sivers dated 13 January 1906

Essential Christ nature must be thought of as the macrocosmic human being in reverse, who, however, is the same as the second aspect of the godhead, or of the Logos. - Imagine the moment before the ‘monad’ (the totality of monads) descended to incarnate in the animal-human body which had been prepared by then. The animal world up to that time, in so far as it had come into being, that is without the mammals, had everything physically spread apart which for the lower human being needed to be concentrated in one entity. The monad world descended into this Lemurian animal-human, with manas initially separating from budhi. Thus manas was incarnated in the Lemurian human being, uniting with kama to be kamamanas; budhi-atman only remaining linked to manas as a potential. The Christ was the spirit who awakened the budhi initially as a first spark. For this it was necessary for the Christ spirit to take possession of a chela of the third degree (Jesus). This, then, is how we should see the Christ event on Earth—as the inversion of the process in the monad world, of what happened with ‘Adam’. Paul made this very clear when he called the Christ ‘Adam in reverse’.141 Corinthians 15: 45. The external historical event is merely the actual symbol for the inner spiritual process.

The matter should thus be seen more or less as shown in Fig. 1.

Earth Through the Ages
Fig. 1