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Part 1

Now, shall we start by turning inward and forming the picture of the threefoldness of the Trinity? Now, this picture that Helena has drawn on the board is just to give you an indication of something I tried to describe yesterday about the threefold countenance – the one, which usually is drawn on the left, is like a profile which looks backwards and upwards and inwards, towards the source of being. And opposite that, the other profile, facing outwards and downwards and to the right, is the profile of that being who turns outwards into Creation – away from God and towards the Creation. And between them is the face that which looks towards us and communicates with us. Now, as we first form the picture outwardly, it’s divided, but, in reality, it is one. When, out of ‘non-being’, ‘being’ comes, then balance, or reconciliation, comes into being at the same time. We have to use the word ‘time’, but in that existence there is no time. There’s no sequence in that sense – Non-being to Being to Balance – these are simultaneous. And this experience of the Trinity, in consciousness, this is new. It’s new in the world, and it is a sadness when one sees coming forward into this time now, still the remains of a kind of dualism like the Manicheans had – black/white, yes/no, either/or. This has never been one of the fundamental realities of existence – always the Trinity has been there, and now, through the Christian dispensation it comes forward into consciousness so that we can hold it and grasp it and, through it, go back into the realities of the Creation.

Now we can say it in this form: The whole mystery of the Trinity lies in the fact that when Being was born out of Non-being simultaneously, that which reconciled the paradox of this, to our minds, impossible situation, had also to exist. That which was brought into being was, at the same time, brought into balance. Therefore the Son, between the Father-God, the Mother-God. We have existence by the Father, we have love by the Mother, so we return, reconciled, to God through the Son in freedom. We have being through the Father, we create through the Son, and so we, inevitably, also awaken to the healing of understanding through the light of the Spirit. This comes into being with the Father and the Son – just as Father/Mother/Son so Father/Spirit/Son. So we have existence, we have love and, out of that, we have freedom to return. We have being, we have, through the Son, creation, so we have awakening through the light of the Spirit.

Now, let’s take this into a meditation in which we see how, through the Father, we are conscious, how, through the Son, we are aware and how, through the Spirit, we are able to grasp and hold and understand – ‘begreifen’ in German – to grasp – is the same as ‘begriff’, which is a concept. So we understand by the same process as we seize. Let me give you what comes into the Act of Consecration of Man in the Christian Community:

"Conscious of our humanity we feel the Divine Father. He is in all that we are, our substance is His substance, our being is His being. He moves through us in all our existing. Aware of the Christ in our humanity we feel the Divine Son. He wields through the world as Spirit-Word. He creates in all that we create, our existing is His creating, our life is His creating life. He creates through us in all the soul’s creating. Grasping the Spirit, through our humanity, we feel the Healing-God. May He shine through the world as Spirit light. May He shine in all that we behold. May our knowing exist in His life, shining with Spirit. May he graciously receive it into His life. May He fill the Spirit with all the ways of our human soul."

Can you see how, even in the grammar of this, we have an understanding of the nature of the Trinity? ‘Is’ comes through all the first part of that; ‘moves’ comes all through the second, and then we go out of the existing mood, the positive mood, into, even grammatically, into subjunctive – ‘may’, ‘May He’. This comes right into our language, the way in which existence, movement, and then possibility move into the language in that way. Even in our language the Trinity is there.

Now, out of that, let us have a look at these nine hierarchies of Dionysus. As we said yesterday, non-being into being, the first beings who emerged out of non-being could only turn back towards the Creator and worship.

"Holy, Holy, Holy,
Lord God of Hosts,
Heaven and Earth are full of Thy Glory,
Glory Be to Thee
O Lord Most High!"

This is the call of the Seraphim. These are the first of the created beings. These do not take part in the outward Creation; they are there, turning inward, to acknowledge the fact of the Creation. And then, outwardly turning, are the Thrones. The Thrones are those who realise that the existence and essence of Creation is sacrifice. They give their own substance that existence may happen. That there should be existence at all out of non-existence is itself the substance of sacrifice. So the love of the Seraphim is countered and balanced by the sacrifice of the Thrones. And, as I said talking about the Trinity, inherently in that whole situation there has to be reconciliation. And there are the Cherubim. The Cherubim who sing the song of reconciliation. The harmony. Music comes from there, so we can have a third Trinity that we can see now in our own experience: The Seraphim – worship, The Cherubim – music, and The Thrones – architecture, the building of the substance of the world through sacrifice. So, worship, music, architecture – these are absolutely part of the Trinity. And, once more, before we leave these ‘words’ of Trinity, think of Blake just for a moment. Innocence, Experience, Imagination. Through innocence we sleep, in experience we dream, in imagination we wake from the dream to restore our innocence! And there’s the Trinity again, as Blake experienced it.

Now this first hierarchy – Seraphim, Cherubim, Thrones – I’ve written here: Love – Harmony – Will – Substance – and I referred didn’t I yesterday to the constant cry or theme of the poet Boethius: "Substance is Love, Love is Substance"? Charles Williams was always quoting this out of Boethius. And between Love and Substance is born Harmony. But this first Creation, this is the first Creation to which Peter referred, this is in darkness and warmth. The Earth is without form and void – there is no life. This is the incarnation of the planet that Rudolf Steiner referred to as ‘Old Saturn’. It was eggs – it was nothing but the eggs of warmth in darkness which were the seeds for all future existence and creation. And its keynote is strength. This is the realm of the power of God. Let’s draw, as we do these, the three Ancient Egyptian signs for Strength, and for Life, and for Health. And Strength here, – this is the Egyptian sign that was known as ‘Seneb’. It’s a sort of flame on a base line, strengthened by these two little forms at the end. And that was their symbol in Ancient Egypt for Strength – the Seneb.

And now we come, out of that, into what Peter referred to as the ‘Second Creation’ – and this is the Creation, the second in Genesis, where we come into the realm of Light.

"The Spirit of God moved on the face of the Waters".

And a whole new hierarchy emerged into being in the Light. And the highest of them, just as the highest of the first three, turned inwards, so the highest of them once more turned inwards and made the tribute of the Light to those who had sacrificed their own substance that Creation might happen. And these were the Curiotetes – the Spirits/Lords of Wisdom. Wisdom is the tribute of Light to what is sacrificed in the dark. Wisdom is the non-visibility of Light. And what opposes that, what comes out of that? Form. Form is Light made visible. And these, the Spirits of Form, are the Exhusii, known in the Bible as the Elohim. Now this is very mysterious about the Elohim, and I shall say it but I’m not going to say that I understand it! The Elohim were seven in number, and because of the need to bring down into Form, in an indirect way first to prepare Mankind, one of the Elohim separated off from the realm of the Sun, where the seven Elohim were, and came into the Moon sphere and operated independently and, in a way, almost back into a kind of Darkness, the reflected Light of the Moon. And this was Jahveh. This was Jehovah, who brought down the essence of the Light in this reflected way first. And behind him remained the six – the six in the Sun, which is why the Christ-star had six points. Christ was not the Elohim but, as a Sun being, He manifested through these six beings, the six Elohim, and we see the wonderful six-pointed star, radiating out the Light of the Christ through the being of the Elohim from the Sun. And now, in our time, these six come, they approached the Earth, they incarnated on the Earth, they are now present in the etheric envelope of the Earth. So the seven are re-united for us in our time and throughout the future the Elohim are re-united.

So, we have Wisdom then, experienced, coming out of the sunrise paying tribute to the sacrifice and the substance of the Thrones and coming out into Form in the land of the sunset. The fact that we talk about Oriental wisdom is not the only reason why we feel that wisdom belongs to the East and Form belongs to the West. This is something inherent in the nature of Wisdom and Form. The East really is the ‘being’ of Wisdom; the West is the ‘being’ of Form. So we can say: ‘Fired out of the East and, in the West, taking shape’ – that’s the characteristic of the ‘Second Hierarchy’. Now its harmony we see in movement. Movement links Wisdom with Form, and the image is of the lemniscate (∞) – crossing over in the middle. A perpetual transformation between Wisdom and Form which takes place in movement. And this crossing is of the essence, this crossing where, out of Wisdom into Form, out of Form back into Wisdom – each time that crossing happens there is a Death process, and a restoration to life. So that life is seen as being inevitably involved in death. And Rudolf Steiner says, "In Christ, death becomes life."

This is not resurrection in the sense of the Holy Spirit, this is the death/life transformation that is perpetual and constant, and it is centred in the Middle Hierarchy of all the Nine – the Dunemais, the Lords of Movement. It’s the realm of our rhythms – it’s where we breathe, it’s where our heartbeats are, the whole rhythm of the Cosmos too, not only of ourselves, is there in this movement. And this is the central of all the hierarchies – it’s the one where we can come most into the consciousness of the present moment. Always, in dualism, we are caught back into the past, or we are caught up into the future.

This is what George said the day before yesterday when he introduced the theme of the Christ-being standing between Lucifer and Ahriman. This is another Trinity – this is the Trinity of ‘The Fall’. In Lucifer we strive upwards in pride and beauty and art and ecstasy into the realm where we deny the Earth. And yet we have to do this because without it we would have no aspiration, we would have no love, we would have no worship, we should have no sense of beauty. So that tendency is there. With Ahriman – in the sharp, external, thorn-filled light of the Earth, with control, with mechanism, with everything that comes outward and downward into the Earthlight, we grasp the whole Earth, just as the Spirit grasps the Earth, but we grasp it without acknowledging the Spirit. We deny the Spirit in order to have the full grasp of the Earth reality. And, standing between them, not just holding them apart, but reconciling them, stands the being of the Christ, who redeems both Lucifer and Ahriman. And this comes into the far future, and this is where the Trinity of the Future will one day incarnate for us, and this is the path along which we go.

So we have, in the First Hierarchy: ‘From the heights to the depths; as above, so below. Let there be formed in the heights that which, in the depths, has substance’. In the Second Creation, we have this East/West dynamic: ‘Let there be fired from out of the East that which, in the West, takes shape’. Now we come into the realm of the Third Creation. Now we’ve had that the Earth is without form and void. Then we come into the Second Creation to the realm where the Spirit of God moved on the face of the waters and there was Light. And now we come into the Third realm. ‘God breathed upon Man and he became a living soul’. This is the Third Realm – the bringing of soul into this realm. And now the three faces are really fully separated from one another – we can hardly look at the Third Hierarchy as one; they are still one, but, for us, they become much more separated. We are now into the realm, not of consciousness, not of awareness, but now of grasp, of grasping the Spirit through our humanity. And we have the three beings of the lowest hierarchy – the Archai. Now these are the Time spirits, and they stand in the same relationship to the Spirits of Form, the Exhusii, as the Wisdom-Spirits do to the Thrones. They stand on the same ground. The Thrones look out with their sacrifice, the Curiotetes look inwards with their wisdom, and now we have the Exhusii looking outwards into the realm of light-filled form, and we have the Archai who, in order to implement that, become the Spirits of Time. Time is only born with the Archai. The successive ages, the transformations from one spiritual age to the next, each of those is in the charge of one of these Archai beings – and ‘Archon’ is the singular in the Greek. An Archon – the Time-Spirit.

And we are in the wonderful time now when Michaèl, who has been in the realm of the archangels all throughout the whole of spiritual history, now goes over into the realm of the Archai. He is not only now the Archangel of our dispensation, he is also our Time-Spirit. So this is Michaèl. And so, turning inwards in the Third Creation, are the Archai, relating back to the formlessness, creating the spirits of the age. And outwards, opposite to them, is the Spirit of Individuation, of coming down into the single being for the first time. The Angels are those beings who, with us, share with us the full individuality of single beings – so they become the messengers and representatives of the whole of the Nine for us. They are the ones who are the nearest – each of us has our Guardian Angel; that guardian angel is inseparably linked to our own higher being. They are messengers and guardians. And, once more, as with the other two hierarchies, coming into being inevitably through this opposition of the two, the reconcilers – the Archangels, the Spirits of Association I like to call them. Every realm where human beings come together and share their experience – nations, groups like this, societies, folk-souls – all these beings are Archangels. They are the ones who turn towards us and link us with this inward/outward process.

Part 2

Q: May I interpolate a question there?

SM: Yes.

Q: There are six, is it, of the great Archangels whom we know – Michaèl, Raphael, and so forth. Are there, therefore, a great many more Archangels, or beings who are really in Archangel quality, apart from those immense half-dozen?

SM: I believe so, because I think that each of the nations has its own Archangel.

Q: The folk-soul behind those Spirits of association?

SM: Yes. Now, how’s the time? It’s getting late.

Q: Go on. This is important.

SM: I’m going to put in the other Egyptian symbols but I’m not going to have much time to talk much about them. This one, the one I think which, in Ancient Greece [sic] corresponds to this Third Hierarchy, is what they call the Seneb (sic), which is something like, and is related to, the serpent, the Hermetic serpent – it may be the same being, for all I know! It was drawn like this, and it was called the Seneb, and really it’s the symbol for health. I won’t put down ‘health’! So we have the Cha – I’m sorry, I called that Seneb didn’t I – it’s Cha, and Seneb. And, in between, we’ll put the other Egyptian symbol which very much corresponds to the whole realm of light and life, and that’s the well-known one – the Ankh. So that Ankh and Cha and Seneb really form a Trinity of signs which relate to these three and which we can use as evokers of the feeling of them.

Now I’m going to go straight over from that to make another link with what we’ve been doing before because, whenever you have ninefoldness, and you’ve seen this already in the way in which the Thrones link so much with the Curiotetes, and the Exhusii so much with the Archai, there is a way of looking at all this which makes it into seven instead of nine, as if it condensed down into a number that’s more related to what we feel ourselves in our own being. For instance, let’s think that the Seraphim, turning inwards and worshipping and glorifying God, these are linked with what we’ve been talking about and experiencing as our ‘crown’. Our Crown chakra, that which turns upwards and flames upwards constantly towards the Light – receiving Light and relating back to it – which is what the Seraphim do. And coming down to the throat first, there we have the substance of the Word. To speak a word is itself a sacrifice, and when the Druids are standing there on the Speaking Stones, they are sacrificing the substance of their own being outwards into the form of the Word. So we can see the throat chakra as the sacrificing, substantial element in this whole thing. And, between them, the brow. The realm of the Cherubim, through which the song of the world flows. Our upright posture, that between the eyes, the music of the spheres is operating through there. We sing the glory of God from the brow.

Then we go down into the Second Hierarchy, and we feel the Spirits of Wisdom also leading up from the realm of the Heart/Understanding into the throat, so that in the Throat chakra, the Curiotetes and the Thrones meet. The wisdom from the heart comes up, the substance of the Creation comes down, between them is born the Word, and in that is the human speech. And there is the throat chakra.

Now we come down into the realm of the Dunemais, and that’s the realm of movement. And here we are in the realm of our own heartbeat and our own breathing, and everything that is there in our own rhythmic systems, moving in this lemniscate – in/out, in/out, constantly exchanging. Venous blood dying, arterial blood being born. This is right here, and this mysterious organ in the middle of our hearts, this that the physiologists call the ‘neuro-muscular bundle’, which seems to be of a substance unidentifiable in any other physiological terms. There, in the ‘heart of it’, as it were, a mysterious being, right in the middle of the heart, where this process of death to life, death to life, this alchemy of this process is embodied. And then down to the Exhusii – the Spirits of Form. We are down now in the Solar Plexus chakra, where we are aware directly of the being of the Earth – sensitively, almost over-sensitively in a way, the light of the Sun pouring in. And our own reaction pouring out . . .

The Time-Spirits turning up, coming from the realm of the forces, the forces of the Earth, the soul realm also, coming up and meeting the Form spirits in the solar plexus chakra there. So this is a tremendously turbulent area, this is where the realm of Light and the realm of soul meet. So there is great turbulence always possible in the solar plexus, and we have to be very assiduous about closing that and seeing that it’s guarded, seeing that this very special, very sensitive region of ours is looked after and guarded.

And then down into the realm of association, we come into the realm of the gonads, into the realm of the feeling relationship to the Earth itself, where the procreative and associative forces are operating in the Angeloi. And then we come right down to the Archangeloi in the Base chakra, where they are the sources of our power, the area where the Kundelini can be contacted. We, in our dispensation, come down to heal and reconcile and contain the Kundelini forces within the Christ-power before we can release it. And then, with our higher being, and with our Angel, we can surge up from below, through all the other chakras, to the heights. So that sevenfoldness and the ninefoldness are intimately linked there, as we can see.

Shall we just quietly now go back into our inner picturing and once more try to form the vision of the one which is, at the same time, three. And we will say the Rosicrucian sayings which are linked with these, as we do this:

Seraphim – Cherubim – Thrones: Spirits of Strength – ‘Let there ring forth from the heights that which in the depths is echoed, speaking: Ex Deo nascimur – from God, Man has being.’

Curiotetes – Dunemais – Exhusii: Spirits of Light – ‘Let there be fired from out of the East that which in the West takes shape, speaking: In Christo morimur – in Christ, death becomes life.’

Archai – Archangeloi – Angeloi: Spirits of Soul – ‘Let there be prayed from out of the depths that which, in the heights is heard and answered, speaking: Per Spiritum Sanctum revivissimus – in the Spirit’s Universal thoughts, the Soul awakens.’

[Most of the unaccredited quotations used by Stanley are taken from the Foundation Stone Meditation of Rudolf Steiner – Ed.]

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