Rudolf Steiner & The Legacy Of The Star Gods

By Brad Steiger

A quantum leap in humankind' s intellectual development occurred in Sumer 6000 years ago when cuneiform writing was invented in order to record a dramatic starburst. Every pulsating thrust of the technology with which humankind surrounds itself today was initiated when a star died in a dramatic, brilliant explosion.

The psychological and cultural impact of the supernova on the inhabitants of Sumer was overwhelming. Literally "overnight" in evolutionary terms, the Sumerians gave the world a law code, the first love song, the first school system, the first parliament, and the first directory of pharmaceutical remedies. The origins of contemporary Western culture were nursed in Sumer, the cradle of civilization. The roots of the Judeo-Christian religious beliefs grew from the "tree of knowledge," the Garden of Eden, which tradition places in that same area.

Today astronomers recognize the nearest and brightest supernova ever witnessed by humankind as Vela X, now a faintly flashing pulsar about 1300 light-years from our solar system. George Michanowsky, a specialist in Mesopotamian astronomy, saw how the very first and most fundamental symbol of Sumerian script was one which represented "star." He went on to show how the first word ever written by a human soon became linked with the symbol for "deity," thus communicating "star god." Michanowsky saw the death-blaze of Vela X to have been such a profound sky show that it became a "cultural organizing principle" that forced human knowledge to take a dramatic leap forward.

But was there something more that took place at that time? The priest -historian Berossus chronicled the account of Oannes, half-man, half-fish, who surfaced from the Persian Gulf to instruct the early inhabitants of Mesopotamia in the arts of civilization. Oannes was said to be one who was possessed of an insight into letters, sciences, and every kind of art. Oannes was but an ancient Greek form of Ea, the star god of the Sumerians.

Were the Sumerians so overwhelmingly inspired by the starburst that they were stimulated into creating writing, law, education, and many of the essential concepts of science?

Or had they received some overt physical assistance and instruction from survivors who might have been escaping the supernova, the death of their sun?

Reference to a god who was said to be half-man, half-fish suggests, once again, an amphibious intelligence. Later, we may recall a great teacher of righteousness, a "fisher of men," who taught the Way and whose followers identified themselves to one another by making the sign of a fish.

Australian Sir John Eccles (1903-1997), winner of the Nobel Prize for medicine in 1963, was the complete scientist, philosopher, metaphysician. As the neurophysiologist who demonstrated the transmission of electrical impulses in the brain, he declared that his research led him to conclude that evolution alone cannot explain man's awareness of himself. Sir John became increasingly convinced that there must have been the intervention of some transcendental agency in the infusion into humankind of Soul. Simply stated, he maintained that the brain and the mind are separate entities which interact, but it is only the brain that is the product of genetic evolution.

Sir John explained that he was an evolutionist, of course, but he did not believe that evolution was the final story As he stated once in an interview in the Washington Post [April, 1981], "The genetic code and natural selection explain quite a lot, but evolution doesn't explain how I came to exist. It doesn't explain even the origin of consciousness .... If you look at the most modern texts on evolution, you find nothing about mind and consciousness. They assume that it just comes automatically with the development of the brain. But that's not an answer. If my uniqueness of self is tied to the genetic uniqueness of self that built my brain, the odds against myself existing are 10 to the 10-thousandth against.

"It is just too improbable to wait around to get the right constructed brain for you. The brain is a computer, you see. Each of us has a computer, and we are the programmers of this computer. [We were] born ... with what this wonderful structure of evolution and genetic coding have wrought.... But the soul is this unique creation that is ours for life. It is us. We are experiencing, remembering, creating, suffering, imagining. All of this is processed here with the soul central to it."

The great metaphysician Rudolf Steiner theorized that the people of our prehistory had been largely guided and directed by a higher order of beings who interacted and communicated with certain humans--the smartest, the strongest, the most intellectually flexible. Eventually these select humans produced what might be called demigods, divine human beings, who, in turn, could relay instructions from higher intelligences.

In effect, Steiner may have given us another definition of the semi- divine progeny that the ancient Hebrews named Nephilim," which does, in fact, mean demigod, men of "great renown."

Steiner went on to speculate that within the larger evolving human race were the descendents of those divine-human hybrid beings, men and women who are animated by higher ideals, who regard themselves as children of a divine, universal power. It need not be overemphasized that the larger body of humankind is devoted to the service of egotism, materialism, and selfish, personal interests.

Steiner believed that within what he termed the emerging "Sixth Post-Atlantean Race" would be children of the divine universal power who would be able to initiate those men and women who have developed their faculty of thought so that they might better unite themselves with the divine. The children of the divine universal power, those who have the "seed" within them, will be able to initiate the more advanced members of humankind. People so initiated will be able to receive revelations and perform what others will consider miracles. The initiates will go on to become the mediators between humankind and the higher intelligences.

The whole point of the efforts of these higher intelligences is to enable humankind to become more independent, more able to stand on its own feet without having to rely on the higher order of beings that directed us in ancient times.

Rudolf Steiner was born at Krajevic, Austria-Hungary (now Yugoslavia) on February 27, 1861. Although he had experienced encounters with the mystical and the unknown as a young child and was guided by an adept he would only refer to as the "Master," Steiner's early academic accomplishments were in the scientific fields. His father had wished him to become a railway engineer, so that had led Rudolf into a study of mathematics, which seemed only to whet his appetite for the material sciences, leading him to pursue studies in medicine, chemistry, physics, as well as agriculture, architecture, art, drama, literature, and philosophy. Fascinated by the works of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Steiner began the extensive task of editing Goethe's scientific papers, and from 1889 to 1896 worked on this project. It was also during this period that Steiner wrote his own highly acclaimed The Philosophy of Freedom.

When he was in his late thirties (c. 1897), Steiner received a revelation of what he believed was the turning point in human spiritual history, the incarnation of the Divine Being known as the Christ. In the twentieth century, Steiner said, humankind began to enter the "fullness of time" when the Christ principle, cosmic consciousness, might once again become manifest.

Steiner defined "Christ consciousness" as a transformative energy that greatly transcended orthodox Christianity. In Steiner's view, the Master Jesus became "christed" and thereby was able to present humankind with a dramatic example of what it means to achieve a complete activation of the spiritual seed within all human souls and to rise above all material considerations.

In Steiner's Tenth Lecture on the Gospel of St. Luke, he reflects that just as a plant cannot unfold its blossom immediately after the seed has been sown, so has humankind had to progress from stage to stage until the right knowledge could be brought to maturity at the right time.

To Steiner, the Christ energy is the catalyst that germinates the seed that great Spirit Beings implanted within their human offspring. There were, of course, the physical seeds of male and female, which intermingled to produce the whole human being. But there was also something in each human that did not arise from the blending of the two physical seeds. There was, so to speak, a "virgin birth," a something ineffable, Steiner says, which somehow flowed. into the process of germination from quite a different source: "

In 1913, Steiner set about forming his own group, the Anthroposophical Society, which he declared would be about the utilization of "human wisdom" (anthro=man; sophy=wisdom) to achieve contact with the spiritual world. The human intellect, Steiner insisted, could be trained to rise above material concerns and to perceive a greater spiritual reality. The human consciousness had the ability to activate the seed that the great Spirit Beings had implanted within their human offspring.

Steiner emphasized that the path to such contact might best be attained by a proper application of meditation. When human consciousness had been raised to the spiritual level where it can experience the eternal element that is limited by neither birth nor death, then it can comprehend its own eternality and its ability to be born again in subsequent life existences.

Such spiritual prophets as Steiner have foretold that humankind is now entering the "fullness" of time when the Christ principle, cosmic consciousness, can once again become manifest. Sensitive observers of the contemporary scene have taken careful note of the fact that thousands of men and women throughout the world are being activated by a heightened state of awareness that comes to them in dreams, visions, and strange memories. These individuals are feeling the seed bringing forth new life within them and they are concerned about the spiritual needs of the human souls around them.

Spiritual history is replete with many sincere and insightful prophets and teachers who lived before the Master Jesus, but, Steiner said, they could speak to their fellows only by using the faculties transmitted through their earthly natures. They used the energy and the wisdom of Earth.

According to Steiner, Jesus tapped into an awareness of that higher energy which comes from the realm of the Divine. He knew that a speck of this energy no larger than a mustard seed could exalt the human psyche. He knew that even the slightest infusion of this energy into the physical seed of male and female would transform the individual into a citizen of a higher dimension of reality, the "Kingdom of God." And, at the same time,.he taught that the doorway to enter such a wondrous kingdom lay within the heart of each sincere pilgrim who sought to join him there.

"The importance of Jesus was not that he was a human like us," John W. White remarks, in the April 2, 1982 issue of New Attitudes, "but that we are gods like him--or at least we have the evolutionary potential to be."

White observes that while Jesus, the man, was a historical person, the "Christ" is an eternal, transpersonal condition of being. When we distinguish between the eternality of the "Christ consciousness" and the man Jesus, we can more completely understand the promise given in John 14:12: "Truly, truly, I say to you. he who believes in me will also do the work that I do; and greater works than these will he do... "

In White's view, Jesus was an evolutionary forerunner of the higher race that will inherit the earth, a " ... race of people that will embody the Christ consciousness on a species-wide basis, rather than the sporadic individual basis seen earlier in history when an occasional avatar, such as Buddha or Jesus, appeared."

White gives the name of Homo Noeticus (pertaining to higher consciousness) to the evolving form of humanity:

"Because of their deepened awareness and self-understanding, the traditionally imposed forms, controls, and institutions of society are barriers to their full development. Their changed psychology is based on expression, not suppression, of feeling. Their motivation is cooperative and loving, not competitive and aggressive. Their sense of logic is multilevel, integrated, simultaneous; it is not linear, sequential, either-or. Their identity is sharing-collective, not isolated-individual. Their psychic abilities are used for benevolent and ethical purposes, not harmful and immoral ones. The conventional ways of society do not satisfy them. The search for new ways of living concerns them."

"We are not simply human beings," White tells us, "we are also human becomings, standing between two worlds, two ages. Each of us has the latent ability to take conscious control of our evolution and thereby become members of the New Humanity ... Jesus did not say that the highest state of consciousness was his alone for all time. Rather, he called us to follow him, from his example."

Numerous mystics and seers, quite apart from the Christian tradition, have noted that there appears to have been some dispensation of cosmic energy that occurred at the time when the Master Jesus was seeking to raise awareness. Some believe that when he preached about a new way that had come from his Father's Kingdom and which had blended with the feminine principle of the Holy Ghost, he was talking about a literal transmission of energy being broadcast to Earth from some higher realm. Pentecost, those metaphysicians will say, was a powerful demonstration of that energy. The apostles were so glowing with the cosmic energy that they appeared to be on flre to those who witnessed the absorption of the Christ principle into their physical bodies.

Perhaps something truly was added to the energy of the Earth Mother at that time--call it the Holy Spirit for lack of a better term--and hundreds of thousands of men and women are being activated by that same cosmic energy today as it is received in their dreams, visions, and memories. All over the planet, contemporary citizens of Earth are having their individual Pentecosts, as the seed within them, their spiritual legacy from beyond the stars is being brought to fruition.

Futurist Theodore J. Gordon has commented: "In considering the future of religion, it is appropriate to ask what the unknown might yield in the next few decades that would have relevance to man' s view of his relationship to the cosmos. A major event ... would be the discovery of extraterrestrial life wherein we would become members of a community of life, participants in a drama bigger than we could have dreamed."