Trumpet(s), Page 2

Let us then look at the meaning of this term in Revelation. There Lazarus/ John gives the entire elaborate picture by which the Trumpet flashes of Paul can be comprehended. The human being, the true Prodigal Son (Lk 15,11-32), left the Father in the highest heaven, journeyed into the “far country” of its present mineral-physical condition, and, by coming to recognize the Christ event, the Incarnation and Mystery of Golgotha in the anthroposophical sense, can “come to itself” and commence its return to the Father. The descent began in, and the ascent will return to, the twelvefold zodiacal realm or kingdom (see “Zodiac” and Twelve”), while evolution, all that is measured by time, occurs in the sevenfold solar realm. Revelation shows us the entirety of this journey; the first half, or descent, is fairly compressed in early passages, while the present and the far distant future are laid out in some detail, starting with the sevenfold solar system in which we find ourselves, then moving through four cycles of seven (letters, seals, trumpets and bowls of wrath) until the twelvefold zodiacal realm is entered with the approach to the New Jerusalem.

Steiner gives us the most helpful of all his schematics as a part of the ASJ lecture cycle. It is reproduced in I-1 (whose introductory narrative also references I-2, I-3 and I-4, the last containing helpful exposition relative to I-1). The Commentary on Revelation⁴ will give a more complete picture, but the following table gives us the basis for understanding the occult meaning of Trumpet(s):

Symbol Scripture Chart I-1 Description 7 Letters Rev 2-3 7 Cultural Ages (of which the human being is in the fifth) of the Fifth Evolutionary Epoch (called post-Atlantean) of the Physical Condition of Form 7 Seals Rev 5,1-8,1 7 Cultural Ages (or their evolutionary equivalent) of the Sixth Evolutionary Epoch of the Physical Condition of Form 7 Trumpets Rev 8,2-11,15 7 Cultural Ages (or their evolutionary equivalent) of the Seventh Evolutionary Epoch of the Physical Condition of Form 7 Bowls Rev 16 7 Evolutionary Epochs (or their evolutionary equivalent) of the More Perfect Astral Condition of Form of the Mineral Kingdom

In ASJ, Lect. 9 (p. 156), we are told:

. . . when the earth has reached its goal, when the seventh trumpet begins to sound, the following will be observed: what exists of the physical body will be dissolved like salt in warm water. Man’s spirit-self [or “manas,” i.e., “Manna”; see I-9 and I-24] will be developed to a high degree, so that man will repeat again and again the words of Paul: Not I, but Christ in me [Gal 2,20] does everything.—Thus man will live. This will enable him to dissolve the physical nature and make the ennobled etheric into a being which can live in the astralized earth. Thus man, a new being, will live over into this spiritualized earth.

We might say that the important stage of passing over into the earth which has become spiritualized is wonderfully expressed in the Bible where it says that everything which man now accomplishes within himself in the physical body during the earth period is like a sowing whose fruit will appear when the earth has become spiritual: [here Steiner quotes 1 Cor 15,36b-40,43a,44]. Paul calls the etheric or life body, spiritual body, after the physical has dissolved and the etheric passes into the astral earth. Paul here sees beforehand the incorruptible spiritual body, as he calls it.

Most significantly, Paul refers to the last Trumpet (1 Cor 15,52), which has no clear meaning until one sees how it relates to the seven “trumpets” in Revelation. This also gives meaning to “meet[ing] the Lord in the air” at the “sound of the trumpet” (1 Th 4,16-17).