I-61 The human race becoming younger

How can Mankind Find the Christ Again of Esotericism, Lect. 3; Ancient Myths Lect. 5; Aspects of Human Evolution, Lect. 1

As yet another way in which the human being has changed with the passage of time, Steiner here tells us that the human race is gradually becoming younger. He is not talking about the demographics of the average age of then living persons. Rather he is referring to a phenomenon that may have escaped our attention, namely, the capacity of a human being, simply by being born, to develop wisdom through its physical body up to a certain age. This fact is totally obvious in the early years of life, but continues long beyond what we might otherwise think. However, it is in this respect that we are getting younger. In other words, the age at which we cease to gain wisdom from our physical bodies is much younger now than in earlier post-Atlantean times. Steiner gives the following ages:

Then he points out the wonderful fact that the age of Christ Jesus when he passed through death on Golgotha coincides with the age to which humanity had fallen back at that time; and that the particular age at which humanity now stands (at the time of the lecture in 1918) is 27 years. (Each Cultural Age lasts approximately 2,160 years, so that the length of time to which a one-year decline is attributable is 308.57 years—the length of each archangelic period as per I-19.)