The single sense perception that was designed for humanity was this—to perceive its Ego in the flash of blood substance and in the immediate rush back into the spiritual. Instead of beholding colors and hearing tones and perceiving tastes the human being ought really to live within the ruling Will. It ought, as it were, to be swimming in it. What was designed for the human was that it would be placed as a pure Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition into the spiritual World-All, whence it would gaze down upon a being on the Earth or in the environs of the Earth. It would not feel, "I am in that being," but rather, "It belongs to me—the spiritual blood becomes for one moment material, and in what flashes up to me I perceive my I." The one and only sense perception that should have come is the perception of the I or Ego, and the one and only substance that was intended for humanity in the material world is the blood in this form of momentary flashing up. If the human had become like this, if the human had remained the "being" of paradise, it would look down from the World-All upon what was destined to symbolize it on this Earth and to give to it the consciousness of I&3151;a purely spiritual being consisting of Imaginations, Inspirations and Intuitions, within which the I shoots up in the attempt to break through. And in this flash the human being would be able to say, "I am, for through me has come into being what is of me down below" (see Steiner's sketch, Diagram 8).

Diagram 8

It is strange but it is a fact. The human was intended to live in the environment of the Earth. Suppose a human being were living here (a in Diagram 8) in the environment of the Earth. It was intended that this human being should produce on the Earth its own reflection, and only through this reflection ray back again its Ego, and then it would say, "There is my sign." It was not intended that this human should carry around with it its being of bones, glands, nerves and all&3151;still less that it should pronounce the grotesque verdict, 'That is I." It should have happened quite differently. The human should have lived in the environs of the Earth planet, and sunk a sign and symbol into the Earth in the flashing up of form in blood, and it should then have said to itself, "There I drive in my stake—my sign and my seal, which gives me the consciousness of my Ego. For what I have become, in that I have passed through Saturn, Sun and Moon existence—with that I can hover here outside in the World-All. It is the Ego I must now add; and the Ego I perceive by inscribing myself in the Earth below, so that I can always read in the flashing of the blood what I am." We were, therefore, not originally intended to walk the Earth in bodies of flesh and bone as we do, but to circle around the Earth and make records, as it were, down below from which we might recognize and know that we are that—that we are an Ego.

Whoever overlooks this fact has no true knowledge of the nature of the human being.

Then came Lucifer and brought it about that this human should have not merely its Ego for sense perception, but should feel its astral body, too, as its Ego, all that it had acquired on the Moon as astral body—thinking, feeling and willing. The Ego was thus no longer pure. Something else was mixed with it, and this led to the necessity for the human being to fall down into matter. The expulsion from paradise is the Fall into matter. And immediately there followed the change in humanity's blood. For now instead of flashing up for a moment and then being received back again into spirituality, the blood becomes real blood substance. It drives right through and spurts up as blood substance. It receives the tendency to be as we know it today. And so this blood substance, which by rights should return into the spiritual in the very moment when it becomes material, now gushes up into the rest of the human being and fills the human's whole organization, undergoing modification in accordance with the various forces in humanity.

According, for example, as it penetrates into a preponderance of physical over etheric body or of etheric body over astral body, and so on, the blood turns into nerve substance, muscle substance, and the like. Thus Lucifer compels blood to a greater materiality. Whereas blood has been designed to shoot up and immediately disappear again, Lucifer brought it into a coarse materiality (Gen 4,10). That is the one direct deed that Lucifer has performed in matter itself. He made blood into matter, whereas with the other things he at least only brought disorder among them. Were it not for Lucifer, blood would not be as it is at all; it would instead exist in a spirituality that comes only to the edge of materiality, only to the cusp of being born, and then at once returns. Blood as matter is the creation of Lucifer, and since the human being has in blood a physical expression of the Ego, its Ego is bound up here on Earth with a creation of Lucifer (see Gen 3,14-15). And since again Ahriman is only able to approach humanity because Lucifer is there before him, we can say that blood is what Lucifer has thrown down for Ahriman to catch so that both now have an approach to humanity (Steiner's Diagram 9). Can we wonder that an ancient primal feeling makes Lucifer-Ahriman³⁷ look upon blood as their earthly property? Can we wonder that he has his contracts written in blood, or that he attaches great value to Faust's signing the contract with his blood? For blood belongs entirely to Lucifer. Everything else holds in it something divine. With nothing else is he quite at home. Even ink is for Lucifer more divine than blood. Blood is precisely his element.

Diagram 9

We see, then, that humanity has these two beings in it, the being of senses, glands and digestion, and the being of nerve, muscle and bone. The corresponding forces of both are charged with a coarse materiality, and both are supplied with blood, in the form it has assumed through the action of the Luciferic influence. For it is quite obvious, is it not, even to external science, that the human being, insofar as it is a material being, is entirely a product of its blood? Everything in the human being that is material is nourished out of blood; it is really all transformed blood. From the point of view of matter, bones, nerves, muscles and glands are all nothing else than transformed blood. The human being is actually blood, and as such it is a walking Lucifer-Ahriman. It is because of what is behind matter and is poured into matter through the blood that the human being belongs to the divine world and to a forward-moving evolution, not to an evolution that is a mere relic of the past. Lucifer, and Ahriman, too came into our world through remaining behind at particular stages of evolution.

Bearing in mind all we have said, we can see quite clearly how at the very beginning of Earth evolution humans had something in common, something that united them. They had from the first in their blood something that was common to them all. For if the blood had remained as it was designed to be for humanity, it would have been a pure emanation of the Spirits of Form. In the blood the Spirits of Form would live in us. These Spirits of Form are none other than the seven Elohim of the Bible.³⁸ Steiner had earlier said in his Munich cycle of lectures on Genesis (GEN), that if the human being had kept its blood in the state it originally was to have had, it would feel in itself the seven Elohim; that is to say, it would feel its Ego within as seven-membered. One of its members would be the chief and would correspond to Jahve or Jehovah ("Yahweh" in English), and the other six would, to begin with, be subordinate. This sevenfoldness that it would feel in its Ego, as it were, a surging up within it of each of the seven Elohim or Spirits of Form, would have produced originally and spontaneously in the human being the sevenfold nature that we now have to acquire with so great toil and trouble. Because human blood has been tainted by Lucifer, humanity has to wait so long. It has to wait until human beings have sent forth sufficient outstreamings of Intuitive and Inspired and Imaginative substance from nerves, muscles and bones for them to be ripe to receive once again this sevenfold nature into themselves. This is the meaning also of Is 6,9-13.³⁹

As important as it is that we have come to this point, we are now only where we can recognize intellectually how the human nature plays into the sevenfold human being (I-9). But humanity would never have darkened the six other members and illumined so greatly the one, the Ego, had not authority been given to Lucifer to interfere in the course of evolution (see Job 1,12). The real cause of the other members' suffering a darkening at the beginning of Earth evolution, while the Ego grew particularly bright and was made to shine with a light-filled egoness, was the Ego's being hurried into dense matter so that it was able to come to a clear consciousness of its Individuality, of its particular single Individuality, whereas it would otherwise all along have felt its sevenfoldness.

Thus we see on the one hand that if the human being's blood had remained as it was the human would have come to an Ego that would from the outset have had a sevenfold character. Through Lucifer having been given the blood, however, the human being has come to an Ego that is single and unitary in character. The human has come to feel and know its Ego as the center of its being. We can, therefore, understand how the blood in its originally intended form contains something that could work in a social direction, that could bring people together, so that they might feel themselves to be one common race of humanity. This would have been so if the seven Elohim had come to revelation in human Egos, as it was intended they should in the beginning. Lucifer's gift to humanity has meant that people feel themselves as particular Individualities and cut themselves off in their self-dependence from the common race of humanity. Diagrams 6 and 9 show the dispersal of the human being's blood upon the "ground" (Gen 4,10) instead of as intended in Diagram 7, the immediate consequence being the expulsion so that we humans would have to "wander the earth" instead of paradise and to be cut off from the "face" of the Elohim (Gen 4,14). The world process takes its course on Earth in such a way that through the working of Lucifer the human being is inclined to become more and more independent, while through the working of the seven Elohim it is inclined more and more to feel itself a member and part of the whole of humanity.⁴⁰