As one would expect, so much is telescoped within Genesis 1 that any ten lectures purporting to cover it must do so with immense conceptual complexities. Indeed, my personal experience suggests that this cycle is one of the most difficult to comprehend of any given by Steiner. It must be taken as only laying the seed for further investigation by those who have to a great extent mastered, through a process of gradually dawning awareness, the fundamentals of spiritual science. How little did I comprehend in my first or second reading. Notably, this cycle was not given until all of his basic books³¹ had been written, and a significant portion of his lectures upon the Gospels was already in place, as indicated by the chronological bibliography in Vol. 1. It is almost as though he realized that it would take time for this to seep down into the understanding of his followers. The most complete basis for understanding is in the complex creation portions of Outline of Esoteric Science (OES), but it is written in a way that requires the student's own recognition of how it relates to the Bible, for there are very few specific references to highly relevant scripture.

What anthroposophy had to say about the biblical creation accounts, along with the nativity accounts, John's Apocalypse, and a far more complete picture of karma and reincarnation, was a strong motivation behind my decision to attempt a comprehensive reduction of Steiner's teachings to show traditional Christendom their applicability to the Bible itself. And no section has presented, in that regard, a greater challenge than the very beginning of the Bible, Genesis 1.

What we are here about is to set out a more easily comprehendible imagination of the progressive "days" of creation and the succeeding Fall expressed by the Bible's first chapters. To do so, we must take note of the Hebrew word for day, yom (e.g., Yom Kippur means "Day of Atonement"). Steiner, discussing the deep and primeval meaning of specific Hebrew words used in Genesis, tells us (GEN, Lect. 4, p.57) that yom meant not a day as we know it, but an aeon, which was a being, a living spiritual entity (see 1 Brit 119, "aeon"; also WNWCD and MWCD). This is clearly in keeping with what we are told in Gen 2,4a about these "days" after they had all been described: "These are the generations of the heavens and the earth when they were created"(Gen 2,4a). In Latin this is reflected by the primeval connection between deus and dies—god and day, dies being the expression of the deus in its descending adjustment to the mode of time.³² What we are here dealing with is the level of the hierarchy immediately below the Elohim, namely, the Archai, or Spirits of Personality (Principalities, or Primal Beings; see I-6). Immediately subordinate to the Elohim, they were their helpers in the creative process. And just as there were seven Elohim, so also were there seven Archai, or "days," described in that process. Collectively, they are the Yamin ("days"). Thus, the Elohim, in Gen 1,1, call to their service their immediate subordinates, the Archai, who are really spirits of time as their Greek name clearly implies, along with the idea of ancientness or originality-almost certainly corresponding with Daniel's "Ancient of Days" (Dan 7,9,13,22).³³ These gods work successively over distinctively different and succeeding eons (aeons). The seven Archangels assume successive regencies, each of approximately three hundred fifty-four years.³⁴ The time periods of the Archai were much longer, especially before the parabolic slowing of events (cf. the mirror-image reversal, the turning around of the parabola, in Mt 24,22 telling of the shortening of days during the reascent of humanity) with the establishment of measurable time in Gen 1,14—after which the smaller divisions of time came under the domain of the servants of the Archai, namely, the Archangels (GEN, Lect. 5, p. 70), though they work closely together, for the Archangels are also Folk-Spirits. When one begins to understand the importance of these time periods, then the ascendancy of the Archangel of the Sun, Michael, in 1879, takes on resplendence of meaning and significance for our own period. Michael, the custodian of the heavenly intelligence before casting Lucifer down to Earth (Rev 12,7-9), has now, in his first regency after the coming of Christ (Rev 12,10), to lead us, in the face of that cast-down "deceiver," into that divine spiritual knowledge of which Steiner is the foremost prophet and servant since Christian Rosenkreutz hundreds of years ago.

Steiner says in the first and last lectures of the Genesis (GEN) cycle (Lects. 1 and 10, pp. 13 and 114) that Gen 1,1 is set at the point in Earth evolution when the Sun and the Earth were about to separate. We must bear in mind that three prior Conditions of Consciousness had come and gone, namely, Old Saturn, Sun and Moon (see I-1). During these primal Conditions, the spiritual origins of the human being's three bodies had been laid down (I-14), which would be transformed into a higher state in the Earth Condition of Consciousness.

What was now to take place during the seven "days?" Let us defer what was taking place in the human being at these progressive stages until we have looked at what was taking place in the lower kingdoms. Here we need to look at Lects. 2 and 3. Inasmuch as the lower (earthly) form is always patterned after the higher (spiritual) form (see "As Above, So Below"), we must recognize that when the Elohim assumed their rulership of Earth creation (see I-16), they brought with them a remembrance of the stages of development from the three prior Conditions of Consciousness.

In Genesis (GEN), Lect. 3 ("The Seven Days of Creation"), Steiner makes what must at first blush be taken as a startling revelation. He mentions the characterization of the event of the first day, "Let there be light," and then says:

[This] allude[s] to an event which we can see as the recapitulation at a higher level of an earlier stage of evolution. . . . In fact all that is narrated in the Bible of the six or seven "days" of creation is a reawakening of previous conditions, not in the same but in a new form.
. . . [W]hat kind of reality are we to attribute to the account of what happened in the course of these six or seven "days"? It will be clearer if we put the question in this way. Could an ordinary eye, in fact could any organs of sense such as we have today have followed what we are told took place during the six days of creation? No, they could not. For the events there described really took place in the sphere of elementary existence, so that a certain degree of clairvoyant knowledge, clairvoyant perception, would have been needed for their observation. The truth is that the Bible tells us of the origin of the sensible out of the supersensible, and that the events with which it opens are supersensible events, even if they are only one stage higher than the ordinary physical events which proceeded from them and are familiar to us. In all our descriptions of the six days' work of creation we are in the domain of clairvoyant perception. What had existed at an earlier time now came forth in etheric, in elementary form. [See I-2, third tier, which shows that we are now in the "Physical-Etheric" Condition of Form, which is, even in the "etheric," lower than the Conditions of earlier planetary existence. For instance, our three bodies have their Egos in the higher three states, the higher and lower spiritual and astral, as indicated in I-89.] We must get a firm grasp of that, otherwise we shall be all at sea over the true meaning of the impressive words of Genesis. (pp. 34-35)

If we ask where in I-1 these seven "days" of "etheric" creation appear we may well scratch our heads in perplexity. For we know that the Sun separated from the mineral-physical Earth in Hyperborea and the Moon in Lemuria, and yet we are told of the creation of both of them in the fourth day (Gen 1,14-19), in the very midst of the series of the six-day creation-and all the while Steiner is telling us that nothing thus perceptible to our senses occurred in any of the seven "days." On this critical concept, we need the additional perspective given in I-2. Let us direct our attention first to the three progressive Elementary Kingdom Life Conditions in the second tier of I-2. Since mineral-physical heat first appeared during the Polarian Epoch, air in the Hyperborean, and water in the Lemurian, and since the Sun, Moon and planets ("stars") all appeared on the fourth day, it would seem we must assume that all seven "days" occurred prior to the Physical-Etheric state of the Present Mineral Kingdom of our Earth evolution. At least they occurred prior to the descent from the etheric into the physical during that Epoch. Based on this assumption, all the events of the seven "days" were prefigured into the spiritual, astral and/or etheric worlds during the three Elementary Kingdom Conditions of Life and the first three Conditions of Form (Arupa, Rupa and Astral) of the fourth Condition of Life (the Present Mineral Kingdom) of Earth evolution. The character of the Elementary Kingdoms and the meanings of the Arupa and Rupa Conditions of Form are generally described in I-4.

The pre-physical Conditions of the fire, air and water elements had their origin during the prior three Conditions of Consciousness and are in place in Gen 1,2, in the memory-like contemplation of the Elohim. But these are all undifferentiated, commingled, in a state of confusion, "without form" and, so far as sensate perception is concerned, "void." What then occurs during the first "day"?

Steiner discusses this in Lect. 3. But the easiest way to comprehend it is probably by referring to the following chart (from I-22) of the four ethers and elements (see "The Four Elements" herein) and how they come about by fission. In the "first day," the fire and air ethers were differentiated—separated. This fission caused, in the contemplation of the Elohim, light to arise as air descended. In the "second day," the Elohim differentiated the air from the water so that there was a spiritual firmament dividing the waters. The "first day" corresponds with Ancient Saturn, the "second day" with Ancient Sun. When we come to the spiritual recapitulation of Ancient Moon, we have the "third day," when life appears in the form of plants. We are told (pp. 42, 117-118) that the "after its kind" language pertains to the group souls of the lower kingdoms. Thus, in the "third day" we are dealing with the group soul or Ego of the plant kingdom (see I-11). It was not yet possible in the "third day" for there to be animals, for the Moon had first to separate. This happened in the "fourth day," and in the "fifth day" we are told that the animals appeared "after their kind," or, in other words, the group souls or Egos of the various animal species. There were, as yet, no plants or animals, for the contemplation of the Elohim was simply that these would come in the mineral-physical Condition of Form "after their kind," or, in other words, in keeping with their group souls or Egos in their respective supersensible worlds (I-11).

When we come to the "sixth day," we change from "the Elohim created," as though already determined from prior Conditions of Consciousness, to "Let us make man." For the first time we are dealing with a new format or image, that of the higher Elohim themselves-as a reflection of the Father. In other words, instead of the "Ego" of the lower kingdoms, we are dealing with the "I AM" of the creative Word itself, the Christ.

We then have the period of cosmic rest (pralaya) between the supersensible and the sensate worlds. Then, in Gen 2,4b we are told, in accordance with the above scenario, that Yahweh, who now had gone with the Moon (i.e., contracted his spherical volume from the Sun sphere down to that of the Moon sphere) in the Moon's separation from the Earth during the Lemurian Epoch, began to act and "made the earth and the heavens, when no plant of the field was yet in the earth and no herb of the field had yet sprung up."³⁵ The time had come for the etheric to become mineralized in the physical existence. With the coming of the "dust" of Earth came also the "breath of life" (Gen 2,7) reflective of the fourth stage of the ethers and elements (again see the I-22 chart above).

Let us pause here to conceptualize by analogy what has been said thus far about the "days" of creation. We know that before anything manufactured by the human being can actually take shape or form it must first be formed as an image in the human's mind. Take the case of a building. First an architect must create a conceptual design. For that, many steps ("days") must fall in place before it is time to bring the concepts into their mineral-physical existence. They exist as physical form only in the mind of the architect at first and then on plans and specifications. But the space where the building is to go is still completely "without form and void." Then a contractor is hired, who first assembles the materials and finally begins to assemble them into a structure. At the outset of construction, it is difficult to visualize what it will eventually become. Finally, over a period of time, involving many stages and subcontractors, it becomes a habitable structure and the resident for whom it was intended, the "I Am," can move in (cf. Heb 10,5, "but a body thou hast prepared for me"). Over time, the building wears out, even if regularly replenished by repair. At some point, it disintegrates sufficiently that, if not destroyed by an owner, it stands empty as a mere shell or skeleton as it goes back to the elements.