Contemplate here how the first hierarchy, the highest, manifests in Earth evolution. See I-29. There, with supporting reference from Steiner's lectures, we find the Seraphim manifesting in lightning and fire, the Cherubim in clouds and air, and the Thrones in solid matter (hence their name). The point where the Seraphim's "flaming sword," i.e., lightning (the imponderable that produces both fire and light), meets the Cherubim in the air (ponderable matter) is where the tree of life (the imponderable) and the tree of knowledge (the ponderable) were divided when humanity descended into materiality, i.e., was driven from the garden (Gen 3,22-24). It is there that the spatial becomes the nonspatial, and vice versa. In Steiner's words, space is "torn apart." We might say instead that "the veil [of matter] is rent" (Mt 27,51; Mk 15,38; Heb 10,19-20; Ex 26,31-35; Heb 9,3,8).

So when we ascend from the ponderable to the imponderable, passing through the realm of heat, the heat wells out in the transition from the pressure effects of ponderable matter to the suction effects of imponderable spirit. Small wonder that such massive heat radiates from the point of transition at the surface of the Sun.

If our proud science of today is to move to a higher level, to what Steiner calls spiritual science, so that it can come closer to understanding the mysteries of our existence, it must begin to apply these concepts to such areas as what it now calls the "conduction" of heat, the hearing of sound, the cause of disease, and countless other domains where spirit manifests in the presence of materiality. Only by moving through these points will we learn how "the heavens declare his righteousness" (Ps 50,6), and only so will science and religion again become one, as they once were, but now transformed at a higher level. We are talking here not about a hike, but about a long journey. But a start must be made. A change in the way of thinking (what John the Baptist called "repentance") is necessary. But by undertaking this journey and moving through these levels, humanity will evolve new organs of perception opening to it more and more of the divine intelligence administered by the Archangel Michael (Dan 10,13-14,21; Rev 12,7-9; see also The Incredible Births of Jesus, Epilogue citing the book of Enoch at pp. 86-88).

Then we will come to know and understand what Christ meant when he said he had come to cast fire upon the Earth.

Fire, The Spiral and the One Hundred Forty-Four Thousand

"This is how the world began—as a coil. . . . The first people came up from the middle and walked around in a spiral." So began an article in People for January 22, 1996 (p. 63), about a sixty-one-year-old Navajo woman who wove such designs in her baskets. "A relative of her grandmother's taught [her] to weave the tales of supernatural beings" when she was eleven. Now, a century after the last embers of Indian conflict have died out, many people are looking more thoughtfully at the ancient shamanistic legends of Native Americans. Even here, in this statement from a simple Navajo basketweaver we come upon a deep truth, known of old, but, not unlike the Copernican rediscovery of the spherical shape of our Earth and the heliocentric nature of our solar system, only now beginning to flicker back into human consciousness after millennia of lost consciousness surrounding the Incarnation of Christ.

Fire and Phi

Before Aristotle and later Arabism³⁶ laid a more secular "scientific" slant on earthly phenomena, Plato had summarized his gleanings about creation from the ancient mysteries in a work called Timaeus. The threads from this work are clearly to be seen in the later writings of Philo, Clement of Alexandria, Origen and other Church Fathers, but especially in the Logos that opens John's Gospel as well as in the teachings of Paul on the hierarchies as finally reduced from oral tradition to writing by Pseudo-Dionysius (PSEUD), who wrote in the name of Paul's Athenian convert, Dionysius the Areopagite (Acts 17,34).³⁷ It is well that we start with Plato's words in our search for the relationship of fire, the spiral and the one hundred forty-four thousand; thus we read (emphasis and footnotes added):

Now that which is created is of necessity corporeal, and also visible and tangible. And nothing is visible where there is no fire, or tangible which has no solidity, and nothing is solid without earth. Wherefore also God in the beginning of creation made the body of the universe to consist of fire and earth. But two things cannot be rightly put together without a third; there must be some bond of union between them. And the fairest bond is that which makes the most complete fusion of itself and the things which it combines; and proportion is best adapted to effect such a union. For whenever in any three numbers, whether cube or square, there is a mean, which is to the last term what the first term is to it; and again, when the mean is to the first term as the last term is to the mean-then the mean becoming first and last, and the first and last becoming means, they will all of them of necessity come to be the same, and having become the same with one another will be all one.³⁸ If the universal frame had been created a surface only and having no depth, a single mean would have sufficed to bind together itself and the other terms; but now, as the world must be solid, and solid bodies are always compacted not by one mean but by two, God placed water and air in the mean between fire and earth, and made them to have the same proportion so far as was possible (as fire is to air so is air to water, and as air is to water so is water to earth); and thus he bound and put together a visible and tangible heaven. And for these reasons, and out of such elements which are in number four, the body of the world was created, and it was harmonized by proportion, and therefore has the spirit of friendship; and having been reconciled to itself, it was indissoluble by the hand of any other than the framer.³⁹ (31b-32c; 7 GB 448)

Literally, this "fairest bond" language describes any geometric progression. Simple cell division (one, two, four, eight, …) is an example. However, there is considerable acceptance of the idea that the highest example of this "fairest bond" is what has come to be called the "golden mean," designated by the Greek letter phi. As we shall see, its character and meaning were also known and applied by the Egyptians much earlier. Later in Timaeus (62a; 7 GB 462), Plato says:

And we must not forget that the original figure of fire (that is, the pyramid), more than any other form, has a dividing power which cuts our bodies into small pieces, and thus naturally produces that affection which we call heat; and hence the origin of the name" [fire, or phi].

Paul similarly identifies this phior fire in Heb 4,12 when he says, "For the word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing to the division of soul and spirit. . . ." The pyramid Plato speaks of here is a tetrahedron, the three-sided pyramid that, with its base, has a total of four sides, the least condensed of any solid geometrical body with entirely flat sides (see fn 20 above). But as we shall see, the Egyptians enshrined phi and other secrets in their four-sided pyramids also, and these forms still thus take a name meaning fire.

But what is meant by phi?

Normally it is given a geometric definition. It can be stated most simply as a geometric progression where A is to B as B is to A plus B.⁴⁰ If, applying such progression, the line XZ below is divided at Y so as to form segments A and B, and A is given a value of one, then B will have a value of 1.618, and XZ (the sum of A and B) will have a value of 2.618. We can at once determine that the ratio 1/1.618 equals .618, while the ratio 1.618/2.618 also equals .618. And we could continue on ad infinitum showing these ratios between two successive numbers of the series. The place where Y bisects XZ is known as the "golden section" and segment B as the "golden mean" or words of similar import. Kepler (1571-1630) apotheosized it as a divine proportion as follows:

Geometry has two great treasures: one is the theorem of Pythagoras; the other, the division of a line into extreme and mean ratio. The first we may compare to a measure of gold; the second we may name a precious jewel.⁴¹