Rudolf Steiner: The small cupola of the first Goetheanum, the colonnade of the planets and the Representative of Humanity (1919)
Each of the seven metamorphoses of the Earth carries with it a “secret of life” which manifests itself in all the successive subdivisions of time (7 Planetary Metamorphoses, 7 Conditions of Life, 7 Conditions of Form, 7 Root races, 7 Cultural Epochs) but which can only reveal itself totally within its own metamorphosis (example: the first secret pertains totally to the first metamorphosis, but is recapitulated at the beginning of each of the seven metamorphoses and each submetamorphosis).
The Secret of the Abyss
The Secret of Number
The Secret of Alchemy
The Secret of Birth and Death
The Secret of Evil
The Secret of the Word
The Secret of Divine Bliss
So, for the moment, being in the fourth metamorphosis of the Earth (Mercury-Earth), only the first four secrets of life have been revealed through the uninterrupted esoteric work of several initiates. Of the other three, and in particular the fifth in relation to anthroposophy, only prefigurations are possible for the moment. The human being will be able to understand them entirely only at the end of the respective planetary metamorphoses.
The Seven Ineffable Secrets are:
1. The Secret of the Abyss: that is, the existence from before the Ancient Saturn to after the Future Volcan, deals with the existence of the being before the cosmic night. The Spiritual Hierarchy of the Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones, existed before the Ancient Saturn deriving from the previous evolution: the sacrifice of the Thrones initiated the existence of the human body through the gift of their substance of will. The “nothingness” that precedes the creation by the First Hierarchy on the Ancient Saturn is the same that will happen to the future metamorphosis of Vulcan, it is the cosmic night (pralaya) projected out of time and space, but at the end of the current planetary chain will take place on another level: the seventh stage is in fact the recapitulation of all the previous six elevated to a higher eighth. See also this post of mine about the evolution of the Earth.
2. The Secret of Number: it is exposed in the doctrine of Pythagoras, where each number from One to Ten is a spiritual entity. The set of the first ten numbers, to which all the other numbers can be traced, reveal the intimate structure of the cosmos: for Pythagoras it is the Tetraktys, in the Hebrew Kabbalah it is the Tree of Life whose “numbers” are the ten sephiroths, successive emanations of the unmanifest divine. Therefore numbers are beings whose progressive manifestation goes from unity to multiplicity. In turn, the unfolding of numbers is linked to rhythm, in particular to the ether of sound or numerical ether.
3. The Secret of Alchemy: it is exposed in the doctrine of Paracelsus and Jacob Böhme. It deals with elective affinities and the conjunction of opposites for the purpose of the completion of the Great Work, the synthesis of the Philosopher’s Stone and the Elixir of Long life. This secret holds the esoteric nature of the element of carbon in its organic and inorganic forms (graphite and diamond): the raw material is precisely the carbon that constitutes the material of the living body, it has the power to become diamond. So when the human being, at the end of the future metamorphosis of Vulcan, will have perfected his body in the Resurrection Body, it will be his “diamond vehicle”.
4. The Secret of Birth and Death: characterizes the metamorphosis of the Earth, in which human beings and the kingdoms of Nature are incarnated in a physical body that undergoes birth and death at the expense of its perennial spiritual existence. The unnatal and immortal being of the human being incarnating himself remains trapped in matter, losing the memory of the spiritual world from which he comes, from the regions of eternity. It is the task of this metamorphosis to understand the eternity of the human being and to reconnect with it in a conscious way through the inner Christ.
5. The Secret of Evil: a secret that Steiner explored with great force, according to which evil is a good out of place, time or space. It is deepened in the Gospel and in the Apocalypse of John. In the present age evil is composed of at least two distinct entities: Lucifer, the great spiritualist who hates matter; and Ahriman, the great materialist who hates the spirit. Lucifer acts by corrupting the astral body to take possession of the sentient soul; Arimane brings death into the etheric body to take possession of the rational soul. Subsequently it will be the turn of the third power of evil, the Asuras who tear the ego from the spirit in order to bind it directly to the physical body. Finally, the antichrist at the head of all three hierarchies of evil, the solar demon Sorath, whose action is aimed at perverting the inner Christ, depriving him of humanity. All that evil will decay in man will form the Eighth Sphere, the world of the obstructors. That of evil is a secret linked to the third person of the Trinity, the Holy Spirit. The struggle for the redemption of evil, inspired by the Archangel Michael, the harbinger of spiritual thinking that sublimates matter in spirit.
6. The Secret of the Word: or the secret of the Logos, linked to the second person of the Trinity, the Son. The AUM-Amen, the power of cosmic prayer is the foundation of creation through the word. Its power goes back to the ether of sound, still united to the ether of life: the Logos who acts by infusing life with the sound of the word. It is the same “lost word” of the Masonic mysteries, whose living physical manifestation is the human being himself and his future spiritual evolutions. Wisdom, the Divine Sophia, is intrinsically linked to Christ, since the creative word is a word penetrated by wisdom.
7. The Secret of Divine Bliss: the Occulta Occultorum, the most sublime secret of occultism. It is linked to the first person of the Trinity, the Father. The journey through the secrets of life is over. Man has finally developed the Man-Spirit, and has therefore returned to the Father through the Son. The human being is now a Creator God who is able to transform the point into the circumference and the circumference into the point or to create from nothing. The life of the Vulcan Man is the birth of a new planetary chain from which future evolution will proceed.
Basically these seven secrets of life, once they are conquered at the turn of a metamorphosis into another, become part of humanity’s degree of consciousness. The state of consciousness depends, in fact, on the questions asked about the world, be it the inner microcosm or the outer macrocosm, and it is in these questions that a secret is enclosed, that of the progressive expansion of consciousness.
“Who I am?”
“Where do I come from?”
“Where I go?”
When the secret ceases to be an unanswered question, the truth content of the secret becomes consciousness. At the beginning of each metamorphosis and subsequent subdivision, the contents of consciousness and the related questions are then recapitulated, always adding one last stage (according to the law of cosmic recapitulation). The questions to which the human being will have found an answer will form his own being. For this reason, once the seventh secret, “divine bliss”, has also been revealed, humanity will also find itself in the condition of consciousness of “divine bliss”.