un had to be abandoned by man. These beings are the
ancestors of the animal kingdom. As time went on, they developed
especially those organs which in man thus far only existed as appendages.
Their astral body had to work on the physical and etheric bodies in the
same way as did the human astral body during the old Moon-period. Now the
animals which had thus come into existence had souls which could not dwell
in the individual animals. The soul extended its being also to the
descendant. Virtually, animals descended from one form have a soul in
common. Only when the descendant diverges from the ancestral type through
special influences, does a new animal soul become incarnated. In this
sense, in accordance with occult science, we can speak of a species or
group-soul, in animals.

Something of a similar nature took place at the time of the separation of
sun and earth. There came forth from the watery element, forms no further
evolved than man was before the old Moon-evolution. They could only
receive an impression from anything of an astral nature when the latter
influenced them from without. This could not happen until after the
departure of the sun from the earth. Whenever the sun-period of the earth
set in, the astral element in the sun stimulated these forms in such a way
that they formed their vital body out of the etheric part of the earth.
When the sun turned away from the earth, that etheric body was again
dissolved into the common earth-life. And as a result of the co-operation
of the astral part of the sun with the etheric part of the earth, there
emerged from the watery element those physical forms which became the
ancestors of the present vegetable kingdom.

Man became an individualized soul-being on earth. His astral body, which
had been poured into him on the Moon through the Lords of Motion, now
became organized on earth into the sentient-intellectual-and
consciousness-souls. And when the consciousness-soul had progressed so far
that it was able to form for itself during earth-life, a body adapted to
that life, the Lords of Form endowed that body with a spark from their
fire. The "ego" was enkindled within it. Every time man left the physical
body he was in the spiritual world, in which he met the beings who, during
the Saturn, Sun, and Moon evolutions, had given him his physical, etheric,
and astral bodies, and who had developed them as far as the earth-stage.
Since the spark of ego had been enkindled durin