nature of the irregularly evolved Moon-spirits. We may call these
Moon-spirits Luciferian, to distinguish them from the other spirits who,
from the earth-moon, made consciousness into a mirror of the universe,
without bestowing free will. The Luciferian spirits endowed man with the
possibility of developing free activity in his consciousness, and at the
same time created the possibility of error and evil.

As a result of these events man was brought into a different connection
with the Sun-spirits from that which had been destined for him by the
spirits of the earth-moon. These wished to develop the reflecting human
consciousness in such a manner that within the whole life of the human
soul, the influence of the Sun-spirits would have become dominant. These
purposes were thwarted, and an opposition was thus created in human nature
between the influence of the Sun-Spirits and that of the spirits who were
irregularly developed on the old Moon. Owing to this opposition, the
inability to recognize the physical Sun-influences as such also arose in
man; they were hidden by the earthly impressions of the outer world.
Filled with these impressions, the astral part of man was drawn into the
sphere of the ego. This ego,--which otherwise would have felt only the
spark of fire bestowed on it by the Lords of Form, and which would have
submitted to the bidding of those spirits in everything that had to do
with external fire,--henceforth worked upon external heat phenomena through
the element with which it had itself been inoculated. A bond of attraction
was thereby established between the ego and the earth-fire.

In this way man became more involved in earthly materiality than had been
ordained for him, which was effected through the earth-moon spirits in
man's body. The real individual ego was thereby set free from the mere
earth-ego so that although man during earth-life only partially felt
himself to be an ego, he at the same time felt his earth-ego to be a
continuation of that of his ancestors through the generations. The soul
was conscious of a kind of "group-ego" in earth-life, dating back to
remote ancestors; man felt himself to be a member of this group. Only in
the disembodied state could the individual ego be conscious of itself as a
separate being. But this state of isolation was impaired because the ego
was still burdened with a memory of the earth-consciousness (earth-ego.)
This memory clouded its vision of the spiritual