Astronomy letters

Dr. Elizabeth Vreede. Dornach - September 1927
(excerpt)

Rudolf Steiner's Spiritual Science has bequeathed us a cosmology of the Spirit, which gives humankind a place within the universal context and links Heaven and Earth as a unity. At the same time, Rudolf Steiner's goal was to build a bridge from this knowledge of Astronomy as cultivated in modern science. The necessity of such a bridge stems from the fundamental principle of all spiritual knowledge: the external world of the senses is maya, illusion, whereas spiritual science penetrates the underlying reality behind this external world. How and at what point do maya and reality meet? This is the great problem that Rudolf Steiner addressed in 1912 in his lecture series in Helsinki: "The Spiritual Hierarchies in the Celestial Bodies and in the Kingdoms of Nature."

In the First Hierarchy, we find the most sublime Beings of the Cosmos: the Thrones, Cherubim, and Seraphim, as they were named by ancient esoteric wisdom. The Thrones or Spirits of Will govern the movement of the planets in space; the Cherubim harmonize the different movements and achieve an "understanding" between one planet and another. They are the Planetary Messengers, just as the Angels are the messengers of the human world. The Seraphim, in turn, have the same task with regard to the world of stars; they produce mutual understanding between the Sun and the other stars, from fixed star to fixed star, uniting the entire Cosmos into a great unity.

Thus, we have: