The seven post‑Atlantean cultural epochs

Within the Earth stage, Steiner distinguishes seven cultural epochs in the current post‑Atlantean age (from about 7227 BC to 7893 AD), each shaping how the human “I” relates to spirit and matter. These epochs are:​

1st – Ancient Indian: very early post‑flood humanity, still strongly clairvoyant and inwardly turned toward a spiritual world, experiencing Earth as Maya (illusion).​

2nd – Ancient Persian: awakening to working into the physical world; the struggle between light and darkness, cultivation and wilderness, becomes a core inner motif.​

3rd – Egypto‑Chaldean: growing interest in earthly order, measure, and cosmic law; geometry, star‑wisdom and post‑death concerns (pyramids, mummification) dominate culture.​

4th – Greco‑Roman: balance between spirit and sense‑world; classical beauty and Roman legal consciousness prepare the ground for the unique central event of Earth evolution, the Mystery of Golgotha.​

5th – Present Anglo‑Germanic: our current epoch, characterized by intense intellectuality, experimental science, nationalism and global capitalism; enormous freedom possibilities, but also maximum danger of falling into cold, Ahrimanic materialism and the “eighth sphere.”​

6th – Future Slavic/Russian: beginning after our epoch, where a more heart‑centered, communal, brotherhood‑oriented culture will gradually arise, transforming intellect into warm, imaginal wisdom in everyday life.​

7th – Future American: final post‑Atlantean epoch, in which human freedom and evil both reach extreme intensity, culminating in the “war of all against all” and preparing the transition toward Future Jupiter.​

In this long arc, the Christ Impulse works from the center of the fourth epoch onward as an ever‑present power of resurrection, gradually spiritualizing thinking, feeling and willing so that humanity can enter the sixth and seventh epochs as free co‑creators rather than as mechanized, eighth‑sphere‑bound beings.

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