The Hierarchies B 139
on earth. In Bittleston's words: "The Archai live in glowing enthusiasm
for the awakening of man into free understanding and free action: feel-
ing himself in ancient times only as part of a tribal community, passing
through stages in which he has a status given to him from outside, to-
wards the awakening of a freedom in which he chooses the purposes
and tasks of his life for himself."
And just as archangels vie to have the nations entrusted to them live
as part of a great choir, each contributing voices in accord with the rest,
so the archai, says Steiner, want every age to play its part in the whole
span of human development, from the first beginnings to the fulfillment
of history. "Seeking the eternal within the temporal," adds Bittleston,
"Archai prepare for the task which lies before them when this universe
will have passed away. They will then rise to the rank of world creators
and bring forth from the invisible, in accord with purposes of still
greater powers, a new heaven and a new earth."
As Steiner shows in his Occult Science: An Outline, the goal of the
world-creator powers with their extraordinarily complex hierarchy of
spiritual beings is none other than the creation of humankind and the
creation of an environment that, in an ongoing evolution, can eventu-
ally help individual human beings to become free. "Preparation for this
development entailed enormous sacrificial work on the part of the hi-
erarchical beings in the course of which they themselves attained a
higher development."
To Steiner the basic "spiritual substance" of the cosmos, his "world-
ether," is generated by the various states of consciousness of hier-
archical beings from primordial spiritual "warmth." World-ether, as
it radiates down to the earth from cosmic heights is, in its essence, a
thought-forming power, a manifestation, says Steiner, of the conscious-
ness of hierarchical beings in differing levels, there being nothing in the
universe but consciousness.
In this scenario, as the hierarchies prepared for the creation of
earthly beings, they first had to secrete and sacrifice from themselves,
as building material derived from world-ether, the four distinct ethers
(warmth, light, chemical, and life) and the four elements (fire, air, water,
and earth), sending both ethers and elements "down into the earthly