Table of Contents
In Our Atlantean Ancestors, Rudolf Steiner gives his account of people who remembered instead of calculating. A multiplication table is unknown. Similar cases, stored as pictures, guide action, and public trust follows long experience. Initiate schools are the exception, admitting students for capacities from earlier lives rather than for age. He says they could turn the sleeping force of grain into power for craft that rode low in denser air, over thinner water. That picture is offered as occult observation, not as laboratory proof. Settlements are gardens of woven branches, and nature’s goods are common. Once memory exists, speech begins, and the strongest words heal, hurry plants, or calm animals, while misuse feels impossible. He later arranges communities by how memory, ambition, and thinking arise in his spiritual science. This page does not quote that arrangement as a ranking of living peoples or as a comment on skin. The lecture’s workable center is picture memory, seed force, and a faded power of speech.
Key points
- In Steiner’s account, early Atlanteans calculated by remembering similar cases, and schools trained that picture memory rather than rules.
- Trust in public matters went to long experience, while initiate schools looked to earlier lives instead of age.
- He claims they turned germ force in seeds into power for low craft that rode on denser air.
- Settlements are pictured as garden like, with woven tree houses and shared natural goods.
- Language, once memory exists, begins as a force that can affect plants, animals, and healing, with misuse felt as ruin.
- Later cultural stages in the lecture stay his esoteric sequence, and they are not used here as a verdict on living peoples.
Short quotes
nowadays man thinks in concepts the Atlantean thought in images
Rudolf Steiner, Steiner on Atlantean memory and craft
Picture thinking, in this lecture, is how the Atlantean mind worked. Watch at 1:45
the Atlanteans knew how to put the germinal energy of organisms into the service of their technology
Rudolf Steiner, Steiner on Atlantean memory and craft
Seed force, he says, was turned into technical power. Watch at 5:37
a settlement resembled a garden in which the houses were built of trees with artfully intertwined branches
Rudolf Steiner, Steiner on Atlantean memory and craft
Homes in this account are living trees woven into shelter. Watch at 10:07
words at that time were curative they could advance the growth of plants tame the rage of animals and perform other similar functions
Rudolf Steiner, Steiner on Atlantean memory and craft
Speech, he says, could heal, grow plants, and calm animals. Watch at 17:28
Video by Rudolf Steiner Press Audio. Watch on YouTube.