Yuga ages

Ancient Indian Hindu uses Yuga ages to describe the qualitative differences of various phases in the evolution on Earth and mankind.

Rudolf Steiner describes these as follows (emphasizing that the time frames given are very broad and indicative).

Golden Age or Krita Yuga — about 20.000 years
Silver Age or Treta Yuga — about 15.000 years
Bronze Age or Dvapara Yuga — about 10.000 years
Dark Age or Kali Yuga — about 5.000 years, began approximately in the year 3101 BC with the end of natural clairvoyance, and came to an end in the year 1899. Thus 1899 is the start of an important new period with, from the 20th century onwards, the start of a period with gradual appearance of natural clairvoyance also called the appearance of 'Christ in the etheric' (see also Christ Module 19 - experiencing the Christ)

Aspects

Irrespective of the above (high level and indicative) time periods given, in other qualitative descriptions of evolution the denomination of ages is used in a different meaning, as:
- the Golden age also refers to the age of the Sun (Hyperborean epoch)
- the Silver age to that of the Moon (Lemurian epoch, moon contains silver)
- the Bronze age refers to the influence of Mars passage (since the middle of the Lemurian epoch, Mars substance of iron intervened on impulse of the White Lodge, to bring warm blood).
the gradual loss of natural clairvoyance is depicted on Schema FMC00.013 below as 'the great goodbye' with the start of the dark age Kali Yuga at the end of the Persian and the start of the Egypto-Chaldean cultural age. This 'great goodbye' of the curtain that is slowly dropped over Man's connection with the spiritual world), which was felt as a great loss by humanity, is represented by the Baldur myth, see Ragnarok. This was around the time of the Krishna impulse and the start of the development of the threefold soul.
Link between yugas and the evolutionary periods. Rudolf Steiner does not link the yugas with any reference to Zodiac clock, platonic year, (see 25920) or the Earth's seven epochs that he uses throughout his work. See however also the periods of 21.000 and 24.000 years mentioned on the Sun and the Cosmic year of Zarathustra topic pages.
link with Prometheus in Greece
- "Kaliyuga is the offspring of Pramathesis which in Greek becomes 'Prometheus.. "which is exactly the same". Kaliyuga in Greek becomes 'Deukalion' (1912-05-20-GA133)

Illustrations

Schema FMC00.485 gives an overview of the yuga ages and golden, silver and bronze ages as used in ancient esoteric traditions. The importance lies in the fact that the years 1899-1900, mankind came out of the dark age into a new light age that will reach into the sixth cultural age.

See also Schema FMC00.052. As the note states, one should not relate these periods to a linear time scale in current Earth years.

Schema FMC00.013 below stacks a number of views and original illustrations that have been calibrated to a single horizontal time line.

It is added here because of the dark age or kali yuga shown in green, following the bronze age in light red (middle of drawing).

The schema depicts the fact that in the current epoch the old form of natural or atavistic clairvoyance ('guided by spiritual beings') slowly ebbed away, and a new form of consciousness is forming and will further develop in the remaining cultural ages into a new independant form of clairvoyance.

The table under the blackboard drawing illustrations shows:

the grey cultural ages on top along the horizontal time dimension (the blue is the current, the yellow pointer showing our current century)
with underneath the typical level of clairvoyance, into which plane or world of consciousness
at the bottom, an illustration to show that 'like a curtain fell' over the old clairvoyance and connectness with the spiritual world (this is the only part of the picture not calibrated to the time scale, it should be more extended)
the blackboard drawing from GA191 shows: the old mixture of wisdom and morality is impacted by the central MoG event (in orange) .. and after a period of impact after consciousness soul (see also the GA343 drawing for this delay) .. a new future lies ahead with a different connectedness, clairvoyance and brotherly love that is developing.

Lecture coverage and references

Overview coverage

Rudolf Steiner only makes reference to the Yugas in a number of lectures, specifically four lectures in 1910 and one in 1912.

1910-01-15-GA117A and 1910-01-25-GA118
1910-03-06-GA118 and 1910-03-15-GA118
1912-05-20-GA133

It appears that after the split with the Theosophical Society end of 1912, Steiner didn't use the concept of the Yugas any more.

Reference extracts

1910-01-15-GA117A

1910-01-25-GA118

Higher knowledge speaks of this age when man was still united with the divine-spiritual Beings as the Golden Age, or Krita Yuga. It is an age of great antiquity, the most important period of which actually preceded the Atlantean catastrophe. Then came an age when men no longer felt their connection with the divine-spiritual world as strongly as during Krita Yuga, when :they no longer felt that their impulses were determined by their life with the Gods, when their vision of the spirit and the soul was already clouded. Nevertheless, there still remained in them a memory of their life with the spiritual Beings and the Gods.
This memory was particularly distinct in ancient India. It was very easy in those days to speak about spiritual things; one could have directed men's attention to the outer, physically perceptible world and yet regard it as maya or illusion, because men had not been having these physical perceptions for so very long. So it was in ancient India. Souls then living no longer beheld the Gods themselves, but they still beheld spiritual facts and happenings and spiritual Beings of lower ranks. Only a comparatively small number of men were still able to behold the sublime spiritual Beings, and even for these men the former living communion with the Gods was already much less intense. The will-impulses from the divine-spiritual world had already disappeared. Nevertheless, a glimpse into spiritual facts and happenings was still possible, at all events in certain states of consciousness: in sleep and in those intermediate states to which reference has been made.
The most important facts of this spiritual world, however, which in earlier times had been experienced as immediate reality, were now there in the form of a kind of knowledge of truth, as something that the soul still knew with certainty but which was now operative only in the form of knowledge, as a truth. Men still lived in the spiritual world, but in this later age the realisation of its existence was not as strong as it had formerly been. This period is called the Silver Age, or Treta Yuga.
Then came the epoch of those incarnations when man's vision was more and more shut off from the spiritual world, when his whole nature was directed to the outer sense-world and firmly consolidated in that world; inner ego-consciousness, consciousness of manhood, became more and more definite and distinct. This is the Bronze Age, or Dvapara Yuga. Man's knowledge of the spiritual world was no longer as sublime or direct as in earlier times, but something at least had remained in humanity. It was as if in men of the present day who have reached a certain age there were to remain something of the jubilance of youth ... this is past and over but it has been experienced and known and a man can speak of it as something with which he is familiar. Thus the souls of that age were still in some degree familiar with experiences leading to the spiritual worlds. That is the essential characteristic of Dvapara Yuga.
But then came another age, an age when even this degree of familiarity with the spiritual world ceased, when the doors of the spiritual world closed. Men's vision was more and more confined to the outer material world and to the intellect which elaborates the sense-impressions, so that the only remaining possibility was to reflect about the spiritual world — which is the most unsatisfactory way of acquiring knowledge of it. What men now actually knew from their own experience was the material-physical world. If they desired to know something about the spiritual world, this was possible only through reflection. It is the age when man was most lacking in spirituality and therefore established himself firmly in the material world. This was necessary in order that he might be able by degrees to develop consciousness of self to its highest point, for only through the sturdy resistance of the outer world could man learn to distinguish himself from the world and experience himself as an individual. This age is called Kali Yuga, or the Dark Age.
I emphasise that these designations — Krita Yuga, for example — can also be applied to longer epochs, for before the Golden Age man experienced and participated in still higher worlds; hence all those earlier ages could be embraced by this name. But if, so to speak, demands are kept moderate and one is satisfied with the range of spiritual experience described, the periods can be divided in the way indicated. Definite time periods can be given for all such epochs. True, evolution progresses slowly and by degrees, but there are certain boundary-lines of which it can be said that prior to them such-and-such conditions of life and of consciousness predominated, and subsequently, others.
[Kali Yuga]
Accordingly, in the sense first spoken of, Kali Yuga began approximately in the year 3101 B.C. Thus we realise that our souls have appeared repeatedly on the earth in new incarnations, in the course of which man's vision has been more and more shut off from the spiritual world and therefore increasingly restricted to the outer world of the senses. We realise, too, that with every incarnation our souls enter into new conditions in which there are always new things to be learnt. What we can achieve in Kali Yuga is to establish and consolidate our I-consciousness. This was not previously possible, for we had first to be endowed with the I.
If in some incarnation souls have failed to take in what that particular epoch has to give, it is very difficult for the loss to be made good in later epochs. Such souls must wait a long time until the loss can in some respect be counterbalanced. But no reliance should be placed upon such a possibility.
We will therefore picture to ourselves that the result of the doors being closed against the spiritual world was of fundamental and essential importance. This was also the epoch of John the Baptist, of Christ Himself on earth. In that epoch, when 3,100 years of the Dark Age had already elapsed, a fact of salient importance was that all human beings ,then living had already been incarnated several times — once or twice at the very least — in the Dark Age. I-consciousness had been firmly established; memory of the spiritual world had faded away, and if men did not desire to lose their connection with the spiritual world entirely, it was essential for them to learn to experience within the I the reality of the spiritual world. The ego must have developed to the stage where it could be certain — in its inmost core at least — that there is a spiritual world, and that there are higher spiritual Beings. The ego must have made itself capable of feeling, of believing in, the spiritual world.
If in the days of Christ Jesus someone had voiced the truth in regard to the conditions then prevailing, he might have said: In earlier times men could experience the kingdom of heaven while they were outside their ego in those spiritual distances reached when out of the body. Man had then to experience the kingdoms of heaven, the kingdoms of the spiritual world, far away from the ego. This is no longer possible, for man's nature has changed so greatly that these kingdoms must be experienced within the ego itself; the kingdoms of heaven have come so near to man that they work into his very ego. And it was this that was proclaimed by John the Baptist: The kingdoms of heaven are at hand! — that is to say, they have drawn near to the I. Previously they were outside man, but now they are near and man must grasp them in the very core of his being, in the ego. And because in this Dark Age, in Kali Yuga, man could no longer go forth from the physical into the spiritual world, it was necessary for the Divine Being, Christ, to come down into the physical world ... Christ's descent into a man of flesh, into Jesus of Nazareth, was necessary in order that through beholding the life and deeds of Christ on the physical plane it might become possible for men to be linked, in the physical body, with the kingdoms of heaven, with the spiritual world. And so Christ's sojourn on earth took place during a period in the middle of Kali Yuga, the Dark Age, when men who were not living in a state of dull insensibility but understood the nature of the times could realise: The descent of the God to men is necessary in order that a lost connection with the spiritual world may be established once again.
If at that time no human beings had been able to find a living link with Christ in their hearts and souls, the connection with the spiritual worlds would have been gradually lost; the kingdoms of heaven would not have been received into the egos of men. It might well have happened that if all human beings living at that crucial point of time had persisted in remaining in darkness, an event of such momentous significance would have passed them by unnoticed.
The souls of men would have withered, gone to waste, decayed. True, even without Christ they would have continued to incarnate for some time still, but they would not have been able to implant in the ego the power that would have enabled them to find the link with the kingdoms of heaven. The event of the Appearance of Christ on the earth might everywhere have passed unnoticed — as it did, for example, in Rome. It was alleged in Rome that a sect of sinful people were living in some out-of-the-way, sordid alley, that among them was a wicked spirit calling himself Jesus of Nazareth and inciting them by his preaching to all kinds of villainous deeds. At a certain period that was all that was known in Rome of Christ! And you may possibly also be aware that Tacitus, the great Roman historian, wrote in a similar vein about a hundred years after the events in Palestine.
Thus it was by no means universally realised that something of supreme importance had taken place: that the Divine Light had shone into the darkness of earth and that it was now possible for men to be brought safely through the Kali Yuga. The possibility of further evolution for humanity was ensured because there were certain souls who understood what was at stake at that point of time and knew what it signified that Christ had been upon earth.
If you were to transfer yourselves in thought to that time, you would realise that it was quite possible to live without knowing anything at all of the advent of Christ Jesus on the physical plane — it was quite possible to live on earth without having any consciousness of this most momentous event.
[Christ in the etheric]
Would it not also be possible today for something of infinite importance to take place without men being aware of it? Might not our contemporaries fail to have the slightest inkling of the most important happening in the world at the present time?
It might well be so. For something of supreme importance is taking place, although it is perceptible only to the eyes of spirit. There is a great deal of talk about periods of transition; we ourselves are actually living in a very important one. And its importance lies in the fact that the Dark Age has run its course and a new age is beginning, when slowly and by degrees the souls of men will change and new faculties will be developed.
The fact that the vast majority of men are entirely unaware of this need not be a cause of surprise, for it was the same when the Christ Event took place at the beginning of our era. Kali Yuga came to an end in the year 1899 and we have now to live on into a new age. What is beginning is slowly preparing men for new faculties of soul.
The first indications of these new faculties will be noticeable in isolated souls comparatively soon now, and they will become more clearly apparent in the middle of the thirties of this century, approximately in the period between 1930 and 1940. The years 1933, 1935 and 1937 will be particularly important. Very special faculties will then reveal themselves in human beings as natural gifts. Great changes will take place during this period and biblical prophecies will be fulfilled. Everything will change for souls who are living on earth and also for those who are no longer in physical bodies. Whatever their realm of existence, souls are on the way to possessing entirely new faculties. Everything is changing — but the happening of supreme importance in our time is a deeply incisive transformation of the faculties of the human soul.

Kali Yuga is over and the souls of men are now beginning to develop new faculties. These faculties — because this is the purpose of the epoch — will of themselves draw forth from souls certain powers of clairvoyance which during Kali Yuga had necessarily to be submerged in the realm of the unconscious. A number of souls will experience the strange condition of having I-consciousness but at the same time the feeling of living in a world essentially different from the world known to their ordinary consciousness. The experience will be shadowy, like a divination, as though an operation had been performed on one born blind. ... Through what we call esoteric training these clairvoyant faculties will be attained in a far better form. But because human beings progress, they will appear in mankind in their very earliest beginnings, in their most elementary stages, through the natural process of evolution.

For continuation and more on Christ in the etheric, see Christ in the etheric and Christ Module 19 - Experiencing the Christ

1910-03-06-GA118

The last three millennia prior to the founding of Christianity belong to an epoch in the history of human evolution called the Dark Age, the lesser Dark Age — Kali Yuga. Kali Yuga began in the year 3101 B.C. With it is connected everything we recognise nowadays as the great achievements of humanity, as the fundamental characteristics of present-day culture. Before this Dark Age, before Kali Yuga, all human thinking, all the powers of the human soul, were in a certain respect differently organised. The year 3101 B.C. is an approximate date, for in the process of development qualities of one kind passed over gradually into others; but before that time the last vestiges of ancient clairvoyance were still present.
In the course of evolution the sequence of the ages is: Krita Yuga, Treta Yuga, Dvapara Yuga, Kali Yuga.
It is the last that is of particular interest to us today. The earlier ages take us back to old Atlantis. In very ancient times, vestiges of the ancient clairvoyance still survived and prior to the Dark Age man was directly conscious of the presence of a spiritual world because he was able to gaze into it. But this consciousness of the spiritual world withdrew more and more from man's vision and speaking generally we can say that the development then begins of those faculties of soul which on the one hand confine his power of judgment to the sense-perceptible world, while, on the other, they promote his self-consciousness; all these powers begin to operate in Kali Yuga. And whereas during this age man was not in a position to look into the spiritual worlds, the firm centre we call the knowledge of self-consciousness developed all the more strongly within him. But do not imagine that even now this knowledge of self-consciousness is already highly developed; it has yet to reach many further stages. But it could never have been experienced by man if there had not been this “Dark Age”.
Thus during the three millennia prior to the founding of Christianity man was losing his connection with the spiritual world to an increasing extent and indeed had no direct perception of that connection.
On the occasion of my last visit here we heard how, at the conclusion of the first millennium of Kali Yuga, a kind of substitute was given for vision of the spiritual worlds. This substitute was made possible through the fact that a particular individual — Abraham — was chosen out because the special organisation of his physical brain enabled him to have consciousness of the spiritual world without the old faculties.
That is why in Spiritual Science we call the first millennium of Kali Yuga the Abraham-epoch; it was the epoch when man did, it is true, lose the direct vision of the spiritual worlds, but when there unfolded in him something like a consciousness of the Divine which gradually made its way more and more deeply into his ego, with the result that he came to conceive of the Deity as related to human I-consciousness. In the first millennium of Kali Yuga — which at its conclusion we can call the Abraham-epoch — the Deity is revealed as the World-Ego.
This Abraham-epoch was followed by the Moses-epoch, when the God Jahve, the World-Ego, was no longer revealed in the form of a mysterious guidance of human destinies, as a God of a single people; in the Moses-epoch this Deity was revealed, as we know, in the burning bush, as the God of the Elements. And it was a great advance when, through the teachings of Moses, the World-Ego as the Deity was experienced in such a way that men realised: the Elements of manifested existence, all that is seen with physical eyes — lightning, thunder, and so on — are emanations, deeds of the World-Ego, ultimately of the one World-Ego. We must, however, clearly understand in what way this denoted an advance.
Before the Abraham-epoch and before Kali Yuga, we find that through the direct vision of the spiritual worlds made possible by the remains of the old clairvoyance, men beheld the spiritual, as indeed was the case in all these ancient times. We should have to go infinitely far back to find anything else. Men actually beheld the spiritual during Dvapara Yuga, Treta Yuga, Krita Yuga, beheld it as a multiplicity of Beings. You know that when we rise into the spiritual worlds we find there the Hierarchies of spiritual Beings. They, naturally, are under a unified guidance, but this was beyond the grasp of consciousness in those ancient times. Men beheld the individual members of the Hierarchies, a multiplicity of Divine Beings. To grasp them as a unity was possible only for the Initiates. But now the World-Ego, grasped for the first time by man himself with the physical instrument of the brain — a faculty that had developed in a specially marked way in Abraham — confronted him, and he conceived the World-Ego as manifesting in the different kingdoms of Nature, in the Elements.
A further advance was made in the last millennium before the founding of Christianity, in the Solomon-epoch.
Thus the three millennia before the founding of Christianity can be distinguished by

calling the first millennium by the name of the individuality who appears and then works on into the second: the Abraham-epoch. From the beginning of Kali Yuga until Abraham men are being prepared to recognise the One God behind the manifestations of Nature. This possibility begins with Abraham.

In the Moses-epoch the One God becomes the ruler of the manifestations of Nature and is sought for behind them.

All this is then intensified in the Solomon-epoch, and we are led through this last epoch to that point in evolution where the same Divine Being whom the Abraham-epoch and the Moses-epoch, too, beheld in Jahve, where the same Divine Being takes on human form.

1910-03-15-GA118

1912-05-20-GA133

Darkness is creeping over the world of the ancient Gods. A time is approaching when in their life of soul men will no longer be able to gaze into the world of the Gods, but when their eyes will be turned to the outer world.
Kaliyuga, the ‘Black Age’ is approaching; the bright age of ancient Divinity is giving place to the age when the Gods of old withdraw. It is the age inaugurated by the God Pramathesis!”
Kaliyuga was said to begin at a time which lies 3,101 years before our own era; this is the time of the “Flood” according to Indian tradition. For it was said that the Flood coincides with the coming of Kaliyuga, and Kaliyuga was conceived to be the offspring of the God “Pramathesis”.
Kaliyuga broke in upon the world, reaching its close in our own age. Now that the ascent to the spiritual world must begin, a spiritual science has come to mankind. Kaliyuga began 3,101 years before our era, and ended in the year 1899 A.D. That is why 1899 is a year of such importance. The re-ascent to the spiritual worlds — this must be the ideal of the future.
The age preceding the onset of Kaliyuga was, however, an age characteristic of the ancient Persian epoch when the old remembrances rose up within man via the astral body. Now he was to turn to the world outside. This was a great and epoch-making transition. In the case of many human beings it came about in such a way that for a time all vision departed from them and darkness spread over their souls. This condition of darkness did not last for long periods, actually only for weeks. But men passed into this condition of sleep, and many never came out of it. Many of them perished and only relatively few were left in widely scattered regions. There is not enough time today to describe the conditions actually prevailing at that time. It can only be said briefly that owing to so large a number of human beings having succumbed, conditions were dark and sinister in the extreme and at only a few scattered places did men awaken from the great spiritual deluge that spread over their souls like a sleep. This condition of sleep was felt by most souls as a kind of “drowning” and by only a few as a re-awakening. And then came the “Black Age,” the age devoid of the Gods.
Were these things known to other human beings on the Earth?
They were indeed. To our astonishment we find widespread evidence of knowledge among the peoples that a deluge had submerged the consciousness of men and that in the Third Post-Atlantean epoch, through the development of the sentient soul — in other words, outward-turned vision — an entirely new power must have been inaugurated. The Indians divined this when they said: Kaliyuga is the offspring of Pramathesis. And what did the Greeks say? In Greece, “Pramathesis” becomes, “Prometheus” — which is exactly the same. Prometheus is the brother of Epimetheus. The latter represents one who still “looks back” into ancient times. Epimetheus is the one whose thoughts turn backward; Prometheus sends his thoughts forward, to the world outside, to what takes place there. Just as Pramathesis has his offspring in Kaliyuga, so, too, Prometheus has his offspring. The Greek form of “Kaliyuga” is “Kalion.” And because the Greeks felt it to be the age of Darkness, the “ d ” is prefixed and the word becomes “Deukalion” — which is really the same word as “Kaliyuga.” This is not ingenious fancy, but an occult fact. It is clear, therefore, that the Greeks possessed the same knowledge as the Indian sages. This is quoted merely as an example, indicating that in their conditions of old clairvoyance, knowledge of these truths came to men and they were able to express them in majestic pictures. The Greek legend tells how, on the advice of his father Prometheus, Deukalion builds a wooden chest; in this he and his wife Pyrrha alone are saved from destruction, when Zeus proposes to exterminate the human race by a deluge. Deukalion and Pyrrha land on Parnassus, and from them issues the new human race. Deukalion is the son of Prometheus — and in the intervening period comes the flood, denoting among manifold peoples, a condition of consciousness.
These wonderful pictures which have been preserved in the traditions of so many of the peoples, show us how truths concerning the evolution of mankind have survived among them.
As men lived on gradually into the age of Kaliyuga, into the Third Post-Atlantean epoch, the ancient clairvoyant knowledge faded away. We who have to recapitulate the Third epoch, must bring this kind of knowledge to life once again, but in an entirely new form. The lecture given a fortnight ago (The Idea of Reincarnation and its Introduction into Western Culture) dealt with this subject. Western culture, the beginnings of which were mingled with the ancient Hebrew culture, has to concentrate primary attention on the single personality living on the physical plane between birth and death; Western culture cannot focus its main attention on the Individuality who passes through the different epochs, but concentrates upon the existence of the one personality, whose life between birth and death runs its course on the physical plane, not in the higher worlds. Now that Kaliyuga has come to an end, consciousness must be imbued with the forces necessary for the further evolution of the human race; what was lost during Kaliyuga must be raised again from the depths. Our eyes must be directed more and more to the onflowing life of the Individuality. I have spoken of a series of lives in the West — Elijah, John the Baptist, Raphael, Novalis — and have shown how by the addition of knowledge derived from the spiritual worlds, we can perceive the continuous thread of the soul, the onflowing life of the one Individuality in Elijah, John the Baptist, Raphael, Novalis.