1. Physical body = Echo of the Zodiac 2. Etheric body = Echo of the planetary movements 3. Astral body = Experience of the planetary movements 4. Ego = perception of the echo of the Zodiac
Rudolf Steiner, Dornach, Switzerland, December 18, 1921:
For some time we have been occupied
with gaining a more accurate knowledge of man's relation to the universe, and
today we would like to supplement our past studies. If we consider how man lives
in the present period of his evolution — taking this period so widely that it
encompasses not only what is historical but also in part the pre-historical — we
must conclude that speech is a preeminent characteristic at this moment of the
cosmic evolution of mankind. It is speech that elevates man above the other
kingdoms of nature.
In the lectures last week I
mentioned that in the course of mankind's evolution, language, speech as a
whole, has also undergone a development. I alluded to how, in very ancient
times, speech was something that man formed out of himself as his most primal
ability; how with the help of his organs of speech he was able to manifest the
divine spiritual forces living within him. I also referred to how, in the
transition from the Greek culture to the Roman-Latin culture, that is to say in
the fourth post-Atlantean period, the single sounds in language lose their names
and, as in contemporary usage, merely have value as sounds. In Greek culture we
still have a name for the first letter of the alphabet but in Latin it is just
‘A’. In passing from the Greek to the Latin culture something living in speech,
something eminently concrete, changes into abstraction. It might be said: as long
as man called the first letter of the alphabet ‘Alpha’, he experienced a certain
amount of inspiration in it, but the moment he called it just ‘A’, the letters
conformed to outer convention, to the prosaic aspects of life, replacing
inspiration and inner experience. This constituted the actual transition from
everything belonging to Greece to what is Roman-Latin — men of culture became
estranged from the spiritual world of poetry and entered into the prose of life.
The people of Rome were a sober,
prosaic race, a race of jurists, who brought prose and jurisprudence into the
culture of later years. What lived in the people of Greece developed within
mankind more or less like a cultural dream which men approach through their own
revelations when they have inner experiences and wish to give expression to
them. It might be said that all poetry has in it something which makes it appear
to Europeans as a daughter of Greece, whereas all jurisprudence, all outer
compartmentalization, all the prose of life, suggest descent from the
Roman-Latin people.
I have previously called your
attention to how a real understanding of the Alpha — Aleph in Hebrew — leads us
to recognize in it the desire to express man in a symbol. If one seeks the
nearest modern words to convey the meaning of Alpha, these would be: ‘The one
who experiences his own breathing’. In this name we have a direct reference to
the Old Testament words: ‘And God formed man ... and breathed into man's nostrils the
breath of life’. What at that time was done with the breath, to make man a man
of Earth, the being who had his manhood imprinted on him by becoming the
experiencer, the feeler, of his own breathing, by receiving into himself
consciousness of his breathing, is meant to be expressed in the first letter of
the alphabet.
And the name ‘Beta’ considered with
an open mind, turning here to the Hebrew equivalent, represents something of the
nature of a wrapping, a covering, a house. Thus, if we were to put our
experience on uttering ‘Alpha, Beta,’ into modern language we could say: ‘Man in
his house’. And we could go through the whole alphabet in this way, giving
expression to a concept, a meaning, a truth about man simply by saying the names
of the letters of the alphabet one after another. A comprehensive sentence would
be uttered giving expression to the Mystery of Man. This sentence would begin by
our being shown man in his building, in his temple. The following parts of the
sentence would go on to express how man conducts himself in his temple and how
he relates to the cosmos. In short, what would be expressed by speaking the
names of the alphabet consecutively would not be the abstraction we have today
when we say A, B, C, without any accompanying thoughts, but
it would be the expression of the Mystery of Man and of how his roots are in the
universe.
When today in various societies ‘the
lost archetypal word’ is talked about, there is no recognition that it is
actually contained in the sentence that comprises the names of the alphabet.
Thus we can look back on a time in the evolution of humanity when man, in
repeating his alphabet, did not express what was related to external events,
external needs, but what the divine spiritual mystery of his being brought to
expression through his larynx and his speech organs.
It might be said that what belongs to
the alphabet was applied later to external objects, and forgotten was all that
can be revealed to man through his speech about the mystery of his soul and
spirit. Man's original word of truth, his word of wisdom, was lost. Speech was
poured out over the matter-of-factness of life. In speaking today, man is no
longer conscious that the original primordial sentence has been forgotten — the
sentence through which the Divine revealed its own being to him. He is no longer
aware that the single words, the single sentences, uttered today represent the
mere shreds of that primordial sentence.
The poet, by avoiding the prose
element in speech, and going back to the inner experience, the inner feeling,
the inner formation of speech, attempts to return to its inspired archetypal
element. One could perhaps say that every true poem, the humblest as well as the
greatest, is an attempt to return to the word that has been lost, to retrace the
steps from a life arranged in accordance with utility to times when cosmic being
still revealed itself in the inner organism of speech.
Today we distinguish the consonant
from the vowel element in speech. I have spoken of how it would appear to man if
he were to dive beneath the threshold of his consciousness. In ordinary
consciousness memories are reflected upwards — or, in other words, thoughts are
reflections of what is experienced between birth and death. Normally we do not
penetrate man's actual being beyond this recollection, this thought left behind
in memory. From another point of view I have indicated how, beneath the
threshold of consciousness, there lives what may be called a universal tragedy
of mankind. This can also be described in the following way: When man wakes up
in the morning and his ego and astral body dive down into his etheric body and
his physical body, he does not perceive these bodies from within outwards; what
he perceives is something quite different. We can get an idea of this by means
of a diagram.
Let us say that here we have the
boundary between the conscious and the unconscious, red representing the
conscious, blue the unconscious. If a person sees something belonging to the
outer world or to himself — for instance, if with his own eye he sees another
man's eye — then the visible rays which go out of his eye into the other man are
thrown back, and he experiences it in his consciousness. What he also bears of
his own being beneath the threshold of consciousness he experiences in his
astral body and his ego, but not in the ordinary waking state. It remains
unconscious and essentially forms the actual content of the etheric and the
physical bodies. The etheric body is never recognized at all by ordinary
consciousness; it recognizes only the external aspect of the physical body. As I
have mentioned in the past, we must plunge beneath memory to perceive the primal
source of evil in human beings — but then something else can also be perceived,
namely, an aspect of man's connection with the cosmos.
We may, through appropriate
meditation, succeed in penetrating the memory representations, as it were, to
put aside what separates us inwardly from our etheric and physical bodies; if we
then look down into the etheric body and the physical body so that we perceive
what normally lies beneath the threshold of consciousness, we will hear
something sounding within these bodies. And what sounds is the echo of the music
of the spheres, which man absorbed between death and new birth, during his
descent out of the divine spiritual world into what is given to him through
physical inheritance by parents and ancestors. In the etheric body and in the
physical body there echoes the music of the spheres. In so far as it is of a
vowel nature it echoes in the etheric body, and in the physical body in so far
as it is of a consonantal nature.
It is indeed true that man, as he
goes forward in the life between death and a new birth, raises himself to the
world of the higher hierarchies. We have learned how man in the world of the
angels, the archangels, and the archai joins in with their life and lives within
the realm of the hierarchies, as here we live among the beings of the mineral,
plant, and animal kingdoms. After this life between death and a new birth he
descends once more to earthly life. And we have also learned how on his way down
he first gathers to him the influences of the firmament of the fixed stars,
represented in the signs of the Zodiac; then, as he descends further, he takes
with him the influence of the moving planets.
Now just picture to yourselves the
Zodiac, the representation of the fixed stars. Man is exposed to their influence
on descending from the life of soul and spirit into earthly life. If their
effects are to be designated in accordance with their actual being we must say
that they are cosmic music, they are consonants. And the forming of consonants
in the physical body is the echo of what resounds from the single formations of
the Zodiac, whereas the formation of vowels within the music of the spheres
occurs through the movements of the planets in the cosmos. This is imprinted
into the etheric body. Thus, in our physical body we unconsciously bear a
reflection of the cosmic consonants, whereas in our etheric body we bear a
reflection of the cosmic vowels. This remains, one might say, in the silence of
the subconscious. But as the child develops, forces press upward within the
body and strengthen the speech organs; these are forces that, as reflections of
the formative forces of the cosmos, build up the speech organs. The more
interior speech organs are so formed out of man's essential being that they can
produce vowels, and the organs nearer to the periphery — the palate, the tongue,
the lips, and everything that contributes to the form of the physical body — are
built up in such a way that consonants can be produced. While the child is
learning to speak something takes place in the upper part of his being, as a
result of the activity of his lower part, which is a consequence of the
formative forces taken up into the physical body, and also into the etheric
body. (This is naturally not a material process but has to do with formative
activity.) Thus when we speak, we bring to manifestation what we might call an
echo of the experience man goes through with the cosmos in the life between
death and a new birth during his descent out of the divine spiritual world. All
the single letters of the alphabet are actually formed as images of what lives
in the cosmos.
We can get an approximate idea of the
signs of the Zodiac if we relate them to modern speech by setting up B, C, D, F,
and so forth, as constellations of the Zodiac. You can follow them by feeling
the revolution of the planets in H [ed.: ‘H’ like in him, her] — H is not
actually a letter like the others, H imitates the rotational movement, the
circling around. And the single planets in their revolutions are always the
individual vowels which are placed in various ways in front of the consonants.
If you imagine the vowel A to be placed in here (see diagram) you have the A in
harmony with B and C, but in each vowel there is the H. You can trace it in
speaking — AH, IH, EH. H is in each vowel. What does it signify that H is in
each vowel? It signifies that the vowel is revolving in the cosmos. The vowel is
not at rest, it circles around in the cosmos. And the circling, the moving, is
expressed in the H hidden in each of the vowels. Consider, therefore, a vowel
harmony expressed somewhere in speech: let us say I, O, U, A. (ed.: IH, OH, UH,
AH in German) What is expressed by this? Something is expressed that is the
cosmic working of four planets. Let us add one of the consonants to something
like this — IOSUA — let us add this S in the middle of it, and this would mean
that not only the forming of vowels within the planetary spheres is expressed,
but also the effect that the planets connected with I, O, U, A experience in
their movement through the connection with the star sign S. Thus if a man in the
days of ancient civilization uttered the name of a God in vowels, a planetary
mystery was expressed. The deed of a divine being within the planetary world was
expressed in the name. Were a divine name expressed with a consonant in it, the
deed of the divine being concerned reached in thought to the representative of
the fixed star firmament — the Zodiac.
When there was still an instinctive
understanding of these things — in the time of atavistic clairvoyance,
clairaudience, and so on — a connection with the cosmos was experienced in human
speech. When speaking, man felt himself within the cosmos. When the child
learned to speak it was felt how what was experienced in the divine spiritual
world before birth, or before conception, gradually evolved out of the being of
the child.
It may be said that if a man could
look through himself inwardly he would have to admit: I am an etheric body, in
other words, I am the echo of cosmic vowels; I am a physical body, in other
words, the echo of cosmic consonants. Because I stand here on the Earth there
sounds through my being an echo of all that is said by the signs of the Zodiac;
and the life of this echo is my physical body. An echo is formed of all that is
said by the planetary spheres, and this echo is my etheric body.
1. Physical body = Echo of the Zodiac 2. Etheric body = Echo of the planetary movements 3. Astral body = Experience of the planetary movements 4. Ego = perception of the echo of the Zodiac
Nothing is said, my dear friends, by repeating that man consists of physical body and etheric body. Those are no more than vague, indefinite words. If we want to speak in a real language, which can be learned from the mysteries of the cosmos, we would have to say: Man is constituted out of the echo of the heavens, of the fixed stars; of the echo of the planetary movements; of what is experienced of the echo of the planetary movements; and of what knowingly experiences the echo of the fixed star heavens. Then we would have expressed in real cosmic speech what is abstractly expressed by the words: Man is made up of physical body, etheric body, astral body, and ego. We remain entirely in the abstract by saying: Man is composed first of physical body, secondly of etheric body, thirdly of astral body, fourthly of ego. But we pass into concrete cosmic speech if we say: Man consists of the echo of the Zodiac, of the echo of the planetary movements, of the experience of the impression of the planetary movements in thinking, feeling, and willing, and in the perception of the echo of the Zodiac. The first is abstraction, the second reality.
When you say ‘I’, what is that
exactly? Now just imagine someone had planted trees in a beautifully artistic
order. Each individual tree can be seen. However, at a distance all the trees
resolve into a single point. Take all the individual things — all that resounds
from the Zodiac in the way of world consonants — then go far enough away:
Everything that is formed as inward sound, in the most manifold way, is
compressed within you to the single point ‘I’.
It is an actual fact that this name
which man gives himself is really only an expression for what we perceive in the
measureless spaces of the universe. Everywhere it is necessary to go back to
what, as reflection, as echo, appears here upon Earth. Thus, when the matter is
seen in its reality, before man's higher and inward experience, everything out
of which man builds himself up as a phenomenon, as pure experience, melts away.
If we look upon man and gradually learn to know his true nature, then his
physical body actually ceases to be in the way it normally confronts us and
otherwise stands before us: our vision widens and man grows into the heavens of
the fixed stars. The etheric body, too, ceases to be before us. Vision is
extended, experience is extended, and we arrive at a perception of planetary
life, for this human etheric body is a mere reflection of planetary life.
Man standing before you is nothing
but the phenomenon, the appearance, the image, of what goes on in the life of
the planets. We think we have an individual human being in front of us, but this
individual is a picture, on a certain spot, of the whole world. What then is the
reason for the difference between an Asiatic and an American? The reason is that
the starry heavens are portrayed at two different earthly points, just as we
have various pictures of one and the same external fact. It is indeed true that
when we observe man the world begins to dawn upon us, and by such observation we
are faced by the great mystery of the extent to which man is an actual pictured
microcosm of the reality of the macrocosm.
Now, of what does modern life consist?
When we look back from these modern times upon mankind's life in primeval times,
we still find an experience of man's connection with the spiritual world in the
instinctive consciousness of those ancient days. In the alphabet we can have a
concrete experience of this. When, in primeval words, man had to express the
rich store of the Divine in all its fullness, he uttered the letters of the
alphabet. When he expressed the mystery of his own nature, in the way he learned
about it in the Mysteries, then he voiced how he had descended through Saturn or
Jupiter in their stellar relation to the Lion or the Virgin — in other words, how
he had descended through the A or the I in their relation to the M or the L. He
gave utterance to what he had then experienced of the music of the spheres, and
that was his cosmic name. And in those ancient days men were instinctively aware
that they brought a name down with them from the cosmos to the Earth.
Since then Christian consciousness
still preserves this primeval consciousness in an abstract way by consecrating
individual days to the memory of saints, who, rightly understood, should give
new life to the spiritual cosmos. By being born on a particular day of the year
we should receive the name of the saint whose day it is on the calendar. What is
meant to be expressed here in a more abstract way was more concretely expressed
in primeval times, when in the Mysteries the cosmic name of a person was found
in accordance with what he experienced as he descended to Earth, when with his
being he created vowels with the planets and added them to the consonants of the
Zodiac. The various groups of the human race had many names then, but these
names were conceived in such a way that they harmonized with the universal
all-embracing name.
Considered from this point of view,
what was the alphabet? It was what the heavens revealed through their fixed
stars and through the planets moving across them. When the alphabet was spoken
out of the original, instinctive, human wisdom it was astronomy that was
expressed. What was spoken through the alphabet and what was taught in astronomy
in those olden days was one and the same thing. The wisdom in the astronomy of
those times was not presented in the same way as the learning contained in any
branch of knowledge today, which is built up from single perceptions and
concepts. It was conceived as a revelation that made itself felt on the surface
of human experience, either in the form of an axiomatic truth or as part of an
axiomatic truth. Thus a concrete experience was represented with a part of the
primal wisdom. And there was something of quite a dim consciousness connected
with the fact that, in the Middle Ages, those who were highly educated still had
to learn grammar, rhetoric, dialectics, arithmetic, geometry, music, and
astronomy. In this ascent through the various spheres of learning lies a half-conscious recognition of something, which in earlier days, existed in
instinctive clarity. Today grammar has become very abstract. Going back into
times of which history tells us nothing, but which, nevertheless, are still
historical times, we find that grammar was not the abstract subject it is today
but that men were led through grammar into the mystery of the individual
letters. They learned that the secrets of the cosmos found expression in the
letters. The single vowel was brought into connection with its planet, the
single consonant with the single sign of the Zodiac; thus, through the letters
of the alphabet, man gained knowledge of the stars.
Passing from grammar to rhetoric
entailed the application of what lived in man as active astronomy. And by rising
to dialectics one came in thought to comprehending and working on what lived in
man out of astronomy. Arithmetic was not taught as the abstraction of today, but
as the entity expressed in the mystery of numbers. Number itself was looked upon
differently from how it is done today. I will give you a trifling instance of
this.
How does one picture 1, 2, 3 to
oneself today? It is done by thinking of a pea, then of another pea, and this
makes two; then another is added and there are three. It is a matter of adding
one to another — piling them up. In olden days one did not count in this way. A
start was made with a unit. And by splitting the unit into two parts one had 2.
Thus 2 was not arrived at by adding one unit to another. It was not a putting
together of units, but the two were contained in the one. Three was contained in
the one in a different way — four again in a different way. The unit embraced
all numbers and was the greatest. Today the unit is the smallest. Everything
today is atomistically conceived. The unit is one member and the two is added to
it; this is all imagined atomistically. The original idea was organic. There the
unit is the greatest and the following numbers always appear as being smaller
and are all contained in the unit. Here we come to quite different mysteries in
the world of numbers.
These mysteries in the world of
numbers give the merest intimation that here we are not concerned with what
merely lives in the hollow of man's head. (I say the hollow of his head because
I have often shown it really to be hollow from the spiritual point of view.) In
the relations of number we can come to perceive the relations of the objectivity
of the world. If we always just add one to one naturally this is something that
has nothing to do with the facts. I have a piece of chalk. If beside it I place
a second piece of chalk this has nothing to do with the first. The one is not
concerned with the other. If, however, I presuppose that everything is a unit
and now pass to the numbers contained in this unit, I get a two in a way that is
a matter of some consequence. I have to break up the piece. I then get right
into reality.
Thus after being borne up in
dialectics to grasping the thought of the astronomical, one reached still
further into the cosmos with arithmetic, and in a similar way with geometry. From
geometry one got the feeling that the geometrical, thought concretely, was the
music of the spheres. This is the difference between what holds good today and
what once existed in the instinctive wisdom of primeval times. Take music today
— the mathematical physicist reckons the pitch of a note, for example, reckons
which pitch is at work in a melody. Then anyone who is musical is obliged to
forget his music and enter the sphere of the abstract if, being a keen musician,
he has not already run away from the mathematician. Man is led away from
immediate experience into abstraction and this has very little to do with
experience.
In itself it is really interesting —
if one has a mathematical bent — to press on from the musical into the sphere of
acoustics, but one does not gain much in the way of musical experience. That
someone today learns geometry and as he proceeds begins to experience forms as
musical notes, that is to say, if he rises from the 5th to the 6th grade, and
makes geometry sound musically, all this, as far as I know, does not enter the
curriculum. But that was once the meaning of rising to the sixth part of what
was to be learned — from geometry to music. And only then did the archetypal,
underlying reality become an experience. The astronomy in the subconscious then
became something that one consciously mastered as astronomy, as the highest and
7th member of the so-called Trivium and Quadrivium.
The history of man should be studied
in accordance with the development of his consciousness, for then we can gain a
feeling that consciousness must return to these matters. That is just what is
attempted in anthroposophical spiritual science. There is no need to marvel that
those who are accustomed to accept the recognized science of the day find
nothing right in what I have written, for example, in Occult
Science. It is necessary, however, that man should go back, in a fully
conscious way, to the true reality which for a time had to recede into the
background to enable man to develop his freedom. Man would have been able ever
more strongly to develop the consciousness of how necessary it is for him to
stand within a divine cosmic world had he not been cast out of this cosmos into
the merely phenomenal, into pure appearance, so strongly indeed that the whole
manifold splendor and majesty of the starry sky was condensed into the abstract
ego.
This was a necessary step in the
struggle for freedom. For man could develop his freedom only by pressing
together quite indistinguishably into the single point of the ego something
that, filled out by the whole of cosmic space, streamed through all time. But he
would lose his being, he would no longer know or possess himself, no longer be
active and act on his own initiative, were he not to reconquer the whole world
from this single point of his ego, were he not to rise again from the abstract
to the concrete. It is indeed important to understand how, in passing from the
Greek to the Latin culture, abstraction took hold of European culture and thus
resulted in the loss of the primeval word. It must be remembered that the Latin
language was for a long time the language of the cultural elite. What persisted,
however, was a kind of desperate holding on to what this Latin language had
actually already discarded. And what had been spoken in the Greek world then
remained behind only in thought. Of the logos there remained logic — abstract
thought.
In the longing that a man such as Goethe had for
knowledge of the Greek culture there lies something that may be expressed as
follows: he longed for liberation from the abstraction of modern times, from the
dry prose of Romanism. He wanted to reach the other daughter of the primeval
wisdom of the world, what remained of all that stood for Greece. — We too must
experience something of this kind if we wish to understand Goethe's intense
yearning for the South. In modern school biographies we find nothing of all
this. Only when in every individual thing there echoes a consciousness of man
being an expression of the whole cosmos will the way be cleared for the forces
needed for man's progress, if civilization is not to decline into utter
barbarism.
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