---
ga: 277
title: "The Tenfold Nature of Human Being and Eurythmy"
date: 1915-01-09
words: 5346
---
# The Tenfold Nature of Human Being and Eurythmy

## GA 277a — 9 January 1915

We have already gained an insight into the complexity of the human being. This is not always borne in mind, because, out of a certain complacency in our quest for knowledge, we strive for simplicity, for a simplification of knowledge, for a certain schematism. Only a more exact study of the things we have observed over the years can show us the complexity of the totality of human nature.

Take, for example, the fact that the human physical body arose in relation to its first predisposition in the distant past, during the ancient Saturn period. What arose at that time as the first predisposition of the human physical body, we still carry within us today, but in such a way that we have to recognize it from the transformed product that we have gradually become. After we have passed through the evolution of the sun, moon and earth as a physical human body, it is no longer possible for us to recognize with ordinary perception what came into being during the ancient Saturn time. For this human body has been transformed during the time of the sun, moon and earth. During the time of the sun it has undergone a transformation through the etheric body permeating it; during the time of the moon it has undergone a transformation through the astral body permeating it, and during the time of the earth it has undergone a transformation through the I permeating it.

If we now consider only the physical human body, not yet the etheric body as such, not the astral body and not the I, but only the physical body, we must say that this physical body has undergone four main transformations.

Once it was there as a physical body, and the higher limbs of human nature were not yet in it. Then it was transformed under the influence of the ether body, then under the influence of the astral body and finally under the influence of the ego. But all this is the physical body, it is a product of the transformation of the physical body.

Let us make a note of this: first we have the first formation of the physical body during the old Saturn time. Then, under the influence of the solar time, we have what the etheric body makes of the physical body, that is, the original formation, and what the evolution of the sun makes of it. Then, under the influence of the moon-time, we have what the astral body makes of it, and during the earth-time, what the I makes of it. These are four forms of transformation of the physical body (see diagram on page 13). We have now considered what is brought about by the etheric and astral bodies and by the I in this physical body. But we have not considered the higher aspects of human nature in themselves, nor what changes have taken place over time in the etheric body, the astral body and the I. During the sun time, the etheric body is added; it undergoes its own development during the sun time and then undergoes changes during the moon time through the influence of the astral body and during the earth time through the influence of the I, so that this etheric body also has a threefold nature. Finally, during the moon time, the astral body is added; it develops for itself in its astrality during the moon time and during the earth time through the I. But now only during the earth time the I itself is added as a single one.

We can now also look at the whole from a different point of view. When we consider the I, we actually have a fourfold I within us. We have within us that which the I makes out of the physical body. We then have that which the I makes out of the etheric body, then that which it makes out of the astral body and then the I itself in the I.

But now let us pose a different question. When we see a person as they are on the physical plane – we know, when we count the sections of the diagram, that the person is a ten-fold being – so when they stand before us on the physical plane, what of their entire ten-fold being do we actually see?

1. Physical body 2. Etheric body 3. Astral body 4. I  
5. Etheric body 6. Astral body 7. I  
8. Astral body 9. I  
10. I

Now, basically, very little of all this is initially present in the physical plane; most of what I have written here about this tenfold nature remains hidden. What is present initially is this I here (diagram: Ich 1). What is this I? This I is what the physical body is, what the I has made out of the physical body. Please pay close attention to what I am going to say, because only then can you get a real idea of it.

When you look at someone, the shape of their head, the physiognomy of their nose and mouth, when you see what they are like – even if you dissect them as an anatomist or physiologist – that is what the I has made out of their physical body.

What existence in the moon, the sun or Saturn has made of the physical body escapes your gaze, and remains hidden from you. Only what the I makes of the physical body is there before your physical eyes. Only by paying attention can we form a clear concept of the matter.

I will try to help you further with another consideration to explain the matter. If you have an animal in front of you, for example a dog, a wolf, a cat, then you have a form that is made by an astral body. When you look at a human being, you have a form that extends into the blood circulation, which is made by the I. When you look at an animal, on the other hand, you have a form that is made by the astral body.

What remains hidden is the configuration of the physical body, which is made by the etheric, the astral and the physical body itself. What we experience externally is actually an embodiment of the ego. Let us bear this in mind. It is an embodiment of the ego, and when we speak precisely about the human being, we should say: the human being in his entire form, right down to the blood circulation, is an ego embodied on earth.

So we perceive what the I does with the physical body. But what do we not yet perceive? What we do not yet perceive is precisely this I. If you call this Ich 1 and this Ich 4 (see the diagram ), then Ich 1 is perceptible from the outside, Ich 4 is what you do not perceive from the outside, but only as a self-experience. When you experience yourself in your self-awareness, when you experience what you perceive, what you feel, what you think, in short, when you experience yourself as I, then you perceive this I as such: that is the I that philosophers speak of. Ich 4, then, you perceive as an inner experience.

Now you would not be able to perceive it as an inner experience if only the ego were really there. I have already told you that we not only sleep at night but also during the day. We are not fully aware of all our inner experiences, and to the extent that we sleep during the day, the beings of the higher hierarchies also live in us during the day.

In this I live, stretching out their impulses from the spiritual world, the Angeloi, the Archangeloi and the Archai. In that which sleeps most of all, in the decisive will, the power of the Archai lives first. The angels and archangels also live in the will, but the deepest impulses of the will always come from the archai. Only, as I have already explained to you, man knows very little about his will. The power of the archangels lives in man's feelings and the power of the angels in his thinking. We may say that the Archai, who give the will, the Archangeloi, who give the feelings, and the Angeloi, who give the thinking, live in us as unconscious self-awareness. And all this strives and weaves into the I and finally becomes what man calls his inner soul life.

But actually only the I is known. 1 Just as behind what we see as the embodiment of the I lies what the astral body, the etheric body and the physical body itself have made out of the physical body, so behind what we experience inwardly lies what the angels, archangels and archai bring about. So that we can say: In essence, the human being knows very little about what he actually is.

When one person meets another, they perceive the other person's Ich 1; when they look into themselves, they perceive their own Ich 4. So eight of the ten limbs remain hidden at first. But even if these limbs remain hidden from us, we can still say that their effects come to light in certain individual phenomena of human experience. What the I does with the etheric body remains hidden. How the I here, which I would like to call Ich 2, behaves in the etheric body remains hidden at first, but only seemingly so. We will see in a moment that something comes out.

What the Ich 1 looks like is revealed to us when we meet a person, in their shape and form. Of course, the Ich 2, that is, what the I makes out of the etheric body, can only appear to a clairvoyant in the same way that the Ich 1 manifests itself in the physical form for external perception. The etheric body is not a body of form but of motion. You can sense, even without clairvoyance, how the I2 sets the etheric body in very specific rhythmic movements, just as the I1 gives the physical body its form. But these rhythmic movements, these inner movements of the etheric body, come to expression in the physical body by pressing through into it, or rather, they come to expression in the physical world.

We try to express through eurythmy movements what the I can produce in the etheric body in terms of movements, I would say, to the extent that this can already happen in the present. If you could imagine a poem or piece of music eurythmized in such a way that you could abstract, disregard the physical body and only look at what the etheric body is doing, then you would have the I in the etheric body moving within.

We try to defy Ahriman with this eurythmy; because Ahriman has come into the world, the human etheric body has become so hardened that it could not develop eurythmy as a natural gift. People would perform eurythmy if Ahriman had not hardened the human etheric body to such an extent that the eurythmic cannot be expressed; for this eurythmic must force its way through only one limb of the human physical body and is held captive by the other limbs of the physical body.

The etheric body, which is actually caused to live in eurythmic movements through music, singing and also speaking, is held back by the heaviness of the physical body, that is, Ahriman, from actually carrying them out and can only express them through a single limb: it can only be deposited in the lungs and larynx by forcing the air through them. This is how speech and song come about. We can therefore say that the I, by wanting to thoroughly organize and thoroughly eurythmize the etheric body, must be content with one part of the human being in song and speech, instead of taking hold of the whole human being.

When a person sings or speaks, a spectrum of the whole person always comes to light in the tone and in the vocalization. What one hears is the tone, the vowel. But for the clairvoyant consciousness, what comes to light is basically the whole person, the whole person in a certain form of movement.

A, E, I, O, U, that is always a whole person, namely a spectrum, an ethereal ghost of the whole person. Only the etheric body is moved in a one-sided way, so that when you hear a person speak: A, E, I, O, U – it happens that you see five people in succession, only always in different forms of movement and in such a way that the whole person is not always seen fully and evenly, but sometimes more of the head, sometimes more of the hands, sometimes more of the legs. The other parts then, I would say, recede into darkness, into gloom.

But now, in connection with that same I 2, of which I have just told you, there is an entity from the series of the angels that resounds in its effects in language and song. But this Angelos is precisely the one of whom I have spoken several times in these lectures. This is something that, of course, cannot come to consciousness at all, because not even what I have just told you about the activity of the I in the etheric body comes to consciousness when people sing or speak. A being from the hierarchy of the Angeloi pours into all of this. This is a servant of the folk spirit, and in this way the particular language coloring comes into the human being from the folk spirit. The fact that the folk spirit belongs to the hierarchy of the archangeloi is connected to the higher realms. It is a complicated path by which the folk-like, the national, enters the human being. But that is how it is integrated, in this way and at this point. Behind this Angelos stands the folk spirit, which is an entity from the series of archangeloi.

We will now call this next ego, which again remains hidden, ego 3. Man does not experience this ego 3 directly either. For that which one experiences directly is ego 4. What one sees from the outside is ego 1. And when we perceive the effect of ego 2 from the outside, it is when a person sings or speaks. I3 lives in very subconscious regions; it lives in everything that man is capable of in the scope of his imaginative creativity. Everything that man can produce within himself in the way of imaginative pictures, pictures that are not copies of the physical external world, comes from I3, so that we can say: it lives as creative imagination in the broadest sense.

What you find in my *Philosophy of Freedom* under the title *Moral Imagination* would also have to be described here. It appears as a moral imagination that creates moral principles. Everything creative, for good or ill, belongs to this part of the human being. I said, “for better or for worse,” because you might think that there are many people who show a striking lack of imagination. One can only say, “Oh, if only they had more real imagination!” Because a little cultivation of real imagination is a good remedy for certain harms of life.

I would like to draw your attention to just one thing. There are people who seem to have no imagination at all in the areas where one often seeks imagination. Yes, when they sometimes take the opportunity to express themselves about imagination, they even show a pronounced hatred for all imaginative creations. But if you get at their souls, they show that they basically have a great deal of imagination: no sooner do they hear a word about their neighbor that is detrimental to him, than they invent whole stories and tell the most outrageous things about their neighbor. All lies are the product of the imagination, a transformation of the imagination into evil. And if you take this extension of the imagination into evil, you will realize that imagination is quite widespread in the human world. If you consider all the creations of fantasy that people bring about by saying this or that about their fellow human beings, or by otherwise passing this or that off as their own, you will find a considerable amount of fantasy even in those people who, in the ordinary, more noble sense, have little imagination. Human abilities sometimes go astray, and mendacity and slander are devious forms of fantasy.

All in all, we can say that down there in the stream of human nature, there rests I3, because in everything that man can create out of himself, that wells up out of the depths of his soul life, in good and in evil, is that which comes from Ich 3. But this Ich 3 is influenced by beings from the category of the angels and beings from the category of the archangels, for better or for worse, by nature, by Lucifer or by Ahriman.


You get an image of human nature when you define it here. (See diagram: Ich 4, Ich 3, Ich 2, Ich 1.) When you define it here, you have the revelation of the human ego on the outside; when you define it here, you have the revelation of the human ego on the inside. Between the two, you have what I would call half-outside, the expression of the inside to the outside; that is Ich 2. Ich 3 is what is only half inside, namely coming from unknown depths into the inside. On the other hand, what lies upwards from this oblique line here is something of the hidden human nature that lies towards physical nature. What lies below this oblique line are the nearest spiritual hierarchies that are connected with the human being. Basically, when we speak of the human being on earth, we have in mind hardly anything other than what lies within this line. Above it, however, is everything that is present in man as a residuum, as a remnant from the old Saturn, Sun and Moon times.

If you draw a line here (☾), you get everything that is hidden in the moon time in man. If you draw a line here (○), you get everything that is hidden in the sun time in man. If you draw a line here (♄), you get everything that is hidden in the Saturn time in man.

If you draw a line here (♃), you get what will become apparent during the Jupiter period, when man will live among the Angeloi. If you draw a line here (♀), you get what will become apparent during the Venus period, and here at the end you get what will become apparent during the Vulcan period.

This scheme gives you a rough idea of the complexity of human nature. It is good not only to look at things as they present themselves in the course of our cycles, but also to relate the individual things to each other. Today I wanted to give you an example of how these things can be related to each other.

There are various ways to find such a scheme. First, I will tell you how a clairvoyant arrives at such a scheme. The clairvoyant will say to himself: I meet a person; from this person, I first perceive his outer form with physical perception, everything that belongs to the outside. But now, with clairvoyance, I can deepen this form; in a sense, I get to the bottom of the outer form. If I then disregard the outer form, I perceive an ethereal being, and into this ethereal being play, song, and in general all sound expressions, play a part. This deepens the outer form for me. In the same way I can deepen my inner life. I can develop my self-awareness in the way one develops it in ordinary physical life. But then you can also deepen it. You can pour your inner life into the world, which otherwise only manifests itself as a fantasy. But then something real arises. Then imagination really arises, then fantasy ceases to be mere fantasy. The human being enters into a feeling that tells him: fantasy is no longer merely fantasy, but is immersed in something real. Something comes to meet you and you know that this is the inner and this is the outer (see drawing), and they come to meet each other.


This is how the clairvoyant consciousness experiences it. Then it has to piece together what it can experience in the vision by placing itself in the time of the moon, the sun and Saturn. In this way, one can clairvoyantly and creatively experience the necessity of such a scheme within oneself. Those who have gone through the first stages of initiation can experience it that way.

But even if you have not yet reached this stage, you can help yourself to a certain extent, so that you gradually come to experience inwardly what is approaching you from the outside. If you take everything that has been presented so far about spiritual science, you can put this scheme together yourself, as it is written here. You just have to make an effort not just to read in succession, but to try to connect the things that have been presented. You can form this scheme from the available cycle material. And that is very useful, because by processing the material offered in the cycles in this way, one progresses from an external assimilation to an internal processing. This internal processing has a high value for real progress.

Today I have given you an example of how to build such a scheme from the cycles. I now hope that many of you will gradually build such schemes. Then, firstly, there will be less uninspired speculation about the content of the cycles, and that is very good; and secondly, through such compilations, real inner evolution will take place. Individuals will progress when such fruitful compilations are made. You cannot just make a few such combinations from the cycles. From what is now available as cycle material, if you make it fruitful, you can make not only hundreds, but many, many thousands, perhaps even more, of such combinations. So you see, you have enough to do if you apply what is given in the cycles in a correspondingly fruitful way.

If you go from such a scheme to an expansion of the scheme, then you will go even further. If you separate what is actually on the physical earth plane, this fourfold formation of the ego, then you can say: everything here lies under the diagonal strip, and everything there lies above it. For these points, we just have to reverse the order. What has been written down here, you have to put up there. Then we have the six points at the top; so we have to make six points up there and write what are here six links on these six points. What is up here, we would have to write down below. We could make six points again and we could write the six points where the upper points are.


But we do not need to do that, because the cosmos has already done that for us. That which is on the earth is there; and although that which lives in us from the Saturn, Sun and Moon periods is hidden for the time being, and that which will come as the Jupiter, Venus and Vulcan periods is also hidden, the traces of it are still 'present in the universe, in the Zodiac, in the zodiac.

So this scheme can be expanded. Everything that is not human on earth can also be found if we ascend or descend. This is just a hint of how you can connect our elementary teachings with what is contained in the cycles about the spiritual hierarchies and their connection with the worlds.

But you will also find much that can be applied to pedagogy, let us say. Even pedagogy will arise when we look at something like we have now discussed in the right way.

Consider that we have come to the conclusion that language and singing are present in I 2. So that we can say: language and singing have been driven out of the whole of human nature by Ahriman. Once this is properly understood, something extraordinarily important for real life will arise. First of all, the principle will arise for singing pedagogy that one must evoke an awareness in the person learning to sing of the part played by the etheric body in the process: so to speak, of the continuous transmission of sounds to the etheric body. Only when this involvement of the etheric body in singing is really taken into account will the impulse for change occur, which, with regard to vocal pedagogy, must necessarily come from our principles. In practical terms, this will be reflected in the fact that singing teachers will increasingly encourage their students to connect the feeling in the physical organs less consciously, but to develop more consciousness in what, so to speak, is adjacent to these physical organs. The singer must have a feeling, not so much of the movement of the organs, but of what the air in and around them does in its movement. An emancipation of the conscious experience of the sound in the air from the experience of the sound in the organ is what will follow from the correct recognition of the spiritual-scientific principles in singing pedagogy.

Likewise, with regard to speech technique, especially as regards recitation, it will become more and more apparent that here too it is a matter of becoming truly aware of the elementary interweaving while speaking artistically.

In this way it is possible for the tone to become a truly artistic tone, for the speaker to gain a sense of awareness that, in speaking artistically, one is not merely living locked up in one's own skin; rather, I would put it this way: the person speaking artistically will feel the sound in the air, feel the tone in the air as a living being, and through this feeling of the tone as a living being, there will be something like an undertone, like an undertone in speaking. Feeling the sound in living speech: this in turn will enrich the pedagogy of recitation.

It is precisely by responding to the intimacies of spiritual science that something meaningful for teaching and learning in life will arise. Much of what resonates when touching on such things as those touched on today is actually still quite unknown to humanity today. For example, it would be good to develop an awareness of how a certain new formulation of sounds has been attempted in individual areas of my Mystery Dramas. This can most easily be followed in the seventh picture of the first Mystery Drama. But there are also such passages in the other Mystery Dramas where this can be followed.

A certain inner shaping of the sound – in addition to everything else that is in it – is the expression of a new element in poetic creation, of which there is hardly a trace anywhere today, but which will take the place of what rhyme, end rhyme or initial rhyme was in earlier times. A certain inward, I would say ethereal-poetic experience of the sound as opposed to the more external-physical experience of the sound, as it is in end rhyme or in initial rhyme. There is a need, even in our increasingly prosaic recitation, to strip away the old forms. Not many people today are willing to use the initial rhyme, the alliteration, as Jordan tried to do; and not many reciters today are willing to emphasize the final rhyme as it was originally emphasized. It is better to emphasize the sense. But that is prose; it is not poetic speech if one merely recites in a manner that is analogous to the sense. Poetic recitation would be recitation with an excellent emphasis on that which is not the prosaic element in the artistic form. But that will only be possible again when one, instead of living in the externals of sound configuration in rhyme or external rhythm, lives in that inner rhythm. In this way one will have to live into the sound in the way I have discussed in another area: as I have discussed it in recent lectures, where I spoke of living into the individual tone in musical composition in the future.

All these examples show that it is not enough to learn the theories of spiritual science, but that it depends on an inner experience of what we take in and on a penetration of the whole soul with what spiritual science wants, as I have already said on another occasion.

And it is precisely with this that we should begin our work. Insofar as something that is capable of providing inspiration can be presented externally, it should be presented in this building, in order to feel an effect in the whole soul and not just in the eye through the contemplation of forms and colors. But what has been suggested will only be fully realized when we feel impelled to shape our whole life in the same way — wherever this is possible today — as was attempted in this building. But then we must also try to make spiritual science truly alive, to really pour it into what we undertake and want to do. It is necessary to become aware that with the spiritual-scientific world view, something is to be given that produces a kind of new human being in that old human being who has come to us like an heirloom from earlier earth evolution. At the same time, with spiritual science, we absorb the prerequisites that serve to help give birth to what is to be born for the future of the earth.

If one wants this, then one must indeed connect one's entire being deeply, deeply with spiritual science. We have already experienced beautiful examples of such penetration here and there. We have often spoken of an outstanding example. I would like to take this opportunity to mention a few words by our friend Christian Morgenstern, which represent such an example of how spiritual science can penetrate our hearts and souls as a soul experience. It is not by absorbing spiritual science in theory that it really penetrates us, but only when it is lived in every fiber of our being.

And this is one example, one example among many, of how spiritual science has been so beautifully expressed in a poem like Christian Morgenstern's. This poem could seemingly have been written from a different worldview, but in reality it breathes the spirit of our spiritual science in every line, and not only in every line, but also in the vocalization - but vocalization here taken in a spiritual sense.

> I am born of God as all being is born of God.  
> I go to God to die with all that is mine.  
> I return home, O God, to live as Thine.
> First I was given out of Thy I.  
> then it was a matter of acquiring what had been given,  
> of raising it breast to breast to Thee as a Thou.
> But pride in the midst of it wanted to ruin it,  
> and it became You, and You were lost to it...  
> Until You, overpowering, summoned me!
> Then I was born to You for the second time:  
> for I understood to die for the first time,  
> for I felt to live for the first time.