Knowledge of Soul and Spirit

GA 56 — 26 March 1908, Berlin

Sun, Moon, and Stars

Time and again, there are references to the close connection between humans and nature. When we encounter hints in scientific writings about fluctuations in grain prices within certain periods of time and references are made to changes in glaciers or the water level in the Caspian Sea, it seems at first glance that these things cannot be taken seriously in connection with each other. However, new connections and confirmations of these connections are constantly being found. Much remains to be discovered, and some errors will have to be ruled out, but science has essentially provided proof of this seemingly mysterious interaction. Many such events are related to the activity of the sun, including the fluctuating number and size of sunspots. Their maxima and minima occur with a certain regularity. After approximately (11\frac{1}{9}) years, such a maximum can be observed. Furthermore, a comparison of the observations made to date shows that a period of twenty-two and a half years could also be expected.

Changes in climatic conditions caused by sunspot activity cannot be dismissed. It seems that a maximum number of sunspots causes a reduction in the sun's heat radiation, which can then bring about major changes in nature. For example, good wine years followed each other at fluctuating intervals of eleven years. The extent to which Brückner's 35-year period of climate fluctuations can be linked to this has not yet been scientifically established.

Even what science knows as ice ages, of which it assumes there have been four, these enormous changes in the face of the Earth, are linked by science to the activity of the sun and the position of the Earth's axis in relation to it.

Thus, our purely mechanical thinking connects events on the sun with the development of the earth. In other times, these things were viewed in a different way, which today is dismissed by science with a sense of superior wisdom.

But what must we feel when we see one of the greatest scholars and such a cautious thinker as Aristotle say that, according to ancient teachings, the stars are gods. Everything else that popular opinion says about the gods is worthless and added by the masses.

Aristotle expressed himself cautiously about this teaching, but he treats it as something that must be approached with respect and reverence.

Such an echo of ancient wisdom, which today's natural scientists dismiss with a shrug, has also been preserved in a mutilated, foolish way in what is called astrology, but nevertheless leads back to the primordial wisdom of humanity. It is not easy to explain what such primordial wisdom consists of. Today, humans see the stars and their Earth as purely physical bodies wandering through space. They would say that it is a childish mental image to think that these other celestial bodies could have any significance for the fate of humankind. In those days, people felt differently when they compared humans to the rest of the world. They did not think of bones, muscles, and senses, but of the feelings and sensations that lived within them. The stars were the bodies of spiritual-divine beings, and they felt themselves permeated by their spirit.

Whereas today people recognize that mechanical forces are at work in the solar system, back then they saw spiritual forces acting from star to star. The great initiates taught that the effects from star to star were not purely mathematical, but based on purely spiritual forces.

It is understandable that this worldview has changed in our materialistic worldview, but only those who believe that the views of the last fifty years are valid for all time can close their minds to the intuition of what lived in the non-materialistic, but spiritual experience of the world. This also applies to the view that places the earth at the center of creation.

In contrast to the coming of Christ on earth, it is said today that this earth is only a grain of sand among the other stars, and that it is therefore inconceivable and unimaginable for anyone who is not caught up in terrible self-overestimation that a divine being should have descended to this insignificant earth. This change did not come about out of nowhere. At that time, people looked up to take in the spiritual content of the universe and had not yet made much progress in mastering physical space. With the advent of the materialistic worldview, the physical world has only been conquered in the broadest sense. We do not want to criticize here, but rather to understand how this transformation took place. It had been in the making for a long time, but it was in the 19th century that it made wonderful progress.

The modern worldview is crystal clear in Kant and his followers. The image they have created of the origin of the solar system is well known: To illustrate the formation of a celestial body, a drop of oil is poured into a vessel containing water or alcohol. This is then set in a rotating motion. As a result, smaller and larger spherical particles separate. Just like these oil particles here, the worlds would have detached themselves from the mist and fire fog, the primordial nebula.

I need only mention that in the 19th century, the admirable advances in natural science and astronomy corrected and changed the worldview of Kant and Laplace, but the basic features have remained essentially the same. The great discovery by Kirchhoff and Bunsen, spectral analysis, also seems to confirm this, as it has been used to detect a large number of the mineral substances that make up our Earth on other celestial bodies. More than two-thirds of all known elements have been identified on the Sun itself. It is very characteristic and more significant than is commonly believed that one of the most knowledgeable developers of this world view uttered the sentence: “If one traces the formation of the universe, it turns out that the primordial nebula took shape in this way, with a necessity similar to that of a working clock indicating that it has been wound up.”

The aforementioned experiment allows us to visualize the emergence of celestial bodies from the primordial nebula. However, logical thinking requires us to think things through to their conclusion. It then becomes apparent that we have forgotten something, and indeed the most important thing. What actually causes the particles to clump together? The movement performed by the experimenter! However, when applying the results of this experiment to the hypothesis of the origin of the celestial bodies, it is forgotten. This “trifle” is completely overlooked in the world view thus proven. No one wants to know anything about the question of the experimenter. Without being an opponent of today's natural science, one can ask this question. One can stand firmly on the ground of scientific thinking and yet not forget the inconvenient experimenter. He is the spirit behind everything, the sum of the spiritual beings who reveal their essence in the phenomena of the world of the senses, as the results of exact research in Spiritual Science can show. Spiritual science does not need to deny anything that modern science has researched. It fully acknowledges its findings, insofar as they have been obtained through rigorous and objective observation, experimentation, and thinking. It recognizes the necessity of such research, which is directed solely at the sensory world. But it also knows that the time has come when humanity must be made aware that spirit is the basis of all matter and that matter is the outer expression of spiritual beings.

Spiritual Science does not only consider the mechanical processes of attraction and repulsion, it also investigates what corresponds to these in spiritual forces. In order to gain a living picture of the plant according to its method, one must proceed as follows:

The plant directs its roots downward and its stem upward. We see two forces at work, one of which is directed toward the center of the earth, while the other seeks to tear it away with its tentacles. Anyone who looks at the plant with more than just their outer eye will see how the root and the flower represent the expression of these two forces. Higher, supersensible forces of attraction and repulsion are at work here. The former come from the earth, while the latter radiate down from the sun. If the plant were exposed only to the forces of the sun, its development would be rushed, it would sprout leaf after leaf and then wither away, lacking the restraining force that acts from the earth. Thus, the plant becomes the result, the expression of the forces of the sun and the earth. We no longer see it as a separate entity. It appears to us as a being that is a member of the entire earth organism, just as hair is a part of the human organism. The earth becomes a living whole, a manifestation of the living, the spiritual, just as man is the expression of the soul-spiritual.

Animals are more independent; unlike plants and hair, they are not just part of an organism. They owe their partial independence to their animal soul. Unlike the human soul, which is an individual soul, the animal soul is a group soul. Animals are its manifestation and relate to it as the finger relates to the whole organism. This makes animals less bound to the earthly organism.

To understand this, one must consider that spiritual research recognizes in the forces of attraction and repulsion the earthly images of what in the spiritual world corresponds to the forces that cause planetary movements, which the Kant-Laplace worldview, with all its later modifications and additions, knows as gravity. These forces and their consequences are facts that can be observed through the senses. Their spiritual archetype, which causes and sustains the physically perceptible phenomenon, is also a fact that can be ascertained through precise spiritual research. The animal group souls orbit their planet, and thus the animal kingdom is independent of the planet. Each planet shares its plant world with the solar system to which it is connected. But each planet has its own orbital forces and thus its own animal kingdom, insofar as it is capable of supporting animal life.

When considering human beings, one must draw attention to a fact that is deeply significant. As an embryo, the human being is subject to the influence of the moon. The human germ needs ten lunar months to develop. Lunar forces dominate it as long as it does not yet appear as an independent being. The plant forces that act as creative forces, urging it to blossom and bear fruit, are solar forces. The human body is dependent on the moon in terms of its form. These formative forces enter into a certain relationship with the forces of the sun. The sun and moon represent the contrast between life and form that is necessary for human development. If only the persistent forces of the moon were effective, any further development would be impossible and a kind of ossification would occur, while the forces of the sun alone would have led to combustion. The light that shines from the moon is not only reflected sunlight, but also forces of form formation. The light from the sun is not only light, but also the force of life, of impetuous life, so that human beings would already be old immediately after birth [if they were exposed to it alone]. The human form is the result of the moon, its life that of the sun.

Spectral analysis can detect the mineral-chemical components of the sun, but not the spiritual life forces that stream down to the earth. Through a telescope, one will see only the rigid celestial body of the moon, not the form-building spiritual force. In the sun, the natural scientist will recognize glowing masses of gas, flowing motion, surging metals, sunspots, and protuberances, but not the body of a spiritual being, the ruler of the processes of life. This is a chapter of new research that is only at the beginning of its development and must first conquer one field after another. But these things are of the utmost importance.

Goethe was one of the first modern natural scientists who saw light as more than just a mechanical-physical process, without reaping any success. In a lecture at the Freies Hochstift in Frankfurt am Main years ago, on the occasion of Goethe's birthday celebration, I pointed out that Schopenhauer bitterly lamented that those who celebrated Goethe did him grave and outrageous injustice with regard to his theory of colors. Today, scholars are reluctant to talk about it. For physicists, it is a beautiful poetic idea, but impossible in view of the purely physical theory of colors. Spiritual Science, however, takes a completely different view. And when the time is ripe to understand Goethe's theory of colors correctly, it will also be recognized that light does not consist only of seven basic colors, of material vibrations, but that behind what we know as earthly light lies the life streaming down from the sun. Then it will also be understood what Goethe meant when he said that the colors of the rainbow are the deeds of light.

Not only rays of light stream down to us from the stars, the sun, and the moon, but also spiritual streams of life. As long as one sees only physical light, one will not be able to understand this, for the spiritual can only be intuited with artistic imagination, experienced as an image in sensual-supersensory vision, and learned through spiritual research.

Human beings are multi-membered beings. When they sleep, only their physical and etheric bodies rest in bed. The astral body with the I separates from the lower members and lifts itself up into the spiritual world. There it receives forces more sublime than those received by human beings during the day from the sun and moon.

Because the astral body is integrated into the much lighter substantiality of the astral world, the starry world can influence it more strongly. Just as physical forces act on the physical body when we are awake, so now the nearer and more distant starry world acts on the astral body, for human beings are born out of the universe, out of the same world spirit as the starry space.

When we look up at the sun, moon, and stars, we can understand the forces at work there and learn to recognize the spiritual in the universe. We cannot imagine a human-like world god, but we can imagine the spiritual forces behind the nebulae and thus begin to understand how worlds are created.

We begin to experience the forces of guiding beings behind the forces at work.

Schiller thought the same when he called out to the astronomers who only explored the physical world of the stars:

Don't talk to me so much about nebulae and suns!
Is nature only great because it gives you something to count?
Your subject is certainly the most sublime in space;
But, friends, the sublime does not dwell in space.

If we only consider external forces, we will not find the sublime. But if we seek the spiritual and return from the immeasurable world of stars to ourselves, we will be able to see within ourselves, as it were, a drop of the spiritual life that floods the universe.

When we face the heavenly bodies with such a mindset, we better understand Goethe's words: Ah, what would they all be, the thousand million suns, if they were not reflected in the human eye and ultimately did not delight the human heart?

It may sound presumptuous, and yet it is humble if we understand it correctly, grasp it correctly. For when we look up at the sun, from which streams of life emanate, it appears so powerful that we could not bear it if it were not paralyzed by the forces of the moon. Thus, we see the spirit in the universe, but we know that we possess organs within ourselves with which we can perceive the spirit in the universe. Then we let it be reflected in our organs, just as the sun is reflected, which we cannot see directly, but whose brilliance is reflected in the falling waterfall, as expressed in Goethe's words where he has Faust say, after bringing him back to earthly life:

So let the sun remain behind me!
The waterfall, roaring through the rocky reef,
I gaze at it with growing delight.
From fall to fall it now rolls in a thousand,
Then a thousand streams pour forth,
Foam upon foam rushing high into the air.
But how wonderful, springing from this storm,
The colorful arch arches in changing patterns...
Sometimes clearly defined, sometimes dissolving into the air,
Spreading cool, fragrant showers all around!
It reflects human endeavor.
Contemplate it, and you will understand more clearly:
We have life in the colorful arch.