4. Man's inner Cosmic System

Over against the entire inner organisation, the organs belonging to the digestive apparatus (in which we must include the organs we have learned to know as liver, gall-bladder, and spleen), we have placed that system for which these organs primarily develop their preparatory activity, namely, the blood-system. But also over against this blood-system we have placed those organs which work, on the one hand to counteract a one-sided isolation, but on the other hand to create a balance between the inner systems we have mentioned and what presses inward from without. If we think, therefore, of the blood-system with its central point, the heart, as placed in the middle of the organism—and we shall see how truly justifiable this is—we have adjoining this system of blood and heart, on the one side the spleen, liver, and gall-bladder systems, and connected with it on the other side the lung and kidney systems. We shall emphasise later on how extremely close this connection is between the lung-system and the kidney-system. If we sketch the systems side by side we have in them everything belonging to the inner organisation of man which is related in a special way, and which so presents itself to us in this relationship that we are obliged to look upon the heart, together with the blood-system belonging to it, as by far the most important part. Now, I have already pointed out, and we shall see even more definitely to what an extent such a giving of names as we have described is justified, that in occultism the activity of the spleen is characterised as a Saturn-activity, that of the liver as a Jupiter-activity, and that of the gall-bladder as a Mars-activity. On the same basis on which these names were chosen for the activities here referred to, occult knowledge sees in the heart and the blood-system belonging to it something in the human organism which merits the name Sun, just as the sun outside merits this name in the planetary system. In the lung-system, there is contained what the occultists, according to the same principle, characterise as Mercury, and in the kidney-system that which merits the name Venus. Thus, by means of these names, we have pointed out in these systems of the human organism, even if at the present moment we do not in the least undertake a justification of the names, something like an inner world system. We have, moreover, supplemented this inner world system in that we have placed ourselves in a position to observe the relationship which manifests itself in the very nature of man as holding good for the two other organ-systems having a certain special connection with the blood-system. Only when we observe these things in such a way do we present something complete in respect to what we may call the real inner human world. In the following lectures I shall have occasion to show you that the occultists have actual reasons for conceiving the relationship of the sun to Mercury and Venus as being similar to that which we must necessarily think of as existing between the heart and lungs and kidneys respectively, within the human organism.