23. The Influences of the Sun and Moon on Man

GA 246/1909-12-12/p035 ·1909-12-12 · English High

Record: listeners' notes. Written from listeners' notes, summaries, or memory rather than a shorthand transcript. The wording is the note-taker's as much as Steiner's: weigh a single striking phrase here far more cautiously than the same phrase in a stenographic volume, and do not rest an argument on one word. Evidence: «Nach zum Teil bruchstückhaften Mitschriften» (From transcripts that are in part fragmentary). The publisher's description of the volume, as mirrored on AnthroWiki (GA 246), which also speaks of "fragmentarischen Hörernotizen und Vortragszusammenfassungen". The translation is the maintainer's, not a published one.

Look at the peoples at the North Pole. If a certain culture of mind and spirit does not penetrate them - and when it does, they have great difficulty in assimilating it - they fall into apathy because of the distribution of winter and summer as it appears around the North Pole. It is the same in tropical regions with their long summers. Humans also fall into apathy there. That culture, however, which is bound to the intellectual soul, can occur in the temperate zones, which have their regular alternation of summer and winter. This has to do with the fact that the peculiar relationship between the intellectual or emotional soul and the etheric body can only occur when the human being really experiences what can be called all the longing for spring that manifests itself in the temperate zone, all the happiness that is then present in summer, all the melancholy that arises in autumn, and everything that can be experienced in winter. This rhythm is necessary so that the etheric body can thrive in such a way that the intellectual or emotional soul can dwell in it in the right way.

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Cite: GA 246/1909-12-12/p035 · edition English