32. The Origin of Man

GA 68b/1907-10-31/p048 ·1907-10-31 · English HighHigh alignmentThis translation's paragraph count matches the German original — the locus maps cleanly to the same paragraph in DE.
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: «Da keine professionellen Stenogramme vorliegen, handelt es sich oftmals um notizenhaft festgehaltene Zusammenfassungen oder Berichte.» (Since no professional shorthand transcripts exist, these are often summaries or reports kept in the form of notes.). The publisher's description of the volume, as mirrored on AnthroWiki (GA 68b). The translation is the maintainer's, not a published one.

[And] so we can go further and further back, to the state where the entire astral body was outside [the physical body], [where the physical body] related to the ether body as [ the body of the snail to the physical house [of the snail] relates, where the astral body /illegible] it, as it were, switches and reworks it, like the snail on the house - the snail does not live in the fabric of the house. [So it belongs to the physical and etheric bodies, but it does not yet live in them; it works on them from the outside; and we find] states, if we go back even further, [where even] the etheric body is not yet in this intimate connection with this physical body, the etheric body is still outside the physical body, and here we come to realize that the members of human nature, [which today in the waking human being are inwardly linked together], in ancient times have joined together. They certainly have a common origin, but despite the fact that they originate from the unified primal being and the unity they form in man is a remarkable one, [they are multi-faceted]. And if we ascribe to the astral body the ability to transform the physical body, what qualities can we ascribe to the [originally] free etheric body? ... /illegible]

Read this passage in another edition
DEoriginalENEnglish
Raw JSON: /v1/steiner/en/ga/68b/1907-10-31/p048.json
Cite: GA 68b/1907-10-31/p048 · edition English