The Rudolf Steiner Archive

3. Dying and Rising Organ Developments in the Human Body. The Physiognomy of Death

Given on the occasion of the General Assembly of the German Section of the Theosophical Society

[ 1 ] From the various lectures that have been given on legends and myths, you can see that ancient knowledge of the spiritual world lives on in such stories, signs, and the like that live among the people or are otherwise propagated by the human spirit. In legends and myths, we find a state of human feeling and perception preserved, so to speak, through which humanity was still in possession of a much, much higher knowledge than that which man can gain with the help of ordinary powers of observation bound to the outer senses. For those who have an inkling of such things, deep wisdom can sometimes shine forth from short legendary tales.

[ 2 ] You know from the various lectures I have given here and there that a great migration once took place from west to east, when a certain part of the Atlantic population moved from west to east, taking with them the memory of conditions in ancient Atlantic times and even older times. Those who, with eyes sharpened by spiritual science, consider the legendary hints of these various peoples settled here and there, will find deep insights into ancient times in these legends. And then not only our thinking, not only our philosophizing, but also our feelings, which can be deeply moved by those wisdoms, come alive in the divine world order. For the more wisdom rushes toward the intellect, the colder and more insensitive it becomes; the more wisdom rushes upward toward the higher regions of actual spiritual life, the warmer and more imbued with feeling it becomes.

[ 3 ] Who could possibly pursue an abstract theory of materialistic natural science, even if it is as permeated with true observations as Darwinism, with warm feeling and emotion? Whose heart could possibly beat faster when they hear the words heredity, adaptation, and the like? They feel nothing. But anyone who hears how the earth passed through the earlier forms of Saturn, Sun, and Moon time, anyone who hears how humanity ascended from the Lemurian to the Atlantean time and so on—anyone who hears this and remains unmoved must be in an unhealthy state of mind. For those who are able to feel impartially, such stories cut deep into the heart. Those who listen to such legends and fairy tales sense the depth of the wisdom they contain in the feelings they arouse in them.

[ 4 ] There is a simple story that lives among the Mongols of Asia and has also spread to Eastern Europe, where Mongolian legends and stories live. Can we not feel something deeply moving, even if we do not yet suspect the wisdom contained in it, when we are told this Mongolian legend, which says:

[ 5 ] There is a mother who has a single eye at the top of her head. This mother rushes desolately through the world because she has lost her only child. She rushes through the world, lifting every stone, holding it up to her eye at the top of her head, and then, disappointed, throwing it back down on the ground, where it shatters into a thousand pieces, because she has had to convince herself that it is not her lost child. She does the same with every object, believing she will find her lost child in each one; she picks it up, holds it to her eye, and throws it away in disappointment. So she rushes restlessly through the world, repeating this procedure over and over again.

[ 6 ] This story is nothing other than the memory of that tribe driven furthest to the east, which still knew about ancient Atlantis, about the primordial state of humanity, when people were still closer to the spiritual worlds and could still see into them themselves.

[ 7 ] You all know that in children, after birth, the bones at the top of the head close only slowly. In ancient times, humans still had a connection with the outside world. If one could have seen then as one can see today, one would have seen an organ protruding from that part of the head like a luminous body, whose rays penetrated human limitations and slowly disappeared into the outside world. One would have seen something like a wondrous lantern, which one would be wrong to call an eye, for that organ was not an eye. But it was an organ of sensation and perception for humanity in those ancient times, with which humans could still look freely and openly into what we call the astral world, with which they could see not only bodies but also souls and what lived in those souls around them.

[ 8 ] This organ has shrunk to the size of the so-called pineal gland, which is now covered by the roof of the head. However, as a legacy of this ancient organ, with which they could experience the spiritual worlds around them, humans today carry something within their souls, and that is the longing for these worlds, to which the gate has closed for them, the gate of their own heads. The longing for this world has remained, but not the ability to see into it. This longing, which lives in human souls, is expressed in religions. Whereas humans used to see warm, feeling beings around them in the spiritual regions, today they see themselves surrounded by physical, contoured figures.

[ 9 ] Is it not moving, then, to hear the story of the woman who is the mother of humanity, who wanders through the world searching for something to satisfy her longing, and cannot find it in any of the external objects because she no longer sees what she once perceived when the single eye at the top of her head still functioned? It can no longer be found in all the external objects that are given to humanity today through the senses. This is how deeply the mouth of the world spirit speaks to us through legends and fairy tales; and only then can we understand their deep meaning when we view them from the standpoint of true spiritual science. When we hear such a story, we might believe that this explanation, which ties in with the memory of a true fact in human history, is profound enough. But it is even more profound than that. In these legends, it is not only what is said that matters, but also how it is said. If we really explore their core of wisdom, we see that an apparent contradiction is resolved. For it might seem contradictory that the woman who has preserved this organ holds external objects up to her one eye and sees and recognizes with this eye, whereas we can only see the things of the outside world with our two eyes. But precisely in this lies a profound mystery truth that we only need to grasp deeply enough; then we can take a look into the events in which humanity is interwoven. We will see how practical and applicable in everyday life such a truth is, which we draw from the depths of mystery wisdom.

[ 10 ] The scientist who observes human beings with an external gaze, in the dissection room or elsewhere, according to their physiological and biological components, has the feeling that he approaches each of the organs with the same attitude; he applies the instruments in the same way when he dissects the heart, the brain, the liver, and the stomach. He believes that the only thing that matters is to understand the chemical components of which these organs are composed and formed. He has no idea that these organs are fundamentally different depending on what they are made of. The nerves would not be there if the human being did not have an astral body, and it is this inner entity that secretes the nervous system and thereby makes the nervous substance something different in nature from the other substances. The creators and builders of the nervous substance exist and live in the astral world, and they create wisely, very wisely.

[ 11 ] In certain even higher realms of spiritual existence there are beings who are identical, similar to the human ego itself, who first gave rise to the formation of red blood. You can read about this in the book “Blood is a Very Special Juice.” I-beings are the creators and builders of this red blood. They worked from outside so that the I could sink into human beings. Animals do not yet have the I. Where there is red blood in animals, beings work from outside; animals are “possessed” by red blood. Human beings, however, attain freedom by being “possessed” by their ego, by themselves. They had to take possession of themselves in order to gain control over their blood.

[ 12 ] The etheric body works in the secretory organs, which we call glands; that is, those beings that work in etheric space work there. In order to understand these glands, we must realize something. If humans had only an etheric body and no astral body, then only beings from the world of ether would be active in the human body, and the organs we call glands could not develop at all, but only organs similar to those found outside in the plant kingdom. For there, too, the etheric body is at work, permeating the plants and calling the inorganic into life. Every new principle that is added has a transforming effect on all existing ones. By penetrating the human body and constructing the nervous system for itself, the astral body also has an effect on the world of ether and transforms the original plant organs so that they become glands.

[ 13 ] It is now possible to study the organs of the human being in their various values if we go back to the original sources that can be found in the spiritual worlds. We find that the liver, gallbladder, spleen, and so on are something quite different when we know how different worlds are involved in their formation than when we merely dissect them physiologically with the usual instruments of science. They are hereditary elements from the spiritual world. We must consider all human organs from their spiritual origins if we want to understand their significance correctly. We are looking toward a future way of treating the human body in which people will be aware of the spiritual origin of the organs and will apply this knowledge in everyday medicine. This is a process that must be carried out slowly and patiently. It cannot happen overnight, but it is in preparation and will happen in the future.

[ 14 ] One thing in particular is important to note when considering the human body. There are organs in it that have only acquired their present form relatively late, and others that have had their present form since time immemorial. There are organs whose current form means they are destined to dry up and fall away, to disappear from the human body; and there are organs that now have their initial form, which are destined to perfect this form more and more and in the future to play an important role in everything that happens through human beings. The organs that will be truly creative in the future include everything related to the human heart and larynx. These organs are only at the beginning of their development; in the future, they will be reproductive organs. You can already see a slight indication of this today in the fact that a man's voice changes when he reaches sexual maturity. The heart and larynx will change, they will become more and more perfect, and later human beings will spring from them.

[ 15 ] Today's reproductive organs, on the other hand, are on the verge of extinction; they will become increasingly hardened and severed from the human body. One can only understand the human body correctly if one knows that it is composed of a dying part and a part that is progressing in its development, and how the dying part relates to the progressing part. The human body contains something within itself that is increasingly moving toward death, and something that is increasingly blossoming into new life. Anyone who views the human being from an occult standpoint can say of each organ whether it is one that belongs to the declining development, that is rushing toward death, that humanity will no longer have in the future, or whether it is one that is at the stage of youth and will only become greater and more powerful in the future. You can see organs in the human body that have already shrunk in nature and become dull in their activity, that now have only a sparse activity. One such organ is the pineal gland. It once had a powerful activity and has now declined to an almost insignificant organ. Certain organs go almost to the stage of death and are then revived in a different way. Other organs die completely, disappearing in their physical form and then reappearing in a different form.

[ 16 ] Now let us consider the human body, where it most clearly rushes toward death on a downward path, and where it unfolds a new, young life on an upward path. These two things intertwine. The most important organs are pressed into this path of ascending and descending development, so that they contain both death and life within themselves. Their treatment is, under certain circumstances, the most important thing in human life. Let us look at them in a significant example.

[ 17 ] You all know from my other lectures the very elementary fact that the human being consists of the physical body, the etheric body, the astral body, and the I. You know that the I first works on the astral body and constantly transforms a part of it. If you look back to that point in human development when the ego, so to speak, descended from the bosom of the Godhead and began to work on the astral body for the first time, you will realize that the astral body was once a gift from the Godhead to human beings. If we want to schematically visualize this human being at the moment when the ego was implanted in him, we can say: His physical body was present (it is drawn), his etheric body, and his astral body.

[ 18 ] Then the I strikes into the astral body from above and begins to work in the human being, and we then have a part of the astral body that is formed by the I itself. Today, this astral body consists of two parts, one part that animals also have, and another that only humans have, which arises from the fact that humans have worked on their astral body with their ego through many incarnations. Now something different is at work in humans than in animals. Animals do not have this impact of the ego on the astral body. It has only formed its astral body in a very specific way, as it has received it from external forces. Now everything that comes from the higher worlds acts back on the whole of the human organism, reshapes everything in a certain way and causes the old organs to be reshaped; it transforms the old organs.

[ 19 ] Let us consider the relationship between these three bodies from this point of view. The physical body consists of similar substances and forces as those found in the mineral world outside, of physical and chemical substances and forces. If it only had these, it would be a mineral, however artfully formed. It is permeated on all sides by the etheric or life body. What does this life body do? It works against the decay of the physical body at every moment; it is the fighter against this decay of the physical body. Without it, the physical body, if left to its own devices, would follow the physical forces and gradually decay. During life, the physical body and the etheric body are connected, and the etheric body constantly fights against the decay of the physical body.

[ 20 ] What does the astral body do? It is extremely important to know this. In a certain sense, during conscious life—not during sleep—the astral body is constantly busy killing the etheric body, constantly reducing and dampening the forces that the etheric body develops. Therefore, the expression of the life of the astral body is fatigue, the weariness of the body during the day. The astral body is constantly destroying the etheric body. If it did not do so, there would be no consciousness, for consciousness is not possible without the life being constantly destroyed again step by step. This is extremely important to note. This spiritual activity — life in the etheric world, the wonderful flare-up of life in the etheric world, which expresses itself in the most magnificent movements and rhythms, and the constant dampening of this rhythm of the etheric body by the astral body — is what produces consciousness, even the simplest animal consciousness. These spiritual processes are expressed in the physical world in such a way that the moment consciousness enters into mere life, hardening and ossification occur in the physical body. Of course, there are transitions, mollusks and so on; these also have a very peculiar consciousness. Consciousness only becomes its own through this process; it approaches self-consciousness all the more, the more the soft, organic life masses assert themselves internally with hard, bony inclusions. It is therefore the astral body in its effect on the etheric body that — as in mollusks, snails, mussels, and so on — secretes the hard shell parts outwardly in order to produce in them the dull consciousness that lives in these animals. In higher animals, where self-consciousness becomes stronger, it is a secondary activity of the astral body, alongside the formation of the nervous system, to secrete everything bony and hardening. To the same extent that self-consciousness becomes stronger, the firm cartilage and bone-like structures separate from the soft, gelatinous mass. In the highest animals, this formation is almost complete; the astral body has developed a skeletal system that is almost complete in its own way.

[ 21 ] Something special happens to the astral body in humans; a new impact takes place. The astral body is partially transformed by the ego, and this causes a reversal of the tendency toward ossification that was previously present. If humans had left the astral body unchanged and continued to work on the formation of the skeleton, there would be no human culture on Earth. All progress in human development is conditioned by the fact that parts of the human astral body are separated out and subjected to the ego. This separated part of the astral body has a special task; it brings about a new tendency, whereby the formation of the skeleton, the ossification, comes under the control of the separated part of the astral body.

[ 22 ] How does this manifest itself? In a very remarkable way. Whereas previously the tendency of the astral body was to harden the being more and more, as it were to put an end to the development of the skeletal system, the astral body of the human being retains a force, a tendency to soften again, so that further development is possible. If this were not the case, everything that can become solid would flow into the human skeletal system, and there would be no human progress, no culture. Just as the animal species knows no progress — the species of lions and tigers is complete, finished — so it would be with humans. But humans can use the separate part of the astral body to take back what has hardened. In addition to the tendency toward hardening, toward bone formation, there is always a tendency in the human body to retain something, so that new organs can be formed that are soft. This is extremely important to note. This tendency does not exist in animals.

[ 23 ] Let us now consider a human being in the middle of life, standing on the one hand with their tendency to harden and on the other with their tendency to retain something. We see these two tendencies diverge when the human being gets their second teeth around the age of seven. The tendency to go into bone formation, to close oneself off in hardening, finds its expression in the teeth that the child gets around the age of seven. The separated part of the astral body causes humans, unlike animals, to retain certain life forces so that they can continue to develop. Until the age of seven, only the species-specific, the generic, was expressed in humans; now the time comes when they can live their way into the cultural progress of our time. School begins. These two things are intrinsically linked: the tendency toward hardening, which is expressed in the formation of teeth, and the tendency toward softening, which must retain something that the etheric body, which becomes free in the seventh year, needs for its further development. These two tendencies are linked, as is clearly evident in life.

[ 24 ] It is easy to observe that some phenomena occur in life that are difficult to connect with each other unless viewed from the standpoint of spiritual science. For example, anyone who observes so-called childbed fever may find that it is usually associated with damaged teeth. Women who have childbed fever often have damaged teeth. Why? Because these two tendencies—the tendency toward hardening, which is expressed in tooth formation, and the tendency to develop, to open up and grow beyond oneself, which is expressed in reproductive power, in procreation—are connected. If one is damaged, the other is also damaged.

[ 25 ] Everywhere in human life we encounter how these two tendencies, the tendency toward hardening and the tendency toward remaining soft in certain organs, are connected. It is important that these two tendencies balance each other out. We must strive to organize our lives in such a way that they remain in balance, because the cultural conditions in which humans find themselves often lead to significant changes. For example, if farm workers are taken away from the countryside, from a life in the open air, from an environment in which their ancestors lived, and transplanted to the city, employed in factories and so on, they lose the harmony, the equilibrium between the hardening and softening forces in their organism due to the completely changed living conditions. And what is the result? One of the two tendencies will then gain the upper hand, either the hardening or the softening forces. These are the causes in the spiritual world; you can see the effects in the physical world for yourselves. Suppose the softening forces gain the upper hand, then cultural diseases such as rickets and similar diseases occur. If, on the other hand, the hardening tendencies gain the upper hand, certain soft tissues of the organism will begin to harden in a very strange way. If the hardening process comes to the fore in an inappropriate way, tuberculosis develops. You will not find such diseases in animals that live in nature. But if you take them out of their familiar environment and put them in ours, for example monkeys, and lock them up, they very often get tuberculosis and die in captivity. Why does this happen? Because the hardening tendencies predominate when the monkey is placed in an environment in which it does not fit in.

[ 26 ] This is how you see spiritual forces influencing our physical life, and this is how we understand the external physical effects from their spiritual causes. I would have to say a lot more if I wanted to explain these connections in more detail. But since very few of you are doctors, you will have to be satisfied with this.

[ 27 ] And now consider how everything that has been said is connected with human happiness or suffering, how the equilibrium of the whole of human life depends on its organs having taken on the right form at the right stage of development. If an organ remains at an earlier stage, if softening or hardening occurs in an irregular manner, the result is an unhappy life. Every organ must reach its specific form at a specific stage of life. If an old organ remains at its earlier stage, misfortune and suffering will ensue. Even the hidden, not entirely visible organs of the human being can either lag behind or rush ahead in their development. Tuberculosis is something that will no longer harm humans in the future; it is only the premature occurrence of a condition that will later be natural. Today the condition is pathological, later it will be healthy. These actual diseases of civilization differ from the common diseases that are also found in animal life.

[ 28 ] Can you not hear this truth echoing in the Mongolian fairy tale of the woman who searches in vain for her lost child? At the wrong time, she still has the organ at the top of her head. It brings her misfortune. Restless, she rushes through the world, unable to find what suits her, what belongs to her. What wisdom is hidden in the simple folk tales told by the leaders of humanity.

[ 29 ] We can now go even further. Consider human beings as they are today, how they consist of organs in ascending and descending lines of development. Human beings did not always have the astral body; it was only gradually incorporated into them. Before it had incorporated the astral body, its organs were plant-like, they were of a plant nature. By incorporating the astral body, human beings incorporated flesh into the entire organism of the plant body. This incorporation of the astral body into the plant body is the incarnation. But this took place gradually; it developed gradually and did not affect all organs at the same time.

[ 30 ] If we go back in human evolution through the entire Atlantean and parts of the Lemurian periods and even further back, we would find a human body that still clearly had plant organs. Parts of the human body had already been transformed into flesh, while others were still of a plant nature. All those organs of the human body that carry less intense desires within them were transformed into flesh earliest; and those that carry the strongest desires within them, the sexual organs, were transformed latest. They were of a plant nature for a long, long time, and they will also return to a plant nature at the earliest. Only when, in the development of the human being, the ego had already descended deep into the astral body and selfish desires had penetrated deeply, did the formerly plant organs transform and become fleshly organs.

[ 31 ] Spiritual science looks back to that ancient sacred time when human beings still knew nothing of sexual forces. In the ancient mysteries, an image was worshipped that represented human beings who were still asexual, whose sexuality had not yet been transformed. In the place of the body where today the sexual organs are located, we can see vine-like, plant-like organs that are permeated only by the etheric body and do not yet contain anything from the astral body. This is how the hermaphrodite of ancient art appears to us. He was depicted in the same way that earlier humans can be described from spiritual research. They have plant organs in place of the current reproductive organs, and vine-like plant structures sprout from their backs. Now we understand — in a different way than the childlike way in which this is usually understood — why the ancient myths and the biblical story speak of the fig leaf: not to cover up or conceal something, but to point to a real fact in human development, to that ancient sacred state which the ancients still knew, when human beings had stood on a higher level and the organs in this place had still been of a plant nature.

[ 32 ] But let us go further. We can observe the conquest of the tendency toward hardening in humans in another way. It is remarkable that this is taken into account in a very peculiar way in occult schools. When the human ego descended to earth from the bosom of the deity, this tendency toward hardening had to be conquered by it. But there are other beings that had already completed their development much earlier. These are the birds. They also have an ego, but one that lives much more in the outside world. Therefore, they did not undergo something that is important for all human higher development, for the occult development of the human being. They did not participate in what finds expression in the formation of certain parts of the bone structure, the bone marrow, the innermost content of the bones. Birds have much hollower bones than humans and other animals; they have preserved a much older state. Humans have moved beyond this state; higher animals have also moved beyond it. Human beings send the forces of the ego into the bone marrow, and a good part of occult development consists in taking this into account through exercises, so that human beings enliven that passive, inactive way in which they relate to their bone marrow and transform it into a conscious one. Today, they can only act on the contents of the bone capsule of their skull, on their brain. But a future state of humanity will be prepared by gaining power over the element that permeates their bones as a semi-liquid element. The construction of the bones has given humans — and also animals — their form on Earth. The fact that humans have developed their bones in this way has given them the possibility of their current development. In the future, humans must gain the power to revive their bones, to remove their tendency to harden and to transform them. They will gain control over their blood, so that the power of the ego will be present in it to a much greater extent, and this blood will then be the instrument with which humans can work to transform the bone substance. What else is bone formation but mineralization? When human beings master the tendency toward softening, which today expresses itself inappropriately as rickets, when they master the blood so that they can work on the bone substance, then they will grow beyond the tendency toward mineralization; they will shape themselves, they will transform their physical body into what we call Atma or spiritual human. Then humans will defeat the principle of hardening, that powerful principle that leads to death, whose true physiognomy is expressed in the human skeleton. It is a correct intuition to illustrate death in the image of the skeleton. Human beings will bring this physiognomy of death under their control. They will overcome it when they control their form from within through the power of the spirit, just as they now control it from without through the mechanical power of the muscles, and give themselves form. Today, humans can only send their thoughts into their bones; when later their feelings will act in their bones, and even later their conscious will, then they will have overcome the physiognomy of death.

[ 33 ] Now imagine how beneficial the sciences can be for people when those who are called upon to represent the sciences once again know how the human organs are subject to this principle of hardening and softening. In this sense, it is meant that what spiritual science says is practically applicable in its effect on life. When these things are applied and have an effect in life, and when one penetrates such truths as are indicated in the old Mongolian fairy tale with a spiritual scientific view, then one will be able to understand better many things that now seem mysterious and recognize their truth. One will view the world with different senses and will, for example, learn to understand the remarkable phenomenon of bird flight. With the onset of the cold autumn season, birds fly along wonderful paths from the far north to the warmer south, sometimes hundreds of miles, and return in the spring along different routes. We have said that birds are a species that has remained at an earlier stage of development. You know that real progress on Earth only began when the moon separated from the Earth. Earlier, when the Earth and the present moon still formed one celestial body, the so-called Earth-moon or moon-Earth, this body moved around the sun in a certain orbit and in a certain time, always facing one side toward it. During this time, all living beings migrated once around the moon in order to receive the sun's influence once. That movement around the planet has been preserved to this day in the flight of birds, because birds separated themselves from the progressive development on Earth before the ego entered into Earth's development.

[ 34 ] Something else is even more remarkable. With the progressive physical development of humans and higher animals, sexuality took hold of the individual body. That desire, which resides in the individual body and today lives entirely in sexuality, did not exist there before; it was a cosmic force. It flowed from the sun to the ancient Earth-Moon. It was the cause of those movements around the planet that were connected with the way in which reproduction took place. The spring migration of birds is in reality nothing other than a kind of bridal procession. In these beings, sexuality is still in the environment, and the cosmic force is the directing power that guides and directs the migration from outside, while in other beings this force has been drawn into the individual bodies. The same forces that work within the human being, in his body, also work in the outer macrocosm. The same force that brings human beings together, that works in the human body as sexual energy, does not work within the bird species, but from outside, and is expressed in the outer migration of birds around the planet.

[ 35 ] Thus, the forces that are outside migrate into the interior of the beings in order to find the possibility in human beings to act outwards again when they have conquered the ability to become one again with the whole cosmos, the extraterrestrial. What humans expressed in such a moving way in the ancient legends and fairy tales – such as in the Mongolian fairy tale of the one-eyed woman – will be expressed by future humanity in other forms. The power of spiritual vision will come alive again in human beings. That power of spiritual vision, which is a characteristic of the head eye, will no longer leave people feeling unsatisfied when looking at the physical things of the world around us, like the woman in the legend who throws away every being that is brought near her. This power will permeate the current being of human beings, and they will then see not only the outer, physical aspect of things, but also what is expressed in the outer objects in terms of the spiritual. What has become material today will be spiritual for them; their now hardened physical bodies will then be spiritualized again. That woman from the Mongolian legend will live again and look out into the world. And while today she rejects beings who show her only their sensual side, because she does not find what she is looking for in them, the human being of the future will once again see the spirit in matter and find in beings what belongs to him; he will be able to grasp it and lovingly hold it close to his heart. He will find in beings the spiritual aspect of the world, that which he can lovingly embrace.

[ 36 ] Human development will be a development toward a slow merging into the cosmos. It must be very slow; it cannot be grasped in a flash. If humans were not willing to participate in it patiently, then the power of the eye, which sits at the head of the ancients, would not flow through their entire being, all their organs, as a fluid of love. This power would be exhausted, and human beings would then have to close themselves off from the outside world in lovelessness and wither away. But human beings are called upon to lovingly permeate everything on their planet, to take the planet with them and redeem it. The redemption of the inner self cannot take place without the redemption of what is outside of us. Human beings must redeem their planet together with themselves. Redemption can only come about when human beings pour their powers into the cosmos; they must not only become redeemed, but they must also become redeemers.