Illness and Therapy E-Book

Rudolf Steiner

• Herausgeber: Rudolf Steiner Press
• Kategorie: Fachliteratur
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

'An external view of states of health and sickness must be augmented by what we can also know about the inner, spiritual reality within the human being.' – Rudolf Steiner. In a series of nine lectures to doctors, pharmacists and students, Rudolf Steiner presents a wealth of medical ideas with numerous therapeutic and diagnostic insights. As with his first series of lectures on medicine held a year previously (Introducing Anthroposophical Medicine), the range, depth and scope of Steiner's subject-matter is breathtaking. Speaking at the international centre of anthroposophy, the Goetheanum in Dornach, Switzerland, Rudolf Steiner begins by describing the interplay of physical and metaphysical aspects of the human being, presenting a paradigm in which the four bodies – physical, etheric, astral and ego or 'I' – interrelate in contrasting ways with the threefold human organism of head, thorax and metabolism, and with our capacities for thinking, feeling and will. These challenging but enlightening concepts unlock a wonderful diagnostic tool for the appraisal and understanding of patients. Steiner considers the medicinal actions of various substances – including silica, phosphorus, sulphur, arsenic, antimony and mercury. Among numerous other subjects, Rudolf Steiner discusses the methodology of medical examination; the treatment of developmental irregularities; the four types of ether; raw food diets; the I and assimilation of food; metal therapy and the actions of lead, magnesium, tin, iron, copper, gold, mercury and silver; the use of root and herbaceous parts and flowers in medicine; the rhythmic balancing process between the action of salutogenic and pathological forces; and the nature of death. This volume also features Rudolf Steiner's answers to questions, an introductory lecture to eurythmy therapy, a comprehensive introduction, notes and index, colour plates of Steiner's blackboard drawings, and facsimiles and translations of his notes for the lectures.

Leseprobe

ILLNESS AND THERAPY

SPIRITUAL-SCIENTIFIC ASPECTS OF HEALING

ILLNESS AND THERAPY

SPIRITUAL-SCIENTIFIC ASPECTS OF HEALING

Nine lectures given to physicians and medical students in Dornach between 11 and 18 April 1921 including Rudolf Steiner's notes for the lectures

TRANSLATED BY MATTHEW BARTON

INTRODUCTION BY ANDREW MAENDL, MD, AND MATTHEW BARTON

RUDOLF STEINER

RUDOLF STEINER PRESS

CW 313

The publishers acknowledge the generous funding of this publication by Dr Eva Frommer MD (1927-2004) and the Anthroposophical Society in Great Britain

Rudolf Steiner Press Hillside House, The Square Forest Row, RH18 5ES

www.rudolfsteinerpress.com

Published by Rudolf Steiner Press 2013

Originally published in German under the title Geisteswissenschaftliche Gesichtspunkte zur Therapie (volume 313 in the Rudolf Steiner Gesamtausgabe or Collected Works) by Rudolf Steiner Verlag, Dornach. Based on shorthand transcripts by Helen Finckh. This authorized translation is based on the 5th German edition of 2001 which was edited by Eva-Gabriele Streit, MD, and Doerte Mehrling

Published by permission of the Rudolf Steiner Nachlassverwaltung, Dornach

© Rudolf Steiner Nachlassverwaltung and Rudolf Steiner Verlag 2011

This translation © Rudolf Steiner Press 2013

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978 1 85584 443 8

Cover by Mary Giddens Typeset by DP Photosetting, Neath, West Glamorgan

CONTENTS

Editor's Preface

Introduction by Andrew Maendl, MD, and Matthew Barton

LECTURE 1DORNACH, 11 APRIL 1921

The human being's supersensible members and the actions of substance on the physical body in disease and treatment. Substances as the outcome of processes. The reciprocal interplay between processes within us and outside us. The four bodies within the head organism, the rhythmic organism and the limbs. The action of silica. Processes involved in the formation of silica and calcium and overcoming these in the human organism's development.

LECTURE 2DORNACH, 12 APRIL 1921

The action of the I in the head (temperature differentiation) and in the system of limbs and metabolism (movement and stasis). The four types of ether and their relationship to the human organism and each other. The nature of illness. Salutogenic and morbid processes. The physical process in the head and its significance for the organism. Dying throughout life, and I consciousness. I and physical process. The nature of death. The astral body and its relationship to disease, the ether body related to health, the physical body related to nutrition, I and death. Supersensible bodies and illness. Phosphorus and sulphur, arsenic, antimony. The relationship between chemical compounds and human organic processes.

LECTURE 3DORNACH, 13 APRIL 1921

Astral body and chest organism. Physical body and etheric body. Plant growth. Rhythmic balancing process between the action of salutogenic and pathological forces. Respiration. Carbon dioxide and oxygen. Sleeping and waking. The importance of soul life for rhythmic processes. Chest organism activity as outcome of processes in the lower human organism, the upper organism and in the external world. The nature of light and altitude cures. Diet. Electricity and magnetism and their use in therapy.

LECTURE 4DORNACH, 14 APRIL 1921

Sleeping and waking. Raw food diets. Stages in the development of human individuality. The I and assimilation of food. The polar development of I activity in childhood. Treating digestive problems concomitant with developmental disorders—differences here between boys and girls. The I in metabolism, relationship to tasting. Treatment of irregularities in I development. The I within varying temperature conditions. Its manifestation at two poles. The activity of the I in assimilation of food, in metabolism, in childhood development. I and temperature.

LECTURE 5DORNACH, 15 APRIL 1921

The arsenization process. The nature of diphtheria, the phenomenon of infection, therapy. The I process and phosphorus processes. The action of the I in dynamic processes. Pathology of I effects, and the manifestation of these in epithelial degeneration and other symptoms. The nature of phosphorus poisoning. Excessive I action.

LECTURE 616 APRIL 1921

Methodology of medical examination. The nature of protein. The relationship between nutrition and respiration. The etheric body as it manifests in fluid, astrality in respiration, I in warmth. Protein in food and organic protein. Uterus and heart. The relationship between heart activity and fat and carbohydrate metabolism. Tuberculosis. The mercury process. Aspects of medicine production.

LECTURE 7DORNACH, 17 APRIL 1921

Comprehensive anthroposophic insight into the world as basis for therapeutic assessment. Relationship of the plant to the human organism: using root parts in therapy (gentian, herb bennett, garden lily); herbaceous parts (marjoram); flowers (elder); seeds (caraway). Metamorphosis of the sensory process in metabolism and associated therapeutic perspectives. Principles of metal therapy. Polarity between silver and lead.

LECTURE 8DORNACH, 18 APRIL 1921

Metal therapy. The concept of poison. Revising the homoeopathic principle. Salt process. Metal process. Radiant actions of the metals. Lead, magnesium, tin, iron, copper, gold, mercury, silver. Answers to questions: treating asthma. Parenteral protein therapy. Colds. Connection between muscles and bones. Enquiries into the sense of taste. Substance and process in the organism. Graves’ disease.

LECTURE 9DORNACH, 18 APRIL 1921

Eurythmy related to the human being configured out of the cosmos as therapeutic element: eurythmy therapy.

Course Participants

Rudolf Steiner's Notes for the Lectures

Notes

Rudolf Steiner's Collected Works

Significant Events in the Life of Rudolf Steiner

Colour Plates

EDITOR'S PREFACE

The present volume consists of transcripts of what was known as the second medical course, held for physicians, pharmacists and medical students as continuation of and addition to the first medical course. The wide-ranging stimulus which Rudolf Steiner had offered in the fields of medicine, psychology and general study of the human being, which had informed his work from the beginning, had reached a new, great culmination in the twenty lectures of the first medical course given one year before, and published under the title Introducing Anthroposophical Medicine (CW 312). This course had come about at the initiative of a participant who, in responding to Rudolf Steiner's suggestions that an intuitive form of medicine was needed, had asked him to provide the foundations necessary for this. This first course gave a powerful impetus to medical work, and led to the founding of the Clinical-Therapeutic Institute in Stuttgart and Arlesheim. Medicines production also got underway at the International Laboratories (in Arlesheim as part of Futurum AG, and in Stuttgart at Der Kommende Tag AG) from which Weleda eventually developed.

Parallel to this second medical course, Eurythmy Therapy (CW 315) was also held each afternoon from 12 to 17 April 1921, and physicians were invited to attend this too. The concluding lecture of 18 April (lecture 9 in the present volume) was intended specifically for physicians as introduction to the field of eurythmy therapy. The eurythmy therapy course came about at the initiative of Elisabeth Baumann-Dollfus and Erna van Deventer-Wolfram to whom, from around 1915, Rudolf Steiner had given many suggestions for the targeted use of eurythmy therapy. In the winter of 1920/21, they asked him to provide a systematic basis in this field. Dr Hendrik van Deventer MD, still a medical student at that time, gave the necessary support for this venture on behalf of the physicians. Thus this new anthroposophic therapy could be inaugurated as an important extension of medical and therapeutic measures.

The chronological table of medical lectures and discussions below offers an overview of Rudolf Steiner's lecturing activities in this field:

Date

Venue

Occasion

21 March-9 April 1920

Dornach

First medical course (

Introducing Anthroposophical Medicine

) GA 312

26 March 1920 7 April 1920

Dornach

Q&A on Psychiatry Hygiene as a social issue (both GA 314,

Physiology and Healing

)

7-9 October 1920

Dornach

Lectures on ‘Physiological and therapeutic themes based on spiritual science’ (GA 314)

11-18 April 1921

Dornach

Second medical course, GA 313 (

Illness and Therapy

)

12-18 April 1921

Dornach

Eurythmy therapy lectures for physicians and eurythmists, GA 315 (

Eurythmy Therapy

)

26-28 October 1922 28 October 1922

Stuttgart

Anthroposophical Basis for the Practice of Medicine (GA 3l4) Lecture on eurythmy therapy (GA 314)

31 December 1923/1 January/2 January 1924 28 August 1923-29 August 1924

Dornach (various cities)

Discussions with anthroposophical physicians on Therapy (GA 314)

The Healing Process

(GA 319)

2-9 January 1924

Dornach

GA 316 (

Understanding Healing

)

21-25 April 1924 21-23 April 1924

Dornach

Easter course, part of above (GA 316) Discussions with medical practitioners (GA 314)

25 June-7 July 1924

Dornach

GA 317 (

Education for Special Needs

)

8-18 September 1924

Dornach

GA 318 (

Broken Vessels

)

Summary of Medical Courses in English Translation (latest editions shown):

GA/CW 312

Introducing Anthroposophical Medicine

(SteinerBooks 2010)

313

Illness and Therapy

(Rudolf Steiner Press 2013)

314

Physiology and Healing

(Rudolf Steiner Press 2013)

315

Eurythmy Therapy

(Rudolf Steiner Press 2009)

316

Understanding Healing

(Rudolf Steiner Press 2013)

317

Education for Special Needs

(Rudolf Steiner Press 1998)

318

Broken Vessels

(SteinerBooks 2003)

319

The Healing Process

(SteinerBooks 2000)

INTRODUCTION

There is a great deal of dissatisfaction in medicine today, and this may partly be due to the prevailing view of the human being as a creature composed more or less entirely of complex biochemistry. Deep down most doctors sense that there is a great deal more to human nature. Steiner has given us a path, albeit a difficult one, for discovering deeper aspects of the human being, upon which a true art of healing can be based. The essence of Steiner's approach is holistic, i.e. not confined to sense-perceptible physical phenomena, but encompassing the whole person. In common parlance, terms like soul and spirit—if used at all—are today regarded as something very vague, at most a kind of ‘icing on the cake’ of physical reality, and produced by it. Steiner has a radically different, non-materialistic yet extremely precise view of the human entelechy, in which the physical body and its functions are embedded in three other aspects: forces of life and growth (etheric body), powers of sentience and sensibility (astral body) and finally powers of spirit, identity and self-realization (the ego or I).

This may sound schematic, but as Steiner is at pains to point out in this volume—known as ‘the second medical course’—the interplay between these different aspects is highly complex. In our attempt to understand health and illness we need to trace this complexity with a precision equal at least to that required for understanding the subtlety of physical processes alone. In fact, as Steiner clearly demonstrates here, we cannot understand physical processes fully without insight into these other, invisible configuring powers that work in them and through them.

Always staying true to such complexity and never simplifying for the sake of easy understanding, Steiner asked a great deal of his original audience of medical professionals. Readers today will find a huge wealth of medical ideas and insights here, but none that can be immediately applied in practice without a great deal of effort and application to make them one's own. Each lecture is likely to need several re-readings, perhaps over years, to accompany our own developing insight as doctors into the causes and remedies of diseases.

The first lecture of this volume offers an introduction to the interplay of supersensible and physical aspects in us. Here Steiner presents a paradigm in which the four aspects referred to above—of physical, etheric, astral and I—interrelate in different respective ways with the threefold human organism of head, thorax and metabolism (which are also the seat or centre, respectively, of our capacities for thinking, feeling and will). It requires a great mobility and fluidity of thinking to grasp the complex dynamic involved in this four-three relationship, but in doing so we unlock a wonderful diagnostic tool that will stand us in good stead in the appraisal of every patient.

I would like to elaborate this a little further here since it is of such key importance for understanding many other insights of Steiner's. Each of the four aspects, as he describes them, exist in a different configuration within each part of the threefold human organism—acting either as ‘primary effect’ or ‘imprint’. The primary effect can be understood as full physical engagement of respective supersensible forces, while the ‘imprint’ is a looser or freer reflection of these forces in our organism. In the former, such forces act more within physical functions and processes, whereas in the latter they are released to become available for conscious thinking, feeling and will. Each of these three ‘soul forces’ as Steiner calls them, in turn have a different quality of relationship with the physical body. We can easily get a sense of such difference by comparing the following three activities: forming a mental image of a candle flame (thinking); going out to dig the garden (will); and listening to beautiful music (feeling). Our experience of will is closer to physical activity while calm, contemplative thinking is furthest removed from it. Feeling, which is centred in and involves the response of our rhythmic system (breathing and circulation), lies roughly midway between the two.

To put this all more precisely—as Steiner does—the I, astral body and etheric body act only in a freer way, as imprint, in the head, while the physical is fully engaged there as primary effect. In the chest region, the astral and I are relatively free as imprint while etheric and physical are more fully engaged in physical processes. In the system of metabolism and limbs, only the I is relatively free as imprint, and physical, astral and etheric take primary effect there, in deeper engagement with the physical body.

Grasping these different relationships and qualities of interplay requires an artistic as much as a scientific sensibility, and interrelating them all in a way that serves diagnosis and therapy asks us to be continually alert, like a conductor to his orchestra, to the potentially huge range and variation in these interactions, their differing harmonies and discords in each patient. Steiner in fact says that ‘nothing so easily invokes imaginative pictures as observing pathological conditions in the human being’; and thus he calls on the faculty of imagination not as it is commonly regarded today—a close cousin to fantasy—but as a tool of real perception essential to the physician.

Taking all this a little further, in lecture 3 Steiner focuses on the thoracic region, reminding us that the life forces of the etheric body work somatically there, and thus in the same way as they work in the plant. In a plant, of course, since it has no sentient consciousness, etheric forces of growth are entirely absorbed in physical processes whereas in us they are released in the head region to sustain thinking and memory. If we consider illnesses of the chest region, says Steiner, we have to realize that the rhythmic qualities of the etheric are intrinsically health-giving (while all illness originates in the astral) and thus we must seek the origin of respiratory and circulatory disorders outside the rhythmic system itself, either in the neurosensory system, the metabolic system or in external environmental influences. And likewise a cure must of course start from diagnosis of the real cause of a disorder, and in the system where it is rooted. For example, pulmonary tuberculosis can be associated with the inappropriate release of the etheric from its somatic function in the lung. The ‘released’ etheric, as we saw, sustains our capacity to form mental pictures, and there may well be good reason, therefore, why poets such as Keats, living so vividly in the pictorial imagination, were more susceptible to this disease. At later stages of the disease, alveoli and lung tissues harden, and Steiner sees this as the result of forces of ossification issuing from the head and acting on the lungs.

As Steiner points out, illness often arises where the sequence of reciprocal actions of one supersensible aspect on the other is interrupted. The phenomenon of ‘serial permeation’ involves the I acting on the astral, which in turn acts on the etheric, and the latter in turn on the physical—rather like a descending chain of command. If the I or astral withdraw from this work under various conditions—such as nervous tension for instance—etheric and physical develop too much vitality and burgeon unhindered. This can produce symptoms such as diarrhoea. Steiner recommends prescribing homoeopathic arsenic in such a case, for this induces the astral to re-permeate the etheric and physical bodies. Arsenic has a hardening action—as we can see in the more or less ‘mummified’ corpses of people poisoned by this substance, and in homoeopathic potency it draws the astral down into a denser state.

In moving from diagnosis to therapy, an infinitely rewarding insight of Steiner's is our complex connection as microcosm with the macrocosm, and how, in consequence, substances drawn from the natural world can be used to redress imbalances in our organism. As just one example of this relationship, he describes the human being as an ‘inverse’ plant, whose roots relate to the neurosensory system, its leaves to the respiratory and circulation systems, and its flower and seeds to metabolism. Thus certain parts of a plant are used therapeutically to address the part of the human organism to which they correspond, and Steiner gives many specific examples of such actions which are invariably more complex than any fixed schema would allow. Likewise, in the mineral realm, Steiner explores the medicinal actions of different, potentized metals, as well as of plants watered with metal solutions. Every substance in the cosmos from which we originated has its specific relationship with our own bodily configuration. This view of medicine is not a combative one in which a physician seeks to suppress and vanquish a disorder, but instead one which asks the earth and the cosmos for help in restoring an always fluctuating balance. Such help is not solely in the form of material or medicinal substances but naturally also includes a wide range of approaches including psychological support where appropriate. It can also involve something as gentle and non-invasive as forms of movement which Steiner devised, and to which he gave the name eurythmy. Rendering speech sounds ‘visible’ in the form of whole body movements, eurythmy draws on the original power of the Word from which the world originated, using the healing effects of vowels and consonants to re-organize and re-attune the human organism.

This course of lectures is far from easy to fathom and requires prolonged, intense study—which will be handsomely repaid in diagnostic and therapeutic insights for those who engage fully with it.

Andrew Maendl, MD, and Matthew Barton, February 2013

LECTURE 1

DORNACH, 11 APRIL 1921

I hope that this supplementary course1 will really augment and enlarge on last year's course, and by the end will crystallize into a number of therapeutic perspectives. My efforts in this course will focus on examining things that formed the subject of our previous observations—human illness and the search for cures—but now from a different angle. However, since we will be looking at things from a different point of view, we will not only discover different aspects but also broaden the scope of our previous studies. In particular, on this occasion I would like to show what happens in the human organization you are all familiar with as anthroposophists, in terms of physical body, etheric body and so forth, when we fall ill and when we recover. Last time I mostly confined myself to presenting the way our inner nature manifests outwardly. This time, in contrast, I will try to show how the diverse levels of the human being are affected by substances external to us, what the real nature of these substances is which can then be used as medicines, and what can act as a medicine by affecting the human organism in other than merely material ways. Here, however, I will first need to offer a proviso by way of introduction.

On the last occasion, when we discussed the same themes, we also spoke in many respects of substances and physical remedies. Now, though, as we come to consider the higher constituting levels of human nature, the supersensible human bodies, we will need to speak about substances in a different way. While we refer to them in what I would call an abbreviated way, we will nevertheless have to remember a fact and principle throughout: that we cannot assume the nature of substance to be as the scientific community commonly regards it today if we really wish to understand our relationship to our environment, and what characterizes us in a state of health and sickness. Rather than substances per se, we must start from processes: developmental processes rather than finished products. And whenever we speak of substance we must really visualize how the external sensory appearance that a substance presents to us is in fact nothing other than a process that has come to rest.

If we have silica before us, for instance, siliceous earth, we initially regard it as a substance. But we overlook the key thing if in doing so we picture it as a particular entity with defined boundaries. We only pinpoint the essential thing about it if we consider what is present as a single, very extensive process throughout the whole universe. This process can as it were crystallize and come to rest, can culminate in a kind of equilibrium and, on coming to rest, manifest as silica. It is vital to consider the mutual effect between processes within us and those which unfold outside in the universe, with which we stand in continual reciprocity both in sickness and health.

To establish the basis for embarking on our actual studies tomorrow, I wish to present today something that can really lead us to ideas about this reciprocal effect. Here we have to try to understand the nature of the human being in terms of anthroposophic spiritual science. I will first express myself somewhat schematically, focusing on what I have often presented as the threefold human being, but now in really concentrated localized form in us. We know that the neurosensory system is largely concentrated in the head, although what is concentrated in the head is actually also spread out everywhere in us, is present everywhere in us; that in the head we are mostly, as it were, a being of nerves and senses but on the other hand that we are also all head, though less so in the other two realms than in the head. Thus we can picture what we call our neurosensory system as being localized in the head. But to make good use, for our present purposes, of the way we understand this human organization, we should really see the rhythmic system, comprising everything relating to respiration and circulation, as being in turn divided into two parts: one part tending more towards the respiratory system and the other more towards the circulatory system. And then, integrated into this circulatory system, is everything that embodies the connection between our limb system and metabolic system.

If we study the human head we are also in a sense studying the part of the human organism that is mostly our neurosensory aspect. The organization of the human head is very different from that of the other two systems, also in relation to the form of the higher aspects of human nature. If we consider the human head from an anthroposophic perspective, it is a kind of replica or one might even say a deposit of the I, the astral body and the etheric body. And then let us see how the physical body relates to the head. This physical body is in fact, one can say, present in the head in a different way from the physical that is a replica or imprint of the I, the astral body and the etheric body. Here I would like to accentuate the higher nature of these things by drawing attention to the fact that the human head, in its first foundations in the human embryo, is not configured solely by the forces of the parental organism but that cosmic forces are at work in it; that cosmic forces simply work into the human being. A great deal of the parental organism is at work in what we call the etheric forces, yet even there in the etheric, cosmic forces are at work from the pre-birth realm—or we could say from soul-spiritual life prior to conception. And even in the astral and the I there is an after-effect of what lived in the world of spirit before conception. It continues to work by exerting a formative effect on the human head. The I creates its imprint in the human head, the astral body creates its physical imprint, the etheric body likewise creates its physical imprint. Only the physical body, which is of course first acquired only here on the physical earth, is what we can call a prime mover—not an imprint or replica but something of primary effect. If I draw this schematically [Plate 1 top centre] I can say that the human head is formed as an imprint of the I. Within, this organizes itself in a certain way—and we will come back to this organization repeatedly. It initially does so chiefly by inwardly differentiating the head's temperature. In addition, the astral body differentiates itself inside here and is primarily encompassed as organizing force in the gaseous, air-related processes that permeate the head (Fig. 1). Then the etheric body imprints itself; and then what is physical body for the head is a physical process, a really physical process (Fig 1, shaded portion). I will indicate this by schematic representation in the drawing of the part of the head that is the bony occiput, with eye level about here.

Fig. 1

But again, the physical forces concentrated here extend over the whole head. Here, in this physical part of the human head, we have a real primary physical process. This is not the manifestation of something else but accomplishes its own process. Yet in this physical head process, nevertheless, we have a duality, an interplay of two processes. What happens here is an interplay of two processes that we can only understand if, in our spiritual research, we relate them to certain other processes occurring outside in the universe.

If you take a look at the primary geological process expressed in schist formation—in fact in everything that leads from siliceous earth to schist or shale formation—then you will find, in the forces at work in this process of schist formation originating in silica, the polar opposite process to that which unfolds, on the one hand, in the physical formation of the head. Here you find an important connection between us and our surroundings. Within the human head a process is at work that unfolds in our external surroundings in mineralization. Today, in geology, people have almost—though not quite—come to realize that everything connected with the process of schist formation, of mineralization involving silica, is related to what one might call ‘devegetabilization’. We should regard schist formation as a mineralized plant realm. In trying to understand this devegetabilization—which is the same as the earth's schist-forming processes—we grasp the same process that unfolds in a different way here in the human head, in its polar opposite form. There is however an interplay here with another process; and this other process that plays in here has again to be sought in the external world. We have to look for it in limestone formations. Once again, geology, as external science, is now close to accepting the truth that limestone formations are based on a geological process which we could call a ‘de-animalization’ process, one which is the reversal of what gives rise to the animal. And once again it is the polar opposite process that is at work here. So if we ascribe to silica and calcium—processes that have come to rest in substance—a part in the formation of the physical human head, we have to realize that something plays into this physical head formation that has a very important role in the whole of surrounding nature. At the same time, by way of preparation, we can orient ourselves by seeing silica, on the one hand—and I am speaking of silica as a process that has come to rest—in its key relationship with what happens in the human head; and by seeing limestone formation, on the other hand, or the calcium process that has come to rest, as connected with all that is embodied in the opposite pole and works in polar reciprocity with the other force in the physical human head. These processes, which today we can still find everywhere around us, are connected in the human head with others that we do not find on the earth, and that are present only as imprint in so far as the head is an impression of etheric body, astral body and I.

In relation to these higher members of the human being, we have processes that have come to rest but are not directly earthly processes. The only true earthly process is what I have spoken of here in regard to the physical head per se. The other processes are not true earth processes although, as we will see, they are connected to earth processes.

To gain an overview I will now pass straight on to the second realm of the human organism—which we locate in very general terms as the chest. This is the part of the human organism that chiefly encompasses the rhythmic system. Let us immediately divide this schematically firstly into all that comprises the breathing rhythm, and secondly into all that comprises the circulatory rhythm. If we wish to consider as a whole this second part of the human being, we must say the following: all that I have here called the organization of the breathing rhythm in the broadest sense (Fig. 2) is initially an imprint of the I and astral body. [See also Plate 1]

Fig. 2

Just as the head is an imprint of the I, astral body and etheric body, so this breathing rhythm is an impression of the I and astral body, while both physical body and etheric body work together in what takes primary effect here (see shaded part of drawing). The physical body alone has a primary effect in the human head, where the etheric body is also an imprint. In the breathing rhythm system, however, a primary interaction of physical and etheric body is at work, while I and astral body only imprint themselves upon it. This is also largely the case in the circulatory rhythm organization, but in a weaker form, as the whole metabolic organism intrudes into the circulatory system. But here there is already a beginning of what then holds good for the metabolic and limb system. We then have a state of affairs in which the limbs, with all that works into them as metabolism—with the exception of circulation as such, thus of the movement present there—are fundamentally an imprint of the I and an interplay of physical body, etheric body and astral body (Fig. 3). Thus we can say that in considering the human chest system the imprint organization present there is really only what relates to I and astral body, while active within it is a primary organization that is not merely physical now, but shows the physical to be informed and structured by the etheric. This is more strongly so in the breathing rhythm while in the circulatory rhythm we have something else working in from the metabolic system. [See also Plate 1]