Sexuality, Love and Partnership E-Book

Rudolf Steiner

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

Seitenzahl: 374

Beschreibung

Rudolf Steiner presents the human soul dilemma, split into male and female attributes... but offers a path of development which will eventually lead to overcoming these - what Jung called 'individuation', a merging with the true self or true ego of the human being.' - from the IntroductionWe live in a sexualised society, surrounded by sexual imagery and content in almost every area of life. This presents us with many challenges, including an increasing blurring and confusion between love and sex; strife between men and women over their roles in society; and a consistent assault on the innocence of childhood. Despite the sensibilities of his time, Rudolf Steiner made a huge contribution to our understanding of the complex theme of sexuality. In this freshly-compiled anthology, Steiner describes the point in evolution at which human beings split from being androgynous and single-sexed to becoming male or female. He traces the changing roles of the sexes in society, from the matriarchal past to today's patriarchal dominance. The division of the sexes brings suffering, but also the possibility of achieving higher stages of love. In the distant future, humanity can evolve sexuality into a new form, with even the possibility of reproduction being metamorphosed. Refreshingly, Steiner is not judgmental and does not preach asceticism. He recognises the 'all-too-human' frailty people confront in their personal lives, even in the case of great individuals such as Goethe. Sex is a necessary stage of human evolution, and the split nature of the human being is a fact of our age. Its healing will be gradual but, like Amfortas in the Grail story - whose wounded groin was a metaphor for amorous misadventure - we can all be healed through love and compassion.

Leseprobe

RUDOLF STEINER (1861–1925) called his spiritual philosophy ‘anthroposophy’, meaning ‘wisdom of the human being’. As a highly developed seer, he based his work on direct knowledge and perception of spiritual dimensions. He initiated a modern and universal ‘science of spirit’, accessible to anyone willing to exercise clear and unprejudiced thinking.

From his spiritual investigations Steiner provided suggestions for the renewal of many activities, including education (both general and special), agriculture, medicine, economics, architecture, science, philosophy, religion and the arts. Today there are thousands of schools, clinics, farms and other organizations involved in practical work based on his principles. His many published works feature his research into the spiritual nature of the human being, the evolution of the world and humanity, and methods of personal development. Steiner wrote some 30 books and delivered over 6000 lectures across Europe. In 1924 he founded the General Anthroposophical Society, which today has branches throughout the world.

SEXUALITY, LOVE ANDPARTNERSHIP

From the Perspective of Spiritual Science

RUDOLF STEINER

Compiled and edited by Margaret Jonas

RUDOLF STEINER PRESS

Rudolf Steiner PressHillside House, The SquareForest Row, RH18 5ES

www.rudolfsteinerpress.com

Published by Rudolf Steiner Press 2012

Originally published in German in various volumes of the GA (Rudolf Steiner Gesamtausgabe or Collected Works) by Rudolf Steiner Verlag, Dornach. For further information see Sources. This authorized translation is published by permission of the Rudolf Steiner Nachlassverwaltung, Dornach

All material has been translated or checked against the original German by Christian von Arnim

Translation and selection © Rudolf Steiner Press 2011

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 284 7

Cover by Andrew Morgan Design featuring a painting by Albrecht DürerTypeset by DP Photosetting, Neath, West Glamorgan

Contents

Introduction

1.  The Division of the Two Sexes and Reproduction

1.1   The division of the sexes

1.2   The transformation of the human form and the forces of reproduction

1.3   The influence of higher beings and the sexual impulse

1.4   Conception and the human being before birth

1.5   Incarnation and its influence on human relationships

1.6   The spread of esoteric truth and the future of reproduction

2.  Male and Female

2.1   Man and woman in the light of spiritual science

2.2   Puberty and adolescence and the difference between men and women

2.3   Differences in educating boys and girls during adolescence

2.4   Transformation of the human organism at the age of puberty

2.5   Spiritual aspects of the women’s question

2.6   The equality of women and the unique individuality

3.  Sex and its Attendant Problems

3.1

3.1.1  Education in adolescence

3.1.2  The young child as an asexual being

3.2

3.2.1  The luciferic influence on love

3.2.2  The attack on the human ego

3.2.3  Christ and the power of wonder, compassion and conscience

3.3

3.3.1  Pneumonia and sexual excess

3.3.2  Clairvoyance and the lower instincts

3.3.3  The realm of the dead and the lower human impulses

3.4

3.4.1  Changes in consciousness and the sexual forces in connection with nationalism

3.4.2  The work of the angels in our astral body

3.5

3.5.1  Methods and rationale of Freudian psychoanalysis

3.5.2  The concept of love and mysticism

3.5.3  The descent of human sexuality and the critique of Freudian psychoanalysis

3.6

3.6.1  The development of the six-petalled lotus flower

3.6.2  The Holy Grail as purifying force

4.  Love

4.1

4.1.1  Love and its meaning in the world

4.1.2  The necessity of love

4.1.3  Mental images as the source of love

4.1.4  Love as the connection with the world

4.2

4.2.1  Love and self-love

4.2.2  Overcoming dependence on blood relationships and egoism in love

4.2.3  The transformation of desire and transpersonal love

4.2.4  The seven sacraments

4.3   The nature of matter and the healing medicine of love

4.4

4.4.1  Social and antisocial instincts

4.4.2  The action of the etheric body in human encounter

4.5   The connection between memory and love and the confusion of love and sexuality

4.6

4.6.1  The influence of karma on human relationships

4.6.2  The consequences of deeds of love and deeds of duty

4.6.3  Learning to understand karma

Notes

Sources

A deeply hidden interplay exists between the soul realm and the spirit sphere. Everywhere, soul longingly seeks spirit and is filled with bliss when it is allowed to draw close to it. This mysterious alternation of seeking and finding pervades all the kingdoms of nature and the human being. In nature, it is concealed in the miracle of the seasons: the earth seeks and finds heaven in spring and summer, and is separated from it again in autumn and winter. The seeking and finding of human beings who love one another is a revelation of the interplay between soul and spirit, holding sway in all creation. The love of the devout heart for God directly reveals this secret, but earthly love is only another aspect of the same phenomenon. In and above all earthly love, the longing, seeking and finding can become visible which guides the soul in the spirit and thereby, in a higher form, to itself.

Emil Bock, The Song of Songs, from Kings and Prophets*

*Translated by Maria St Goar, Floris Book, 1989.

Introduction

It is with slight trepidation that we are offering this selection of extracts on the themes of sex and love, as it is far from any desire to appear salacious or sensational. When Rudolf Steiner was alive he could speak about love but was unable to say a great deal about sex, for apparently he could perceive the inner agitation of souls if he embarked on the topic. Presumably it would have been much more possible—and indeed asked of him—today. It was in any case not ‘done’ in the early twentieth century to speak freely on the subject beyond medical circles or in private. We live in very different times in which we cannot escape exposure to the stirring of the sexual in us at every opportunity and in almost every area of life. The sexual ‘revolution’ of the 1960s brought much that was good in relation to the status and needs of women and in opening up the pit to reveal the horrors of sexual abuse, which all along had been happening in secret. However they also ushered in the present increase in pornography, in the decline of taste and judgement regarding appropriate behaviour, language etc., and the darker prevalence of what had once seemed perverse and undignified human behaviour being presented—and encouraged—as the norm, something in fact Steiner warned would come about, whilst the other major decline has been in the stability of family life. But if readers are hoping for indications on contraception, abortion, homosexuality or transsexualism they will be disappointed. As far as I am aware no written records exist, and verbal references are of the flimsiest. Transsexualism or gender reassignment was not in any case possible medically then, though there were probably always some individuals who lived as the opposite gender.

Something of a sexual revolution had also begun by the latter part of Rudolf Steiner’s life. People in artistic or ‘bohemian’ circles had long lived more freely, but the years following the First World War saw a breakdown of many of society’s norms, women’s emancipation grew and both sexes enjoyed a greater freedom to mix and choose their marriage partners. People complained of the decadence, especially in city life, as they still do, but few would want to return to the constraints of nineteenth-century society. Young people in Germany were throwing off these constraints and joining the Wandervogel1 movement, rather like the hippies and students of the 1960s, seeking new freedoms in simplicity of dress, behaviour and outlook, and many were drawn to anthroposophy. Tragically their ideals were also exploited by the rise of Nazism. Steiner gave great encouragement to these young people, but was also aware of their vulnerability. This was daringly portrayed somewhat earlier by the German playwright Frank Wedekind’s Spring Awakening (1891), which caused a scandal at the time for showing scenes of free adolescent sexuality, leading tragically to abortion and suicide. In Britain, in 1915 D.H. Lawrence’s novel The Rainbow was suppressed on account of its ‘indecency’ and Women in Love was not published until 1921. There were other sexual theorists and experimental ways of living too. The notes to the conversations with the younger people drawn to anthroposophy in Youth and the Etheric Heart2 give some interesting examples. These conversations, however, barely touch on the theme and the replies are more fully dealt with in the extracts here.

These extracts attempt to show how at the time in evolution known as the ‘Fall’3 the interference of adversary beings Steiner calls luciferic caused a change to come about in the human being, who hitherto had been a single sexed entity and who then gradually became split into two with the beginning of reproduction as we know it. This stage is echoed in embryology when the fertilized egg only displays secondary sex characteristics from an undifferentiated form, but otherwise it is familiar to us in myths such as described in Plato’s Symposium.4 After this, we are to learn through suffering our sexual nature, according to Rudolf Steiner, in order to achieve higher stages of human love. He even indicates that reproduction will happen differently in the distant future and a more androgynous human being will emerge as the female grows more barren. There are hints of this future androgyny today in the more boyish form of many women and the reduced fertility in both sexes.

In various lectures on cultural evolution Rudolf Steiner speaks about an earlier stage of history when women had greater dominance or valued positions in society and how this had altered by the period he called the fourth post-Atlantean epoch (747 BC-AD 1413),5 partly overlapping with the Iron Age. Male dominance then became the norm, especially reflected in Graeco-Roman times, and remained largely unchallenged until about the eighteenth century. By the beginning of the twentieth century, however, a woman’s movement had begun in earnest—‘the woman question’ as it was put. We have to remember how rare it was then for a woman to have a profession and that suffrage was not granted to all women until 1928 in Great Britain and 1920 in the USA, although New Zealand granted it in 1893 and Finland was the first European country to do so in 1906. Rudolf Steiner was certainly in the vanguard of his time in 1894 when he stated that it was up to women themselves to determine what they could achieve. He had the highest regard for his female co-workers, amongst whom were the speech artist Marie Steiner-von Sivers, the medical doctor Ita Wegman and the astronomer Elisabeth Vreede. When asked to found the movement for religious renewal known as the Christian Community, he made it clear from the outset that there were to be women priests ordained with equal status to the men—the first Christian Church to make this possible, something still unacceptable to many branches of Christianity (and indeed some other faiths). He pointed to a time, already coming about, when women would again assume significant positions in society.

With respect to children’s sexuality, Steiner was adamant that the young child is not a sexual being—this only develops towards adolescence. We should remember that Freud’s ideas were already prevailing at this time with the notion of an infant sexuality, the Oedipus complex and childish sexual fantasies of abuse (which in hindsight may not necessarily have been fantasies at all). Thus the ‘innocence’ of childhood beloved by the Victorians was disappearing fast. If today one might question Steiner’s remarks here, it could be as a result of culture and fashion that young children appear sexualized, and of a society which harshly criminalizes anyone whose weaknesses lead them to fall into temptation. Whilst not in any way condoning their behaviour, it would surely be a wise move if society were to look at what it is doing to children and how this trend is also a form of abuse.

It is about the confusion of sex and love that we can really learn to think differently. In our time, sadly, ‘love’ usually means ‘sex’, so that same-sex friendships are constantly viewed with salaciousness or suspicion, and even to comfort a distressed child other than one’s own with an embrace is to risk prosecution. The current assumption that one cannot ‘love’ without physically desiring another person greatly needs to be challenged.

Certain beings are at work in our sexuality and of these Rudolf Steiner again said little beyond some of the influences of the main adversary beings he referred to as Lucifer and Ahriman. Lucifer, whose aim is to lead souls away from the earth to his own realm, inspires the yearning of romantic love. Ahriman, whose aim is to bind souls more firmly to the earth, encourages the physical side of desire—sex without love. Because of the way in which sexuality is linked with our metabolism, in which beings of a destructive nature play an important part in the breaking down of food substance, we can assume the presence of other elemental beings which have a role that is partly destructive but also creative—as in the case of reproduction. It is when they spill over into areas beyond their ‘remit’ that they become evil. In lectures given in England in 1924,6 Steiner indicated some of the aberrations connected with these elementals, especially in relation to human fluid emanations. With regard to the practice of sex in spiritual life, his view was that this is not the modern path of development. It may have been possible without polluting the soul in ancient cultures such as the original Indian, but an increased ‘fall’ of the beings involved in such practices has come about, with a different connection to the blood and nerves. Subjects such as ‘tantric’ sex he did not speak about, and the assertion sometimes made that he belonged to the Ordo Templi Orientis (OTO), which practised this, is a misunderstanding of the tenuous connection between his early ritual Lodge and this order, which only somewhat later was taken over by figures such as Aleister Crowley and used for magical tantric practices.7

In the anthroposophical spiritual path of development, the chakras or ‘lotus flowers’ are unfolded from above downwards and Steiner warned against the danger of a prematurely awakened kundalini. As the extracts from Community Life, Inner Development, Sexuality and the Spiritual Teacher make clear, sexuality should be kept apart from the spiritual life. However this does not make him an ascetic. He was not preaching chastity, nor following St Paul by saying ‘It is better to marry than burn’. It is much more a matter of coming to understand what we are doing, as his reply to Elsa Kriewitz shows. She had asked him in 1921 if an anthroposophist should renounce sensual love. He replied: ‘Ganz anders ist es! Alles dürfen Sie! Lieben, heiraten, sich scheiden lassen—nur wissen müssen Sie, was Sie tun! Das ist notwendrng!’8 (On the contrary! You can do everything! Love, marry, divorce—you just have to be aware of what you are doing! That is essential!)

As these passages hopefully reveal, sex is a necessary stage of human evolution. How we handle it determines our stage of inner development—though, as in the case of Goethe, Steiner was perfectly able to acknowledge Goethe’s genius whilst recognizing the ‘all-too-human’ which prevailed in his personal life. This split in the human being he described as a fact of our age. The healing of it will only happen gradually. The story of Parzival bringing healing to Amfortas by finally asking the Grail question of what ailed him—his wounded groin being a metaphor for sexual misadventures—this story, though medieval in origin, is in fact the one for our time, showing how we can proceed. In a lecture of 7 February 1913, given in Berlin (not included here),9 Rudolf Steiner makes the connection between Goethe’s dual nature and the wounded Amfortas as reflecting the plight of the modern human being. Parzival, the bearer of the ‘consciousness soul’ forces is the one who can heal him. Amfortas is healed by love and compassion and the renewing life forces of the Grail. The main protagonists achieve wholeness through marriage: Parzival has remained true to Condwiramur, Gawain overcomes his lower passions, and Feirefiz comes to the Grail by loving the Grail-bearer. The valuable insights of C.G. Jung have shown us how our soul life needs to unite the male and female qualities within us to achieve wholeness, an inner marriage again hinted at much earlier by Johann Valentin Andreae’s Chymical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz (1616).10 Rudolf Steiner presents the human soul dilemma, split into male and female attributes, and also with regard to both sexes split within itself, but offers a path of development which will eventually lead to overcoming these—what Jung called ‘individuation’, a merging with the true self or true ego of the human being.

*

In making this selection I must gratefully acknowledge the spadework provided by Richard Lewis in a privately printed compilation Love, Marriage, Sex in the Light of Spiritual Science (undated). His thoroughness in his search for extracts has proved invaluable. The translations used here are not his, however, but in most cases are revised from the original English editions.

The selection does not claim to be exhaustive. For instance, the interesting but rather specialized material from the lecture series The Temple Legend11 has not been included as it is lengthy and its context within Freemasonry would take us further from the theme.

Margaret Jonas

1. The Division into Two Sexes and Reproduction

In these six extracts Rudolf Steiner describes the earlier stages of the earth’s evolution, in particular the period known as Lemuria12 when the division into two sexes began to occur, at a time when the moon separated from the earth. Reproduction started to take place differently, at first more unconsciously, directed by spiritual beings, until the Atlantean epoch when human beings began to be aware of a more sensual attraction to one another. Steiner stresses that although humanity had ‘fallen’ due to the influence of luciferic beings, reproduction should not be seen as pernicious; it is the misuse of these forces which can lead to evil. This is in contrast to the medieval Church’s view that human sexuality was intrinsically evil— though a necessary one.

The last two extracts discuss the process of incarnation: how souls seek to incarnate, how they can perceive the love feelings of prospective parents and—even more importantly—are active together with spiritual beings in bringing about a couple’s relationship. The idea that souls choose their parents and influence them is an important part of understanding how we pass through successive earth lives. Steiner was anxious that the term ‘unbornness’ should enter our languages.13 Here he gives meaning to it. Moreover by working with the beings of the zodiac and planets we prepare our descent from the spiritual world often for centuries in advance and influence the marital choices of our ancestors to a remarkable degree. The final extract describes the future of human reproduction. Steiner was aware that it sounds extraordinary—we can only live with the idea.

1.1 The division of the sexes

The moment in human evolution we want to recall lies a long way back. If we go back through post-Atlantean times and then through Atlantean times as far as ancient Lemuria, we come to that moment when the division of the sexes took place in the human realm on earth. You know that before this we cannot speak of such a division of the sexes in the human realm. I want to emphasize that we are not speaking of the very first appearance altogether of two sexes in earthly evolution or in evolution as a whole, in so far as it comprises the realms that are around us. Phenomena that certainly involve two genders occur earlier. But what we call the human realm did not divide into two genders until Lemurian times. Prior to that the human shape was formed differently, and both sexes were in a way contained within it in an undifferentiated way. We can form an external picture of the transition from dual sexuality to the division into sexes if we visualize how the earlier dual gendered human being gradually developed in such a way that in one group of individuals the characteristics of the one sex, the female, became more pronounced, whilst in the other group the characteristics of the male sex developed more strongly. This was still a long time before the sexes separated, when there was progressive development in one direction or the other, at a time when man still lived in a very insubstantial material body.

We have focused our attention on this moment in time to start with because we want to enquire into the meaning of why the two sexes arose. It is only when we have a spiritual-scientific basis that we can enquire into such meaning, for physical evolution receives its meaning from higher worlds. As long as we are in the physical world, it is somewhat childish to talk of purpose if we consider it from a philosophical perspective. And Goethe and others were right to make fun of the people who talked of the purpose in nature, as though nature in her wisdom had created cork so that human beings could make stoppers with it. This is a childish way of looking at things and can only lead to our missing the main point at issue. This view would be similar to thinking of a clock as having little demonic beings behind it wise enough to make the hands go round. In actual fact if we want to know how the clock works we must go to the mind that produced it, namely the clockmaker. And similarly when we want to understand purpose in our world we must step beyond the physical world and enter the spiritual. Thus purpose, meaning and goal are words that we can apply to evolution only when we consider them on a spiritual-scientific basis. It is in this sense that we ask the question: what is the meaning behind the two sexes gradually developing and then interacting?

The meaning will become clear to you when you see what we call fertility, the reciprocal influence of the sexes, replacing something else that had previously existed. You must not think that fertility appeared for the first time at the moment when the division into sexes occurred in human evolution. That was not so. We must picture to ourselves that in the times preceding dual sexuality this fertility took place in quite a different way. Clairvoyant vision can see that there was a time in humankind’s earthly evolution when fertility happened in connection with the intake of food, and those beings which in those early times were male-female received fertilizing forces with their food. This food was still of course of a much more delicate nature, and when human beings partook of nourishment in those times there was something else contained in these nourishing fluids which gave these beings the possibility of producing another being of like kind. You must realize, however, that the nourishing fluids taken from the substance of their surroundings did not always contain these fertilizing fluids, but only at quite definite times. This depended on the changes that took place which are comparable to today’s seasonal changes, changes of climate, and so on. The nourishing foods imbibed from the surroundings by these beings of a dual sexual nature had the power of fertilization at quite definite times.

If with clairvoyant consciousness we look further back still, we find another peculiarity in the propagation of ancient times. What you know today as the difference between the various individualities, which expresses itself in the multiformity of life in our present cycle of humanity, these differences did not exist before the sexes came about. A great uniformity was there then. The beings that arose then were similar to one another and to their forefathers. All these beings that were still undivided into two sexes were outwardly very similar, and their characters were more or less the same too. That human beings were so much alike did not have the disadvantage in those times that it would have in the present time. Just imagine how infinitely dull human life would be if people were to come into the world today with identical appearance and character, and how little could actually happen in human life, as everybody would want to do the same thing as everybody else. But in ancient times this was not the case. When the human being was still as it were more etheric, more spiritual, and not so firmly embedded in matter, then at birth and on into childhood human beings were really very similar to one another, and the teachers would not have needed to notice whether the one child was a scamp and the other a gentle little being. Although the people were different in character at different times, they were in a certain way all fundamentally alike. Each person, however, did not remain the same throughout his life. Because the human being was still in a softer, more spiritual body, he was much more open to the permanent influences coming from the environment, so that in those ancient times these influences brought about tremendous changes in him. The human being became individualized in a certain way because, having a nature as soft as wax, he became more or less an impress of his surroundings. At a quite definite time in his life, which would coincide nowadays with puberty, it became possible for him to let everything that happened in his environment work upon him. The difference between the various periods that were comparable to our present-day seasons was very great, and it was of great importance to a man whether he lived in one part of the earth or another. If he travelled just a short distance over the earth, that had a great influence on him. If people go on a long journey nowadays they return on the whole the same as when they went away, however much they see (unless they are very impressionable). This was different in olden times. Everything had the greatest influence on people, and as long as they had a body of soft material they could actually become gradually individualized in the course of their life. Then this possibility ceased.

Something further that reveals itself to us is that the earth itself became denser and denser, and to the same extent as the substance—let us say the earthy nature of the earth—intensified this uniformity became harmful. For it gradually reduced the human being’s capacity to change. He became very dense at birth, as it were. This is the reason why people nowadays change so little during their life. And this led Schopenhauer14 to think that people were absolutely incapable of bringing about any basic changes in their character. The reason for this is that human beings are embodied in such dense substance. They cannot easily work on the substance or change it. If, as once was the case, human beings could still alter their limbs at will, make them long or short according to their need, then the human being would, of course, still be very impressionable. Then he would really be able to incorporate into his individuality the power to change himself. The human being is always in inner contact with his environment, especially his human environment. To clarify this, I would like to tell you something that you may not have noticed before but which is nevertheless true.

Imagine you are sitting facing someone and speaking to him. We are referring to ordinary human relationships in the normal course of life and not to someone who has a special and profound esoteric training. Two people are sitting together, one talking and the other just listening. It is generally imagined that the one who is listening is not doing anything. But that is not true. In things like this we still see the influence of the environment. It is not noticeable to outer perception, but inwardly it is very clear, in fact striking, that the one who is merely listening is joining in everything the other one is doing.

He even imitates the movements of the vocal cords and speaks with the speaker. Everything you hear you also say with a gentle movement of the vocal cords and the other speech organs. It makes a great difference whether the speaker has a croaky voice and those are the movements you have to imitate or whether he has a pleasant voice. In this respect the human being does everything the other person is doing, and as this is really happening all the time it has a great influence on a person’s whole development, though only in this limited respect. If you imagine this last residue of the human being’s participation in his surroundings increased to a vast extent, you get an idea of how a person in ancient times lived and felt with his environment. The human being’s faculty of imitation, for instance, was developed on a tremendous scale. If one person made a gesture, then everyone else made the same gesture too. Only a few insignificant things in certain particular directions remain of this today, like for instance when one person yawns other people do too. But remember that in these ancient times it was entirely a question of their having a dim consciousness with which this power of imitation was connected.

Now as the earth and everything upon it became denser and denser, the human being became less and less capable of transforming himself through the influence of his environment. In comparatively late Atlantean times a sunrise, for instance, had a powerfully creative effect upon the human being, because he was completely open to its influence and underwent sublime inner experiences, which if they continually recurred changed him tremendously in the course of his life. This diminished more and more and gradually disappeared altogether the more humanity progressed.

In Lemurian times, before the moon left the earth, humankind was in a dangerous predicament. It was in danger of becoming rigid to the point of mummification. Through the gradual departure of the moon from the evolution of the earth this danger was averted. At the same time as the moon departed, however, the division into sexes took place, and with this division came a new impulse for the individualization of the human being. If it had been possible for human beings to propagate without the two sexes, this individualizing would not have taken place. The present diversity among human beings is due to the interaction of the sexes. If there were only the female element, human individuality would be extinguished and human beings would all become alike. Through the co-operation of the male element, human beings are individual characters from birth. So the significance and meaning of the interaction of the sexes is to be found in the fact that through the separation of the male element the individualizing of the human being at birth has replaced the old kind of individualization. What was achieved in earlier times by the whole surrounding environment was compressed into the interaction of the sexes, so that individualization was pushed back to the creation of the physical human being at birth. That is the significance of the interaction of the two sexes. Individualization happens by way of the effect of the male gender on the female.

Spirits overshadowed the human being and stimulated him to bring forth his kind, and this was also experienced and seen as a spiritual process.

Then, little by little, it became impossible for human beings to see the spiritual in their environment. It became more and more veiled from sight, especially during their day consciousness. Little by little human beings lost sight of the spirit behind things and they only perceived the external objects which are the outer expression of these. They learnt to forget the spiritual background and the influence of the spirit grew less and less the denser the human being’s body became. Through this densification the human being became a more and more independent being and shut himself off from his spiritual surroundings. The further we go back into these ancient times the more spiritually godlike was this influence that came from the surroundings. Human beings were really organized in such a way that they were a likeness of the spiritual beings present round them in their environment—images of the gods who in older times were present on earth.

Through the interaction of the two sexes, in particular, this was increasingly lost and the spiritual world withdrew from human beings’ sight. Human beings beheld the sense world more and more clearly. We must picture this situation vividly. Just imagine, in those times the human being was fertilized from the spiritual world of the gods. It was the gods themselves who gave forth their forces and made people like themselves. That is why in those ancient times what we call illness did not exist. There was no inner disposition to illness and it could not be there because everything that was in the human being and that worked on him came from the health-giving divine-spiritual cosmos. The divine-spiritual beings are full of health and in those days they made human beings in their image. The human being was healthy. But the nearer he came to the time when the interaction of the sexes came about, and together with it the withdrawal of the spiritual worlds, and the more independent and individual the human being became, the more the health of divine-spiritual beings withdrew from him and something else took its place. What happened in reality was that such interaction of the sexes was accompanied by passions and instincts aroused in the physical world. We must look for this stimulus in the physical world after human beings had reached the point when the two sexes were sensually attracted to one another. This was a long time after the sexes already existed. The effect of the sexes one upon the other—even in Atlantean times—happened when physical consciousness was actually asleep during the night. It was not until the middle of the Atlantean period that what we call the attraction of the sexes began, what we might call passionate love—that is, sensual love that mingled with pure supersensual or platonic love. There would be much more platonic love if sensual love did not enter into it. And whereas everything that formerly helped to form the human being came from the divine-spiritual environment, it now came more from the passions and instincts of the two sexes working one upon the other. The kind of sensual longing that is stimulated by seeing the outer appearance of the opposite sex is bound up with the working together of the two sexes. And therefore something was incorporated into the human being at birth that is connected with the particular kind of passions and feelings human beings have in physical life. Whilst in earlier times the human being still received what was in him from the divine-spiritual beings of his surroundings, he now acquired something through the act of fertilization which, as an independent, self-contained being, he had taken into himself from the world of the senses.

After human beings had separated into two sexes, they passed on to their descendants what they themselves experienced in the sense world. So we now have two types of human being. These two types live in the physical world and perceive the world through their senses, and this leads them to develop various externally triggered impulses and longings, especially those arising from their own externally stimulated sensual attraction to one another. What now confronts a person in an external way has been drawn down into the sphere of the independent human being, and it is no longer in full harmony with the divine-spiritual cosmos. It is imparted to human beings through the act of fertilization; it is implanted in them. And this worldly life of theirs, received not from the world of the gods but from the external side of the divine-spiritual world, is passed on to their offspring through fertilization. If a person is bad in this respect, then he passes worse qualities on to his descendants than another person who is good and pure.

1.2 The transformation of the human form and the forces of reproduction

This change goes hand in hand with a transformation of the human form. One half of this form, together with two organs of movement, now becomes the lower half of the body, which functions mainly as the carrier of nutrition and reproduction. The other half of this form is turned upward, so to speak. The remaining two organs of movement become the rudiments of hands. Those organs which previously had served for nutrition and reproduction are transformed into organs of speech and thought. The human being has become upright. This is the immediate consequence of the separation of the moon. With the moon all those forces disappeared from the earth through which, during the fire-mist period, the human being could still fertilize himself and produce beings like himself without external influence. His whole lower half—that which we often call the lower nature—now came under the rational formative influence of higher beings. What these beings could previously regulate within the human being when the mass of forces now split off with the moon was still combined with the earth they now had to organize through the interaction of the two sexes. It is therefore understandable that the moon is regarded by initiates as the symbol of the reproductive force. After all, these forces adhere to it, so to speak. The higher beings we have described have an affinity with the moon, are in a sense moon gods. Before the separation of the moon they acted within the human being through its power; afterwards their forces acted from outside on human reproduction. One could also say that those noble spiritual forces which previously had acted on the still higher impulses of the human being through the medium of the fire-mist had now descended in order to exercise their power in the area of reproduction. Noble and divine forces do indeed exercise a regulating and organizing activity in this area.

This reflects an important proposition of esoteric teaching, namely that the higher, more noble divine forces have an affinity with the—apparently—lower forces of human nature. The word ‘apparently’ must here be understood in its full significance. For it would be a complete misconception of esoteric truths if one were to see something base in the forces of reproduction as such. Only when the human being misuses these forces, when he compels them to serve his passions and instincts, is there something destructive in them, but not when he ennobles them through the insight that a divine-spiritual power lies in them. Then he will place these forces at the service of the development of the earth, and through his forces of reproduction he will carry out the intentions of the higher beings we have characterized. Esoteric science teaches that this whole area should be ennobled, should be placed under divine laws, but not be made to die off. The latter can only be the consequence of esoteric principles that have been understood in a purely external fashion and distorted into a misconceived asceticism.

The heart, which after all is also a muscle, constitutes an exception to this general condition. In the present period of human development, the heart is not subject to voluntary movement, yet it is a ‘striated’ muscle. The science of the spirit indicates the reason for this. The heart will not always remain as it is now. In the future it will have a quite different form and a changed function. It is on the way to becoming a voluntary muscle. In the future it will execute movements that will be the effects of the inner soul impulses of the human being. The present structure already shows what significance it will have in the future, when the movements of the heart will be as much an expression of the human will as the lifting of the hand or the advancing of the foot are today. This conception of the heart is connected with a comprehensive insight of the science of the spirit into the relation of the heart to the so-called circulation of the blood. The mechanical-materialistic view of life sees in the heart a kind of pumping mechanism which drives the blood through the body in a regular manner. Here the heart is the cause of the movement of the blood. The insight of the science of the spirit shows something quite different. From such a perspective, the pulsing of the blood and its whole inner mobility are the expression and the effect of the processes of the soul. The soul is the cause of the behaviour of the blood. Turning pale through feelings of fear, blushing under the influence of sensations of shame are coarse effects of soul processes in the blood. Everything that takes place in the blood is only the expression of what takes place in the life of the soul. However, the connection between the pulsation of the blood and the impulses of the soul is a deeply mysterious one. The movements of the heart are not the cause but the consequence of the pulsation of the blood. In the future, the heart will carry what takes place in the human soul into the external world through voluntary movements.

Other organs which are in a similarly ascending development are those of respiration in their function as instruments of speech. At present the human being can use them to transform his thoughts into air waves. He thereby impresses upon the external world what he experiences within himself. He transforms his inner experiences into air waves. This wave motion of the air is a rendering of what takes place within him. In the future, he will in this way give external form to more and more of his inner being. The final result in this direction will be that through his speech organs, which have arrived at the height of their perfection, he will produce his own kind. Thus the speech organs at present contain within themselves the future organs of reproduction in an embryonic state. The fact that a transformation (change of voice) occurs in the male individual at the time of puberty is a consequence of the mysterious connection between the instruments of speech and reproduction.

One could, for instance, proceed to draw the following conclusion from the description given above: because the human organs of reproduction in their present form will in the future be the first to lose their importance, they therefore were the first to acquire it in the past. Hence they are in a sense the oldest organs of the human body. Just the contrary of this is true. They were the last to receive their present form and will be the first to lose it again.

The following presents itself to spiritual-scientific research. On the Sun,15 the physical human body had in a certain respect moved up to the level of plant existence. At that time it was permeated only by an etheric body. On the Moon16 it took on the character of the animal body because it was permeated by the astral body. But not all organs participated in this transformation into animal character. A number of parts remained on the plant level. On the Earth, after the integration of the ‘I’, when the human body elevated itself to its present form, a number of parts were still decidedly plantlike in character. But one must not imagine that these organs looked exactly like our present-day plants. The organs of reproduction belong to these organs. They still exhibited a plantlike character at the beginning of Earth development. This was known to the wisdom of the ancient mysteries. Older art, which has retained so much of the traditions of the mysteries, represents hermaphrodites with plant-leaf-like organs of reproduction. These are precursors of the human being which still had the old kind of reproductive organs (which were double-sexed). This can be seen clearly, for example, in a hermaphrodite figure in the Capitoline Collection in Rome. When we look into such matters, we will also understand, for instance, the true reason for the presence of the fig-leaf on Eve. We will comprehend true explanations for many old representations, while contemporary interpretations are, after all, only the result of a thinking which is not carried to its conclusion. We shall only remark in passing that the hermaphrodite figure mentioned above shows still other plant appendages. When it was created, the tradition had still been passed down that in a very remote past certain human organs changed from plant to animal character.

1.3 The influence of higher beings and the sexual impulse