Harmony of the Creative Word: The Human Being & the Elemental, Animal, Plant, and Mineral Kingdoms (CW 230) (Human Being and the Elemental, Animal, Plant and Mineral Kin) Paperback – March 1, 2002

Rudolf Steiner reveals the deepest facts about the elemental realms in these lectures; these are concepts derived from direct experience of these realms that you simply cannot find in any other literature besides the anthroposophical. RS also speaks here in a beautiful poetic form that is exquisite. 10/10

Here is an inspirational scheme of the world as a living flux of spirit seeking incorporation into matter, and matter itself seeking to be spiritualized; here is a world picture which has as its genesis and goal the idea of the truly human being, whose volution has been carried spiritually by the creativity of cosmic forces since the very beginning. — Ann Druitt in her 2001 Introduction The human being is a microcosm of the cosmos in which we are embedded. The laws and processes found in the world around us are also found within us human beings. There is a harmony in what exists in us and what exists in the world around us. To tap into this knowledge we will have to delve into the secrets which lie in the world, and we will have to delve at the same time into the secrets which lie inside of us as living human beings. Steiner will be our guide into this world of laws and processes of the world and the human being.Part One: Man’s Connection with the Cosmos, the Earth and the Animal World. If we look for the characteristics of the bird in the human being, we see the head; for the characteristics of the lion, we see the human chest. Lion-hearted means to have the breathing and circulation attuned in the human body as it is in the lion. If we look for the characteristics of the cow, however, we must look at the stomach, for entire cow seems to be designed for digestion. It not only has a long digestive tract, but it has multiple stomachs to extract nutrients from the plant stuffs it ingests while grazing. It devotes its life to digestion and anything which distracts it from digestion is unwelcome. What does any of this have to do with the human being? From the above considerations of the animal kingdom’s bird, lion, and cow, Steiner has drawn out for us the three human processes of thinking, feeling, and willing and shown their relationship to the bodily processes occuring in the head, breathing and circulation, and the metabolism. Steiner said about the below process, “Reality of this kind cannot be grasped by mere thoughts, for to them reality is a matter of indifference. ” Thoughts depend only on logic, but logic can be used to prove anything. Compare the logic used by the hyena and the wolf in this amazing metaphor, a fable of the African tribe, the Felatas. [page 18] Once upon a time a lion, a wolf and a hyena set out on a journey. They met an antelope. The antelope was torn to pieces by one of the animals. The three travelers were good friends, and now the question arose as to how they should divide the dismembered antelope between them. First the lion said to the hyena, “You divide it. “ The hyena said, “We'll divide the antelope into three equal parts — one for the lion, one for the wolf, and one for myself.” Then the lion fell upon the hyena and killed it. That was the end of the hyena. The antelope still had to be shared out. So the lion said to the wolf, “Look here, my dear wolf, we'll have to share it out differently now. You divide it. How would you share it out?” Then the wolf said, “Yes, we must now apportion it differently; there can't be equal shares, like before. Since you have rid us of the hyena, you as the lion must of course have the first third; the second would have been yours in any case, as the hyena said, and the remaining third shall be yours because you are the wisest and bravest of all animals.” That is how the wolf apportioned it. Then said the lion, “Who taught you to divide in this way?” To which the wolf replied, “The hyena taught me.” “So the lion did not devour the wolf, but, according to the wolf’s logic, took all three portions for himself,” Steiner said of the fable. This is how it is with abstractions — especially logic — you can prove anything you want, but if you ignore the realities of life and the lessons it teaches you in the moment, your life could be in danger. “Use it right away” is an excellent motto for learning, and the wolf showed us the life-saving value of immediately applying his new-found learning from the hyena. America is infused with the one-sided nature of the eagle, Europe with that of the lion, and the Orient with that of the cow. Steiner explains how any one of these one-sided approaches to civilization would end in a sad fashion. He gives us a modern version of the African fable above to illustrate his point, which is that we must oppose each of the one-sided approaches with a threefold approach of the human being. We must grasp “the call of the eagle from the heights, that of the lion from the surrounding world, that of the cow from the interior of the earth.” (Page 37) Then we can learn the language of the stars from the cow, the language of the cycles of the Earth from the lion, and the language of the eagle which allows us to create a universe in our head.Part Two: The Inner Connection of World Phenomena and the Essential Nature of the World. The three lectures in Part Two of this four-part book deal with “The Inner Connection of World Phenomena and the Essential Nature of the World.” In Lecture 4 we learn about the butterfly, which corresponds in its metamorphosis to the plant. Its seed does not enter the Earth, but hangs in the air. When its caterpillar appears, it is like the leaf appearing on a plant. When the caterpillar enters its chrysalis stage, it resembles the calyx of a plant from the flower later developed. The butterfly when it unfolds its wings does so as a flower unfolds its petals. Bright colors appear and flutter in the breeze with the flower as with the butterfly. “Just as the butterfly lays its egg, so does the flower develop within itself the new seed for the future. So you see, we look up towards the butterfly and understand it to be the plant raised up into the air.” (Page 67) [page 83, 84] The bird is the flying thought. But the bat is the flying dream; the flying dream picture of the cosmos. So we can say: The earth is surrounded by fluttering butterflies — they are cosmic memory; by the kingdom of the birds — this is cosmic thinking; and by the bats — they are cosmic dream, cosmic dreaming. The flying dreams of the cosmos actually rush through space as bats. And as dreams love the twilight, so, too, does the cosmos love the twilight and send the bat through space. The enduring thoughts of memory, these we see embodied in the girdle of butterflies encircling the earth; thoughts of the moment we see in the birds encircling the earth; and dreams in the environment of the earth fly about embodied as bats. And you will surely feel, if you enter deeply enough into their form, how much affinity there is between looking at a bat in this way and having a dream! One simply cannot look at a bat without the thought arising: I must be dreaming; that is really something which should not be there, something which is as much outside the other creations of nature as dreams are outside ordinary physical reality. So we can say: The butterfly sends spiritualized substance into spirit land during its lifetime; the bird sends it out after its death. Now what does the bat do? During its lifetime the bat gives off spiritualized substance, especially that spiritualized substance which exists in the stretched membrane between its separate fingers. But it does not give this over to the cosmos; it sheds it into the atmosphere of the earth. Thereby beads of spirit, so to say, are continually produced in the atmosphere.Part Three: The Plant World and the Elemental Nature Spirits In Lectures 7, 8, and 9 Steiner gives a detailed description of the interactions of the plant world and the elemental beings of gnomes, undines, sylphs, and salamanders (fire spirits). In fairy tales and movies we see gnomes and dwarves always associated with mountains, but we see them walking freely outside the rocky substrates in which these elemental being actually live. For gnomes, rocky strata are like a living room would be to use or a large stadium, a place in which to roam and play. Gnomes are root spirits and are responsible for pushing plants up out of the ground. Once the plant reaches out of the ground into the air, the water sprites or undines which are the elemental spirits of the watery element which work in the sphere of moisture-air while the gnomes only worked in the moisture-earth sphere. While the gnomes operate in the moisture-laden earth around the roots, the undines operate in the moisture-laden soil in the air directly above the surface of the soil. The undines act as chemists who foster the growth of the plant. The next elemental which fosters the life of the plants are called sylphs. These beings live in the elements of air and warmth and are particularly drawn to currents in the air, such as a flock of birds. In fact, a sylph flitting through air devoid of birds feels like lost. When a bird then arrives, it feels its ego through the generated by the bird’s flight through the air. Through the sylphs birds become like the bearers of love. The sylph is the light-bearer to the plant world and the force of this light augments the chemical actions generated by the undines. One begins to see how the elemental forces are at work in the soil, water, air, and light around the plants and to feel as a gnome must about what botanists try to convince us are merely chemical reactions in the material world which create the lush plant life we live amongst. Now we are able to follow the process of reproduction of the plant aided by the elemental fire spirits. [page 119, 120] Up here (see drawing), after it has passed through the sphere of the sylphs, the plant enters the level of the elemental fire spirits. These inhabit the element of heat and light. When the warmth of the earth is at its height, or has reached a sufficient level, it is gathered up by the fire spirits. Just as the sylphs gather up the light, so do the fire spirits gather up the warmth and carry it into the flowers of the plant. Undines carry the action of chemical ether into the plants, sylphs the action of light ether into the flowers. And the pollen provides what may be called little airships that enable the fire spirits to carry warmth into the seed. Everywhere warmth is collected with the help of the stamens, and is carried by means of the pollen from the anthers to the seeds in the carpel. And what is formed here in the carpel in its entirety is the male element that comes from the cosmos. It is not a case of the carpel being female and the anthers of the stamens being male. In no way does fertilization occur in the flower, but only the preforming of the male seed. Fertilization occurs when the cosmic male seed, which fire spirits in the flower take from the warmth of the universe, is brought together with the female principle that has trickled down into the soil as an ideal element at an earlier stage, as I have described, and is resting there. For plants the earth is the mother, the heavens the father. In Lecture 9 Steiner gives this summary of the four elementals. [page 150, 151] Thus we see how these elemental beings are the intermediaries between the earth and the spirit-cosmos. We see the drama of the phosphorescent upsurge of the undines, which pass away in the sea of light and flame of the higher hierarchies as their sustenance; we see the upward flashing greenish-reddish lightning, which is breathed where the earth continually passes over into eternity, the eternal survival of the fire spirits, whose activity never ceases. For whereas, here on earth, birds tend to die at a particular time of year, the fire spirits make sure that what is to be seen of them pours out into the universe throughout the entire year. Thus the earth is as though cloaked in a mantle of fire. Seen from outside the earth appears fiery. But everything is brought about by beings who see the things of the earth quite differently from how man sees them. As already mentioned, man's experience of the earth is of a hard substance on which he stands and walks about. For the gnomes it is a transparent globe, a hollow body. For the undines water is something in which they perceive the phosphorizing process, which they can take into themselves as living experience. Sylphs see in the astrality of the air, which emanates from dying birds, something that makes them into more actively flashing lightning than they would otherwise be, for in itself the lightning of these sylphs is dull and bluish. And then again the disintegration of butterfly existence is something which continually envelops the earth as though with a shell of fire. Beholding this, it seems as though the earth were surrounded by a wonderful fiery painting; and there to one side, when one looks upwards from the earth, one beholds these lightning flashes, these phosphorescent and evanescent undines. All this shows us that here on earth the elemental nature spirits move and work actively, striving upwards and passing away in the fiery mantle of the earth. In reality, however, they do not pass away, but they find their eternal existence by passing over into beings of the higher hierarchies. The title of this book is “Harmony of the Creative Word” and the Gospel of John begins with these words, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” What is the meaning of Word and how was it in our beginning? Steiner sheds light on that in this next passage and calls our attention to the chorus of voices proclaiming the Word that we humans might miss in our current state of evolution of consciousness where the voices of the gnomes, undines, sylphs, and fire spirit spirits do reach our ears and we have been unconscious of their presence in the world around us, up until now. And, of course, among those countless beings are our new friends, introduced to us by Rudolf Steiner in these pages, the gnomes, undines, sylphs, and fire spirits. If we do not attend to the presence of their voices in this cosmic chorus, we lack understanding into our skeletal system, our metabolic system, our rhythmic system, our nerves and sensory system. [page 156, 157] When the gnome chorus sounds forth its 'Strive to awaken' this — translated into gnome language — is the force which is active in bringing about the human skeletal system, and the system of movement in general. When the undines utter 'Think in the spirit', they utter — translated into Undine — what pours itself as World Word into man in order to give form to the metabolic organs. When the sylphs, as they are breathed, allow their 'Live and create breathing existence' to stream downwards, there penetrates into man, moving and pulsating everywhere in him, the force which endows him with the organs of the rhythmical system. And if one attends to the fire-spirit sounds that resound and stream in from the fire mantle of the world with a voice of thunder, then one finds that this sounding manifests as image or reflection. It streams in from the fire mantle — this sounding force of the word. And the nerves and senses of every human being, every human head we might say, is a miniature image of what — translated into the language of fire spirits — rings out as: 'Receive in love the will-power of the gods'. This 'Receive in love the will-power of the gods' is what is active in the highest substances of the world. When man is going through his development in the life between death and a new birth, this transforms what he brought with him through the gate of death into what will later be the human organs of the nerves and senses.Part Four: The Secrets of the Human Organism This series of lectures given to people with the purpose to foster a deep study of the human being. For example, when we eat foods, they can be combinations of minerals (such as salt), plants, and animals. These foods must be completely altered before they can become part of our human body. Unless that transformation is complete, we will become ill from the food. Minerals must be given warmth by our body, plants must take on a transitional airy form, and everything animal must be made into a liquid form before the human body can digest it. Food is dissolved in the mouth by saliva, the pepsin in the stomach, secretions from the pancreas and then from the gall bladder, etc. Each of these processes must be linked in a chain because when the next process in the chain takes over it and checks the previous metabolic process, which if unchecked would make one ill. Note that metabolic processes started during the Moon period of evolution and the circulatory processes started during the earlier Sun period. The circulatory processes continually heal the body while the metabolic processes try to harm it. It’s as if divine wisdom had created the doctor in advance of the illness. What happens in smoking (and using other tobacco products) is that when the substance nicotine enters the body, the heart rate is increased in relation to the breathing rate. This throws the cosmic balance of our breathing and respiration out of whack and eventually causes sickness. Steiner shows us how to calculate our respiration rate from the cosmos and this allows us to check our respiration rate against our circulatory (pulse) rate and discover for ourselves if it is out of balance. The processes of the circulatory and nervous systems must be kept in harmony and what runs in each must be kept separate from each other or problems will occur. Steiner summarizes neatly: [page 177] What runs in the nerve must remain in the nerve, what runs in the blood must remain in the blood. If what belongs in the blood enters into adjacent tissues, inflammation results. If what belongs to the nerve enters into adjacent tissues, all kinds of lesions develop that are commonly referred to as tumors. And yet the factors which can cause illnesses in the human body must be there as under certain circumstances, they are agents of healing. It is good to recall what Steiner says about “evil” — it is a good out of its time or place. And there is no better way to look into the world or into yourself than to have Rudolf Steiner as your guide and clairvoyant seeing-eye assistant. It should be clear that Steiner does not begin with abstractions about the world or the body. He doesn’t peer into a telescope to learn about the cosmos, nor does he peer into a microscope (which he labels a “nulloscope”) to learn about the human body. He makes observations about how the processes of the human body’s systems interact together. Most importantly he avoids the deadly assumption that what happens in the human body is equivalent to what happens in a chemical laboratory. Human beings are not machines and deserve to be treated as individuals, not as diseases on a doctor’s chart. “Here’s the hernia patient. . . . etc.” To recognize a person’s name is to recognize their individuality and separate what is going on in them from what goes on in every other patient with the same disease. The human organism must exert enough force to bring the external mineral substance into warmth ether, and if it doesn’t achieve this, the substance remains as a foreign inorganic matter and in deposited as such in the body. (Page 186) Gout and diabetes are too common examples of such a condition. In gout it is uric acid crystals which are deposited in the muscle tissue of the lower limbs and the result is extreme pain which persists until the conditions, usually overeating, which caused the crystal deposits, are reversed. In diabetes, it is sugar in mineralized form which is deposited. The Swedes say this about the weather, “There is no bad weather, only bad clothing.” What is it about cold weather which causes one to catch a cold? If one is not wearing the appropriate clothing for the conditions one finds oneself in, then one is unable to adjust one’s individual warmth quickly enough. Good clothing prevents cold by allowing one to do this. Steiner has on several other occasions mentioned that the human beings does not require the complex proteins in animal meat unless one has a very short intestinal tract such as the lion and other meat-eaters naturally have. In fact, eating a diet of meat easily leads to overeating of protein which can make one more susceptible to infections and other illnesses. Some people have short digestive tracts, but probably a minority of people. In any case, Steiner refuses to tell individuals what they should eat. He simply gives the facts of nutrition as he knows it and allows individuals to decide for themselves. This is a healthier approach, in my opinion, than most Western doctors take with their patients. For their part, they seem to be mostly quoting statistics as if one could accurately choose what’s right for oneself from statistics. And if you don’t choose to do what their statistics indicate you should, your doctor will likely get upset or even angry at you. Such an “I-know-what-you-should-do” attitude of Western doctors towards their patients does not serve either the doctors or their patients well. Steiner rarely uses the word should as an injunction for his listeners and readers to do some thing or another. He lays out the facts as he knows them, sometimes he is a minority of one, and you get to decide what is best to do in your life. In this case he uses should to refer to something he strives to avoid doing for himself in the spiritual science he founded and promoted. As you read this next passage, imagine yourself hearing such advice from your personal doctor, “I give you the information about diet and you decide what’s best for you.” It would be surprising and refreshing, would it not? We look at the human body today and see only half of its reality unless, in addition to flesh and bones, we perceive it at the level of mind and spirit. We would not know, for instance, that the bones can lead us into hatred and the blood into confusion. But the ancients could perceive such things directly by looking at a person. A popular song during the last quarter of the twentieth century was “These Boots Are Made for Walking” and it was about a woman who was tired of being put down and ignored by her man and who said in the song that she would reverse the order of things when, “One of these days, these boots are gonna walk all over you.” The idea that the boots could think for themselves didn’t seem strange in the context of the idiomatic speech of the song, but Steiner might say that it indicated a spiritual truth that our feet have an innate knowledge of our karma which ofttimes our head does not possess. We perceive but half of the actuality of the world around us if we perceive it only with our physical senses, and likewise, any biography written of one’s life by someone who only perceives with physical senses will portray only half of one’s existence — the part between life and death — and the other half — the part between death and a new lifetime — will be ignored. People are always asking questions of this tone, “How did we get in the mess we’re in?” They seem to love asking the question, but I wonder how many of them have ever tried really hard at finding the answer to this question. And of them how many would do the hard work to understand the answer if someone laid it out on the table for them as Steiner has done? See for yourself what he has to say about how our civilization came to be the way it is. It is not surprising that the two illnesses Steiner chose almost a hundred years ago to use as metaphors for our civilization’s sorry shape should be the very same physical illnesses which plague so many people today. In 1914 he was speaking of the time immediately before the Great War which after the second great war in 1940 became called World War I. He was aware of the spiritual illnesses in the world, what he called the “utterly diseased tissues of civilization.” He saw the parasitic tendencies of civilization in his time. If he were alive today, no doubt he would see even more parasitic tendencies in our time. Mistletoe is a parasite that cannot live in the earthen ground, but can only live off of living plant tissue. Much in our civilization is like mistletoe, but it lives off of the products of the human mind. “Change your thoughts and change your life” was the motto of Donald Curtis in his book entitled “Your Thoughts Can Change Your Life” written in the mid-twentieth century. What Steiner is telling us is that we can change our mind and change all of civilization! And now he gives us a quick summary of material he covered in the earlier lectures of this book dealing with the elementals, material which if he had not covered, we would not be able to grasp what he is telling us now. He is revealing how two poisons fill our culture. A parasitic culture which ignores elemental law and spirituality which is converted to poison when it enters people. “This is all well and good,” you might be thinking, dear Reader, “but why doesn’t Rudolf Steiner offer a solution to the problems he raises?” If that question or one like it arose in your mind, perhaps you are unaware that one of the medicines for what ails civilization that Steiner proposed was right thinking education. He actually created a form of education which bypasses the entire process of parasitic poisoning mentioned above. He gave a lecture on education to the workers at the Waldorf-Astoria Cigarette Factory in Stuttgart, Germany and after the lecture the workers and managers asked him to start a school for their children which operated on those principles he had expounded. That led to the founding of the Waldorf Schools which now operate around the globe, in greater and greater numbers every year. (In Australia they are known as Steiner Schools.) Steiner has given us the diagnosis of the illness that civilization is infected with and now he has also, like a good doctor of medicine, provided the therapy needed. It will come, not in some drug-de-jour as so many cures in the twenty-first century, but in a revolutionary way of teaching our precious children so that the parasitic poisons are eliminated by the very form of education they receive from the youngest age through to high school. Imagine a school system which encourages teacher to progress through each grade with their pupils, so that they come to know each child individually in a way no mass-produced educational system can ever encourage or deliver. This may sound fanciful and impractical to you if you have never been in a Waldorf School or never had a child in a Waldorf School or known a Waldorf School teacher, but I guarantee you that further study of Waldorf School will feel you with awe and wonder at the results they produce. If someone has had a problem with a modern Waldorf School, most likely that person was educated in a state or private school that did not use the Waldorf principles and they are filled with the very kind of parasitic and poisonous thinking that the Waldorf system strives to eliminate from the very children who will lead the next generation of our civilization. In them lie our best hope for curing the illnesses of civilization — of extirpating it, pulling it out at its roots — and those roots grow in the great majority of our children of today, up until now. It is up to each one of us to ensure that our children's education will be free of the parasitic and poisonous ways of thinking from now on. Hopefully this blurb will prompt you to read the entire review. As a blurb, it can only serve up an appetizer of what the full review contains. Taste these hors d’oeuvres and if you enjoy them, you may wish to sample the entree awaiting you in the full review in DIGESTWORLD 14c by Bobby Matherne.

great book

Excellent treatise on the metaphysical and an overview of human evolution as one of .the primary components of a multiplex reality.

The book consists of 12 lectures that Steiner gave in 1923 in Switzerland. It deals with mankind's place in the cosmos and his relationship with the other forces in the visible and invisible worlds. Our inner relationship with three ancient symbols: the eagle, the lion and the bull is interestingly explored as is our connectedness with the plant and animal kingdoms in general in the context of planetary and cosmic evolution.A really fascinating section follows on the elemental nature spirits. Steiner describes these metaphysical beings in detail and explains their work with plants and animals and how they co-operate with mankind. Finally he investigates the place of the human being at the heart of the cosmic process.The work is divided into the following chapters: 1. Man's connection with the cosmos, earth and the animals. 2. The inner connection of world phenomena and the essential nature of the world. 3. The plant world and the nature spirits. 4. The secrets of the human organism.The Harmony Of The Creative World is a fascinating read for those interested in the esoteric and those who would have a better understanding of the relationship between the seen and the unseen. Steiner was a great visionary and his life and ideas bore good fruit. This is a thought provoking and uplifting read.

Reading this I feel like I am venturing beyond normal understanding into a brave new world. It’s exciting to read. I can’t say I understand all of the concepts described but I want to. This is the second time I’m reading these lectures and I doubt it will be the last. Powerful stuff!

Great book.

Once again I had already read it bit wanted it for my collection.