The Rudolf Steiner Archive

10. The Path of Knowledge and Its Stages II

Imaginative Insight and Artistic Imagination

[ 1 ] Among the various instructions that the occult teacher gives to the student, imagination was mentioned as the second most important. It consists in a person not simply going through life as one does in everyday existence, but rather in the spirit of Goethe’s saying, “All that is transitory is but a parable,” so that behind every animal and every plant, something of its deeper meaning becomes apparent to them. In the autumn crocus, for example, they will then perceive an image of a melancholic disposition; in the violet, an image of quiet piety; in the sunflower, an image of life brimming with vitality, of independence, and of ambition. When a person lives in this spirit, they rise to a level of imaginative insight. He then sees something like a cold flame rising from a plant—a picture of color that introduces him to the astral plane. In this way, the student is guided to see things that spiritual beings from other worlds reveal to him. It has already been said, however, that the student must strictly follow the occult teacher, because only the teacher can tell him what is subjective and what is objective. And the occult teacher can provide the student with the necessary steadfastness that the sensory world provides on its own, because it continually corrects errors. In the astral world, however, it is different. There, one is easily subject to delusions; there, the more experienced must stand by one’s side.

[ 2 ] The teacher gives a series of instructions to the student who wishes to follow the Rosicrucian path. First, he gives the student a specific instruction once the student has begun to reach the stage of imaginative development. He tells the student: “First, strive not merely to love individual animals, not merely to develop a specific relationship with individual animals, or to experience this or that with this or that animal, but try to have a living feeling for entire groups of animals; then you will gain a sense of what the group soul is.” The individual soul, which is on the physical plane in human beings, is on the astral plane in animals. The animal cannot say “I” to itself here on the physical plane.

[ 3 ] People often ask: Doesn’t an animal have a soul like a human being? — It does have such a soul, but the animal soul is located on the astral plane. The individual animal relates to the animal soul in the same way that the individual organs of a human relate to the human soul. If you hurt a finger, it is the soul that feels it. All sensations from the individual organs flow to the soul. The same is true for a group of animals. Everything that an individual animal feels is also felt within it by the group soul. Take, for example, all the different lions: the sensations of the lions all flow toward a common soul. On the astral plane, all lions share a common group soul. In this way, all animals have their group soul on the astral plane. If one causes pain to an individual lion, or if it experiences pleasure, this extends all the way to the astral plane, just as the pain in a finger extends to the human soul. A human being can rise to an understanding of the group soul if he is able to form a mental image that encompasses all the individual lions, just as a general concept encompasses the individual entities that belong to it.

[ 4 ] The plant has its soul on the Rupa plane of Devachan. As a person learns to view a group of plants as a whole and to establish a certain relationship with the group soul of the plants, he learns to penetrate the group souls of the plants on the Rupa plane. When the individual lily or tulip is no longer something special to him, but rather when the individual plants merge into living, condensed imaginings that become images, then the human being experiences something entirely new. What matters is that this is a very concrete image, individually shaped in the imagination. Then the person experiences that the Earth’s plant cover—that any meadow sown with flowers—becomes something entirely new to them, that the flowers become for them a true revelation of the spirit of the Earth. This is the revelation of these various plant group souls. Just as a person’s tears become an expression of the soul’s inner sadness, and just as a person’s physiognomy becomes an expression of their soul, so the occultist learns to regard the green of the plant cover as an expression of inner processes—of the Earth’s true spiritual life. Thus, certain plants become for the occultist like the Earth’s tears, from which the Earth’s inner sorrow wells up. Just as someone who resonates with and empathizes with the tears of fellow human beings, so too does a new, imaginative content pour into the disciple’s soul.

[ 5 ] Human beings must pass through these states of mind. When they experience the corresponding state of mind toward the animal kingdom, they ascend to the astral plane. When they place themselves in the described state of mind toward the plant kingdom, they ascend to the lower region of the Devachan plane. There they observe the formations of flame rising from the plants. The Earth’s vegetation is then covered with a multitude of forms—the incarnations of the rays of light that descend upon the plants.

[ 6 ] In this way, one can even go as far as the inanimate stone. There is a fundamental sensation associated with the world of stones. Let us take the rock crystal, which glows with light. When one looks at it, one will say to oneself: In a certain sense, this represents an ideal for human beings themselves. Just as the human physical body represents something physically material, so too is the stone something physically material. But there is a future perspective toward which the occult teacher guides the student. Even today, human beings are permeated by instincts and desires, by passions. This permeates the physical nature. But an ideal lies before the occultist. He tells himself: Humanity’s animal nature will gradually be purified and cleansed to a degree at which this human body can stand before us, inwardly as chaste and desireless as the mineral, which desires nothing, in which no desire stirs when something comes near it. Chaste and pure is the inner material nature of the mineral. — This chastity and purity is the feeling that should pervade the student upon beholding the mineral world. Depending on how the mineral world manifests itself in various forms and colors, these feelings are specified, but the fundamental feeling that pervades the mineral kingdom is chastity.

[ 7 ] Today, our Earth has a very specific configuration, a very specific shape. Let’s go back in the Earth’s evolution. Once upon a time, it had a completely different form. Let’s go back to the time of Atlantis and even further back. There, we encounter ever-higher temperatures at which metals flowed about, just as water flows today. All metals became the veins within the Earth because they first flowed there in streams. Just as lead is solid today and mercury is liquid, so lead was once liquid, and so mercury will one day become a solid metal. Thus, the Earth is changeable, but human beings have always participated in these various stages of evolution. In the times we have spoken of, physical human beings did not yet exist. But the etheric body and the astral body were present; they were able to live in even higher temperatures. As the Earth cooled, the physical sheaths gradually formed and took shape around the human being.

[ 8 ] As something new has continually taken shape within human beings throughout Earth’s evolution, something correspondingly new has also taken shape in the natural world around them. First, the rudiments of the human eye emerged on the solar planet. The etheric body was the first to develop, and this, in turn, gave rise to the human physical eye. Just as a piece of ice freezes out of the water, so the physical organs are formed out of the finer etheric body. Inside the human being, the physical organs developed; outside, the Earth solidified. In every age, the formation of an organ within the human being proceeds in parallel with the formation of certain configurations in nature. While the eye was being formed within the human being, chrysolite took shape in the mineral kingdom. Therefore, one can imagine that the same forces that assemble the nature of chrysolite in the external world also form the eye within the human being.

[ 9 ] We cannot be satisfied with general sayings such as that man is the microcosm and the world is the macrocosm; rather, occultism has demonstrated the actual connection between man and the world. When the physical organ for the intellectual combination formed during the Atlantean era, lead solidified in the external world; it transitioned from a liquid to a solid state. The same forces are at work in the solidification of lead and in the development of the intellectual organism. One can only understand human beings when one is able to recognize the connections between them and the forces of nature. Within the socialist movement, there is a particular group that differs from general social democracy in its great moderation. These are the moderates, who have always held intellectual combinations in high regard. This particular group within the socialist movement is made up of printers. This is because printers work with lead. The collective bargaining agreement between workers and employers was first developed among the printers. Lead induces this state of mind when ingested in small quantities.

[ 10 ] Another example can be drawn from experience, where the effect of a metal’s nature on a person could be observed in a similar way. A person had noticed how easily he found analogies in all sorts of things. One could conclude that he had a lot to do with copper. That was indeed the case! He was a French horn player in an orchestra, so he worked with an instrument that contains a lot of copper.

[ 11 ] Once the relationship between the external, inanimate world and the human organism is studied, one will find that a relationship exists between human beings and their environment in a wide variety of ways—for example, the relationship between the senses and gemstones. There are certain relationships with gemstones that are rooted in the evolution of the senses. We have already found a relationship to the eye in chrysolite. Similarly, there is a relationship to the organ of hearing in onyx. It stands in a remarkable relationship to the vibrations of the “I”-life within the human being. Occultists have always associated it with this. For example, it represents life emerging from death. Thus, in Goethe’s “Fairy Tale,” the dead dog is transformed into an onyx by the old man’s lamp. This intuition of Goethe’s is the result of occult knowledge. The onyx’s relationship to the organ of hearing is connected to this. Furthermore, an occult relationship exists between the sense of taste and topaz, the sense of smell and jasper, the sense of touch—as the human sense of warmth—and carnelian, and the productive imagination and the carbuncle. The carbuncle was used as the symbol of the productive imagination, which arose in humans at the same time as the carbuncle did in nature.

[ 12 ] Occult symbols are drawn deeply from true wisdom. Wherever one delves into occult symbolism, genuine knowledge is found. Whoever recognizes the meaning of a mineral gains access to the higher regions of the Devachan plane. When one looks at a gemstone and senses what it has to tell us, one finds access to the Arupa realms of the Devachan plane. Thus the occult student’s vision expands, and more and more worlds open up to him. He must not be content with general indications, but must find access to the whole of the worlds piece by piece.

[ 13 ] In German literature, too, one can see how an instinctive intuition regarding mineral forces manifests itself in poets who were miners—for example, in Novaks, who had studied mining science. Körner frequently chose miners as the archetypes for his occult characters. In the work of the poet Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann—that curious spirit who at times delved artistically into the mysteries of nature, particularly in the story “The Mines of Falun”— one can sense echoes of what hints at the occult connections between the mineral kingdom and humankind, and what also demonstrates how occult forces intervene in the artistic imagination in remarkable ways.

[ 14 ] The mystery is the true cradle of art. The mysteries were real and alive in the astral realm. There, one found a synthesis of truth, beauty, and piety. This was particularly true of the Egyptian mysteries and those in Asia, as well as the mysteries of Greece, especially the Eleusinian mysteries. There, the initiates truly saw how the spiritual powers descended into the various forms of existence. At that time, there was no other science than the one that was thus witnessed. There was no piety other than that which arose in the soul when one beheld the Mysteries. Nor was there any beauty other than that which one beheld when the gods descended.

[ 15 ] We live in a barbaric age, a chaotic age, an age devoid of style. All great artistic eras drew their creative inspiration from the deepest depths of spiritual life. Anyone who looks at the images of the Greek gods will see exactly three distinct types: First, there is the Zeus type, which also includes Pallas Athena and Apollo. In these, the Greeks characterized their own race. It was a specific shaping of the eye’s oval, the nose, and the mouth. Second, one can observe the group that may be called the Mercury type. Here, the ears are quite different, the nose quite different, and the hair is woolly and curly. Third, there is the satyr type, in which we find a completely different shape of the corners of the mouth, a different nose, eyes, and so on. These three types are clearly depicted in Greek sculpture. The satyr type is said to represent an ancient race, the Mercury type the race that followed it, and the Zeus type the fifth race.

[ 16 ] In the past, spiritual worldviews permeated and imbued everything. The Middle Ages were a time when this was still reflected in craftsmanship, when every door lock was a kind of work of art. Back then, the outer culture still presented us with what the soul had created. The modern era is quite different in this respect. The new era has produced only one style: the department store. The department store will be as characteristic of our time as Gothic architecture—such as Cologne Cathedral—was for the Middle Ages of the 13th and 14th centuries. The cultural history of the future will have to reckon with the department store just as we do with the Gothic architecture of the Middle Ages. The new life expresses itself through these forms. Through the spread of the teachings of spiritual science, the world will once again be filled with spiritual content. When spiritual life later expresses itself in external forms, we will have a style that expresses this spiritual life. What lives within spiritual science must later find expression in external forms. Thus, we must regard the mission of spiritual science as a cultural mission.