The Twelve Moods of the Zodiac
We now enter the mood of Libra, the scales, and the opportunity to carry the gifts of the Virgin and the warm summer sun through the cold, dark winter. We carry these forces into the frigid world through our will and heart-felt actions. Rudolf Steiner offers twelve verses of the zodiacal moods revealing the human experience as a reflection of the cosmos. In Virgo, cosmic forces enlivened the interior of the body below the diaphragm in the solar plexus. Now, in Libra, we cross the threshold between the higher world and the lower as represented in the hips and pelvis of the human body. Our legs will carry us forward through our will and our arms convey our feelings out into the world through our actions.
"As an earthly human being—wandering about aimlessly, as man does, with the beings who were cast into the abyss, into the earthly depths—a person generally, as a matter of course, errs with his thoughts and feelings during earthly existence. Yet he is able to raise himself aloft out of this erroneous thinking and feeling, to raise himself to what becomes for him, out of quiet movement, a firmer thinking or feeling. You see, the cosmos that confronts us to begin with as our solar system is only a special case. 'In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was of God.' And in the cosmos we see the word as though congealed, the word at rest and the word in movement. One must feel it in the cosmos, however. I certainly hope that what is presented here will not be taken for all kinds of confused mysticism current today. We are not concerned here with imitating the methods of those modern astrologers who outdo all materialism with their methods, simply adding ignorant superstition to materialistic ignorance. We are concerned here instead with introducing the lawful relationships of a spiritual world that manifest in the human being just as in the cosmos. True spiritual science does not try to find human laws from the constellations of stars but rather to find human laws as well as natural laws out of the spiritual. Although this spiritual science is again and again thrown together with nonsensical mystical strivings of modern times, it has no relationship to them at all. Here, where in certain descriptions of the human being analogies with cosmic relationships are applied as the basis of a way of expression, it must be emphasized particularly that spiritual science does not wish to have anything to do with the dilettantism of modern astrologers and their crude revelations.
Thus an attempt has been made to offer a sequence of feeling, sensing, and speaking, which, as it is presented, gives, as it were, another version of the inner soul-feeling in relation to what has flowed into the movements of our solar system. The structure of twelve verses, each with seven lines, corresponds, you could say, to the outer skeleton. If you take this attempt at a twelve/seven-membered poem, however, you will see that what wishes to reveal itself is present in every detail."
Read more about the twelve moods of the zodiac in Rudolf Steiner's Twelve Moods, a lecture given on 29 August 1915 in Dornach.
The Calendar of the Soul Zodiac Signs
The first edition of the Calendar of the Soul (1912) contained reproductions of new zodiacal images made by Imme von Eckardstein according to indications given by Dr Steiner. Rudolf Steiner says of them, "In this Calendar will be found signs that differ from those handed down by tradition, because the latter are no longer suitable for modern consciousness. These pictures of the Zodiacal constellations are representations of actual experiences connected with the waking and sleeping of particular spiritual Beings. We have in these pictures a renewal of certain knowledge that needs to be renewed at the present time, because the third post-Atlantean culture-epoch must as it were rise again in the fifth epoch."
Read more: Rudolf Steiner, The Calendar of the Soul, Volume II, Lecture II, GA 143, 7 May 1912, Cologne