The Human Being as Body and Soul in relation to the Cosmos

‘That is the ideal towards which Ahriman is striving: to destroy the individuality of human beings in order, with the power of human thinking, to transform the earth into a web of gigantic thought spiders – but real spiders. That is the ahrimanic goal from which we must escape by really imbuing ourselves with the spirit Word: “Not I, but the Christ in me”.’ – Rudolf Steiner

These majestic lectures speak of the threefold human being – of body (head, heart and hands), soul (thinking, feeling and will), and spirit (waking, dreaming and sleeping). Such holistic concepts challenge the acute dangers of polarisation, of twofoldness – being bound to the earth through dead thought on the one hand (the ahrimanic) and taken up into states of fantasy on the other (the luciferic). The challenge, says Rudolf Steiner, is always to see the intermediary or balancing force, the Christ being, in every context.

Steiner refers to the conclusions of the Ecumenical Council of 869 AD, that human beings consist only of body and soul. Now, he says, we are entering a period where even the soul is denied in favour of the physical brain. In contrast, he presents a vision of evolving humanity in the broader context of a cosmos that reaches to realms of existence beyond even space and time. 

This previously-unpublished course of lectures ­– released in tandem with the twin course in CW 206 – features an introduction by William Forward, notes and an index.

Thirteen lectures, Stuttgart, Bern & Dornach; June–July 1921, GA 205