Sexuality and the Human Makeup

Sexuality And The Human Makeup

  An Effort At An Anthroposophical View.

CONTENTS – Clicking on a Section # will take you directly to that Section – continuous scrolling through the complete document works as on other pages!
Part I
1 – Introduction
2 – The Varied Makeup Of The Human Being
3 – Beginning An Anthroposophical Perspective
4 – Time And History-With A Future
5 – Time, Man, Woman, Masculine, And Feminine
6 – The Birth Of The Ego And The Mineral Kingdom
7 – The Dual
8 – Heredity And Reproduction
9 – A Greek Perspective In Relation To The Dual Of Man And Woman
10 – Other Approaches To The Sexual Make Up Of The Human Being

Part II
11 – The Physiological Make Up Of The Human Being
12 – From Form And Physiology To Other Perspectives
13 – The Fourfold Make Up Of The Human Being
14 – The Brain As An Organ Of Reproduction
15 – The Life Process Of Reproduction And Sexuality
16 – Inner Movements, Sexuality And Reproduction
17 – The Reproductory Organs
18 – The Configuration Of The Reproductory Organs
19 – Man’s Double Nature And Sexuality
20 – The Double And Sexuality

1 – Introduction
There is a direct relation between the soul and sexuality. In recent years there has been a tremendous move to make the sexual the center of the soul. This has evolved in modern times out of the perspective given by Freud at the beginning of the twentieth century. The all-pervading sexual emphasis that was born with the Freudian view can hardly be overemphasized, but can be seen as a mirroring of Egyptian times, with Mysteries of Isis, Osiris, and Horus. Even those who claim opposition and have a much broader view often use psychoanalytic conceptions. The sexual as a basis for human relations is evidenced when all relationships become sexually tinted. Such is the view of parental relationships with each other, with their children, and with anyone else. Meanings for motherliness, fatherliness, brotherliness, sisterliness, husband, wife, and all friendships have become sexualized by modern sexual preoccupations. With such a situation, let me make a small effort to expand the perspective in an effort to bring a different emphasis.

It is sexuality that lies at the basis of the child-parent relationship, according to Freud. All evolves out of this kind of primal sexuality. From there he has extended the sexual to all human relationships, as if nothing else were significant, and all these other relationships are a result of sublimations. Everything other than sexual relations is but a sublimation of the sexual drive. With this approach, even hereditary relationships are sexualized. Sexual instincts, urges, and drives bring the tendency for young girls to seek a relation with the father and young boys to seek a relation with the mother based in sexuality.

The story of Oedipus is fundamental, according to Freud. The incestuous impulse lies at the basis of all relations. Only the incest taboos hold all the natural impulses in check, in Freud’s perspective. From Rudolf Steiner’s perspective, the Oedipus Myth is significant as well, but with a very different orientation. This orientation can be discovered in the course of his lectures on the Gospel of St. John. There he comments that if the Mystery of Golgotha had not come about, the myth of Oedipus would have become a verity for mankind as a whole. Fratricide and incest would have become a major impulse for human beings. From Rudolf Steiner’s investigations, it becomes evident that it has not been the taboos that have been operative in mankind, but the Deeds Of Love by the Christ. We will return to this Love at the end of this essay. However, the possibility of another view, one radically different from the sexual orientation of modern times, is addressed here at the outset as a direction for the remainder of this essay.

In recent years, the focus on early life sexual abuse is nothing but a similar overemphasis on the sexual element. This is not to say that there is not abuse, but what has taken place is sexualized, and abuse has many grounds other than sexuality. It is not only psychology that is full of such a sexual coloring, but sexual inclinations are exploited by advertisement and by the media. Next to violence, sexual references and overt sexual display are the name of entertainment today. It is said that the Internet is used most often for sending e-mail, and that its second greatest use is to seek out pornography. The drug industry, with the new anti-impotence medicine, has entered this domain in a forceful and determinative way. Thus there is little question that we are surrounded by a world of sexual references and stimuli.

With this approach, the domain of Will becomes instinct, urge, and drive, whose origin is sexual. Feelings are replaced by satisfactions of sexual drives. Finer feelings, such as aesthetic feelings, and the endless complex of human soul-feeling life, are reduced to simple satisfaction of sexual urges and drives. The element of love, be it the love of wisdom as a first stepping stone, or the love of other human beings, is replaced by the drive for self- satisfaction through sexual encounter.

So if one moves from will to feeling, the reductionistic thinking in analytic psychology results in a kind of singular fixation on one aspect of human makeup. That the ideal might be a source of action, this is lacking in many forms of psychological reasoning. That religion might play a role in the domain of the sexual is totally absent unless the religion is of sexual origin or coloring. Much of human experience becomes a seeking for the orgastic.

The materialism of our day assures each person that he is but a caloric vessel whose energies arise from the burning of inner fuel­: carbohydrates, fats, and proteins. As only water can quench an outer fire, so human inner fire of energies derived from the metabolic pathways can only be quenched by sexual encounter and fulfillment. It is surprising how much this simplistic perspective is a part of the culture. Even the drive for monetary power is reduced to sexual drive and power, resulting in the gender conflict which is so prevalent in the workplace today. The basis for the gender and sexual orientations is the metabolic-caloric energy process. Even energy becomes the energy of sexuality.

From an anthroposophical perspective a group of lectures was given by Rudolf Steiner to the Dornach Community in 1915. This was necessary when some from the analytic movement came to Dornach and infused this type of thinking into the events that were taking place there, where an effort was under way to found a community based on the spirit, through activities based on human striving for the spiritual world in a conscious way. The origin of the problems came from an effort on Rudolf Steiner’s part to inaugurate a spiritual esoteric activity within a society of human beings interested in anthroposophy. Rudolf Steiner’s effort to inaugurate an esoteric school, an esoteric schooling, is documented in a small publication called the “Stiftung.” One of the women who worked with Rudolf Steiner was asked to take a role in the founding of an esoteric school based on the “Stiftung,” a bestowal from the spiritual world. Esoteric schools, if they are true and good, are based on the will and on a bestowal from the spiritual world. This particular woman, one of a number of others active in the same way with Rudolf Steiner, developed the delusion that Rudolf Steiner was going to marry her. Rudolf Steiner was already married. This deluded individual fell into the hands of an analytic psychologist, who then brought an analytic perspective to the Dornach community in 1914 and 1915. This created havoc for a brief period of time.

This situation is cited here only to point to the fact that Rudolf Steiner met the psychoanalytic movement quite directly, giving evidence of how this perspective impacted his work, resulting in significant social consequences. Rudolf Steiner stood strongly in opposition to this analytic movement, but if one follows out his critiques, one can find that he as well placed this analytic in a positive light when it came to medical therapeutic work. For Rudolf Steiner the question was always where a particular perspective stood in a whole, and where the perspective could be valid. For diagnostic purposes, diagnostic in terms of the physical underlying soul problems, Rudolf Steiner held the analytic movement to be valid. Many of the soul struggles have been pointed to as physical in origin according to Rudolf Steiner’s research. Here the analytic symptomatological method can be highly valid for diagnosis.

What this community struggle in Dornach, Switzerland gave rise to can be seen in a very positive light. The Stiftung effort, by its trial within a living community, and its apparent failure, gave rise to what is called the “Christmas Foundation Meeting.” The Christmas Foundation Meeting sought to inaugurate human association on a soul-spiritual basis in the physical world, for present times, so that a “School for Spiritual Science” could be founded. The human community has since that time been called the “Anthroposophical Society,” a society based on the association of human beings on purely soul-spiritual grounds. The effort to found such a society was an effort to birth human relationships not based on gender, race, nation, or schooling. It is an association which, as it were, grew out of an apparent failure, where one of the components involved was an overemphasis on the very element that we are addressing here. Significant for our considerations is that Rudolf Steiner brought forth a verse, a meditative verse, for those who seek to associate within a society based on soul-spiritual grounds. This verse is attached for those interested. This verse can speak for itself, as it addresses the highest–redeeming whatever needs redeeming–for the sake of the “All Human” in existence.

Thus, the materialistic perspective on the makeup of the human being, and the sexual orientation, were factors in the unfolding of the Anthroposophical Society as it was reborn in 1923 and 1924. The Anthroposophical Society was born out of a real creative opposition to a view in which the spiritual core of each has nothing but a primal sexuality, a view that placed the human being in the light of a highly complex energy system. On anthroposophical grounds it is possible to search for a more soul-spiritual perspective, which can transform, supplement, or even overcome the purely sexual orientation that has grown up out of analytic psychology and psychiatry. This was and is possible without inaugurating a movement which has asceticism as its foundation. For this reason this essay is being written. A second reason is that an anthroposophical view is being asked for by those who educate young children. This essay is seen as a first attempt, which needs to be taken further and transformed for the sake of balance and an ever- increasing depth and breadth.

Also notable is that the analytic psychology of Freud, with marked alterations by Jung, was born in Vienna. One could say that a great deal of anthroposophy grew out of this city, this city so much situated between the East and West of Europe. This strategic positioning of Vienna is noted here, not only because the geographic situation is important, but also because the old of the East and the new of the West can be seen to meet in this city.

If careful review of Freud’s life is made, my thesis is that it is possible to discover that very ancient perspectives have insinuated themselves into analytic psychology and psychiatry through Freud. One of the old perspectives, which has do with the East, but as well the South, has to do with the mysteries of birth. The Birth Mysteries of Egypt, the Isis and Osiris Cults, are important, as are the semi-east Mysteries of ancient Greece. One need only look at the room where Freud did his analytic therapeutic work. This room is peopled by old statuary from Egyptian times. In contrast with this old of Vienna comes Rudolf Steiner, who with science, depth, and breadth seems to be walking down the streets of Vienna, going in just the opposite direction from Freud. It of course remains to be discovered by modern- day civilization just how modern Rudolf Steiner has been with his “spiritual scientific investigations.”

Rudolf Steiner tried to take up western civilization with its science and to transform this materialistic science for the sake of a soul and Spiritual Science. He saw the need for research into the soul and spirit, which was and is quite different from what is needed by materialistic science. He had much respect for true materialistic science. This means that he was very involved with the science of the day, seeking a way to extend, augment, or replace conventional science with a proper soul and Spiritual Science. It is his extensive research that has come to interest many scientists in our day, even though it is not an overwhelming number of scientists.

In contrast with the rather strict methods of research of science today, stands the research of the associationalist psychologists, who are busy with research and psychotherapy. It is the Associational Method of Freud that has become a great factor in present-day psychology. This method has been considered far too little to help with its valid applicability and its limitations. With some investigation, it can be found that “free association” is in fact the significant basis for much of the symptomatology of the ill person. For those dealing with illness, it takes little to see that not all symptoms are of sexual origin, as is asserted by those whose paradigm is solely sexual. In polarity with “free association” stands the exact thinking activity of the thinker involved in “free spiritual activity” as inaugurated by Rudolf Steiner.

A kind of non-science lives in the associational method–that is, letting the human mind, the soul, surface whatever might come forth out of inner depths. That instincts, urges, drives, desires live in the deep regions of the soul, this is not questioned today, but the unconscious was just surfacing at the turn of the century, when Freud and Rudolf Steiner walked the earth. In the healthy person it is possible to consider that the creativity of the artist lies in the more associational experiences of the soul, particularly if the artist strives for a higher soul-spiritual life and does not live out of simple urges, drives, and desires.

Rudolf Steiner’s method was and is to bring the impulse of initiation, soul-spiritual training, to meet what lies in the depths of the human being. Rudolf Steiner, through spiritual scientific research, could reveal that wish, judgment, motive, intention, and resolution are the more conscious side of the human will, as opposed to instinct, urge, drive, and desire.  Rudolf Steiner further elaborated the other regions of the soul that could lead to the experiencing of the spirit directly, either in idea form or by clear spiritual perception. The trained soul-spiritual activity he termed “free spiritual activity,” as just noted. Needed is the capacity to think in the form of pure ideas and experience: “pure thinking.”  As result of this pure thinking, Rudolf Steiner could evolve the Sophias, which only slowly come to be recognized. He worked out an Anthroposophy, began a Psychosophy, and laid a seed for a Pneumotosophy. These Sophias he grounded in a love, a deep love, the love of wisdom, or Philosophy. These Sophias stand in contrast with the metabolic-sexual orientation of the human being in modern times. At the same time, the metabolic sexual is not negated or downplayed by Rudolf Steiner, but it is contexted. Other dimensions are given by Rudolf Steiner. An attempt to use these “other” perspectives will be made in what follows. Perhaps the most significant research of Rudolf Steiner has led to the results that the human soul and spirit lie within the instincts, urges, drives, and desires, but are asleep there, as it were. When these depths are plummeted, what surfaces are what from ancient times have been called Karma (soul) and Reincarnation (spirit) and not just sexuality.

Thus, from the side of spiritual scientific investigation, sexuality is not denied. Instincts, urges, drives, and desires are of course very much a part of life, but what is not obvious is that the soul and spirit lies hidden in these depths. Rudolf Steiner pointed out again and again that there is a certain dilettante view in the purely sexual perspective. When the soul and spirit are perceived as independent agents in the human makeup, then depth psychology becomes the basis for a deeper revelation, that of karma and reincarnation. A real challenge from the indications given by Rudolf Steiner, given the essential sexual orientation of our time, is that karma today presents itself in the form of instinct. Here much discrimination is needed to differentiate instincts. Much is asked of us if we are to make such distinctions so that the sexual of the day can be seen through and the truly essential nature of the human core can become evident through karma and reincarnation.

Thus, from a spiritual scientific perspective, from an anthroposophical perspective, analytic depth psychology has a hidden component, not seen at first. The hidden component is that the depths of human makeup are his soul and spirit. These are revealed as the human core and can emerge from depths as instinct related to karma and reincarnation. Sexuality may be hidden but for the most part is not, and it is by no means the real core of the human being. Sexuality is but one dimension of the multi-dimensioned human being. The sexual theories of today cover the potential depth of the human being and therefore need penetration with a spiritual perspective. This will now be attempted as a very first effort, a first step, as it were.

2 – The Varied Makeup Of The Human Being
What one can learn from a depth perspective, from not only a psychology but a psychosophy, is that the view, the ideas, the perspective, the paradigm of human makeup can determine how we  try to understand the activities of human beings. If we view the human being wi th a monistic, materialistic orientation, then of course the caloric, the energy-driven metabolic system is the origin ofinstincts and drives, urges and desires. This monism reduces all  human functioning to the energies of substance transformations. With this perspective there is no need for designation of soulness. Those who are materialistic monists fight desperately to maintain this form of monism, and honestly say that they have no need to speak of a soul.

If, on the other hand, one takes soulness as a monism, as the only significant orientation, then the purely physical falls into the background to be negated, and only soul content becomes important. From this perspective, the sexual impulses can be seen as important and as significant, and, from a reductionistic point of view, can become the only significant aspect of the soul’s makeup and functioning. Such is the analytic and depth psychology of the psychoanalysts, or some of them. Note should be made that schools of thought (philosophical views) and schools of psychology (psychologies) are often not clear about their own orientation, as they make their particular perspective the only one. Once one begins to look for different views and perspectives, then a more open orientation is possible. What is needed is a method for validating the different views, a way to see where a view is valid.

Today human soulness, with many different perspectives on soulness, is beginning to consume humankind, along with the purely materialistic orientation noted above. It is hoped that this essay will point to an aspect of this soulness without closing the door to appreciating the vast dimensions of the human soul.

Another monism is that which has to do with the spiritual. This monism does away with the multifaceted dimensions of the soul and the often deterministic role of the body. In relation to the spiritual, it is just here that schools of thought, idea orientations, need to be considered. Schools of thought exist as spiritual reality for human beings but this reality is not cognized. It is just the idea that is not seen for what it is. Or, this idea content can be replaced by dogma, where cliched repetition replaces active thinking. When dogma replaces idea search, then fixed ideas become a kind of religion. Dogmatic ideas become the basis for comprehending the human being and its soul and spiritual activity. For the dogmatic semi-religious thinker, directives for behavior are given, are set. With this, ethical ideas are not sought and moral behavior is directed by commandment. This lack of ethical search and commandment directed behavior may well be far more common than realized. Authoritative views are sought from all sides. The rather independent and free thinker is not well tolerated, even in our time when we think that there is abundant freedom in the domain of ideas.

If, however, philosophical views are entertained as a possibility, then the thinking intellectual can live in the many experiences of idea activity–and the views concerning the makeup of the human being can become a part of this. Ideation, thinking, is a central concern for those who work with world views, and the human being is usually included in such views. When ideas that exist within differing world views are applied to the makeup of the human being, then a richness and depth can emerge in regard to the many experiences of we human beings.

However, the experiences of the thinking spirit may appear too limited for some, and a deepening asks for an inwardness that opens the door to mystical experiences. Here a monism may become that of mysticism, and all existence seeks depth experience through mystical vague sensations which come to fill the soul. Often such individuals attest to the depth of the soul but can articulate little except to say that each has feelings and these feelings have to be respected. Some mystics are more thinking, some more feeling, and some more intuitional-instinctual. The latter souls seek the depth of mystical experience in action, in life, in the flow of life events. Or, the same thinking spirit may seek a depth in an outward way. This outward seeking of deeper experiences leads to a kind of empirical search that can culminate in the laboratory bench or in a cultic celebration of a specific religion. With the mystic and the empiricist,  monisms, views which seek a single explanation of existence, gradually come to an end.

Thus we can see the trend of modern times coming out of a materialistic monism, even when those who hold such a view are not aware of their own orientation. In this regard we have taken a look at the bodily-will-driven human being. Such driven individuals, and there are a fair number who will even complain about their driven state, are the ones who easily fall prey to our sexually oriented advertising and our sexually drenched civilization. The newspapers are continually reporting about men who cannot keep their hands off women or the women who are continually seducing men without an apparent awareness of the potential consequences other than sexual fulfillment. Female sexual seduction goes on in the form of the dress, makeup, and the endless emphasis on the seductive capacities of women.

The monism of soulness is being sought on all sides, as is evident with the many differing approaches to psychology, particularly the depth psychologies. A continual rummaging of the soul takes place today, so that satisfaction is taken in the experiences of the soul without a sense of where this soulness will lead. The emphasis on soulness often leads to a self-centeredness that makes social relationships more and more difficult. Many a psychotherapy winds up removing the human being from a place in the social circumstance, rather than helping the individual to become a part of a social organism. Relatedness is very much a part of the soul search today, when loneliness is experienced by ever more individuals and feared by all. On this soul path it can easily appear that as soulness is sought it is being lost.

Finally and again, the monism of the spiritual can be sought in outward religious cult. That there is a monism of the all-pervasiveness of the spirit, this is not considered by most. The monism that results in religious practice and cult tends to separate out human beings from the course of daily life and action. Retreats of so many types are devised for this purpose if the regular Sunday service is not sufficient. Only a few realize that the human spirit might be approached via the higher transformation of intellect, its discipline and methods for higher training though thinking experiences, and that retreats are not needed, but active involvement in life. A spiritual thinking which takes hold of life and does not retreat from life appears to be a dire need.

Body, soul, and spirit are on trial, as it were, with each threatening to eliminate the other. The way the human body is approached by science today, little can be found to support a soul. The spirit is not existent for the thoroughgoing materialist. It is difficult to grasp that anything but bodily function exists, although more and more human beings begin to speak of experiences of a more soul and spiritual nature. In our materialistic times, it is the body that is a stumbling block. Another perspective can be that, with an anthroposophical assist, just this marvelous, complex, and puzzling body, the human organism, can be approached so that other views than are current might be possible. This is what I would like to try, and I will use this as an approach to the problem of sexuality and the problem of sex in our day.

3 – Beginning An Anthroposophical Perspective
A quite new way to begin with the human physical makeup is given by Rudolf Steiner when he speaks about the mission of the Archangel Michael. One can wonder why it takes an Archangel to bring such a view and focus. The focus with this Michaelic perspective is that of Dualizing the human body. This duality emphasizes the roundness of the head and the crescent-to-elongate makeup of the human organism from the neck down. A kind of sphere and pillared form is the result. Few human beings construct such an imagination of the human form consciously. The child, however, often makes pencil sketches of a sphere with sticks to support the sphere. Another way to come to this image is for one human being to perceive another human being without a head, as it were. There are actually a number who in fact have such an experience. This of course may be said to be a bit abnormal, but may actually point to a rather unusual state of the soul. I would call this state that of experiencing the duality between soul and body. Individuals inclined to be soul searchers tend to see other human beings without a head. The searcher finds the other soul in action, in doing, in common activity.

One can seek another type of duality in human history. This was done and often spoken of by Rudolf Steiner. It is possible, but not absolutely necessary, to look at the Ecumenical Council of 869 AD as evidence of such a dualization of the human being. Before that Council, the human being was understood as body, soul, and spirit in the cultural evolution taking place in the western world. In 869 AD, a group of Church officials gathered to say that the human being was body and soul, with the soul bringing forth spiritual activities. The spirit from this perspective is then in fact only soul. This Ecumenical Council eliminated the spirit, which in turn laid the seed to eliminate the soul. The elimination of the soul took place in the nineteenth century–nearly a thousand years later. Few except Rudolf Steiner have traced this sequence in human history. Today this dogma of the soul and the body is perpetuated with some religious confessions, but I tend to see it emerging in the present “Mind-Body Movement” in therapeutics.

During the time following the Council, a period of a thousand years as just noted, the body emerged as the reality. Slowly the monism of the body with soul and spirit-like activities was born. The nervous system became the “soul” and all else the “body.” Today most accept that the nervous system is the soul without it being noted. This is due to the fact that few human beings really think about the nature of the human being. A good number in the mind-body movement who see the soul in the nervous system do not note that they are creating a materialistic monism. They make the distinction between the nervous system and all other bodily structures, particularly the immune system, as with psychoneuroendocrinology.

There are others that speak of the soul as independent of the body. They speak of consciousness. How this consciousness relates to the body is either not articulated or, if it is, the monistic materialistic model of the nervous system and the remainder of the body is often employed.

It is Rudolf Steiner who took great pains to reintroduce the trinity of body, soul, and spirit. At the same time, it is he who then also introduced the Michaelic duality, of head and trunk, as a purely physical revelation of a depth in human makeup. My impression is that this is a truly Michaelic revelation, one that was given Rudolf Steiner by this Archangel. This unusual perspective on the physical makeup of the human being can help us wrestle with the trinitary makeup of the human being. So far I have found that it is only Rudolf Steiner who has presented this duality, a duality morphologically expressed by the gross configuration of the human being. This duality lies at the hand of sense perception, but to make such a perceptual judgment requires the thinking soul. The head can be seen, touched, moved, and addressed, as it were. No higher capacities are needed, but careful observation is needed to make a duality with the remainder of the organism. Here Rudolf Steiner is totally empirical and bodily oriented, a pure empiricist, as it were. This can be our point of departure.

What type of body is this? It is a body that originated in the oldest of times (Saturn evolution) and became slowly what it is today. How can one come to this impression of an obvious twofold body? It can become an impression by experiencing the tension between the head and all else. This tension can then become a deep inward shock. That the round head has an attached elongate organization can become a very deep shock. It is not so easy to make an elongate pillar out of a spherical structure. This can bring about a deep shock, an inner shock, which leads to questionings and a sense of different origins for the head and the remainder of the organism. Out of this shock can come the sense that the very body, the outer garment of one’s own soul is a gift from other domains, is a creation by other intelligences than one’s own. The experience of the head is such that it is sensed strongly as an agent of intelligence, while the remainder of the body stands in darkness, inpenetrable by the intelligence of normal consciousness. An immediate sense for other “beings” somewhat akin to one’s own “being” can surface. Such can be an experience of the body if it is carefully observed.

It can become quite real that one’s own body is given to one, is a gift from elsewhere, perhaps from other spiritual beings. Certainly one’s organism has been received from one’s parents, but the form is a different matter. This form can be used to awaken one. The element of heredity is far less in one’s consciousness than the human form when another person is being observed. One hears that one has a heredity that relates one with one’s ancestors, but the dual suggests a relation with beings who have an intelligence somewhat as one’s own. Thus this Dual introduced by Rudolf Steiner can be considered to be a powerful awakener. The dual can, as it were, shock one, become an aid to awaken. It can be used to shock one into fundamental questions and a state of questioning one’s relation with one’s spiritual ancestry, while one’s physical ancestors can become far more remote. The shock can help us ask about our makeup in relation to other spiritual beings. In this process of questioning, one might come to an identity which is not of hereditary origin. At the same time, one can come to sense that one’s identity is not such that one’s own being could construct such an instrument as the “Holy Body.” That there can be such a Being as a God, as a Jehovah, this might arise in the soul, might come as a question.

With this as a searching mood it is possible to turn to the research of Rudolf Steiner. One can seek what he has uncovered with this spiritual scientific research as well as his conventional research. From Rudolf Steiner’s research it is possible to discover that heredity came quite late in world evolution. Heredity is a product of the spiritual being known to the Hebrew as Jehovah. We learn about this Spiritual Being from Rudolf Steiner’s efforts. The evolution of the body can be followed from a spiritual scientific perspective until the time of late Lemuria and early Atlantis (the Ice Age) without the presence of a soul. From Spiritual Science we can come to a view that the human body was determined by spiritual beings without the presence of a human soul or individuality. It is during the time of late Lemuria that Jehovah then stepped into the fashioning of the body so that a living memory, heredity, could be born. The result was an instrument for the incarnation of the individuality, and this instrument could be propagated. It was after Jehovah (a Mighty Spirit of Form, and His Hosts) had created heredity that the human soul, the individuality, could be born into the body. The human individuality came quite late into the human body, and became a living soul when something of a higher nature of humankind was breathed into the body, as the individual soul was being birthed into the body. Through this “breath” (spirit-self, life-spirit, and spirit-man or Atma) Jehovah then could make the hereditary body into an instrument, so that the individual could become a “living soul.” It is then that another dual came into existence. This dual is man and woman.

If we come to look at the dual of the body, and then make the shift to the dual of body and soul, we quite naturally come to a third dual, the dual of man and woman. The head and the trunk, the soul and the body, can lead quite naturally to the dual of man and woman. This third dual came into existence at the time that the individual was born into a hereditarily determined body, and a body that had a higher nature placed into it. The individual became a part of the evolving body just when the division between man and woman came about. With this line of contemplation we come to a very direct relation between the individuality, the ego, and the dual makeup of all human beings today, that is the dual of man and woman.

Here, with a perspective from anthroposophical Spiritual Science, we come to the fact that the human soul, which can work upwards towards the spirit (through spirit-self, life-spirit, and spirit-man), is given this potential by having a part of the fundamental bodily makeup held apart. A part of the man and a part of the woman is held apart. It is precisely the portion that is held apart that became the basis for the individual, out of himself or herself to strive upwards towards the spirit. If one pursues an understanding of this “other part” of  man or  woman, one can find this other part actively forming and then using the embryonic membranes. These membranes are cast off at birth and the liberated forces become available for nourishment (spirit-self activity), for healing (life-spirit activity), and for breathing (spirit-man activity). (All of these forces are used for initiation if a path of initiation is taken.)

On the other side, on the side of the body where hereditary rules, the human soul has to penetrate through the senses to the world around and within the body itself. The bodily makeup of the human being has inherent in it the senses, which at first were sevenfold in makeup (from the time of ancient Saturn), then became tenfold (the time of Atlantis), and finally became the twelve physical senses one can speak of at the present time. Three higher senses are possible. It is from the time of the Flood, the time of the Ice Age, when the senses became opened to the outer world, that the division between male and female became finalized (the division began in later Lemuria). The receding of the Flood and the appearance of the rainbow speak to this moment in history in the book of Genesis, when the senses became active in the way they are today, more or less. At the same time that the senses were maturing and the rainbow appeared to the human being, the division became complete so that, with each individual, only a part of his full nature is brought forth. The other half, as it were, became a potential for self-directed, self-unfolded spiritual life. The maturing senses helped the earthly part of the individual to unfold. Because only a part of the human being, of all human beings, incarnated, it remained a potential for each to be able to strive towards that which remained as a higher element in the spiritual world. This potential for a higher life made it possible for each to become more and more individual. At first human beings came to earth guided by “group-soul” beings, but with a spiritual germ remaining behind, it became possible for individuality to become a reality.

One way to consider the half of the human being that did not incarnate, that was created by the division of the sexes, is to think that the other half brought about the membranes for embryonic development. These same membrane forces, then, after birth can be used for a striving towards higher life, for activating the inmost core of each. These higher forces are operative in the molding of the human fetus for only nine months, then in nourishment, healing-breathing, and striving for initiation. It is in later life that these forces, the forces of spiritual man (spirit-self, life-spirit, and spirit-man), can become a basis for spiritual striving.

Rudolf Steiner has made the point that, from the perspective of anthroposophy, the starting point for contemplating the human being as a sopheic being is the physical senses. As noted several times, the dual or twofoldness was introduced morphologically with the head and the trunk. This dual led to a next dual, that of the body and soul. Now, by introducing the twelve senses, we come to a potential for another dual. This dual is the one that can be seen, on the side of the physical body, with the twelve senses and, on the other side, by considering the emerging individual who can take a path to the soul and spiritual worlds. With the sense system, one is led to a twelvefold view of the physical–the physical of the ego. This twelvefolding then becomes the basis for a sopheic perspective. The dual with this twelve is the one, the single individuality that constitutes the human being when incarnated. (Once a spiritual path is taken, the ego becomes more and more complex, eventuating in a sevenfoldness.)

That the human being has twelve senses, this is a new creation and finding by Rudolf Steiner. The human being is very basically related to himself and the world in a twelvefold manner. This is the finding of Rudolf Steiner’s researches. With this we are led to a physical that is far more complex than the dual of head and trunk or the dual of body and soul. With the twelve senses and the individual, a dual appears which opens the way for the individual to create higher senses. Now a potential door is open to the spirit. The door to the spiritual world can be thought to begin with a quest for wisdom, for sophia as a method of unfolding higher faculties.

The steps from the dual of the body with head and trunk, to the dual of body and soul, and finally to the dual of twelve senses and the individual, these are essential aspects of the human being found in a basic anthroposophical perspective on the human makeup. From the outset, the human being can be seen from more and more perspectives, one of which is the dual of male and female. Male and femaleness, this dual needs a very broad context. My impression is that the first of the duals is given by the spiritual world, at the hand of an Archangel, that is Michael, so that our path, our search, is supported out of the spirit. Starting with this dual we can make our way to other duals and then to a trinitary perspective, and progressively more diverse perspectives. Such a roundabout way in dealing with sexuality, including the complexity of thoughts, is deemed necessary in order that one can have decidedly non-sexual contemplative experiences.

What seems very important to me is that the starting point for an anthroposophical Spiritual Science is the body. Today, with our materialistic orientation, it is the body that should be the starting point. The problem becomes, however, how to build up a knowledge of the body so that it supports soul and spirit. Our beginning with the dual of the body, then the dual of the soul, to arrive at twelve senses standing in dual with the single, the one individual, all this is needed to lead over to a threefold perspective on the human makeup. In the process, the emerging individuality with the division of the sexes and a potential for conscious spiritual life is brought along. For anyone who has worked at the duals, the threefolding emerges, as it were, almost of itself. It is the dual of the twelve senses and the individual that then places the individual between the physical and the spiritual world, asking for a recognition of this threefoldness. This threefoldness is that of the body with the senses, the individual as a soul, and the spirit towards which the individual can strive.

The twelvefoldness becomes evident as one works with ideas which can become twelvefolded as well. With the twelvefold perspective, one’s own identity and one’s relation with the body slowly changes. This one can experience. In this way one’s identity is not at all a dual, but a single entity molding a space for itself, while a relation with the world is created in process with the many senses, while ideas become more and more complex. It is the sopheic, the love of the sopheic, or philosophy, which permits the grouping of ideas into philosophical views, twelve views. One’s identity in this way becomes progressively not of the body alone, but one senses that one can become free of the body with the twelve senses. Living in the twelve philosophical perspectives, ideas grouped in a meaningful way, permits the individual to find a new identity with a particular set of ideas. One’s identity can then be recognized as related to ideas and one’s identity can with effort become that of a thoughtful individual. An individual can then be somewhat identified with a “world view.”

What further do these experiences of the twofold and the twelvefold bring? One can experience that the twofold addresses a physical-hereditary makeup, while the twelvefoldness sensitizes the searcher to another bodily relation and one’s own being. The sensitivity points to the senses needed for an individuality to be present in the body. The body is of one source; the soul-spirit, one’s own being, is of another source–this becomes more and more an experience. This is not merely a thought, but a delicate experience. One, however, then needs to be able to live quite actively in ideas, and not only in the senses.

To make the dual experiential and not just an idea is not so easy. What one can find is that Rudolf Steiner has taken this monism of our day, the purely physical bodily makeup, and he has first pointed to the dual. By this means, the searching soul in relation to the body can begin to have quite new bodily experiences precisely because a number of the senses spoken of by Rudolf Steiner is far from what one knows with conventional sensology. Here is a list of the twelve senses addressed by the anthroposophical paradigm: 1) Sense of touch, 2) Sense of life, 3) Sense of movement, 4) Sense of space-balance, 5) Sense of taste, 6) Sense of smell, 7) Sense of warmth, 8) Sense of sight, 9) Sense of hearing, 10) Sense of word, 11) Sense of idea, and 12) Sense of ego.

It is the sense of sight that one uses to perceive another human being as a dual, with head and trunk. The use of the sense of sight is fairly well-known to most of us; however, if one begins to seek duals as here mentioned, then even the activity of the sense of sight begins to undergo changes. The dual here addressed with the sense of sight has to do with morphological comparison–the round of the head and the elongate makeup of the remainder of the body. In order to have such morphological perceptions, to make morphological comparisons, a number of other senses have to become active. In ordinary psychology a perception of a form is called Gestalt perception. When this type of perception is considered from an anthroposophical perspective,  it can be seen that a number of senses noted above have to be active. The sense of movement, balance, and touch are all active. A comparison with one’s own bodily shape has to take place as another body is perceived in terms of a form or forms. When a duality is to be perceived, then the capacity to make distinctions in sense perceptions is needed. Judgment, perceptual judgments, are needed. What may appear to be simple is far from simple when morphological perception is a starting point. This is interjected here just to share that this is by no means a usual approach, and some efforts have to be made to make what is shared experiential.

If the twelvefoldness of the senses then comes into question, not just a twofoldness, then the process becomes much more complex. One’s experiences of another human being from such a twelvefold perspective brings an astonishingly broadening experience to the seeker. The human being begins to appear extremely manifold. It is in the manifoldness that the dual of the individual then needs to arise. Out of twelve the one has to be able to emerge. Twelve and one become another dual.

The dualization of the twelve and the one brings the human individuality of the one into relation with the world, so that a relatedness to the world dawns along with the individual, the individual ego. In the process the individual ego comes to be experienced as a being of activity, active in manifold activities of sense experience. The sense experience is with the world as well as oneself. With sight one can slowly come to experience that one steps outside of oneself, and the meeting of another human being in sight is not in the body as it were. Space, the space between individuals, slowly becomes social space. This is particularly the case with sight. With the other senses it is just a little different. The senses on this path can bring quite new meanings to the term social.

If now we look at another human being with the senses, and the goal is to take up the dual of the sexes, the male and the female, then this dual appears in the midst of a rich and manifold world of duals as we have just been considering. This, it seems to me, needs to be repeated again and again. Male and female as a dual does not become the sole dual but only a part of a much larger fabric. The immensity of the male and the female becomes contexted, as it were. Without this effort to expand the comprehension of the human being, in order to try to bring an anthroposophical perspective to sex, to male and female, the twelve senses in relation to the ego, it is all too easy to fall into the dual that is of sexual origin. The twelvefold makeup of the human physical body is particularly important so that the individual emerges before maleness and femaleness of the body is contemplated.

It seems to me to be crucial to find the undivided individual, the ego, so that the domain of sexuality with a duality can be seen with an overriding principle of a unity. The twelve of the physical and the one of the individuality can be carried over to our further contemplations of the human sexual makeup.

4 – Time And History-With A Future
Rudolf Steiner has given an interesting perspective on a dual, which he had to resolve before he could go ahead with his esoteric work. This dual, he notes, arises not out of the outer form of man (man and woman) nor the more inner with the senses and the individual, but with the inner of the soul itself. In this case the dual has to do with the two members of the human makeup: that is, the etheric–the life body, and the astral body or soul body. These two can be met, can be experienced in the form of time; they are dualized in time or polarized in time. As noted, the one pole is the etheric and the other pole is the astral. Together they work so that the etheric in its differentiations, warmth, light, tone, and life ethers, can form a basis for the soul life of thinking, feeling, and willing. The astral penetrated by the ego permits the birth of the soul life, that of the thinking, feeling, and willing when the astral is carried into the etheric by the ego. However, the etheric and the astral can as well come to be experienced as different dimensions in time.

In terms of time, the etheric body can be experienced as a memory body. The etheric carries memory we might say. A sense for memory can emerge from the soul in thinking. The astral body can be experienced also as a time being, but it is time that is yet to come. The future is experienced out of the soul active in will. The not yet, the sense for futurity, can slowly emerge as the astral is experienced soul-wise. With feeling there is a weaving between the past and the future. Time becomes soul-rich, and is not something that is an abstract concept. Time is dualized now, in order that that which is sexual can be placed in time, in a time span, and seen along with other events in human history, in the human being coming into existence, and as well, distinctions between etheric and astral can be made.

An outline of the duals and time polarity is then:
Sense perceptible dual—–head and the trunk of the body
Intuited dual—————-12 senses and the single individual
Mobile polarity————-etheric and astral

Now what is important is to look at an essential difference between that etheric and the astral. The former is related so much to life and its metamorphosis into memory. The etheric, which can be fourfolded into warmth, light, tone, and life, becomes transformed into memory so that the four becomes one when it comes to individual memory, but becomes four again in cosmic memory.

The astral, on the other hand, carries the future, that which is full of activity when more will directed. The astral is full of movement, as it were, and the movement can be differentiated into thinking, feeling, and willing. The movement, the inner movement of thinking, takes up more the personal memory of the individual before birth, while the willing takes up more what is to be brought to the future, after death.

Here is another outline to add dimensions to time:
Etheric differentiated into warmth, light, tone, and life
Astral differentiated into thinking, feeling, and willing
Etheric carries the past with thinking–from pre-birth
Etheric weaves in the present with feeling–from midnight hour
Etheric is moralized with willing–for the future

This dual-polarity is, then, important for all human beings, as it speaks so directly to the soul of each individual. As the morphological makeup of the human being directs the human being to the 12 senses and the single individual, so the soul life of the human being points to memory with the past, the inner soul life of feeling, and the future soul life in willing.

It is this dual-pole in the makeup of the human being that Rudolf Steiner had to wrestle out as he sought to comprehend the makeup of the human being and how this human being stood in the world. The human being he found is not only a morphological being, but is as well a being who lives in time, with memory and future. Each human being has his or her own memory, but on this path a memory can be found for the larger world as well. The larger world contains the human and has a past and a future. Both past and future have to be grasped with the ever-weaving reality of the present. True history, then, can only be taken hold of if personal history is dealt with, and world or cosmic history as well. Their relation has to be appreciated, and set forth with clarity. One history cannot be dealt with without the other.

The etheric of time permits that the individual could be approached, with cosmic and then individual history. This individual then can be found to be recurring, reincarnating or revisiting a body with a number of dual components. One might ask what the purpose is for returning to the earth from a cosmic existence, or what might occur because of this process. One statement might be that the individual ego, the person in the body, can become a higher person, and more and more of an individual. What might this mean? It could mean that the ego could become an increasingly able being who can carry ever higher spiritual beings of the Hierarchical world. Such a formulation could mean that the “I” can say “not-I” but a higher spiritual being “in me”.

On the other hand, the astral, the pole with the etheric, helps us approach the moral, the ethical-moral, so that past sins, omissions, errors, or even evils can be rectified. The astral points to a future that has been laid out as a result of a past. This correction of the past, this rectification, can be called working with karma. This is a working with a past karma. But the astral also contains a future which is not only dependent on the past, but is evolved out of intentions which are quite new for each individual. By this means, the human being has not only a past karma but a future one as well. It would be important to find the intentions for the future, intentions not dependent on the past. On this path to find intentions, the soul can be lifted to rather lofty spiritual heights, to the domain where ideas can become moral ideas, ethical ideas. With this step from idea to moral idea, the idea can become a potential ideal for the individual. Here the future looms for the individual who assembles the numerous duals in an individual way. The individual becomes overriding of the different duals and by this means a master of them as well. Again, this is pointed to so that the dual of the sexual, the male and the female, is not seen as ruler but rather can be, with effort, ruled.

Such considerations were worked with by Rudolf Steiner, but of course elaborated differently by him and assuredly in a better way. However, each who works with this type of content has to make his or her own way. Thus this sharing. The contemplations can then be seen as following Rudolf Steiner walking, fighting his way, struggling his way with “Time,” into which the dual of sexual differences has to be placed.

5 – Time, Man, Woman, Masculine, And Feminine
Armed with the preceding considerations, we can, as it were, fight our way to another dual. This is a dual which again has no outer manifestation and cannot be considered separate from the sexual makeup of the human being. This dual is that of the masculine and the feminine. But before taking up the feminine or the masculine from a spiritual scientific perspective, it is necessary to speak of man and woman. This can be done in the light of what Rudolf Steiner has given with his investigations into the cosmic and human evolution, and now appears as the reason for the time contemplations that proceeded this section.

Let us take up the evolutionary steps that have to do with the human being. To do this we can go back as far as Old Saturn evolution. We are enlightened by Spiritual Science that, on Saturn, the kingdom of the Human Being came into existence. On Sun, the kingdom of the Animal was birthed. On Moon, the Plant kingdom and on Earth, the Mineral kingdom.

Now if we turn to Earth evolution, again stages or evolutionary steps have been identified by Spiritual Science as well as by the Old Testament (with Genesis). It is the descriptions from both Spiritual Science and the Old Testament that will be used with this next step.
According to Spiritual Science, three recapitulatory steps can be seen at the beginning of the Earth evolution. These three steps or recapitulatory stages overshadow three epochs which have been called “racial epochs.” The recapitulatory phases can be seen as kinds of shadows which stand and work on the etheric level, while a slightly more physical level is evolving with the races epochs. Over long, long ages, these racial epochs pass from race to culture as the future of mankind unfolds from the beginning of Earth evolution. Racial epochs pass to cultural periods. The racial epochs and cultural periods are:

Polarian racial epoch
Hyperborean racial epoch
Lemurian racial epoch
Atlantean racial epoch
Post-Atlantean cultural periods
Indian cultural period
Persian cultural period
Egyptian cultural period
Greek cultural period
European cultural period
Slavice cultural period
American cultural period
Sixth cultural-racial epoch
Seventh cultural-racial epoch

At present we are in the post-Atlantean epoch living out the European cultural period. We are moving towards epochs where culture will become determinative of races. This means that the purely hereditary racial impulses will gradually fade, and cultural activities with moral life will determine human relations in the future. In this vista, racial to cultural, we can place the sexual, which originates more or less during Lemuria and will pass as the cultural periods penetrate and transform the human being who became sexual during Lemuria-Atlantis. By the time of the seventh cultural-racial epoch, procreation by sexual means is meant to come to an end.W ith this historical perspective, which is cosmic, earthly-racial, and progressive soul-spiritual-cultural, we can take up man and woman, feminine and masculine.

Let us ask where the human being was at the time that the human kingdom came into existence. As noted, this question points all the way back to Saturn evolution. At that time, the human being was in the lap of the spiritual world as far as ego-existence is concerned. The human ego was born out of the domain of the Exusiai but only much later. On Saturn what belongs to the human being, what was brought forth was a physical body. This physical body was the derivative of what the Thrones sacrificed as astral substance to the world for further evolution. On Old Saturn, the physical body of the human being was in an astral condition, and the ego-ness of the human being was totally within the bosom of the Exusiai. During this evolutionary incarnation of the earth, the physical body was worked through by all the hierarchies so that a spirit-man was formed for the human being, anticipating the future.

Next, on Sun evolution, an etheric element, a life element, was added to the human being. A soul and individual element was not yet part of the human being. This living element, this life body, was such that it was worked through by the spiritual beings so that a higher form of the life body, the life-spirit, came into existence.

The Moon evolution saw the Spirits of Movement, the Dynamis, bring forth out of renunciation the principle, the element, the member we call the astral body. By the end of this evolution, the astral body was penetrated and worked through so that a “spirit-self” came into existence. Still no individuality, no ego was present, so that at that time the human being consisted only of a physical, life, and astral body by the end of Moon evolution. A potential for higher states of evolution for these members, that is, spirit-man, life-spirit, and spirit-self hovered before the human being for the future. However, first the human being needed an ego.

With the advent of Earth evolution, the three evolutions again came forth out of cosmic sleep, during which time the higher members were able to evolve; in particular, the etheric evolved from light, to tone, to life. This will be taken up later with much more detail. As already noted, these three evolutions stood like a shadow behind the racial evolutionary periods of early Earth evolution, the Earth embodiment of the earth.

With the first earthly evolutionary epoch, the Polarian racial epoch, with Saturn standing behind, there came forth a physical body that was all warmth, physical warmth, which had progressed from the more soul warmth of Saturn, to living, and then to soul fire warmth of Earth-Polaria. This warmth was more like fire, as it were. At this phase of unfolding, the ego still was within spiritual beings, within the hierarchical world. At this stage of Earth evolution, the human being was earth and human both, both at the same time. A potential for an “all-human” existence pervaded the evolution.

The next epoch, the Hyperborean racial epoch, with Sun evolution standing behind, brought about conditions that permitted a life body to be added to the physical body. At the same time, a kind of auxiliary plant kingdom came into existence along with the human physical kingdom. This plant kingdom was breathed out of the human being, and in-breathed were the higher principles, the spiritual principles–that is, spirit-man, life-spirit, and spirit-self. They were breathed into the human being by God, by Jehovah, along with the warm-fiery substance which then condensed to air. Elementals were born in this warm air breathed into the human being. Still the human being did not have an individual ego. The all-human from Polaria became more a human with a beingness given by the etheric of the Sun. A potential for “human­ beingness” lived at this time of evolution.

With the advent of the Lemurian racial epoch, with the Moon evolution behind, the animal was excreted from the human organization, which gained an astral body. The breath gained a kind of soul-element as it already had higher principles at work in breathing. The breath gained a “living soul” element which could begin to mediate between the body and the spirit. The makeup of the potential all-human and the potential human-being was largely etheric, with materiality still in an ethereal-astral condition. It is at this time that the potential “all-human” and “human-being” became “androgynous man.” A kind of Man-Woman came into existence. As yet there was nothing that could be called sex.

We might consider that the taking of the rib from the side of Adam to create Eve can be thought of as the spiritual world taking a part of the physical makeup of Adam to create Eve. The process is from the side near the heart. This taking of the rib we might consider as taking place in the time of Lemuria. Nothing of reproduction is indicated, and the process of separating man and woman is a spiritual activity of the Gods, as it were. The man of that time was more physical-spiritual, while the woman was more life-etheric and soul in makeup. Still the ego was within the bosom of the Gods, the spiritual hierarchical world. One might consider that the human kingdom was breathed into existence, the plant kingdom was breathingly secreted into existence, and so at this time the animal kingdom was breathingly excreted into existence. What was “all-human” potential from Polaria, and “human-being” potential from Hyperborea, now during Lemuria became “masculine and feminine” in potential. True division into the sexes was not yet there and only came towards the end of the Lemurian racial epoch.

Now comes Atlantis, or the time of the Ice Age. It is at this time that we can speak of the separation of the sexes, so that the potential all-human, the potential human-being, and the potential masculine and feminine became male and female, with the all-human, the human being, and the masculine and feminine as germs for the future. The masculine and the feminine can be thought of evolving out of the tendency of man and woman, but first male and female had to appear. For the first time in world history, the sexual is established. At the same time, the potentially individual ego was being given out of the Hierarchy of the Elohim, the Exusiai. The potential for the single individual to master the duals of man and woman, the masculine and the feminine, as well as maleness and femaleness was born with this gift by the Elohim in birthing the human ego.

The first “man” to be born on earth as male has been called Adam as we hear from the Genesis. But this birth was not a simple matter. With the birth of the first man, Adam, a counterpart to Adam was left in the spiritual world. This counterpart has been known as Adam Kadmon. With the birth of the woman, as well as the man, counterparts appear to have been left in the spiritual world.

Those who saw more deeply into existence came to address this counterpart in the spiritual world, this “sister-soul” of Adam. I would identify this more cosmic aspect of Adam or Adam Kadmon out of whom Adam was born. From my searches it appears that the Adam Kadmon becomes evident in human life with the structuring of the embryonic membranes. As the fetus currently swims in the waters of the amnion, within the embryonic membranes, so the first Man, Adam, can be thought of as an ethereal being swimming in the waters of existence, to gradually be born onto solid earth (when the Ark rested on solid ground as it were). Adam or the earth was surrounded not by membranes but by Adam Kadmon. The embryonic period therefore can be seen as a mirror of that time, the time of Lemuria to Atlantis before the Fall and the coming to rest of the Ark that is actually man.

Thus Adam was still quite ethereal at the beginning of Atlantis. Slowly the solid was coming into existence. As Polaria birthed the Human kingdom, Hyperborea birthed the Plant kingdom, and Lemuria birthed the Animal kingdom, so Atlantis birthed the Mineral kingdom. The birth of the ego into the human being at that time brought a core to the evolving human being. It was the Exusiai who birthed the ego for the human being as he became male and female. Thus much took place before male and female came forth, and there lies within the human being much that is not sexual if we do not think that all that has preceded the sexual stage of human unfolding was lost.

One can still carry the image of God taking a rib from Adam to fashion Eve as true reproduction but without sexual processes taking place. Sexual processes evolved slowly. Sexual reproduction as noted above took place when the pair, Adam and Eve, saw that they were naked–that is, could experience themselves as physical beings of differing sexual makeup, but also experienced the spiritual world as lofty, far above them, and therefore their shame. They had to hide their reproductory organs as they were still brought to reproductive activity by spiritual beings. My impression is that sexual activity as we know it today did not take place with consciousness and with the pleasures that are part of the sexual activity in our day. All then was still far more in the hands of the gods. The loftiness of the spiritual beings active in recreative activity made Adam and Eve sense their lowliness, and for this reason they experienced shame. I would interpret their shame as a result of their activity in the face of the activity of the loftiest spiritual beings, who are active in the recreative process, be it spiritual activity or physical procreative activity. They could begin to experience their lowliness in comparison to the activity of the higher spiritual world first and foremost in the process of reproduction. We can learn that shame comes out of the experience of the human being standing before the loftiness of the spiritual world unless one has arrived there though initiation or by grace. The sense for self was, and remains, much more lowly than the experience of standing before the beings of the hierarchies. For the first time, the mineral and plant (the apple tree) appear in mineral form, solid form, at the point when the human being, Adam and Eve, could experience shame. They for the first time could experience their existence outside the domain of the hierarchies.

From a spiritual perspective, shame is an important recognition for the human being, a recognition that the greatness of his bodily creation far outstrips his own capacity, particularly in the case of reproduction. Today there is a slight echo of this shame in the lives of some human beings, but they do not know where this comes from. I would suggest it comes from a sense that the process of reproduction opens the door to the workings of higher worlds (I am not now including the more lowly soul experiences of sensual sexual life).

The expulsion of Paradise can be seen as the human being becoming an actual physical being who before the expulsion was more of an etheric being. It is only at this step that the sexual comes into existence, if this line of contemplation is followed, and shame could appear in human evolution by dint of the gift of an ego by the Elohim, who tower above the human condition. This can be outlined:

Polaria– the potential “all-humanness” – born of spirit fire creativity – an astral condition
Hyperborea– the potential for “human-beingness” – breathed out of the Gods – an astral and etheric condition
Lemuria– the potential for man and woman as masculine and feminine secreted-excreted by the spiritual world – an etheric condition
Atlantis– man-woman become male and female sweated out by the spiritual world – an etheric to physical condition

6 – The Birth Of The Ego And The Mineral Kingdom
If we follow up this line of thinking, we come to the fact that the Mineral kingdom was the last kingdom to be born in earth. At the same time, the ego became the core of the human being. The way Rudolf Steiner depicts the birth of the ego is that it died out of the hierarchy of the Elohim. This is the imagination that Rudolf Steiner gives in the cycle called Inner Realities of Evolution.  As the ego is born into the astral, etheric, and physical bodies, there are changes in each of these bodies. The physical body becomes solid, or a portion becomes solid with the advent of Atlantis. The etheric is condensed from a light organization to a warmth element. Warmth-ether is not present until Atlantis. Warmth-ether is brought about by a condensation which is the result of the activity of the Jehovah Elohim–that is, a specific Elohim. (There are other Elohim–not all are of the same rank and capacity.) The astral goes through a complex evolution. During the early phases of Earth evolution, the astral,which receives an ego, gains an impulse to the all-human, to human beingness, to man-woman, masculine-feminine, and then finally male and female. The male-female division of the astral body could then bring about the male and female physical differentiation by working via the etheric organization.

A perspective can be that the sun exited during Hyperborea, which was brought about by Pleuromic Elohim, Elohim who stayed behind on old Saturn evolution. The exit of the sun from the earth brought about the more masculine of the human being. The earth-moon carried the more feminine quality of cosmic evolution. With the exit of the moon, Jehovah was active, which led to the capacity of Jehovah to condense light-ether to warmth-ether. With the condensation of the ether, the Elohim who had taken the moon out of the earth became the Elohim that came to be known as the Jehovah God. It is from other Elohim that the ego of human beings was “deathed” into existence. This means that the ego was totally separated from the source of origin. This also means that the element of death, a total separation from source, is inherent in the ego, requiring the ego to bring about a re-union as a goal. The re-union can be called “re–ligere,” to reunite. This goal of reuniting is a goal for the ego. The ego was separated in coming into existence, bringing an impulse to death but also one to re-unite. Such can be seen as a source of religion.

The human ego, we can consider, incarnated into the evolving physical, etheric, and astral bodies because the warmth-ether had been brought into existence. Through the warmth-ether the ego could slowly come to penetrate the existent bodies or organizational principles. These bodies were the dual astral body (masculine and feminine), the fourfold ether body (warmth-, light-, tone-, and life-ether), and the physical body, which existed with the four states of matter. With the advent of the ego, the dual of masculine and feminine could come to penetrate into the physical body to bring about the physical structures characteristic of the two sexes. The physical became a dual sexually speaking. As the physical became dualized, however, the ego remained a single entity. The ego itself remained above the dual of male and female, working out of the spirit to bring about the threefold soulness–that is, thinking, feeling, and willing.

Two further details need to be addressed. The first is that as the physical became mineral and slowly became solid it was penetrated by sub-earthly forces. The sub-earthly forces come about as a result of the ethers being drawn away from the domain of the divine. During Lemuria some of the ether forces were drawn out of the domain of the divine by the Being known as Ahriman. These forces then penetrated the physical, which existed in the four states of matter. This means that the fourfold makeup of the ethers became dualized and a part “fell” into existence. This brought about the forces of gravity, magnetism, electricity, and informational activity, which then penetrated matter. With the “Fall of the Etheric,” the physical in turn “fell,” giving rise to the “Fall of Matter.” Thus with the evolution up to Atlantean times there was a 1) Fall of the Etheric, and a 2) Fall of Matter. (These two falls followed the “Fall of the Angels” or the fall of the astral during Lemurian times, a mirroring of Old Moon evolution. )

The second detail is that Jehovah took hold of a segment of the etheric, warmth- and light-ether, to mold a hereditary process for the human being. Heredity became then for the first time the directive principle for the evolution of the physical body of the human being who received his ego at the time of the Fall. The ego, as it were, fell into matter at the time that it was “deathed” into existence with a physical body. Actually, the ego first began an existence while the physical body was still more ethereal, and this state of existence is called “Paradise.”

With the fall out of Paradise, with the birth into a physical body, the human soul, the ego, sank into a physical body that was determined by heredity. This hereditary body was also penetrated by a fallen Double, an etheric Double of the body, which was and is very much determined by the geography of the earth and the cosmos. At that time, geographic and geological conditions came to determine an essential part of the physical body, but the cosmos did as well. Towards the time of the Mystery of Golgotha, the working of the Double became increasingly important and, as it were, threatened to take the human condition out of evolution. Because of this the Mystery of Golgotha was needed.

This makeup of the body, with a Double and a hereditary makeup, meant that the incarnating soul, the ego, had  and has to penetrate both these workings in the body. At the same time, the ego brought with it the conditions of the spiritual world out of which it was born, the domain of the Exusiai or the Elohim. This birth of the ego out of the spiritual created and creates the possibility for the ego to incarnate into the fallen of the etheric and physical, which in
turn had been dualized into male and female. The “Fall of Man,” then, is associated with the fall of the angels or the fall of the astral, the fall of the etheric, and the fall of matter. With the Fall of Man came the division into the male and the female.

As already noted, the exit of the sun and the moon from earth can be seen as the original impulse for the division between man and woman at the stage of potential for all humanity, the masculine and feminine at the stage of potential for human beingness, and mother and father with the potential for the division into male and female. Cosmic events have been responsible for the division into the sexes.  These cosmic events come about through the activity of spiritual beings.

Here is another outline:
Polaria–all human potential with man and woman
Hyperborea–human being potential with masculine and feminine
Lemuria – human being potential with the division into sexes
Atlantis – human being potential with capacity for reproduction
Post-Atlantis–masculine-feminine potential with capacity for creativeness and cosmic responsibility

7 – The Dual
We have already noted a number of dual circumstances. Man and woman is a dual, masculine and feminine is a dual, and the two sexes is a dual. We have noted duals with head and trunk, and we have noted duals with regard to the senses and inner organs. A much less conspicuous dual is that which is played out between the earthly sojourn of the ego and its journey after death in the spiritual world. This last dual, we noted, gives rise to incarnation with an impulse within the ego to reunite with the divine out of which it died into existence. The reuniting can be called re-ligere, Latin for this process. Religion, then, is a fundamental impulse in the ego, with its home among the Exusiai. From this perspective religion is also an overcoming of death, which is not just a bodily affair. It is also an affair of the spiritual core of the human being, finding a way back to the spiritual domain out of which it arose.

In Jewish history and occult legend in relation to this history we come across another dual that has to be resolved. This is the dual that deals with the astral and the etheric in the world. This dual has to do with the dual of time, but now the time element has to be incorporated into the human makeup. It is the “Temple Legend” that addresses this dual of the etheric and astral as it becomes a working part of the human condition. With the help of Rudolf Steiner we can gain a certain view and perspective if we take up this legend.

What Rudolf Steiner brings to us is that Cain is more astral in makeup (the astral predominates) and Abel more etheric in makeup. Both have a hereditary relation with Jehovah, but it is the Abel-etheric stream which is favored by Jehovah. As we know, Cain slew Abel, but the etheric stream of Jehovah was continued by Seth, who was born after Abel’s murder. The Seth stream was propagated while the Cain stream was banished, as it were. However, the Cain stream did appear in evolution, slowly descending from astral heights to appear in the stream of human culture where creativity is central. The whole cultural impulse in humanity, with creativity and also exotericism, can be viewed as coming from the Cain stream of existence. The problem with the Cain stream and the Abel stream is that the astral has to come to live into the etheric so that the etheric is not destroyed in the process. The original murder of Abel by Cain addresses this issue. Because Cain was banished from the earth, as it were, the Cain stream came to bear the responsibility to bring the creative without taking life. The creative element has to be brought in such a way that the life, the etheric, is not consumed in the process and the result does not become death or murder.

After the banishing of Cain, the Cain aspect of evolution can, as just indicated, be seen as that which took hold of the etheric to become creative. The resolution of the murderous potential inherent in the astral was for the astral to gave rise to the arts and crafts, such as we find with the master builder Hiram supported by Tubal-Cain, the relative of Cain in later evolution. One of the mighty creative acts of astral evolution is to reunite the ego with its spiritual source in a conscious fashion, a direct outcome of the line carried by Cain. The direct and conscious reuniting of the ego with its source is known to us as “Initiation.” The Abel stream, on the other hand, brought about a reuniting of the ego with the spiritual world through what was given by the Jehovah and taken up by the priestly-rabbinical in the form of cult. Religious life became the responsibility of the rabbinical-priest, while initiation became the responsibility of those who carried the impulse to individual creativity, that is, the Cain stream impulse. With the priestly there is a reuniting that permits the ego, the individual, a degree of passivity. This priestly belongs to the Abel line. With the Cain line, another form of reuniting of the ego with its source had to come about. The creative path, the path forged by Cain as a result of his banishment, is called Initiation as just indicated.

One of the methods of reuniting, then, is the method of bread and wine, the method of the most high priest Melchizedek. This is the path of religion. The other method is that of Initiation, that which was brought by Cain. Enoch is one of the first of the great Jewish initiates. It is said that Enoch was scorned by his contemporaries because he was taken up into Heaven, as it were. At the same time, Heaven was brought to others in the form of the cult of “bread and wine.” Thus it can be considered that Initiation grew out of the Cain line of evolution and united with the initiation practices elsewhere in the world, which were more or less determined by birth, by blood. The initiation practice that grew out Cain was much more determined by individual effort, whereas, in the past, as with the line of Abel, it was heredity that determined the relation of the individual with the Divine on a spiritual path.

Here then is another dual, that of Religion and that of Initiation. The one does not negate the other, and each will bring its experiences. In both cases it is the ego coming home. However, there is a more active element with initiation and a passivity with religion as it flows from the stream of “bread and wine.” Initiation culminates in religion, as it were, and thereby shares the fundamental trend of religion practiced by formal cult. Here is a very essential trend of a dual that challenges the core, the spiritual core, of the human being who has the task to become active in order to deal with the many duals that beset the human condition. In this sense the dual becomes the challenge to activity at the deepest level of existence, that of the ego as spirit. Religion, then, is the resolution of the impulse of the astral brought by Cain and the trend carried by Abel. The resolution of another dual, the dual that has to do with sexuality, has as a fundament finding a proper relation with religious life. It is the individual, the spiritual core, that has to resolve the difference between the dual of the sexes brought about ultimately by the sun and the moon of cosmic evolution.

Another aspect of the dual of Cain and Abel is that the masculine is more the element of the astral at work and the feminine more the etheric. The basis for the rivalry and the tension between the masculine and the feminine, as well as man and woman, finds its source in these two aspects of the human condition. Because the impulse of the Abel line was so much allied with the etheric, the feminine became a major factor in the unfolding of the Hebrew people. Memory and heredity also were and are important to this day in this blood line, in this heredity-based people. Ancestral memory and festival cult appear to be very much the basis of Jewish religion.

The astral line, the Cain line of unfolding, became the secret of the brotherhoods. At first the brotherhoods were open only to men, as men carried the astral impulse, while the women carried the force to steer a people through heredity. In the Temple Legend it is King Solomon who carries the Abel stream, the etheric stream. Solomon carried the stream which was responsible for the more general evolution of a people, while the Cain stream addressed the more individual. The dual of Cain and Abel, the Initiate and the Priest, the creative individual and the servant, might be seen as a revelation of the masculine and the feminine. Together these two streams can build a temple, a physical temple at first, the Temple of Solomon. The more difficult temple to build is in process, and this is the temple of the social process. This is today underway and requires both the Priestly and the Initiate to succeed.

The birthing of the temple of the social process is brought so that the creation of the social process might be considered to follow from the masculine and the feminine of the human makeup. The creation of male and female is another human being, a child to begin with. The potential creation from the masculine and the feminine can be the social process. These two forms of creation help us to appreciate a significant difference between the masculine and feminine, and the sexual of male and female. The Masonic impulse is often seen as intimately related to the Temple Legend and to the Cain impulse. The Jewish religion is seen in relation to the Solomonic-Abel impulse.

It is more the astral that lies at the hand of the man, and more the etheric at the hand of the woman. The slaying of Abel (the more woman) at the hand of Cain (the more man) indicates how the astral can overcome the etheric (and thus it appears that the animal-astral consumes the plant-etheric in nutrition). I take it that the dual, the man with his astral and the woman with the more etheric, has two basic and fundamental impulses associated with it: the prorogation of knowledge and the propagation of humankind. The view as noted above can be that Cain is the one who is the ground for initiation wisdom in the line of the Jew, while Abel is the basis of devotion and religious life via the priest, also in the same bloodline. This bloodline impulse became all human with the Mystery of Golgotha, we are taught from Rudolf Steiner’s researches.

It is possible to consider that the legend of Cain and Abel points to a time before the human being became definitely differentiated with male and femaleness. One can think that the more cosmic astral of Cain served as a basis for science, while the more basic cosmic etheric of Abel served more as a basis for art. The two together unite to serve religion. The Hibernian-Hyperborean Mysteries pointed in this direction as is revealed to us by Rudolf Steiner. With this perspective, the scientific and the artistic are predecessors of religion. By the union of the two, a new birth is brought about, and this is a religion where the man and the woman, the astral and the etheric, bring about a child, a religious child. If one is familiar with the union of Isis and Osiris, one can think of this birth from a man and woman who at the same time are brother and sister. Sexuality has nothing to do with the bringing forth of a child, such as Horus, from this perspective.

In our more modern times the union of art and science according to Goethe births religion, but this is an esoteric matter and not the usual exoteric art and exoteric science. Quite new dimensions in art and science are being referred to here, as noted by Goethe and upheld by Rudolf Steiner. It is from the ancient mystery of Hibernia that this religious impulse can be considered as birth from the cosmic of science and the cosmic of art.

Previously we noted the Lemurian to Atlantean times addressed in Genesis of the Old Testament; now with the orientation of the old Egyptian, the Hyperborean to Lemurian times come more into focus with the Osiris and Isis mysteries. However, from my research it would appear that Osiris was the bearer of a more etheric makeup and Isis of the more astral makeup, but both principles seem operative in these two pre-Adamic times.

The man of Hyperborean times became much more masculine with the evolution of the earth, while the woman became more feminine. Each gained sexual maturity only later, with late Lemurian and Atlantean times. The astral born in the cosmos came after the etheric was given to existence and was feminine to begin with. With further evolution it appears that it became masculine as the division of the sexes approached. The reversal took place with the etheric as well. That is, the etheric was first masculine and only with the approach of the division of the sexes did the etheric become feminine. As the man of Atlantean times became male and the woman female, the active astral could slay the etheric, so that it was necessary in human evolution to protect the etheric for the sake of life, reproduction, and divine service. Cain with his working had to be removed a bit from evolution so that the Abel line could unfold without continual destruction. If evolution is seen in this way, then it can be contemplated that the spiritual world has to work and “experiment” in order to find its way. A plan for all existence does not come from the most high, as it were, but asks for activity and creativity on the part of all spiritual beings, human and others as well.

What might be considered, however, and accords with some indications by Rudolf Steiner, is that the creative that is inherent in the astral brought about murder cults in order that the more passive etheric could be taken into the domain of the astral to serve this active astral. This brought about new cultural impulses and new life for humankind. Rudolf Steiner indicates that wars were waged in the past for this reason. Cultures were by this means eliminated, and the conquered could take up what ether forces remained from lives that
were not used up, as it were. The activity of the conquerors was supported by the etheric given over by the dead. With this perspective such cults had quite a different meaning than they do today. Today wars and murder cults need to be replaced by creative efforts, and these efforts need a source in love, not in the taking of life in one form or another. Since the time of the Mystery of Golgotha what was true for war and murder cults has been replaced through the Deeds of the Christ, so that new ether forces are available for creativity. It was the Deeds of Love that began this change in creative potential. What is called the “Murder of the Innocents” might be viewed from this perspective as an expression of older ways of renewing mankind.

Before the Mystery of Golgotha, before the Deeds of the Christ, a whole people, a whole culture, had to be born so that the Cain impulse did not slay the Abel impulse. The entire history of the Jewish people then is seen from this perspective in the light of the Temple Legend. The Jewish people had to bring the potential for hereditary influence to mankind–that is, the Abel impulse had to be preserved. This has meant for mankind that the incarnating soul can rely on a copy of the human organism being given as a vehicle for incarnation. If this were not the case, each incarnating soul would potentially have to start from scratch, as it were. As we know from genetics, heredity is more strongly, more dominantly, carried by the woman who becomes female. For a long time this verity had to be kept secret, and this we might consider is the birthmark of the hidden, the esoteric. The propagation of the physical body became a matter of exoteric knowledge, and became a significant basis for Jewish laws governing the life of human beings. This is the indication given us by Rudolf Steiner.

One can ask when the heredity impulse arose in evolution. As noted, we can speak of the time when Jehovah penetrated the etheric, which was taken up by the incarnating soul.

However, an even earlier basis for this came about with the evolution of the old Moon. What took place there was that Luciferic spirits took hold of ether forces brought over from Sun evolution. These spirits took etheric forces unto themselves to somewhat individuate the etheric. This etheric then was taken up by the Elohim who birthed the Ego, the human individuality, while Jehovah wove the hereditary impulse into this ether. This activity of the Luciferic spirits taking hold of the ether, which then became the possession of Jehovah, is called the “Sins of the Fathers.” This ether was taken hold of by the Elohim to birth the human individuality into a physical body. This was held to be a deep secret and constituted a very esoteric aspect of Judaism as best as I can determine. Some of the Jewish laws I understand have their source in this process. It was known that because of this origin of heredity, heredity would become the basis of illness as time went on, and it came about by the Fall of the Angels or the Sins of the Fathers. Lucifer’s deeds led to the Fall of the Angels. As time went on, it was seen that a mingling of blood was needed, so that the Fall of the Angels, the Sins of the Fathers, did not become all determinative. The mingling of blood is referred to in the New Testament in relation to the Good Samaritan.

The perpetuation of pure hereditary process is countered with the Incarnation of the Christ. With the Incarnation the perspective has become that the Christian has to leave the father and mother to follow the Christ. This is not a dogma, then, when seen from the aspect of hereditary process. It is a direction for souls to transform the hereditary process, which has significant illness associated with it. Souls now can meet on a soul-spiritual level, and this can replace heredity, which is becoming progressively ill as we are finding out today. Again this is a significant secret not known to many but pointed to by Rudolf Steiner and worked with in his educational indications for early life.

That a human being might make a copy, an individual copy from the model of heredity given by parents, this is quite new from the indications given by Rudolf Steiner. His indication is that in the first seven years of life, the incarnating individual has the potential of making his own hereditary force system from the model offered by parents. This takes place out of the capacity of the child to imitate behavior, not just take on the inherited qualities of the body. Rudolf Steiner gives the image of the artist child who makes a copy of the inherited form like an artist who makes a copy of the Dresden Madonna. Through sexual propagation, hereditary forces are carried from one generation to another. However, the individuality has become progressively stronger and more able to alter this hereditary influence, so that an independence of the purely hereditary is now present, which is possible because of the Mystery of Golgotha. The sexual propagates the hereditary of human existence; this can be altered, we hear, from an anthroposophically-oriented Spiritual Science.

8 – Heredity And Reproduction
Why is all of this complex process important? I would say that it is important because of the forces at play in the reproductory process. If a human being is very much determined by his parental heredity, and his individuality has not been able to transform what has been given, then his inner instinct, urges, and desires can be determined out of the hereditary elements. The whole process of reproduction and nurture plays into this. If the human individuality comes to surmount heredity to a great extent, then it is the individual who plays into the reproductory process. This individual element in reproductive process comes to expression in love, while the purely hereditary plays much more into instincts, urges, and drives where the individual is quite helpless in the whole process. Such would be a formulation that I would offer for the complex considerations shared with this essay.

If reproduction is seen in this light, then the sexual can be more determined by the bodily makeup of a human being or by a soul-spiritual element that lies inherent in the more individual makeup of the human being. Instinct or love can become significant elements in the domain of the sexual, the sexual which has to do with reproduction. This line of contemplation then also suggests that the hereditary elements can come to play a very significant role in the lives of human beings, and the human being may have little determination in the case of human sexual activity. Such might be a line of thought or reasoning. The significant question can be raised as to the capacity of the individual to master his sexual makeup and his sexual impulses.

From another perspective one can ask about the actions connected with sexual activity. Whether the actions have an element of freedom or whether the individual is totally determined in his sexual activity. If one takes up this view, that of freedom and determination, then one might contend that it is actually the sexual above all else that has to do ultimately with freedom. Rudolf Steiner has suggested that, with the division of the sexes, the seed for freedom was sown. However, this can be the case only if the hereditary makeup is not determinative and the individual has been able to master his hereditary gift–and then the impulses which arise out of this domain. If freedom is looked at in this way, then the individual who acts in relation to the sexual makeup, has to be determined out of his own love and not the instincts, urges, and drives associated with the reproductory process. In a way, love has to be determinative and has to transform the sexual.

9 – A Greek Perspective In Relation To The Dual Of Man And Woman
The same duality, that is, the two-ness of the Jewish stream, the Priest King Solomon and Hiram, the stream of Abel and that of Cain, can be thought of also in relation to the Greek period of culture. This is the time when the Mystery of Golgotha took place. At the time of the Mystery of Golgotha, the Egyptian culture of mammoth physical structures, the Jewish propagative cultural orientation, and the Greek god-human culture existed side by side, influencing each other. In Rudolf Steiner’s time this juxtaposition was noted, but it is only in the last twenty-five years that it is becoming well recognized. It is for this reason that we take up the Greek cultural working and its dual mythological orientation, its orientation to man and woman.

Let us take up Greek mythology with this duality in mind. One can think that the dual was begun in the Greek culture as the play between Uranus, the cosmic man impulse, and Gaia, the earthly female impulse. When Uranus is kept as a purely cosmic impulse (man), then it is that the cosmo-earthly Gaia (female) can propagate giants, as can be found in the Hebrew initiation book, “The Book of Enoch.” The union of cosmic man with earthly female is said in the Greek as well as the Hebrew culture to have given rise rise to giants, a being of huge cosmic-earthly dimension. The time of Uranus and Gaia may point to the time when Earth evolution began. Here the human, the more cosmic of Uranus, and the female, the more earthly, could be seen as a step in evolution that could not continue. This is a kind of mishap in evolution. This error on the part of the spiritual world in relation to the human being, with an error on the part of the gods, introduces a more human element into the ranks of the gods. Human beings have to take up what the gods brought forth and can do so if human beings have insight and take responsibility.

A second generation of spiritual beings then stepped forth as I depicted in Greek mythology, perhaps as a result of the failure of the first generation. The second generation had to bring forth a more healthy relation between the man and then the woman. Chronos and Rhea can be seen as a dual that is more representative of Man and Woman. Now spiritual beings have, as it were, withdrawn a bit more. With this stage of cosmo-earthly evolution, cosmic beings are not bringing forth offspring by uniting with earthly females as well portrayed in the Book of Enoch and the Temple Legend. With Chronos and Rhea time is born, or “time beings” are born. A more proper basis for further change and evolution can follow. The human being can be brought forth gradually, over time, with the birth of the “time beings” or, as we know them, Archai or Spirits of Time. Thus, more cosmic man (Chronos) and cosmic woman (Rhea) are the basis of earthly humanity, but it all has to rest in the bosom of time, the first offspring of the Gods that permits a healthy evolution.

With this second generation of gods the impulse for man and woman as well as the masculine and the feminine was laid. What seems important to me is that the first generation of the gods are portrayed in the Greek cultural perspective with a potential for error. We hear of this from Spiritual Science with the Being known to us as Lucifer. It is Luciferic for “the-god” world to propagate human beings. Today we can say that if the gods fructify the human being, be it male or female, it is to birth knowledge of the spirit. This is a correction of a former error on the part of the gods. If we take this view, then the Greek culture introduced error in human evolution as an almost first-generational impulse in the spiritual world. In this way the Greek culture from the outset wrestles with the Luciferic of existence.

With the next, the third generation of the Greek gods, we can think that the masculine and the feminine are transformed to become male and female. This couple is born out of time and, because of such a birt

If reproduction is seen in this light, then the sexual can be more determined by the bodily makeup of a human being or by a soul-spiritual element that lies inherent in the more individual makeup of the human being. Instinct or love can become significant elements in the domain of the sexual, the sexual which has to do with reproduction. This line of contemplation then also suggests that the hereditary elements can come to play a very significant role in the lives of human beings, and the human being may have little determination in the case of human sexual activity. Such might be a line of thought or reasoning. The significant question can be raised as to the capacity of the individual to master his sexual makeup and his sexual impulses.

From another perspective one can ask about the actions connected with sexual activity. Whether the actions have an element of freedom or whether the individual is totally determined in his sexual activity. If one takes up this view, that of freedom and determination, then one might contend that it is actually the sexual above all else that has to do ultimately with freedom. Rudolf Steiner has suggested that, with the division of the sexes, the seed for freedom was sown. However, this can be the case only if the hereditary makeup is not determinative and the individual has been able to master his hereditary gift–and then the impulses which arise out of this domain. If freedom is looked at in this way, then the individual who acts in relation to the sexual makeup, has to be determined out of his own love and not the instincts, urges, and drives associated with the reproductory process. In a way, love has to be determinative and has to transform the sexual.

9 – A Greek Perspective In Relation To The Dual Of Man And Woman
The same duality, that is, the two-ness of the Jewish stream, the Priest King Solomon and Hiram, the stream of Abel and that of Cain, can be thought of also in relation to the Greek period of culture. This is the time when the Mystery of Golgotha took place. At the time of the Mystery of Golgotha, the Egyptian culture of mammoth physical structures, the Jewish propagative cultural orientation, and the Greek god-human culture existed side by side, influencing each other. In Rudolf Steiner’s time this juxtaposition was noted, but it is only in the last twenty-five years that it is becoming well recognized. It is for this reason that we take up the Greek cultural working and its dual mythological orientation, its orientation to man and woman.

Let us take up Greek mythology with this duality in mind. One can think that the dual was begun in the Greek culture as the play between Uranus, the cosmic man impulse, and Gaia, the earthly female impulse. When Uranus is kept as a purely cosmic impulse (man), then it is that the cosmo-earthly Gaia (female) can propagate giants, as can be found in the Hebrew initiation book, “The Book of Enoch.” The union of cosmic man with earthly female is said in the Greek as well as the Hebrew culture to have given rise rise to giants, a being of huge cosmic-earthly dimension. The time of Uranus and Gaia may point to the time when Earth evolution began. Here the human, the more cosmic of Uranus, and the female, the more earthly, could be seen as a step in evolution that could not continue. This is a kind of mishap in evolution. This error on the part of the spiritual world in relation to the human being, with an error on the part of the gods, introduces a more human element into the ranks of the gods. Human beings have to take up what the gods brought forth and can do so if human beings have insight and take responsibility.

A second generation of spiritual beings then stepped forth as I depicted in Greek mythology, perhaps as a result of the failure of the first generation. The second generation had to bring forth a more healthy relation between the man and then the woman. Chronos and Rhea can be seen as a dual that is more representative of Man and Woman. Now spiritual beings have, as it were, withdrawn a bit more. With this stage of cosmo-earthly evolution, cosmic beings are not bringing forth offspring by uniting with earthly females as well portrayed in the Book of Enoch and the Temple Legend. With Chronos and Rhea time is born, or “time beings” are born. A more proper basis for further change and evolution can follow. The human being can be brought forth gradually, over time, with the birth of the “time beings” or, as we know them, Archai or Spirits of Time. Thus, more cosmic man (Chronos) and cosmic woman (Rhea) are the basis of earthly humanity, but it all has to rest in the bosom of time, the first offspring of the Gods that permits a healthy evolution.

With this second generation of gods the impulse for man and woman as well as the masculine and the feminine was laid. What seems important to me is that the first generation of the gods are portrayed in the Greek cultural perspective with a potential for error. We hear of this from Spiritual Science with the Being known to us as Lucifer. It is Luciferic for “the-god” world to propagate human beings. Today we can say that if the gods fructify the human being, be it male or female, it is to birth knowledge of the spirit. This is a correction of a former error on the part of the gods. If we take this view, then the Greek culture introduced error in human evolution as an almost first-generational impulse in the spiritual world. In this way the Greek culture from the outset wrestles with the Luciferic of existence.

With the next, the third generation of the Greek gods, we can think that the masculine and the feminine are transformed to become male and female. This couple is born out of time and, because of such a birth, can evolve in time with an essential possibility of creating, of procreating to begin with. Cosmic manh, can evolve in time with an essential possibility of creating, of procreating to begin with. Cosmic man became man and woman, then masculine and feminine, and now finally male and female. From the time when “beings of time” were born, it can happen that an evolution can take place, and the result can be the “Human.” A goal through events in time can be that the “human” comes about. The division into sexes plays an essential role here.

From Rudolf Steiner’s indications we can find that these three generations not only are actually what has taken place in the past, but in a way point to the future. These generations of coming into existence point to ever higher states of consciousness. With Uranus and Gaia the soul state of “intuitive consciousness” is pointed to. With Chronos and Rhea “inspirational consciousness” is indicated or addressed. And finally with Zeus and Hera the soul state of “imaginative consciousness” is brought into focus. Noteworthy is that in each case a dual, something that is related to sexuality, ultimately has to be taken into consideration. A conceptive process, not only physical conception, is indicated. In the non-physical conceptive activity there is a dual that can bring about a third as it were, a created element, or a knowledge process. With the male and female a physical offspring of course comes to mind, but at the same time a soul-spiritual conception is also important, that is, a knowledge process.

Rudolf Steiner’s indications for the three generations of the gods can be as follows:
Imagination – Hera-Zeus – male and female to masculine-feminine
Inspiration – Chronos-Rhea – masculine and feminine to man and woman
Intuition – Uranus-Gaia – man and woman to cosmic man

In the life of the human being today we can think that the cosmic impulse, the Uranus-Gaia impulse, comes in the first seven years. The Chronos-Rhea stage comes during the second seven years, and the Zeus-Hera impulse lies embedded in the third seven years when the true male and female arises. This means that the Greek had a very definite sense of the relation of the sexual of evolution to the knowledge process, that is, to the tree of life and the tree of knowing.

Here is another outline to bring in the Jewish stream in comparison to that of the Greek, and later the Christian.

Cosmic and earthly from the point of view of history:

Jewish exotericism	Cosmic	Jehovah	……………	man
	Earthly	Solomon	human heredity	female
Jewish esotericism	Cosmic	Cain	human skills	masculine
	Earthly	Abel	human service	feminine
Greek exotericism	Cosmic	Uranus	……………	man
Greek esotericism	Earthly	Gaia	……………	female
Christian(later)	Cosmic	no spirit	……………	church
	Earthly	body	……………	feminine

10 – Other Approaches To The Sexual Make Up Of The Human Being
Now let us try to look at the human being in the light of this outline and consider the emergence of sexual differentiation: the steps from birth to twenty-eight. This is an approach where time, with development of the human being, can be focused on. Rudolf Steiner has given indications for something like this in his lectures that have to do with the unfolding individual.

Man |	Cosmic |	head of child unfolds	(1-7)	masculine and feminine
	Earthly |	trunk of child infolds	(1-7)	feminine
Man |	Cosmic |	head of child unfolds	(1 -7)	masculine and feminine
	Earthly |	trunk of child unfolds	(7-14)	boy or girl
Man |	Cosmic |	head of child unfolds	(1-7)	masculine and feminine
	Earthly |	trunk of adolescent	(14-21)	male and female
Man |	Cosmic |	-head of child unfolds	(1-7)	masculine and feminine
	Earthly |	trunk of adult unfolds	(21-28)	man & woman
				father & mother

It is possible to ask why the head is always 1 to 7 years of age. From a spiritual scientific perspective it can be said that it is because the head carries a cosmic imprint and the imprint is not sexually differentiated. The head of the human being is not gender distinct, but can be thought of as masculine and feminine with each person. The human being from a spiritual scientific perspective is not a sexually differentiated being before seven years, despite the Freudian concept of “infantile sexuality.” Freud as best as I can see was using later intellectual, sexually-based reasoning to try to understand the developing child, and projected this time of sexual differentiation into childhood.

The masculine and the feminine of each person was noted by Karl Konig in his lectures on embryology. However, I can say that I came to the same image before I heard of Karl Konig, read his lecture on embryology, or spoke to him about such matters. So I can say that the following image I arrived at myself and found confirmation of when I met Karl Konig later on.

To consider the head of the human being as masculine and feminine I took my point of departure to be the two reproductory configurations of the human being. The male and the female physical makeup I pondered for a long time, noting the difference. Then I became interested in the Curative Eurythmy Course, where it is possible to find the metamorphosis of the whole human skeleton into the larynx. With Rudolf Steiner’s indications for this transformation, I then began a transformation of the entire organism, not only the skeleton. Anyone who wishes can look up the metamorphosis that Rudolf Steiner gave but will find it to be quite complex.

When I then added the entire organism to this metamorphosis, it became evident that the organs of reproduction below in the pelvic region may well have a correspondence with the makeup of the human head. In fact one might in reverse consider that the reproductory organs have fallen out of the head. What can help to confirm this perspective is that the kidneys begin embryologically as pronephroi in the region of the ear and slowly descend into the pelvis. Pronephros becomes mesonephros and then metanephros. Something of what is later in the region of the pelvis began in the head behind the ears. This is a very legitimate consideration. So a correspondence between the reproductory organs and the makeup of the head of every person can be searched for.

If we take the makeup of the female reproductory system, the ovaries, fallopian tubes, uterus, and vagina, and then look at the head, something similarly structured can be found. In the head we can look at the ears (like the ovaries) with the Eustachian tubes (like the fallopian tubes) and the pharynx and mouth (like the uterus and vagina) and find a correspondence to a certain degree with the reproductory organs of the female. The correspondence is with the above and the below in the makeup of the human being. The metamorphosis of the skeleton as given by Rudolf Steiner is to some degree the opposite, but not entirely. Rudolf Steiner gives the rising line, which is the raising of the entire skeleton from below to form the larynx. He also gives a descending line, with the descent of the brain from above to the thyroid gland in front of the larynx.

If we turn to the male next, we can look at his physical makeup. Here we now find the scrotum with testicles hanging down from the pelvis, outside the body. The male organs have fallen further than the female organs. They have fallen out of the pelvis. The penis of the male is also outside the abdominal-pelvic cavity, with only the prostate within the abdomen above the pelvis. Now if we search the human we can again find something of a correspondence, a correspondence that belongs to all human beings. The physiognomy presents this correspondence with the genital makeup of the male. The eyes can be likened to the testes, while the nose can be likened to the penis. Now we do not think of the eyes and nose as sexual manifestations, but for our present perspective they can be seen as evidence of the masculine in body form. The human physiognomy and the speech apparatus is present in all normal human beings.

Notable is that below we find the sexual makeup of the human being. Below in the pelvis there is a differentiation, that of male and female. Above, there is not male and female but, I would say, masculine and feminine. All human beings carry something manifest as masculine and feminine, but only one set of sexual organs. This is what I came to before I met Karl Konig, who had come to the same by another route, by pondering embryology and Rudolf Steiner’s indications in regard to speech.

It is for this reason that the head of the human being, of the child, can be said to be masculine and feminine long before there is anything resembling true sexual differentiation, which means not only genital differences but soul and spiritual differences. The masculine and feminine can also be said to point to soul spiritual differences, but differences which are carried by all human beings regardless of gender. It is not until the human being is mature, at about twenty-eight years of age, that the reproductory organs are mature and have a completed correspondence with the physiognomy of each person. In truth, sexual activity today, and in the past as well, begins for most in adolescence, but this does not take human maturity into consideration. Maturity from a spiritual scientific perspective arrives when there is a mature knowledge potential with the brain being complete. The brain is not complete until almost thirty years of age, when the u-fibers structure the prefrontal cortex. With this brain maturity, then sexual maturity has arrived, so can it be thought, reasoned. Such details concerning the human physical makeup were known to Rudolf Steiner through his spiritual scientific investigations as well his very careful perusal of scientific literature.

This then can be cited as a time revelation of the human being sexually and in terms of the masculine and feminine, and then male and female. Such a way of contemplating the human condition helps the sexual makeup of the human being become much more fluid and mobile in terms of knowledge. Our thoughts need to become more mobile as best as I can see, particularly in relation to this subject.

PART II

11 – The Physiological Make Up Of The Human Being
Let us try to contemplate the physiology of the human being with the imaginations just noted and with an assist from Anthroposophy. The intent is to help us come to sense even more that the human being is more than male and female, is something more than simply sexually distinct beings. For this purpose let us step from the time unfolding of the human being to his physiological functioning in terms of reproduction and coming to knowledge. Let us take up another dual, that of the mother and child in each human being. Again the goal is to enliven the activity of contemplation in order to come to new views of the human condition vis-à-vis sexuality. We have already taken up the feminine and the masculine in terms of the head, the oral configuration with the ear, and the physiognomy.

Perhaps a point of departure would now be to seek the child and the mother in each and every human being. Now the dual is not male and female, masculine or feminine, but mother and child. A search for the mother and child can be undertaken with physiology. Again a bit of imaginative activity is needed.

Let us imagine the head of each human being to be a child as it were. We have done this to a certain extent, when we took up the developing human being. We pointed out how long it took for the head to mature. The remainder of the body goes through twenty-eight years of maturation while the head remains in the first seven years of life. The head is like a child of cosmic origin, as we noted already, and remains such for many years. Maturity is not seen in the head until quite late, something that is not so often noted. Every human being likes to think of him or herself as mature by ten years of age. At this point, the child suddenly becomes man. Sexual maturity by 12 to 14 years is taken as soul-spiritual maturity, and this maturity only becomes visible about 28 years of age. Such are some subtle observations that easily escape perception, but can be seen if one takes some hints from Spiritual Science.

Within the head we find the brain, the organ we so much associate with knowing. The brain is close to death in a way. It cannot reproduce the human being, but can reproduce thoughts. This capacity to reproduce thoughts comes about when the prefrontal cortex is mature, at about twenty-eight years of age. Of course thoughts can be reproduced before this, but the finer thoughts of a ripe intellect require a mature brain to be able to think with clarity. Such thinking is abstract and concrete at the same time. Such thinking is experientially quite meaningful and results in the mature thinkers who wrestle with the wisdoms of our existence, such as theosophy, philosophy, and anthroposophy, with others to follow.

The potential to reproduce thoughts has to be born almost every day. The brain wilts and dies almost every eighteen hours to be reborn during the next six hours of each day. The brain in a way has to be born almost every day through nourishment and sleep. As a dual with the head, one can take the digestive tract as pointing to something of the mother. It is the digestive tract that is so important in the nourishing and the rebirthing of the wilted dying brain in the course of each night of sleep. If one does not have to sleep so long, this means that the human being is living in a thinking process that is not very bodily, brain dependent, for mirroring. Two individuals come to mind, two who needed very little sleep: Thomas Edison and Rudolf Steiner. Both are reported to have needed only two hours of sleep. Both were highly creative and gifted in the sphere of ideation, thinking.

What is this mother element in digestion? The mother is the nourishing process for the head, for the brain. The digestive process as a mother element can be imaged as the basis for the nourishing of the brain in the head. Mothering digestion and a child nourished brain can be contemplated, imaged. Here is a possible outline of thoughts and images. The relation of the digestive-abdominal system to the brain is well pointed to in the journal Science, May 29, 1998, in an article entitled “Solving the Brain’s Energy Crisis” by Ann Gibbons. Here the abdominal contents of primates and humans are compared as well as their respective brains. In the primate the gut is large and the brain small. In the human the brain is large and the gut small. In the human being the gut gives over its functioning to the brain, as it were, and shrinks as a result. This relation does not appear in this way in the article, but points to the relationships being dealt with here. An outline follows which might be of help for anyone who wants to live into such an image of the mother-digestive process and the child who is continually birthed and is nourished.

The Human being as Child and Mother

• the Head is the cosmic of the child as brain. The individuality out of the past slowly incarnates into the head, slowly aging both the head and the brain.
• the Trunk of the body bears the processes of digestion, which brings the earthly to the child, to the brain. The digestive tract in the trunk is like a mother who nourishes her child, the brain.

If we take up this dual, then we come to another, very imaginative twofold makeup of the human being, that is, the head with the brain and the trunk with the digestive tract. With this approach we can use the concept of child and mother in such a way that there is nothing of a sexual element involved. The various duals that we have noted already can come to be related to this perspective of child and mother, which offers a very singular approach to the human being.

If we continue with the head and the trunk, a true dual as worked with by Rudolf Steiner, a “Michaelic Dual,” then another perspective is possible. A degree of imagination is needed. The head can be one aspect of a dual, with the focus on the eye as a sense organ. This eye, sitting in a hollow of the head, can remind one of an old man who rests in a crevice of the skull. Now the image of an old man can be one image of a dual. The other image can be brought to mind, that of the inner organs as youthful. The inner organs can be considered to be located within the skull (the brain) and as well within the trunk (the other inner organs). The inner organs are youthful in comparison to the eye. The eye is almost mechanical in makeup. The eye approaches a non-living apparatus and is comprehended in terms of physics, the physics of optics. The inner organs are comparatively young; they are always in process, always busy with metabolic activities needed for the life of the body, and also serving the activities of the soul and spirit (the life-processes, and the inner movements). The inner organs from this perspective are quite youthful. They can be imaged as youthful. Now the images become old man and youth. Again, a dual that is not purely sexually oriented but bespeaks other aspects of our humanity that can become significant.

Now an outline can become–
The Head with eye as sense organ————————- old man
The Trunk with the inner organs reflected in the brain — youth

With such a dual, such an image, little that has to do with gender can to be called to mind, and another aspect of human existence can surface. In this way the immense richness of the human being emerges without much emphasis on gender.

12 – From Form And Physiology To Other Perspectives
So far we have pointed to different views of the human being. We started with a dual: head and trunk. We then progressed to different aspects of the human condition in the view of other duals. The dual is taken as a starting point, since the sexual makeup of the human being is a dual, and this is the consideration of this essay. We dualized with man and woman, masculine and feminine, male and female, father and mother, husband and wife, mother and child, and then with old man and youth. We have not elaborated all of the duals, but have emphasized duals that have a closer or more distant relation with gender. With the dual of head and trunk there is an obvious morphological dual. With the mother and child there is an attempt at a physiological dual. And with the old man and youth there is a dual related to optics.

What can be seen is that with such an approach there is a possibility for comparisons. The human condition can be seen quite differently by employing different comparisons. Such manifold comparisons might help place the rather singular perspective of male and female into a context, with less of the focus on sexuality that is happening with our culture today.

That physiology can be dualized, and the whole of human morphological makeup as well, this might be quite new for many of us. This suggests that gender can be modified by purely physical structuring and physiological functioning. By this route gender can be seen also from a non-sexual perspective or a very transformed perspective. Again the human condition is widened and sexuality brought into perspective.

If a dual perspective is possible, then other perspectives are as well. Let us look at some other perspectives.

The unified human being.
Here we can think of the wholeness of the human being and have to eliminate all details, as it were. The outer form, the morphological, can be seen as a single unit, a single form. Even the concept of the human being itself is encompassing and uniting, bringing all details into a unified whole. If one turns to the cellular, the tissue, the organ, and the systems makeup of the human condition, then one quickly loses the whole. For those involved in the physical makeup, a wholeness is not possible unless the wholeness of the morphological makeup is taken into consideration. The wholeness of human morphology is by and large not a central concern for many scientists who study the human body.

The dual or twofold makeup of the human being.
We have been detailing more and more of the possible duals inherent in human beingness, beginning with the sexual makeup of each and all. We have wandered quite far in following out the duals, but have not included all possibilities. Enough have been considered to bring a perspective on the dual of sexuality.

The trinitary or threefold makeup of the human being.
The threefold makeup of the human being is actually quite old. The perspective of the human being as body, soul, and spirit is very old. Only in 869 AD with the Ecumenical Council, as noted again and again by Rudolf Steiner, was the death blow dealt to this threefoldness. The human being as body, soul, and spirit has been largely eliminated in the evolution of Western culture. Today the human being is considered a body only by many exposed and raised in Western culture.

That the human being can be seen physically as a threefold organization, as a reflection of the soul life of each, this is totally new with Rudolf Steiner’s perspective. He discovered this threefoldness in his deeper searches into the physical makeup of human beings. What he has given as Anthroposophy is for the most part the result of his investigations into the threefold makeup of the physical body, needed for the threefold soul life of thinking,
feeling, and willing. His discovery of the possible threefolding of the human organism led him to the potential threefolding of the social organism and the world-earth organism.

The quaternary makeup of the human being.
This makeup deals with existences in man that require capacities more advanced than most have. For the cognition of organizations or bodies that are higher or non-sense-perceptible entities, supersensible capacities are needed. The four members or organizations of the human condition demand higher states of consciousness. Rudolf Steiner was able to investigate not only the physical organization, but worked to acquire capacities to detail other organizations, which are supersensible, soul and spiritual in nature. This is quite new for most of us. What Rudolf Steiner has offered are the results of his investigations into the supersensible soul and spiritual worlds. He has again and again noted that his results are put into a form of logic, reasoning, thinking, so that the soul and spiritual life of the student of his revelations becomes more and more capable of dealing with soul and spiritual worlds. Working with his reported results, then, is a first step on a spiritual path. On this path the four member or the four organizational makeup of the human being can be spoken of.

On this journey one can find that Rudolf Steiner enumerates four basic organizations, four bodies, or four members. The four bodies are the 1) Physical Body, 2) the Etheric Body, 3) the Astral Body, and 4) the Ego. The latter is actually not a body. The ego approaches the bodies noted, but in pointing to an ego, the student is helped to come to grips with a possible totally supersensible entity, an entity as activity, as a core of his own being. This fourfold makeup has been detailed by Rudolf Steiner in his book Theosophy. With some work, this fourfold makeup of the human being can be followed into the physical makeup of the human being and will be shared shortly.

The five- to ninefold makeup of the human being.
A fivefolding is possible to articulate out of a theosophical perspective, and then a sixfold makeup as well. Work with theosophical concepts can help with these numbering or member perspectives of the human makeup and functioning.

A sevenfold makeup can be formulated by focusing on the core of each of us, the ego. This can become active and be sensed as active. The path to come to the ego has been laid in thoughtful terms in such texts as A Theory of Knowledge, The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity, and Truth and Science. With these three texts, the thinking demanded brings ordinary thinking to a point of becoming a spiritual activity dealing with pure ideas. When this form of thinking is practiced, then the core of the one who is thinking can begin to emerge. The one who thinks, who does the thinking, steps on to the stage and can be addressed as an ego. This is quite a demanding path, not easily available to many, but offered to many. An alternate path is that found in the text Theosophy where one can practice a higher form of thinking to come to a sense of the reality of an ego and then the other organizations.

The sevenfold makeup can be formulated by taking the ego as the focus and as the central aspect of the human condition. This ego can become active on a spiritual path to transform the lower bodies or organizations, that is, the astral, the etheric, and the physical bodies. The results are that the ego can transform the astral body to birth the spirit-self. The same ego can transform the etheric body to evolve a life-spirit. And finally the ego, with much effort, can surface a spirit-man through the transformation of the physical body. These three transformations of the lower bodies or organizations produce the “spiritual organizations” of the total human makeup. The spiritual organization is needed for supersensible cognition, for life in the soul-spiritual world.

This same ego can, however, also bring forth entities that are needed for a footing in the soul world. The ego by this means can evolve the soul activities of thinking, feeling, and willing as a threefold basis for the endlessly complex life of the soul. For the most part our soul is an array of happenings, with little conscious structuring or guidance. With thinking, feeling, and willing the soul can begin to gain some form, some structuring, so that the array of complex happenings, experiences, can become related to the thinking, reasoning human spirit. So this means that a threefolding of the soul is needed as an important step in soul evolution.

This soul, however, needs a footing in the soul world, and not just in the physical body where thinking, feeling, and willing can be found as a very basic activity. The ego, working through the astral body into the other members of the human being can transform other members of the human makeup to bring about soul structures, soul organizations. The ego, working strongly into the astral body while the human being is awake, can bring about an organization of the soul called the sentient-soul, the sentient-soul body, or the sentient­ body. The ego next can work through the astral into the etheric body to bring about an intellectual-soul or reasoning-soul configuration. And finally the ego can penetrate through to the physical body to bring about a consciousness-soul organization. These are soul structures which permit the soul to live in the body and at the same time help the soul to enter the soul world. If this makeup of the soul-organizations is added to the other organizations, members, or configurations, then a total of nine to ten aspects of the human makeup can be considered.

Here is a listed summary of the various perspectives on the human makeup.

One-fold Man	a) whole physical configuration which is sense perceptible but carries other dimensions
Twofold  Man	a) head and trunk of the whole human configuration or
	b) body and soul
Threefold Man	a) head with sense extremities, chest with limb extremities, and abdomen with limb extremities
	b) body,soul,and spirit
	c) nerve-sense system, rhythmic system and metabolic limb system
Fourfold Man	a) physical body, ether body, astral body and ego
Sevenfold Man	a) physical body, ether body, astral body, ego, spirit-self, life-spirit, and spirit-man
Ninefold Man	a) physical body, ether body, astral body, sentient-soul, intellectual-soul, consciousness-soul, spirit-self, life-spirit, and consciousness-soul
Tenfold Man	a) physical body, ether body, astral body, ego, bringing about sentient-soul, intellectual-soul, consciousness-soul, spirit-self, life-spirit, and spirit-man.

13 – The Fourfold Make Up Of The Human Being 
As can be seen, in order to get to this fourfold, it is necessary to get from a twofold to a threefolding. The next step is the fourfolding, and with this the organs for reproduction can be considered. Here is an outline of a fourfolding where the physical body can be used as manifestation of the fourfoldness.
The physical body – The bony system can be seen as a manifestation of the physical body as well as the senses. The prime condition of the physical materiality is the solid state of matter. The bony system and some of the sense organs have a solid basis.
The ether body – The glandular systems can be seen as a manifestation of this body as well as the musculature. The prime condition of the physical substances in this body is the liquid state of matter.
The astral body – The neural systems can be seen as a manifestation of this body as well as the inner organs. The prime condition of the physical substances of this body is the airy state of matter. (Here the organs of reproduction can be contemplated.)
The ego – The circulatory systems, the lymph, venous, and arterial systems, are a manifestation of this core of humanity in a threefold way. The prime condition of physical substance in this domain is the warmth state of matter.

14 – The Brain As An Organ Of Reproduction
If we now turn to the Inner Organs, as just noted, they can be considered to be a manifestation and revelation of the astral makeup of man. In this context let us try to approach the brain as a reproductory organ and then later the organs of reproduction themselves. The reproductory organs are those of the female: the ovaries, the uterus, and the clitoris. The homologous organs for the male are the testes, the prostate, and the penis. The other inner organs are the heart, lung, liver, gallbladder, spleen, kidneys, and the brain as noted.

In keeping with our discussion on sexuality, let us try to contemplate the brain as a reproductory organ. As the genital systems of the male and female are needed for the reproduction of humankind, so the brain can be considered a reproductory organ as well. The reproductive process that belongs to the brain is the reproduction of images  from the sense impressions that work into the soul from the outer to become the inner world of man, and for the “conception” of ideas. In this regard the brain can be seen as a mirror, as it were (a convex mirror). It is an organ that is related to the soul, where the impressions of the world are taken up by the soul with impression. Impression is alive in the world and is sense-organ-dependent. A further stepwise progression can be followed from impression to sensation, a soul experience still related to the world but on the path to the soul. Sensation is neural-dependent, is dependent on the nerves. The soul uses the nerves as a reflective agent; this could be a conclusion from spiritual scientific observation. From impression to sensation a third step to the soul can be considered to be perception. Perception, as best as I can find from spiritual scientific research, needs the brain as a mirror. A dependency on organs, the sense organs, the nerves, and the brain, does not mean that the organs produce soul experiences, but merely that they are the basis for reflection and supporting conscious experience. What can be thought about the physical organs mentioned is that they serve the soul to the extent that they are non-living, to the extent that life, or the etheric, has been removed from the organ. Organs that cannot support cellular reproduction have life removed, and this life can be thought to support the experiences of the soul in sense perception. The soul by this line of reasoning does not live in limbo, but in the life freed from physical organs: sense organs, nerves, and the brain. All three are not capable of physically reproducing themselves, though of course not all life has been removed. This metamorphosis, of life or etheric forces, from organ support to soul support is an important consideration with an anthroposophical perspective on the human being.

Thus, it is at the hand of the brain that the soul can raise the impression, and sensation to perception and then image can follow with the reproductory process related to the brain, that is conceptions. The soul is active with the senses in impression; there follows sensation and finally perception. Perception is, however, just a beginning of another process, which leads to image. It is in the process of image formation that the thinking human being begins thinking, begins to conceive, to bring forth ideas in relation to perceptions. If perception does not take place automatically, so to speak, but gives rise to a conscious thinking, a conceptional activity takes place, what is conceived in image or idea.

Now again the brain is a needed organ that can help with a reflection of the conceptional process. The result of a perception that gives rise to thinking, to a conceiving, can be that a higher form of image comes about. This consciously conceived picture is called a representation by Rudolf Steiner. (From what I can gather, this is a personal construct that depends very much on personality.) The representation is much more consciously conceived and can be called a conceptional creation, in contrast with the passive image (from the world of archetypal imaginations), which can come without thinking entering the field of perception in a conscious way. Such is some of what appears to be the process of conceiving in terms of the thinking human being. With careful observation it can appear that the passive image related to sense perception is brought about by a kind of thinking, a thinking reasoning which reaches to the world of archetypal imaginations. When the reasoning is carried on more consciously, then ideas can come about. In this latter situation it may be that the thinking soul reaches to the world of reason, and what results is the idea and not the image.

Now all of this can seem far-fetched and, it is true, could be formulated a bit differently. The effort here has been to follow up some of the thoughts, ideas, and the thinking that can be exercised by The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity by Rudolf Steiner. All that has been stated in relation to the reproductive activity of idea-conception and image-formation with reason can be doubted. What cannot be doubted is that the conceptional activity of knowledge process with idea and image depends on the brain. What is significant with the brain is that it is an organ that swims in a body of water, the cerebrospinal fluid. None of the other organs for reproduction lie within a body of such fluid to such an extent. That an organ that serves knowing, knowledge process, swims in water, this cannot be doubted. That this fluid medium has something to do with this type of recreation, conception, reproduction, this has to be taken into consideration, and to this day it has not been the case for many. The brain is treated as if it existed as an independent organ. The lay of the land, the place where the organ of reproduction lies, this can be significant in the line of contemplation that is being presented. Yet, I have never found this contemplation in any old or modern texts that deal with thinking and the brain.

From the investigations of Rudolf Steiner, it is the levitational forces of the cerebrospinal fluid which are the foundation for the thinking activity where conception becomes soul spiritual activity for image or idea. The brain is not the instrument for the thinking soul, but the forces of lightening, levitation. This permits the light experiences that are so fundamental for the thinking soul. Rudolf Steiner never tired of addressing the activity of thinking and as well noted repeatedly that the 1,500-gram brain weighs 20 grams because of the levitational force system of the cerebrospinal fluid. He then pointed to the levitational forces as the important element in thinking and to the brain serving as a mirror. From this perspective, thinking as a conceptional activity can be considered to be a brain-independent activity dependent on the brain for mirroring.

Should anyone find this line of contemplation difficult, I can be very sympathetic to this view. It has taken me nearly fifty years to come to such a perspective and, in truth, this is all very much at the beginning.

Thus the reproductive process related to the brain can be seen with idea and image formation, the latter being passive or active. It is, however, not the organ that does the thinking, imaging or representation. The brain is needed for the sake of consciousness, and the activity can be located in another domain, the domain of ether forces, levitational forces.

The brain is a part of the over neural system, which is a manifestation of the astral body. This neural system can be threefolded. The brain itself, the spinal cord, and the autonomic system are the three parts which make up the neural system. It is, however, also possible to fourfold the neural system. This can be done by noting the twofold nature of the autonomic system. The major plexuses and the diffuse sympathetic bundles make for a twofolding of the sympathetic system. The brain and the spinal cord can be seen as a twofold structure. Thus the twofold central system and the twofold sympathetic system constitute the fourfoldness. In this way we can be flexible as to how we look at the neural system. The threefolding of the nervous system fits with the threefolding of soul life–that is, thinking, feeling reflex activity, and volitional activity. The latter does not take place within the domain of consciousness.

Remarkable is the finding by Rudolf Steiner that the brain has a form determined by gender, maleness or femaleness. The brain of the male is female in configuration. This can be said as a result of the investigations of Rudolf Steiner. On the other hand, the brain of the female is male in configuration. As best as I can see, the male brain supports the more imaginative soul life of the woman, and the female brain helps support the more pictureless soul life of the male. This may be quite new for those not familiar with such spiritual scientific research, which impacts our knowledge of the physical world. It is only in recent years that Magnetic Resonance Imaging has been able to pick up more subtle differences in brain configuration. It is reported in scientific literature in the last four years that the brain configuration of male homosexuals differs from the brain of the non-homosexual. Here a relation with sexual orientation and practice can be seen in relation to the brain configuration, even if gender is the same. However, for us what is important is the fact that there appears to be configurational differences of the brain depending on sexual practice even when gender is the same. Here something of the findings of Rudolf Steiner over seventy years ago appears to be corroborated today at the hand of very new technology. The modern findings are not saying what Rudolf Steiner has said, but they direct one’s considerations to the material at hand.

Thus the configuration of the brain can be gender-related, and sexual practice appears to play a role, but this does not make the brain a sexual organ as such. This distinction is crucial in order to not mix everything up and make the whole human being into a purely sexual entity. Thus maleness and femaleness belong to gender, but it is not the sole aspect of sexuality. Maleness and femaleness can determine aspects of different organs, such as the brain and the truly reproductory organs, but this does not mean that sexuality is the only aspect of either the male or female. I would think that it is quite possible to say that sexuality is more a bodily aspect of gender, of maleness and femaleness, whereas the maleness or femaleness of the brain is not a sexual matter but a gender affair. The brain has a much more immediate relation with the soul (gender relation), while the reproductory organs have a more immediate relation with the body (body sexual relation).

Male brain soulness is image-rich, while female brain soulness is more pictureless. Such might be a consideration. The sexual as soul revealed and experienced, as it appears in conscious ideation and image, might well be considered the basis for what we can call erotic experiences. The sexual on the basis of soul with idea and image can be thought of as the erotic aspect of the human being.

Let us look further at the brain as an organ for the conscious cognitive process. The purely reproductory activity of the reproductory organs is not cognitive activity as such. In the past, reproduction may well have been more cognitively experienced–as we can find in the Bible, for example. There we can read that Joseph knew his wife and she conceived a child. Something of cognitive activity is pointed to in such a formulation of reproduction. What we can consider is that the reproductive, the physical reproductive process, was then a much more soul-involved process, was much less a purely physical and sexual activity. In olden times physical reproduction and soul reproduction were not so clearly differentiated. We can think that reproduction took place in the past without such a distinction between erotic experience and pure sexual activity. This is what Rudolf
Steiner has described from his investigations.

Only slowly, might we reason, did the reproductive activity of eroticism of the soul and the reproductive activity of the body become two distinct domains for the human being. Physical reproductive activity is not very close to our normal day consciousness. Soul-permeated reproductive activity, with eroticism, takes place in consciousness. It is evident that modern media try to address the erotic of soul life.

With such thoughts it is possible to say that today we know relatively little of what actually takes place with reproduction, with physical reproduction. What we do know are the more sensual soul experiences of reproduction, that is, eroticism. Earlier in human evolution, the less sensual soul experiences of cognition, of knowing, was the more conscious aspect of actual conceiving sexually. These are subtle distinctions that appear to be lacking in our current considerations concerning sexual aspects of existence. It is perhaps humorous but serious at the same time to contemplate that, when the usual thinking and cognitive activity is in process, there is a sexually related aspect to the process, but the process is actually not sexual at all. To make such distinctions means that a given soul has to be able to make many differing perceptions concerning soul life and not mix every thing of the soul into one bundle, as it were. A first step is to draw attention to the cognitional process.

It can be asked if there are cognitive states where the gender-differentiated brain is actually not used. The answer from the perspective of Rudolf Steiner is that we can in fact form ideas and thoughts which are not brain-dependent and are thus free of any tint of gender and therefore quite unrelated to anything of a sexual nature. The type of thinking that is being attempted here is sought to be independent of the brain as such. It is with a new form of thinking, a thinking that is not brain-dependent, that the previously noted books by Rudolf Steiner have been written. These texts speak of free spiritual activity, a spiritual thinking that is by no means the usual. With free spiritual activity one stands independent of eroticism, gender experiences, and of sexuality. Cognitive activity can become a process that is not at all bodily dependent–this is quite new and is a path trod by Rudolf Steiner. He shares his researches so others can try to make their way.

Sight can be taken up in relation to reproduction next. This is a natural step from the brain that swims in water and deals with a reproductory process related to thinking that is light dependent, to the eye, which is also light-related. Both the brain and the eye are organs related to light, the light of thinking consciousness and the light that illuminates outer objects. Light that is inward and light that is outward. These are two types of light. As the brain is embedded in a watery medium, the eye is embedded in fat, which is also quite related to water, has a high water content. The socket in which the eye rests is to a certain extent filled with fat, warmth substance. The eye as we have noted earlier can be seen in terms of masculinity and femininity; it carries something of the male and the female in its activity towards the world.

The next step from the eye is to the actual reproductory process of the physical body. We have descended from inner light to outer light and now to darkness and heaviness. The skull is full of fluid, the eye socket contains fat, and the pelvis, in which the reproductory organs sit, contains neither. Weight penetrates into the pelvis and casts its shadow of darkness upon the actual physiological processes of conception and reproduction. The steps are out of light and into darkness. With the move from brain to eye we move from an inner organ, the brain, to an outer sense organ, the eye. Inner light and outer light are the two forms of light that are central to these two organs, a sense organ and an inner organ. Two distinct types of light are involved. So we move from an inner light sensitive organ, the brain, to an outer light sensitive organ, the eye. This example is used to try to clarify the difference with the reproductory process of the inner organ of the brain and the outer organ reproductory process of the eye as contrasts with physical reproductory processes.

Now, let us return to the eye with this perspective in mind. Rudolf Steiner in his considerations about the eye has spoken in terms of maleness and femaleness with the visual process. Again the process is gender-related but is not sexual. In this example, the object along with light behaves more like a male element but is by no means a sexual male impulse. This is a more active process in looking, or observing, wherein the soul enters the light of the world, penetrates the object, and lifts the object into a visual impression experience. The impression experience is not very conscious for the observing individual. On the other hand, with sight, the eye within the orbit plays a more receptive role. The eye within the orbit of the skull is more like a female receptive element. (Even the orbit pressed within the skull can remind one of a receptacle.) Much of the eye itself is liquid, and here in the liquidity of the eye more conscious experiences of sensation to color experiences can be had. Note can be made that the role of liquidity with lightening buoyancy forces is important for this more passive activity of the visual process. Further events in the visual process then follow in relation to the brain that swims in water. It is with the brain in the fluid that perceptual experience can be had.

An outline can be:
Outer light and object— male element
Eye in fat in orbit——– female element
Brain in water of skull– perceptive to conceptive element

It is important to realize that it is in the lifting, buoyancy forces of the light that we are here considering first the male-like active soul process, then the more passive female receptive soul process with the eye that is constituted by much fluid and sits in fat. The lifting, buoyancy of light and the fluid of the eye are etheric forces. The eye itself though quite fluid in makeup, behaves very much like a mechanical apparatus, like a camera, but the actual visual process takes place in the etheric, the receptive etheric. This process has been given as the female component of the visual process and is carried over to the brain, which as noted swims in water. The visual image process with perception takes place in the lightening forces of liquidity.

If one uses such an example as sight, then the optic neural system and visual cortex can be considered to be the place where the conception takes place. Fecundation begins with the object in light, proceeds to the eye embedded in warm fat, and there the soul activates the more female etheric. The further progression is to engage the visual neural brain system lying within the fluid of the skull. From within the fluid lightening forces within the spinal cord and brain the soul can bring forth a conception. The brain is needed, the visual brain is needed to make the conception conscious. At a still higher level the soul can bring forth a union of perception and conception to create a representation. Such might be considered as the reproductive process of sight.

The conceptional process is usually within the sleep of the soul, but can become more conscious as the process itself is investigated. All activity takes place not in the organs themselves, the eye, the nerves, and the brain, but within the etheric, which is a part of each of these organs. Note has to be made that none of these organs are vital, are filled with life. Each of the physical structures, the eye, nerve, and brain, have had life taken away, and it is just this life, this etheric, which becomes a part of the visual process that is lifted into the etheric of the fluids noted. The organs are needed for consciousness but are not the sole basis for sight and image formation.

The image can be considered to be the reproduced from the visual process. The image is a visual construct which is in a way a reproduction taken from the outer world. The image is a kind of reflection in sight of a very lofty world known as the world of archetypal imaginations. It appears that the optic radiations and the occipital cortex of the brain are needed for the image, the conceptional image, to arise in consciousness. The process takes place in the etheric, as it were, but is reflected in the brain, which is borne by the etheric.

For those more familiar with anthroposophical perspectives, we might think of the sentient-body, sentient-soul, and intellectual body in relation to the visual process. With the object in light and the visual field with impression we might contemplate the sentient-body as the male component of sight. With the sentient-soul the eye itself may lay the basis for sensation as a female receptive process. With the optic radiations the sentient to intellectual-soul becomes active so that perception can take place. Then follows the activity of the thinking soul, which has to be able to climb in thinking to the domain of the world of archetypal imaginations in order to conceive and image for the perception. For this to become conscious the occipital brain is needed as a mirror. Note can be made that all physical structures serve as mirroring devices and do not perform the soul activities, which are those of the sentient, intellectual, and consciousness soul. (More than once Rudolf Steiner has made the point that the brain is such a perfect reflection of soul activity that the brain is thought of as the thinking agent. The brain is a perfect imagination of the activity carried on by the soul in thinking.) Thinking, an activity within the ethers of cognition, births the image from the highest of spiritual worlds while the brain born of the world of the spirit and reason mirrors the image.

The foregoing might then be considered from the perspective of male brain and female brain. With this perspective, the image may be more apparent for the male brain in the female, and the idea may be more important for the female brain in the male. Again here, sexuality is absent but gender makes its appearance.

Thus the sight process might be seen in the light of conceptional activity that is more related to the outer world and gives rise to an image in a passive way reflecting by use of the hind brain, the occipital cortex. On the other hand, the same sight process can act as a stimulus for a conscious conceptional activity, which we call thinking in order to conceive an idea, as it were. Image and idea both require the brain as a mirror. Both require an instrument that is buoyed and swims in liquid, giving a more ethereal quality to the conceptional process, or the conceptional activities, passive and active, more male and female, and more masculine and feminine.

15 – The Life Process Of Reproduction And Sexuality
If we now turn to actual physical reproduction, we have to look to the pelvis of the human being. We have moved from the brain to the eye, and now move to the reproductory organs in the pelvis and partly outside the pelvis. The reproductory process requires actual sexual contact, sexual activity. Eroticism and imaging activities are set aside, and purely physical activities are now required for reproduction. A uniting of the male and the female is needed, with actual fecundation occurring within the womb, the uterus. The uterus itself exists outside the coelomic cavity. This means that the uterus, as with the kidneys and bladder, has fallen below the coelomic cavity, the heavenly cavity, to exist much more in connection with the direct force systems of the earth. With the brain it was inner light that was a focus; with the eye the outer light was the focus. Two forms of light were the basis for the reproduction related to brain and eye. With physical reproduction the whole process is much more related to the forces of the earth, to electricity, magnetism, and gravity. If we compare inner light, outer (fallen) light, and then electricity, magnetism, and gravity, then we once more are dealing with the etheric world that we have already detailed quite extensively. Significant differences begin to appear if carefully thought through.

What is actual sexual reproduction takes place below. What is male and female above with the senses and brain is much more of a masculine and feminine quality and only remotely related to actual reproductive sexuality. Even with the indication that the brain of the woman is male and the brain of the man is female, this distinction is related to sexuality but is not actually directly involved in sexual activity. As noted, the erotic and the sensual are present with upper pole activity. The experience of Eros is much more ethereal, related much more to image and idea, than to actual sexuality.

If we reason, and contemplate in this way, distinctions can be made, and the thinking person does not have to consider that he or she is but a sexually constituted being. Many delicate nuances of the reproductive process can appear, and sexual reproduction is only one of the many. The overriding process is reproduction, and sexual reproduction is only one type, as it were. Such a view can free the thoughtful person of the over-sexualized perspective of our day.

In this way we can come to two very essential activities of the human being that have been addressed by Rudolf Steiner but not developed extensively. Rudolf Steiner has noted that there are seven life processes needed for life on Earth. The seven are 1) breathing, 2) warming, 3) nourishing, 4) secreting-excreting, 5) maintaining, 6) growing, and 7) reproducing. These seven life processes take place as an interplay between the etheric organism and the physical organism as a general statement. Note can be made that reproducing, when addressed as a life process, is not solely the process of physical reproduction. It is with physical reproduction that sexuality has come to be so much a part of the scene. However, with reproduction as a life process different forms of reproducing are important. We have noted the two more soullike activities that belong to reproduction, such as image formation and conceptual image birth.

A primitive form of reproduction is cellular reproduction. This is a form of division and multiplication that takes place on all levels of cell-related growth within the human organism. The technical and biological term is cellular proliferation. There is a reproducing of cells so that growth can take place by an increase in the number of cells. There is also something of a chemical multiplication without cellular division, as, for example, with hypertrophy or enlargement of the cells. Cellular proliferation and cellular hypertrophy belong together, the first having to do with cells and the other with substance. In both cases something of the life process of reproduction can be contemplated.

Cellular reproduction and hypertrophy are not sexual but rather purely a kind of life process without sentient experience–that is, without sensuous experience. Cellular proliferation and hypertrophy are, then, very direct evidence of life process, as it were. When it comes to sexual reproduction, then, one steps from a purely life and plant activity to that of an animal. With sexual reproduction the purely biological becomes penetrated by something that is characteristic of the animal–that is, the astral. The sentient, the sensual, becomes a part of the process of reproducing. With this step from life process to sexual reproductive process, a sentient, a sensitive element, enters the purely living. Sensuality becomes essential. A further step from the sensual of reproduction to that of sexual with soul-satisfying experiences enters the arena of reproductive activity with the human being. With the sensual that becomes a goal and a drive for the sake of satisfactions, one has to envision another principle.

Now a principle higher than the astral can be sought. This higher principle is that of the ego. The enacting of sexual activity purely for the sake of self-satisfaction, this becomes the case as higher animal nature reaches towards egoity. A still further step in sexual activity takes place when the element of love enters to add the satisfaction of another human being’s experiences to the sexual activity which is carried out for pleasure. When love enters the arena of reproduction and sexual activity, then one might think that the true individuality of the human being can begin to become evident. The deeper essence of individuality is sympathy, is love.

It takes little to notice that love may or may not lead to sexual activity. In reverse, sexual activity need not lead to love but can remain a purely animalic activity that brings self-satisfaction without consideration of another human being. When a love is quite pure and guides human relationships, then it is said to be Platonic in nature. If one keeps this in mind, then it can be considered that a rather pure form of love is the love for wisdom, a love for knowing, a love for truth. Since the love of wisdom, philosophy, is not so extensive and is, for the most part, laughed at today, this form of love is not so easily identified. Rather, he who loves wisdom, knowing, and truth appears to be the odd fellow, as it were, and seems abnormal in comparison with those who are driven by sexual desires and appetites. There is little in advertisement, in what is written, that does not extol the satisfactions of the more instinctual, sensual, and urge nature of sexual activities. A verification of this statement can be found, as already noted, with the realization that the second most frequent use of the Internet in our day has to do with sexual matters–the most frequent use is for electronic mail transmission.

If the love of wisdom is taken as in a polarity with sexual appetites and desires, then it is possible to ask how the purely sexual can be altered. The answer is then more easily seen, which is that by practicing the love for wisdom–the various wisdoms–the purely animalic, the drives, urges, desires, and impulses that have to do with sexuality will undoubtedly be altered. Loveless sexuality might gain a grain of love. Or sexuality might well be tempered by love.

To round out the discussion here on love, the love for wisdoms, it can be noted that there are a number of wisdoms that can help love to be practiced. One of the oldest wisdoms has to do with God. Theosophy is a very old wisdom that a handful of humanity takes to heart, and can be seen as furthering love in relation to the purely sexual. Then there is, of course, Philosophy, which again not very many find their way to, but which directly speaks to the element of love. A third wisdom, a third sophia that helps support love, is the wisdom of the human being–that is, Anthroposophy. It is upon this ground that this essay is built. I have proposed a fourth sophia, which is based on the love of wisdom and might be called Socio-sophy by those who love the social domain for the sake of mankind and human relations. This sophia was introduced by Rudolf Steiner with his threefolding of the social organism. This latter sophia has yet to get a hearing by mankind; it still remains quite hidden. All of these sophias help that the love of human beings can be turned to elevate the purely animal sexual to level of human beings who can love each other.

If we look to the inner organ that supports reproduction, reproduction on the basis of greater soul-spiritual involvement, then we can, as already undertaken, take note of the brain. The brain is an organ that is needed to help wisdom transform animality through love. What is being said is that a pursuit of wisdom may have inherent in it a potential for love to help transform the more selfish and animalic side of sexual activity. Some think that wisdom of the head can, if carefully tended, lead to a love involving the heart. Rudolf Steiner has pointed to “Gemut” as a German term for heartfelt intellectual exchange that bears love. For intellectual striving to take up wisdom and in the process lead over to a love from the heart, this intellectuality has to have a quality of penetrating existence and not bring about a removal from the world. Such a wisdom can be called “practical wisdom.” One has to have a love of the world to unfold a practical wisdom. Such a striving involves a transformation in human relationships when sexuality becomes involved.

The inner organs of the reproductory tract stand in polarity with the brain as a door to the heart. The sensual of the reproductory process assumes an animal activity along with the reproductory organs, which have a life process. The next step is a progression from life to soul activity. Here we can take up the soul by contemplating what Rudolf Steiner has called “inner movements.” It is the inner movements that can now become the focus as we ascend from life process to the soul on the way to love.

16 – Inner Movements, Sexuality And Reproduction
Our further contemplations now permit us to step from the Life Process to Inner Movements. The life processes are needed for physical reproduction. The inner movements are needed for activities of soul that are reproductive in a way and also support the sopheic pursuits as noted above. The step from life process to inner movement is the step from the etheric organization to the astral organization.

Let us first list the inner movements.There are seven inner movements noted by Rudolf Steiner from his research. The seven are 1) Uprightness, 2) Speaking, 3) Thinking, 4) Breathing, 5) Circulation, 6) Endocrine secreting, and 7) Reproduction. It can be thought that these inner movements involve an organized activity of the soul body or the astral body–the astral organization. These inner movements are more soul-related even if they are organized. The life processes are more related to changes that involve the physical body.

I have spent considerable time trying at the gatherings of the Anthroposophical Therapy and Hygiene Association (ANTHA) to take up the inner movements in relation to the metals. In the process I have tried to detail a possible approach for an understanding of the inner movements in relation to the inner organs–the seven inner organs. The method I have employed is to image each of the seven organs originating from the activities of immense cosmic planetary ether spheres. During embryological development, the activity of the planetary spheres is embedded in the embryonic membranes. The whole of the human embryo is formed out of the membranes, but in particular the inner organs are influenced by these membranes, of which there are four. The four are the chorion, the amnion, the allantois, and the yolk sac. The planetary ethers, by working through the embryonic membranes, give the potential for an individual element to be brought to the inner movements, while building the inner organs. Seven to eight inner organs come about in this way. The human soul on incarnating is able then to bring a potential individual element in relation to the inner organs at the time of birth.

Thus, the inner organs are formed out of the planetary world by working via the embryonic membranes. The inner organs in turn come to give a foundation for inner movements. It is the inner movements that we want to focus on now.

It is largely the embryological membrane activity that brings about inner organs that tend towards a crescent shape. The ether spheres that are brought out of the cosmos to unfold the inner organs are altered by the embryological membrane forces, particularly by forces which can be called sentient-body forces. These forces bring about an invaginating process with all spherical forms, as, for example, when the blastula of the embryo becomes a gastrula. From Rudolf Steiner’s investigations it is possible to consider that the ether spheres out of which the organs are formed are altered by the activity of the soul-body, or sentient-body. The result is a crescent form, an invaginated form, for the final organ.

If one turns the inner organs upside down, a number of the organs can be seen to approach the shape of a crescent. That is to say, the final shape of most inner organs tends to be a crescent shape. The inner organs can be imaged as vessels when they are turned upside down. The liver when turned upside down can be seen as an organ that sets the example as a vessel form.

If one places the inner organs within a sphere, then the space that is not physical organ can be thought of as “embryologically­ derived ether space.” That space which is not filled by the physical organ, but can be imagined as a space that fills out the sphere, I call the space of embryologically freed ether. It has come to be my contemplation, after considerable research, that the free ether from these organs supports the inner movements. The movements are astral, but an etheric support is needed. The embryologically freed ether can be the etheric support that the inner movements need.

This step from the organ with life process to the free ether that supports inner movement can be considered to be the step from body to soul. This is the body-soul step. Thus, the progression is from the physical organ to the life process of the organ. Next, the step from the organ with life process to freed ether can become the step from body to soul. The freed ether comes to support inner movements and in doing so makes the step from the physical of the organs to the more soullike inner movements.

The inner movements are not completely associated with each organ since freed ether forces are not organ dependent. With this imagining of the forming of organs and the support for inner movements, we come to the step from body to soul. The organ with life is the organ with life-process, and, in turn, the living organ can be associated very loosely with the inner movements by virtue of the embryologically freed ether.

By and large inner movements are not well known to students of Rudolf Steiner, except for three, the first three movements . These three are walking, speaking, and thinking. For the most part teachers look very carefully at these three movements. These three have been addressed as three that have been penetrated by the pre-earthly deeds of Christ. The upright position of the human being, speech, and thinking are the three inner movements that have been transformed by deeds enacted by the Christ during the times of Lemuria and Atlantis and with the Mystery of Golgotha. I have come to consider that the Christ Being works through the Archangel Raphael to accomplish the upright position in walking, speaking, and then thinking. The other four inner movements of breathing, circulation, endocrine secreting, and reproduction are seldom addressed in the anthroposophical community up to this time. The last four along with the first three are fundamental to the ensouling and enspiriting of the living organism that belongs to humankind.

It is the Inner Movement of Reproduction that is the focus of this discussion. We have spent some time contemplating the life process of reproduction. Now it is more the sentient, the sensuous, that can be considered with inner movement. The step from simple reproduction to the sensual and sexual of reproduction most likely finds its origin here with the inner movements. In regard to the human soul, in regard to our discussion, I would venture the thought that the inner movement of reproducing is the step from the purely sexual on the way to higher forms of reproducing where eroticism has its true domain. The sensual, the sexual, can be raised into the domain of soul-spiritual activity of the mind, so that eroticism becomes a reality as already noted. Thinking is needed for eroticism. The inner movement of thinking is needed. Such could be a consideration.

With these two differing sets of activities, life processes and inner movements, we can make more careful distinctions between the reproductory process of the soul and that of the body. With the life processes the reproductory activity is more related to reproduction of kind–that is, physical reproduction. In the case of the inner movements it is the soul-spiritual reproductive activities that are significant. Eroticism is born as the inner movement of reproduction slowly becomes the inner movement of thinking. With the inner movement of thinking, the inner movement of reproduction drops in the background and the sexual becomes eroticism. And with this the sexual is a step towards the soul, as becomes evident with eroticism. The inner movement of thinking is significant for the way the reproductive process enters the soul and spirit of the individual. Both the life processes and the inner movements can be thought of as directing and determining the activities of the physical body, but the inner movements influence the soul very directly.

17 – The Reproductory Organs
If we turn back in time, and again go to the beginning of Earth evolution, we can contemplate the human being with a few forms in our imagination. The first form of the human being, in Polaria, was given by Rudolf Steiner when he pointed to the acorn of the oak tree. There was a kind of cup-form to the human being as with the acorn. The cup-form can be considered to be the more earthly side of the acorn. The remainder of the acorn is more living, more life-filled. It is somewhat shaped as if the cup were filled with fire. In the time of Polaria the cup was, as it were, filled with fire. Light, tone, and life with warmth filled the acorn-man to give a soul nature to the acorn. This can be considered to be a seed or germinal form of the human being.

With Hyperborea the form of the human being was a bit more like a flower, with the cup-calyx drawn away from the earth. We can image that out of the cup rose a pistil-like configuration with a kind of seed-generative organ at the top. A number of stamen then encircled the pistil, rising like tentacles resembling the tentacles of the jellyfish. The pistil with the flower stamen became the pineal gland, and the abdominal organs later on. This “flower-organ man” was surrounded by four major archetypal animals, the Lion, Bull, Eagle and Man (man as astral archetype was somewhat of a heavenly animal while the flower-man was more plant in archetype). The cosmic flower-man rose like a cosmic Adam, surrounded by mighty heavenly animals in the light of the sun, while the calyx was the Moon and Earth together. The acorn base had become a flower while the Polarian flame permitted the emergence of the animals. All was sound and warmth while color hovered to be seen with great difficulty. This cosmic man was and is called Adam Kadmon in the occult literature of the Hebrew.

This flower, tentacled, pistil-seed man surrounded by animals secreted its own likeness as a kind of reproductory process. The pistil with the seed or seeds became inverted with the next step in cosmic evolution. The whole flower structure with the archetypal animals fell during the time of Lemuria. The archetypal animals became earthly animals, and the flowerlike structure gave rise to plants
that populated the earth. The original upward-directed flower-animal man fell and became inverted so that the base of the flower became the dome of the head, with a slight remainder of the original structure to form the pineal gland. This gland tended to secrete structures as a reproduction of what came to the gland with the emerging light of the exited Sun. The larger part of the flower sank downward, became inverted, and served as a basis for the digestive, glandular, and reproductory organs of the abdomen, at the time when man was born out of the cosmos. What was flower directed to the light during Hyperborea, became the digestive, glandular, reproductory system in Lemuria within the human being. It was after this fall and inversion that Adam was born out of the cosmos to become the first born of Earth. Lemuria gave way to Atlantis. Part of the flower remained in the cosmos to become the head of the human being, who then incarnated to inhabit the earth. Only slowly did the earth become solid to sink away from the human being.

Even so, a part of Adam Kadmon did not incarnate until a much later time. The portion of Adam Kadmon that become the head of the human being remained flowerlike and gave rise to the hole in the human skull when he or she is first born. The hole we call the fontanelle. The original pineal gland extended far out into the cosmos, as far as the present sun.

The original pineal gland was a huge organ that contained all of the organs which later became part of the human abdomen, then the generative organs and the organs within the skull. At the same time, part of the ear organ, the petals of the cosmic flower-man, began to fall as well. The fall of a part of the original ear structure of the flower we have detailed with the gradual descent of the pronephros to the mesonephros and then finally to the metanephros. The fall involved the pineal organ (the stamen and pistil of the cosmic flower-man) and then the ear organ (the petals of the cosmic flower-man).

Today, with the human embryogenesis, there is a mirroring of the cosmic process just presented. The human embryo develops upside down, in a way, like the flower-man from Hyperborea before inversion. When the human erects himself at birth, a small portion of the flower is erected, and the largest portion of the flower becomes the abdominal organs and the reproductory system of the human being who at birth falls into existence. What was rising in the case of the flower-man can be seen as falling with the human being after birth, or after the Fall with birth. With birth the Paradise of intrauterine life for the fetus is left for the Fall into the life on Earth that begins as a baby. If we carry this image of the unfolding human being, then embryology can be viewed as a reflection of much earlier times of Earth evolution, and the evolution of the human being. With birth, the Fall is the Fall of the Individual. Adam can be considered the archetype for the Fall of All Humankind. To further the imaginative capacity of all of us, we can turn to a pastel by Rudolf Steiner. He made a pastel painting of Adam Kadmon, the Adam out of which Adam fell so that all human beings could fall as individuals.

The ascent of the inner organs with human embryogenesis and then with the descent at birth, the present inner organs of the human being are presently inverted from the original orientation with Adam Kadmon. At the same time, part of the reproductive makeup of both man and woman unfold from the embryonic membrane, the allantois, and part from what is called the urogenital ridge. Thus, a portion of the reproductory organs have risen or have fallen out of the head, as it were, and the remainder has ascended from below upward if the orientation is post-birth. In the case of the woman, the ovaries arise during embryological times from the urogenital ridge and the Fallopian tubes as well. The uterus comes from the mesenchyme of the embryo, and the vaginal tract unfolds out of the original allantois as an outpouching. The entire female reproductory system remains within the pelvis. This embryological process is the mirror of cosmic Earthly evolution at the time of Lemuria and Atlantis, the time of the division of the sexes, the fall of the ethers, the fall of matter, and the Fall of Man.

Thus, by studying the embryology of the human being one finds a mirror of far off times, if one develops a sense and an eye for such things. The spiritual scientific researches of Rudolf Steiner help
this become a possibility for the individual searcher.

Essentially the same process is present with the unfolding of the male during embryological development. The Fall can be read in the unfolding of the testes, the prostate, and the penis. As also previously noted, the testes and the penis fall out of the pelvis to be much more exposed to the earth and earthly conditions. The male testes do not enter the scrotum for some time, up to three years after birth. It is possible to consider that the male generative organs have fallen, descended much more into the domain of the earth, physical nature, and sub-earthly forces.

What has remained in the sphere of the head, as just noted, are the senses, the nerves, and the brain with the pineal gland. The original reproductive-secretory activity of the present pineal is lost when compared to the pineal of Hyperborean and Lemurian times. What remains of the flower-man of Hyperborea is a domed head and a tiny organ that is vestigial to say the least. The pineal gland retains only a slight memory in the functioning of the metabolic, secretory, and reproductory activity of the original Adam Kadmon as flower-man. So what remains in the head of the human being later on is only a delicate secretory process. The pineal gland produces very small amounts of a hormone in present-day humankind. In Hyperborean times the whole human being was secreted into reproductory existence. At that time it was the life process of secretion that brought about reproduction, as best as I can see. It can be thought that the present-day fallen organs of reproduction began their activity of reproduction with secretion. Only later on did excretion become a part of the reproductory process. Menses and birth can be thought of as excretions. Thus the birth of the human being can be seen as an excretory process.

18 – The Configuration Of The Reproductory Organs
A way to take up the reproductory organs is to take a look at their inner configuration. This can be done so that indications given by Rudolf Steiner for architectural forms can be found in the inner configuration. Here a bit of imagination and disciplined fantasy is needed. “Fantasy image” is the technical term that can be used for the imaging and fantasy needed here.

When Rudolf Steiner spoke of a new impulse in architecture he spoke of the architectural forms of Greece during the “golden period.” In these lectures, Rudolf Steiner indicated that this period of Greek architecture was born out of insights by a Greek initiate known as Callimachus. This initiate could see the departed soul of a young girl over a grave where the acanthus plant, with its prominent leaves, was present. The newly departed became evident in the leaf form of the acanthus plant. Such was the insight of this Greek initiate.

This plant and leaf is held to be very much influenced by the moon. The leaf is a bit heart-shaped and as such has a contractile component to its tip. In polarity with this plant and leaf is the palm with its elongate and narrow leaf structure. If the leaves of the palm tree are considered, then an expansile gesture becomes evident. The Sun in those times was taken as the responsible agent for the expansion. Thus, two plant forms can be considered: one is contractile and the other expansile. The moon was seen as bringing about contraction and the sun expansion. The two gestures of the human heart can be looked on morphologically if the two plants are placed one next to the other in succession. Such a working together of Sun and Moon can be considered to point back to the time of Hyperborea and Lemurian. The two plants with the two forms, contractile and expansile, were used in important temple ceremonies of the mysteries of conception and reproduction, with the mysteries of birth.

At that time the palmate and the acanthus leaf form became the important architectural motif placed in the architraves of the buildings. In later times, something of the acanthus form can be considered to appear in the Romanesque rounded forms of the architraves of buildings. The more expansile form of the palm can be seen in a delicate way with Gothic forms. In a way one might say that the buildings that carried these forms pointed, on the one hand, to the mysteries of birth and, on the other hand, to the expansion and contraction of the human heart. Reproduction and the human heart are brought together.

Now we might try to use these two basic forms to investigate the inner configuration of the reproductory organs of female and male. Anatomical forms can be searched in the light of these two plant gestures: in the light of the Sun and the Moon and their formative activities. These force systems were grasped by Callimachus through the activity of a departed young soul present in these systems. One can say that the living dead could reveal secrets of formative activity, cosmic formative activity to the initiate at that time. We can learn from Rudolf Steiner that such formative activities are in fact operative in the formation of the human being, today as well as in Greek times. When the young dead join with these force systems then architectural forms come about. The young dead, the living dead, help bring about architectural forms, while the forces systems themselves serve the process of recreating the human being. As just noted, Temple cults were built up on such secrets, secrets that human beings needed to know in order to “Know Thyself.”

Here I should like to point to the possible revelation of the formative forces of Sun and Moon in the morphology of the male and the female reproductory organs.

A perspective can be that we consider that Callimachus pointed to Adam Kadmon to help human beings reach to their cosmic origin. This initiate then helped this cosmic origin stand in the light of day, in architectural forms for human enlightenment, even if for the unenlightened they worked silently. By this means the human beings of that time could experience something of their own inner makeup and, particularly, the makeup of organs needed to birth the human being. In order to bring this cosmic working of Adam Kadmon in relation to Adam, Callimachus brought forth the acanthus leaf motif for the architraves of the Greek temples of that time. Man could then be contemplated as dying into the conditions of earlier times and could be seen as active with early death, to help form the temple where the birth of the human being takes place, this is within the organs of reproduction. The Greek Ephesian Mysteries approached such matters–that is, the process of reproduction, of being born.

Now, this is shared because it seems possible to find the acanthus leaf configuration and the palmate form in the inner structure of the reproductory organs of male and female. If one cuts the ovaries in cross-section, what can be seen is something that hints at an acanthus form. With a bit of imagination, this form can be seen with the attached reproduction of the ovary from a modern anatomy text.

If next the inner form of the uterus is viewed in vertical section, then a more palmate configuration of the endometrial lining of the uterus can be seen. This palmate configuration is even pointed to in anatomical texts. In this way we might find our way to the forms and then consider the formative activities of the Sun and the Moon.

If we turn to the male reproductory system, something similar can be found. If the testes are cut in vertical section, then something of the radiating palm configuration can be seen. With a horizontal
section of the prostate, an acanthus leaf form can be seen. In this way the formative activities of female and male reproductory organs are reversed and something of the pure plant formative process can be contemplated, as well as planetary formative activity. Earlier times can also be considered–that is, Hyperborea and Lemuria. With such an orientation, the human being in reproductive activity has a potential to sense a rather pure relation with the plant and the planetary world while contemplating sexual reproduction.

Such an approach helps the reproductory process be seen from a very large perspective. The animal nature of sexual reproduction can stand a bit apart from the pure plant formative activity of the organs themselves. It is when the archetypal animals of flower-man fall into the animals of earth existence that the animal activity of sexual activity can be taken into consideration. Something of the purity of plant and Adam Kadmon can be contemplated. We human beings might then be permitted an insight into a non-animal element of sexual reproduction. In those very old times when the animals fell out of the heavenly archetype, only then was the animal element placed into the astral body of the human being, into the soul body. The functioning of the Archetypal Animals–Man, Bull, Lion, and Eagle–was present in the beingness of Adam Kadmon as a cosmic existence. Then with later Hyperborea and Lemuria to Atlantis, Adam was born out of Adam Kadmon to become the first man of Earth–that is, Adam. With Adam came the fall of the animals, and this fall became a part of Adam and of all men to follow, with the fallen reproductory organs as well.

Important to consider from spiritual scientific research is that an etheric remainder of Adam Kadmon was left in the cosmos. As Adam fell to incarnate as a first man, so at the same time an etheric Double remained in the cosmos for later times. This sister-soul of Adam incarnated into a human form later on. Rudolf Steiner’s research identified this etheric remainder as the being who incarnated into Krishna, and then into the Nathanic Jesus. This entry of the etheric remainder of Adam Kadmon into history is the beginning of the being that we seek with Anthroposophy. Thus, in the contemplation of such a subject as reproduction, we come to the very important consideration of the Being whom we can seek today as Anthroposophy, when the recreative processes are not sexual. The path is a sopheic path, a path of wisdom. This is a rather pure, non-animal path. From what has been said it is not possible to consider such a pure non-animal path without considering the animal nature of sexual reproduction.

Adam as we know appears, with the fallen animals, plants, and minerals, to be influenced by these kingdoms. The fallen animal nature around we human beings became or has become a part of the human astral-soul makeup. It is for this reason that the reproductory process has as a part of it animal instincts, impulses, urges, drives, and desires. Our lower nature in relation to the animal kingdom comes automatically. The higher nature, which lives in the sphere of Adam Kadmon, this we can acquire only through spiritual striving. The sopheic search for the human being, Anthroposophia, raises we humans above our animal nature, which threatens the very existence of human beings today.

19 – Man’s Double Nature And Sexuality
For many, the subject of the Double is totally new. For those of us who have worked a bit with the Double, we also know that the subject is quite new and also difficult. It is difficult because we are a part of something that is not easily recognized and not so easily known. Rudolf Steiner has addressed the Double makeup of the human being from the outset. His indications are not so easy to grasp. Thus I will do what I can, knowing well that much is still needed.

The Double makeup of the human being comes about as the ethers that formed in the past come to a new condition determined by evolution and by the Fall. I have repeatedly taken up this subject and have tried to bring a point of view that I have not heard from others. This different perspective is noted to help keep a critical eye on what I will present with the Fall of the Ethers.

Let us begin with the birth of the etheric. If we look at the etheric we can turn to Sun evolution. It was then that the etheric was born as it were. The etheric existed before the Sun evolution but was much more a part of the makeup of spiritual beings, particularly the Thrones. The etheric of the Thrones was the foundation for world creation as Rudolf Steiner has indicated in the Inner Realities of Evolution, a cycle of five lectures. Elsewhere I have suggested that this particular ether of the Thrones may well have constituted the basis for the Kyriotetes to birth the Sophia, the Mother of creation, as it were. The Thrones in their work bring about the Father impulse. The Thrones, in sacrificing their astral makeup, birth what is the physical of existence. This ether of Saturn evolution is a warmth ether, but it is not the ether that was given over to Earth for the further evolution of this cosmic body.

If we consider the activity of the Thrones in bringing forth the physical of this world, the activity of the Father, then we can turn to the Sun evolution to seek the Son. With the gift of the ether to Earth evolution by the Kyriotetes, we can approach the activities of the Son at work. So we are treading on deeper soil when we take up the subject of the Double, where the etheric or the Son aspect of existence becomes important. Here we have to consider Sun ether gift by the Kyriotetes and not the ether that served as the womb for cosmic birth of our Earth. The ether that served the Thrones on Saturn I have called a “mother” element.

With the birth of the etheric on the Sun, a form of ether that can be called light-ether came and still comes forth. (I have often suggested that the warmth-ether of Saturn evolution is the ether that is the lowest member of the Thrones and is not the ether that evolves through the reincarnating Earth. The evolution of the Sophia impulse I have taken up with this ether of Old Saturn.) This light-ether of old Sun is evolved between the Sun and the Moon evolutions. This takes place in cosmic sleep called Pralaya by old Indian esotericism. This is a kind of Luciferic process in evolution even if Lucifer as such was not yet in existence. One might think that this evolution of the etheric made the birth of Lucifer possible later on.

Next, it is during the Pralaya between Sun and Moon that light-ether is evolved to become chemical-ether, also later becoming sound-ether and number-ether as variations of chemical-ether. With the next Pralaya there is an evolution of the ether, from tone-ether to life-ether. This ether is also called world-ether later on. It is between Moon and Earth evolution that this takes place. So it can be seen that the evolution of the ethers take place during cosmic sleep, when the evolution of our world is taken back into the bosom of spiritual beings.

With Earth evolution, there is not yet an independent warmth-ether. What comes forth out of the past is light-ether, tone-ether, and life-ether. It is during Earth evolution itself that warmth-ether is brought forth, by the Elohim Being called Jehovah. It is the deed of Jehovah to bring forth warmth ether. This takes place between Hyperborea and Lemuria to Atlantis. Thus it should be noted that etheric evolution takes place between major evolutionary periods, but the warmth-ether “devolves” during the evolution of  Earth itself. It is into this warmth-ether that the ego is birthed out of the bosom of other Elohim, also called Exusiai or Spirits of Form. Until the ego is given over to the evolving human being, there is no true human potential. The ego is “deathed” into existence–that is, totally given and separated from the origin, the Exusiai. There is an aloneness, or a separateness of ego beingness, that is much greater than with the other principles in existence–that is, the physical, etheric, and astral.

Now it is also during the time of Lemuria that a Fall took place in the etheric. The etheric that had evolved during the Pralaya time–that is, the light-ethers, tone-ethers, and life-ethers, fell. These ether
evolutions during the Pralayas as noted can be considered to have laid a basis for the birth of Lucifer. Lucifer can be seen as a retarded Spirit of Motion, but in fact accompanies evolutionary events which
are future-oriented. A Spirit of Motion had gone ahead, taking a host of other beings along, and this gave a potential for the birth of Lucifer later. The birth of Lucifer took place during Moon Evolution. Now, at the time of Earth evolution, as the ego was coming forth from the Spirits of Form, there came forth, there was born, a retarded Spirit of Form (and hosts of other spiritual beings of all ranks) who had remained behind during Sun evolution. This retarded being is called Ahriman and was born during the time of Lemuria. He with his followers, elemental beings in part, gathered ether forces to bring about a Fall of Ether Forces. This took place at about the middle of Lemuria, as Jehovah was in the process of condensing (devolving) light-ether to warmth-ether.

What is it that came about with the Fall of the Ethers? Light-ether fell to become Electricity, tone-ether fell to become Magnetism, and life-ether fell to become Gravity. These transformations have been given by Rudolf Steiner. I would add a fourth transformation which is still underway and is dependent upon warmth-ether and the working of the human ego. The transformation of warmth-ether might be considered to be Information, ego-like warmth-ether that carries apparent knowledge and wisdom. Information as fallen warmth-ether is carried by electricity and magnetism within the field of gravity.
Here is an outline of the Fall of the ethers:

Warmth-ether—— information
Light-ether ——— electricity
Tone/chemical-ether ——— magnetism
Life-ether  ———- gravity

Now we can look to how these fallen ethers might be considered in relation to the whole of the earth and cosmos. If we start with the earth, we can consider that the fallen life-ether, gravity, is particularly important for the West, for the Americas. If we then move to the light- and tone-ethers, then it is Middle Europe to Eastern Europe where these ethers work most strongly in the waters and the atmosphere, and here electricity and magnetism are particularly important. With the warmth-ether it is the East where we can look. In the East, with the remarkable wisdoms from ancient times, we might consider that the tremendous information systems that are now being born in the West will be taken up, particularly as we see in Japan. Japan might be considered to be the Silicon Valley of the East.

Now let me suggest a view of the fallen ethers that can be considered to be an essential element in the makeup of the human Double. A Double, an etheric Double, was constituted for the human being by lofty spiritual beings, and by the time of the Mystery of Golgotha, had become very much a part of every human being. This means that for every human structure there is a Double made up of the Fallen ethers. Let me interject that the Double of the human being should most likely always be considered in relation to the Guardian. The Guardian is the other side of the Double and stands to help the individual evolve to a higher nature by confrontation of the Double. The Double accompanies the human being from birth, until just a few days before death, when it is released from the individual human organism. Let me offer an outline of the makeup of the Double.

Fallen life-ether——Americas—-becomes the body of Vistliputzli
Fallen tone/chemical-ether—-West Europe–becomes the body of Ahriman
Fallen light-ether—-East Europe–becomes the body of Lucifer
Fallen warmth-ether-Far East—–becomes body of Zorath

All together these ether forces constitute an essential basis for the Double. I would have to add that it appears that the Double has a valid existence vis-à-vis the Guardian.

Within the human being the same fallen ethers are operative. Here is the distribution that might be considered in outline form:

Fallen life-ether———gravity active in the limb up to the thighs
Fallen tone/chemical-ether–magnetism centered in the liver
Fallen light-ether——-electricity centered in the heart
Fallen warmth-ether—information centered in the head

If we look at the two outlines, and configure the forces in relation to the earth and the human being, then we come to those forces in which elemental beings, children of the hierarchies and hierarchical beings, are active. The just noted forces along with the elemental-spiritual beings can be thought of as a kind of Double of the earth and the Double of the human being.

From the lectures that Rudolf Steiner gave on the Mexican Mysteries, a brief comment can be found that indicates that the geographic Double was created by a “Jehovah-like being.” This took place, if I gather correctly, around the time of the Mystery of Golgotha. It can be thought that this Double is but the Geographic Double where the life-ether is most important, since it is around the Mexican Mysteries that he gave these indications. For our purposes I will assume that it is at this time that the whole of fallen ether forces and the associated spiritual beings come to make up the Double of the human being, and the earth as well.

My reasoning for such a perspective is that just as the Christ brought the higher form of the human being, the Adam Kadmonic impulse to the human being through the Jesuses, and then penetrated the Jesus configuration, in the same way the “Jehovah-like Being,” noted by Rudolf Steiner in relation to the Mexican Mysteries, birthed the Double of the earth and the human being. If one reasons in this way, the Christ impulse is to take on the Double of earth and man, to redeem the Double as it were. The Rebuilding and Raising of the Temple in three days might be considered as an expression of just this process of the Christ working to redeem the Double and the spiritual beings that make up the Double.

20 – The Double And Sexuality
Anyone who bothers with the Double can ask what the Double has to do with sexuality. A view can be unfolded that the Double is all-important in considering the sexual makeup of the human being and sexual functioning.

It might be well to polarize love with the sexuality that arises out of the Double. As we have considered, the sexual makeup of the human being is quite fundamental for the male and the female, along with the bodily construction that accompanies the sexual makeup. In addition we have considered that the sexual makeup is only a part of the whole human existence, and serves the purpose of reproducing kind. We have considered that the process of reproduction belongs to the life body, and is but one of seven life processes. In addition we have pondered the fact that there are as well seven inner movements, one of which is reproduction. This latter movement serves very much the more soul-spiritual aspects of human functioning.

We can from the foregoing imagine that the life processes are a part of the makeup of each organ. In addition we can consider that inner movements ride on the life processes, as it were. So we can as well think that each organ also has a Double. This has been indicated already when the different “subnature forces”–that is, information, electricity, magnetism, and gravity–were assigned to different organs above. It can be assumed that that whole human configuration has a Double as well with the activity by the “Jehovah-like Being.”

Now what might this Double mean in terms of the life processes and the inner movements? If we polarize love and the workings of the Double we can have an approach. Let us try this approach. With love, what constitutes actual sexual activity becomes imbued with a higher element. The lower side of sexuality can be placed more and more to the side. Love in itself has nothing to do with sex, as Rudolf Steiner has indicated. However love has all to do with how the sexual is handled, particularly between human beings.

Let me, however, turn to the more or less loveless activities of sexual activity. With prostitution the sexual makeup is used for economic purposes. With animality the sexual becomes progressively self-serving and has little to do with the other person or persons. With masochistic, painful, and harmful practices associated with sexual activity, self-satisfaction takes place at the expense of someone else and with pain and injury to someone else. With flights of sexual fantasy, which replace actual sexual practice, the fantasy-filled individual becomes totally self-consuming. Here follows an outline of how the differing aspects of the Double might enter into the life processes and the inner movements to bring about sexual behavior that is actually becoming progressively extensive.

An Outline Of The Double Working To Influence Sexuality

Effect of the Double of the West (fallen life-ether)
1) on the life process of reproducing – Sexual Cult Practice leading to murder & orgiastic experience for the         murderer.
2) on the inner movement of reproducing – Sale of Sex (Prostitution)

Effect of the Double of West Europe (fallen tone/chemical-ether)
1 ) on the life process of reproducing – Sexual Practices at the hand of Psychoactive Substances
2) on the inner movement of reproducing – Movements, Dances, and Sexually-Imbued Gestures

Effect of the Double of Eastern Europe (fallen light-ether)
1 ) on the life process of reproducing – Sexual Picturings and Images from Memory
2) on the inner movements of reproducing – Sexual Fantastics

Effect of the Double from the East (fallen warmth-ether)
1 ) on the life process of reproducing – Animal Sexuality with Humans as well as Animals
2) on the inner movements – Informational Sexuality as with Technology, Glitter, and Mechanics

The foregoing list is made not because of my being so well-informed but just because it takes so little to find out that all of these practices are actually going on. Perhaps I could offer an antidote to the foregoing by creating another list of how love might metamorphose these aberrations in sexual behavior. Unfortunately these aberrations are becoming a bit the norm so that calling them aberrations today does not set well for many. This comes about because there is such difficulty with moral insight, on all our parts.

An Outline Of The Potential For Love To Metamorphose The Working Of The Double In Mankind.

Effect of Love on gravity (fallen life-ether) — love
1 ) alters the life process of reproducing–helps bring about a religious sense for the Creativity of the Word – The Father Spirit
2) alters the inner movement of reproducing- to initiate a Devotional Sense for the Sacredness of Movement, and the Making of Sacred Movements

Effect of Love on magnetism (fallen tone/chemical-ether) — love
1 ) changes the life process of reproducing – helps with a Reverence for the Word, the Sacredness of the Word — the Son Spirit
2) changes the inner movement of reproducing – helps with a Devotion Towards Speech Formation

Effect of Love on electricity (fallen light-ether) — love
1 ) transforms the life process of reproduction – helps with a Deeper Sense for Thinking Action – The Holiness of Spirit
2) transforms the inner movement of reproducing- helps with a Love for the Sophias

Effect of Love on information (fallen warmth-ether) — love
1 ) brings Enthusiasm for Spiritual Striving – The Quest for the Eternal
2) brings Fire for Freedom and Quest for Moral Action

What is inherent in the outlines given is that falling into the Double can cause real difficulties. These difficulties are a challenge on a spiritual path. It can be contemplated that it is just the redemption of the fallen that is so essential. With such a view, the fallen, the Fall, makes a significant difference for the striving human being, who goes along a path of thinking where freedom and moral life are central. This means not the avoidance of that which the Fall has brought but a significant challenge for taking up just what the Fall has brought. It is little wonder that the theme of sexual differentiation stands at the gate of a spiritual view of existence. With this said, it can as well be seen that the sexual makeup of the human being is only a part of existence while at the same time being essential for the perpetuation of kind and offering challenges to the higher evolution of the individual human being. Hopefully the effort here can help that a perspective can be striven for.