GA 136: Spiritual Beings in the Heavenly Bodies and in the Kingdoms of Nature

A study guide to one volume of Rudolf Steiner's collected works.

Spiritual Beings in the Heavenly Bodies and in the Kingdoms of Nature is a cycle of ten lectures Rudolf Steiner gave in Helsinki between 3 and 14 April 1912, catalogued in the Gesamtausgabe as GA 136. Steiner had been invited by Finnish members of the Theosophical Society to speak on the spiritual beings active in the realms of nature and in the planets and stars, and the resulting course became one of his most sustained treatments of cosmic spiritual hierarchies. Across the ten sessions he builds a picture of the universe in which suns, planets, comets, the fixed stars, and the four classical elements are not dead matter but the outer expression of living beings ranged in ordered ranks above the human level.

Place in Steiner's Work

By the spring of 1912 Steiner was moving steadily away from the inherited vocabulary of Theosophy toward the independent spiritual science he would soon name Anthroposophy. GA 136 belongs to this turning. It takes the hierarchy of higher beings that Christian esotericism had named Angels, Archangels, and the orders above them, and presents them not as articles of belief but as the objects of a trained inner perception. Where a year earlier his cosmology had largely described the evolution of the Earth and humanity through great planetary stages, here he turns the same method outward, toward the present sky. The lectures sit alongside other 1912 cycles in which Steiner refined how the spiritual researcher describes what cannot be reached by the senses, and they prepared the ground for the more explicitly Christian and developmental work of the years that followed.

The Helsinki setting matters as well. Steiner was speaking to an audience already schooled in spiritual study, so he could assume a working familiarity with terms such as the etheric and astral bodies and the stages of consciousness, and proceed quickly to harder material. This is why GA 136 reads less as an introduction than as a working manual for a reader who already accepts that a spiritual world exists and now wishes to learn its inhabitants by name and by rank. For the student, then, this is the volume where Steiner's account of the spiritual order of the cosmos is laid out most directly, with the planets and stars treated as the bodies of beings rather than as physical objects alone. It pairs naturally with his earlier descriptions of cosmic evolution and with his later lectures on the elemental world, and it gives a clear map of how the named hierarchies relate to one another above the human level.

Themes and Structure

The cycle opens by establishing that behind the visible world stands a world of definite beings and forces, and that just as the physical world can be specified into plants, animals, and minerals, the spiritual world can be specified into distinct classes of beings. From this starting point the lectures climb the ranks of what Steiner calls the three Hierarchies. The early sessions describe the Third Hierarchy, the beings nearest to the human level: the Angels who guide the individual, the Archangels who lead whole peoples, and the Spirits of the Age who govern the character of historical epochs. A defining quality of these beings, Steiner explains, is that they cannot lie; whatever lives in their inner being is at once revealed outwardly, so they dwell in a world of unbroken truthfulness.

From there the lectures ascend to the Second and First Hierarchies and ask how the path of inner development reaches them. Steiner connects this ascent to a discipline of selflessness, describing how the researcher must set aside personal sympathies and pour his own attention into the being he wishes to observe. He illustrates the laws of the spiritual world with a now-famous image of two glasses of water, used to show that love does not diminish the one who gives it:

One does not become poor, nor empty, by giving love or doing loving actions.

The middle and later lectures turn to the great bodies of the cosmos. Steiner discusses the planetary spirits and the group souls behind the stars, the meaning of the zodiac and the fixed stars as the dwelling of exalted beings, and the strange place of comets within the cosmic order. A planet, on this view, is not simply a sphere of matter circling the sun but the visible deed of a being whose life expresses itself through that body, and the regular motion of the planet is the rhythm of that being's activity. The fixed stars and the constellations of the zodiac, ranged far beyond the planets, are read as the seat of still higher orders, so that the night sky becomes a kind of writing in which the ranks of the hierarchies are set out in light. Comets occupy an unusual position in this order, moving against the settled rhythms of the planetary spheres, and Steiner treats them as bearers of a different and disturbing influence rather than as accidents of the void.

He describes the Spirits of the Rotation of Time who govern the cycles and revolutions of the heavens, the beings whose work appears to us as the turning of the year and the wheeling of the stars. The closing lectures bring the cosmology back to Earth and to the kingdoms of nature, tracing how beings of the various hierarchies cooperate in the plant, animal, and mineral worlds. The final session is given over to the mineral kingdom, where Steiner sets out how the principles that in the human being are concentrated on the physical plane are, in the mineral, distributed across several spiritual worlds. Throughout, the structure moves from the human being upward to the highest accessible ranks, then outward to the heavenly bodies, and finally back down into nature, so that the cosmos and the Earth are shown as a single woven order of spiritual life.

Glossary Terms from this Volume

This study library treats GA 136 as a source volume for several entries in the Thalira glossary. Each term below is explored in its own entry, and this guide serves as the hub for the cluster of ideas that this lecture cycle gave rise to:

Where to Read It

You can read the full text of these lectures at the Rudolf Steiner Archive, which hosts the English translation of the Helsinki cycle in full. For a printed edition, search the publisher catalogue at SteinerBooks. Reading the lectures in sequence is recommended, since Steiner builds each session on the perceptions established in the one before, beginning with the beings nearest to the human level before ascending to the highest ranks and then returning to the kingdoms of nature.

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