Occult Investigation into Life Between Death and Rebirth gathers sixteen lectures Rudolf Steiner gave across central Europe and Scandinavia between October 1912 and October 1913, in cities that include Milan, Vienna, Munich, Stuttgart, Bern, Breslau and Bergen. As the volume catalogued GA 140 in Steiner's collected works, it sets out, with unusual concreteness, what spiritual research claims to find when it follows the human soul past the threshold of death. The single subject running through every lecture is the long passage between one earthly life and the next, described not as a vague afterglow but as a structured itinerary through the planetary spheres, in which the soul is gradually expanded into the cosmos, reshaped by the spiritual hierarchies, and prepared for the body it will inhabit when it returns.
Place in Steiner's Work
These lectures belong to the period when Steiner was steering his movement out of the Theosophical Society and toward the independent Anthroposophy he would formally found in 1913. The tone reflects that shift. Where earlier teaching on the after-death state, such as the accessible picture given in Theosophy and An Outline of Occult Science, sketched the broad regions of soul-world and spirit-land, GA 140 reports findings that Steiner presents as freshly verified, the result of what he repeatedly calls his most recent research. He returns again and again to the discipline behind such research: the inner stillness, the moral preparation, the refusal to take a vision for a fact until it has been understood as clearly as a physical object.
The volume sits naturally beside its neighbours in the karma and cosmology lectures of the same years. It extends the planetary scheme of The Spiritual Hierarchies and Their Reflection in the Physical World, which it explicitly cites, and it lays groundwork for the great karma cycles of 1924. Readers who know the threefold soul of Steiner's books will recognise here how that anthropology is carried beyond the grave, where the three bodies a person wears in life are dismantled and rebuilt from cosmic forces.
One feature sets GA 140 apart from the calmer prose of the printed books. Because these are spoken lectures, Steiner reports his findings as a living investigation, pausing to qualify a claim, comparing the spiritual researcher to a climber who sees a landscape afresh from each higher vantage point. The same after-death stages are described to a Vienna audience in one register and to a Stuttgart or Bergen audience in another, so the volume reads as a set of variations on a single theme, each adding a detail the others leave out. For the student, this repetition is a gift rather than a redundancy: it shows the picture being built up from many angles, much as Steiner says the spiritual world itself must be approached.
Themes and Structure
The cycle has no single delivery. It assembles lectures given to different audiences, so its themes circle and deepen rather than march in sequence. Four threads hold it together.
The first is the discipline of spiritual research itself. The opening Milan lectures insist that the world entered after death is at first a mirror. A soul meets those it loved, yet perceives only the measure of affection it actually carried, no more, and feels that limit as a weight. The hierarchies then shine into this cloud of memory like sunlight on mist, and the soul begins to receive an objective world.
The second thread, and the structural heart of the volume, is the journey through the planetary spheres. Steiner describes how the soul, contracted to a point during physical life, expands stage by stage after death: first to the sphere of the Moon, where the time of purification ends, then outward through Mercury, Venus, the Sun, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn, and finally into the wide sphere of the zodiac. Each sphere supplies forces the soul needs to rebuild what earthly life wore away. Moral conduct determines whether a soul passes the Mercury sphere as a sociable spirit or an isolated one. Religious feeling governs the Venus sphere in the same way. The Sun sphere, where the etheric body is renewed, is opened by an inward relationship to the Mystery of Golgotha. In the farther spheres the soul reads what Steiner names the cosmic script and works with higher beings on the pattern of its next existence.
The third thread is karma as a precise technique rather than a moral slogan. An untrue word, Steiner argues, lowers the worth of the very self that spoke it, and only in earthly life can such a deed be set right. What cannot be corrected here is carried outward and worked upon by cosmic forces, so that the spheres become the workshop in which destiny is balanced and the next body is formed.
The fourth thread is the relationship with the so-called dead. Later lectures, among them the Bergen and Düsseldorf addresses, turn to how the living and the departed remain in genuine commerce, and how the way we think and feel reaches those who have crossed over. Throughout, Steiner frames the whole picture backward as well as forward: the soul reviews its life in reverse, and the lectures ask the reader to grasp earthly existence as a transitional stage whose meaning is completed beyond it.
A few sign-posts help a first reader find their way. The two Milan lectures open the cycle with the discipline of research and the role of the Mystery of Golgotha in keeping consciousness clear after death. The Hanover lecture on the journey through the planetary spheres is the keystone, and a reader pressed for time might begin there. The Munich, Bern and Vienna lectures of late 1912 and early 1913 deepen the working of karma and the soul's slow expansion into the cosmos. The Tübingen and Stuttgart lectures take up anthroposophy as a force that quickens feeling and gives the mission of earthly life its weight. The closing Bergen lectures of October 1913 turn most fully to intercourse with the dead. Read in this order, the volume moves from method, to map, to the practical bearing of both on how the living regard those who have died.
Glossary Terms from this Volume
Thalira's glossary draws many of its entries on the after-death journey directly from GA 140. This study guide is the hub for those terms; each one below opens a focused entry that develops a theme from the lectures above.
- Life Between Death and Rebirth
- The Soul After Death
- The Moon Sphere
- The Mercury Sphere
- The Venus Sphere
- The Sun Sphere After Death
- The Mars Sphere
- The Jupiter Sphere
- The Saturn Sphere
- The Zodiacal Sphere After Death
- The Backward Journey Through Life
- The Expansion into the Cosmos
- Soul Groups After Death
- Reading the Cosmic Script
- The Forming of the Next Body
- The Meeting with the Hierarchies
Where to Read It
Thalira provides this study guide as an orientation; the lectures themselves live with the sources that hold the full text. You can read the full text at the Rudolf Steiner Archive, which carries the English translation of the cycle without charge. For print editions and current translations, search SteinerBooks under the published title. We summarise and interpret here so that a reader can find their bearings before turning to Steiner's own words.
Continue Your Study
If this volume has drawn you in, a few paths open from it, and you may follow whichever speaks to you.
- Begin with the gateway theme on the life between death and rebirth, which gathers the after-death stages into one view.
- Trace the cosmology that underlies the journey through the expansion into the cosmos and the planetary spheres it names.
- Follow the moral logic of the soul's passage into the theme of how destiny is balanced, opened by the forming of the next body.
- Browse the full collection of entries gathered in the Thalira glossary for related volumes on karma, the hierarchies and the threefold human being.