Volume 183 of Rudolf Steiner's collected works gathers nine lectures given at Dornach between 17 August and 2 September 1918, published under the German title Die Wissenschaft vom Werden des Menschen and known in English chiefly as Occult Psychology or The Science of Human Development. The cycle falls into three tightly linked movements: a first group on the inner geography of the human soul, a middle group titled Mysteries of the Sun and of the Threefold Man, and a closing group that draws the whole toward the future destiny of the human being. Its governing image is the human aura, the coloured soul-atmosphere in which Steiner reads the shape of consciousness itself.
Place in Steiner's Work
GA 183 belongs to the concentrated wartime lecturing Steiner carried on at the first Goetheanum while the building still rose around him. By 1918 he had spent two decades setting out the members of the human being, the physical, etheric, astral, and the I, in books such as Theosophy and Occult Science. These Dornach lectures do something different. Rather than cataloguing the bodies, they turn to the living psychology of the soul: how consciousness is bounded, how memory and perception arise, and why the ordinary mind meets a wall both when it looks outward at matter and when it looks inward at itself. The volume sits alongside the closely related cycles of 1917 and 1918 on the threefold human organism, and it carries forward the account of the threefold physiology of nerve, rhythm, and metabolism that Steiner had first made public a year earlier. Read in sequence, GA 183 is where his earlier map of the invisible bodies becomes a working psychology, an attempt to give inner life the same disciplined study that natural science gives the outer world.
The date matters. These lectures were given in the final weeks of the First World War, and Steiner speaks openly of a civilization whose habits of thought have grown rigid to the point of danger. He points to scholars who reason soundly inside their narrow field and then talk plain nonsense the moment they step beyond it, and he treats this fragmentation as a symptom of concepts that no longer breathe. Against that background the cycle is not an academic exercise but a proposed remedy: a way of thinking supple enough to follow a reality that is always in motion. That practical edge, the sense that a better psychology is needed for the age itself, runs under every lecture and gives the volume its urgency. It also explains why Steiner keeps returning to the same demand, that the student learn to hold ideas that move, grow, and transform with their object rather than freezing it into a fixed outline.
Within the collected works the volume also marks a bridge between two great streams of Steiner's teaching. One stream is the study of the human interior, the members of soul and spirit and their development. The other is his Christology, his reading of the Mystery of Golgotha as the pivot of cosmic history. GA 183 is one of the places where these two streams meet in a single argument, so that a lecture on the geometry of the aura can turn, a few days later, into a meditation on the Sun and the descent of the Christ being into earthly evolution. For a reader new to Steiner, this makes the cycle a useful cross section: in nine lectures it touches psychology, cosmology, history, and religion, and shows how he understood them as one connected inquiry rather than separate disciplines.
Themes and Structure
The opening three lectures sketch the soul in profile, as if one could draw its side view the way an artist draws a face. Steiner describes two boundaries. On one side the mind reaches the edge of the outer world and can go no further, holding empty concepts such as atom, matter, and force that it can never actually enter. On the other side it meets an inner boundary that hides the churning subconscious from view. Between these two dams the aura hovers, and Steiner reads its shifting bands of blue, green, red, and violet as a picture of where the soul stands in relation to the cosmos and to itself. He is careful to insist these are imaginative pictures of a spiritual reality, not naturalistic copies.
He offers a plain description of the aura as a side-seen figure:
Here you get from the right side what I might call the side view of the normal aura of man.
The middle lectures, Mysteries of the Sun and of the Threefold Man, widen the frame from the individual soul to cosmic history. Steiner contrasts how people experienced the Sun before and after the turning point he calls the Mystery of Golgotha. Older humanity, he argues, saw a threefold Sun: a physical disc, a soul being the Greeks named Helios, and a spiritual reality they called the Good. Modern consciousness sees only the physical ball. The three lectures trace how this spiritual sight faded, why an era of prosaic, rigid thinking followed, and how the threefold pattern of the Sun mirrors the threefold constitution of the human being. Steiner ties this to his broader claim that only in the human being does anything survive the long cosmic transformations he describes as the Earth passing toward its future stages.
One of the more striking passages in this middle group is Steiner's picture of an image that consumes its own origin. He asks his listeners to imagine painters who pass so completely into their finished portraits that they themselves vanish, leaving only the picture behind, which the cosmos then rebuilds afresh. The parable is his way of describing how the human being is at once a hardened image, an inheritance from the past, and a living archetype still being renewed. It is characteristic of the whole cycle: an ordinary act, here the making of a picture, is turned into a diagram of how the soul stands between what it has already become and what it is still becoming.
The final three lectures, The Science of Human Development, gather these threads into a single argument about becoming. Steiner treats the human being as a being still in formation, whose true reality can be grasped only with fluid, mobile concepts rather than the hard outlines inherited from a mechanistic science. He returns repeatedly to the danger of concepts that have hardened into corpses, and he presses toward a knowing that follows the flow of a reality that is always in the act of coming to be. He is sharply critical here of the law of the conservation of matter and force, which he regards as a superstition that hides a deeper question: what of the present world will actually endure. His answer is that only what is planted as seed in the human being carries forward into the far future, a claim that gives the cycle its title and its moral weight. Across all nine lectures the method is consistent: take a familiar fact of inner life, memory, attention, the sense of a boundary, and show the spiritual activity working behind it.
For a student approaching the volume today, a few practical bearings help. Read the three groups in order, since each builds on the pictures set up before it, and keep the central image of the two boundaries in mind throughout, because the aura, the Sun mystery, and the science of becoming are all ways of describing the same in-between place where the human soul lives. Do not expect finished proofs. Steiner offers pictures meant to be worked with in inner activity, and he says as much, warning against mistaking his coloured diagrams for naturalistic copies. Approached in that spirit, GA 183 reads less like a doctrine to be memorized and more like a set of exercises in a new kind of seeing.
Glossary Terms from this Volume
The following entry in the Thalira glossary draws directly on GA 183. It is the hub linking this volume to the wider vocabulary of Steiner's spiritual science.
Where to Read It
You can read the full text of these lectures at the Rudolf Steiner Archive, which hosts the English translations of the GA 183 cycle. For print editions and current translations, search the publisher at SteinerBooks.
Because this cycle has circulated under several English titles, checking both the Archive and the publisher will help you match the lectures across editions.
Continue Your Study
To go deeper into the ideas this volume opens:
- Begin with the term above and follow it into the full Thalira glossary, where the language of aura, soul, and spirit is defined entry by entry.
- Return to the GA Work Library to place these 1918 lectures beside Steiner's other volumes on the human being and the threefold organism.
- Trace the theme of the aura and the boundaries of consciousness through related study guides in the library to see how Steiner developed it across the years.