Planetary Spheres and Their Influence gathers fourteen lectures Rudolf Steiner gave between October and December 1922, spoken in Stuttgart, Dornach, Berlin, and across a focused London cycle. The volume takes its English title from that London series, where Steiner described how the soul, after death, passes outward through the spheres of the planets before turning back toward a new earthly life. The lectures study the unseen side of human existence: what the soul experiences in sleep, what it lives through between death and rebirth, and how the moral substance of the cosmos shapes the person who returns to birth. It is a late and unusually concrete statement of Steiner's spiritual cosmology, addressed to listeners who wanted exact knowledge rather than vague intimation.
Place in Steiner's Work
By 1922 Steiner had been lecturing for two decades, and these talks belong to the closing phase of his life, given only two and a half years before his death. The year was busy and itinerant. He carried the same themes to different audiences, refining each telling for the room in front of him. The Stuttgart and Dornach lectures address members already steeped in anthroposophy, while the London lectures patiently open the ground for English listeners encountering the work for the first time. Several of the London talks were translated soon after delivery, which is why this material reached an English readership early, and why some of its phrasing reads with the slight stiffness of a contemporary translator working at speed.
The volume sits alongside Steiner's other studies of life after death and the cosmic journey of the soul, and it extends ideas first set out in his written books on the path of knowledge. He refers his listeners directly to those books, naming the works in which he had already set down, in writing, the methods for developing imaginative, inspired, and intuitive cognition. Where the early books describe the method, these 1922 lectures describe the territory the method opens. They form a bridge between his foundational teaching on higher cognition and the detailed accounts of the soul's passage through the heavens that occupied much of his final years.
The setting matters too. Steiner was speaking in the years just after the First World War, to a Europe shaken in its certainties, and he repeatedly contrasts the picture he is drawing with the assumptions of the natural science of his day. He does not dismiss that science. He grants, for instance, that physiology is right to tie ordinary memory to the condition of the physical body, noting how memory is absent in the first years of life, grows with the organism, and fades again toward its end. His claim is that this is only half the account, and that a trained inner observation reveals a second, spiritual side that the instruments of the laboratory cannot reach.
Themes and Structure
The collection opens in Stuttgart and Dornach with the question of memory and the sleeping soul. Steiner argues that what the soul undergoes between falling asleep and waking is a quiet revelation of its own immortal nature, ordinarily hidden because waking consciousness perceives only the present moment. He distinguishes passive memory pictures, bound to the physical body like a flame to its candle, from a living tableau of the whole earthly life that opens to trained perception. This tableau is not made of pale recollected images. It carries an active, formative strength, akin to the growth forces that build the body out of the food it takes in. This time-body, woven from the formative forces of a person's biography, appears all at once rather than in sequence, and surveying it is the first step beyond ordinary memory toward what Steiner calls imaginative knowledge.
The London lectures then widen the frame to the cosmos itself. Steiner describes how, in sleep and after death, the soul goes out into what he calls the cosmic ether and meets the moral essence gathered near the stars and planets. By day a person stands within this ether without knowing it; in sleep the soul feels itself in a vast and vague unknown, and at first is overcome with a kind of anxiety until something in it awakens. He traces an ascent through the planetary spheres, with the soul passing the regions associated with the Moon, then the Sun, and outward toward Saturn, before the long return that prepares a new birth. Saturn recurs more than any other body in these talks, marking the far reach of the journey and the threshold of memory in the cosmos. Crucially, Steiner treats these spheres as moral as well as spatial: the cosmic ether near the heavenly bodies carries an ethical substance, so the journey outward is at the same time a reckoning with the moral weight of a life.
Around this central arc the lectures weave the working of the Luciferic and Ahrimanic powers wrestling for the human being, the place of the Christ in the metamorphosis of destiny and karma, and the relation of anthroposophy to Christianity. These are not digressions. Each names a force that bears on the soul's passage through the spheres, so that the cosmic journey is shown to have a spiritual drama and not only a geography. The talk on Christ and the metamorphoses of karma, given in London, ties the moral substance of the cosmos to the figure Steiner places at the center of earthly evolution.
A central London lecture, on exact clairvoyance and ideal magic, sets out the disciplined inner work Steiner held to be the entrance to this knowledge. He insists the word exact is meant seriously: not the exactness of laboratory experiment, but a developed, step-by-step training of thought that follows a definite course. Modern people, he says, are hampered because they perceive the world only in the present moment, through eyes that see and ears that hear only what is here now; everything beyond that fades into shadowy memory. Through meditation and concentration the student learns to live in thinking as vividly as in sense impression, until those shadowy memories can be stirred to a higher life and the world can be surveyed beyond the present moment. An inner illumination then arises, one that does not depend on outer light at all:
"A new life awakens within us, although our physical body is just as quiet and inert as when we are asleep in ordinary life."
The closing Stuttgart and Berlin lectures turn inward and bodily by turns, treating memory and love, the human experience in the ethereal cosmos, and even the formation of the ear as an image of cosmic music. The lecture on the ear is characteristic of Steiner's method: he reads a physical organ as the earthly trace of a cosmic process, so that anatomy becomes a record of spiritual history. Throughout, the structure moves from the near and personal, the night's sleep and the act of recollection, to the far and cosmic, and back again to the person standing at the gate of a new life. A reader new to Steiner may find it easiest to follow the volume not lecture by lecture but along this rhythm, watching how each talk leaves the body, travels through the spheres, and returns.
Glossary Terms from this Volume
Several entries in the Thalira glossary draw on GA 218 for their grounding. Each links to its own study page, where the term is defined and its sources are traced:
The lecture on exact clairvoyance and ideal magic is the common root for two of these terms, and the imagery of gates opening to the spiritual world recurs in the sleep lectures that begin the volume.
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 individual talks. For print editions and current scholarship, search the publisher catalogue at SteinerBooks. Because the lectures were translated piecemeal by different hands over many years, wording varies between versions, so it is worth comparing more than one rendering of a passage that matters to you.
Continue Your Study
To carry these themes further, you might:
- Browse the full Thalira glossary to follow terms like exact clairvoyance and ideal magic into their wider context.
- Return to the GA Work Library to find companion volumes on the soul's life after death and the cosmic journey toward rebirth.
- Read the entry on the Gates of Knowledge first, since it frames the threshold experience that the rest of GA 218 explores.