Rudolf Steiner's On the Astral World and Devachan (GA 88) is a cycle of early lectures given in Berlin between 1903 and 1904, in the first years of his public teaching, when he was still speaking within the setting of the Theosophical Society. Across roughly two dozen sittings, arranged by the editors into four parts, Steiner sets out to describe the two supersensible regions that a person passes through after death and before a new birth: the astral world, which he treats as the world of desire and feeling, and Devachan, the properly spiritual world he also calls the mental plane. These are working lectures rather than a finished book, delivered to mixed public audiences, and they read as an attempt to give ordinary listeners a first, careful map of worlds that most people never perceive. The core subject is the invisible constitution of the human being and the journey of the soul between lives, approached with a repeated insistence that these matters can be investigated rather than merely believed.
Place in Steiner's Work
GA 88 belongs to the formative period before Steiner had coined the word anthroposophy for his own path. Many ideas that later received fuller treatment in his written books appear here in an earlier, more exploratory voice. The account of the human being as body, soul, and spirit, and the passage of the soul through Kamaloca and Devachan after death, would be set out again with more system in Theosophy (1904) and Occult Science: An Outline (1910). Reading these lectures alongside those books shows how his thinking took shape: the same territory is surveyed, but here Steiner is still testing images, drawing on the vocabulary of the Theosophical movement, and speaking directly to an audience he must first persuade that unseen worlds are real at all.
Two features mark the volume as early work. The first is vocabulary. Steiner uses terms borrowed from Theosophical usage of the day, such as Devachan for the higher spiritual world and Kamaloca for the region of purification after death, terms he would later use less often as he developed his own language. The second is method. In these years he is addressing general audiences in Berlin, many of whom had no background in esoteric study, and so the lectures spend real effort on persuasion before they turn to description. The volume is therefore useful less as a settled doctrine than as a record of a teacher building his descriptions in front of his listeners, choosing images that a modern audience might accept, and returning again and again to the question of how anyone could know such things at all.
Themes and Structure
The opening lectures work outward from a single vivid comparison. Just as a snail can crawl through a hall filled with a Beethoven symphony and perceive nothing of the music, so a person may live surrounded by worlds for which no organs of perception have yet opened. From this starting point Steiner argues that the physical world is interpenetrated by a finer astral world of pleasure and displeasure, and that this in turn is pervaded by a still higher spiritual world. He describes the astral body as a real second organism, larger than the physical body and visible to trained sight, that carries a person's feelings, passions, and temperament. A recurring claim is that the physical world is an effect rather than a cause: the body a person carries is assembled by forces that work from these higher worlds, and so the study of feeling and spirit is, for Steiner, the study of what actually shapes physical life.
From this foundation the early lectures move to the human constitution and the meaning of birth and death. Steiner treats death not as an ending but as a threshold at which the physical body is returned to the ordinary forces of nature while the astral and spiritual members continue. The middle sequence then follows the soul across that threshold. The lecture on Kamaloca treats the region where desires that were bound to physical life must be gradually laid aside, a process he presents as difficult but purposeful rather than as punishment. The several lectures on Devachan describe the spiritual world proper, where the enduring core of the human being lives between one earthly life and the next, and where the fruits of a completed life are worked into the seeds of the next one. Steiner returns repeatedly to reincarnation and destiny, presenting them not as exotic beliefs but as consequences of the way the spirit relates to the physical.
Later lectures widen the frame considerably. One of the most striking, the eleventh, treats the Sun Logos and the ten avatars, reading a sequence of world stages as successive incarnations of a cosmic being and setting the Indian avatar series beside an image drawn from Rosicrucian tradition. In that lecture Steiner links the avatar sequence to stages in the development of living forms, so that the descent of the spirit into matter and its later ascent are told as one continuous story. Other sittings take up the Bhagavad Gita, the doctrine of the three Logoi, the higher development of the human being, the meaning of mysteries and secrecy, occult approaches to history, physical illness in relation to cosmic law, earlier conceptions of God, the Fall of Man, and a reading of the cosmology implied by Genesis. The range is wide, but a single thread holds it together: the conviction that spiritual facts underlie physical ones, and that a disciplined inner development can open the perception needed to study them.
Throughout, Steiner insists that a teacher should speak only of what he has himself investigated, comparing this to the way no one should teach chemistry who has not studied it. The lectures keep circling back to that discipline of caution, and he admits openly that an investigator can err in particulars without that error disproving the reality of the worlds described. The reader should treat the summaries here as a guide to the shape of the volume, not as a substitute for the lectures themselves.
Glossary Terms from this Volume
The Thalira glossary draws on GA 88 for the following entry, which cites this volume as a source. This study guide serves as the hub for that term:
Where to Read It
You can read the full text of these lectures at the Rudolf Steiner Archive (rsarchive.org), which hosts the working English translations prepared by the Steiner Online Library together with the original German. To check for any print edition and related titles, you can also search the publisher catalogue at SteinerBooks.
Note: GA 88 has no standard published English book edition. The English available online is a working translation of these lecture transcripts, so wording will vary between sources and should be read as provisional.
Continue Your Study
To go further with the ideas in this volume, these paths may help:
- Browse the full Thalira glossary to see how terms such as the astral body, Kamaloca, and Devachan connect across Steiner's wider work.
- Return to the GA Work Library to find study guides for the related written books, including Theosophy and Occult Science, where this same territory is set out more fully.
- Follow the term The Ten Avatars into its own entry to study the cosmic sequence Steiner sketches in the eleventh lecture.