What a person makes in his calling detaches from him and becomes the outer sheath of elemental beings that continue evolving without him.
Elemental Beings of Human Work in Anthroposophy is Rudolf Steiner's teaching that the labour a person performs in a trade or profession separates from that person and becomes the outer sheath, the body, for elemental spirits who then continue their own evolution inside the world process. Steiner set this out in the fourth lecture of The Karma of Vocation (GA 172), given at Dornach on 12 November 1916, in a cycle that reads Goethe's life as a study in vocational destiny. During Earth existence the beings so produced are elemental of the fourth degree; on Jupiter, the next planetary condition, they will stand at the third degree, and so on up the scale. Steiner's picture is deliberately unromantic: a workman at his vice, sparks flying, generates them whether he knows it or not. Whether they serve or disturb the world process depends on the consciousness the worker brings.
The elemental beings of human work are, in Steiner's account, spiritual entities that come into existence through vocational labour and take that labour as their outer covering. They belong to no folklore of brooks and hedgerows. They are made at the bench, the desk, and the machine, and they carry the moral quality of the work outward into the world process.
In Steiner's Own Words
Everything that happens in the evolution of the world is related to the spiritual, and in what we create within the sphere of our vocations, whether by bodily or by mental labor, there lies the possibility for the incarnation of spiritual beings. At present, during this earth stage, these spiritual beings are, to be sure, still of an elemental kind; we might say an elemental kind of the fourth degree. But they will have become elemental beings of the third degree during the Jupiter evolution, and so on. The labor in the objective vocational process is detached from us and becomes the external sheath for elemental beings who thereby continue their development.
What it Means Today
Matthew B. Crawford published Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work with Penguin Press in 2009, after leaving a Washington think tank to open a motorcycle repair shop in Richmond, Virginia. His argument is that knowledge work has been abstracted away from its object, while the mechanic stays answerable to something that either runs or does not, and that this answerability forms character. Crawford is not a Steiner reader and makes no spiritual claim. What he supplies is a contemporary vocabulary for the half of Steiner's picture a 1916 audience took for granted: the thing worked on pushes back, and the worker's attention is legible in the result.
Steiner adds the half Crawford leaves out. For Steiner the finished thing does not merely record the worker's attention, it houses something. The lathe, the vice, and the keyboard release beings that go on evolving after the shift ends, and the worker's inner state at the moment of making decides whether they serve the world process or disturb it. That is why he insisted the compensating pole could no longer be Sunday religion held in the abstract, but concrete knowledge of the spiritual world carried to the bench itself.
Thalira synthesis: Crawford reads the craftsman's dignity as self-knowledge, Steiner reads it as cosmic hygiene, and both arrive at one instruction, which is to be awake in the hour you are working and not only in the hour you are free.
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