The sixth planetary stage in Steiner's cosmology, on which humanity attains Life-Spirit as a shared species-faculty.
Future Venus in Anthroposophy is the sixth of seven planetary conditions in Rudolf Steiner's evolutionary cosmology, sequenced Old Saturn, Old Sun, Old Moon, Earth, Future Jupiter, Future Venus, Future Vulcan. Steiner sets out this scheme in Occult Science: An Outline (GA 13, 1910) and develops it across the Düsseldorf cycle The Spiritual Hierarchies (GA 110, April 1909). On Future Venus humanity reaches Life-Spirit, also called Buddhi, the second-highest member of the sevenfold human being. Life-Spirit is the etheric body fully transformed by the I, and on Future Venus this faculty matures as a collective species-attainment rather than an individual achievement. The Sun re-absorbs what it once cast out, redeeming the beings excluded at the Earth stage. Future Venus is not the astronomical planet Venus and not Venus the Roman deity.
Future Venus is the sixth of seven planetary conditions in Rudolf Steiner's spiritual cosmology, the future stage on which humanity attains Life-Spirit (Buddhi) as a collective species-faculty. It follows Future Jupiter, where Spirit-Self matures, and precedes Future Vulcan, where Spirit-Man completes the arc. On Future Venus the etheric body becomes wholly the work of the I.
In Steiner's Own Words
But through all this, they are gradually maturing towards re-union with the Sun. And when the condition of the Venus-development will have come, all the beings who now live and move upon our earth will be re-absorbed into the Sun, and the Sun itself will have reached a higher stage of development, just because it will have again redeemed all the beings it had formerly excluded. Then will come the Vulcan development, the highest state in the development of our system. These are the seven stages of evolution of our system: Saturn, Sun, Moon, Earth, Jupiter, Venus and Vulcan.
What it Means Today
Among contemporary expositors, Sergei O. Prokofieff (1954 to 2014), board member of the General Anthroposophical Society at the Goetheanum in Dornach until his death, gave the future planetary conditions their most sustained recent treatment. In works such as The Cycle of the Year as a Path of Initiation and his late lectures on the Foundation Stone, Prokofieff reads the Saturn-to-Vulcan arc as Steiner's answer to the question of where the I-being is going, not merely where it came from. Future Venus, in this reading, is the stage on which the Christ-impulse achieved at Golgotha bears its mature fruit in the etheric. The single human etheric body that Christ took up becomes, by Future Venus, a collective Life-Spirit shared as breath, the heart-of-the-cosmos work that Steiner described as the next great evolutionary task.
Read the diagram backwards and the present moment opens up. Anthroposophic medicine, the biodynamic preparations begun at Koberwitz in 1924, and the threefold social organism of GA 23 each work on the etheric body now, in this Earth period. They are early seeds of the Life-Spirit faculty that Future Venus will bring to full collective ripeness. The companion stages help locate it. Future Jupiter, fifth, develops Spirit-Self from the astral. Future Vulcan, seventh, develops Spirit-Man from the physical. Future Venus is the heart-middle of the three, the work done at the level of life forces and shared organism.
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