Steiner's teaching that bodily hair is hardened sunlight, the dried remnant of astral-etheric streams that once flowed into the human being from outside.
Hair as Hardened Light in Anthroposophy is Rudolf Steiner's account of bodily hair as the hardened residue of sun-forces that once streamed into the human being from outside and were registered inwardly as inspiration. He set it out in Berlin on 23 November 1909, in the cycle published in English as Deeper Secrets of Human History in the Light of the Gospel of St. Matthew (GA 117). In the far past those currents were purely astral-etheric, visible to clairvoyants. As that openness closed and sense-observation replaced it, the currents dried and condensed to etheric-physical form, appearing on the body as hair. Steiner reads three witnesses for this: the sculptors of antiquity who set a lion's mane in like sunbeams, the ancient Hebrew script in which he says light and hair carry nearly the same characters, and the Nazirite vow to leave the hair uncut while preparing for seership.
Hair as hardened light is the shorthand Thalira uses for a claim Steiner made twice in the autumn of 1909: hair on the human body is not a leftover of animal ancestry but a leftover of spiritual reception. What once entered as light, and was felt inwardly as inspiration, hardened outward into a filament once the human being turned to study the world with the senses.
In Steiner's Own Words
As strange as it may sound to humans, in our hair we have a remnant of certain rays through which the sun's energy was previously carried into the human being. In the past, this was something living that carried the sun's energy into humans. That is why you still find this expressed in a certain way where people still had an awareness of deeper things: in old lion sculptures, you can often clearly see that the sculptor did not simply want to copy a modern lion with its more or less poodle-like mane. Those who still had the good tradition from ancient knowledge depicted the lion in such a way that one had the impression that the hair was inserted into the body from the outside, similar to sunbeams penetrating and hardening in the hair.
What it Means Today
Hair is still read as a record of what came in from outside, though the streams are now counted in isotopes rather than in inspirations. In February 2008 the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences published Hydrogen and oxygen isotope ratios in human hair are related to geography, by James Ehleringer, Gabriel Bowen, Lesley Chesson, Adam West, David Podlesak and Thure Cerling, working from IsoForensics in Salt Lake City. They sampled hair across 65 American cities and showed that the hydrogen and oxygen bound into the keratin track the drinking water a person took in, closely enough to place a region of residence. Hair grows about a centimetre a month and is not remodelled once it leaves the follicle, so each strand holds its intake in order, oldest at the tip, which is how forensic laboratories reconstruct where an unidentified person had been living.
Thalira synthesis: Steiner and the isotope chemists disagree completely about what streams into a human being, and agree exactly about the grammar of hair, that it is the body's method of making an incoming current visible by letting it dry.
That grammar is why Steiner treats heavy hairiness as a stage left behind rather than a sign of vigour, and why the Nazirite kept his hair uncut as a memory of an older openness, not as a working organ.
Where to Read More
- Deeper Secrets of Human History in the Light of the Gospel of St. Matthew, GA 117
- Find GA 117 at SteinerBooks [THALIRA_BLOG_LINKS_PLACEHOLDER]