The fixed symbolic figures of the ancient Mysteries, seen by instinctive clairvoyance rather than invented, and now reappearing in natural science from the outside.
Instinctive Imaginations in Anthroposophy is Rudolf Steiner's term for the fixed symbolic figures of the ancient Mystery schools: pictures of world processes that were read off from an instinctive clairvoyant viewing rather than devised by argument. Steiner set them out in the fifth lecture of Anthroposophy: Its Roots of Knowledge and Fruits of Life (GA 78), given in Stuttgart on 2 September 1921. Before the fifteenth century, he says, knowledge came through images built up inwardly, taught in small closed groups and guarded out of a desire for power, the serpent devouring its own tail being the one figure that leaked into popular use. Because those pictures were held in physical drawing and physical secrecy, Thalira maps the term to the root zone. Steiner's cultural-historical claim is the sharp part: natural science has now begun to draw the same figures from outside, exoterically, without knowing whose they were.
Instinctive Imaginations were not chosen symbols. Steiner describes them as figures a person could only receive by living through the visualization of a world process inwardly, then setting it down in line and colour. The old schools of wisdom taught with such pictures the way later schools teach with books, and kept the sharper versions behind a closed door.
In Steiner's Own Words
I am hinting at something that may be of little interest to many people today, but which those who are honestly engaged in the pursuit of knowledge must regard as an outstanding cultural fact in the most eminent sense. Haeckel depicts the outside world and arrives at the origins of those symbolic figures that were considered the most esoteric in a certain past era, which are still preserved here and there today, but are kept very hidden. Certain power-hungry groups consider it nothing less than treason to speak of them. These figures were once drawn from inner experiences; they were recorded instinctive imaginations.
What it Means Today
Aby Warburg (1866 to 1929) spent his last five years building the Bilderatlas Mnemosyne, a set of black cloth panels pinned with photographs, tracking what he called the Nachleben, the afterlife, of ancient image formulas as they resurfaced in Renaissance painting. Warburg's argument was that certain gestures and figures persist across centuries carrying a charge no artist consciously invents, and that the historian's task is to trace the survival rather than the authorship. The library he assembled in Hamburg was moved to London in 1933 and is now the Warburg Institute, where the Mnemosyne panels remain the reference case for iconology as a discipline. Warburg and Steiner were reading the same evidence at nearly the same moment, Warburg from a photographic archive and Steiner from the record of the Mystery schools, and both concluded that the figure came before the concept.
Thalira synthesis: what Warburg called survival, Steiner called recording, and the whole difference lies in where each man put the origin. Warburg traced a figure back to an earlier image; Steiner traced it back to a seeing, which makes the serpent swallowing its tail a report rather than a borrowed motif. Read that way, an iconographic lineage is a chain of copies whose first link was an observation, and the embryologist who redraws the gastrula from a microscope reaches the same figure by the opposite road.
Where to Read More
- Anthroposophy: Its Roots of Knowledge and Fruits of Life, GA 78
- Find this volume at SteinerBooks
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- The Moon Tarot Card Meaning: Illusion, Instinct and the Unconscious
- The Centaurs: Half-Man, Half-Horse and the Tension Between Instinct and Reason