The mature Spirit of Form who withdrew with the Moon and from there gives the human being its fixed bodily form, Steiner's reading of the Biblical Yahweh.
Jehovah, the Moon Deity in Anthroposophy is the most mature Spirit of Form, an Exusiai, who in Rudolf Steiner's cosmology of GA 105 (Universe, Earth and Man, 1908) withdrew with the Moon when it separated from the Earth and from there gives the human being its fixed bodily form. Working from the Moon as a darker, form-bestowing god, Jehovah holds human development in balance: he counters the light-radiating Sun-Elohim on one side and the retarding hosts of Lucifer on the other, so that man neither races ahead nor hardens prematurely. Steiner identifies this Moon-deity with the Biblical Yahweh, the God who poured the living breath into man and later gave the Law through Moses and the prophets. His native chakra correspondence is the root center, the pole of physical body and ground.
Jehovah, the Moon Deity is, in Rudolf Steiner's spiritual science, the leader of the Spirits of Form who departed the Earth with the Moon and from that station bestows on humanity its fixed, upright form. Steiner reads the Biblical Yahweh as this single Moon-god, the counterweight to the Sun-Elohim, the divine source of the form into which the living breath was poured.
In Steiner's Own Words
After the separation of the sun the leader of the Spirits of Form remained with the earth, and later departed from it with the moon. We can therefore speak of a moon-deity; he is that deity who in the Biblical records is called Jehovah, and the Sun Powers, those who sent light to earth from outside, are called in the Bible the Elohim, or Spirits of Light. Under the influence of the Elohim on one hand and Jehovah on the other, balance was maintained in the evolution of man.
What it Means Today
Steiner's claim that the Biblical Yahweh is a Moon-god rhymes with a reconstruction modern biblical scholarship reached on its own terms. In The Early History of God: Yahweh and the Other Deities in Ancient Israel (Harper and Row, 1990; second edition, Eerdmans, 2002), Mark S. Smith of New York University traced how the God of Israel emerged out of the West Semitic pantheon, with Yahweh at first distinct from the high god El, the plural Elohim, before the two were fused into one. Smith and colleagues at the Ugaritic-studies school read the Hebrew Bible against the Ras Shamra tablets, where El presides over a council of sky and astral deities. Where Smith works through philology and the archaeology of Ugarit, Steiner works through what he calls occult observation, yet both arrive at a layered Godhead: a luminous El or Elohim distinguished from a separate, form-binding deity later named Yahweh. The convergence is striking precisely because the methods share nothing.
Thalira synthesis: read together, the philologist and the seer describe the same fault line in the divine name, El the radiant sky-father and Yahweh the binding ground-god, which Steiner simply relocates from the page of the Torah to the heavens, naming the Moon as the throne from which fixed human form is given.
Where to Read More
- Universe, Earth and Man, GA 105
- Find Universe, Earth and Man at SteinerBooks [THALIRA_BLOG_LINKS_PLACEHOLDER]