The soul's journey through the spiritual world, expanding outward through the planetary spheres, in the interval between one earthly life and the next.
Life Between Death and Rebirth in Anthroposophy is the soul's objective journey through the spiritual world during the interval that separates one earthly incarnation from the next. Rudolf Steiner described this period in Occult Investigation into Life Between Death and Rebirth (GA 140, lectures of November 1912), where the discarnate human being expands beyond the body and travels outward through the planetary spheres, from the Moon sphere where kamaloka ends, through Venus, Sun, and on to Saturn. In each sphere the human spirit gathers the forces needed to rebuild the astral and etheric bodies for a future life on earth. The moral and religious quality carried through the gate of death determines whether one moves as a sociable spirit or an isolated one. This cosmic passage, sometimes called the life in devachan or the spirit-land, is where the karma for the next incarnation is laid down.
The life between death and rebirth is the long arc Steiner places between two incarnations, when the human being lays aside the physical body and grows outward into the cosmos. After the burning-off of earthly desire in kamaloka, the soul ascends through the planetary spheres, drawing from each the forces it could not gather on earth, until it is ready to descend again into a new birth.
In Steiner's Own Words
To the eyes of the spirit it is disclosed that the human being on the earth between birth and death, contracted as he is into the smallest possible space, emerges from it when he lays aside his physical body and expands farther and farther out into the universe. Having passed through the gate of death he grows stage by stage out into the planetary spheres. First of all, he expands as far as the area marked by the orbit of the Moon; the sphere indicated by the position of the Moon then becomes his outermost boundary. When that point has been reached, kamaloca is at an end. Continuing to expand, he grows into the sphere formed by the orbit of Venus.
What it Means Today
What sets Steiner's account apart in the wider field of comparative esotericism is its insistence that the journey after death is objective, not a subjective dream cast up by the dying brain. In the Hanover lecture of 18 November 1912, he traces the soul's expansion outward through the Moon, Venus, Sun, and Saturn spheres as a real itinerary through a structured cosmos, where the discarnate being meets specific spiritual hierarchies and gathers the forces to rebuild its astral and etheric bodies. This reading is studied today at the Goetheanum School of Spiritual Science in Dornach, founded in 1923, and worked with by anthroposophical communities who treat the months and years after a death as an active relationship, not a closed chapter.
It is worth contrasting this with the Tibetan bardo of the Bardo Thodol, the after-death intermediate state read aloud to the dying in Vajrayana practice. Both traditions chart a passage between lives and both warn that the soul's own moral condition shapes what it encounters. Yet Steiner's spheres are not the bardo: where the Tibetan teaching reads the post-mortem visions as projections of mind to be recognized and released, Steiner held that the planetary spheres are an outer cosmic geography the soul genuinely inhabits, and that one's earthly morality determines whether it travels as a sociable spirit or an isolated one. The distinction is the whole point. For Steiner, the heavens between death and rebirth are the objective ground from which the next earthly life, and its karma, is composed. The long passage of the soul after death fills the whole life between death and rebirth.
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