A false path into the spirit-world in which the Ego and astral body vacate the body, and an alien being takes possession of the deserted physical and etheric sheaths.
Mediumship in Anthroposophy is the false path into the spiritual world in which a person's Ego and astral body are driven out of the physical and etheric bodies, which an alien being then takes possession of. Rudolf Steiner sets out this account in True and False Paths in Spiritual Investigation (GA 243), the lecture cycle he gave at Torquay in August 1924, where he calls mediumship and somnambulism the exact opposite of the dream state. In dreaming the Ego and astral body stay inwardly active; in the medium they desert the body entirely, leaving the physical and etheric sheaths as deserted territory open to suggestion and to sub-earthly elementary beings. The throat, the organ of conscious speech and will, is precisely what the medium surrenders. This is why Steiner treats it not as a higher faculty but as a loss of the self-possessed Ego, the same century that the Society for Psychical Research, founded in London in 1882, was measuring such trances from outside.
Mediumship, in Rudolf Steiner's anthroposophy, is an abnormal condition in which a person's Ego and astral body are pushed out of the physical and etheric bodies, leaving those bodies as deserted territory that an alien being occupies. The medium loses conscious control, becomes open to suggestion, and serves as a vehicle for sub-earthly elementary forces rather than for genuine spiritual knowledge.
In Steiner's Own Words
The precise opposite is the case with the medium and somnambulist. Man is only in a mediumistic or somnambulistic condition when his Ego and astral body are outside his physical and etheric bodies; but in this case his Ego and astral body are possessed by an alien being. Thus we have the medium or somnambulist with his physical being, but the Ego and astral body are outside the physical and etheric bodies. The Ego and astral body are suppressed, for another being takes them over. Consequently the medium cannot influence the physical and etheric bodies in the right way.
What it Means Today
Steiner gave the lectures of GA 243 at Torquay in August 1924, four decades after the seance had become a parlour fixture across Europe and America. The body that took it seriously was the Society for Psychical Research, formally constituted in London on 20 February 1882 with the Cambridge philosopher Henry Sidgwick as its first president. Its members ran controlled sittings, weighed ectoplasm, and recorded the automatic writing and altered speech of trance mediums, hoping to settle by experiment whether the spiritual world was real. Steiner names this work directly in the lecture cycle and calls its method a caricature of science, not because the phenomena were fake, but because the investigators studied an empty vehicle.
For Steiner the medium's body is genuinely producing the handwriting, the movements, the strange voice, yet the being doing the producing is not the medium at all. The Ego and astral body that would normally answer for the person have withdrawn, so what the researchers measure is an automaton given over to elementary beings and cosmic influences. Thalira synthesis: the SPR and Steiner were looking at the same trance and disagreeing about the address, one party recording the deserted house, the other asking who had moved in. The practical caution that follows is plain: a path to the spirit that begins by emptying the Ego of its own body is, in Steiner's reading, no path at all, but a surrender of the very instrument through which conscious knowledge becomes possible.
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