Hierarchical beings who keep their proper rank are normal; those who renounce that rank to work one stage below are abnormal, shaping language and peoples.
In Steiner's 1910 folk-souls lectures, normal and abnormal Spirits name two ways a member of the spiritual hierarchies can work. A normal spirit occupies the rank its evolution has reached. An abnormal spirit has, out of sacrifice, stayed behind at an earlier rank, lending its greater forces to a domain below its own. The pair explains how language and the differentiation of peoples arise.
In Steiner's Own Words
He is naturally quite wrong to look upon the fact of these high Beings having remained behind in evolution like a school-girl left behind in her class. They do not remain behind because they have not studied, but for reasons pertaining to the great Wisdom which rules the world. If certain Beings had not renounced their normal evolution, and instead of going on further with the Sun, continued their evolution on the earth, then that which we call speech could not have arisen on the earth. In certain respects man ought to love his language, for the very reason that, so to speak, out of love high Beings remained behind with him and renounced certain attributes in order that man should be able to evolve in accordance with what wisdom decrees.
What it Means Today
Steiner gave these eleven lectures in Christiania, the old name for Oslo, in June 1910, and the cycle reads as a piece of spiritual philology. His claim is concrete: a people's language and inner cast of thought are not produced by climate or by the normal Folk-soul alone, but by a cooperation. A normal Archangel guides the national temperament. Beside it works an abnormal Archangel, a Spirit of Form that renounced its higher rank on Old Sun and stayed behind to mould the larynx and shape speech. Where the two harmonise, as Steiner says they did for the Sanskrit of the ancient Indian people, a language of unusual force and inner completeness appears. One stage higher, abnormal Spirits of Form working as Spirits of Personality produce the differentiation of humanity into its varied thought-forms.
The natural modern home for this is comparative philology and the study of how peoples diverge in language and mind. Steiner is offering a spiritual account of the same data the philologists of his century, from Wilhelm von Humboldt to the comparative grammarians, gathered through fieldwork. Thalira-synthesis: read this way, an abnormal spirit is not a defective one but a deliberate underreach, a being that trades its own ascent so that something can be born one floor below it, which is why Steiner asks the reader to love a mother tongue as the fruit of a sacrifice rather than an accident of geography.
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