Three sister beings in Steiner's first Mystery Drama who carry the sentient, intellectual and consciousness souls, presented as living persons rather than symbols.
Philia, Astrid and Luna in Anthroposophy is the collective name Rudolf Steiner gave to the three sister beings who appear in his first Mystery Drama, The Portal of Initiation (Die Pforte der Einweihung), staged in Munich in August 1910. They belong to Scene Seven, the spirit realm, where the drama shows Devachan directly instead of describing it. Philia sets herself into the wide spaces of the cosmos, Astrid relates herself to the moving elements, and Luna turns toward firmness, free deed and self-knowledge. Read against Steiner's anthropology they answer to the sentient soul, the intellectual or mind soul and the consciousness soul, and they work into the astral body, the ether body and the physical body in that order. In his Berlin lecture of 31 October 1910, printed in GA 125, Steiner insisted that they are in no way personifications, symbols or allegories of those soul members. They are persons who are alive, and that distinction is the whole point of the scene.
Philia, Astrid and Luna stand together in the Devachan scene of Steiner's Rosicrucian Mystery Play as companions of Maria, and their speeches grade the threefold soul by sound rather than by argument. Steiner asked his audiences to listen to the vowels each sister uses, because the difference between sentient, intellectual and consciousness soul lives in how the three speak, not only in what they say.
In Steiner's Own Words
Let us not think that we know anything of higher worlds by speaking about them with the words sentient soul, intellectual soul, consciousness soul, alluding to Philia, Astrid, and Luna. These three figures are in no way personifications of the three soul principles, nor are they symbols for them. Listen to the vowels with which each of these characters describes her activities. Try to hear what lives in the vowels. Then you can follow how the sequence of single vowels and single words make clear what is given in a different way as sentient, intellectual, and consciousness souls.
What it Means Today
The claim that gives these three figures their edge is a negative one: Steiner refused to let them be read as personifications. Archetypal psychology arrived at the same refusal sixty-five years later through a different door. James Hillman, who served as Director of Studies at the C.G. Jung Institute in Zurich before founding archetypal psychology, opened his 1975 book Re-Visioning Psychology with a chapter titled "Personifying, or Imagining Things." The argument there is that the figures who appear in dreams, visions and imaginative work are not stand-ins for concepts. Reading them as allegory, as coded notes about ego development or repressed drive, converts a living presence into a label and then discards the presence. Hillman wanted the figure kept as a figure and addressed as a someone.
Steiner's Berlin audience in 1910 was being drilled in the same etiquette by a harder method. Listen to the vowels, he told them, because the soul member is in the sound and not in the name. Take one line out and the whole is gone. A reader who wants to test this can read Scene Seven aloud, first Philia, then Astrid, then Luna, and notice the mouth changing shape before the meaning arrives.
Thalira synthesis: the three sisters are a rehearsal room for the etiquette of the imaginal, a place to practise meeting a spiritual figure as a person before meeting one somewhere less forgiving, and the refusal to allegorise is the same lesson whether it comes from Dornach or from Zurich.
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