The image-based awareness humanity lived in before object-consciousness, creative rather than observant, which formed the body's organs from outside and survives now only in dreams.
Picture Consciousness in Anthroposophy is the pre-objective mode of awareness that preceded ordinary waking thought, in which the human being did not confront a world standing over against him but lived inside images that rose plastically from within. Rudolf Steiner described it in the Paris lecture cycle of May and June 1906, published in English as An Esoteric Cosmology (GA 94), where he calls this consciousness creative: it brings forth forms and colours that have no counterpart in physical reality. Its bearer is the not yet incarnated soul, which surrounded the human being like a cloud and modelled the sense organs from outside. Steiner sets the turn towards object-consciousness in the middle of the Lemurian epoch, when the soul entered the house it had built. Its surviving remnant is the dream, and its German name is Bilderbewusstsein.
Picture consciousness names the older state of soul in which perceiving and creating were one act. Nothing stood at a distance waiting to be named; images simply arose, carrying colour and form of their own. Steiner treats this as a real evolutionary stage, plastic and magical in its working, not as a poetic mood.
In Steiner's Own Words
Dream-consciousness is an atavistic survival of the picture consciousness of olden times. One quality of this picture consciousness is that it is creative. It creates forms and colours which do not exist in physical reality. Objective consciousness is by nature analytic; subjective consciousness is by nature plastic and has magical power. (This is indicated by the etymology of the word ‘image’). The subjective, plastic consciousness of man was thus superseded by objective, analytic consciousness. The procedure by which the soul (which, to begin with, enveloped man like a cloud) subsequently penetrated into the physical body, may be compared with that of a snail secreting its own shell and then shrinking back inside it. The soul first gave form to the body and then penetrated within this body, having prepared the organs of perception from outside.
What it Means Today
The most developed modern treatment of this idea came from Owen Barfield (1898 to 1997), the English philosopher who took up Steiner's work in the early 1920s and spent his life on the history of consciousness. In Saving the Appearances: A Study in Idolatry (1957) Barfield named the pre-objective condition original participation, and he argued for it on philological rather than clairvoyant grounds. In Poetic Diction (1928) he had already shown that words such as the Latin spiritus and the Greek pneuma were not metaphors joining breath to spirit; they carried one undivided meaning, and the later split into literal and figurative senses is the fossil record of an awareness that had not yet stepped back from what it perceived. Barfield made this case inside the Inklings at Oxford. C. S. Lewis dedicated The Allegory of Love (1936) to him as the wisest of his unofficial teachers, and the two argued it out in the long exchange they called their Great War.
Thalira synthesis: Steiner and Barfield reach the same stage from opposite ends, Steiner reading it in the body (a soul that shaped the eye from outside before withdrawing behind it) and Barfield reading it in the dictionary, which leaves picture consciousness with two independent evidence trails, physiological and philological, where most esoteric claims carry none.
What follows in practice is a change of reading. Myth, early poetry, and scripture stop looking like decorated statements about a world already known, and start reading as reports from a soul not yet finished separating from its surroundings.
Where to Read More
- An Esoteric Cosmology, GA 94
- Find An Esoteric Cosmology at SteinerBooks [THALIRA_BLOG_LINKS_PLACEHOLDER]