The supersensible world of desire and feeling that Steiner places between the physical and the spirit, woven of astral substance and ruled by sympathy and antipathy.
The Soul World is the realm Rudolf Steiner describes as standing between the physical world and the spirit, the home of every impulse, passion, and wish. Where the body draws its substance from physical matter, the soul draws its life from this finer, more mobile world. Steiner calls its material astral, and he shows it ordered not by space but by inward forces of attraction and repulsion.
The Soul World in Anthroposophy is the second of the three worlds Rudolf Steiner describes in Theosophy (GA 9, 1904), the supersensible realm whose substance is desire, feeling, and wish rather than physical matter. The human soul, bearing its impulses, passions, and sensations, is a member of this world exactly as the body is a member of the physical. Steiner names its material astral and shows it governed by two basic forces, sympathy and antipathy, which attract and repel its formations by inner affinity instead of by space. He divides it into seven interpenetrating regions, from Burning Desire through Soul-Light to the true Soul-Life. After death the soul passes through this world in kamaloka, the region of purified desire that Steiner places between earthly life and the spirit-land of Devachan.
In Steiner's Own Words
One of the first things that a man must acquire in order to make his way about the soul-world, is the power to distinguish the various kinds of forms found there in a similar manner to that in which solid, liquid, airy or gaseous bodies are distinguished in the physical world. In order to do this one must know the two basic forces which are the most important here. They may be called sympathy and antipathy. According to the way in which these basic forces work in any soul-formation, its nature is decided. The force with which one soul-formation attracts others, seeks to fuse with them, to make its affinity with them effectual, must be designated as sympathy. Antipathy, on the other hand, is the force with which soul-formations repel, exclude each other in the soul-world, with which they assert their separate identity.
What it Means Today
The closest modern approach to Steiner's soul-world is Jungian depth psychology. When Steiner maps a region governed by sympathy and antipathy, where forms draw together or push apart by inner affinity rather than physical contact, he is charting the same territory C. G. Jung approached through the imaginal unconscious: a psychic field with its own topography, its own attractions and repulsions, encountered most directly in dream and active imagination. Jung's analytic practice, formalised at the C. G. Jung Institute in Zurich founded in 1948, took the unconscious not as a private byproduct of the brain but as an autonomous realm with figures and forces that meet the conscious self as something other than itself. That is recognisably Steiner's claim that the soul is a member of an objective world, not merely an inner mood.
The parallel is genuine, and it should be named exactly as a parallel. Jung worked phenomenologically, describing what appears to consciousness and bracketing questions of metaphysical reality; Steiner worked as a spiritual scientist who held that trained supersensible perception discloses the soul-world as really as the eye discloses colour. Where Jung sees the archetypal image, Steiner sees a soul-formation woven of astral substance and ordered into seven regions. A reader who has met Jung's imaginal unconscious already has a working analogy for kamaloka, the after-death passage through purified desire that Steiner places before the spirit-land. The two vocabularies illuminate one shared intuition: that feeling and longing are not private noise but a structured world the human being inhabits. The soul-world borders the Moon-sphere, the first station beyond kamaloka.
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