In Steiner's spiritual science, the cold-blooded animals are the most earthbound creatures, mirroring the human digestive pole.
The Amphibian and Reptile in Anthroposophy are the cold-blooded creatures Rudolf Steiner read as the densest descent of the animal soul into earthly existence. Toads, frogs, snakes and lizards belong, in his picture, not to the head or the breast but to the lower organs of the human being, the digestive tract and the renal canal. They are nature's most earthbound forms, pressed into the watery-earthly element.
In Steiner's Own Words
It is otherwise with the reptiles and with the amphibians; with the frogs, for instance, which are remarkably characteristic in this respect. These creatures are less connected with the etheric element of the cosmos; they are connected to a greater degree with its astral element. If one were to ask a fish: “How are things with you?” it would answer: “Well, yes, here on earth I have become an earthly creature, formed out of the earthly-moist elements; but my real life is the life of the whole earth with its cosmic breathing.” This is not so with the frog; here matters are essentially different. The frog shares in the general astrality diffused everywhere.
What it Means Today
Modern zoology classes the amphibian and reptile by skeleton, scale and body temperature, and stops there. The reading Steiner gave at the Goetheanum in October 1923 asks a different question: what is the creature's gesture, and where does its form answer to something in the human being? His answer is uncompromising. The toad and the snake belong low down. Where the eagle expresses the human head and the cow the patient labour of the abdomen, the cold-blooded animals correspond to the working interior of digestion, the large intestine with its power of excretion, and the snake to the renal canal that forms in us at the same world-moment. Nothing in nature is ugly, Steiner insists; it must only be regarded with objective impartiality.
This way of seeing now lives on in the Goethean zoology cultivated through the Goetheanum's Natural Science Section, where Wolfgang Schad's morphological work (his 1971 study Säugetiere und Mensch) extended Steiner's threefold method into a rigorous reading of animal form. The amphibian and reptile come into focus there as a polarity to study, not a rung on a ladder: the frog so given over to the astral atmosphere of the earth that it feels the year's wet and dry spells and answers them with its concert, the creature most surrendered to the watery-earthly, the densest point of the animal descent before the kingdom passes, in the fish, into pure water-dreaming.
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