The Brain as Metamorphosed Ganglion in Anthroposophy

Glossary✦ Anthroposophy✦ 3 min read
The Brain as Metamorphosed Ganglion n.

Steiner's extension of Goethe's metamorphosis: if skull bones are transformed vertebrae, the brain is the transformed and complicated form of a simple spinal nerve structure.

What is the brain as metamorphosed ganglion?

The Brain as Metamorphosed Ganglion in Anthroposophy is Rudolf Steiner's extension of Goethe's theory of metamorphosis from bone into nerve: the claim that the human brain is the transformed and complicated form of the simple nerve structure housed inside a spinal vertebra. Goethe, after finding a well split sheep's skull in the Jewish cemetery in Venice on his second Italian journey of 1790, had argued that the skull bones are metamorphosed vertebrae. Steiner asked why Goethe stopped at bone, and while working at the Goethe and Schiller Archive in Weimar in the early 1890s he found the same thought pencilled in one of Goethe's own notebooks from the 1790s. He set the argument out publicly in the lecture of 6 January 1920 in Basel, printed in From the Unitary State to the Tripartite Social Organism (GA 334). The idea belongs to the sensory-nervous pole of Steiner's threefold organism, the pole that carries thinking.

The brain as metamorphosed ganglion is where Steiner turns Goethean botany into an anthropology of the nervous system. Goethe read the whole plant in a single leaf, and the skull in a vertebra. Steiner read the brain in a ganglion, the small nerve knot lying inside the spinal column, and took thinking to rest on an organ that begins as a plain repeated node.

What did Steiner actually say?

This view of the transformation of the skull bones, the vertebral bones into skull bones, was also part of what I developed in more detail for the Goethean world view. But I said to myself, how could it have escaped such a universal mind as Goethe's that when one speaks of the transformation of the vertebral bones into skull bones, one must proceed to the view of the transformation of the simple nervous structure in the spinal cord into the complicated structure of the brain, so that one must also look at the brain as a transformation of the simple nervous structure that sits inside the spinal cord vertebra.

Rudolf Steiner, From the Unitary State to the Tripartite Social Organism (GA 334, Basel, 6 January 1920)

What it Means Today

Goethe's vertebral theory of the skull did not survive the nineteenth century intact. Thomas Henry Huxley took it apart in his Croonian Lecture of 1858, "On the Theory of the Vertebrate Skull", arguing that the skull grows from a cartilaginous base rather than from modified vertebrae, and a repeated unit running from tail to head was thereafter treated as poetry, not anatomy. Steiner gave his Basel lecture sixty-two years after Huxley, defending not the bone claim but the nerve claim lying underneath it.

The nerve claim aged better. In 1989 Andrew Lumsden and Roger Keynes published "Segmental patterns of neuronal development in the chick hindbrain" in Nature, showing that the embryonic hindbrain divides into repeating compartments, the rhombomeres, each generating its own set of neurons, each walled off by cells that will not mix across the boundary. Hox gene expression falls into an ordered series along those same borders. The vertebrate brain, at its base, is assembled by repeating a unit and then elaborating it, which is the structural grammar Steiner was pointing at when he asked why Goethe stopped at bone.

Thalira synthesis: what Steiner is teaching here is less an anatomical verdict than a habit of reading, holding one organ as the simplified form of another until the relation between them becomes perceptible, then testing whether that perception survives contact with the specimen. Set the human arm beside the human leg, or the flower beside the leaf, and stay with the pair until the transformation, rather than the parts, is what you are looking at.

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