Steiner's teaching that feeling, desire, and will absorb the mineral, plant, and animal kingdoms across the Earth, Jupiter, and Venus stages, leaving only the human kingdom on Vulcan.
The Consuming of the Nature Kingdoms in Anthroposophy is Rudolf Steiner's teaching that the lower soul faculties of feeling, desire, and will absorb the mineral, plant, and animal kingdoms one planetary stage at a time. In the lecture of 14 February 1920 at Dornach, published in Spiritual and Social Changes in the Development of Humanity (GA 196), Steiner states that feeling stands in a special relation to the mineral kingdom and will have consumed it by the end of the Earth stage, which is why Future Jupiter carries no mineral kingdom. Desire consumes the plant kingdom during the Jupiter stage, so Future Venus carries no plants, and will consumes the animal kingdom during the Venus stage. By the Vulcan stage only the human kingdom remains, holding what the three kingdoms have become. The teaching grounds a long ecological reading of human responsibility for nature.
The Consuming of the Nature Kingdoms names one of Steiner's starkest cosmological pictures: the kingdoms surrounding us are not permanent scenery but nourishment for the developing human being. Feeling devours the mineral world across the Earth stage, desire takes the plant world during Jupiter, and the will takes the animal world during Venus, until Vulcan carries a single kingdom, the human, bearing the fruits of all three.
In Steiner's Own Words
Just as there will be no mineral kingdom on Jupiter, which, as the future planet, will be the next embodiment of our Earth, because during its time on Earth feeling will have consumed the mineral kingdom, so during the Venus period there will no longer be a plant kingdom because human desire during the Jupiter period will have consumed this plant kingdom, and human will during the Venus period will have consumed the animal kingdom. And when the time of Vulcan comes, the future incarnation of Vulcan on our Earth will no longer contain the three kingdoms, but only that part of the present kingdoms that will have become of the human kingdom.
What it Means Today
The nearest modern relative of this teaching is the evolutionary cosmology of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, the Jesuit paleontologist whose book The Phenomenon of Man appeared posthumously in 1955. Teilhard read the history of matter as a single ascent: the geosphere gives rise to the biosphere, the biosphere to the noosphere, the thinking layer of the planet, and the whole movement converges on a final state he called Omega Point, in which matter is taken up into consciousness and personhood. The structural parallel with GA 196 is close in one respect and instructive where it breaks. Both thinkers deny that mineral, plant, and animal are permanent furniture of the cosmos, and both see the human being as the site where the kingdoms are gathered and carried forward. The difference is direction: Teilhard's kingdoms complexify upward from below, while Steiner's kingdoms are consumed from above, drawn into the human being by feeling, desire, and will, faculties that ripen into conscious Imagination, Inspiration, and Intuition on the coming stages. Where Teilhard offers a physics of convergence, Steiner offers a physiology of it, naming which faculty digests which kingdom and on which planetary embodiment. Thalira synthesis: the nature kingdoms are not our surroundings but our unfinished body, and every act of feeling, desiring, and willing is already a mouthful of the world's future. Read this way, ecological care gains a second meaning: what feeling consumes it must also be able to carry, which makes the schooling of feeling, desire, and will a duty owed to the mineral, plant, and animal worlds themselves.
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