The eagle is Steiner's head-bird: the soaring representative of the bird-world whose feathered form mirrors the human nerve-and-thinking pole.
The Eagle in Anthroposophy is the bird Rudolf Steiner reads as the head-creature of the animal kingdom, the winged representative of the whole bird-world and the outer image of the human nerve-and-thinking pole. In Man as Symphony of the Creative Word (GA 230, 1923, Dornach) the eagle is shaped by the sun-irradiated forces of the air working from the heights of Mars, Jupiter and Saturn, the same forces that within the human being are turned inward to give rise to thought. Its plumage is the bird's outward thinking, sculpted where our nerves sculpt ideas. As the eagle among the four apocalyptic beasts, it marks the upward, cognitive member of the threefold human form, the pole of clear cold thought that the head-system carries today.
In Rudolf Steiner's spiritual science the eagle is the animal that belongs to the human head. Where our nerves quietly fashion thoughts inside the skull, the same sun-borne forces of the heights work outward in the eagle to fashion its plumage. Steiner calls it the representative of the entire bird-world, the creature of the upper air whose whole being is gathered toward thinking, light and the cold clarity of the heights.
In Steiner's Own Words
Let us turn our gaze away from man and towards something which has claimed much of our attention during the last few days, let us turn our gaze to the world of the birds, represented for us by the eagle. We spoke of the eagle as the representative of the bird-world, as the creature which synthesizes the characteristics and forces of the bird-kingdom. When we consider the eagle, we are in fact considering, in their cosmic connection, all the attributes which prevail in the bird-world as a whole.
What it Means Today
Read on its own terms, the eagle is a thought taken flight. Steiner places it in the threefold scheme of GA 230 as the head-pole, set against the lion of the rhythmic chest and the cow of the patient metabolism. What the human being does inwardly, holding the streaming forces of the air within the nerve-system so that ideas of the immediate present can arise, the eagle does outwardly: it lets those forces sculpt its feathers rather than its thoughts. The same plumage is the bird's cognition, worn on the outside.
This is why the eagle keeps its ancient place among the four apocalyptic beasts of the Book of Revelation, the winged one set beside the lion, the ox and the man, and named since Irenaeus around 180 AD with the Gospel of John, the gospel of the cosmic Logos and of luminous knowing. For Steiner the eagle is precisely that pole in us, the faculty of clear, detached, heaven-facing thought. The warning he draws from it is exact: when the eagle-forces press one-sidedly on the head, thinking grows cold, abstract and severed from heart and limb. A reader does not need to believe in clairvoyant biology to feel the picture. To watch an eagle ride a thermal, motionless and far above the field, is to watch the gesture of a mind that has risen too high to touch the ground, and to be reminded that thought is meant to descend again into feeling and deed.
Where to Read More