The dreamlike after-resonance of the world before birth that early humanity still felt in pictures, and lost as the sense of I grew strong.
The Echo of Pre-Earthly Existence in Anthroposophy is the faint after-resonance of the spiritual world before birth, which Rudolf Steiner described as ordinary content of ordinary consciousness in earlier ages of humanity. In Cosmology, Religion and Philosophy (GA 25, 1922), Steiner places it in a middle state between waking and sleep, where prehistoric man lived in pictures rather than in thoughts and felt his own pre-earthly soul-nature sounding on within him. Because that picture reached back behind birth, it carried a practical certainty: the centre of the human being was something death could not touch. The echo dimmed as the feeling of the I grew definite, and Steiner sets its final extinction in the centuries around the Mystery of Golgotha, the moment at which death first became a tormenting riddle rather than a passage. In German: Nachklang des vorirdischen Daseins.
The Echo of Pre-Earthly Existence is Steiner's name for something ancient humanity did not need to believe, because it still half-remembered it. Before the I hardened into its present sharpness, a picture-consciousness stood between sleep and waking, and in that picture the soul heard its own life before birth still sounding. The echo told the human being where his centre lay, and that this centre outlasted the body.
In Steiner's Own Words
In this life of pictures, and not of thoughts, early man had a dream-like experience of his pre-earthly existence. He felt his pre-earthly soul-nature as an echo of what he had gone through. On the other hand he had not that sense of self which present-day man has. He did not find himself in the same degree as to-day as an ‘Ego’. This feeling has arisen only in the course of human spiritual evolution, and the decisive epoch of this development is that in which occurred also the event of Golgotha.
What it Means Today
Julian Jaynes, a psychologist at Princeton, published The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind in 1976 and argued something no anthroposophist had asked him to argue: that introspective selfhood is recent. Reading the Iliad against the Odyssey, Jaynes found in the older poem almost no interior deliberation. Homeric men are moved by gods who speak, and Jaynes took the speaking literally, as heard voice. He dated the collapse of that arrangement to the upheavals at the end of the second millennium BCE, and read the spread of divination, oracles, prayer, and anxious attention to the dead as symptoms of a guidance that had gone quiet. The dead had been heard. Then they were not, and the living began to petition.
Steiner is describing that same silence from the other side. Where Jaynes hears voices stop, Steiner watches a picture fade, and where Jaynes puts the break near 1200 BCE, Steiner sets the last extinction at the Mystery of Golgotha. Thalira synthesis: the two accounts disagree about the century and agree about the wound, that the birth of the sharply felt I and the birth of death as a problem are one event and not two. That agreement is worth more than the dating dispute. It means the modern dread of extinction is not cowardice and not a failure of nerve. It is the accurate response of a soul whose old organ of certainty has closed, and Steiner's path of knowledge is the attempt to reopen that organ by work rather than by inheritance.
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