The work of the journey's second half, where spiritual beings help the soul model the seed of its future physical body out of the cosmos.
The forming of the next body in Anthroposophy is the work of the second half of the journey between death and rebirth, when the spiritual beings help the soul sculpt the seed of its future physical form out of the cosmos. Rudolf Steiner taught it in Occult Investigation into Life between Death and Rebirth (GA 140, lecture of 27 October 1912, Milan): after the soul has expanded to the Saturn-sphere and retraced its steps inward, it carries home a mirror-picture of cosmic existence that becomes the germ of the coming embryo. The bearer is the descending I, working with the Hierarchies before conception. Steiner places this cosmic modelling before hereditary forces ever touch the embryo, and modern anthroposophical embryology reads early human development as the earthly echo of that prenatal cosmic gesture.
In Steiner's Own Words
At the outset the human germ carries a mirror-picture of cosmic existence from which its life in the solar system is excluded. It is remarkable that during the further stages of embryonic development all cosmic influences are rejected except those emanating from the solar system. These are absorbed by the embryo. Hereditary forces commence their activity on the embryo at a comparatively later stage when, during life after death, we have retraced our steps via Saturn, Jupiter and Mars. Therefore it may be said that the germ is already prepared by man during cosmic existence in a condition of universal sleep and before the embryonic period.
What it Means Today
Steiner's claim is concrete and testable in its own way: the human body is not assembled from heredity alone but first modelled out of the whole cosmos, then narrowed to the solar system, and only at the last admitted to the stream of inheritance. Contemporary anthroposophical embryology takes this as a working hypothesis rather than a metaphor. The Dutch embryologist Jaap van der Wal, who taught anatomy at Maastricht University before founding his Embryo in Motion (Embryosophy) workshops, asks students to read the early embryo as gesture and movement rather than as a machine being built part by part. In his reading the form does not push outward from a blueprint inside the cells; it is drawn inward from the surrounding space, exactly the reversal Steiner describes when he says the germ carries a mirror-picture of cosmic existence before the solar forces and then heredity take hold.
For a practising student this changes what the prenatal months look like. The ten lunar months that the embryologist watches under the microscope become, on Steiner's account, the visible end of a long invisible sculpting that began among the Hierarchies after the cosmic midnight. The Forming of the Next Body is therefore the hinge of the return: the soul stops gathering cosmic experience and starts spending it, modelling the instrument it will need on earth. Goetheanum-trained doctors and curative educators use this picture when they look at a newborn and ask not only what was inherited, but what the child brought with it from the far reaches of the cosmic journey.
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