Steiner's name for the shift in where divine beings do their nightly work in us: once the sleeping head, now the metabolic and limb system.
The Gods' Change of Workshop in Anthroposophy is Rudolf Steiner's account of where divine spiritual beings do their earthly work while a human being sleeps, and of how that place has moved. He set it out in the lecture of 17 June 1922 at Dornach, printed in The Human Soul in Relation to World Evolution (GA 212). In sleep the I and the astral body withdraw chiefly from the nerve-sense system, leaving the head vacated, while the rhythmic and metabolic-limb systems stay penetrated. In older humanity the gods took up their abode in that emptied head, ordered the nerve processes, worked into the circulation, and sent the sleeper back to waking with an echo of their deeds felt as inspired thought. Today they have moved down, opening their workshop in the metabolic-limb organism, a region that stays unconscious even while we are awake.
The Gods' Change of Workshop names a relocation, not a withdrawal. The divine beings did not stop working in the human being when the old clairvoyance faded, they changed the room they work in. Steiner follows the move from the sleeping head, where their deeds could still be felt on waking as inspiration, down into the limbs and the metabolism, where the same deeds now reach us only as will.
In Steiner's Own Words
I have said that the divine-spiritual beings have their earthly concerns in the human head. In man we distinguish a threefold being: The nervous-sensory being centred chiefly in the head, the rhythmical being which lives in the middle part, and the metabolic limb being, which is contained in the extremities and in their inner ramifications, that is to say, in the real metabolic organs. Now we know that the gods ordered their earthly concerns during the sleeping condition of the older type of humanity; that they opened their workshop, as it were, in the head of man while he was asleep. What takes place in the man of to-day? It happens also at the present time that the gods open their workshop in man while he sleeps, but they no longer work in his head, they work now in his metabolic system.
What it Means Today
Cognitive science spent its first decades placing the mind exactly where Steiner says the gods used to work, in the head. The correction came in one book. In 1991 MIT Press published The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience by Francisco Varela, Evan Thompson, and Eleanor Rosch, which argued that cognition is not a computation running inside a skull but an activity enacted by a whole organism moving through a world. They named this the enactive approach and assembled it from laboratory work on colour vision, the phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Buddhist mindfulness practice. The centre of gravity of mind drops out of the cortex and into the loop running through limb, gut, and surroundings.
Thalira synthesis: the enactive turn is the laboratory half of a movement Steiner described from the other side, because a discipline forced to hunt for mind in the limbs is mapping the region into which he said the divine work had shifted. Thinking does not count for less. It is that the will, dark to us even while we are awake, has become the place where anything new enters, and the will is not reached by observation. Steiner's answer in the same 1922 cycle: what was once inherited must now be worked for, through meditation and an education that begins in movement.
Where to Read More
- The Human Soul in Relation to World Evolution, GA 212
- Find this volume at SteinerBooks [THALIRA_BLOG_LINKS_PLACEHOLDER]