The color-sheath of the human soul and spirit, perceived by Imaginative consciousness as a normal pattern of blue, yellow, green and orange.
The human aura, in Rudolf Steiner's spiritual science, is the colored soul-and-spirit sheath that Imaginative consciousness perceives around and within a person. Seen in profile, as Steiner painted it in 1918, it has a normal structure: a blue cosmic surround, with yellow, green and orange currents hovering toward the face. The pattern shows where the soul sits in its spiritual world and where knowledge reaches its two limits.
The Human Aura in Anthroposophy is the color-sheath of the soul and spirit that Imaginative consciousness perceives around a living person, described by Rudolf Steiner in Occult Psychology (GA 183, lectures of August 1918 at Dornach). Steiner paints it as a side view of the soul: a blue sea of the surrounding spiritual world, a red-violet wave that is the person, and yellow, green and orange currents floating toward the physical face. This sheath is not a vague glow. Its structure expresses two things at once. First, it shows how the soul is placed within its spiritual surroundings, borne like a wave on a cosmic sea. Second, it marks the two boundaries of knowledge: the outer boundary where cognition of nature halts at empty concepts such as atom and force, and the inner boundary that keeps a person from gazing endlessly into their own depths.
In Steiner's Own Words
This is essentially an expression of man's relation to the cosmos, to the surrounding world of soul-and-spirit. You can, however, find all that you actually experience as lying in your consciousness represented here as a mixture of blue, green and yellow running into orange towards the inside. But that pushes up against here; within the soul part of man this yellow-orange collides with what waves on the blue sea as the soul-and-spirit of the lower man, of the man below. What I have shown here in red passing into orange, belongs to the subconscious part of man, and corresponds to those processes in the physical that take place principally in the activity of the digestion and so forth, where consciousness plays no part.
What it Means Today
The clearest modern echo of Steiner's aura is not a New Age poster but a Victorian laboratory. Walter John Kilner, in charge of electrotherapy at St Thomas's Hospital in London from 1879 to 1893, published The Human Atmosphere in 1911, reissued in 1920 as The Human Aura. Kilner built a screen of glass slides stained with dicyanin, a coal-tar dye, and asked patients to view people through it, hoping to train the eye to see a faint sheath he divided into an inner haze, an outer aura and a coarser layer near the skin. He read changes in this field as signs of illness, an early clinical instinct that the body has a perceptible envelope. Steiner, lecturing in Dornach only a few years later, drew a sharper line than Kilner could. For Kilner the aura was a borderline physical radiation that a tinted screen might catch. For Steiner it was soul-and-spirit, available only to Imaginative consciousness, never to a dye on glass. Thalira-synthesis: the Kilner screen and the Steiner sketch agree that a person reaches beyond the skin, yet they part on the threshold, because one looks for the aura with chemistry and the other with a trained inner organ. That distinction still sorts honest aura research from the camera-and-filter trade.
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