The nature kingdoms below the human, formed by beings that failed to keep pace with the human line on each planetary embodiment.
The Kingdoms Left Behind in Anthroposophy is Rudolf Steiner's account of how the mineral, plant, and animal kingdoms came to exist: they were formed by beings that could not keep pace with the human line as the Earth passed through its planetary embodiments. Steiner set the doctrine out in the Hanover lecture cycle of September 1907, published as Introduction to the Basics of Theosophy (GA 111), and again in An Outline of Esoteric Science (1910). On Old Saturn only the physical body existed. When the Sun condition brought the etheric body, the beings that received no etheric body stayed as Saturn beings and formed a second kingdom. Those halted on the Sun formed a third kingdom on Old Moon, and the mineral kingdom appeared only on Earth. Each retarded kingdom stands roughly half a step below the one above it. The teaching still shapes how Waldorf teachers and biodynamic growers read animal form.
The Kingdoms Left Behind answer a question Darwinism answers the other way round. Steiner did not derive the human being from the animals. He derived the animals, and below them the plants and minerals, from beings that halted while the human line went on. Each planetary condition added a member, and whatever could not take up that member crystallised into a kingdom one half step lower.
In Steiner's Own Words
The beings that had remained on the sun formed the third kingdom on the moon, so that we have mineral, plant and animal kingdoms. The latter, however, are different from the higher animals. They were animal-men, the regularly developed first kingdom; the other kingdoms have remained at the various levels. The highest kingdom actually consisted of animal-men and the second kingdom of plant-animals, the third kingdom of mineral-plants, the kingdoms have descended half a level. The human animals, however, were half a step higher than our present-day apes. The moon mass itself was a plant-mineral kingdom, it was like a peat bog, a mass of plants, half alive.
What it Means Today
Comparative morphology reached a similar conclusion from the other direction. In 1926 the Amsterdam anatomist Louis Bolk published Das Problem der Menschwerdung, arguing that the human body is the least specialised primate form: we keep into adulthood the rounded skull, the flat face, the hairless skin, and the forward-set foramen magnum that other primates carry only as embryos. Bolk called this fetalisation, and named its engine retardation, a slowing of development. On that reading the apes are not our ancestors but our specialists, forms that pushed early into a fixed adult shape while the human line stayed unfinished. Adolf Portmann, professor of zoology at Basel, extended the picture in Biologische Fragmente zu einer Lehre vom Menschen (1944), where the human infant's first year outside the womb reads as a genuinely embryonic period, an openness no other mammal keeps. Hermann Poppelbaum, the anthroposophical zoologist, carried Bolk's data directly into Steiner's frame in Man and Animal: Their Essential Difference, treating each animal species as a human possibility fixed too early.
Thalira synthesis: the kingdoms left behind are not failures but held positions, each species a capacity paid out early and spent, while the human line kept its capital unspent long enough to receive the I. What follows is a way of looking. Watch an eagle, a lion, a bull, and ask what one-sidedness each purchased and what it surrendered to buy it. That question is the doctrine in working form, and it is how Waldorf teachers open the animal kingdom in the fourth-grade main lesson.
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