The after-death realm beyond the Sun where the soul turns outward and the harmony of the spheres begins to sound as the speaking Cosmic Word.
The Mars Sphere in Anthroposophy is the station the disembodied soul reaches beyond the Sun on its journey between death and rebirth, where it first turns from gazing toward the Sun to gazing outward into cosmic space and begins to hear the harmony of the spheres as spiritual music. Rudolf Steiner describes it in the GA 140 cycle Occult Investigation into Life between Death and Rebirth (1913) as the realm of the old Mars-wisdom, the forces of speech, and the sounding Cosmic Word that ripens through Mars and Jupiter toward Saturn. Here whatever spirit a person gathered on earth becomes the organ by which they hear, and so retain sociability and acquaintance with the beings of the sphere. In Thalira's mapping the Mars sphere belongs to the throat centre, the seat of the Intellectual Soul and of audible speech.
In Steiner's Own Words
Thus, we arrive in the Mars sphere. As long as we dwelt below the Sun, we gazed towards the Sun. The Sun is now below us, and we look out into the widths of universal space. We experience the widths of universal space through what is often referred to but little understood as the harmony of the spheres, a kind of spiritual music. The visions in which we are enveloped hold less and less significance for us. Increasingly what we hear spiritually grows meaningful. The heavenly bodies do not appear as they do in earthly astronomy that measures their relative speeds.
What it Means Today
Of all the after-death stations, the Mars sphere is the one Steiner ties to speech. Older esoteric astronomy called Mars the bearer of the cosmic word: the place where the music first sensed beyond the Sun begins to articulate itself, ripening through Jupiter and reaching its full sounding in Saturn as the Word "in the beginning." On earth a faint echo of that Mars-wisdom lives wherever the human voice is treated not as noise but as a forming force, and the discipline that took up this lineage directly is the speech work that grew at the Goetheanum in Dornach. From 1912 onward Marie Steiner-von Sivers developed Sprachgestaltung, speech formation, drawing the consonants and vowels back toward the gesture and breath out of which they once sounded. The same impulse stands behind eurythmy, which Steiner called visible speech: the larynx made into movement so that the audible word can be seen. Both arts are still taught through the Section for the Performing Arts at the Goetheanum, the body Marie Steiner helped found, where actors and eurythmists train the voice as an organ of the cosmos rather than a tool of mere information. Read against the Mars sphere, this work carries a quiet claim. What the soul hears between death and rebirth as the harmony of the spheres is the same Word the speaking human being is learning, dimly and on earth, to carry. To shape a vowel with care, in this view, is to rehearse a faculty that on Mars becomes the very medium of perception and companionship.
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