A supreme clairvoyant vision in which the student, standing outside the body, beholds the physical body expanded as the lost Paradise of early humanity.
The Paradise Imagination in Anthroposophy is one of the two most sublime Imaginations attainable in the Earth-period, described by Rudolf Steiner in The Effect of Occult Development Upon the Self and the Sheaths of Man (GA 145, 1913). Standing in clairvoyant consciousness outside the physical and etheric bodies, the student beholds the present physical body expanded to gigantic proportions and recognises it as Paradise itself, the grandiose world humanity once inhabited in late Lemurian times before being driven out into the sense-world. The legend of Paradise is thus re-experienced as occult fact. The vision is approached only by passing two trials, the egoism of the liberated astral body and an icy solitude, and union with it coincides with crossing the Guardian of the Threshold at the heart of the path.
The Paradise Imagination is the clairvoyant vision in which a trained student, looking back at the body from outside it, sees the physical body grown to gigantic proportions and knows it as the Paradise from which humanity was once expelled. What scripture preserves as the legend of Eden, occult sight recovers as a present fact: Paradise has not vanished but shrivelled into our own inward organs.
In Steiner's Own Words
I have now given you an idea of how, through clairvoyant observation, the student arrives at what is called Paradise. In fact, this was the conception of Paradise to which the students in the mystery-schools were led. ‘Where was Paradise?’ people ask. Paradise formed part of a world which is no longer present in the sense-world to-day. Paradise has shrunk together, yet multiplied; for Paradise has left behind the physical inward parts of the human body as its last relics; the human being himself has, however, been driven out of it, he no longer lives in these inward parts.
What it Means Today
Steiner gave these lectures at The Hague in March 1913, and the picture he draws has a striking parallel in the history-of-religions scholarship that followed him. Mircea Eliade, the Romanian historian of religion who taught at the University of Chicago, argued across The Myth of the Eternal Return (1949) and The Sacred and the Profane (1957) that archaic cultures everywhere carry a "nostalgia for paradise," a longing to return to the perfect, whole condition of the beginnings before the fall into ordinary time. Eliade read this not as wishful thinking but as a structural fact of religious consciousness, recoverable through ritual and initiation. Steiner, working from clairvoyant rather than comparative method, locates the same lost Paradise with unusual precision: it is the body itself, seen from outside and expanded, the shrivelled relic of the grandiose world humanity inhabited in late Lemurian times. The legend of Eden, for him, is not myth in the dismissive sense but the folk-memory of an occult fact.
Thalira synthesis: Where Eliade documents the universal homesickness for paradise and Steiner names its hidden address in the human body, the Paradise Imagination becomes the moment where comparative myth and inner experience meet, the nostalgia studied from the outside is recovered from the inside, but only by a heart that has learned to carry world-interest through the icy solitude before the Threshold.
Where to Read More
- The Effect of Occult Development Upon the Self and the Sheaths of Man, GA 145
- Find at SteinerBooks
- The Elysian Fields: The Greek Paradise and the Reward of the Heroic Dead
- The Minotaur and the Labyrinth: Theseus, the Beast, and the Path to the Centre
- The Conference of the Birds by Attar: The Sufi Journey to the Self