Steiner's sixfold map from GA 119: Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn work on the sleeping soul; Venus, Mercury, and Moon govern its waking life.
The Planetary Forces of Sleeping and Waking in Anthroposophy is the sixfold correspondence Rudolf Steiner set out in the second lecture of Macrocosm and Microcosm (GA 119), given in Vienna on 22 March 1910. Each member of the threefold soul receives one planetary influence in each of the two daily states. By night Mars works on the Sentient Soul, the force that drives the sleeper out of the physical and etheric sheaths and carries him back at waking; Jupiter works on the Intellectual or Mind-Soul and sends dreams into sleep; dark Saturn works on the Consciousness-Soul and, where a person cannot withstand it, stirs the sleepwalker into unconscious speech and action. By day the order inverts: Venus fills the Sentient Soul with feeling for the sense world, Mercury lifts the Mind-Soul into reflective thought, and Moon steers the Consciousness-Soul into conscious deeds. Steiner read the planetary orbits as a cosmic clock displaying these same six forces.
The Planetary Forces of Sleeping and Waking answer a question few sleepers ever ask: is sleep one state or several? In the second lecture of GA 119, Steiner distinguishes dreamless sleep, dreaming, and sleepwalking, assigns each to one member of the soul, and names the powers behind them Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn, with Venus, Mercury, and Moon as their waking counterparts.
In Steiner's Own Words
The force which works upon the Sentient Soul and at the times of going to sleep and waking drives man out of his bodily sheaths and eventually into them again, was designated in one of the ancient languages by a name that would correspond with the word “Mars”. The force which works upon the Mind-Soul after the man has gone to sleep and again before waking, that is to say, in two different periods, was designated by the word “Jupiter.” It is the force which drives the world of dreams into the Mind-Soul. The force which works upon the Consciousness-Soul during sleep and under special circumstances would make a man into a sleep-walker, was designated by the name “Saturn.”
What it Means Today
In September 1953 Eugene Aserinsky and Nathaniel Kleitman of the University of Chicago published a two-page report in Science announcing rapid eye movements in sleeping subjects, the finding that founded modern sleep-stage research. The laboratory picture that grew from it shows no single undifferentiated night but an architecture of states: deep slow-wave sleep from which dream reports are rare, REM sleep where vivid dreaming concentrates, and a third category that Roger Broughton's 1968 Science paper classified as disorders of arousal, in which sleepwalkers rise out of the deepest slow-wave stage and act without either dreams or waking awareness. The parallel to GA 119 is hard to miss. Speaking in Vienna in March 1910, Steiner also refused to treat sleep as one state: he distinguished dreamless sleep, dream-filled sleep, and the rare sleep in which a person speaks and acts, and traced each to a separate influence on a separate soul member. Polysomnography describes these states from the side of the body left lying in bed; Steiner described them from the side of the soul that has left it. Thalira synthesis: the sleep laboratory confirmed the threefold architecture of the night from the outside, while GA 119 names what no electrode can measure, which soul member each state belongs to and which force, Mars, Jupiter, or dark Saturn, holds it.
Steiner's own practice suggestion in the same lecture needs no equipment: observe yourself at the moment of falling asleep and notice the order in which the faculties withdraw, first the limbs and speech, then taste and smell, and hearing last. That sequence, he says, is the Mars force drawing the soul out of its sheaths, the same force that carries it back each morning.
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