Seven concentric spiritual realms, from the Moon out to Saturn, that form the human being and that the soul travels through between death and rebirth.
The Planetary Spheres in Anthroposophy are seven concentric spiritual realms, ordered Moon, Mercury, Venus, Sun, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn, that surround the Earth as nested zones of cosmic activity rather than mere physical globes. Rudolf Steiner describes them in Man's Relation to the Cosmos (GA 201, 1920) as the macrocosmic source of the human being: Saturn and Jupiter shape the head and the day-conscious life, while Mercury and Venus work upon the trunk and the sleeping, night-side organism. Between death and a new birth the soul ascends and descends through these spheres, gathering the formative wisdom that later builds a new body. The same seven spheres stand behind the seven life-processes that sustain the etheric body, so the planets are read not as distant objects but as living regions through which the human being is woven into the universe.
The planetary spheres are the seven graduated heavens of older cosmology, which Rudolf Steiner renews as concentric realms of spiritual activity encircling the Earth. Each sphere, from the Moon nearest us out to far Saturn, carries forces that form one region of the human being and that the soul passes through on its long journey between earthly lives.
In Steiner's Own Words
This progression corresponds in man to the fact that during sleep what we have taken into us, though it may not pass over at once into consciousness, is elaborated; during sleep we work upon it. It is principally during sleep that we work on what we have absorbed through our life, our training and education. During sleep Mercury and Venus communicate that to us. They are our most important night-planets, as Jupiter and Saturn are our most important day-planets. Hence the old instinctive atavistic wisdom was right in connecting Jupiter and Saturn with the formation of the human head, Mercury and Venus with the formation of the human trunk, with the rest of the organism. These things arose from an intimate knowledge of the connection between man and the Universe.
What it Means Today
The line of work that took Steiner's planetary spheres furthest is astrosophy, the spiritual study of the stars founded by Willi Sucher (1902 to 1985) during the Second World War and carried on today through the Astrosophy Research Center in Meadow Vista, California. Sucher set aside prediction and read the heavens as a script of the soul's biography. In his reading the seven spheres are the macrocosmic source of the seven life-processes, the rhythms of breathing, warming, nourishing, secreting, maintaining, growing, and reproducing that Steiner had described as sustaining the etheric body. Each life-process, in this view, echoes the activity of one planetary sphere working into the living body. Astrosophy also takes seriously the passage Steiner outlines in GA 201: that between death and a new birth the human soul widens out through Moon, Mercury, Venus, Sun, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn, gathering from each sphere the wisdom and the forces that will shape its next earthly form. A horoscope, on this account, is less a forecast than a memory of that descent, a picture of which spheres a soul drew on most strongly before birth. Practitioners trained in this lineage use the planetary spheres to study biography, illness, and the timing of a life rather than to foretell events, keeping the spheres as regions of formative activity, exactly as the older cosmology and Steiner both intended. Among the planetary spheres the soul reaches at last the Saturn-sphere, the cosmic memory. The planetary spheres of the cosmos are the deeds of the planetary spirits.
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