The spiritual intelligences whose will lives in each planet, so that the orbit of Saturn, Jupiter or Mars is the gesture of a being, not a mechanism.
The Planetary Spirits are, for Rudolf Steiner, the individual beings whose life is voiced in the wandering of the planets. Where astronomy sees Saturn as a lit globe, the occult observer finds a presiding intelligence that shapes the planet's whole etheric sphere and steers its course. Mercury, Venus, Mars and Jupiter each carry such a spirit, and together these spirits keep council in the Sun.
The Planetary Spirits in Anthroposophy are the individual spiritual beings whose creative will is expressed in the body and movement of each planet, so that Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, Mercury and Venus are read as the outer sheaths of inner intelligences rather than as dead globes. Rudolf Steiner set this out in Spiritual Beings in the Heavenly Bodies and the Kingdoms of Nature (GA 136), the Helsinki cycle of April 1912. Each planet has a presiding Spirit of Form that draws the boundary of its etheric sphere, and these Spirits hold council in the Sun, which is their common centre. The visible planet is only the densest point of a far wider being. Today the Mathematical-Astronomical Section at the Goetheanum still works from this premise: that the heavens disclose deeds of will, not mechanism alone.
In Steiner's Own Words
That Spirit of Form which forms the basis of Saturn, sets a boundary, gives form to this etheric substance which in an occult sense we call Saturn. Thus the outermost line in the formation of Saturn has been shaped by the Spirit of Saturn, which is also a Spirit of Form. In the same way the line of Jupiter was formed by the Spirit of Form allotted to Jupiter; the line of Mars by the Spirit of Mars, which is a Spirit of Form. Now we may ask: Where then actually dwells the Spirit of Form which corresponds to Saturn, or Jupiter, or Mars? If we can speak of a place in which these beings are, where is this place?
What it Means Today
Steiner's claim is concrete, not poetic shorthand. To occult vision the planet is not the small bright disc the telescope shows; it is the whole etheric volume bounded by the orbit, and the presiding spirit is the will that draws that boundary. The regent of Mercury, of Venus, of Mars and of Jupiter governs one such sphere, and the visible point of light is merely where two streams of force notch the ether into something the eye can catch. This is why the planets move as they do: a course is the signature of a being, the way a gesture is the signature of a person.
The lineage that took this seriously as a working method is the Mathematical-Astronomical Section at the Goetheanum in Dornach, founded in 1924 and first led by the Dutch astronomer and mathematician Elizabeth Vreede. Her circulars to members read planetary positions as the script of intelligences rather than as data for prediction, and the Section's later researchers, among them Joachim Schultz with his studies of planetary loops and rhythms, kept asking what the wandering of Venus or the retrograde arc of Mars discloses about the being behind it. The practical discipline is patient observation of where each planet stands against the fixed stars, held with the question Steiner pressed in Helsinki: not what force moves the planet, but whose deed the movement is. Read this way, an ephemeris becomes a record of will, and the night sky a council of spirits seated, as he put it, around the Sun.
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