The possession-concept is Steiner’s name for the idea of owning what lies outside one’s own person, an idea born only when Sun and Moon separated from the Earth.
The Possession-Concept in Anthroposophy is Rudolf Steiner’s term for the idea of having something that lies outside one’s own person, and for the cosmic conditions that first made such an idea possible. In a lecture of 7 August 1915 in Dornach, published in GA 162, Artistic and Existential Questions in the Light of Spiritual Science, Steiner argues that possession (German Besitzesvorstellung) could never have arisen had the Sun and Moon not separated from the Earth. On the Old Sun, an Archangel could say ‘I Sun’: he beheld nothing and was everything, so the wish to own had no foothold. Only when the separation opened the human sense organs, which had lain blind and unperceiving since Old Saturn, did beings begin to see objects outside themselves and want them. Sense perception and possession therefore develop in parallel, a pairing Steiner links to the Luciferic promise ‘your eyes shall be opened’ and which speaks directly to modern debates about ownership and consumption.
The possession-concept names something so ordinary we rarely question it: the feeling that a thing out there can be mine. Steiner treats this feeling as a cosmic result, not a given. Beings who behold nothing because they are everything cannot want to own. Eyes that open onto separate objects, and the wish to keep them, arrive together, and Goethe’s Heidenröslein sings the cost.
In Steiner's Own Words
Now the concept of possessing something which is outside could not be formed in us at all, if there had not arisen the separation of what had formerly belonged to the earth, and the being drawn in again of the Sun and Moon to the earth. Our life was quite different on the Old Sun. There Sun and Moon were united as Sun with what were processes of Earth; they were inwardly united with the whole human existence. There the human being could say: ‘Sun activity in me,’ ‘I Sun activity’ (if he could have said ‘I’ already, as the archangels could) ‘I Sun activity’; not ‘the sun shines on me, Sun activity comes toward me.’ This Planet or Fixed Star Sun had to be separated so that we as earth men could develop this special configuration of the possession-concept.
What it Means Today
Six decades after this lecture, the social psychologist Erich Fromm built an entire late work on the same polarity. In To Have or To Be? (1976), Fromm distinguished the having mode of existence, in which identity rests on owning objects, people, and even ideas, from the being mode, in which identity rests on aliveness and relatedness. His famous opening contrast places Tennyson, who plucks the flower from the crannied wall to study it, against the Japanese poet Basho, who is content to look at the blossom by the hedge. Steiner had reached for the identical image in this very lecture: Goethe’s Heidenröslein, where the boy who says ‘ich breche dich’ (I will pluck you) turns nature’s gift to all into his own, and the rose answers ‘ich steche dich’ (I will prick you). What Fromm diagnosed psychologically and Steiner traced cosmologically converge on one point: having is no neutral fact of life but a specific, late configuration of consciousness, and it can be examined.
Thalira synthesis: possession is the shadow price of perception; every sense organ that opens on a world of separate objects also drafts the first deed of title, so any practice that loosens the grip of having must work on seeing itself. A reader who wants to test the idea can hold one owned object in mind and try, as Steiner asks in the lecture, to think the wanting of it without any picture of space or time: the exercise turns a legal category back into an experience.
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