Steiner's reading of John 1:1, where "In the beginning was the Word" records the cosmic Logos as the origin of the world and the human body.
The Prologue of John is the opening passage of the Gospel of St John, which Rudolf Steiner read as an exact account of how the world and the human being came into existence. The verse "In the beginning was the Word" names the Logos, the creative Word through whom all things were made. For Steiner this Word is the archetype of the physical body, present in germ on Old Saturn and unfolding through every later stage of evolution.
In Steiner's Own Words
In the beginning was the Logos which was the archetype of the physical human body, the foundation of all things. All animals, plants and minerals appeared later, for the human creature alone was present upon Saturn. In the Sun Period, the animal kingdom was added, in the Moon Period, the plant kingdom and upon the Earth the mineral kingdom appeared. Upon the Sun, the Logos became Life and upon the Moon, it became Light; then when the human creature became endowed with an ego, the Logos as Light confronted him.
What it Means Today
Within esoteric Christianity, the tradition the Anthroposophical Society has carried since its founding at Dornach, the Prologue is not read as an abstract hymn about a divine principle. It is read as a precise report. When Steiner gave the Hamburg lectures in May 1908, he told his listeners that the writer of the Gospel of St John had been an initiate, and that the opening verses set down in compressed form what the old "servants of the Logos" had taught in the Mystery schools. The Word that "was in the beginning" is the same creative power that shaped the human body on Old Saturn, that became Life on the Old Sun, and that became Light on the Old Moon. On this reading, John 1:1 answers a question most theology leaves untouched: where did the human form itself originate? Steiner's answer is that it originated in the Logos. Priests in the Christian Community, the movement for religious renewal that grew out of his work in 1922, still treat the Prologue this way in the act of consecration, reading it as the cosmic prehistory of the human being rather than a passage of devotional verse. The practical consequence is a shift in how a reader meets the text: the first words of John become an account of one's own bodily descent through the planetary stages, a path that runs from the Word, through Life and Light, to the waking ego that now stands and reads. The Word of John's prologue is the same creative word that sculpts every living form.
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