Steiner's principle that the organs of the human body differ in evolutionary age: the heart is an older formation than the brain, which arose on the heart's foundation.
The Relative Age of the Organs in Anthroposophy is Rudolf Steiner's principle that the organs of the human body are not contemporaries: each one carries a different evolutionary age, and anatomy only becomes truthful when it ranks them by seniority rather than laying them side by side in space. Steiner set out the idea in Macrocosm and Microcosm (GA 119), a lecture cycle given in Vienna in March 1910. There he taught that the heart is the older organ, formed out of the World of Spirit during the Old Moon stage of planetary evolution, and that the brain is a younger structure, built later out of the World of Reason on the foundation the heart had prepared. The lunar heart carried the earthly heart within itself as a blossom carries the seed of the fruit. Anthroposophic physicians still read the body through this layered timescale.
The Relative Age of the Organs names Steiner's demand for a new kind of anatomy. Two organs standing side by side in the body are not equals: the heart has passed through two great transformations, the brain through one only. Comparing them as contemporaries, Steiner says, is like judging a father of forty and his son of fifteen by standing them next to each other.
In Steiner's Own Words
Our brain was formed out of the World of Reason and our spiritualised heart of the future will be formed out of the World of Archetypal Images; as we have heard, our present heart was formed out of the World of Spirit. Thus the heart is revealed as an organ indicating the foundation which existed in man before the organ of thinking was formed. The brain, therefore, could only have been created at a later stage than the heart. All this gives one a quite different conception of man's external bodily nature. The several organs are not all equally developed; the brain is a later structure than the heart; the heart is the older organ and had to be elaborated in a certain respect before the brain could develop on that foundation.
What it Means Today
An anatomy that ranks organs by age sounds eccentric until you meet its counterpart in evolutionary biology. In Ontogeny and Phylogeny (Harvard University Press, 1977), Stephen Jay Gould rehabilitated the study of heterochrony, the term Ernst Haeckel coined in 1875 for evolutionary changes in the timing of development. Heterochrony treats a body the way Steiner asked anatomists to treat it: not as a set of parts in space but as a bundle of timelines, some features ancient and conservative, others recent and still plastic. Developmental biology gives the heart exactly the seniority Steiner claimed for it. The heart is the first organ to function in the human embryo, beating around the twenty-second day of gestation, while the cerebral cortex is still laying down its architecture months later, and the tube-heart of the embryo repeats a form our chordate ancestors carried hundreds of millions of years ago.
Gould would not have accepted Old Moon, and Steiner was not doing comparative zoology; the two projects meet at the method. Thalira synthesis: the Relative Age of the Organs is Steiner's heterochrony of the spirit, reading each organ as a clock that started at a different cosmic hour, so that the body becomes a recording of time rather than an arrangement in space. A practitioner who takes this seriously stops asking only where an organ sits and starts asking how old it is, which is the question lecture ten of GA 119 says modern anatomy forgot.
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