Steiner's name for the three earlier human beings, formed on Old Saturn, Old Sun and Old Moon, that still live and work inside the present earthly human being.
The Saturn Man, Sun Man and Moon Man in Anthroposophy is Rudolf Steiner's name for the three older human beings that the present earth man carries within him, each preserved from an earlier planetary stage and each living at its own grade of consciousness. Steiner set the picture out in a lecture of 3 June 1915 in Dornach, printed in Artistic and Existential Questions in the Light of Spiritual Science (GA 162). The earth man wakes in the trunk and limbs up to the throat. The Moon man dreams in the head, and the Angeloi lift his dreams into imaginations. The Sun man sleeps like a plant in head organs already breaking down, feeding the inspirations of the Archangeloi. The Saturn man rests in mineral-deep sleep in organs scarcely discernible, and the Archai draw intuitions from him: the seed of the future Jupiter. In modern terms, it anticipates the question evolutionary neuroscience still asks: how older structures survive inside the newer body.
Steiner taught that we are four beings in one. The Saturn Man, Sun Man and Moon Man live on inside the earth man as the preserved fruit of three past planetary conditions, and none of them is idle: one dreams, one sleeps like a plant, one sleeps like a mineral, and higher hierarchies read their sleeping life the way we read waking thoughts.
In Steiner's Own Words
It is quite obvious that in reality the lunar human being does not sit enclosed within the earthly human being like a shell, but when we imagine reality in relation to the earthly and lunar human beings, it is, for example, like this: That which belongs to the earth in a specific sense, we must imagine as sitting mainly in the trunk, the lower and upper limbs, extending into the neck region. And if we want to imagine the moon man, we must imagine this moon man as the head above it; while we must imagine the sun man as certain organs in the head that are already in a state of destruction, and the Saturn man as organs in the head that are already barely perceptible.
What it Means Today
In 1990 Paul D. MacLean of the National Institute of Mental Health published The Triune Brain in Evolution (Plenum Press): the human brain carries three evolutionary formations living one inside the other, a reptilian complex, a limbic system (a term MacLean coined in 1952), and the neocortex. Later anatomists have trimmed the model, but its governing observation stands: nature did not discard the older brain when it built the newer one, and the older layers are never idle. Steiner's Dornach lecture of 3 June 1915 draws the same figure with a different pencil, 75 years earlier, and grades the strata by consciousness rather than by tissue: the earth man wakes, the Moon man dreams, the Sun man sleeps as plants sleep, the Saturn man sleeps as minerals sleep.
MacLean's formations are sealed inside one skull and explain where the brain came from. Steiner's sleepers have readers: the Angeloi turn the Moon man's dreams into imaginations, the Archangeloi turn the Sun man's plant-sleep into inspirations, and the Archai turn the Saturn man's mineral-sleep into intuitions that outlast the earth. The Thalira synthesis: MacLean's strata look backward to our animal past, while Steiner's three sleepers look forward, each a seed the hierarchies are already ripening into the mineral, plant and animal kingdoms of the future Jupiter.
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