For Steiner, the Egyptian Sphinx is a clairvoyant memory of an early human stage, a being still animal in form with an etheric, human-like head rising out of it.
The Sphinx in Anthroposophy is Rudolf Steiner's reading of the Egyptian Sphinx as a remembered image of human evolution rather than a mere myth or monument. In Egyptian Myths and Mysteries (GA 106, 1908), Steiner describes how the Egyptian initiate, during the three-and-a-half-day temple sleep, perceived the four human types, the bull, the lion, the eagle, and the true man, and saw the Sphinx as the human being when the body was still animal-like and the head only an etheric form. The reptile-tailed Sphinx records a Lemurian stage, and the apocalyptic four beasts mark the discarded animal natures the human form once passed through. Steiner read the Sphinx as throat-centred speech and riddle, the enigma man poses to himself, and traced the midday woman of European folklore to this same decadent astral remnant.
The Sphinx, in Steiner's spiritual science, is the Egyptian initiate's clairvoyant memory of an early evolutionary stage of the human being. It pictures man when the physical form was still animal-like and only an etheric, human-shaped head projected from it. The four creatures bull, lion, eagle, and man are read as the physical, etheric, astral, and ego-bearing natures, the beasts that humanity passed through and left behind.
In Steiner's Own Words
He saw the four human types, the bull, the lion, the eagle, and the true man. He also saw what happened to man between death and a new birth. The Sphinx appeared to him as a real form; he experienced it. He could say, "Oh, I have seen the Sphinx, man as he was when he still had an animal-like form, and his etheric body, similar to the human, only projected out of this animal-like form!" The Sphinx was a real experience for the initiate. He even heard the question of the Sphinx with its enigmatic content. He saw how the human body prepared itself out of the animality, at a time when the head was only an etheric form, the ether-head of the Sphinx.
What it Means Today
The closest modern parallel to Steiner's Sphinx is not in Egyptology but in the philosophy of history. In his Lectures on Fine Art (delivered in Berlin in the 1820s, published 1835) and again in his Lectures on the Philosophy of History, G.W.F. Hegel singled out the Great Sphinx of Giza as the central image of the Egyptian spirit. Hegel called it "the symbol of the symbolic itself" and read the human head straining upward out of the lion's body as the human spirit pushing itself forward out of animal nature, not yet free, still bound to what is other than itself. Steiner, lecturing in Leipzig in 1908, arrives at almost the same picture from the opposite direction: where Hegel sees spirit climbing out of matter as an idea, Steiner reports the etheric human head rising out of the animal body as a perceived evolutionary fact, witnessed by the Egyptian initiate in temple sleep.
Both men also fix on the riddle. Hegel notes that the Sphinx poses a question Greece must answer; Steiner says the initiate "heard the question of the Sphinx with its enigmatic content," and that this questioning even survives in the midday woman of European peasant folklore, a worn remnant who still pesters sleepers with endless questions. Thalira synthesis: read together, Hegel's Sphinx and Steiner's Sphinx describe one threshold from two sides, the moment the human countenance separates from the animal, where Hegel hears a philosophical riddle and Steiner hears a memory the throat still carries as speech.
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