Souls not yet descended to birth who, in genuine ceremonial Lodges, communicate spiritual nature-wisdom to the living through the Earth-Spirits.
The Unborn are, in Rudolf Steiner's spiritual science, human souls still living in pre-earthly existence before they descend to physical birth. In a 1922 lecture cycle, Steiner described how such souls could be present in sincere occult Lodges, hovering in anticipatory existence and conveying spiritual truths to gifted members through feeling rather than thought, the precise reversal of ancient Egypt's intercourse with the dead.
In Steiner's Own Words
They actually experienced these rejuvenations because in their souls they had intercourse with men as yet unborn. Just as the priests of the temples in ancient Egypt had intercourse with the souls of men after their death, so persons such as I have named had intercourse with human beings still living in pre-earthly existence. And from this existence before birth, human beings can bring spirituality into the world of the present. They bring, not intellectualism, but spirituality, which a man then receives through his feelings and which can pervade his whole life.
What it Means Today
The closest contemporary field to Steiner's Unborn is prenatal and perinatal psychology, the discipline that takes the psychic life of the human being before birth as a serious object of study. Its central German figure, the Heidelberg psychoanalyst Ludwig Janus, served as president of the International Society for Prenatal and Perinatal Psychology and Medicine (ISPPM) and wrote, in The Enduring Effects of Prenatal Life, of the hidden attendance of prenatal existence in the work of Sandor Ferenczi, Carl Gustav Jung, and Melanie Klein. Janus, with Jenö Raffai, developed the Prenatal Bonding method, a practice that treats the unborn child as a present, communicating soul rather than a future one. The vocabularies differ. Janus reads pre-birth life through depth psychology and gestation; Steiner placed the Unborn in a spiritual cosmos, descending from the heavens toward a chosen earthly life. Yet both reject the assumption that the human being begins at the cradle, and both insist that something real reaches the living from before birth.
Thalira synthesis: Where Janus listens for the prenatal soul inside the womb, Steiner heard the Unborn speaking from outside it, through the Earth-Spirits of the rite, so that the same threshold is approached from the biological side by the clinician and from the cosmic side by the seer.
Where to Read More
- Fundamentals of Therapy and the Spiritual Communion of Mankind, GA 216
- Find at SteinerBooks
- The Minotaur and the Labyrinth: Theseus, the Beast, and the Path to the Centre
- The Conference of the Birds by Attar: The Sufi Journey to the Self
- The Elysian Fields: The Greek Paradise and the Reward of the Heroic Dead