Steiner's name for renewal by shedding and rejuvenation on the Old Moon, before birth and death, of which the bird moult is the last trace.
World Moulting in Anthroposophy is Rudolf Steiner's name for the mode of renewal that preceded reproduction, described in his lecture of 3 July 1924 at Dornach, published as The Evolution of the Earth and Man and the Influence of the Stars (GA 354). During the Old Moon stage, before the mineral kingdom formed and before death entered earthly existence, the creatures of the dense fluid and the dense sulphurous air brought forth no offspring. They lived long, threw off worn substance, rebuilt it, and rejuvenated themselves again and again. Steiner calls this Weltenmausern, world moulting: a renewal carried by the whole living earth-body rather than by parent and child. The upper world fructified the lower and the lower fructified the upper, so generation was planetary rather than individual. The moulting of present-day birds, when they lose their feathers, is the single surviving remnant of that world-wide process.
World moulting is what Steiner called the way living beings renewed themselves before birth and death existed. On the Old Moon there were no parents and no offspring. Creatures held their form for long ages, threw off worn substance, and built themselves fresh. When a bird moults today it repeats, in a small and hardened way, what the whole earth once did.
In Steiner's Own Words
That was the fructifying process at that time. That was the only way in which these creatures which had originated there could continue to live. In those ages there was no definite coming forth of one animal from another, as we have now. One might say that actually these creatures lived a long time; they kept renewing themselves. One could call it a sort of world-moulting; the animals down below kept rejuvenating themselves again and again. On the other hand, to the creatures above came what was developed by those below and this again was a fructification. Reproduction was at that time of a very different nature; it went on in the whole earth-body. The upper world fructified the lower, the lower world fructified the upper. The whole earth-body was alive.
What it Means Today
Biology took a long time to treat moulting as a deep fact rather than a housekeeping detail. In May 1997, Nature published "Evidence for a clade of nematodes, arthropods and other moulting animals" by Anna Marie Aguinaldo, James Lake, and five co-authors. Working from 18S ribosomal RNA sequences, they proposed the Ecdysozoa, a superphylum gathering arthropods, nematodes, tardigrades, onychophorans, and priapulids on one shared trait: they grow by shedding an outer covering and rebuilding it. The grouping displaced the older Articulata scheme, which had joined annelids to arthropods by segmentation, and set periodic shedding at the base of the branch holding most animal species alive today.
Steiner was not describing arthropods. He pointed at birds, which sit far outside Ecdysozoa, and he spoke of a whole planet rather than a clade. The meeting point is the gesture, not the taxonomy. Thalira synthesis: what molecular phylogeny found at the root of the largest animal group, that renewal by shedding is older and more widely inherited than renewal by generation, is the same order of finding Steiner reached from the other side when he called birth and death latecomers to the earth. Read that way, a moulting hen and a moulting crayfish perform one archaic act in two unrelated lineages, and the question worth holding is why so much of life still renews itself by letting an old covering go.
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