Karma, Death & Rebirth

The Akashic Records (Akasha-Chronik) are the imperishable script of cosmic events that trained supersensible cognition reads as the object of imaginative and inspirative research.

In Steiner's spiritual science, destiny (Schicksal) is the way a person meets the consequences of their own earlier earthly lives as the circumstances of the present one.

Steiner's polarity in which Moon, Venus and Mercury bind human fate, while Mars, Jupiter and Saturn set the human being free.

The spirit-land, the region the soul enters between physical death and the next incarnation.

Steiner's teaching that disease is a biographically meaningful event within the law of repeated lives, often sought by the soul so that overcoming it strengthens the inner being.

The eternal I that reincarnates from life to life, set against the single-life self of name, character, and epoch that is laid aside at death.

Kamaloka is the soul-world's first phase after death, in which the astral cravings still bound to earthly experience are purified through reverse re-experience.

Karma is Steiner's term for the lawful continuity of the I across incarnations, carrying the moral fruits of one earthly life into the next.

The connections between individual souls that form across repeated earthly lives, which Steiner researched as biographical fact rather than as belief.

The soul's journey through the spiritual world, expanding outward through the planetary spheres, in the interval between one earthly life and the next.

The visible workings of destiny in Steiner's spiritual science: how the law of karma shows itself in body, biography, history, and the cosmos.

The spiritual hierarchies of the Old Moon stage, above all the Spirits of Wisdom, who gave the human being its etheric life-body.

The soul-and-spirit life a human being leads in the spiritual world, among stars and higher Beings, before descending to earth at birth.

Reincarnation is the I's repeated descent into earthly bodies, researched through supersensible cognition rather than received as doctrine.

The continuing, mutual bond Steiner described between the living and those who have died, kept alive through remembrance, feeling, and reading to the dead.

The Anthroposophical teaching that the human individuality reincarnates through many successive lives on Earth, ripening the moral fruit of each life into the gifts and destiny of the next.

In Steiner's reading, the composer whose music dramas renew lost mystery wisdom, carrying the listener from the Twilight of the Gods to the Christ principle of Parsifal.

In Steiner's spiritual science, sleep is the nightly departure of the astral body and the I from the physical and etheric bodies, which stay behind to be restored.

For Steiner, eclipses are cosmic safety-valves: a solar eclipse releases humanity's evil will outward, a lunar eclipse lets evil thoughts stream in.

A polarity in which Sun forces shape the human form and make a person an individual, while Moon forces drive heredity and the propagation of the race.

The midpoint of the soul's journey between death and rebirth, the farthest point from the earth, where it communes with the highest hierarchies before turning back toward a new birth.

The soul's journey down from the spiritual world into a hereditary line, clothing the I in an etheric and physical body at conception.

The being of the rank Angeloi, one stage above the human I, whose task is to guide and protect a single human biography across life and across incarnations.

The Finnish national epic, which Steiner read occultly as three heroes who inspire the Sentient, Intellectual, and Consciousness Soul.

Steiner's teaching that the spiritual hierarchies are themselves bound by karmic law and work out their destinies through the course of human history.

Steiner's teaching that the daily labour of one's profession works on destiny unconsciously, sowing seeds whose fruit ripens only in distant cosmic time.

Steiner's claim that Sun and Earth move together along a helical screw-line through space, whose projection is a lemniscate, not an ellipse.

In Anthroposophy the Lord of Karma is the spiritual office of balancing destiny, which Steiner taught the Christ assumes from the twentieth century onward.

The panoramic life-review that appears in the first three days after death, when the etheric body loosens and the whole biography stands present at once.

The medieval Song of the Nibelungs, which Steiner read as the record of reincarnated mythic beings whose earlier lives still echo through Siegfried and Brunhilde.

In Steiner's spiritual science, blood is the substance in which the human I lives and works, making it the seat of selfhood contested by good and evil.

Steiner's reading of the seven weekdays as a daily calendar of planetary evolution, each day named for the planet whose stage it recalls.

The 25,920-year turning of the vernal point around the zodiac, the same number-rhythm Steiner found in human breath and lifespan.

The supersensible world of desire and feeling that Steiner places between the physical and the spirit, woven of astral substance and ruled by sympathy and antipathy.

Steiner's name for the three assumptions behind Copernican astronomy, the third of which modern science quietly drops while still keeping the heliocentric picture.

Steiner's account of three suns behind the visible one: a spiritual Sun-Being, a soul-elemental Sun, and the Sun-flooded ether, known to ancient initiates and lost to Rome.

Steiner's reading of the Norse Ragnarok as the Nordic folk soul's prophetic picture of fading old clairvoyance and the coming new spiritual sight.

The silent Norse god who slays the Fenris Wolf and, for Steiner, heralds the new vision of Christ in the etheric world.

The Norse world tree that Steiner read as an Atlantean clairvoyant memory of how the human being became a self-conscious ego-bearer.