Man & the Kingdoms of Nature
Steiner's reading of the animal, plant and mineral kingdoms from GA 230: eagle, lion and cow, the butterfly and the bee, and the human being as the symphony of the creative word. Part of Thalira's Anthroposophical Glossary of 515 terms, and companion to the in-depth guide Biodynamic Agriculture.
Steiner's 1923 picture of the human being as the living chord in which nature's scattered kingdoms, eagle, lion and cow, sound together as one creative Word.
In Steiner's spiritual science, the cold-blooded animals are the most earthbound creatures, mirroring the human digestive pole.
Steiner's reading of the honeybee colony as one warmth-being, an open-air head that gathers the sun's gift in the blossoms and condenses it into honey.
Steiner's reading of birds as the most spiritualised animals, beings that are all head, whose plumage is cosmic thought made visible and who carry earthly substance back to the spirit.
In Steiner's reading, the butterfly is the risen plant, a creature of sunlight and air whose wing-colours mirror, in the cosmos, the play of memory within the human being.
In Steiner's reading, the ruminating earth-animal that is wholly given over to digestion, the living picture of the human metabolism.
Steiner's name for the formative cosmic speech, the Logos, that sounds every living form into being out of the voices of countless spiritual beings.
The eagle is Steiner's head-bird: the soaring representative of the bird-world whose feathered form mirrors the human nerve-and-thinking pole.
In Steiner's reading, the animal that lives wholly within water as the earth's purest etheric creature, dreaming below waking life.
The upright human being who carries the eagle, the lion and the cow within one form, holding in balance what the animals each express singly.
In Steiner's account, the kingdom of hovering, light-born creatures that the cosmos lends to the blossom as the mobile soul the plant cannot grow for itself.
In Steiner's spiritual science, the animal that embodies the human breast: heartbeat and breath held in perfect, courageous balance.
The lifeless realm of salt, metal and stone that the human being alone takes inward and raises to warmth, the lowest pole of nature redeemed inside the body.
Steiner's picture of the green plant as a being stretched between earth and sun, rooted in soil yet opening its blossom to the light.
Four ranks of elemental beings, gnome, undine, sylph and fire-spirit, that Steiner saw raising the plant from root to seed, each tending one ether.
The eagle, the lion, and the cow, read by Steiner as the human threefold organism spread out across the animal kingdom.