Man & the Kingdoms of Nature

Steiner's teaching that landmasses float in the sea and are held in position not by the earth but by forces streaming from the fixed-star constellations.

Steiner's name for the pre-Christian faiths whose gods were fixed to an earthly place or ruler, which is why every locality produced its own religion.

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.

Steiner's Hague image pairing the destiny of metal in fire with the cosmic forces that raise the little child upright to walk, speak and think.

Steiner's rule that a plant's yellow arises through a process in the blossom itself, while blue arises through a process in the root that presses upward into the flower.

Silicious Rock as Cosmic Eye is Steiner's image of quartz-bearing mountain rock turned transparent at the threshold of Imaginative cognition, an eye through which the soul gazes into cosmic space.

In Steiner's spiritual science, the cold-blooded animals are the most earthbound creatures, mirroring the human digestive pole.

The moral impressions of a life stamp the astral body into an animal shape, a cowed dog or a lion, which the I must strip away after death.

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 teaching, the chaotised germ is the fertilised egg reduced to pure chaos, the one substance in nature disordered enough for a descending soul to enter.

Steiner's teaching that every kingdom of nature is conscious, but in different worlds: the animal in the astral, the plant in devachan, the mineral in formless arupa.

The heavenly form-picture of the human body: planets shape the skin and senses, planetary movements the nerves, Cosmic Music the blood, and the Cosmic Word the bones.

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.

Each kingdom shows its essential being at its peak: the annual plant in fertilisation, the animal beyond fertilisation, the human being in death.

The eagle is Steiner's head-bird: the soaring representative of the bird-world whose feathered form mirrors the human nerve-and-thinking pole.

The Earth's Memory in the Metals is Steiner's name for the experience in which the earth's metal veins reveal the planet's own memories of its pre-mineral cosmic past.

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.

The nature kingdoms below the human, formed by beings that failed to keep pace with the human line on each planetary embodiment.

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.

The moral-spiritual physiognomy is the legible spirit-form after death: the whole ethical quality of a completed life made visible as one great expressive countenance.

The part of the human being dissolved into a mere picture during the Sun-existence becomes the head of the next incarnation, and its picture-character makes freedom possible.

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.

Steiner's finding that mineral, plant and animal feeling runs opposite to human expectation, because those kingdoms carry their egos in worlds above the physical earth.

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.

Steiner's Easter teaching that every full moon subtracts renewing force from the sun, so each spring the sun works weaker, and Golgotha supplies the counterforce.