The Riddles of Nature and Ancient Cosmology
The great questions modern science leaves open, set beside the cosmologies of the ancient world: the Kant-Laplace nebula and the heat death of the universe alongside Zarathustra's Amshaspands, Izeds and Ferruhars, and the riddle of granite and the earth's own becoming. Part of Thalira's Anthroposophical Glossary of 1112 terms.
The leading monad Bruno called the human soul, around which the body's lesser monads gather at birth and from which they scatter at death.
Goethe's epithet for granite, which Steiner read as the earth organism's first cast off bone, the primal rock laid down before any life stood on the surface.
Two rival geological schools of Goethe's day: Neptunists traced every rock to water, Plutonists to fire. Steiner read the deadlock as a limit of geology.
Twelve spirit beings Zarathustra called the sons of Ormuzd, each carrying the light activity of one zodiac sign into earthly life.
The Ferruhars are the lowest of Zarathustra's three orders of serving spirits, the spiritual reality behind material appearance and the guides of animal group souls.
Steiner's name for the verdict of physics that all cosmic motion must end in undifferentiated warmth, proof to him that matter has a term and spirit does not.
Du Bois-Reymond's 1872 verdict that certain questions are forever closed. Steiner reads it as Scholasticism with the revelation half quietly deleted.
The Izeds are the Zarathustran spirit-ranks standing below the Amshaspands, usually counted as twenty-eight, whose forces work into the animal kingdom and the lower soul-life.
The nebular hypothesis of how the solar system formed, which Steiner treated as the model case of a cosmos described with the spirit removed from it.
Steiner's rule that a child inherits will and worldly skill from the father and intellectual agility from the mother, each shifting one level according to sex.
Steiner's name for the lifeless image of nature that exact science produces after cognition has drawn the life out of what it observes.
Zarathustra's name for boundless time closed into a circle, the single living unity that gave birth to both Ormuzd and Ahriman.