Stars
The starry skies are made up of star Constellations, whereby we distinguish the milky way and zodiac belt. In spiritual science these are called the 'fixed stars', part of a sphere that lies higher than the Planets part of our solar system.
A fixed star sends life forces to planets surrounding it, which are communities for different spiritual beings at various stages of development. The star represents the etheric body of a planetary system which is a living organism permeated by life, with the sum of the planets as physical body, and whereby a continual stream of etheric life flows from the fixed star to the outermost boundary of the system, and back again.
Every star we see in the sky is a gate of entry for the astral, an expression of the love with which the astral cosmos works upon the etheric cosmos. Thus in the starry heavens we perceive, also in star clusters and nebulae, we behold an expression of the soul-life of the cosmic astral world.
The zodiac is really a representation of the astral world beyond, projected into our spatial perception (see Zodiac#1920-04-17-GA201)
These stars and images appear fixed, because the etheric cosmos is organized for very long durations, and hence we perceive the astral universe's perpetual but slowly changing influence on the cosmic ether.
Aspects
- a star represents the etheric body of a planetary system which is a living organism permeated by life, with the sum of the planets as physical body, and whereby a continual stream of etheric life flows from the fixed star to the outermost boundary of the system, and back again (1912-04-10-GA136)
- difference between stars and constellations of the zodiac and outside of the zodiac
- Mankind has always studied the constellations of the zodiac with special attention, because both Sun and Moon pass through these constellations on their journey through the heavens. That makes these constellations and their corresponding zodiacal spiritual influences special, because their influence is sometimes there and sometimes not. This modulates the effect of specific spiritual influences on Man and the kingdoms of nature with certain rhythms related to Sun and Moon. Other constellations outside the zodiac have a continuous influence which does not change. (1924-05-17-GA353, see Zodiac#1924-05-17-GA353)
- In 1904-12-19-GA090F, Rudolf Steiner links the light of the stars to the Spirits of Wisdom. To see this, consider the zodiac on the Earth column on Schema FMC00.077B. The region behind the Zodiac was called the Chrystal Heaven, see Zodiac#Aspects. Note: The SoW is also the entry point the Logos used for entry into descent towards Earth, see:
- See also: Planes or worlds of consciousness
Illustrations
Lecture coverage and references
1904-GA011
In the sense of mystery science, a fixed star is one which sends life forces to one or several planets situated at a distance from it.
1904-12-19-GA090F
Gazing into cosmic space today, we see the light shining steadfastly and harmoniously from the stars.
In reality, however, the Spirits of Wisdom reveal themselves through the light, which in ancient religions was conceived of as the garment of cosmic wisdom.
It was at first celebrated as the unity, the primeval wisdom, then as the duality of light and darkness, and finally as the trinity, the illuminated human being, the teacher and mediator, Mithras.
But mankind could be blessed by this cosmic harmony only when a consciousness of it arose from the human heart itself. The external light, the light that is born out there in the universe, must today be born also in the human heart.
1912-04-10-GA136
We then gain the knowledge that when we look at the fixed star, we actually see the etheric body of the planetary system raying down from it.
We can now say:
- In the moons we have the corpse of the planetary system,
- in the totality of the planets we have its body, its physical body;
- and in the fixed star itself, raying out from it, we have the etheric body of the planetary system.
In fact, the possibility of occult vision clinging to the dead paper-mache ideas upon which all physical astronomy is based, soon ceases; for this vision everywhere recognizes that the whole planetary system is permeated by life, and is a living organism.
Indeed a continual stream of etheric life flows from the fixed star to the outermost boundary of the system, and back again. We have continually to do with life-forces (as in living animal and plant bodies) which appear centered—I say that now by way of comparison—centered in the fixed star—as the life of the animal is centered—let us say—in the heart; or as plant-life is centered in the various organs which regulate the rising and failing of the sap. In short, we have to do with a center of the planetary system, which we must seek in the fixed star.
1921-01-29-GA203
When we look out into cosmic space and behold the totality of the stars — what is this sight? Why do we have this view?
We have this special sight, the appearance of the Milky Way, the appearance of the rest of the star-strewn heavens, because it is the manifestation of the Luciferic nature of the world. All that surrounds us shining and radiating is the manifestation of the Luciferic nature of the world, it appears as it does because it has remained behind at an earlier stage of its existence. And when we walk over the solid ground of the earth it is hard and solid because conglomerated within it are the Ahrimanic beings, beings which should only possess at a later time of their evolution the stage that they now provide for themselves artificially.
Thus it is possible that if we surrender ourselves to the sense world by gazing at the aspect of the sky, we make ourselves more and more Luciferic. When in the life between birth and death we have this inclination to gaze upon the heaven, this means nothing actually immediate and direct; it means a sort of instinct that has remained in us from the time before birth or conception when we were in the spiritual world and lived with the stars. We have entered then into too close a relationship with the cosmic worlds and we have retained this inclination — though indeed to surrender oneself to gazing at the physical star-world is not a particularly noticeable tendency of mankind. We develop this tendency when through our karma — which we always draw to us between birth and death — we have too deeply slept away the time between death and a new birth, when we have developed too little inclination to live there in full consciousness.
...
... if I gaze up to the star-worlds and only form concepts of what I see physically, then I make myself Luciferic. However .. if I am able to read the spirit in what appears to me in outer semblance, if I can say to myself: "Yes, I behold stars, I behold a Milky Way and suns, they inform me of Spirits of Wisdom. Spirits of Movement, Spirits of Form", then I find the equilibrium.
1921-01-15-GA323
Suppose you thus look into it and recognize that there is something in the human organization which falls right out of space, is not in space at all, but obliges you for instance to imagine spatially separated line-systems, inherently united with each other and yet united by another principle than three dimensional space affords. Thinking in this way, you will no longer be too far removed from what I shall now bring forward. You will at least be able to entertain the thought in a formal sense. No-one, I mean can validly object to thinking it as a pure form of thought. For to begin with, all we are called upon to do is to conceive a clear idea, as in mathematics generally. It cannot be objected that the thing is unproved, or the like. We are only concerned to reach a self-contained and consistent idea.
Think therefore for a moment that you had to do not only with ordinary space, conceived in its three dimension, but with a 'counter-space'. Let me call it so for the moment, and I will try to evoke an idea of it, as follows. Suppose I form the thought of ordinary, three-dimensional, rigid space. I form the first dimension, I form the second dimension and I form the third dimension (Fig. 4).
Figure 4
Then I have, so to speak, filled-in in thought — in the idea and mental presentation of it — three-dimensional space with which I am ordinarily confronted. Now as you know, in any such domain you can not only advance up to a certain degree of intensity; you can subtract from it too, and as you go on subtracting — taking away — you come at last to the negation of it. There is not only wealth but debt. Likewise I cannot only make the three dimensions to arise in thought but I can also make them vanish. Only I now imagine the arising and vanishing to be a real process, — something that is really there. Of course it is possible to think only two dimensions instead of three, but that is not my meaning. What I now mean is this: The reason why I only have two dimensions (Fig. 4a)
Figure 4a
is not that I never had a third. The reason is, I had a third and it has vanished. The two dimensions are an outcome of the coming-into being and vanishing-again of the third. I now have a space, which, though it outwardly shows only two dimensions, must inwardly be conceived as having two third dimensions, one positive and the other negative. The negative dimension springs from a source that can no longer be there in my three-dimensional space at all. Nor must I think of it as a 'fourth dimension' in the conventional sense. No, I must think of it as being, to the third dimension, as positive to negative (Fig. 4a once more).
And now suppose that what I have been indicating is really there in the Universe; yet, as things generally are in the real world, approximately so. It would then be not a pedantically accurate but an approximate rendering of what I have here drawn. This need not cause you any great surprise, for in outer sense-perceptible reality you never find mathematical figures reproduced in any other way, always approximately. If then I claim that the picture represents something real, you will only expect it to do so in an approximate sense.
To represent a reality corresponding to it, I need not repeat exactly the same drawing, but I should have to draw something flattened; that would answer to it. The fact that something has been there and has then vanished, I may perhaps suggest in this way: I will suppose that the density of an effect, indicated by the dark shading, came into being and then partly faded out again, drew weaker (Fig. 5).
Figure 5
You are then left with a sphere that has a denser portion in the middle region.
Compare this with the real cosmic system, as we see it with our eyes: the cosmic sphere with all the stars widely dispersed, and then the stars more densely packed in the region of the Milky Way, or what we call the galactic system.
Yet you may also compare it with something else. Take any popular star-map. The picture we have shown (Fig. 5a)
Figure 5a
— let us still take it simply as a picture — is fundamentally equivalent to what is always being shown: the passage of the Sun or of the Earth through the Zodiac, with the with the North and South poles of the ecliptic somewhere out yonder. The idea we have been forming is, as you see, not so very remote from what is there in the outer universe.
[ continued to explain inner planets are within space and polar coordinates, but outer planets such as mars and jupiter require etheric counterspace coordinates - see Mathemathics of the etheric]
1923-06-25-GA350
If you consider this, you will say to yourself: Yes, the powerful influences of the stars, of course, they are constantly affecting people. And everything that Europe has experienced together with America and the whole earth for four hundred years is under the influence of the stars. But what is this star influence like? Well, gentlemen, you have to imagine the following. Imagine that here is the Earth (it is being recorded). There was the piece of earth that people used to know only. Somehow the stars are above it, I am of course only drawing it schematically for you. People are under the influence of these stars. This is the time before the discovery of America. People have firmly established ideas. If you look at the pictures and portraits of the old councilmen, you will see that people have their fixed ideas and that they stand with both feet firmly on the ground. This is because in those days there was a constellation of stars where the stars were very close together. Since then, we have had a different star constellation. When the earth is there, the stars are, so to speak, much more oblique, of course again drawn very schematically. If you were to draw it in detail, each one would naturally stand out, so to speak. You will say: But the fixed stars have not changed? — But they have changed too, although not to such an extent. So you can see from this: the spaces between them became larger in the 15th, 16th, 17th, 18th, 19th centuries. The concepts have dissolved. And now there is again a time coming when the spaces become smaller, when the stars again contract. This is only very little with the fixed stars, but it is still the case. Even when one records the fixed stars, one sees that the fixed stars have to shift. And now men are exposed to the fact that they have acquired ideas through the influence of stars that were far apart. But now they have to get concepts under the influence of the stars that are close together again. There is a completely new star constellation in the world. This can be seen if one has lived awake from the previous century into this century. You see, I was born in 1861, so I consciously experienced the time in the seventies, eighties, nineties and now the 20th century. Yes, in my childhood it was quite different from today! In my childhood people simply thought quite differently than today. Everything has changed now, and in one area in particular it has changed completely. When I was a little boy of twelve, I didn't have much money back then to buy books, but every year we were given a school program; it contained the most important physical terms of the time. Well, I spent a lot of time chewing over those. They were hard to grasp. Even back then, I had to learn differential calculus to understand the concepts. But I know what the physical concepts were back then.
But today it is quite different. When someone studies physics at university today, he learns something completely different from what we learned as boys. And from what happened then, we can see that the physical concepts have disintegrated. Today, no physicist knows which concepts to use. In the past, we spoke of space and time as two different things. Today, the physicist speaks of four dimensions, taking the first, second, and third as dimensions of space and the fourth dimension as equivalent to time. Most people have no idea what teaching is like today. People who are outside of schools still live with the concepts that I learned as a boy. But in actual physics today, they are already talking about something completely different. This shows that the concepts have become completely mixed up. Today, the physicist knows least of all what he is supposed to do. Everything has become mixed up.
Yes, gentlemen, it shows you in the human mind that there is a different star constellation. For the story is that today's people all have more blood in their heads than people through all the centuries have had in their heads, because the moon is supported by the stars, which in turn are closer together. So if you study human evolution, you find that a wave of blood has gone up to the head through the star constellation. But this wave is not only happening in man, but on the whole earth. And it is this same influence that once threw the cold from south to north and buried the mammoths, which are still fresh meat in Siberia today, as if in a large ice cream factory. Just as it was thrown up then, just as blood is driven up into the head by the moon, so today these volcanic eruptions are thrown up by the stars. Thus we have today the effect of a star constellation coming from the other side of the Earth. It passes through North America, through Greenland, and throws cold air over here, so that today, as a result of the star constellation, large masses of cold air are continually being thrown from west to east.
And now I have told you: If you go to Italy, you only need to light a piece of paper on certain parts of the ground and it will smoke from below. It is not that the earth throws up the smoke, but that I make the air above warm and thin, causing these vapors to rise. Now the star constellation throws these air masses from west to east. We are exposed to them here, which is why we now have this climate. Here it goes from west to east. But this causes the ground below to throw out its masses, its fire masses. First they were thrown out over America by the huge volcanoes and the huge earthquakes. Now it is moving further and further east. Etna and Vesuvius are all beginning to erupt because the wave is flowing over there, and down below it is becoming elastic. It is not pushed up from below, but is brought to the surface by the star constellations. In the human being, blood is pushed into the brain, and on Earth, masses of air are thrown over and fiery masses of gas are thrown out from under the Earth and transported to other places. It is the same story. It all starts with the stars.
1923-09-10-GA350
People fall prey to the greatest fallacies. For example, they point telescopes out into the starry world. Now they point the telescope in a certain direction at a star. Yes, gentlemen, I turn the telescope, the instrument, and in another direction I see another star.
And on the other hand, it is calculated that the stars are so far away that this can no longer be seen clearly, but only calculated in terms of light years, according to how fast the beam of light travels. One calculates how far the beam of light travels in one year. That is a distance that is even more difficult to express in figures than when you pay for a midday meal in Germany in German currency. That is difficult enough to express! But to express this, how fast a beam of light moves, what a long way it covers in a year, this number goes into the billions. Therefore, one does not speak of it, but one only says: A star lies so far away that the light would take so and so many light years. Yes, gentlemen, now I point my telescope in that direction, I look into it and see the star. It needs, let's say, 300,000 light years to get here; the light needs that long. But the other star, it may be far back, it may need 600,000 light years. Then I look there, but I don't get the present form of the star at all, but a past one. And when I look there, what I see is not really there now. The star still appears to me, but I only see what it used to be, because the light took 300,000 years to get here. So I see an object that is not really there, that took 300,000 years to become visible there!
So you see, when you look around with the telescope, you don't really see the true shape of the starry sky! That is one thing.
The other thing is this: people believe that where they see the stars, there is something. But the truth is that there is nothing there, that where you see stars is where the ether ends! This does not apply to the sun and the moon – to the sun it applies to some extent, to the moon not at all – but it does apply to the stars: there is nothing there! There is a hole in the universe.
It is remarkable how anthroposophy and real science almost converge here. When we founded our institutes in Stuttgart, I said: One of our first tasks is to prove that where there is a star, there is absolutely nothing, that nothingness shines. Because there is something all around, you see a kind of light where there is nothing. Well, actually we are rather poor people with our research institutes, and the Americans are rich. Since that time, news has come from America that even with ordinary science it has been discovered that there is actually nothing where there are stars.
1924-06-04-GA236
(SWCC)
Here we come to something of extraordinary importance, something which in its true nature is quite foreign to the human being of to-day. Let us take our start from this. We have, first, the Earth; and on the Earth we have Man, with his etheric body. Then in the Earth's environment we have the cosmic ether — the cosmic ether which is of the same nature as the etheric in man. In Man we also have the astral body. In the cosmic environment too there is astrality.
Where are we to find this cosmic astrality? Where is it?
It is indeed to be found, but we must first discover — what it is in the Cosmos that betrays the presence of cosmic astrality; what it is that reveals it. Somewhere or other is the astrality.
Is this astrality in the cosmos quite invisible and imperceptible, or is it, after all, in some way perceptible to us?
In itself, the ether too is imperceptible for our physical senses. If I may put it so, when you are looking at a small fragment of ether, you see nothing with your physical senses, you simply see through it. The ether is like an empty nothingness to you.
But when you regard the etheric environment as a totality, you behold the blue sky, of which we also say that it is not really there but that you are gazing into empty space. Now the reason why you see the blue of the sky is that you are actually perceiving the end of the ether. Thus you behold the ether as the blue of the heavens. The perception of the blue sky is really and truly a perception of the ether. We may therefore say: In that we perceive the blue of the sky we are perceiving the universal ether that surrounds us.
At first contact, we see through the ether. It allows us to do so; and yet, it makes itself perceptible in the blue heavens. Hence the existence for human perception of the blue of the sky is expressed in that we say: The ether itself, though imperceptible, yet rises to the level of perceptibility by reason of the great majesty with which it stands there in the universe, revealing its presence, making itself known in the blue of the vast expanse.
Physical science theorises materialistically about the blue of the sky; and for physical science it is indeed very difficult to reach any intelligent conclusion on this point, for the simple reason that it is bound to admit that where we see the blue of the sky there is nothing physical. Nevertheless men spin out the most elaborate theories to explain how the rays of light are reflected and refracted in a peculiar way so as to call forth this blue of the sky.
In reality, it is here that the super-sensible world begins already to hold sway. In the cosmos the supersensible does indeed become visible to us. We have only to discover where and how it becomes visible. The ether becomes perceptible to us through the blue of the sky.
But now, somewhere there is also present the astral element of the cosmos. In the blue sky the ether peers through, as it were, into the realms of sense.
Where then does the astrality in the cosmos peer through into the realms of perceptibility?
Every star that we see glittering in the heavens is in reality a gate of entry for the astral. Wherever the stars are twinkling and glittering in towards us, there glitters and shines the astral. Look at the starry heavens in their manifold variety; in one part the stars are gathered into heaps and clusters, or in another they are scattered far apart. In all this wonderful configuration of radiant light, the invisible and super-sensible astral body of the cosmos makes itself visible to us.
For this reason we must not consider the world of stars unspiritually. To look up to the world of stars and speak of worlds of burning gases is just as though — forgive the apparent absurdity of the comparison, but it is precisely true — it is just as though someone who loves you were gently stroking you, holding the fingers a little apart, and you were then to say that it feels like so many little ribbons being drawn across your cheek. It is no more untrue that little ribbons are laid across your cheek when someone strokes you, than that there exist up there in the heavens those material entities of which modern physics tells.
It is the astral body of the universe which is perpetually wielding its influences - like the gently stroking fingers - on the etheric organism of the cosmos. The etheric cosmos is organised for very long duration; it is for this reason that a star has its quality of fixity, representing a perpetual influence on the cosmic ether by the astral universe. It lasts far longer than the stroking of your cheek. But in the cosmos things do last longer, for there we are dealing with gigantic measures. Thus in the starry heavens that we perceive, we actually behold an expression of the soul-life of the cosmic astral world.
In this way, an immense, unfathomable life, yet, at the same time, a soul-life, a real and actual life of the soul, is brought into the cosmos. Think how dead the cosmos appears to us when we look into the far spaces and see nothing but burning gaseous bodies.
- Think how living it all becomes when we know that the stars are an expression of the love with which the astral cosmos works upon the etheric cosmos — for this is to express it with perfect truth.
- Think then of those mysterious processes when certain stars suddenly light up at certain times, — processes which have only been explained to us by means of physical hypotheses that do not lead to any real understanding. Stars that were not there before, light up for a time, and disappear again. Thus in the cosmos too there is a “stroking” of shorter duration. For it is true indeed that in epochs when divine beings desire to work in an especial way from the astral world into the etheric, we behold new stars light up and fade away again.
We ourselves in our own astral body have feelings of delight and comfort in the most varied ways. In like manner in the cosmos, through the cosmic astral body, we have the varied configuration of the starry heavens. No wonder that an ancient science, instinctively clairvoyant, describes this third member of our human organism as the “astral” or “starry” body, seeing that it is of like nature with that which reveals itself to us in the stars.
Elisabeth Vreede
see: pages 253 - 262-264 - 266
