Rudolf Steiner gave a thirteen part lecture series in 1906 titled Supersensible Knowledge. The second of these lectures was titled Blood Is A Very Special Fluid.
Using that line from Goerthe’s work Faust, the lecture explores why blood is so special that the devil character, Mephistopheles, demanded his deal be signed in Faust’s own blood.
His lecture is outlining the evolution humanity has experienced and the stages moved through in passing from 'one' or whole consciousness to the individual consciousness. Broad and interesting territory is covered to ultimately impress upon the audience why blood is in fact, a special fluid.
Steiner, and others, believed this is an important topic for humanity.
Steiner conveys that blood evolved into the physical human body at a specific period when the species could begin to individualize. This meaning that prior to this time humans were connected in a way they no longer are. A human, according to Steiner, had a memory of ancestors which was not separate from the memory of one’s self. All were the same memory of one being. A human in that period would experience the world much more broadly and with no disconnect from the whole. The human was the whole and aware of this as a vague and hazy perception. Steiner says;
“…In the past ... the inner life contained all that was brought over through heredity. A human's mental life depicted ancestors' experiences as if they were his own. A person could remember not only his own childhood, but his ancestors' lives, because they were contained in the pictures absorbed by his blood. Incredible as it may seem to the modern materialistic outlook, there was a time when human consciousness was such that an individual regarded both his and his forefathers' physical experiences as his own. -Rudolf Steiner
According to Steiner, blood was introduced into the human physical form as the separation of this unity consciousness began. A stream of flowing life was the force contained in the blood that individualized the whole into what we might now call fractal parts. The function or principle at play was for a unique evolutionary purpose.
Fractal is a somewhat common word now, brought into our vocabulary in the 1980's by Benoit Mandelbrot, a mathmetician born in 1924. Steiner, lecturing on this topic in 1906 did not use that word, however he no doubt understood the principles behind it. The subject of 'fractal dimensions' was published and discussed by a German mathametician
In ancient times the inner life of the human culture came to expression in the blood. Later, the individualized “I” began to live a personal life.
Perhaps the new blood of the individual evolved the self governing impulse according to what became unique experiences. The ability to separate my experience, the "I" experience, from the whole of humanity experience is the concept.
In 1906 Steiner is leading his small intimate lecture audience through these stages by way of their group knowledge of the physical, etheric, and astral bodies. But today, here, in this summary of Steiner’s presentation a hundred plus years later, the audience is not an intimate group and this knowledge of the etheric and astral bodies can not be assumed as group knowledge. We have evolved as individuals coming together online. There may be a gap of understanding due to varying levels of individual knowledge. But this next segment from the lecture may assist some with understanding;
“… formless substances come together in the human body, …the ether body transforms them into living forms, ….through the astral body the outer world is reflected and becomes inner sensation, and finally this inner life produces of itself pictures of the outer world. “
It may sound a bit like smoke and mirrors to anyone not familiar with the system of knowledge, and it is in a way just that. The haziness of the ancestral consciousness was alive and understood as a whole, a one, until an astral mirror reflection came into focus. The fractured pieces, the individual pieces, of the whole began to come together [or apart] as puzzle pieces to form anew, and a never before realized [smaller] bigger picture becomes seen. The previously hazy, out of focus whole was now viewed through a new light of consciousness, via the astral mirror reflection, the cosmic microscope looking into things.
To imagine this is not so hard. Think of using a microscope to look into the indivisable atom, before knowledge of the subatomic particles. Or just the frog in your high school biology class.
How does a microscope work? Have you ever been curious? Its all smoke and mirrors.
Something is gained and something is lost. The "big picture" is now not as big through this lense, but is instead exceptionally in focus.
An overhead lighting system is used to assist a group entering a room see the places to sit, and also to see the person presenting, and the screen showing a mapped out presentation. But a laser is used to point the attention of the audience to a specific detail in the presentation map. This is two ways to use light, expansively overall and contracted to a laser point of focus. Consciousness and Light are the subject of the astral influence on the blood. The Light of Consciousness is the one, the individualized consciousness is the laser focus on the one. The one on one. The Light remains the Light, only forming and functioning in a different way. The Principle of light has been used functionally to see the form, the Beauty. A principle is a truth, an essence, esse.
Steiner says, "..we have followed a path that leads from the outer world to humanity's inner world and back to the outer world. We have seen that the origin of blood coincides with our ability to face the world as an independent being, a being able to form his or her own pictures of the external world from its reflection within the self."
Unless this stage is reached, a being cannot say “I” to itself. Blood is the principle whereby “I-hood” is attained. An “I” can express itself only in a being who is able independently to formulate the pictures the outer world produces within the self. A being who has attained “I-hood” must be able to take in the outer world and recreate it within the self.
And here is the key.
To take in the outer world and recreate it… within the self.. is the power to change the outer world. And it is in the blood.
The experience of the outer world mirrored as an inner life is a nonindividualized reality. Something like what most of us have experienced as school . Everyone, the whole group, experiences the established curricumum, as one body of students, the student body.
Or, everyone in a movie theater sees the same movie and comes out of the theater with the same image of a scene or character shown on the screen. Everyone remembers the same line, the same scene... decades later even.
Back to Steiner's words - "...a being who in addition possesses blood will experience inner life within the self. The blood, assisted by oxygen [ formless substance ] taken [in] from the outer world, builds up the individual body according to the inner pictures. This is experienced as perception of the “I”.
Reading a book, as opposed to watching a movie, engages the inner pictures of an individualized being. Several individuals having read this said book may then go to see the movie that was later made from it, and realize the difference between movie pictures and the unique images created personally by their own unique inner ability. The group of individuals may talk this over later discussing how the movie was nothing like the book…. The reader has had an individualized experience in response to what was read, and it remains in the blood. The experience may even alter the individual's way of seeing the world.
And so the same, or similar, with a Hollywood movie. Only this may alter the masses of individualized beings not with inner images created by experience, but with outer pictures manufactured outside and taken in, and therefore potentially shaping the group way of seeing.
In the lecture Steiner also reveals the role of blood as the differentiation of the spiritual and physical, the macrocosm and microcosm, the above and the below.
He says "…remind ourselves of a maxim that originated within the civilization of ancient Egypt, where the priestly wisdom of Hermes held sway. This maxim, which expresses a fundamental truth, is known as the Hermetic maxim and runs as follows: As above, so below..."
The ancients understood that the human body, the fractal of the whole cosmos, also contained the cosmos. The body itself is the above and the below.
"…Physical principle, ether body and astral body are the “above” blood; …"
"the “I” forms the center; " …
"and physical body, living fluids and nervous system are the “below.” --Steiner
Below is the lower being, engaged in the survival of existing in the material world. Survival or creation which the individual may influence or not, relative to the conscious knowledge of the show on the screen and whether one is a Principle player in the story .
I think this lecture is in essence showing that as we evolve, if we as humanity want to climb up the mountain, there is risk of falling down the mountain. We have evolved into higher forms of beings, but there is also a devolving that could drag us down. Maybe there were civilizations near the top of the mountain before humanity was flooded with material wants. Maybe there still are.
The material world is dense and heavy. Understanding how to use the material ballast is an evolved skill, it is the spiritual work required in the above and below.
"But in the work accomplished spiritually by the efforts we have to make, we get rid of a little of our egotism; we enter what we wish to acquire …in a more hallowed frame of mind if we have had to take trouble over it, than if it had been presented to us in quite an easy and popular form." -Steiner in 1915
As above so below. We use the Light to focus and read our own inner Spirit. We work to become well grounded in the novel material experience. And we rise to the heavens to take in all the pieces of our Soul that we have put together.
A wrap up of this overview is best done with Steiner’s own words from this lecture given in 1906;
"In our time, a person's whole surrounding world in which he acted came to expression in the blood; consequently, this surrounding world formed the inner in accordance with the outer.
In ancient times it was more a person's inner bodily life that came to expression in the blood. A person inherited, along with the memory of his ancestors' experiences, also their good or bad inclinations; these could be traced in his blood.
This ancestral bond was severed when blood became mingled through outside marriages. The individual began to live his own personal life; he learned to govern his moral inclinations according to his own experiences. Thus, ancestral power holds sway in unmixed blood; that of personal experience in mixed blood.
Myths and legends told of these things: “That which has power over thy blood has power over thee.” Ancestral power over a folk came to an end when the blood, through being mingled with foreign blood, ceased to be receptive to its influence. This held good in all circumstances.
Whatever power wishes to subjugate a person will have to exert an influence that imprints itself in his blood. Thus, if an evil power wishes dominance over an individual, it must gain dominance over his or her blood. That is the profound meaning of the quotation from Faust, and the reason the representative of evil [Mephistopheles] says: “Sign your name to the pact in blood; once I possess your name written in your blood, I shall have caught you by the one thing that will hold man. I shall then be able to pull you over to my side.” That which possesses a person's blood possesses that person, and possesses the human “I. ”
"Not till Beauty and Truth become part of a person's blood does he truly possess them. Mephistopheles wants power over Faust's “I”; that is why he seizes Faust's blood. So you see that the quotation, which is the Leitmotiv of this lecture, arose out of profound knowledge. Blood is indeed a very special fluid." -Steiner
These lectures and much of Steiner's work is available to read here. But remember to look for the files with an authentic human translator of his work.
Supersensible Knowledge was published in German as, Die Erkenntnis des Uebersinnlichen in Unser Zeit und Deren Bedeutung Fuer das Heutige Leben. Here are 13 lectures given by Rudolf Steiner at Berlin and Cologne in 1906 and 1907. Translated by Rita Stebbing
curious about Felix Hausdorff
