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WorkRudolf Steiner

An Outline of Occult Science

Steiner's history of the cosmos from a first state of warmth to the present earth, offered as the results of his own spiritual sight.

by Rudolf Steiner647 passages held

  • German, the original language
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Original title
Die Geheimwissenschaft im Umriß
First published
(aged 49)
Original language
German

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Overview

The first preface, written in December 1909, imagines the book's critics. A physicist would find its use of a word like warmth ignorant of elementary science; a philosopher would ask whether its author had never heard of Kant, who had shown such claims to be out of bounds; and a reader of his earlier books would ask how the man who had defended Ernst Haeckel, the Jena zoologist and leading German Darwinist, and dedicated a book to him, could now write this. Rudolf Steiner published anyway in 1910. Die Geheimwissenschaft im Umriß had first been planned as the closing chapters of Theosophy, which described the single human being; this book sets out the history of the cosmos as Steiner says he saw it. In his account the human being and the earth passed through earlier planetary states he names Saturn, Sun and Moon before reaching the present Earth, and further stages are still to come. The book also gives the method, the exercises by which, he holds, knowledge rises through three stages he calls imagination, inspiration and intuition. Readers objected that other sciences prove their claims while this one merely states them, and for the edition of 1920 Steiner rewrote almost the whole first chapter to answer the charge. In his last preface, dated at the Goetheanum in January 1925, less than three months before his death, he denied that he had drawn his accounts from Gnostic or Eastern texts: the pictures came first, he said, and he borrowed the old words only to name them. He also wrote that the book was deliberately hard, so that the effort of reading it would already be a first step in spiritual training.

Key concepts

What are imagination, inspiration and intuition in this book?

The three stages by which, in Steiner's account, knowledge rises above the senses. In imagination the soul perceives spiritual realities as pictures; in inspiration it perceives the inner meaning of those pictures, as one hears the sense in a spoken word; in intuition it lives within spiritual beings themselves. Each stage, he insists, is reached by exercises that strengthen clear ordinary thinking, never by dimming it.

What is the Rose Cross meditation?

The book's central example of a meditative picture: a black cross bearing seven red roses. The black wood stands for desires and passions that have died away, the red roses for blood purified of them and still full of life. Steiner stresses that the picture copies nothing outward; it is a symbol built by thinking, and its value lies in the feelings the student lives through while forming it.

What are Old Saturn, Old Sun and Old Moon?

Earlier states of the cosmos in Steiner's account, not the present planets that share their names. On Saturn, a condition of warmth, the first germ of the human physical body was laid down; on the Sun the life body was added, on the Moon the astral body, and only on the Earth the I. He calls each a planetary embodiment of one and the same evolving world.

What is the astral body?

The third of the four members in the book's account, shared by humans and animals but not by plants: the bearer of sensation, desire, pleasure and pain. With the I, it is what leaves the physical and life bodies in sleep, and after death it is what must be purified of the cravings it still carries. Without it, a being can live and grow, as a plant does, but cannot feel.

What is the memory tableau seen after death?

In Steiner's account, the whole past life spread out at once like a great picture, which the dead person surveys for a period of days after death. It lasts as long as the life body stays joined to the astral body and the I, and ends when the life body dissolves. What remains of it, he writes, is an extract the individual carries forward into later lives.

Themes of the book

What this book returns to, gathered into themes and ordered by how much of the text each one occupies.

A Science of the Supersensible

Can knowledge of what the senses never show deserve the name of science? The book claims it can, if its method is as strict as the natural scientist's, and names three stages by which, it says, knowledge rises.

The opening chapter, rewritten for 1920 to answer readers who said that other sciences prove while this one merely asserts, argues that occult science brings to the unseen the same disciplined thinking natural science brings to the seen. Its results, Steiner holds, can be understood by sound thinking before anyone perceives them. The path he describes leads through imagination, where the soul perceives in pictures, to inspiration, where it grasps what the pictures mean, and to intuition, where it lives within spiritual beings. His central exercise is the Rose Cross.

  • epistemology
  • knowledge
  • spiritual knowledge
  • supersensible knowledge
  • perception
  • spiritual perception
  • imagination
  • meditation
  • self-knowledge
  • spiritual development
  • spirituality

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From Old Saturn to the Present Earth

What if the history of the cosmos were also the history of the human being? The book tells both as one story, from a first state of warmth through stages Steiner names Saturn, Sun and Moon to the present Earth.

In Steiner's account the human physical body was first laid down on Old Saturn as a state of warmth, the life body was added on Old Sun, the astral body on Old Moon, and the I only on Earth. Spiritual beings of many ranks worked on each stage. The Earth period runs through ages he calls Lemurian and Atlantean into the cultural epochs of recorded history, with the deed of Christ at its centre. Two opposing powers, Lucifer and Ahriman, enter the story as sources of freedom and of error alike.

  • cosmology
  • spiritual beings
  • human development
  • human evolution
  • spiritual evolution
  • evolution
  • embodiment
  • human nature

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Sleep, Death and the Four Members

What happens to a person each night, and at death? The book answers through four members, physical body, life body, astral body and I, and treats sleep and death as two ways in which they come apart.

In sleep, Steiner writes, the astral body and the I withdraw from the physical and life bodies, which stay behind in bed, and return at waking. Death differs in that the life body leaves as well. For a few days, in his account, the dead person surveys the whole past life as a single tableau; then the life body dissolves, and the soul spends about a third of its lifetime going back through its deeds and wishes, feeling what it made others feel. Only then does the spirit enter the world where its next life is prepared.

  • consciousness
  • astral body
  • etheric body
  • selfhood
  • afterlife
  • reincarnation
  • sleep
  • death
  • memory
  • desire
  • soul

Enter a dialogue

Within this work

passages held
647
distinct concepts
487
by passages held, corpus-wide
#107

What this book thinks together

The wheel takes this book’s leading concepts and shows how often they come up together. The wider the band between two, the more of its passages speak of both. Among them, most often together: “cosmology” and “spiritual beings”.
Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 8 concepts, joined by 25 pairings. 79 pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
ConceptPaired conceptShared passages
cosmologyspiritual beings33
consciousnesscosmology20
cosmologyhuman development20
consciousnessperception18
consciousnessspiritual beings17
cosmologyembodiment17
cosmologyperception16
perceptionspiritual beings14
consciousnessembodiment13
epistemologyperception11
embodimenthuman development10
epistemologyspiritual development10
consciousnessepistemology9
human developmentspiritual beings9
consciousnesshuman development8
consciousnessspiritual development8
cosmologyepistemology8
embodimentperception6
embodimentspiritual beings6
perceptionspiritual development6
cosmologyspiritual development5
human developmentperception4
epistemologyhuman development2
embodimentspiritual development1
epistemologyspiritual beings1

Works held

The author's work in order, this book marked in place. Your-language title first, the original beneath it where the two differ; side chips show which full texts are held.

  1. 1891 Die Grundfrage der Erkenntnistheorie (Die Grundfrage der Erkenntnistheorie mit besonderer Rücksicht auf Fichte's Wissenschaftslehre)

    A doctoral thesis and the groundwork for The Philosophy of Freedom, though most readers know it only through the 1892 book that absorbed it.

     DE
  2. 1894 The Philosophy of Freedom (Die Philosophie der Freiheit)

    The philosophical centre of Steiner's work, written in his Weimar years before any theosophy, and the book he kept sending later readers back to.

     DE
  3. 1895 Friedrich Nietzsche, Fighter for Freedom (Friedrich Nietzsche, ein Kämpfer gegen seine Zeit)

    Written between The Philosophy of Freedom and the Goethe book, while Steiner still counted himself among Nietzsche's allies and before his dealings with the Nietzsche Archive turned sour.

     DE
  4. 1897 Goethe's World View (Goethes Weltanschauung)

    The last book of Steiner's Weimar years and the summing-up of his work as Goethe's scientific editor; The Philosophy of Freedom supplied its theory of knowledge.

     DE
  5. 1901 Mystics of the Renaissance and Their Relation to Modern Thought (Die Mystik im Aufgange des neuzeitlichen Geisteslebens)

    The first book to come out of Steiner's lectures for the theosophists, still written in the voice of the naturalist philosopher of the 1890s; Christianity as Mystical Fact followed from the next course.

     EN
  6. 1902 Christianity as Mystical Fact (Das Christentum als mystische Tatsache und die Mysterien des Altertums)

    The book that marks Steiner's turn from philosophy to esoteric Christianity, given first as lectures to the Berlin theosophists in the months before he became their leader.

     EN
  7. 1904 How to Know Higher Worlds (Wie erlangt man Erkenntnisse der höheren Welten?)

    The practical companion to Theosophy: that book describes what the trained seer claims to see, this one the training that is meant to lead there.

     DE
  8. 1904 Theosophy (Theosophie)

    Begun two years after Steiner took charge of the German theosophists, and the systematic foundation that his later accounts of initiation and cosmic evolution build on.

     DE
  9. 1910 An Outline of Occult Science (Die Geheimwissenschaft im Umriß) you are here DE
  10. 1911 The Spiritual Guidance of Man and of Mankind (Die geistige Führung des Menschen und der Menschheit)

    Steiner's second book on the figure of Christ, nine years after Christianity as Mystical Fact, and one that carries the account far deeper into esoteric claims.

     EN
  11. 1919 The Threefold Commonwealth (Die Kernpunkte der sozialen Frage in den Lebensnotwendigkeiten der Gegenwart und Zukunft)

    Composed for the months after the German revolution, and Steiner's chief written statement on society; it reached English readers within a few years as The Threefold Commonwealth.

     DEEN
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