4. The Fourfold Similarity

The fourfold content of soul life is like an expansion/contraction in the succession of the four reigning spirits of the four Conditions of Consciousness, thus:

<Will><Wisdom><Movement><Form> (see I-1, I-6 & I-16)

Steiner sketched them imaginatively as follows (a = shrunk; b = expanded; c = content of soul life):

Form is the outer boundary of movement. Space is created from shattered form. Matter is created from shattered spirit. When form is shattered, space is created but so also is the virginal creation of mineral matter (physical). When movement is shattered it creates plant matter (etheric). The shattering of wisdom creates animal matter (astral). And finally, it would seem to follow, the shattering of will creates the human Ego. The following tabulation results:

Spirits of Form	Imagination	Bones
Spirits of Movement	Inspiration	Muscles
Spirits of Wisdom	Intuition	Nerves

5. Summary Leading to Blood

The following tabulation is developed:

Bones = materialized Imagination
Muscles = materialized Inspiration
Nerves = materialized Intuition

But the human being is a duality as follows:

Senses vs. Nerves Glands vs. Muscles Digestion vs. Bones

and the first column is transitory, like a wheel going round and round, with nothing lasting or eternal in it, while the second column represents the three human elements that must be transformed and correspond with the three soul-healing sentences given in Gen 3,16-19, having to do with pain, toil and death.

What follows, almost verbatim, is Steiner's discussion of blood as the special substance that lies between the two "beings" of the human being, the above duality.

And now, in between the two "beings," mediating, as it were, between them, stands the blood—which is in this connection also a "special fluid."³⁵ For as we have seen, all that we have learned to know as nerve substance has only become so in those particular workings of force that were due to the action of the Luciferic influence. But in blood we have something that has directly undergone, as substance itself, the Luciferic influence. You will remember we saw how the manner in which physical body, etheric body and astral body work into one another would be different had it not been for the Luciferic influence. But there we have to do in a certain respect with supersensible things which only afterward take up matter into themselves—which work upon matter with the Luciferic influence they had themselves first undergone, and make it what it is. The substance of nerve and muscle and bone owes its existence to the fact that certain bodies of the human being are irregularly put together. Lucifer has no influence upon the substances as such, for these arise as the result of what he has previously done. They are there because he has already displaced, disarranged, the bodies. Where Lucifer approached the human being he brought about a disarrangement between the bodies (see Lect. 3 above). But he works directly upon the blood—upon the blood as matter, as substance. Blood is the one case—and therefore a "special fluid"—where in the material substance itself we have evidence that the present human being is not as it was really intended to be, is not as it would have been but for the Luciferic influence. For blood has become something quite different from what it should have been.

This may seem a rather grotesque idea but it is true. Recall what was said in Lect. 4 about the origin of matter. We said that matter arises when spiritual form comes to a kind of boundary or limit and there breaks and scatters. This pulverized form then shows itself as matter. That is the actual earthly matter. It really occurs directly in this way only in the mineral world, for the other worlds (plant, animal and human) are taken hold of and changed by other things that intervene. The substance of blood as such, however, is a unique substance.

Blood substance was originally also destined to come first of all to a certain limit. Suppose you have here (a in Diagram 7) purely form-rays of the blood substance, and here (b in Diagram 7) its force is exhausted. Now according to the tendencies originally inherent in it, blood substance was not meant to be dispersed and sprayed into space; instead here at the boundary (b) it was to become just very slightly material and then spray back into itself, spray directly back again into the spiritual. That is how the blood ought to have been. To put it rather crudely, blood ought to have come only so far as to form, as it were, a skin of substance, fine and slight; it ought to have come only to the point of beginning to be material.³⁶

DIAGRAM 6	DIAGRAM 7

It should be forever shooting out of the spiritual for a moment, becoming matter just to the extent of being materially perceptible, then again shooting back into the spiritual and being received up again into it. A perpetual surging forth from the spiritual and shooting back into it again—that is what blood should have been. Its inherent tendencies are directed to this end. Blood was designed to be a perpetual flashing up of light in the material. It was really intended to be something entirely spiritual. And it would have been so if human beings had at the beginning of Earth evolution received their Ego from the Spirits of Form (the Elohim) alone, for then they would experience their Ego through the resistance created by the momentary lighting up in the blood. In the lighting up in the blood the human being would experience the "I AM"; it would be the organ for the human being's Ego perception. That would, however, be the one and only sense perception which human beings would have. The other eleven senses [see I-20] would not be there if everything had happened without the Luciferic influence. The human being would have lived in union together with the ruling Will.