The Rudolf Steiner Archive

31. Animal Souls and Human Individuality

[ 1 ] Today, we will address the question of whether creatures other than humans have souls, particularly the question of whether animals have souls in any way. To those who gloss over such matters, this may seem superfluous, yet even in the past, highly educated people have grappled with this question. Cartesius, who lived at the beginning of the 17th century and revived philosophy that had died out in the Middle Ages, already raised this question. Of course, he viewed animals as machines, as beings that cannot be said to have a soul, reflex machines. Anyone who observes animal life meaningfully will find it difficult to share this view. We need only point out how some animals in our environment perform tasks and form relationships with each other that are difficult to imagine without a soul. One example is the loyalty of dogs. It is difficult for us to accept the idea that nothing lives within them, similar to what lives within humans.

[ 2 ] When we consider certain activities, can we disregard a higher mental activity? Let us consider, for example, a beaver lodge. Such an elaborate construction would require great mental effort on the part of a human being. The fact that certain beams are precisely, but also very precisely, adapted to the slope of the water and the respective conditions at exactly the right angle shows a profound wisdom.

[ 3 ] Take the ants! In every anthill, you encounter something like a wise state institution of humans, even surpassing that of present-day humans. The ants are divided into three groups: workers, males, and females. It has been proven that the workers are very clever, the females are less intelligent, and the males are very stupid. Everything in the nest is artfully structured: how they procure everything necessary for building and raising their young, how they carry out their raids, and so on. If all this requires mental activity in the human state, then we cannot deny that animals have a soul. Humans are always content with instinct, but they never try to think beyond instinct. We must now also consider the other side and not overlook the fact that there is a fundamental difference between what animals do and what humans do with their souls. Let us take a specific fact as an example. Travelers have noticed on several occasions that when they lit a fire in the cold and then left it, monkeys came and warmed themselves by it. However, no one ever noticed a monkey fetching wood to keep the fire going. It does not come up with this combination, and that is extremely important: it cannot use its own mental abilities to add something new, such as stoking the fire and so on.

[ 4 ] If we want to understand the animal soul, we must start from this difference to the human soul. Another difference between the animal and human soul is that you can write a biography of every human being, but not of every animal. This is very important. If you ask yourself about your interest in different beings, you will find that you have the same interest in the animals of an entire group of the same kind as you have in a single human being. Imagine a lion: you feel exactly the same way about the lion's grandfather, father, son, grandson, and so on. When it comes to humans, this view would seem downright frivolous to you. The fact that a dog owner might claim to be able to write a biography of their dog is meaningless. After all, you could also write the biography of a steel spring or about the differences in the lives of a darning needle and a sewing needle. This is just a figurative term. Just as the entire animal species differs greatly, so too do individual humans differ greatly. A common soul lives in the entire animal group. Just as your ten fingers are members of your hand, so too are all wolves members of the wolf group soul.

[ 5 ] Now we must take a closer look at the human soul, which was not as individualized in the past as it is today. At one point in human development, humans were much closer to the group soul. In his “Germania,” written a hundred years after Christ, Tacitus paints a picture of the individual Germanic peoples. At that time, all members of a group felt they belonged together, with differences of course, because everything in human development is gradual. All members of a group also saw themselves as equal. The pronounced individual physiognomies are a sign of the distance of the individual soul from the group soul. Among savages, you still find more or less the same physiognomy today. We must note the fact that the pronounced physiognomy is proof that individuality has a formative effect on the body. This will become even more pronounced in more highly developed human races. A time will come when the national character will completely recede. Once a soul is incarnated here in this nation and there in that nation, national differences will disappear, and everyone will see themselves as the same, the more their individuality has worked through. In the past, when people still married within their own tribe, the members stuck together like fingers on a hand, avenging one another's insults as if they had been inflicted on themselves. This cohesion disappears more and more; the larger the union, the more universal the union of people, the more individual the souls and characters become. This does not result in a mishmash, but rather, the more differences disappear, the more individuality there is.

[ 6 ] How do human group souls differ from animal souls? We have to go back a long way in the history of their origin. There was a time when human beings did not yet live as they do now in their physical bodies and spiritual essence. I am referring to the Lemurian period. At that time, the highest beings were a kind of human-animal with a physical body, etheric body, astral body, and the predisposition for the I, but not yet with the I itself, beings that were capable of receiving the divine seed. The soul that lives within them today had not yet emerged from the womb of the deity; it still lived in a layer of soul spirit. Imagine a vessel of water with a thousand drops that merge into one another without separation, forming one whole. Take a thousand small sponges, each of which can hold a drop, and dip them in, and each will be filled with a drop. So imagine that the human shells absorb the divine seed. This is what makes them individual and independent. Now imagine that in the beginning, the soul did not immediately take up residence in each individual, but rather one soul was distributed among many bodies as a group soul. What now resides in each individual once resided in an entire tribe. And here you must grasp a new concept. Such a group soul does not die either. The beautiful and significant aspect of death is a specific feature, a privilege of the individual human soul. When a part of a group soul dies, it is immediately replaced, like the appendage you cut off a polyp. Thus, the group soul, which does not descend to the physical plane, experiences death as the departure of a limb and birth as the regrowth of one. It does not have the privilege of death. Only when a sensual being says, “I am it,” does death begin to intervene in individual life. Through death, man fights for and achieves his higher life. If death were not overcome, he could not attain a higher life through it.

[ 7 ] On the astral plane we find the souls of animals, which are connected to each individual of their group by a thread. To understand how animal group souls arise, you must be clear about what makes humans physical beings, how they are.

[ 8 ] When the seeds of God came down, they found their carriers very different. Some were specially trained for combat, others were similarly designed but more trained for work, patience, and so on. Thus, the different bodies became diverse in their training, as well as in their outward appearance. What exists today in lower animals, such as insects and others, has already been branched off in an earlier incarnation on Earth and has developed on its own.

[ 9 ] Now we are only concerned with animals from fish upwards. When the descent into the waiting body took place, which was externally, not internally, at about the level of the fish body, there were no mammals yet. The human beings who lived at that time had to move around half swimming, half floating, and had fin-like organs for this purpose. What happened to his body on earth was caused by the human soul dwelling within him. Only in the course of long developments was this transformed into the present godlike body. Many things have remained unchanged along the way. But because the earth continued to change in the meantime, this stagnation led to a downward development of the bodies. Take two siblings as an example: one changes through all stages of life, the other remains at the childhood stage. At the age of sixty, however, it no longer looks like a child. Thus, the present-day fish have degenerated and look different than they used to. Humanity continued to develop and shaped everything up to the mammalian body. Everywhere, some remained behind, people who had degenerated through decadence. If you really put yourself in their shoes, you will understand that all animals have aged at the juvenile stage, have aged too early, have taken on fixed forms that they should have outgrown: they have, as it were, crystallized in their entire development. The upward development now brought humans into a peculiar situation with regard to certain characteristics. They lost their security. Monkeys in captivity soon fall prey to tuberculosis and other diseases. Animals cannot tolerate the human way of life. They also have a certain security in terms of food. When a cow walks across a meadow, it knows exactly which grass is good for it. Humans no longer have that. They need uncertainty in order to arrive at free choice. The current uncertainty is necessary to achieve security on a higher level. Humans adapt to the higher level. Thus, becoming uncertain is a guarantee that humans will be independent. What has remained secure is what has not progressed to the point where the ego works in the individual entity. We should be no more surprised by animal wisdom than by the wisdom of our own hands. The individual beaver is merely the henchman of the group soul on the astral plane. On a completely different level from the beaver stands the ant, and much further away from us, because it already split off on the much earlier planetary existence of the Earth. In its one-sided direction, it has gone even further than man. Humans think, feel, and want in close connection. If I see something I like, I reach for it. Imagination gives rise to desire. Without this interconnection, humans would become very insecure. In spiritual training, will, imagination, and feeling are torn apart and must be completely separated. For humanity in general, this will only be achieved in the Jupiter existence of the Earth. But before the student experiences this, he encounters the Guardian of the Threshold, who gives him clarity about his entire life up to that point.

[ 10 ] Certain animal group souls have prematurely undergone this disintegration of soul activity into the trinity. In fact, individual parts of the spiritual student's brain are differentiated like ants in a colony. The ant has prematurely anticipated this and now remains immaturely clever, like a child. The beaver group soul will have to make up for what it has missed, while the ant soul has forfeited this once and for all and is going down a completely different path. Animal souls are human souls that have become one-sided. Oken says: The tongue is a squid. — Of course, this is not to be taken literally. But the being in whom the characteristics of the tongue have become too prominent has remained stuck in that state. Paracelsus said these profound words: When we look at nature, we see nothing but individual letters, and the word they form is ‘human being’. All the different characteristics that you find together in humans, imagine them distributed among different bodies, each belonging to a group soul. Animals are humans who have remained stuck in the one-sided development of their characteristics. Humans became inventors through the loss of security. The first element they learned to use was fire. With it, they climbed the first step of culture, which made them productive beings. They are an encyclopedia of the various animal souls.

[ 11 ] Now you must clarify one more point. If you go to lower animals, you will find that they cannot directly express suffering and joy through sound. Insects do make noises, but these are bodily noises. Occult science makes very subtle distinctions between animals that make sounds and those that do not. But it is only in humans that the inner sound becomes a word, a language. Even the highest animals have only one-sided sounds. In later times, the animal group souls, not the individual animals, will become human beings, but in a completely different constitution than today's humans.

[ 12 ] Even before spiritual science, Goethe sensed this and expressed it wonderfully in his Metamorphosis of Animals: they are like a human being laid out. The whole animal nature looks out from the human form. Thus, when looking at all animal beings, the human being says: All this combined into one, you are.

Questions and Answers

Will there be further divisions in human development?

[ 13 ] Yes, and this is what is called in theosophy the passing through the crisis. We are now in the fifth epoch. The sixth epoch will see a completely different race, noble and beautiful in contrast to the split-off decadence, which will consist of a race of abominably ugly, animalistic, sensual, vicious people, much more repulsive than is possible in the present humanity, because they are developing downwards again. And how the division will take place is clearly described in the Apocalypse, in the so-called “Last Judgment.” Those who are completely selfless can already become ready for the sixth period. They may still be reincarnated, but only to help others. Some may find the judgment harsh, but they have a choice. Understand me correctly, not for reincarnation, but I mean for the sixth period.

Why do old people become mentally weak if the soul cannot change?

[ 14 ] The soul does not change either. It never descends from the level it has once attained, but its instrument has become weak. It is like a great pianist who can no longer play as well as before on a poor instrument.

[ 15 ] You will say that the soul no longer knows its own level. Yes, the soul does not see itself as long as it is in the physical body. There is only the reflection of the soul, the mirror image. Now the mirror becomes cloudy or broken, so it can no longer reflect. Only the spiritual student truly perceives his soul.