The Interior of the Earth: An Esoteric Study of the Subterranean Spheres

by Rudolf Steiner, Paul V. O'Leary (Introduction)

Selected lectures Modern science cannot speak with justifiable authority about more than only a tiny fraction of the Earth’s interior. We have, literally, scratched just the surface of our planet. Can we know what lies beneath our feet in the unimaginable depths of the Earth? Can spiritual investigation give us answers to our questions about something virtually impossible to perceive through our physical senses? Rudolf Steiner’s discussions of the subterranean spheres are gathered, along with notes and an introduction, for the first time in this comprehensive volume. His unique overview pictures of the nine layers of the Earth as they become visible through spiritual scientific research. The strata range from what we know as the “mineral” layer, on which we live, to the Earth’s innermost core, which Steiner connects to human and animal reproductive forces. In between these radically different strata are layers such as what Steiner calls the “Mirror Earth,” representing qualities of extreme evil, and the “Fire Earth,” connected to natural catastrophes. Steiner never conveys abstract or theoretical information, but fact related intimately to humankind. Fire Earth, for example, is acutely affected by human volition. When the human will is chaotic and untrained, says Steiner, it acts magnetically on this layer and disrupts it, leading to volcanic eruptions. He describes other natural catastrophes, such as extreme weather and earthquakes, in connection to the interior of the Earth and to karma.

144 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2006

About the author

Author also wrote under the name Rudolph Steiner.

https://www.goodreads.com/author/show...


Rudolf Joseph Lorenz Steiner was an Austrian occultist, social reformer, architect, esotericist, and claimed clairvoyant. Steiner gained initial recognition at the end of the nineteenth century as a literary critic and published works including The Philosophy of Freedom. At the beginning of the twentieth century he founded an esoteric spiritual movement, anthroposophy, with roots in German idealist philosophy and theosophy. His teachings are influenced by Christian Gnosticism or neognosticism. Many of his ideas are pseudoscientific. He was also prone to pseudohistory.
In the first, more philosophically oriented phase of this movement, Steiner attempted to find a synthesis between science and spirituality. His philosophical work of these years, which he termed "spiritual science", sought to apply what he saw as the clarity of thinking characteristic of Western philosophy to spiritual questions,  differentiating this approach from what he considered to be vaguer approaches to mysticism. In a second phase, beginning around 1907, he began working collaboratively in a variety of artistic media, including drama, dance and architecture, culminating in the building of the Goetheanum, a cultural centre to house all the arts. In the third phase of his work, beginning after World War I, Steiner worked on various ostensibly applied projects, including Waldorf education, biodynamic agriculture, and anthroposophical medicine.
Steiner advocated a form of ethical individualism, to which he later brought a more explicitly spiritual approach. He based his epistemology on Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's world view in which "thinking…is no more and no less an organ of perception than the eye or ear. Just as the eye perceives colours and the ear sounds, so thinking perceives ideas." A consistent thread that runs through his work is the goal of demonstrating that there are no limits to human knowledge.