Copyright Alan Whitehead & Earthschooling: No Part of this book, post, URL, or book excerpt may be shared with anyone who has not paid for these materials.
Alan speaks in a very symbolic and esoteric manner in some parts of his books. Although they can be read anthroposophically, passages speaking of Atlantis, archangels, gods, etc. do not need to be taken literarily to be meaningful. The more you read, the more you will realize he uses many different religions to express ideas in a symbolic manner and not in a religious manner. His writings are not religious. In some places his writings are meant to refer to religious events in a historical way. In some places he is using religious figures (from Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, Paganism, Ancient Roman and Greek Religions, etc.) in a symbolic manner. However, at no point is he promoting a specific religion or speaking from a religious point of view.
I have kept the writing as close to one-hundred percent original so you will also find that he speaks of Australia often and some spelling or manners of speaking may be cultural. Any words I have changed are presented like this: <word>.
Also keep in mind that these books are written by a Waldorf teacher with decades of experience who also studied with a Steiner student himself, so he speaks to an audience that is dedicating their lives to the Waldorf method without exception.
Because of this, all of his views are not reflected in the Earthschooling curriculum and not all of them may be ones you want to embrace or are able to use. In all of Alan Whitehead’s writings the opinions are his own and may not align with Earthschooling or Waldorf Books. In some cases, we will be updating some of these chapters in the future with additional and/or updated information.
Ultimately, however, as I read through these passages I find I can distill wisdom from even those paragraphs that do not resonate with me.
We invite you to read with an open mind and heart and with eagerness to learn and discuss…
MAN MEETS PENGUIN
Evolution of the Third Kingdom
Greetings: I am an animal – oh, it doesn’t matter which kind, I might be an aardvark or a zonure, the alpha and omega of most animal encyclopedias. If I have to choose, I’ll be a … penguin (see picture later). Anyway, I have been asked to give our side of the Story of Creation. I suppose a human could have done it, but with their rampant ego forces, you can’t really trust them to represent a kingdom whose same principle, at this stage in evolution at least, is still in the lap of the gods – in devachan. As well, humans have not exactly given us animals a fair shake up to date!
Where to begin? Okay, we animals consist, generically speaking, of a Physical, Etheric, and Astral Body. Oh, we have an Ego too, just like you lot, but this exists supersensibly in the Soul or Astral World in the form of a group soul. There is one of these for every designated animal species – of course the reality is much more complex than this simplistic exposition would suggest – What about sub-species and the like? As such, one could say that one animal species is equivalent to one human individual – and there are about the same numbers of both on earth! When you think of it this way, which of you is the lion? Who the dolphin?… then there’s the tapeworm? … some parasite no doubt!
The animal ego will manifest as a self-conscious organ on the Jupiter planetary evolution, the 5th, the one after this. I’m not sure I’m looking forward to this, as a self-conscious ego doesn’t’ seem to have made you lot especially happy! But one thing’s for sure, we are, have been, and will continue to be, for a very long time your fellow travelers in evolution. Your highly enlightened teacher, Rudolf Steiner, mirrors this in his insistence that in teaching children the miracle of zoology, the emphasis must remain on Man and Animal, the tile of his Class 4 main lesson – never animals in isolation: I will also try to keep to this holy maxim. (In the kingdom below us, botany, the equivalent is Plant and Earth.)
To separate animals from man is to lose sight of the fact that we creatures – yes, all of us – were, so to say, extruded from evolving humanity. Each animal species is a tiny shard in the majestic mosaic that is the human being. Mind you, there is an element of sacrifice here: so that man could proceed apace with his evolution, we animals had to apply the brakes to our own progress.
But there’s a price man is obliged to pay for our unwitting martyrdom, drawn from his Compassion bank account actually. People who love and protect animals are making continual deposits. Those who do not, who are indifferent to or cruel to animals, are overdrawing their account to a dangerous degree; a deficit that will have to be paid in an equivalent level of spiritual retardation – the consequences being too dire to mention! The singular mission of this entire 4th planetary existence, our Earth, is to develop compassion – the human mission at least, we animals being incapable of it, in the higher sense.
Any brutality or heartless exploitation of the faunal world hinders this divine plan. Human beings, even in the Genesis sense of “subdue the earth”, have a sacred custodianship over the animals, with its attendant responsibilities. This must be heart guided, and to be achieved, the heart must be informed.
One of your luminaries, John Lennon, said in good faith, “All you need is love”. Paradoxically, his son Julian later corrected his departed dad with “Love is not enough”. And he was right, this representing father-to-son progress of a pleasingly rapid kind. Love is indeed not enough to prevent well-meaning pain and destruction caused by ignorance. Love must be informed by spiritual knowledge – with the emphasis on spiritual. In fact, some of the worst atrocities have been visited on me and mine by good-hearted but sadly mis-informed humans. So I’m going to let you peek into a small window of this spiritual knowledge animals mansion, and vicariously your own.
For a start, cruelty to animals is really cruelty to Self.
A person who visits pain on an animal bonds his soul with the victim; a bond which must be expiated in the afterlife, in Kamaloca. Kick a dog and you will be kicked, soul-wise at least, 10-fold after death. Condemn tens of thousands of battery hens to a life of misery and … well, it doesn’t bear thinking about! Kill an animal in the holy presence of a child – any animal – and you scar the child’s soul for life, the higher the animal form and the younger the child, the more severe to soul injury. A small child who witnesses a litany of brutality, as can occur in farming or fishing communities, can later become destructive and intractable – and worst of all, self-destructive. The (usually sub-liminal) pain is so great that a black nihilism grips the soul of the child.
To hit a child is bad enough; to hit an animal in the child’s presence is even worse. In fact, everyone suffers in animal abuse – the victim, the perpetrator, the witness, and in a small way the whole of the human family – even the good gods weep! – whereas everyone and everything benefits when the Spirit of Compassion reigns.
Every culture has a specific relationship to the animal world; the naïve materialism of the West regards us as mere things, soul-less commodities. In the worst case they reduce us to the ranking of plants, as in the long-suffering swine exploited to produce pork in cramped, lightless, filthy stalls. The animal is completely removed from its natural, sustaining environment in order to serve man through a lifetime of suffering. In contrast, much Western animal husbandry curiously takes great care of the physical welfare of its charges, like racehorses (while they’re winning at least!) And pampered pooches; but this still fails to acknowledge the self-evident soul of the animal.
In the East the opposite prevails; there is great concern for the soul of the wolf, cow, bird, whatever, but often a heartless neglect indeed brutal mistreatment, of the animal’s body. (Thank heavens there aren’t many penguins in Asia!) It pains us to experience how the West conceives of us as soul-less; and it equally pains us to be so physically abused in the East. Of course, ostensibly animal-loving Buddhism is a glaring contradiction to this truth, which, incidentally, is of course just a generalization, the opposite abounding in both hemispheres. IN any case, both East and West still have a long way to go in comprehending our realty – hence our needs.
Take the vegetarian issue; some of us animals actually wish to be eaten, in the generic sense only of course. The truth is that a supersensible pact was made long ago between carious animal species and man. “You assure our flourishing by protecting, sheltering, and feeding us, and in return you can eat some of our number”. Hence the goose relinquished its freedom-loving high-flying ways for the feed pen. This spiritual verity is reflected in the Noah story.
Noah was an astral (animal) initiate. On his ark he loaded both ‘clean’ and ‘unclean’ animals. The unclean, or wild, animals were loaded in pairs, while the clean, the domestic animals, those with which the above deal was made, were taken rather in sevens. Not many Sunday school teachers make this important distinction!
Seven is a numerological symbol for the more refined astral bodies of domestic animals – the wild wolf has a fearsome one indeed! Two is the number of genetics, of primal astrality, seven that of perfection. (A penguin is nominally a wild animal, but I think we’re an exception, being so universally loved by humans as we are!)
If you look at it, every animal species that has been domesticated, whether eaten or not, has flourished. As the sheep idly grazing out in the lush, safe pasture whether they would change their lives for one of fear, and privation in the wild – even if they know that some of them are going to end up as lamb chops one day!
So back to the East; their Animal Circle, or Zodiac, is a different window into spiritual realty than that of the West. Here, instead of The Bull, Crab and so on, they have the Year of the Bog, Pig, Rat, Rooster, Snake, et alia. There is a higher truth to this configuration, just as there is to the Western Animal Circle. In the East it operates only on an astral plane. The Western Zodiac is active rather in the ego realm – in relation to the physical body of course, hence the ‘birth sign’.
As Rudolf Steiner says, “the ego lives in the physical body”. Even in the West a person born in, say, 1941 or 1946 is a Snake and Dog respectively, but without spiritual knowledge this can be a prison “I am what I am and cannot change”. The same pertains to the east, a person born in, say, July 11 or June 16 is still (in the new post-1413 dispensation) Gemini and Taurus respectively, whether they know it or not! With the evolution of the self-conscious ego stronger in the West than the East, one can more easily escape the tyranny of one’s birth circumstances – whether the year in the East, or the month in the West.
Yes, there was an all-pervading Snake astrality in the circuit of the zodiac in, say, 1941, especially for everyone born in that year, but the informed ego can transcend this, reducing it effects to one’s choosing.
Anyway, back to eating animals: one wonders what many of the food animals of the world would think of the concept of universal vegetarianism. Well, spiritually at least, only beneficial things happen in the world, even though we rarely have the necessary long-term view to appreciate them. For instance, after the hypothetical domestic sheep were ‘mercifully’ released into the wild, where they starved to death or were eaten, they would probably region their Group Soul to proceed with their eternal evolution. Though this would almost certainly still be in the company of man, as an animal’s progress is more rapid when in the presence of egoism.
If it is the astral (or ‘soul’) world we animals return to after dying – not as individuals mind you, more like drops merging with an astral sea. Though we do take our accumulated experiences on earth with us so that this astral sea becomes incrementally informed about a realm it cannot, without our collective sense impressions, access. As such, animals are in a constant state of becoming and begoing; more so than humans, whose off-earth journey is far more complex and long, containing, as it does, an ego-based moral element. Throughout the geological history of the earth, animals have continued to evolve to become later curiously extinct. Humanity has never had this problem!
An extinct species, in most cases anyway, proceeds to evolve off earth to a higher form, to be subsequently reborn; dinosaurs becoming marsupials, for instance. These savage saurian certainly didn’t cease to exist after The Great Dying – in fact, spiritually at least, nothing ever dies. Just as you humans have the mission to evolve from brutes to buddhas during the current Earth incarnation, we animals evolve from amoebas, through penguins, to whales – and beyond.
Buddha of course is the human embodiment of compassion, which gets us back to humanity’s task on earth, to develop love. Many Buddhists are quite a long way down that blessed track already; especially in their relationship with the animal world, being strict vegetarians and the like. Though vegetarianism is only truly justified when one simply cannot endue the idea of eating a fellow sentient being. Then Buddhism can throw up some strange contradictions in the compassion department; like the following anecdote of a World War II Japanese general:
This all-powerful martial figure has just finalized a meeting where he’d made decisions that would result in the deaths of thousands of his countrymen. “This battalion is expendable for this strategic advantage.” – that kind of thing. As he walked out into the manicured garden with his top-brass colleagues, he accidentally stepped on a caterpillar slowly inch-worming its way across the raked, white gravel path.
This same man, who moments ago had blithely condemned legions of his comrades to death, wept bitterly at the seeming meaningless death of the caterpillar – the enigma of Buddhism, yes?
So, you want to know how world fauna evolved; in a spiritual rather than a mere Darwinian sense I presume? Well, it all began back on Ancient Sun, the second planetary stage (our current Earth being the fourth); you humans had already existed on the first, Ancient Saturn, where you evolved your sense-based Physical Body.
After the obligatory Pralaya, or spiritual slumber, you re-appeared on Old Sun, where you began work on your glands-based Etheric Body. Those laggards who couldn’t keep up, not having sufficiently developed their physical bodies, formed the nucleus of the Animal Kingdom. We animals therefore established our physical bodies on Ancient Sun, just as you did on Old Saturn.
On the net, the third planetary incarnation, Ancient Moon (sometimes known as Old Mars), you advanced to the nerves-based Astral Body, while we tailed along establishing our ether bodies. So, you see now why we are developing the astral body here on Earth, in tandem with you lot working on the blood-based ego.
But back to Old Sun, our birth planet, to see what happened to this physical body of ours. This expressed first of all as pure will, the “germinal” physical body having but one imperative, to exist – to come into being. It’s second stage, on Old Moon, the physical-will nature advanced to a state of survival, another fundamental will aspect of Creation; this being rather a “precursory” stage in our evolution.
Here on Earth, this physical-will, expressing through the senses as it always does, reached a third stage, one of “perfection”, expressing as the will to flourish. All animals, in their highly specialized way, are perfecting, in this third round of evolution, the senses. These we use, in our manifold ways, to flourish, which is the highest element of the will. Oh, those wonderful senses of ours – if it can be smelt, heard, or seen an elephant, bat, or eagle can smell, hear, or see it! Your senses, however, are in their fourth evolutionary phase, and therefore in “decline” (they were “perfect” on Old Moon). Indeed, in the following Jupiter evolution, you sense organism will be gone altogether, and our will be sadly in decline.
On Old Moon our ether body was germinal; this phase being feeling based. Plants today have a germinal ether boy, and the feeling aspect is, as it was for us on our last planetary incarnation, one of grace; the morally pure feeling life or world flora being God-given. But on Earth, animal ether bodies are in their second planetary state, the precursory, hence manifesting the element of passion. The marvelous faunal world embodies the full range of passions, or emotions, like anger, tenderness, protectiveness, joy, fear, and sadness.
Human ether bodies are in their perfection stage on Earth, the body of formative forces being based on the glandular system. Being “perfect”, it expresses compassion, something we animals can never do. Even with humans, this quality will not be fully unfolded until the end of the Earth planetary phase; as shown by both world events and personal conduct; which seem to indicate that you still have a long way to go in the compassion stakes! Of course, our glandular system will be perfect on New Jupiter.
Finally, our astral bodies, our current developmental phase, newly formed on Earth as they are: these are of course germinal; they are based on the nervous system and express as instinct – a rudimentary kind of thinking, or nerve activity.
The Divine World always plays the first hand in Creation; with the physical body they cause it to exist, a supreme act of Will on their part! With the life body they imbue it with grace, and with the soul body they whisper cosmic thought into the unconscious ear through the mystery that is instinct. Even the human nervous system is still only precursory; how little of that huge brain do you actually use!
The precursory nervous system allows for the creation of concepts – which modern humans are all too fond of, in my opinion – then I suppose that’s the mission of man’s nerves in this planetary incarnation. Mind you, on Jupiter your nerves will have reached a stage of perception expressing not as mere concepts, but true Imagination, Inspiration, and Intuition.
Oh, you want to know what’s germinal for you on Earth? It’s the Chakras of course, based on the Ego.
But enough of you, this book is about animals: our egos, in the form of the multiplicity of group souls, are still hovering around in the soul world waiting for the Jupiter incarnation before they can individualize and descent to earth.
So, to sum up: as you view the animal world today, in all its stages of development from the lower to the higher, it is comprised of perfecting senses, expressing through the need to flourish; a precursory glandular system, expressing a passion for life; and a germinal instinct-based nervous system. This three-fold germinal-precursory-perfect key can unlock many secret doors into the mystery of animality.
So, no matter how much you abuse, violate, mistreat, or even kill us, we’re going to be your traveling companions for a very long time yet. So, it’s better for us all if you adopt the attitude of the man in the picture, the Dalai Lama I think he’s called. And the sooner you do, the sooner you will achieve Buddha-like compassion and depart this matter-bound planet of suffering forever.
FROM: Sacred Fauna: Zoology in Light of Steiner’s Spiritual Science
Four Kingdoms Companion volume to: Sacred Places Minerals & Land; Sacred Fauna Botany; Sacred Faces A Study of Man
Important Earthschooling Notes
Copyright Alan Whitehead & Earthschooling: No Part of this book, post, URL, or book excerpt may be shared with anyone who has not paid for these materials.
Alan speaks in a very symbolic and esoteric manner in some parts of his books. Although they can be read anthroposophically, passages speaking of Atlantis, archangels, gods, etc. do not need to be taken literarily to be meaningful. The more you read, the more you will realize he uses many different religions to express ideas in a symbolic manner and not in a religious manner. His writings are not religious. In some places his writings are meant to refer to religious events in a historical way. In some places he is using religious figures (from Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, Paganism, Ancient Roman and Greek Religions, etc.) in a symbolic manner. However, at no point is he promoting a specific religion or speaking from a religious point of view.
I have kept the writing as close to one-hundred percent original so you will also find that he speaks of Australia often and some spelling or manners of speaking may be cultural. Any words I have changed are presented like this: <word>.
Also keep in mind that these books are written by a Waldorf teacher with decades of experience who also studied with a Steiner student himself, so he speaks to an audience that is dedicating their lives to the Waldorf method without exception.
Because of this, all of his views are not reflected in the Earthschooling curriculum and not all of them may be ones you want to embrace or are able to use. In all of Alan Whitehead’s writings the opinions are his own and may not align with Earthschooling or Waldorf Books. In some cases, we will be updating some of these chapters in the future with additional and/or updated information.
Ultimately, however, as I read through these passages I find I can distill wisdom from even those paragraphs that do not resonate with me.
We invite you to read with an open mind and heart and with eagerness to learn and discuss.
END NOTE
Alan has presented dialogue in his writings in an expressive form, where he tries to capture the accent of the person he was with to give his writing more authenticity and to allow the reader to “be with him” in his experience. In no place in his writings is he using expressive language to make fun of or demean the speaker. So, as a person with a linguistics and anthropology degree I find this enriching and informative to me as the reader. Thus, we have made the decision to leave all expressive writing in its original form.
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