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The Occult Significance of Blood

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1907. Blood is a Very Special Fluid.

31 pages, Kindle Edition

First published October 1, 1967

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193 people want to read

About the author

Rudolf Steiner

4,316 books1,099 followers
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.

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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
Profile Image for ekari.
108 reviews
April 13, 2024
more than what the title conveys, this essay explores a jung-esque intelligence of humanity, both accepting and presenting mankind's primitive pictorial knowledge as the ancient wisdom that reveals a greater clearness of the universe today.

it presents our faces as animations of our very souls: tears, betrayals of a suffering being; a smile, the manifestation of joy itself. and yet, in the expression of every inquisitive thinker, there resides an essence of "absorbed pain." it postulates that, in accordance to spiritual science, the constitutions of wisdom itself rely on the experience of life and the many pains it entails: a crystallized pain, conquered and transformed into an inseparable part of one whole man. and why, for all these reasons, does the phenomenon of blood play such a crucial role in changing the outlook of our lives once the spiritual knowledge of such matters is holistically understood.

the author depicts blood as the very essence—elixir—of life, "foe of the devil," and where the power of each individual man resides. in fact, it is where every answer to the questions that plague our anxious minds resides: the "race question," the "woman question," the "labor question." it is through blood we breathe oxygen, the very breath of life; it is through blood we bring the exterior world into the interior; and it is through blood we extract the very sustenance and strength our body relies on.

he elaborates: as far as our senses can possibly reveal man to us in the physical world, this projection is only an incomplete form of the human being, as in "the above," there exists an etheric body of man that surpasses the life-less minerals that surround us. and there exists the astral body, in which all life-substance persists in the expressions of pain, joy, and grief, thus, distinguishing us man and animals from plant. wherein this exists a further distinction between man and animal: the ego, the ability to look inwardly and say "I" to oneself, a soliloquy of the soul.

according to the author, we are not merely reflections of the cosmos around us. we are our own individuals, perceiving the universe while experiencing ourselves as our own cosmic force, "I" — an ability enabled by our blood bringing in the outside world to create an inner life of our own. again, it is through blood we can obtain the materials of life; it is through blood we allow ourselves to open up to the outside world; and it is through blood we give rise to our ego, "I." like a crystal that carries the entire cosmos within itself, so do even the most elementary of life-forms that each contain a little universe reflecting the cosmic laws from within.

this is a thought-provoking essay that synthesizes elements of theosophy, biology, and philosophy into one profound occult theory of human blood, intelligence, and sentience. in the same jung-esque fashion described earlier, the author concludes that the collective human understanding of our universe is inherited from ancestor to predecessor through the form of blood. thereby, it was through the intermingling of bloods that gave rise to humanity's higher forms of consciousness and allowed man to develop his own moral conscience and personal freedom, alas, at the cost of his own clairvoyance.

while i don't adhere to the exact school of thought described by the author, i argue this philosophy can be an intriguing experience to study for those open-minded to the occult and spiritual sciences. like with all schools of magic, i implore you to look into this lecture with a grain of salt and perhaps you will pick up a piece of knowledge or two that will challenge your conventional ways of thought.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
Profile Image for Ulrike.
233 reviews
August 31, 2021
complete gibberish what was this... bought this bc i thought it would be a study of like, the purported uses of blood in occult rituals in real life and in fiction. scammed. tricked. bamboozled. rudolf u cant just make up incomprehensible shit and say its true.
Profile Image for Hugo Gomez.
100 reviews
October 23, 2018
Dated but interesting

Steiner makes many allusions to blood as it was beginning to be understood in his era, but is lost in many ways and given to fancy when applying mystical properties to DNA to explain interest in the fluid as a central theme in the story of Faust in the contract or exchange with Mephistopheles. Steiner also explicitly states that blood carried over to descendants experiences and memory to a greater degree before various races intermingled their blood, giving over the inherited memory in exchange for higher states of consciousness. No explanation is given for this transaction except dilution and complexity via added diversity.
Profile Image for Shaun Phelps.
Author 21 books16 followers
February 28, 2021
Steiner provides an occult explanation of the power of blood. His ultimate conclusion is interesting. Steiner is quick to criticize science for it's closed-minded view of the unknown while Steiner draws absolute conclusions from that which cannot be known. As such, this is an interesting thought exercise with a grain of salt.
Profile Image for Gustavo Balam.
121 reviews
April 2, 2024
siempre es gustoso leer a Steiner, este relato corto es una investigacion muy interesante
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews

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