The Double

From Rudolf Stein­er’s Secret Broth­er­hoods and the Mys­tery of the Dou­ble (CW 178), lec­ture 2, “The Mys­tery of the Dou­ble. Geo­graph­ic Med­i­cine, St. Gallen,” 16 Novem­ber 1917 (audio excerpt below, read by Dale Brunsvold).

“We arrive in this world with the gar­ment of our organ­ism, with­out being able to reach down into it with our soul to any great extent. Instead, short­ly before we are born … there is also an oppor­tu­ni­ty for anoth­er spir­i­tu­al being apart from our soul to take pos­ses­sion of our body, name­ly, of the sub­con­scious part of our body. This is a fact. Short­ly before we are born, anoth­er being indwells us. In the ter­mi­nol­o­gy we use today we would call this an Ahri­man­ic being. It is just as much in us as is our own soul.

These beings lead their lives by mak­ing use of human beings to enable them to inhab­it the sphere in which they wish to dwell. They have an excep­tion­al­ly high degree of intel­li­gence, and a very sig­nif­i­cant­ly devel­oped will, but no qual­i­ties of soul, noth­ing like what we would call the human qual­i­ties of soul and heart and mind. So we pro­ceed through our life while hav­ing our soul and also a dou­ble who is far clev­er­er, far clev­er­er than we are; very intel­li­gent but with a Mephistophe­lean intel­li­gence, an Ahri­man­ic intel­li­gence. And in addi­tion also an Ahri­man­ic will, a very strong will; a will that is much more akin to the forces of nature than it is to our human will, which is ruled by our heart and mind.

In the 19^th cen­tu­ry sci­ence dis­cov­ered that our ner­vous sys­tem is inter­spersed with forces of elec­tric­i­ty. Sci­ence was quite right. But the sci­en­tists are wrong if they believe that the ner­vous force which belongs to us, and which pro­vides the foun­da­tion for our inner world of pic­tures and think­ing, has any­thing to do with the elec­tric cur­rents that course along our nerves. These elec­tric cur­rents are the forces that are intro­duced into our being by the being I have just been describ­ing. They do not belong to our being at all.…

These beings have decid­ed, out of their own will, that they do not want to live in the world to which they were assigned by the wise gods of the upper hier­ar­chies. They want to con­quer the earth, so they need bod­ies. Hav­ing no bod­ies of their own, they use as much of human bod­ies as they can, since the human soul can­not quite fill out the human body. While a human body is devel­op­ing, these beings can slip into it at a spe­cif­ic point before birth, and, there­after, they accom­pa­ny us beneath the thresh­old of our consciousness.

But there is one aspect of human life which they can­not stand, and that is death. So they always have to depart from the human body they have invad­ed before it is afflict­ed by death. This is again and again a bit­ter dis­ap­point­ment for them, for what they so much want to suc­ceed in is to remain in the human body beyond death. In their own King­dom this would be a high achieve­ment for these beings, but so far they have failed in this. If the mys­tery of Gol­go­tha had not tak­en place, if Christ had not passed through the mys­tery of Gol­go­tha, these beings would long since have gained the abil­i­ty on earth to remain in the human body after a karmi­cal­ly pre­de­ter­mined death. They would then have gained con­trol over human evo­lu­tion on earth, and would have become the mas­ters of this human evo­lu­tion on the earth.

.… These mat­ters have long been known to cer­tain secret Broth­er­hoods, who are very well informed about these things yet have with­held this infor­ma­tion from human­i­ty at large.… This knowl­edge must take hold of peo­ple in the right way, and can­not be allowed to be spread around by secret Broth­er­hoods who want to use it as a way of increas­ing their pow­er. Nor above all may it be per­mit­ted to be kept secret as a means of increas­ing the pow­er of cer­tain Broth­er­hoods who work egoistically.…

This dou­ble of whom I have been speak­ing is nei­ther more nor less than the orig­i­na­tor of all phys­i­cal dis­eases that arise spon­ta­neous­ly from with­in. And to know this being ful­ly is what is meant by organ­ic med­i­cine. Dis­eases that come spon­ta­neous­ly from with­in, not those caused by exter­nal injuries, do not come from the soul but from this being who is the orig­i­na­tor of all organ­ic dis­eases that arise spon­ta­neous­ly from within.

… Psy­cho­analy­sis, togeth­er with oth­er ways of think­ing … involves hav­ing to deal with spir­i­tu­al enti­ties while not know­ing enough about them. So one is at a loss as to how to deal with phe­nom­e­na that are enter­ing more and more into human life. It will thus be nec­es­sary for cer­tain things to hap­pen, even things that may be harm­ful in one respect must hap­pen, because peo­ple need to be exposed to this harm in order to over­come it, and gain strength by doing so.”

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