Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    The Occult Significance of Blood
    The Occult Significance of Blood
    The Occult Significance of Blood
    Ebook35 pages43 minutes

    The Occult Significance of Blood

    By Rudolf Steiner

    4/5

    ()

    Read preview

    About this ebook

    Steiner begins this book by quoting Faust: 'Blood is a very special fluid.', and then goes on to explore the significance of blood in occult rituals. It's quite a short book and is comprised of only the one chapter. If you want to know more about why blood is so important in the occult, this makes an interesting read.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherGIANLUCA
    Release dateJan 14, 2020
    ISBN9788835366959
    The Occult Significance of Blood
    Author

    Rudolf Steiner

    Nineteenth and early twentieth century philosopher.

    Read more from Rudolf Steiner

    Related to The Occult Significance of Blood

    Related ebooks

    Body, Mind, & Spirit For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      On Writing Poems Facing Into The Broken World

      Mar 1, 2020

      Kaveh Akbar and Jane Hirshfield have been in a running e-mail conversation since January 2016, when Akbar first contacted Hirshfield about doing an interview in his Divedapper series, before his first, widely acclaimed book, Calling a Wolf a Wolf (Al

      16 min read

    • Article

      Astrology for The New Age

      Jan 21, 2022

      It is not well known in the larger culture, but the phrase “Time marches on” was actually coined by an astrologer, admittedly a somewhat unorthodox one, named Saluton VonMars, one of a long line of astrologers from a German military family from the l

      8 min read

    • Article

      Claim To fame?

      Oct 6, 2023

      Claim To fame?
      8 min read

    • Article

      The Universe in a Sentence: On Aphorisms

      Sep 18, 2019

      “An aphorism,” Friedrich Nietzsche aphoristically wrote, “is an audacity.” Exploring the pithiest of phrases, from Ben Franklin to Susan Sontag. The post The Universe in a Sentence: On Aphorisms appeared first on The Millions.

      11 min read

    • Article

      Ingenious: Albert Camus

      Jun 29, 2017

      I had always dreamed of meeting Albert Camus and so was thrilled when he appeared at Lucey’s Lounge, a dark and yellowy lit bar in Brooklyn. The Algerian writer had graciously agreed, or so it seemed, to be interviewed about absurdity, the concept in

      14 min read

    • Article

      The Classical Werewolf

      Nov 4, 2021

      Daniel Ogden Oxford University Press 2021 Hb, 280pp, £25, ISBN 9780198854319 Daniel Ogden has established himself as the go-to academic for scholarly, text-based surveys of supernatural motifs in the Ancient World, into which context this book fits a

      8 min read

    • Article

      An Interview With Bianca Stone

      May 1, 2023

      An Interview With Bianca Stone
      11 min read

    • Article

      Grappling With Evil

      Oct 28, 2021

      Grappling With Evil
      6 min read

    • Article

      Thinking Makes It So: Ward Farnsworth Reframes the Stoics with Wit and Insight

      Aug 30, 2018

      Seneca’s suicide, at the order of the emperor Nero, presents a macabre scene. Previously adviser to the fickle, impetuous, paranoid, thin-skinned emperor, Seneca was erroneously implicated in an assassination plot and was ordered to take his own life

      9 min read

    • Article

      In Memory of Stanley Cavell

      Jun 21, 2018

      In Memory of Stanley Cavell
      4 min read

    • Article

      Reviews / Books

      Feb 23, 2023

      This new discussion of the nature and origin of consciousness might be completely wrong, says Charles Foster, but it’s still a brilliant and essential book The Invention of Consciousness Nicholas Humphrey Oxford University Press 2022 Hb, 256pp, £16.9

      11 min read

    • Article

      Thug Life

      Jan 23, 2018

      Thug Life
      4 min read

    • Article

      Challenging Orthodox Science

      Jul 15, 2021

      TO SEND REVIEW COPIES, CONTACT THE BOOK REVIEWS EDITOR AT DVBARRETT@FORTEANTIMES.COM Imants Barušs Imprint Academic 2021 Pb, 228pp, £14.95, ISBN 9781788360418 The late William Corliss was very fond of a particular quotation from the 19th-century psyc

      11 min read

    • Article

      Back To Reality

      Jan 26, 2023

      SO SAYS PRINCE HARRY, and it’s lucky he thinks this because Spare, where this profound philosophical reflection on epistemology can be found, has a number of rather well-recorded moments where the truth as he remembers it (hearing, for example, about

      3 min read

    • Article

      The Body, Real And Imaginary

      Oct 7, 2021

      TO SEND REVIEW COPIES, CONTACT THE BOOK REVIEWS EDITOR AT DVBARRETT@FORTEANTIMES.COM Frank Gonzalez-Crussi MIT Press 2021 Pb, 264pp, £24, ISBN 9780262045889 Sometimes you can grasp the essence of a book by its cover. Frank Gonzalez-Crussi’s The Body

      3 min read

    • Article

      Edgar Allan Poe’s Other Obsession

      Jun 11, 2021

      This article was published online on June 11, 2021. In the early and macabre days of coronavirus shutdowns, Edgar Allan Poe was trending. “The Masque of the Red Death,” his Gothic tale from 1842, became in March of 2020 a go-to source for allegory: A

      9 min read

    • Article

      How Posture Makes Us Human

      May 10, 2018

      The very notion of what in the ancient world defines the human being in contrast to all other living things is simple: upright posture. Best known of the ancient commentators is Plato, who, according to legend, is claimed to have seen the human as bi

      12 min read

    • Article

      Harnessing Ancient Sensitivity

      Dec 1, 2022

      Adventures in 40,000 Years of Consciousness Charles Foster Profile Books 2022 Pb, 400pp, £10.99, ISBN 9781788167185 Charles Foster’s first best-seller – Being a Beast (2016), widely praised as a “strange masterpiece” – had a premise that was hard to

      11 min read

    • Article

      SETI Dreams

      Aug 13, 2020

      Wade Roush MIT Press 2020 Pb, 221pp, £12.99, ISBN 9780262538435 If for some reason or another you feel the need to consume a history of the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) – the effort to contact aliens over vast cosmic distances via

      8 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for The Occult Significance of Blood

    4/5

    5 ratings0 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

      Book preview

      The Occult Significance of Blood - Rudolf Steiner

      THE OCCULT SIGNIFICANCE

      OF BLOOD

      BY

      RUDOLF STEINER

      1912

      The Occult Significance of Blood

      AN ESOTERIC STUDY by RUDOLF STEINER, Ph.D. (Vienna), 1912

      Blood is a very Special Fluid

      Each one of you will doubtless be aware that the title of this lecture is taken from Goethe’s Faust. You all know that in this poem we are shown how Faust, the representative of the highest human effort, enters into a pact with the evil powers, who on their side are represented in the poem by Mephistopheles, the emissary of hell. You will know, too, that Faust is to strike a bargain with Mephistopheles, the deed of which must be signed with his own blood. Faust, in the first instance, looks upon it as a jest. Mephistopheles, however, at this juncture utters the sentence which Goethe without a doubt intended should be taken seriously: Blood is a very special fluid.

      Now, with reference to this line in Goethe’s Faust, we come to a curious trait in the so-called Goethe commentators. You are of course aware how vast is the literature dealing with Goethe’s version of the Faust Legend. It is a literature of such stupendous dimensions that whole libraries might be stocked with it, and naturally I cannot make it my business to expatiate on the various comments made by these interpreters of Goethe concerning this particular passage. None of the interpretations throw much more light on the sentence than that given by one of the latest commentators, Professor Minor. He, like others, treats it in the light of an ironical remark made by Mephistopheles, and in this connection he makes the following really very curious observation, and one to which I would ask you to give your best attention; for there is little doubt that you will be surprised to hear what strange conclusions commentators on Goethe are capable of drawing.

      Professor Minor remarks that the devil is a foe to the blood; and he points out that as the blood is that which sustains and preserves life, the devil, who is the enemy of the human race, must therefore also be the enemy of the blood. He then – and quite rightly – draws attention to the fact that even in the oldest versions of the Faust Legend – and, indeed, in legends generally – blood always plays the same part.

      In an old book on Faust it is circumstantially described to us how Faust makes a slight incision in his left hand with a small penknife, and how then, as he takes the pen to sign his name to the agreement, the blood flowing from the cut forms the words: O man, escape! All this is authentic enough; but now comes the remark that the devil is a foe to the blood, and that this is the reason for his demanding that the signature be written in

      Enjoying the preview?
      Page 1 of 1