Silver cord

The silver cord (Hebrew: הַכֶּ֔סֶף חֶ֣בֶל hak-ke-sep ḥe-ḇel "the cord, the silver one"; Spanish: cordón de plata or hilo de plata "silver thread") or silver string of pearls is the thin band formed from the kundalini fire that connects the astral body with the physical body during the entire earthly life of the human being and only breaks at death. In the Old Testament book of Kohelet (Ecclesiastes) it is said:

„5 even the hill is feared, and the terrors along the way; the almond tree blossoms, the locust drags along, the fruit of the caper bursts, yet a man goes to his eternal home and the lamented wander the streets - 6 yes, before the silver cord breaks, the golden bowl breaks, the pitcher is shattered at the spring, the wheel falls broken into the pit, 7 the dust falls back to Earth as what it was, and the breath returns to God who gave it.“

– Ecclesiastes 12:6

When the upper parts of the astral body are lifted out of the body in sleep, the silver cord appears to the clairvoyant gaze as a fine silvery shining ribbon which joins the body in the spleen region. When this fine cord breaks with death, the astral body can no longer return to the body.

„So, what connects the astral body with the physical body and its organs, and what leads it back again? There is a kind of bond, a connection that is an intermediate matter between physical and astral matter. And that is called the kundalini fire. If you have a sleeping person, you can always follow the astral body in the astral. You have a luminous streak to where the astral body is. You can always find the place. If the astral body moves away, then to the same extent the kundalini fire becomes thinner and thinner. A thinner and thinner trace it is; it becomes more and more like a thin mist. Now, if you look closely at this kundalini fire, it is not uniform. Certain places in it will be more luminous and denser, and these are the places which lead the astral back to the physical.“ (Lit.:GA 88, p. 237f)

„I have often said that at night the astral body of man goes out of the physical body. The astral body is then connected with the physical body during sleep only through an astral cord in the region of the spleen, which is perceptible to the clairvoyant. The spleen has not only a physical task, but it is also its function to mediate the connection between the physical and the spiritual part of the human being. The spleen is the point of connection of the physical body with the astral body. That is why you can read in every textbook of anatomy that nothing is really known about the spleen. The spleen is one of those organs which stand at the boundary of the physical organs. The astral body, which during sleep is only connected to the physical body through the spleen, works to remove the fatiguing substances from the physical body. To the clairvoyant the sleeping man appears as if enveloped in a strange cloud which is continually working on the physical body.“ (Lit.:GA 96, p. 238)

Literature

• Rudolf Steiner: Über die astrale Welt und das Devachan, GA 88 (1999), ISBN 3-7274-0880-4 English: rsarchive.org German: pdf pdf(2) html mobi epub archive.org
• Rudolf Steiner: Ursprungsimpulse der Geisteswissenschaft, GA 96 (1989), ISBN 3-7274-0961-4 English: rsarchive.org German: pdf pdf(2) html mobi epub archive.org

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