Caduceus

The caduceus (Latin), the staff of Mercury or Hermes (Greek: κηρύκειον kērū́keion "herald's staff"), like all occult symbols, has multiple but internally coherent meanings:

Staff of Mercury Serpent of evil and good [sign], which, through knowledge (Mercury) overcoming evil through his own strength

Merkurstab Schlange des Bösen und des Guten. [Zeichen], das den Menschen durch Erkenntnis (Merkur) zur Überwindung des Bösen durch eigene Kraft leitet. (Lit.:GA 266a, p. 205)

For the spiritual disciple, the staff of Mercury with the two serpents is a good aid to prevent the intrusion of ahrimanic beings into his consciousness:

„There is a means to prevent the penetration of the ahrimanic beings into our consciousness, a symbol that one must allow to come alive in oneself. This is the staff of Mercury, the luminous staff with a black snake and the brightly shining glittering snake. The snake is the symbol of the astral body. Every evening the astral body sheds its skin, it sheds the used skin. The black snake is the symbol of this. Overnight it receives a new, shimmering skin, and this newly revived, beautiful, shining skin of the astral body is symbolised by the shining snake.

This symbol banishes everything that wants to penetrate our consciousness in a disturbing way, if we let it arise vividly before us before every meditation: the staff of Mercury, which the messenger of the gods holds in his hand, showing the way. When man rises higher, when he becomes clairvoyant, the Ahrimanic entities force themselves before him in images. He sees parasitic animals, rats and mice. Beings with beautiful human faces but crippled feet approach him as a temptation. One must not surrender to them. Good images are when the meditator sees a sphinx (Seraphim) or a Cherubim. - Here, too, the wand of Mercury is to be used to banish the prostrating beings.“ (Lit.:GA 266a, p. 465)

„Now it is so that the beginner at first feels only the presence of dark powers in the distracting thoughts, while the advanced one sees these astral powers as parasitic animals, as rats and mice. But no one who sees the rats and mice should rejoice that he has already come so far, otherwise he would succumb to these powers altogether. One must make oneself strong in order to resist the influences of these dark powers.“ (Lit.:GA 266a, p. 451)

The Mercury staff meditation or Mercury staff imagination helps to reject disturbing thoughts, feelings and desires. The healing power of Raphael, the Christian Mercury, helps.

„That which allows us to look at everything from the outside, that which works, is that which on the other hand gives us clear concepts of everything, but does not immediately draw abstraction into these clear concepts, but allows our heart to think along with them. We must not become confused in our concepts, but neither must we exclude the heart from our abstract thinking. We must be human by being a whole human being, so that the heart always thinks along with us. We must therefore strive not merely to think into the world, to think abstractly, and that is basically what all thinking does today. We must be clear that we must submerge our thinking, we must bring the heart into everything. We must also know that which cordially winds around the thoughts, we must learn to handle the Mercury staff again, and we will not be able to do this in any other way than when we go from the Moon to Mercury. That is what I meant for general cultural life in the lectures which also dealt with Raphael, for Raphael is precisely the Christian Mercury“ (Lit.:GA 316, p. 205f)

„Now there are two things we want to discuss. One concerns those who have not yet advanced to the state of seeing, the other those who have reached the state of imagination. The former, as you have all experienced, at the moment when they begin their meditation, are literally assailed by thoughts concerning their daily life, the outer world, their surroundings. All noises are felt to be more disturbing, all images and thoughts that do not belong here more intrusive. Fighting against them would be of no use, for there are powers behind these thoughts. It would be as if a man wanted to lash out in the midst of a swarm of bees in order to defend himself: the bees would come at him with double violence.

We now have an occult means of combating these unwanted thoughts, of silencing them, and this means is the same both for what has just been discussed and for the disturbances suffered by those who have already attained the vision. Imagine as clearly as possible the staff of Mercury: a luminous staff around which a black serpent coils, and then imagine a light one coiling towards the other. The black snake symbolises the material thoughts that disturb us: the lower self; the light one: the divine thoughts, the higher self. And if we place this symbol, how the light snake curls towards the black snake, in all its meaning before our soul, all disturbances will disappear and we can immerse ourselves in our meditation.

Those who have attained the vision are disturbed in their visions by the same forces which unleash the everyday thoughts in others, in that they see all kinds of passions, desires, and so on, which live themselves out in the astral, in the form of wild, often very ugly, sometimes also seductively beautiful animals. Against this, too, the idea of the staff of Mercury, the messenger of the gods, is the only remedy.“ (Lit.:GA 266a, p. 442f)

„Now what is the essential thing to be aimed at by us in meditation to begin with? We are to forget ourselves by extinguishing everything connected with ordinary life in order to immerse ourselves only in the content of the prescribed words, so that we no longer know or feel anything of our body, nor of the thoughts and feelings of daily life. But this is precisely what the opposing powers want to prevent us from doing! They try to pull us back into everyday life by preventing us from concentrating our thoughts. As soon as we notice this - for example, in the meditation: "In the pure rays of light ...", whereby we should think and feel nothing other than that the light is the garment of the Godhead, so that we live entirely in this image - we can imagine the rod of Mercury as an effective symbol, namely a luminous, bright rod, entwined with two serpents, a dark and a luminous white serpent; one begins with the dark serpent.

All living things are enclosed in a skin as a sign that they are enclosed in the physical world. The etheric body also has a skin, as does the astral body. When man receives the impressions of the day through his senses, this has an effect on the skin of his astral body, it is worn away, it gets cracks and fissures. This shows itself in fatigue. When he falls asleep, this skin tears and is renewed again during sleep. We should now try to become aware of this process before falling asleep. We can imagine how we now enter the spiritual worlds, where in the realms of harmonies and spherical sounds the astral body is renewed by the spiritual beings. We should fall asleep with the feeling of gratitude towards these divine beings and powers: we should feel the love of wisdom. Then bad influences will not be able to approach us. Just as man wears out and renews the skin of his spiritual body in the course of twenty-four hours, so also the snake sheds its skin in certain periods of time, leaves it behind and renews it again. Therefore, the spiritual contemplation of the staff of Mercury is an effective means of penetrating the spiritual worlds in meditation in such a way that inhibiting influences are overcome.“ (Lit.:GA 266a, p. 449f)

The knowledge of good and evil, as man has attained it during earth evolution, is the result of a long evolution of consciousness, which has prepared itself through all the previous planetary stages of world evolution and will find its true fulfilment in those yet to come:

„All things which we conceive with our minds in the physical world have a spiritual background; and we can see these things in the spiritual world. I would now like to give an example of how something that is conceived on the physical plane expresses itself as a figure in the spiritual: the Caduceus, the staff of Mercury.

The consciousness we have today is the so-called light day consciousness, where we perceive through the senses, combine through the mind. This day consciousness has only developed to its present height. It was preceded by another consciousness, a dreamlike picture consciousness. At the beginning of the Atlantean era, man still perceived the world and its spiritual and mental entities clairvoyantly in astral and ethereal images. Today's dream is a last remnant of this atavistic picture consciousness. Let us draw a picture of it. First we have the bright daytime consciousness. This was preceded by the consciousness that only plants have today, which we can call sleep consciousness in humans. Then there is an even duller consciousness, such as our physical minerals have today; we can call it a deep trance consciousness. (While this was being said, it was written on the blackboard, from bottom to top: Day Consciousness, Image Consciousness, Sleep Consciousness, Deep Trance Consciousness. See drawing). We can connect these four types of consciousness by a line (it is drawn: straight line from top to bottom). But man does not develop like this line. If man were to develop like the straight line, he would start from a deep trance consciousness, then descend to sleep consciousness, then to picture consciousness and finally to the present day consciousness. But it is not made so simple for man, but he must go through various stages. Man had a deep trance consciousness in the first earth embodiment we can trace, on Saturn; there he developed this consciousness in various degrees. We draw it here in such a way that we allow the consciousness to develop along this line.

Man separates from the straight line and joins it again on the sun, where he passes through sleep-consciousness, then goes on as this spiral line shows, to reach picture-consciousness on the moon. And today, again after various transformations, man stands on the level of the bright day-consciousness. Man retains this bright day-consciousness for all subsequent times and consciously conquers those states of consciousness which he had dully on earlier stages. Thus he again conquers the picture-consciousness on the Jupiter state of the earth; this will enable him to perceive spiritual things around him again. This development, however, takes place in such a way that his bright day-consciousness is not weakened, not dulled, but that on Jupiter he will have picture-consciousness in addition to his day-consciousness. One could say: the day-consciousness brightens up to picture-consciousness (see drawing: broken line). Then he will acquire the sleep-consciousness which he had on the sun, again on the Venusian state of the earth; this will enable him to look deeply into the beings, as only the initiate can do today. The initiate takes the straight path, he develops in a straight line, whereas the normal development of man is that which runs in windings. As he ascends the volcano, he regains his first consciousness, the trance consciousness, but retains all the other states of consciousness. Thus man goes through a development in a descending line and one in an ascending line. You can see this line recurring again and again. This path of descent and ascent is a real line which has found expression in the caduceus, in the Mercury staff [...]

And such a line as the caduceus also has an educational significance for the human being if he devotes himself meditatively to this figure. No one can memorise this figure without it having a deeply inner educational effect on him. The seer has taken this line out of the spiritual worlds in order to give people something that will make them future seers. What you have to develop when meditating on this line are certain sensations. First you feel dull darkness. You stare into the darkness, gradually it begins to lighten and take on violet colour, then indigo, blue, green, yellow, orange, red, and now back, with a certain mirroring of the development taking place, until you have again risen to violet. In following this toned line, your sensations will pass from the qualitative of the colour nuances to moral sensations. If you do not feel this line merely as a chalk or pencil line, but, looking into the black, try to place the darkness before your soul, imagine the giving in the violet, and so on through the other colours, the blue, green, yellow, orange, then call the joyful in the red before your soul, then your soul will go through a whole scale of sensations which are first colour sensations and then become moral sensations. Through the fact that the form of the Mercury rod is reflected in the soul in sensations, something is incorporated into it which enables the soul to form the higher organs. Through the real symbol it is so transformed that it can receive the higher organs into itself.

Just as the influence of the outer light once conjured up the eyes from indifferent organs, so devotion to the symbols of the spiritual world conjures up the organs for the spiritual world. It is quite impossible to say: I do not yet see what is to come into being. - That would be just as if the human being who did not yet have eyes had said: I don't want to let the light work on me. - We must first be taught what can lead to the development of the inner organs, then we can perceive the secrets of the spiritual world around us.“ (Lit.:GA 101, p. 238ff)

The symbol of the caduceus also corresponds with the external cosmic facts:

„Very strange it would have seemed to a man of Persian culture to look at the movements of the planets and deduce a world system from them, as Copernicus did. And now I must say something very paradoxical. A person of the ancient Persian culture would probably have been very surprised if he had been taught astronomy in the way we know it today. He would have said: Should I be so foolish that if I want to walk, someone has to show me how to walk? When the Sun goes its way through the space of the world, my soul goes there. I must notice that. - He knew that, just as a man today knows which way he is going when his body walks. Out of this ancient recognition, the Original Persians drew a spiral that really corresponds to the Sun's path through celestial space. This Sun's path is found through an inner perception. The human soul felt itself in contact with the earth-soul and traced the path of the Earth through the Caduceus Mercury staff. That man was thrown out of his spiritual environment in such a way that he had to spint out and calculate the path of the Earth as the path of a planet, that arose only later.“ (Lit.:GA 152, p. 81)

Literature

• Rudolf Steiner: Mythen und Sagen. Okkulte Zeichen und Symbole, GA 101 (1987), Köln, 28. Dezember 1907 English: rsarchive.org German: pdf pdf(2) html mobi epub archive.org
• Rudolf Steiner: Vorstufen zum Mysterium von Golgatha, GA 152 (1990), Kopenhagen, 14. Oktober 1913 English: rsarchive.org German: pdf pdf(2) html mobi epub archive.org
• Rudolf Steiner: Aus den Inhalten der esoterischen Stunden, Band I: 1904 – 1909, GA 266a (1995), ISBN 3-7274-2661-6 English: rsarchive.org German: pdf pdf(2) html mobi epub archive.org
• Rudolf Steiner: Meditative Betrachtungen und Anleitungen zur Vertiefung der Heilkunst, GA 316 (2003), ISBN 3-7274-3160-1 English: rsarchive.org German: pdf pdf(2) html mobi epub archive.org

References to the work of Rudolf Steiner follow Rudolf Steiner's Collected Works (CW or GA), Rudolf Steiner Verlag, Dornach/Switzerland, unless otherwise stated. Email: verlag@steinerverlag.com URL: www.steinerverlag.com. Index to the Complete Works of Rudolf Steiner - Aelzina Books A complete list by Volume Number and a full list of known English translations you may also find at Rudolf Steiner's Collected Works Rudolf Steiner Archive - The largest online collection of Rudolf Steiner's books, lectures and articles in English. Rudolf Steiner Audio - Recorded and Read by Dale Brunsvold steinerbooks.org - Anthroposophic Press Inc. (USA) Rudolf Steiner Handbook - Christian Karl's proven standard work for orientation in Rudolf Steiner's Collected Works for free download as PDF.