Animal

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The animals (Latin: animal; Greek: ζῷον zóon; Hebrew: בְּהֵמָה Behema, "animal, domestic animal, livestock"), which form an independent kingdom of nature on Earth alongside minerals, plants and humans, are souls living beings that have an independent etheric body and astral body, but no individual I. However, the I of the animals, the group soul of the animals belonging to each species and genus, lives as a spiritual reality on the astral plan. The entirety of the animal kingdom or the animal world is also called fauna (derived from Faunus, the Roman god of nature and the forest).

The Astral Body of Animals

The animals have their own astral body, but it is not as self-contained as that of the human being embodied on Earth. However, the nascent astral body that man forms before he descends to earthly incarnation shows a similar form.

„The human astral body has a shape enclosed within limits, it has definite outlines. The astral body of animals has no such definite outlines. The astral bodies of animals look quite different. They do not belong to a single being, but group souls exist for whole groups of animals. The individual physical animals hang, as it were, from a common trunk, and from these individual animals a kind of strand then leads to the group souls which move the animals. You can also discover certain animal forms, which cannot be encountered in the physical, in the astral. These astral bodies are nascent human beings who are forming and further developing their astral bodies to form a suitable vehicle for such as come down from the spiritual world.“ (Lit.:GA 88, p. 67f)

The group ego of the animals

As the group ego of the animals has a formative effect on the astral body, the animal group soul is formed, which was called Nephesch by the Hebrews. It surrounds the individual animal, as it were, from the outside and regulates its respiratory activity. Only in humans does Nephesh move into the interior as the soul of feeling.

„In the animal there is a respiratory process which is, so to speak, strictly regulated from the outside, which is not subject to the inner individual ego in the relationship described today. That which maintains the respiratory process, that which actually regulates it, was called, for example, the 'Nephesh' in the Old Testament secret doctrine. In truth, this is what is called the "animal soul". So what is a group ego in the animal is the nephesh. And in the Bible it says quite correctly: "And God breathed into man the nephesh - the animal soul - and man became a living soul in himself. - Of course, this is often misunderstood, because in our time we cannot read such deep scriptures, because we read one-sidedly. For example, when it says: "And God breathed into man the nephesh, the animal soul", it does not mean that he created it at that moment, but that it was already there. It does not say that it was not there before. It was there, externally. And what God did was to transfer what had previously existed externally as a group soul into the human being's inner being. That is the essential thing, that one should understand such an expression in its real thoroughness. One might ask: What came about through the transfer of the nephesh into the human interior? Through this it became possible for man to attain that sublimity above the animal which made it possible for him to unfold his I inwardly in an active way, to laugh and to cry and thus to experience joy and pain in the way that they work on himself.“ (Lit.:GA 107, p. 269f)

Literature
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.
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