Spider creatures

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Spider creatures is the name Rudolf Steiner gave to various types of spiritual or elementary beings. They can only be perceived supersensually and have no direct relationship to the spiders found in earthly nature.

Spider-creatures and the sense of beauty

A group of abnormal spider-like elementary beings awakens in man the sense for real art. They are always to be found in the vicinity of artists and works of art, but are very difficult to observe with the clairvoyant gaze and are by no means of a luciferic nature, as one might erroneously assume. These spider-like beings are virtually archetypes of ugliness and live predominantly in the water and air elements. They belong to the same elementary kingdom as the sylphs and undines, with whom, however, they are in constant battle. Unlike the regular elemental beings, they are in descending development.

„Another kind is that which lives preferably in the aqueous and aeriform elements, like those beings which you will find described by me in the mystery dramas alluded to as the sylph-like beings and so on. These beings I am now referring to are preferably concerned with the world of appearances, of beautiful appearances; they attach themselves less to clever people than to artistic natures. But they too are very difficult to discover because they can easily hide. They can be found where there are real works of art, where the human form or natural forms or the like are present in appearance. That is where they can be found. As I said, we can only discover these beings with difficulty. When we ask ourselves: How is it that we are interested in beautiful appearances, that under certain circumstances we take greater pleasure in a beautiful statue than in a living human being - a different kind of pleasure, to be sure, but a greater pleasure - or that we build ourselves up and delight in the melodic or harmonic shaping of sounds? - then we very easily roll over into another realm, into the realm of the luciferic beings. But it is not only the luciferic beings which carry the artistic, but again such a realm of elementary beings which keep alive in this interest the human being, who would otherwise always be inclined to have no interest in the artistically beautiful appearance, because it is unreal, which stimulate the artistic interest in the first place.

Now it is so difficult to discover these beings because they can hide themselves even more easily than the foolish in the spirit world, for they are really only there where the beautiful asserts itself. And when one is devoted to the beautiful, when one enjoys the beautiful, then one certainly does not see these beings. Why?

In order to become aware of these beings in a normal way, one must indeed try, if one is somehow given to artistic impressions, to direct the clairvoyant gaze towards those beings which you find described in the same scene as nymph-like or sylph-like beings, which are also present in the elementary kingdoms of nature, and one must put oneself in their place. One must, as it were, look at the others with these air and water beings, who are present in the enjoyment of beauty. And since that is difficult, one must help oneself in another way. Fortunately, I would say, one can easily discover these beings if one listens to someone who speaks quite beautifully and whose language one does not understand properly, where one only hears the sounds without understanding their meaning. If one abandons oneself to this beautiful speaking - but it must be beautifully spoken, it must be oratorically spoken, and one does not have to understand it properly - then one can acquire the ability, it is an intimate, delicate ability, to see these beings. So one must try, as it were, to acquire the talent of the sylphs and to strengthen it by that talent which then develops when one listens to speeches which are beautifully spoken and which one does not understand, whereby one also does not listen to what they are supposed to mean, but only to the beautiful speaking. Then one discovers these beings, which are everywhere where the beautiful is, and give their support, so that man can have the right interest in the beautiful.

And then comes the great disappointment, then comes the great terrible astonishment. These beings are in fact extremely ugly, the ugliest thing one can discover, horrible beings, the archetypes of ugliness. And once one has acquired the spiritual eye for these beings and then visits with this spiritual eye some studio in which artistic things are created, then one finds that it are these beings which, like spiders, are actually at the bottom of the world's existence on earth, so that man is interested in beauty. It is these horrible spider-beings of an elementary kind that awaken the interest in beauty. Man would not be able to have a real interest in beauty if his soul were not enmeshed in a world of primordially ugly spider-creatures.

One does not suspect, when walking through a gallery in this way - for what I have told you is all for the discovery of the forms of these beings, they are there every time man enjoys beauty - how one is supported in one's interest in the most beautiful pictures by the fact that in all ears and in all nostrils these ugliest spiders crawl out and in. At the bottom of ugliness rises man's enthusiasm for beauty. That is a mystery of the world. One needs, I would say, the incitement of ugliness in order that the beautiful may come to the fore. And the great artistic natures were those who, through their strong corporeality, were able to endure the imposition of these spiders in order to produce a Sistine Madonna or the like. Whatever beauty is produced in the world is produced in such a way that it stands out from a sea of ugliness through the enthusiasm of the human soul.

You must not believe that when you go beyond the veil of the sensual, when you come to the region beyond the threshold, you come into all that is beautiful. Do not think that anyone who knows these things is being careless when he says that people, if they are not properly prepared, must be held back at the threshold of the spiritual world. - For first of all, for everything that is uplifting and edifying, as it were, before the curtain, one must become acquainted with the thoroughly unedifying substrata. And if, therefore, you spend your time gazing into the elementary world which belongs to air and water, you will again see the great struggle of the fleeting world of sylphs and undines against these archetypes of ugliness. I say spider-creatures; they do not consist of the spider's web, but are built of the element of water and of the element of water vapour. They are fleetingly formed aerial figures, which increase their ugliness still further by having a different ugliness every second, whereby one always has the feeling that each succeeding ugliness, which is superimposed on a preceding one, is still greater than the preceding one. This is the world which is just as present in air and water as that which is pleasing in air and water.“ (Lit.:GA 219, p. 78ff)

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.