Translations:Benutzer:Arian/Klett-Mini-Test/1460/en

and the great civilizations that followed them. Humanity lived then still in a dreamlike consciousness. One can call it a mythological consciousness as well. Out of it flowed the myths of the peoples — inspirations from a world experienced as spiritually and supersensibly real. It stood under the guidance of the inspired priesthood of the Mysteries. In these spiritual backgrounds must the becoming-domestic of animals be sought (cf. chap. "The Domestic Animals — Organs in the Farm-and-Landscape Organism," p. 126 ff.). This consisted in the fact that the evolutively disposed instinctive life of the animals was gradually replaced by human guidance. This step of transformation out of the soul-spiritual consciousness of humanity at that time impressed itself upon the life body of the animals, and through this upon the physical body, and so also upon the stream of heredity. It helped the domestic animal to preserve its youthfulness, to keep its bodily constitution variable. In the last consequence one may assume that the secret of the becoming-domestic has found its deposit in the physical body — in the specific arrangement of the substances, in their "structure" — there, where life congeals fully into form. Once the form is created, life withdraws from it; it falls prey to death. This arrangement of substances, created by the formative forces of the domestic animal, is in each case a different one: in the tubular bones of the limbs, in the bones of the pelvis and the spine, and again a different one in the cranial bones enclosing the centre of the nerve-sense system. The predominant substance that builds the latter is calcium; it occurs in various compositions with phosphorus, carbon, oxygen, and fluorine. Its forces directed, as it were, toward a midpoint lend the braincase its form approaching the spherical. The compositional arrangement of calcium in the bones of the braincase is — so one may conclude — the expression of the soul-force interplay of the domestic animal, held youthful and stimulated by the human being. It is, at the animal level, a higher kind of substance-arrangement of calcium than that which is present at the plant level — as, for instance, in the bark of the oak. Seen in this way, the domestic animal skull preserves in its calcium compositions astral forces that have flowed to the domestic animal through the active devotion of the human being, and have taken the place of the lost instincts. They possess, in a higher sense, the capacity to work in a purifying, clarifying, and healing way upon proliferating life processes.