research & reviews
Form, Life, & Consciousness Form, Life and Consciousness: An Introduction to Anthroposophic Medicine and the Study of the Human Being, by Armin J. Husemann; transl. by Catherine Creeger; Foreword by Prof. Peter Heusser; SteinerBooks (2019); 360 pp.
by C.T. Roszell Anthroposophy begs to be lived out in confidence and beauty. Where it does, it convinces, and becomes a force of healing and new creation. Form, Life and Consciousness is such an example. It expresses the harvest of a lifetime, illustration by illustration, and discovery after discovery. An imminently readable book, it will fascinate anyone interested in the riddles of the human mind, body, and spirit. It is a must-read for anthroposophic doctors, and a copy belongs in every Steiner School library for science classes. Indeed, the world would be a very different place if it were a resource tool in general education. Husemann’s latest work has been happily translated at full-length and great cost for good reason. Together with its companion volume, The Harmony of the Human Body: Musical Principles in Human Physiology, the book allows the one who takes it in hand the opportunity to realize how seemingly impossible, invisible principles can become palpable realities, and to taste the reality of the spirit in motion on paths of the structure and movement of the far reaches of creation in the marvel of human body. Starting from natural phenomena perceived through sensory observation and basic scientific research,
the reader is invited to participate with the author in discovering—proceeding the way harmonics of a note rise into ever higher ethereal regions—the spiritual organizing principles of what anthroposophy refers to as the realms of the etheric, the astral, and beyond.
A Taste of the Journey: from one of the routes one can take in the book Husemann’s focus is one of delicately careful scientific delineation together with nuanced experience of organizing principles—a process that leads to the heightened artistic sensibilities required to articulate them. Organizing emergent principles familiarly characterized in anthroposophy such as the etheric and life-spirit, astral, and spiritself—such words fall away in the doing of them together, the way individuals like Steiner, Goethe, or Husemann exercise and experience them. We can allow ourselves— and it is so refreshing and such a delight to do this!—to set aside everything we think we know about anthroposophy, and discover it afresh from the ground up. Here is the right place for the reviewer to stand aside, and to let readers taste and glimpse what such an exercise can bring, with any of the many expositions the book affords. A very striking opening into the author’s theme is the graphic below that shows the interplay of musical tone, movement of the human sheaths, and phases of development in the brain ventricles and flow of the cerebrospinal fluid from the companion volume, Harmony of the Human Body.
Fig. 1. From the left, the four topmost images show the development of the brain ventricles, followed by the flow of the cerebrospinal fluid in the images top right. The complete progression is an image of a process of inversion by which the etheric organization separates from the fluid physical form and unites with the astral, penetrating the cerebrospinal fluid during respiration. Harmony of the Human Body, p. 74.
44 • being human