The Seat of the Soul Rudolf Steiner’s Seven Planetary Seals by Yvan Rioux

• “The seat of the soul is where the inner world and the outer world meet. Where they overlap, it is in every point of the overlap.”—Novalis

How are the internal and external forms of the human organism shaped? How does human consciousness emerge? These are questions that conventional science cannot answers.

In The Seat of the Soul, Yvan Rioux invites us to consider new concepts that explain these phenomena. His exposition is based on the existence of external “formative forces”—morphic fields—that, he asserts, create the human body or organism in conjunction with forces that resonate within us from the living solar system. The psyche—the soul—progressively emerges as an inner world of faculties that, with time, comes to apprehend and understand the outer world.

In his previous book The Mystery of Emerging Form, Rioux explored the formative forces of the twelve zodiacal constellations. In this absorbing sequel, he investigates how such activity from the planetary spheres works within us as “life stages” or metabolic processes. In seven chapters, he explores the impact of each of these planetary spheres on our complex organic makeup and psychic activity. The links among organs and tissues, he says, produce five specific “inner landscapes” in connection with the external rhythmic environment. Rioux also describes, from a biological perspective, Rudolf Steiner’s seven “planetary seals.” According to Steiner, these seals are “...occult scripts, meaning that, as hidden signatures, they show their ongoing etheric impacts on the seven stages of our metabolism.”

Between Rudolf Steiner’s indications about human physiology and the ancient Chinese view on the subject, there is a convergence of ideas—synthesized here—that breaks through the boundaries of modern reductionist science, offering exciting perspectives for understanding the human being.