Abstract

This dissertation presents an overview of Rudolf Steiner's esoteric cosmology and consequent conceptions of balance and imbalance in human health. In includes background summaries of Steiner's angelology, evolutionary cosmology, account of human evolution, and model of the human being. It discusses how substances, forces, and processes relate in maintaining a dynamic balance of health in the living human organism. ;Through a primary methodology of extensive text-based research, focusing principally on Steiner's work, this dissertation distills, consolidates, and organizes many details of an alternative paradigm to the prevalent materialistic, reductionistic, objectivistic paradigm that dominates contemporary western culture and biomedicine. This alternative paradigm, with its extraordinarily expanded anatomy and physiology of the human organism, can serve as the foundation for a salutogenic orientation toward health studies, investigating correspondences of cosmic and terrestrial processes with natural processes within the human organism. ;The correlations between Steiner's account of spiritual macrocosmic evolution and his expanded model of the human organism provide a serviceable working hypothesis for understanding the processes active in the human being as a physically embodied spiritual being rooted within a spiritual-material cosmos