the biography of a steel nib or about differences in the life of a darning needle and a sewing needle. That is merely a transfer of ideas. Just as one whole animal species differs from another, so does a single human being differ from others. A common soul lives in the whole group of animals. Just as your ten fingers are part of your hands, so are all wolves part of the wolf group soul.
Now we also need to consider the human soul more closely. It was not as individual in earlier times as it is today. There was a point in human evolution when man was much closer to a group soul. A hundred years after Christ, Tacitus gave a description of individual German tribes in his Germania. All members of a group felt they belonged together, though there were, of course, differences, everything happening by degrees in human evolution. All who belonged to a group saw themselves to be the same. Markedly individual facial features are a sign that the individual soul is more removed from the group soul. You still see more or less the same facial features among savages. We have to remember the fact that marked facial features prove that the individual nature is influencing the bodily configuration. This will be increasingly the case as human beings continue to evolve. A time will come when national characteristics disappear completely. With a soul incarnating now in one nation, now in another, national differences will vanish, with everyone immediately always looking just like himself the more his individual nature has come through. In earlier times, when people still married within the tribe, its members would hold together like the fingers on a hand, with one avenging the dishonour done to another as though it had been done to him. This cohesion is gradually disappearing, and the greater the union, the more general the unity of human beings, the more individual will souls and characters be. So you do not get a mishmash but the more the differences fall away, the greater the individuality.
Where do human group souls differ from animal group souls? We have to go back a long way in evolution. In Lemurian times human beings did not yet have different bodies enveloping a spiritual core. The highest form of life was a kind of human-animal with physical body, ether body, astral body and the potential for an I, but not yet the I as such. They were able to receive the divine seed. The soul which now lives inside man had not yet left the keeping of the godhead and still lived in a soul spirit stratum. Think of a container holding a thousand water droplets that merge into one another, forming a single whole. Take a thousand small sponges, each able to absorb one drop, and put them in, so that each contains one drop. This makes them individual and independent. Now imagine that to begin with the soul did not came to dwell in every individual but that one soul was shared by many bodies, a group soul. At that time, the soul which today dwells in every individual dwelt in a whole tribe.
And here you have to accept a new idea. Such a group soul also does not die. The beautiful, significant aspect of death is something specific, something given to the individual human soul. When one unit which is part of a group soul dies, it is replaced immediately, just like the process when you cut off a polyp. And so the group soul, which does not come down on to die physical plan, is sentient of death as the loss of a part, and birth as a new one growing in its place. It does not have the special quality that comes with death. It is only when a sentient entity says: ‘It is I’ that death begins to intervene in individual life. Man gains a higher life by facing death. If death were not overcome, he could not go through death into a higher life.
On the astral plan we find the souls of animals that are linked by a thread to each individual in the group. To understand the origin of animal group souls you have to know what makes man the kind of physical being he is.
When the divine seeds came down, they found very different vessels to contain them. Some were specially dev