Life and Form
The forces of the moon are connected in Anthroposophy on the one hand with reproduction and fertility and on the other hand with rigidity and the hardening of life processes into death.
How can these two faces of the moon be related?
It is important in this matter that we not confuse reproduction with the creation of a new life, but see clearly that it is connected with the ability to bring forth a new form. Life itself is sun-like and continuously flows out of itself. Life moves on and through form, and is only arrested for a while in a form. The power of an organism to bring forth a new complete material form, reproduction, belongs to the forces of the moon, which arrests the continuous life-movement into a particular form. This power of formation when taken to its conclusion brings rigidity, hardening and death. Look about you, what we see of a plant is its developing material form; its true being and essential nature as an etheric life-movement we do not see. What we see is that part of a plant that is already on the way to death. Only at those points where a plant is still developing and growing can we see the light of life shining through the material existence. The ever-unfolding growth of the plant would produce leaf after leaf indefinitely, if it did not transition into the flower and prepare to produce seeds. It is in the seed-form, containing the cotyledons as a tiny plantlet, that we find the general life-flow of the plant encapsulated and separated off as an individual organism from the living continuity of the mother plant. The forces of life and form are forever entwined as the aspects of continuity and discontinuity in the manifestation of living organisms.