NEUOFFENBARUNGThe spleen of the Earth (14 January 1847)
1. In every animal, after the lungs, one of the most important viscera – which is the real source of fire in every animal body – is the spleen. This viscera is just as necessary for the preservation of animal-life as the heart, stomach and lungs; for without this viscera, the former would be dead in every animal body.
2. I said, it is the fireplace in the animal body. The fireplace is the most necessary thing in every house for the cooking of food and for the warming of the rooms; it may look very ordinary, but it must be there, and it was the very first need of man, and the very first people on earth got to know fire before anything else, and if they had not known it, Cain and Abel would not have been able to sacrifice burnt offerings.
3. To illustrate the importance of such a fireplace and what such a fireplace actually is, with an example from your more recent times, let us take a look at the so-called locomotive that exists at present.
4. See, such a locomotive is very artisticly arranged, according to human fashion; if we fill the boiler with water, but do not put a fire underneath in the hearth, by which the water is decomposed into the driving vapors, it will immediately be seen that this whole mechanism is useless. The fire is therefore the real motive power; it first sets the water into vapors, and the vapors only then engage the mechanism, and such a steam car then comes into it's well-known rapid motion.
5. Similar, animal bodies are admittedly infinitely more artistic than locomotives; but their whole mechanism, which consists of countless parts and organs, would be useless if the fire source were missing in it. Fire decomposes all the nourishing parts taken in, and drives them by it's own power into the vessels, where they pass into the blood, and by this reach the heart and from there to their actual destination.
6. This fire-source in the animal body, called a spleen, therefore also consists of it's own loose mass, which in it's criss-cross interwoven cellular tissue, is perfectly suitable to generate and maintain the electromagnetic fire in itself, namely by generating this electromagnetic fire through constant friction of it's cellular tissue, and then stored it in it's countless pouch-like vessels as in small electric bottles, and is in a certain way always saturated with it, in order to thereby, moment by moment, supply the negative part to the stomach and the positive part to the heart.
7. I am well aware that many physicians and naturalists do not yet know what to make of the spleen; but it is difficult to find out, because no-one can look at an animal in it's living state and find out what it does. But once the animal is dead, this presupposes the death of the spleen long before that anyway; but now let it be known to you what the spleen is and what it serves for.
8. We have thus seen that the spleen is one of the most necessary viscera in the animal body, because it generates the actual motive power for the entire rest of the animal-mechanism within itself, carries it, and passes it on to the other parts.
9. But as this seemingly insignificant viscera is one of the most important in the animal body, there is also such a viscera in the earth itself, which can be called the earth's spleen with the same right. This earth's spleen is firstly attached to the stomach as in the animal bodies, but on the other hand, it is also in the closest organic connection with the earth's heart, and that because the stomach must draw it's digestive heat from the spleen, and the heart it's pulsating power from this main viscera; The same applies to the activity of the lungs, which is more or less derived from this part of the intestine, although half of the lungs also have completely free movement, which is connected with the will of the soul, for
which reason man in particular can breathe faster or slower at will.
10. Since the spleen plays one of the most important vitalizing roles in our earthly body, it is only right to pay special attention to this part of the intestine.
11. In order to also see this, however, we want to have a quick look at the effects of our earth's spleen.
12. Look at all the fire-spitting mountains of the earth; they are, of course, only quite insignificant offshoots of this main fireworks, but they can nevertheless give a convincing view of how things happen in in the main fire-kitchen of the earth's body. That would be an effect, which would be documented on the surface of the earth.
13. Then we consider the innumerable quantity of the boiling hot water-springs, which also take their heating from this main tissue of the earth, if not directly, then still indirectly by those fiery organs, which stand in most intimate connection with this piece of tissue. There we have a second effect of this piece of earth-tissue, on the earth's surface.
14. Let us further consider the clouds and fog formations, and also the winds that move them. All this is a product of this earth-tissue; for it's main central fire penetrates countless organs of the earth, and heats them in all their parts in a sufficient way. Someone could only penetrate a little more than a German mile deep into the earth's interior, and he would convince himself how powerfully this inner earth-warming apparatus works already there. When water penetrates into these depths, it is soon dissolved into vapors; these then inflate the earth's skin, and then either gradually penetrate as gases or vapors through the pores, fissures and other cavities of the earth's crust, and thus fill the air, and disturb it's equilibrium, whence then the winds take their origin; or if these internally formed water vapors and gases sometimes take a more violent way out due to an overfilling, then it will likely cause a greater or smaller earthquake, and in the area of eruption, all-destructive hurricanes, wind and sometimes also fire-tornadoes are brought to light. There we now again have a third descriptive appearance on the earth's surface which originates from this earth-tissue piece.
15. In a similar way, the movement of the sea (not the ebb and flow, but only the surging and stormy), as well as all the currents of the sea, originate from this very viscera. Also the saltiness of the sea, which can only happen when certain substances are dissolved by fire beforehand and are then driven up as salt through countless organs for the salting of the sea, stems from this. So also all the meteoric phenomena, which appear in the air circle of the earth, as not less also all vegetative power of the earth, originate from it. Besides these, there is an innumerable quantity of phenomena in and above the earth, which all originate from this piece of viscera – with the entire enumeration of which a hundred writers would not finish in a hundred years; Therefore, it would be a highly inexpedient and ridiculous work here to enumerate and discuss all these phenomena separately, and all the more inexpedient, because all these phenomena can be easily understood from the later observation of the spiritual part anyway. Therefore it is enough that we touch this matter here only in general, although on the other hand it must not be an indifferent matter to anybody to get a little deeper information in advance on this very important point, without which he would not understand the spiritual too deeply.
16. We have now listed some of the main manifestations of this piece of viscera, and this for the reason of understanding this extremely important piece of earthly viscera all the more deeply; However, in order to examine and appreciate it even more deeply, we will soon go into this piece of intestine itself, as if in person, and will take a quite purposeful little walk in it, and at the same time direct our attention to how this piece of intestine is built, from where it gets it's fire and the firing material.