The Rudolf Steiner Archive

We will turn our thoughts to-day to the Festival which every year revives remembrance of the Mystery of Golgotha.

There are three such main Festivals in Christendom: at Christmas, Easter and Whitsuntide. Each of these Festivals brings man's life of soul into a different relation with the great events from which the whole of earth-evolution receives purpose and meaning.

The Christmas Festival is connected more directly with man's life of feeling. In a certain sense it has the most popular appeal of all the Festivals, because when rightly understood it deepens the life of feeling and is always dear to the human heart.

The Easter Festival makes great demands upon man's powers of understanding, because here some measure of insight is essential into the Mystery of Golgotha itself, into how a super-sensible Being entered the stream of earthly evolution. Easter is a Festival which carries the faculty of human understanding to the highest level, a level which is, of course, ultimately accessible to everyone; but the appeal of the Easter Festival can never be as widespread as that of Christmas.

Through the Whitsuntide Festival, relationship is established between the will and the super-sensible world to which the Christ Being belongs. It is of the impulses of will which then take effect in the world that the Whitsuntide Festival makes men conscious when its meaning is rightly understood.

And so the great Christian Mystery is illustrated in a threefold way by these Festivals. There are many aspects of the Christmas Mystery and in the course of years we have studied them from different points of view at the time of the Festival. To-day we will think of an aspect brought graphically before us in the Gospels.

The Gospels tell of two proclamations of the birth of Christ Jesus. The one proclamation is made to the simple shepherds in the fields, to whom—in dream or in some kindred way—an Angel announces the birth. In this case, knowledge of the event was brought by inner soul-forces which were of a particular character in the shepherds living near the birthplace of Christ Jesus. And the Gospels tell of another proclamation made to the Three Kings, the Three Magi from the East who follow the voice of a star announcing to them that Christ Jesus has come into the world.

Here we have an indication of two ways in which higher knowledge came to men in earlier times. This is again a matter of which the modern mind has no understanding. The idea prevailing nowadays is that man's faculties of apprehension and thinking—that is to say, inner powers of the soul—have for thousands and thousands of years been fundamentally the same as they are to-day, except that in earlier times they were more primitive. But we know from spiritual science that the tenor and mood of the human soul has undergone great changes in the course of the ages. In times of antiquity, let us say about six or seven thousand years ago, man had a quite different conception not only of his own life but also of the universe around him. His attitude of soul underwent continual change until, in the modern world, it amounts simply to intellectual analysis and a purely physical conception of things in the outer world. This development proceeds from an instinctive clairvoyance in ancient times, through the phase of our present mood-of-soul, in order, in the future, to return to a form of clairvoyant vision of the world pervaded by full, clear consciousness.

At the time when the Mystery of Golgotha took place on the earth, the old instinctive clairvoyance had already become dim. Although men's attitude of soul differed widely from that of to-day, they no longer possessed the powers of that ancient clairvoyance; neither were they able to apply the old forms of wisdom in seeking for intimate and exact knowledge of the world. The teachings of the ancient wisdom, as well as the faculties of instinctive clairvoyance, had lost their power when the Mystery of Golgotha took place. Nevertheless, echoes still survived, as the Gospels clearly indicate if we understand them aright. Echoes of the ancient wisdom survived here and there in certain exceptional individuals. These individuals might well have been the simple shepherds in the fields who with their great purity of heart possessed a certain power of clairvoyance which came over them like a dream. And there might also well have been individuals who had reached the heights of learning, like the Three Magi from the East, in whom the ancient faculty to gaze into the how of cosmic happenings had been preserved.

In a kind of dream-condition, the simple shepherds in the fields were able inwardly to realise what was drawing near in the event of the birth of Christ Jesus. On the other hand, the knowledge possessed by the three Magi from the East enabled them, by contemplating the phenomena of the heavens, to discern that an event of a significance far transcending that of the ordinary course of life was taking place on the earth.

Our attention is therefore directed to two definite but quite distinct forms of knowledge. We will think, first, of the knowledge possessed by the three Magi as a last remnant of an ancient wisdom. It is clearly indicated that these Magi were able to read the secrets of the movements of the stars. The story of the three Kings or Magi points to the existence of an ancient lore of the stars, an ancient knowledge of the secrets of the worlds of stars in which the secrets of happenings in the world of men were also revealed. This ancient lore of the stars was very different from our modern astronomical science—although in a certain respect it too is prophetic in that eclipses of the sun, of the moon, and the like, can be predicted. But it is a purely mathematical science, speaking only of conditions and relationships in space and time in so far as they can be expressed in terms of mathematics. What plays with a higher significance into man's inner life from beyond space and time, but into the world of space and time, was read by an ancient star-lore from the courses and movements of the stars, and it was this star-wisdom that formed the essential content of the science belonging to an earlier epoch. Men sought in the stars for explanations of what was happening on the earth. But to such men the world of stars was not the machinelike abstraction it has now come to be. Every planet was felt to have reality of being. In a kind of inner speech of the soul, these men of old conversed, as it were, with each planet, just as to-day we converse with one another in ordinary speech. They realised that what the movements of the stars bring about in the universe is reflected in man's inmost soul. This was a living, spirit-inwoven conception of the universe. And man felt that as a being of soul and spirit he himself had his place within this universe. The wisdom relating to cosmic happenings was also cultivated in Schools of the Mysteries where the pupils were prepared, carefully and intimately, to understand the movements of the stars in such a way that human life on earth became intelligible to them.

What form did these preparations take? These preparations for knowledge of the stars and their workings consisted in training the pupils, even in the times of instinctive clairvoyance, to unfold a more wide-awake consciousness than that prevailing in normal life. The masses of the people possessed faculties of instinctive clairvoyance which were natural in a life of soul less awake than our own. In ancient times the wide-awake thinking of to-day would not have been possible. Nor could mathematics or geometry be grasped in the way they are grasped by the modern mind. Man's whole life between birth and death was a kind of dreamlike existence, but on that very account he had a far more living awareness of the world around him than is possible in our fully wide-awake consciousness. And strange as it seems, in the age which lasted into the second millennium or even as late as the beginning of the first millennium B.C. (—it was to the last surviving remains of this age that men like the three Magi belonged—) individual pupils in the Mysteries were initiated into a kind of knowledge resembling our geometrical or mathematical sciences. It was Euclid¹ who first gave geometry to the world at large. The geometry presented to mankind by Euclid had already been cultivated for thousands of years in the Mysteries, but there it was communicated to chosen pupils only. Moreover it did not work in them in the same way as in men of later time. Paradoxical as it seems, it is nevertheless a fact that the geometry and arithmetic learnt by children to-day was taught in the Mysteries to individuals specially chosen from the masses on account of their particular gifts who were then received into the Mysteries.

One often hears it said to-day that the teachings given in the Mysteries were secret and veiled. In their abstract content however, these so-called ‘secret’ teachings were no different from what is now taught to children at school. The mystery does not lie in the fact that these things are unknown to-day but that they were imparted to human beings in a different way. For to teach the principles of geometry to children by calling upon the intellect in an age when from the moment of waking until that of falling asleep the human being has clear day-consciousness, is a very different matter from imparting them to pupils specially chosen because of their greater maturity of soul in the age of instinctive clairvoyance and dreamlike consciousness. A true conception of these things is rarely in evidence to-day.

In Eastern literature there is a Hymn to the God Varuna which says that Varuna is revealed in the air and in the winds blowing through the forests, in the thunder rolling from the clouds, in the human heart when it is kindled to acts of will, in the heavens when the sun passes across the sky, and is present on the hills in the soma juice. You will generally find it stated in books today that nobody knows what this soma-juice really is. Modern scholars assert that nobody knows what soma-juice is, although, as a matter of fact, there are people who drink it by the litre and from a certain point of view are quite familiar with it. But to know things from the vantage-point of the Mysteries is quite different from knowing them as a layman from the standpoint of the experiences of ordinary waking consciousness. You may read to-day about the ‘Philosopher's Stone’ for which men sought in an epoch when understanding of the nature of substances was very different from what it is today. And again, those who write about alchemy assert that nothing is known about the Philosopher's Stone. Here and there in my lectures I have said that this Philosopher's Stone is quite familiar to most people, only they do not know what it really is nor why it is so called. It is quite well known, because as a matter of fact it is used by the ton.

The modern mind with its tendency to abstraction and theory and its alienation from reality, is incapable of grasping these things. Nor is there any understanding of what is meant by saying that our geometrical and arithmetical sciences were once imparted to mature souls quite different in character from the souls of modern men, In my book Christianity as Mystical Fact I have indicated the special nature of the Mystery-teachings but these significant matters are not as a rule correctly understood; they are taken far too superficially. The way in which the subject-matter of the Mystery-teachings in ancient times was imparted—that is what needs to be understood.

Novalis was still aware of the human element, the element of feeling in mathematics which, in utter contrast to the vast majority to-day, he regarded as being akin to a great and wonderful Hymn.² It was to an understanding of the world imbued with feeling but expressed in mathematical forms that the pupil of the ancient Mysteries was led. And when this mathematical understanding of the universe had developed in such a pupil, he became one whose vision resembled that of the men described as the three Magi from the East. The mathematics of the universe which to us has become pure abstraction, then revealed reality of Being, because this knowledge was supplemented and enriched by something that came to meet it. And so the science and knowledge of the outer universe belonging to an ancient culture which in its last echoes survived in the Magi, was the origin of the one proclamation—the proclamation made by way of wisdom pertaining to the outer universe.

On the other side, inner feeling of the secrets of the evolution of humanity could arise in men of a disposition specially fitted for such experiences. Such men are represented by the shepherds in the fields. These inner forces must have reached a certain stage of development and then instinctive-imaginative perception became direct vision. And so, through their faculty of inner vision, the simple shepherds in the fields were made aware of the proclamation: ‘The God is revealing Himself in the heavenly Heights and through Him there can be peace among all men who are of good-will.’

Secrets of the cosmos were thus revealed to the hearts of the simple shepherds in the fields and to those who were the representatives of the highest wisdom attainable by the human mind at that time. This is the revelation made to the three Magi from the East. The great mystery of earth-existence was proclaimed from two sides.

What was it that came to the knowledge of the Magi? What kind of faculties developed in specially prepared pupils of the Mysteries through the mathematics imparted to them?

The philosopher Kant says of the truths of mathematical science that they are a priori. By this he means that they are determined before the acquisition of external, empirical knowledge.³ This is so much lip-wisdom. Kant's a priori really says nothing. The expression has meaning only when we realise from spiritual-scientific knowledge that mathematics comes from within ourselves, rises into consciousness from within our own being. And where does it originate? In the experiences through which we passed in the spiritual world before conception, before birth. We were living then in the great universe, experiencing what it was possible to experience before we possessed bodily eyes and bodily ears. Our experiences then were a priori—a form of cognition independent of earthly life. And this is the kind of experience that rises up, unconsciously to-day, from our inmost being. Man does not know—unless, like Novalis, he glimpses it intuitively—that the experiences of the life before birth or conception well up when he is engrossed in mathematical thought. For one who can truly apprehend these things, mathematical cognition is in itself a proof that before conception and birth he existed in a spiritual world. Of those to whom this is no proof of a life before birth, it must be said that they do not think deeply and fundamentally enough about the phenomena and manifestations of life and have not the faintest inkling of the real origin of mathematics.

The pupils of the ancient Mysteries who had absorbed the kind of wisdom which in its last echoes had survived in the three Magi from the East, had this clear impression: If as we contemplate the stars we see in them the expressions of mathematical, arithmetical progression, we spread over universal space the experiences through which we lived before birth. A pupil of the Mysteries said to himself: Living here on the earth, I gaze out into the universe, beholding all that is around me in space. Before my birth I lived within these manifestations of cosmic realities, lived with the mysteries of number connected with the stars, with all that I can now only mentally picture in terms of mathematics. In that other existence my own inner forces led me from star to star; I had my very life in what is now only a mental activity. Such contemplation made vividly real to these men what they had lived through before birth, and these experiences were sacred to them. They knew that this other world was a spiritual world—their home before they came down to the earth. The last echoing remains of this knowledge had survived in the Magi from the East and through it they recognised the signs of the coming of Christ.

Whence came the Christ Being? He came from the world in which we ourselves live between death and a new birth, and united Himself with the life that extends from birth to death. Knowledge of the world in which our existence is spent from death to a new birth can therefore shed light upon an event like the Mystery of Golgotha. And it was through this knowledge that the Mystery of Golgotha, the Christmas Mystery too, was announced to the Magi.

While man is living on the earth and unfolding the forces which bring knowledge of the world around him, while he is unfolding the impulses for his actions and social life, he is unconsciously experiencing something else as well. He has no knowledge of it, but just as he experiences the aftereffects of his life before birth, so does he also experience what finally passes through the gate of death to become the content of the life after death. These forces are already present in germ between birth and death but come to fruition only in the life after death. They worked with intense strength in the old, instinctive clairvoyance, and in their last echoes they were still working in the simple shepherds in the fields because of their purity of heart. We live within the play of these forces above all during sleep, when the soul is outside the body, within the outer universe. The soul is then living in the form of existence in which it will live consciously after death, when the physical body has been laid aside.

These forces from the world of sleep and dream which in certain conditions can penetrate into waking life, were very active in the old, instinctive clairvoyance, and they were working in the simple shepherds to whom the Mystery of Golgotha was proclaimed in a way other than to the three Magi.

What kind of knowledge is brought by the forces that are paramountly active between death and a new birth, if, as was the case with the Magi, they have been kindled during life between birth and death? It is a knowledge of happenings in the world beyond the earth. The human being is transported from the earth into the world of the stars in which he lives between death and a new birth. This was the world into which the three Magi from the East were transported—away from the earth into the heavens.

And what kind of knowledge is brought by the forces that well up from the inmost being of man, above all in the world of dream? These forces bring knowledge of what is coming to pass within the earth itself. In this kind of knowledge it is earthly forces that are most strongly at work, the forces we have through the body, through existence in the body. These are the forces which are particularly active between sleeping and waking. Then too we are within the outer universe, but the outer universe that is especially connected with the earth.

You will say: this contradicts the statement that during sleep we are outside the body. But in reality there is no contradiction. We perceive only what is outside us; we do not perceive that within which we actually live. Only those who lack real knowledge and are satisfied with phrases speak of such things in glib words to the effect that it is meaningless to base spiritual science upon knowledge acquired outside the human being, for what really matters is that knowledge of outer nature shall be gained through the forces within man. ‘Schools of Wisdom’ like the one in Darmstadt⁴ may be based on high-sounding principles of this kind, but a man can remain a phrasemonger in spite of being the founder of such a ‘School of Wisdom.’ We must understand the inner nature of the world before we can acquire super-sensible knowledge, and it is only then that we can penetrate into the nature of our own inmost being. Men like Keyserling speak of the need to view things from the vantage-point of the soul, but they do not penetrate into the inmost being of man; they simply pour out phrases.

The truth is that between sleeping and waking we look back, feel back, as it were, into our body. We become aware of how our body is connected with the earth—for the body is given by the earth. The revelation to the shepherds in the fields was the revelation given by the earth, proceeding from their bodily nature. In a state of dream the voice of the Angel made known to them what had come to pass.

And so the contrast is complete:

To the Magi: revelation through heavenly lore.
To the Shepherds: revelation given by the earth.

That the revelation should have been from two sides is entirely in keeping with the Mystery of Golgotha. For a heavenly Being, a Being Who until then had not belonged to the earth, was drawing near. And the coming of such a Being must be recognised through wisdom pertaining to the heavens, through wisdom that is able to reveal the descent of a Being from the heavens. The wisdom of the shepherds is knowledge proceeding from the earth; the weaving life of the earth becomes aware of the coming of the Being from heaven. It is the same proclamation, only from another side—a wonderful, twofold proclamation to mankind of a single Event.

The attitude with which the Event of Golgotha was received by mankind is to be explained by the fact that only vestiges of the ancient wisdom remained. In the first centuries of our era, certain Gnostic teachings were able to shed light upon the Mystery of Golgotha, but as time went on, men strove more and more to understand it through purely intellectual analysis and reason. And in the nineteenth century, naturalism invaded this domain of belief. There was no longer any understanding of the super-sensible reality of the Event of Golgotha. Christ became the ‘wise man of Nazareth’—in the naturalistic sense. What is necessary is a new, spiritual conception of the Mystery of Golgotha. The Mystery of Golgotha as such must never be confused with the attitude adopted to it by the human mind.

The mood-of-soul prevailing in the shepherds and in the Magi was in its final phase at the time of the Mystery of Golgotha. Everything in the evolution of humanity undergoes constant change and metamorphosis. What has the wisdom possessed by the Magi from the East now become? It has become our mathematical astronomy. The Magi possessed super-earthly knowledge which was actually a glorious remembrance of life before birth. This knowledge has shrivelled away into our mathematical-mechanistic conception of the heavens, to the phenomena of which we apply only mathematical laws. What wells up from within us in our mathematical astronomy is the modern metamorphosis of the knowledge once possessed by the Magi.

Our outer, sense-given knowledge, conveyed as it is merely through eyes and ears, is the externalised form of the inner knowledge once possessed by men like the shepherds in the fields. The mood-of-soul in which the secrets of earth-existence were once revealed to the shepherds now induces us to look at the world with the cold detachment of scientific observation. This kind of observation is the child of the Shepherd-wisdom—but the child is very unlike the parent! And our mathematical astronomy is the child of the Magi-wisdom. It was necessary that humanity should pass through this phase. When our scientists are making their cold, dispassionate researches in laboratories and clinics, they have very little in common with the shepherds of old, but this attitude of soul is nevertheless a metamorphosis leading back directly to the wisdom of the shepherds. And our mathematicians are the successors of the Magi from the East. The outer has become inward—the inner, outward. In the process, understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha has been lost, and we must be fully conscious of this fact. Understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha has vanished most completely of all, perhaps, in many of those who claim to be official ministers of Christianity to-day.

With the forces of knowledge, feeling and belief possessed by modern men, the true reality of the Event of Golgotha can no longer be grasped. It must be discovered anew. The Magi-wisdom has become inward; it has become our abstract, mathematical science by which alone the heavens are studied. What has become inward in this way must again be filled with life, re-cast, re-shaped from within.

And now, from this point of view, try to understand what is contained in a book like my Outline of Occult Science.

The Magi gazed at the worlds of the stars; therein they beheld the Spiritual, for they could behold man's experiences in his life before birth. In our mathematics this has become pure abstraction. But the same forces that are unfolded in our mathematical thinking can again be filled with life, enriched and intensified in Imaginative perception. Then, from our own inner forces there will be born a world which, although we create it from within, can be seen as the outer universe, embracing Saturn, Sun, Moon, Earth, Jupiter, Venus, Vulcan. We then behold the heavens through inner perception, inner vision, as the Magi discerned the secrets of the Mystery of Golgotha through outer perception. The outer has become inward, has become mathematical abstraction. Therefore what is now inward must be expanded into perception of the outer universe; inward perception must lead to a new astronomy, to an astronomy inwardly experienced.

It is only by striving for a new understanding of Christ that we can truly celebrate the Christmas Festival to-day. Can it be said that this Festival still has any real meaning for the majority of people? It has become a beautiful custom to take the Christmas Tree as the symbol of the Festival, although as a matter of fact this custom is hardly a century old. The Christmas Tree was not adopted as a symbol of the Festival until the nineteenth century. What is the Christmas Tree, in reality? When we endeavour to discover its meaning and know of the legend telling that it grew from the tiny branch carried in the arms of the boy Ruprecht on the 6th of December, when we follow its history, it dawns upon us that the Christmas Tree is directly connected with the Tree of Paradise. The mind turns to the Tree of Paradise, to Adam and Eve. This is one aspect of the way in which the Mystery of Golgotha can again be proclaimed in our time. The mind turns from the Mystery of Golgotha, back to the world's beginning. The meaning of world-redemption is not understood and the mind turns again to the Divine creation of the world. This comes to expression in the fact that the real symbol of Christmas—the Crib—so beautifully presented in the Christmas Plays of earlier centuries, is gradually being superseded by the Christmas Tree which is, in reality, the Tree of Paradise. The old Jahve religion usurped the place of Christianity and the Christmas Tree is the symbol of its recrudescence. But in its reappearance the Jahve religion has been split into multiple divisions. Jahve was worshipped, and rightly worshipped, as the one, undivided Godhead in an age when his people felt themselves to be a single, self-contained unity not looking beyond their own boundaries and full of the expectation that one day they would fill the whole earth. But in our time, although people speak of Christ Jesus, in reality they worship Jahve. In the various nations (this was all too evident in the war), men spoke of Christ but were really venerating the original Godhead who holds sway in heredity and in the world of nature—Jahve. Thus we have the Christmas Tree on the one side, and on the other, national Gods at a level inferior to that of the Christian reality. These were the principles by which men's comprehension of the Mystery of Golgotha was diverted back again to the conceptions belonging to a much earlier epoch. The assertion of the principle of nationality, the claiming of national Gods, denotes a step backward into the old Jahve religion. Those who see fit to worship Christ as a national God—it is they who deny Him most deeply.

What must never be forgotten is that the proclamations to the Shepherds and to the Kings contained a message for all mankind—for the earth is common to all. In that the revelation to the shepherds was from the earth, it was a revelation that may not be differentiated according to nationality. And in that the Magi received the proclamation of the sun and the heavens, this too was a revelation destined for all mankind. For when the sun has shone upon the territory of one people, it shines upon the territory of another. The heavens are common to all; the earth is common to all. The impulse of the ‘human universal’ is in very truth quickened by Christianity. Such is the aspect of Christmas revealed by the twofold proclamation.

When we think of the Christmas Mystery, our minds must turn to a birth, to something that must be born anew in our time. For true Christianity must verily be born anew. We need a World-Christmas-Festival, and spiritual science would fain be a preparation for this World-Christmas-Festival among men.

• 1. About 300 B.C.
• 2. None really comprehend mathematics who do not undertake the study with reverence and devotion as a revelation from God." (From Thoughts on Physics).
• 3. "Mathematics and physics are the two theoretical sciences of reason which have to determine their objects a priori." (From the Preface to the 2nd ed. of The Critique of Pure Reason, 1787).
• 4. Founded in 1920 by Count Hermann Keyserling (1880-1946).

The time from Christmas until about now is actually an important, a significant time of the year, also in occult terms. It is called the time of the thirteen days. And the remarkable thing is that this period of thirteen days is sensed in its importance by those people who, in their entire soul disposition, have retained something of the old connection of the human soul with the spiritual world, of which we have often spoken. We know that more than the person of today's urban population has retained from the connection with the spiritual world that once existed in ancient times, the primitive person who lives out in the countryside or in a population that is even less affected by our urban culture. And there we find much that is related in folk poetry about the experiences of the soul, about experiences of the soul during the period from Christmas to Epiphany, January 6.

This is the time when, after the annual eclipse has most befallen the earth, immediately after the winter solstice, when the sun begins its victorious course again, with nature's deepest immersion and release and redemption, the human soul can also undergo very special experiences if it still has special connections with the spiritual world. Those people who no longer have the old clairvoyance but are still connected to the spiritual world in their soul feel a difference in the abnormal world of dreams at this time of year. What the soul can experience there becomes meaningful, because the soul, if it is still receptive, can really get most involved in the spiritual world then. For the modern man, the year really is such that he no longer particularly distinguishes the individual seasons, because while the snow storms outside, darkness already begins at four o'clock in the afternoon and it only gets light late, the city dweller feels the same as in the summer months, when the sun can unfold its full power. Man is torn out of the old connection with the cosmos in which he lived when he was outside in nature. But for those who have retained a connection with nature, it is not the same thing that falls during the Christmas season as what happens at another time, for example, at midsummer. While in midsummer the soul is most emancipated from what is connected with the spiritual world, in the time when nature is most dead, it is most connected with the spiritual world and used to experience special things during this time.

Now there is a beautiful folk tale in the old Norwegian language, a tale that was rediscovered only recently and has quickly become popular again due to the peculiar understanding of the Norwegian population. It is about a man who still had a connection to the spiritual world, about Olaf Åsteson. What Olaf Åsteson experiences in the time between Christmas and Epiphany is beautifully depicted in this poem.

At the New Year's celebration in Hannover in 1912, I first tried to put this folk tale of Olaf Åsteson into German lines so that it could also be performed before our souls. Tonight's program will begin with the Song of Olaf Åsteson, which contains Olaf Åsteson's experiences during the thirteen nights.

It was followed by a recitation by Marie von Sivers.

The poetry itself is old. But, as I said, it has recently been rediscovered by the Norwegian people as if by magic and is spreading rapidly. The fact that something like this is spreading will, among many facts prevailing at present, also be one that proves how it is pushing towards an understanding of the mysteries that anthroposophy can bring us today. For that something like what is described here is taking place in a soul, or at least could take place relatively recently, is not just a 'fiction'. This writing is not just fantasy, but reality, it is real. And with Olaf Åsteson, it is pointed out to people of those Nordic regions who, in the Middle Ages, around the middle of the Middle Ages, still had the opportunity, one might say, to literally experience something as it is expressed here.

When our Norwegian friends gave me this poem during my penultimate visit to Kristiania and wanted to hear something about it from me, it was initially this fact, interesting from a general spiritual scientific point of view, that was emphasized, that pushed itself into the soul. But what led to our wanting to include this poem in our spiritual scientific program, so to speak, is that one can also go into the details more and more. Through anthroposophical understanding, one finds oneself delving ever deeper into what comes to light in the poem. For example, it was significant to me that Olaf — which is an old Norwegian name — has the epithet Åsteson: Åsteson. The son of what? Of Äste. And I tried to find out what kind of mother this son actually is. Of course, one can argue about the meaning of the word “Äst” in many different ways, and there are also things that can be disputed. It is not possible today to sort out everything that comes into question. But if we take into account everything that is in question, then a name such as Olaf Åsteson means: he who is still a son of that soul that goes down from generation to generation and is connected with the blood that runs from generation to generation. But we have traced this name back to what we have so often discussed in the field of anthroposophy, that in ancient times, ancient clairvoyance was connected with the kinship of the blood that runs through the generations. And one would be able to translate Olaf Åsteson as: Olaf, born of many generations and still carrying the characters of many generations in his soul.

If we now go into the experiences, it is extremely interesting to see what the sleeping Olaf Åsteson goes through from Christmas Eve through thirteen days, during which he does not wake up, that is, is in a kind of psychic state. If one allows the individual verses to take effect, which allow the individual experiences to arise before the soul with a broad, folksy comfort, one is reminded of certain descriptions of the first stages of initiation, where it is said that such and such a one has been led to the threshold of death. The poem shows that Olaf Åsteson comes to the gates of death. And it will be particularly vivid when he feels like a corpse himself – except for the earth that he feels between his teeth. If we remember that the etheric body of the person to be initiated grows beyond the boundaries of the skin and the person becomes bigger and bigger, so that the person lives into wide cosmic spaces, then we are pointed to in this poem how the person descends deeply, empathizes with the depths of the earth and ascends to cloud heights. What a person has to go through after death, for example in the sphere of the moon, is also what Olaf Åsteson has to go through. It is poetically described how the moon shines brightly and how the paths stretch far and wide. Then the gulf that has to be crossed in the world is shown, the one that lies between the human and the one that leads out into the cosmic expanse. And the bridge of heaven connects what is human with what is cosmic. Then our attention is drawn to the interplay of the beings that find expression in the constellations of Taurus and Ophiuchus. But for those who can see into the world spiritually, the constellations are only the expression of what is present in the spiritual realm in the vastness of space. And then the world of Kamalokaw is depicted in the description of 'Brooksvalin'. It is shown how a kind of retribution takes place, how people there go through - but in a compensatory way - what they have not acquired here on earth. But one does not need to interpret all the details of this poetry, one should not do that at all with such poetry. But one should feel that they emerged from such an atmosphere, which is closely related to what was present in such a people for much longer than in peoples who lived more in the interior of the continents or came into contact with big city culture. The Norwegian people, who still have much in their vernacular that comes close to the boundary of occult secrets, had the possibility for longer to keep the souls connected with what lives and moves behind the outer material phenomena.

Do you remember how I have dealt with the way the course of the year has its spiritual parallel series of facts? How in spring, when plants sprout from the earth, when everything comes to life, when the days get lighter, we have to recognize what we can call a kind of falling asleep of the elementary and higher spirits that are connected to the earth. In spring, when the earth awakens outwardly, in spiritual contemplation we are dealing with a kind of falling asleep of the earth. When outer nature dies down again, we are dealing with the awakening of the spiritual nature of the earth. And when outer nature is asleep around Christmas time, then that is the time when the spiritual of the earth, which is connected with earthly existence both through elemental, less significant beings and through great, powerful beings, is most active. It only appears so when viewed superficially, as if we had to compare spring with the awakening of the earth and winter with its falling asleep. For occult observation, it is the other way around. The spirit of the earth, which consists of many spirits, awakens in winter and sleeps in summer. Just as in the human organism the organic and vegetative are most active during sleep, as the forces play up into the brain, and as the purely organic activity is killed off during waking, so it is with the earth. When the earth is most active, when everything has sprouted, when the sun is at its highest around Midsummer, the spirit of the earth sleeps. And it is not without connection to these occult truths that Christmas, the festival of the awakening of the spirit, has been moved to the winter season. The things that have come down to us as customs from ancient times correspond in many ways to these occult insights.

Those who know how to live with the spirits of the earth do not just celebrate Midsummer in the summer. For the celebration of St. John's Day in summer is already a kind of materialistic celebration. One celebrates what external materialistic revelation shows. But he who has the connection with the spirit of the earth, with that which lives spiritually in the earth, awakens to his inner self, that is, he sleeps for his outer self, like Olaf Åsteson, best at Christmas time during the thirteen days. This is also an occult fact, which means exactly the same for occultism as, for example, the fact of the external position of the sun for external materialistic science. Of course, materialistic science will take it for granted that within astronomy it describes the activity of the sun in summer and in winter in a certain purely external way; it will consider it foolishness what is a fact for the occultist that the spiritual position of the sun is most intense in the winter time and that therefore the conditions are most favorable for those who want to come close to a deepening of the soul, which is connected with the spirit of the earth and with all spiritual. Therefore, for someone who wants to seek a deepening of their soul, it may turn out that they can have the best experiences during the thirteen days of the Christmas season, when, without us realizing it, the experiences arise from the soul, although the modern person is already so emancipated from external events that the occult experiences can come at any time. But in so far as the external can nevertheless have an influence, the time between Christmas and New Year is the most important.

Thus we are reminded in a very natural way by this poem how much of what we could mention when discussing the time between death and the next birth was still quite close to certain areas of the world relatively recently, as some people still knew from direct experience.

You will remember that I have spoken of the meaning of the Christmas Festival in its connection with the evolution of races, or, better said, the epochs of civilisation, and indeed the significance of the Festival lies in this very connection both in respect of the past and of the future.

I want to speak to-day about a Festival to which in modern times less importance is attached than to the Christmas Festival itself, namely, the Festival of the Three Kings, of the Magi who came from the East to greet the newly born Jesus. This Festival of the Epiphany (celebrated on the 6th of January) will assume greater and greater significance when its symbolism is understood.

It will be obvious to you that very profound symbolism is contained in the Festival of the Three Magi from the East. Until the 15th century, this symbolism was kept very secret and no definite indications were available. But since that century some light has been thrown on the Festival of the Magi by exoteric presentations. One of the Three Kings—Caspar—is portrayed as a Moor, an inhabitant of Africa; one as a white man, a European—Melchior; and one—Balthasar—as an Asiatic; the colour of his skin is that of an inhabitant of India. They bring Myrrh, Gold and Frankincense as offerings to the Child Jesus in Bethlehem.

These three offerings are full of meaning and in keeping with the whole symbolism of the Festival celebrated on the 6th of January. Exoterically, the date itself throws some light; esoterically, the Festival is pregnant with meaning. The 6th of January is the same date as that on which, in ancient Egypt, the Festival of Osiris was celebrated, the Festival of the re-finding of Osiris. As you know, Osiris was overcome by his enemy Typhon: Isis seeks and eventually finds him. This re-finding of Osiris, the Son of God, is represented in the Festival of the 6th of January. The Festival of the Three Kings is the same Festival, but in its Christian form. This Festival was also celebrated among the Assyrians, the Armenians and the Phoenicians. Everywhere it is a Festival connected with a kind of universal baptism—a rebirth from out of the water. This in itself points to the connection with the re-finding of Osiris.

What does the disappearance of Osiris signify? It signifies the transition from the epoch before the middle of the Lemurian race to the epoch after the middle of that race. Before the middle of the Lemurian race, no human being was endowed with Manas. It was not until the middle of the race that Manas came down as a fertile seed into men. Manas (Spirit-Self) was now disseminated among men and in each single individual a grave was created for Manas—for the dismembered Osiris. The Divine Manas was disseminated and thereafter dwelt in men. In the Egyptian Mystery-language, the bodies of men were called the ‘graves of Osiris’ Manas was fettered until it was freed by the new revelation of Love.

What is the new revelation, the new manifestation of Love? The descent of Manas somewhere around the middle of the Lemurian epoch, was accompanied by the penetration into mankind of the principle of desire, or passion. Before that time there had been no desire-principle in the real sense. The animals of the preceding epochs were cold-blooded; even man himself at that time, had no warm blood. In the Old Moon period and, correspondingly, in the Third Earth-Round, men may be likened to fishes, in the sense that their own warmth and the warmth of their environment were equal in degree. Of this epoch the Bible says: ‘The Spirit of God brooded over the waters.’ The principle of Love was not within the beings, but outside, manifesting as earthly Kama (that is to say, earthly passion or desire). Kama is egotistic love. The first bringer of Love free of all egoism is Christ Who appeared in the body of Jesus of Nazareth.

Who are the Magi? They represent the Initiates of the three preceding races or epochs of culture, the Initiates of mankind up to the time of the coming of Christ, the Bringer of the Love that is free of egoism—the resurrected Osiris. The Initiates—and so too the Three Magi—were endowed with Manas. They bring gold, frankincense and myrrh as their offerings. And why are their skins of three colours: white, yellow and black? One is European—his skin is white; one is Indian—his skin is yellow; one is African—his skin is black. This indicates the connection with the so-called Root Races. The remaining survivors of the Lemurian race are black; those of the Atlantean race are yellow; and the representatives of the Fifth Root Race, the Post-Atlantean or Aryan race, are white.

Thus the Three Kings or Magi are representatives of the Lemurians, the Atlanteans and the Aryans. They bring the three offerings. The European (Melchior) brings gold, the symbol of wisdom, of intelligence which comes to expression paramountly in the Fifth Root Race. The offering of the Initiate representing the Fourth Root Race (Balthasar) is frankincense, connected with what was intrinsically characteristic of the Atlanteans. They were united more directly with the Godhead, a union which took effect as a suggestive influence, a kind of universal hypnosis. This union with the Godhead is betokened by the offering. Feeling must be sublimated in order that God may fertilise it. This is expressed symbolically by the frankincense, which is the universal symbol for an offering that has something to do with Intuition.

In the language of esotericism, myrrh is the symbol of dying, of death. What is the meaning of dying and of resurrection, as exemplified in the resurrected Osiris? I refer you here to words of Goethe: “So long as thou hast it not, this dying and becoming, thou'rt but a dull guest on the dark earth.” Jacob Boehme expresses the same thought in the words: “He who dies not ere he dies, perishes when he dies.” Myrrh is the symbol of the dying of the lower life and the resurrection of the higher life. It is offered by the Initiate representing the Third Root Race (Lemurian). A deep meaning lies in this. Jesus of Nazareth is a very highly developed individuality. In the thirtieth year of his life he gives up his own life to the descending Christ, the descending Logos. All this the Magi foresaw. The great sacrifice made by Jesus of Nazareth is that he gave up his ‘ I ’ to make way for the Second Logos. There is a definite reason for this sacrifice. Not until the Sixth Root Race will it become possible, and then only gradually, for the human body to receive into itself the Christ Principle from childhood onwards. Only then, in the Sixth Root Race, will mankind have reached such maturity that the body will not need years of preparation but will be able from the beginning, to receive the Christ Principle. In the fourth sub-race of the Fifth Root Race it was necessary for a body to be prepared for thirty years. (In the Northern regions we find something similar, in that the personality of Sig was so prepared that he could place his body at the disposal of a higher Being, and, in fact, did so). In the Sixth Root Race it will be possible for a man to place his body at the disposal of a sublime Being, as did Jesus of Nazareth when Christianity was founded. At the time of the founding of Christianity it was still necessary for an advanced individuality to sacrifice his own ‘ I ’ and send it into the astral realm, in order that the Logos might dwell in the body. This is an act upon which light is shed by the last words on the Cross. What other meaning could these words contain: “My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me?” These words give expression to the mystical fact then consummated. At the moment of Christ's death, the Divine Being had departed from the body, and it is the body of Jesus of Nazareth that utters these words—a body so highly developed that it could voice the reality. And so these words give expression to an event of untold significance. All this is represented by the myrrh. Myrrh is the symbol of sacrifice, of death, the sacrifice of the earthly in order that the Higher may come to life. In the middle of the Lemurian epoch, Osiris came to his grave; Manas drew into human beings. Men were educated under the guidance of the Initiates until the principle of Love (Budhi) could shine forth in Christ Jesus. Budhi is the heavenly Love. The lower, sexual principle is ennobled through the Christ Love. Kama is purified in the fire of the Divine Love.

Melchior is the representative of the principle of wisdom, of intelligence—the task of the Fifth Root Race. This is symbolised by his offering—gold.

The principle of sacramental offering is represented by the frankincense. This offering symbolises the principle that was dominant in the Fourth Root Race, the Atlantean. The task of Christianity is fulfilled in the Sixth Root Race, when material existence will be fraught with sacramentalism and sacramental deeds. Sacraments have very largely lost their meaning to-day; the feeling of their significance has disappeared. But this feeling will be kindled to life again when the higher man is born. It is this that is symbolised by the frankincense.

In the Lemurian Race, Osiris meets his death, in the Sixth Root Race, Osiris is resurrected.

Thus the offerings made by the Three Kings indicate the connection of the Festival with the Third, Fourth, Fifth and Sixth Root Races. By what are the Three Holy Kings guided, and whither are they led? They are guided by a Star to a grotto, a cave in Bethlehem. This is something that can be understood only by one who has knowledge of the so-called lower, or astral mysteries. To be led by a Star means nothing else than to see the soul itself as a Star. But when is the soul seen as a Star? When a man can behold the soul as a radiant aura. But what kind of aura is so radiant that it can be a guide? There is the aura that glimmers with only a feeble light; such an aura cannot guide. There is a higher aura, that of the intelligence, which has, it is true, a flowing, up-surging light, but is not yet able to guide. But the bright aura, aglow with Budhi, is in very truth a Star, is a radiant guide. In Christ, the Star of Budhi lights up—the Star which accompanies the evolution of mankind. The Light that shines before the Magi is the soul of Christ Himself. The Second Logos Himself shines before the Magi and over the cave in Bethlehem.

The grotto or cave is the body wherein dwells the soul. The seer beholds the body from within. In astral vision, everything is reversed—for example, 365 instead of 563. The human body is seen as a cave, a hollow. In the body of Jesus shines the Christ Star, the soul of Christ. This must be conceived as a reality, taking place in the astral world. It is an enactment of the Lesser Mysteries. There, in very truth, the Christ Soul shines as an auric Star, and it is by this Star that the Initiates of the three Root Races are led to Jesus in Bethlehem.

The Festival of the Three Kings is celebrated every year on the 6th of January, and its significance will steadily increase. Men will understand more and more what a Magi is, and what the great Magi, the Masters, are. And then understanding of Christianity will lead to understanding of spiritual science.

"Were Christ born a thousand times in Bethlehem, and not in thee, thou art lost eternally."

There are two aspects of this beautiful saying of the great Mystic Angelus Silesius. The one is the declaration that the true Christmas must be celebrated in man's inmost heart, that any outward celebration of Christmas must quicken the impulse whereby in the Holy Night of winter, the very deepest forces of the soul are drawn forth from the darkness prevailing within as the darkness of winter prevails without. These deep forces of the soul are aware of their union with the Being Who pervades all earthly evolution, giving it meaning and purpose. Within us we find some thing with which Christ is united if with conscious devotion to the Spiritual Powers working in the world we penetrate deeply enough into our life of soul.

And the other aspect of the words of Angelus Silesius is that the human being in earthly evolution to-day can become conscious of the fact that true manhood, assurance of true manhood, depends upon the soul feeling inwardly united with the essence and substantiality of Christ Jesus.

In the course of years our studies have brought it home to us that as earthly evolution proceeds, consciousness of Christ deepens, that human beings passing from incarnation to incarnation attain greater and greater understanding of the real nature of Christ. And we have tried to intensify this knowledge by drawing upon a source which enables us to celebrate the Holy Night of Christmas, the Festival of the Birth of Jesus, in a deeper and more worthy way.

What this implies will become clear from the lecture to-day.

A famous modern historian was once asked by a man interested in world events, why no mention is made in his writings of happenings which are the outcome of the Mystery of Golgotha, nor of the influences of Christ Jesus in the course of human history. The historian was asked why his books speak of the influences exercised upon history by popes, monarchs, military campaigns, governments, even by happenings in nature, but have no single word to say about the forces that have poured into mankind from the Mystery of Golgotha and since then have been at work in all human life and human affairs. After a long pause and deep deliberation, the historian answered: The method I have adopted for the exposition of history must remain as it is; for the Christ-forces that stream through happenings in the world belong to a primordial realm into which the human mind is incapable of gazing. The effects and influences of the Mystery of Golgotha—yes, certainly they can be discerned; but to describe the intrinsic, essential nature of these deeds of Christ is not possible in the writing of history.

This is only one of the many examples that could be given in proof of the fact that the most distinguished and enlightened minds of modern times cannot claim to celebrate the Christmas Festival in an inner sense. For in the soul of this historian, Christ Jesus as a living Figure, a living Being, had not become such intense reality that he could feel His presence in all human evolution from year to year, from week to week, even from hour to hour. It is possible for a really learned scholar to-day to survey the whole course of history without perceiving that since the Mystery of Golgotha, the Power of Christ has been working everywhere. There are many causes to account for the fact that the Festival of the Holy Night, the Festival of the Christmas Mystery, is not yet celebrated in the souls of the vast majority of human beings.

A certain illumination is given by one who has spoken of these things out of a deep and true feeling for the Christian Mystery. This was Goethe, who so beautifully recounts the life and travels of Wilhelm Meister. Wilhelm Meister comes to a stately building and is conducted around it by its owner. He is shown the gallery which contains a series of paintings of the most important historical occurrences among various peoples of antiquity—notably among the early Hebrews—from the time of Paradise, the Fall, and on through the later epochs. History is portrayed in impressive scenes, ending with the destruction of Jerusalem ... but there is no single picture of a scene from the life of Christ Jesus, although the series continues beyond the Crucifixion as far as the destruction of Jerusalem. Wilhelm Meister asks: Why does nothing in this picture-gallery portray the life of the divine Man who has brought such blessing into the evolution of humanity?—These are his words:¹ "In your historical series I find a chasm. The Temple of Jerusalem is destroyed and the people dispersed, yet you have not introduced the divine Man who taught there shortly before; to whom, shortly before, they would give no ear." The answer made to Wilhelm Meister is: "To have done this, as you require it, would have been an error. The life of that divine Man whom you allude to, stands in no connection with the general history of the world in his time. It was a private life; his teaching was a teaching for individuals. What has publicly befallen vast masses of people and the minor parts which compose them, belongs to the general history of the world, to the general religion of the world, the religion we have named the First. What inwardly befalls individuals, belongs to the Second religion, the Philosophical: such a religion was it that Christ taught and practised, so long as He went about on earth."

These are deeply moving words. Every human being on the earth is related individually to the Christ. Folk-history, as it may be called, is woven by the affairs of the several peoples, for it is concerned with human affairs in general, within the orbit of general human destiny. But what Christ Jesus has brought into the world penetrates deeply and inwardly into the experiences of every human heart, every human soul—belonging to no matter what part of earthly evolution—in so far as it feels itself truly Man. We must realise that this ‘feeling of oneself as man’ arose for the first time from what came into human evolution through the Mystery of Golgotha.

And now to continue. The owner of the palace leads Wilhelm Meister to another gallery that has been kept closed, where the events of the New Testament are portrayed. Wilhelm Meister is therefore not permitted to see the events of the New Testament in a place where external happenings and actions in the world are presented, but only in an esoteric sanctuary, for the sight of which the soul must have been prepared, have withdrawn from things pertaining to the worldly history of the peoples. The basis of the soul's activity must now be esoteric and individual: then it may cross the Threshold leading to the pictures of scenes from the New Testament. Here again the pictures go no farther than the Last Supper. Wilhelm Meister asks: "As you have set up the life of the divine Man for a pattern and example, have you likewise selected his sufferings, his death?" The answer he receives is full of significance; it is an answer which indicates what reverent awe accompanies the experience of the mystery fulfilled on the earth by the Being dwelling in the body whose birth is celebrated in the Holy Night of winter. Wilhelm Meister has been conducted as it were to the first level of esoteric truth, where he witnesses the delineation of scenes as far as the Last Supper; but then comes the most esoteric portion of all, referred to with deep and holy awe: "We draw a veil over these sufferings, because we reverence them so highly. We hold it a damnable audacity to exhibit that torturing Cross and the Holy One who suffers on it, exposing them to the light of the sun." (Travels of Wilhelm Meister. Part II.)

This is an example of the feeling for esotericism to be found in the 18th century. The feeling was sound and true, for we ourselves shall readily agree that pictorial representations of Christ's sufferings, unless they are from the hand of a supreme artist, drag down the Mystery of Golgotha to the human level. And we can understand that one who in the 18th century had a deep, deep feeling for the Mystery of Golgotha was averse from looking at the many distorted portrayals of this sacred Mystery, preferring to draw a veil over these things, because he felt that only the inmost forces of the soul can be united, supersensibly, with what is connected with and follows the Last Supper.

But what is it that underlies these esoteric feelings and experiences? The hearts of men were yearning for a vista, a conception of the Christ Mystery greater than any that was possible at that time. With all humility, with a humility deeper than that with which we approach any other matter presented by spiritual science, it may truly be said that for long ages the best human souls have been yearning, pining for the knowledge of Christ that can be imparted by occult science. And to-day we may be assured that when the time is ripe, the souls of men will behold as reality, what hitherto could only be known in a different form.

The consciousness that such knowledge will one day be within the reach of the human heart, and the longing for it, has been one of life's great riddles to the best souls. Men have been reaching out for an understanding of Christ that will enable them to grasp the import of the mighty Deed accomplished on Golgotha which can be revealed to the eye of soul when the veil is lifted. In the lecture yesterday I explained why a knowledge of Christ once enriched by the old clairvoyance was bound to recede, how it was received in the earliest periods of Christendom but then gradually waned and faded away. I will read, again to-day, an ancient Gnostic hymn from which it is clear that in the old, clairvoyant form of knowledge the consciousness was alive that the Christ Who came into the world through the Child born at Christmastime, is a Cosmic Being, increasing in majesty and greatness, the higher the soul's vision soars into the realms of spirit—for through these realms He descended. It was inevitable that in later times, when the springs of this knowledge had run dry, a veil should be drawn over the great Event, because men were no longer able to explain that in the secret represented by the Child, the highest wisdom is enshrined. In this Child was born a Being Who traversed the heavenly worlds before His appearance on earth.—

Behold, O Father, how, distant from Thy Breath,
This being upon earth
(this ‘being’ is the human soul)
Wanders, the target and victim of all ill,
Lost and perplexed, it flees the deadly chaos—
How shall it find its way?

In converse with the Father God, Jesus is speaking of the descent through the cosmic spheres, of how his eyes turn to the human soul to whom he would fain bring salvation, wandering in chaos but yet longing for Christ.—

Therefore send me, O Father,
Descending, I bear the seal of heaven,
Traversing all the Aeons ...

The spiritual worlds are ranged one above the other in the heavenly spheres and the higher we ascend the more do we find that the older worlds are still living realities, the most ancient being present to this day in the highest spheres of all. What was once connected with the Saturn evolution is to be found in the very highest spiritual spheres, and these successive spheres, related to the flow of time, are called ‘Aeons.’

Traversing all the Aeons,
Teaching all sacred knowledge;
Thus may God's image be made manifest;
And thus to you I give
The deeply hidden knowledge of the sacred way:
‘Gnosis’ it shall be for you.

Mankind has very largely lost consciousness of the Christ as a Cosmic Being. This loss was inevitable, for the old clairvoyance had to disappear and an intervening period—an Aeon devoid of spirit—to come, in order that eventually a new form of clairvoyant vision may arise. But this new vision must again be directed to the spiritual worlds, must not characterise in forms such as are presented to men's outward sight, the Being Who in the Holy Night entered into the evolution of humanity. This new vision must reveal how the Christ Being descended from heavenly sphere to heavenly sphere and thence to the earth, giving the earth meaning and purpose.

Behold, O Father, how, distant from Thy Breath,
This being upon earth
Wanders, the target and victim of all ill,
Lost and perplexed it flees the deadly chaos—
How shall it find its way?
Therefore send me, O Father,
Descending I bear the seal of heaven,
Traversing all the Aeons,
Teaching all sacred knowledge;
Thus may God's image be made manifest;
And thus to you I give
The deeply hidden knowledge of the sacred way:
‘Gnosis’ it shall be for you.

What, in reality, is the earth that surrounds us, when we perceive its essential being? If the corpse of one whose soul already dwells in spiritual worlds lies before you, will you ever say: This is a man? Will you ever say: This is still, in the full sense of the word, a man? The higher members of human nature are no longer in the corpse from which the soul has departed. But since the middle of the Atlantean epoch the earth has been gradually becoming a corpse devoid of soul. The earth around us, despite its manifold beauties, has been approaching the state of a corpse since the middle of Atlantean times and is becoming more and more corpselike. Standing before the huge rocks, one can say no truer thing than that here is the skeleton which the earth has been in process of becoming ever since that time! In the rock-strewn earth we perceive the dying part of the earth-organism, which was a living organism only until the middle of the Atlantean epoch. Geology itself realises that when we walk over the earth or guide the plough through the soil, we are walking over the corpse of the earth, guiding the plough through the corpse of the earth. Geologists have acknowledged this and external science itself, when it begins really to think, cannot do otherwise. And so, inasmuch as we are surrounded by the earth, we confront death; we are spectators of the gradual dying of our earthly globe.

And now let us imagine that the Mystery of Golgotha had not taken place, that the Cosmic Being Whom we call Christ had not entered through the two Jesus boys into earth-evolution.² Earth-evolution would then be no more, would already by to-day have been overcome by death. But through the two Jesus boys the Christ did enter earthly evolution and then, living in the one for three years, consummated the Mystery of Golgotha, whereby a new seed of life was imparted to the earth. Therefore when the time is fulfilled, the earth will not remain a corpse in cosmic space—the soul having become the prey of Ahriman and Lucifer! No—that is what would have happened had Christ not come into the earth as a living, fertile seed. Because He has come, the earth will not fall into dust, the soul will not be in the sole possession of Lucifer and Ahriman, for the Christ Seed has infused new life into earth-evolution! Just as the earth once separated from the sun and has become a child of the sun, so will earth-evolution, imbued with a new impulse, be fraught with the meaning and purpose imparted by Christ.

Thus spiritual science turns our eyes with awe and reverence to the Mystery of Golgotha and because it points to realms beyond the range of material vision, we feel that it is for us to lift the veil ... since we are resolved to see behind this veil not only what comes before the eyes of an age destined to grow into materialism. Therefore it is again beginning to be possible for those in whom the impulses of spiritual science have come to life, to look up to the Christ as a Cosmic Being. Again and again let it be repeated that the infinite devotion we can feel towards the Child born in the Holy Night of Christmas is not thereby diminished. Rather is this devotion deepened when we can feel the reality of Christ as did Christian Morgenstern when there sprang from his soul a poem which seems like a resurrection of ancient and holy Gnostic thoughts pervaded alike by the Christ-Love and cosmic wisdom. And so a new Christmas is celebrated when in the dark night of materialism, voices ring out that are not the voices of the Gnostics of olden times but are quickened and enriched by dedication to the Living Being of the Cosmic Christ.

Licht ist Liebe ... Sonnen-Weben
Liebes-Strahlung einer Welt
schöpferischer Wesenheiten—

die durch unerhörtte Zeiten
uns an ihrem Herzen hält,
und die uns zuletzt gegeben

ihren höchsten Geist in eines
Menschen Hülle wahrend dreier
Jahre: da Er kam in seines

Vaters Erbteil—nun der Erde
innerlichstes Himmelsfeuer:
dass auch sie einst Sonne werde.

(Light is Love ... the rays of sunshine are the weaving radiance of a world of loving Creator-Spirits. Who, after hiding us in their heart through endless ages, at the last surrendered to us their sublimest One. Wrapped for three years in the body of a Man, He came then into possession of His Father's estate—and is now the innermost heavenly flame of Earth herself, that she too may one day be a Sun).

"Were Christ born a thousand times in Bethlehem, and not in thee, thou art lost eternally."

May there be celebrated in our souls an inner festival of the Holy Night; may our souls be filled with the realisation that a new knowledge of Christ must be born in our time. This new knowledge of Christ links the inmost core of man's being with primal innocence, links the state of childhood, not, as yet, that of mature life, with the very heights of cosmic being. When, in the Holy Night of winter our minds turn to the Christ Child, there is enacted before our souls the greatest of all festivals of consecration, the festival that rings through all the Aeons—and we know that the deepest realities of man's being and nature are indissolubly connected with all cosmic evolution.

Those whose hearts are kindled by spiritual science feel and know that victory over all death can be achieved when the soul is united with the Christ Being. I spoke of this to-day at the funeral of one taken from us so tragically by the war. Realisation of how the heights of cosmic being are connected with the inmost nature of man was impossible as long as the human mind was unable to conceive that the very quintessence of history lies in the Mystery of Bethlehem. But this insight will dawn in those who understand the secret of the two Jesus boys. In the one boy there was present the power of the wisest of all men in pre-Christian times, namely Zarathustra. This boy represents the flower of the previous stages of human evolution; the aura of the other boy was illumined by the forces of the great Buddha. The body of the one boy springs from the noblest blood of the ancient Hebrew peoples; the soul of the Jesus boy described in the Gospel of St. Luke leads back to the earth's beginning.³ The soul of this Jesus boy was kept back, when, in the age of Lemuria, man came to the earth; this soul was guarded by the Mysteries until it was sent into the body of the Jesus whose birth is described in the Gospel of St. Luke. It is said that immediately after birth, this Child uttered words intelligible only to the Mother, in a language unlike any other language, and which the Child himself forgot directly earthly consciousness awoke in him. A mystery was voiced immediately after birth ... And indeed, much of what we have to reveal concerning the Christ Mystery is an exposition of what was uttered by the Jesus boy of the Gospel of St. Luke directly after his birth.

And so spiritual science enables us to understand the Christ Impulse in the deeper aspect of human evolution—in the evolution of pre-Christian times too—for the differences disappear and the voice of the Initiates can still be heard. When once the magnitude of what poured into the evolution of humanity at the Mystery of Golgotha is grasped it will be possible for these forces to be brought to even greater fruition. But men must know Who the Christ was before they can speak truly of Him—in history, for example. If within our movement there are individuals—in greater and greater numbers—who resolve to kindle the light that can be kindled in those inner depths which since the Mystery of Golgotha have been within men's reach then the Christ Light will shine out in every single soul. This Christ Light becomes the Christmas Tree that will illumine all evolution in ages of time to come. The soul will behold an earth again made living, will find Christ everywhere within this new earth.

Those who have allied themselves with spiritual science can receive its tidings of Christ with such depth of feeling that the Christmas Festival will one day be celebrated in every individual soul. It is the Festival which represents the birth of that knowledge of Christ which comes from Christ Himself and is therefore a birth of Christ within us, True, indeed are the words: "Were Christ born a thousand times in Bethlehem, and not in thee, thou art lost eternally." But to this beautiful string of Angelus Silesius we can add: We are secure eternally if we seek the experience belonging to the Holy Night of winter, if we seek to bring Christ to birth in the depths of our souls!

• 1. The translation of the quotations from Wilhelm Meister is that of Thomas Carlyle.
• 2. See: The Spiritual Guidance of Man and Mankind; also the Lecture-Courses on the Gospel of St. Luke and the Gospel of St. Matthew by Rudolf Steiner.
• 3. See Rudolf Steiner's Lecture-Courses on the Gospel of St. Matthew and the Gospel of St. Luke.

The so-called “Traumlied” (Dream Song), which will be performed today, requires a few remarks to be made beforehand.

I already referred to this Dream Song in my Christmas address to you a few days ago. There I was able to say that the establishment of Christmas is by no means an imaginary one, one that has arisen from thought, but that the establishment of Christmas arises during the course of the year from very specific inner processes that can take place in the human soul when this soul comes to clairvoyant visions as the highest fruits of the soul, either through certain powers inherent in the natural course of things or through trained clairvoyance. We can best understand what may actually lie at the root of the human soul by visualizing the following thought.

All the plants, all the sprouting and sprouted growth that sunlight and solar warmth conjure up in spring and allow to flourish throughout the summer, all this, as it were, enters into a winter sleep, into winter darkness, on a kind of winter path at the time when Christmas was moved from the historical consciousness of humanity. The time in which Christmas is celebrated seems to us like sleep, like the darkness of the natural world. It is the opposite with the human soul as it is with the natural world. While the beings of nature descend into darkness and accompany the human soul into this realm of outer eclipse, it becomes, or can become, lighter in the human soul. She can, through the natural course of things, which we have often hinted at as a certain inherited clairvoyance, or through trained clairvoyance, dive straight into the brightest spiritual world, where the secrets of the spirit, hidden behind the outer sensual things, then dawn on her. And just as this descent of the plant world around the time of the winter solstice is subject to a regular law, so too the spiritual blossoming of human beings is subject to such a law, so that it coincides in its luminous brightness with the natural darkness into which the Christmas festival is placed.

It might seem as though such things are only being expressed out of today's schooled clairvoyance, or, as our opponents say, out of mere fantasy. But there will always be a living, fully valid proof of what people and nations experience outwardly. Therefore, it was extremely interesting for me that, after I had spoken about this Christmas clairvoyance within our movement for several years, which introduces us to the meaning of the Christ-being, to the arising of the Christ-being precisely when the human soul is most strongly immersed in clairvoyance , and I once again came to Norway, which is spiritually related to us, for a lecture cycle — that a remarkable vision was brought to me up there, of which, however, anyone who is familiar with such things must immediately say: Yes, it is reminiscent of many similar visions that have always been experienced by Germanic peoples, visions that many people have seen with their clairvoyant vision during the period of the thirteen nights from Christmas Eve to Epiphany, January 6. There the human soul can look into the spiritual world and see the fate of the human soul in the disembodied state, when it goes through Kamaloka and it then becomes clear to it how a relationship is established between the higher spiritual worlds and the deeds of people here on earth. And it is interesting that the person of whom we are told in this dream song and to whom these visions in this Nordic region are attributed through this dream song is a person who bears the name Olaf Åsteson. It is said of him that during these thirteen nights he underwent in a kind of clairvoyant experience what the Nordic man can feel as a vision in his way. He first learned how human deeds continue to unfold after the human being has passed through the gate of death, but he also learned how that which we call the Christ-being , how the office of judge of Jesus, the Christ, enters into the Nordic spiritual order of life after death, as the old world judge, the so-called face of Jehovah, the archangel Michael. So that, in addition to everything else that appears to the clairvoyance of Olaf Åsteson, the penetration of Christianity into the north can be heard, and that everything becomes clairvoyantly clear to him during the period of the Jesus birthday festival in the thirteen nights that he sleeps through.

Which consciousness becomes clear? It is now strange that this is already hinted at in the name, which quite obviously originally meant in the north such a human consciousness, which is inherited from the forefathers, from the ancestors. Olaf is truly himself in those times when the ancient, clairvoyant ancestral consciousness arises again in him. He who has inherited his consciousness, his inner being, from his ancestors: that is contained in the name Olaf. And Äste means love, the love that is passed down in the blood from generation to generation. Olaf is the son of this love, Åsteson, is the consciousness that has been passed down from generation to generation from the old clairvoyant times, is like resurrected ancestry. Olaf, who is born with this clairvoyant consciousness, recognizes the destiny of the human soul, and at the same time sees the intervention of the being we celebrate in Jesus' birthday festival as his entry into earthly existence. And strangely, while such visions have certainly always been experienced, especially in Germanic countries, this dream song seems to have been forgotten. In 1850, the preacher Landstad set out to collect folk songs in Telemarken, a lonely mountain valley where few people lived at the time. And among the many folk songs, he did not know since when, he did not know for how long, the song of Olaf Åsteson was alive in the vernacular – the song of Olaf Åsteson, who in the thirteen nights saw the destiny of the human soul after it had passed through the gate of death, and the coming into the world of Christ Jesus. He did not know when this song of initiation of the human soul came into being, for it was always recited in the vernacular, leaning on a musical mood. The few people in the lonely mountain valley enjoyed it, and there it was read by the preacher Landstad, in that it spoke to him of the secrets that had been uncovered – as if from the folk mind itself – about initiation in ancient times. And so it came to be that Landstad found it in the vernacular. Many people naturally believe that it alludes to Saint Olaf, who introduced Christianity in 1030 AD and whose mother was called Love. This is the case with many things that have both a historical and a spiritual significance.

Furthermore, it is interesting that this dream song has now quickly penetrated a large part of the Nordic people and lives in the hearts of the Norwegian people. There is, after all, a great movement in Norway to bring the old days back to life, and with that to revive the old language, which is very close to the ancient Germanic language, the Nordic language, in contrast to the Danish language, which was introduced later. Now this song is in a language that echoes the oldest language that has been preserved there, and the people who want to revive their antiquity in the first place, to whom this song spoke to the heart, and in the last ten to fifteen years it has not only penetrated into the hearts of the people, but also into the schools. It is sung and recited everywhere, and everywhere you hear, so to speak, where the soul awakens to the old folkways, the dream song of Olaf Åsteson, who in the thirteen nights from Christmas to January 6, so to speak, was naturally initiated into the sacred secrets of humanity. And for this reason, we would like to present this dream song of Olaf Åsteson to you today. Miss von Sivers will recite it. I tried to make a provisional arrangement so that it could be recited in German. Mrs. Lindholm helped me to make the peculiar language in which the song lives and now lives more and more and has become an aria of folk song possible in German. So we will now hear it in this provisional arrangement, which I was able to create in a few days.

The Dream Song

I.

So listen to my song!
I will sing to you
of a nimble youth:

It was of Olaf Åsteson,
Who once so long slept.

Of him I will sing.

II.

He went to rest on Christmas Eve.
A heavy sleep soon fell on him,
And he could not awaken
Before on the thirteenth day
The people went to church.

It was Olaf Åsteson,
Who once slept so long.
Of him I will sing.

He went to rest on Christmas Eve.
He slept for so long!
He could not wake
Before the thirteenth day
The bird spread its wings!

It was Olaf Åsteson,
Who once slept so long.
I will sing of him.

Olaf could not awaken
Before on the thirteenth day
The sun shone over the mountains.
Then he saddled his nimble horse
And rode hastily to the church.

It was Olaf Åsteson,
Who once slept so long.
I will sing of him.

The priest was already standing
At the altar reading the mass,
When at the church door
Olaf sat down to tell
The content of many dreams,
Which in the long sleep
Filled his soul.

It was Olaf Åsteson,
Who once slept so long.
Of him I will sing to you.

And young and old alike
Listened attentively to the words,
Which spoke of his dreams of Olaf.

It was Olaf Åsteson,
Who once slept so long.
Of him I will sing to you.

III.

“I went to rest on Christmas Eve.
A strong sleep soon embraced me;
And I could not awaken
Before on the thirteenth day
The people went to church.

The moon shone brightly
And the paths stretched far and wide.

I was raised up in the clouds
And thrown into the bottom of the sea,
And anyone who wants to follow me
Cannot be overcome by serenity.

The moon shone brightly
And the paths stretched far and wide.

I was raised up to the height of the clouds
Then plunged into gloomy swamps,
Beholding the terrors of hell
And also the light of heaven.

The moon shone brightly
And the paths stretched far and wide.

And I had to travel in the depths of the earth,
Where the streams of the gods rush terribly.
I was unable to see them,
But I could hear the rushing.

The moon shone brightly
And the paths stretched far and wide.

My black horse neighed not,
And my hounds did not bark,
Nor sang the morn's bird,
There was a single miracle everywhere.

The moon shone bright
And far the paths extended.

I must have traveled in the ghost land
er Dornenheide weites Feld,
My scarlet cloak was torn from me
And also the nails of my feet.

The moon shone brightly
And the paths stretched far and wide.

I came to the Gjallarbridge.
In highest wind heights this hangs,
With red gold it is studded
And nails with sharp points it has.

The moon shone brightly
And the paths stretched far.

The ghostly snake struck me,
The ghostly dog bit me,
The bull stood in the middle of the road.
These are the three creatures of the bridge.
They are of a terribly evil nature.

The moon shone brightly
And the paths stretched out wide.

The dog is snappy,
And the snake wants to sting,
The bull, he threatens mightily!
They let no one cross the bridge
Who does not want to honor the truth!

The moon shone brightly
And the paths stretched far and wide.

I crossed the bridge,
Which is narrow and dizzying.
I had to wade through the mire....
They are now behind me!

The moon shone brightly
And the paths stretched far and wide.

I had to wade through swamps,
They seemed bottomless to my feet.
When I crossed the bridge,
I felt earth in my mouth
Like dead people lying in graves.

The moon shone brightly
And the paths stretched out far and wide.

Then I came to water,
In which the ice masses shone brightly like blue flames
...
And God, he directed my mind
So that I avoided the area.

The moon shone brightly
And the paths stretched far and wide.

I turned my steps to the winter path.
On the right I could see it:
I looked as if into paradise,
Which shone brightly in the distance.

The moon shone brightly
And the paths stretched out wide.

And God's high Mother,
I saw her there in the splendor!
To Brooksvalin to go,
So she called me, announcing,
That souls are judged there!

The moon shone bright
And the paths stretched far and wide.

IV.

"In other worlds I dwelt
Through many a night's length;
And God only can know
How much of soul-afflict I saw —

In Brooksvalin, where souls
To the world's judgment are subject.

I could see a young man
who had murdered a boy:
Now he had to carry him forever
on his own arms!
He stood in the mud so deep

In Brooksvalin, where souls
Are subject to the judgment of the world.

I also saw an old man,
He wore a cloak of lead;
Thus he was punished for Living in greed on the earth,

In Brooksvalin, where souls
Are subject to the judgment of the world.

And men appeared,
Who carried fiery substances;
Dishonesty weighs
On their poor souls

In Brooksvalin, where souls
Are subject to the judgment of the world.

I could also see children
Who had glowing coals beneath their feet;
They did evil to their parents in life,
Which weighed very heavily on their spirits

In Brooksvalin, where souls
Are subject to the Last Judgment.

And to approach that house,
It was laid upon me,
Where witches were to work
In the blood they had angered in life,

In Brooksvalin, where souls
Are subject to the Last Judgment.

From the north, in wild hordes,
There came riding evil spirits,
Led by the prince of darkness,

In Brooksvalin, where souls
Are subject to the Last Judgment.

What came from the north
Seemed evil above all else;
He rode in front, the prince of darkness,
On his black steed.

In Brooksvalin, where souls
Are subject to the world's judgment.

But from the south came
Other hosts in lofty calm.
Saint Michael rode ahead
At Jesus Christ's side

In Brooksvalin, where souls
Are subject to the world's judgment.

The souls, laden with sins,
They had to tremble in fear!
The tears ran in streams
As evil deeds follow

In Brooksvalin, where souls
Are subject to the Last Judgment.

In majesty stood Michael
And weighed the human souls
On his scales of sin,
And standing by in judgment
The Judge of the world, Jesus Christ.

In Brooksvalin, where souls
Are subject to the Last Judgment.

V.

"Blessed is he who in life
Gives shoes to the poor;
He need not walk with bare feet
In the field of thorns.

Then speaks the tongue of the scales,
And world truth
Sounds in the spiritual state.

How blessed is he who in earthly life
Gives bread to the poor!
He cannot be hurt
By the dogs in the other world.

Thus the tongue of Libra speaks,
And world truth
Resounds in the spiritual state.

How blessed is he who in earthly life
Gives grain to the poor!
He cannot be threatened
By the sharp horn of the bull
When he must cross the Gjallar bridge.

Then the tongue of Libra speaks,
And world truth
Sounds in the mind.

How blessed is he who in earthly life
Clothes to the poor gives!
He cannot freeze to death
The ice masses in Brooksvalin.

Then speaks the tongue of Libra,
And world truth
Sounds in the mind.

VI.

And young and old alike
Listened intently to the words,
Which told of the dreams of Olaf. You have slept for so long... Wake up now, O Olaf Åsteson!

Yesterday I pointed out to you how the fact of Jesus' birth has only gradually conquered the hearts and souls of men, and how the Christmas play, as we have been able to let it affect us, has basically only gradually developed into this noble and beautiful form and at the same time with all the spirit of consecration with which it had been imbued during the times in which it had flourished. Basically, one can say of the first forms of this Christmas play: People were trying, out of a completely profane mood, to take part in what the people had seen for centuries in a way that was incomprehensible to them. The Christ Child only gradually won the hearts of the people. And it even took quite a long time to win the hearts of humanity. When we see in the 8th, 9th, 10th, 11th centuries that what the priests had gradually done was to involve the people, then this involvement is, as I indicated to you yesterday, not yet of the noble form that these Christmas plays had later, of which we have just seen two examples.

But I tried to make you aware that these two games are quite different in origin, and that this is clearly visible. The first game has something simple and folksy about it, so that you can see that the main thing in this game is to The main thing about it is to show how the child, in whom the great world spirit was later embodied and worked within earthly existence, how this child entered the world, how it was received on the one hand by the hosts, the two innkeepers, and on the other hand by the shepherds. And basically, this Christmas play, the first one we saw yesterday, shows very clearly how different the reception was with the innkeepers and with the shepherds. That is what particularly stands out for us.

The other Christmas play is quite different. There we are led straight to the fact that wise men – who at that time were wise kings for the peoples involved – read in the stars about the significant fate that awaits humanity. So we see occult ancient wisdom poured out into the action of the play at the same time. And then, as the story unfolds, we see how the being who now, in the sense of this occult wisdom, this wisdom divined from the stars, enters into earthly events, is confronted by the one at whose side we clearly see evil, the retarded principle, the devilish, the Ahrimanic-Luciferic principle — Herod. We see how the Christ principle and the Luciferic-Ahrimanic principle are set against each other. But we also see how that which is revealed out of spiritual spheres asserts itself in the course of events. As if proclaiming that they are guiding us from spiritual spheres, the angels appear and guide and direct the events so that what Herod wills does not come to pass, but something else happens. Human beings are permeated in their will by what comes from the spiritual worlds. So we have a play that, in terms of the forces it contains, points us beyond mere earthly events.

When we consider how these two plays face each other, the one steeped in primitive folk-watching, the other steeped in a wisdom that really refers us back to an ancient wisdom of the evolution of the earth , we are led to let many thoughts arise in us about what has happened in the course of time and what is connected with the full significance of the Mystery of Golgotha for the evolution of the earth. Let us consider that at the time when the Mystery of Golgotha took place, in a broader sense, there was a deep, profound wisdom in certain circles about spiritual matters. This wisdom is called Gnosis. In the outer world, in the progress of European spiritual culture, one can positively say that this gnosis, this gnostic science of the secrets of the spiritual world, had disappeared within European culture for the outer world. In the third, fourth, fifth and sixth centuries, within spiritual life, there was really still very little awareness of what this science contained. Those who knew something – I mean those who knew what one could easily know if one was a Christian priest or a Christian scholar – knew about this gnosis because there were opponents of this gnosis in the first centuries of Christianity and these opponents fought against the gnosis. Imagine that today all the books that we consider to be our literature and all the cycles were to be eradicated, burned, so that nothing of them remained, and only what the opponents had written – and in a few centuries someone would come across these books of the opponents that remained and would have to form an idea from them of what was written in our books: That was the case with Gnosticism! |

One of the most important church writers was Irenaeus, who was a student of Bishop Polycarp of Asia Minor, who himself was a student of the apostles. But Irenaeus wrote as an opponent of Gnosticism. Over the centuries, the only way to learn what the Gnostics taught was to see what Irenaeus stated and recorded in his book in order to refute it. So everything of this ancient wisdom had to be accepted, which was caused by the fact that this wisdom had only been handed down by an opponent. You see from this that the whole development of the Occident was actually based on the fact that something that came up from the old times was eradicated, properly eradicated. Outwardly, you can simply see from this fact how new the beginning was for Western culture, which was given with the Mystery of Golgotha; how basically it began with something completely new everywhere. I would say that just as a buried city is buried in the ground, so the ancient literature was buried for that which emerged from the ancient church fathers through Ambrose, Augustine, Scotus Erigena and so on. A new beginning! And just as a new city rises on what appears to be new ground, so the new rose — a new city, but on ground in which the old city lay submerged, without any hint of what it had looked like. Such was the case with the development of European civilization. Hence it can also be seen that in our time, if there is to be a spiritual deepening again, it is necessary that this spiritual deepening be achieved from the original strength of human beings, that human beings themselves again find what they have not received from outside, at least within the course of European spiritual development. And – I cannot speak of this today because it would lead too far – there can be no question of the fact that, for example, obtaining Oriental documents could be a substitute for what has disappeared in the way of external documents in Western intellectual life, for the simple reason that the Oriental documents actually give something much, much more primitive than what has become of it in the world that extended over Asia Minor, North Africa, Southern Europe and even partly over Central Europe. What spiritual knowledge had developed to in the first centuries of Christian development had been thoroughly eradicated; it only survived thanks to the writings of opponents.

Now in these writings, which have been eradicated, we have not only the knowledge, the spiritual knowledge that related to the spiritual worlds, apart from the Christ, but in these writings the application of all the old comprehensive spiritual wisdom to the mystery of Christ Jesus has also been lost. These Gnostics wanted to understand in their own way – if we may call them that – the process of evolution on earth and the nature of the Christ. The time had not yet come to understand the matter in the way we understand it now, by drawing from the original spiritual worlds truths that need not be written down because they are directly present in the spiritual world in a living way. It was not possible to extract the knowledge of the nature of Christ Jesus in this way. This is only possible in our time. But in the older way, certain things were known about Christ in a knowledge that has really been lost. Only recently have a few scant remains been found: the Pistis Sophia writings, then the writings on the “Secret of Jeü”, which are now there as if to draw people's attention to the fact that the knowledge of Christ, which is now being sought in our way, is not as foolish as the opponents of our movement would have us believe. The Book of Jeü — little of it remains, in Coptic script, but what little there is is as if to say: Look at what is in the Gospels — it is not the only thing that filled the minds of people in the early centuries of Christianity. This book Jeü contains messages about how the Christ spoke after the resurrection, after he had gone through the mystery of Golgotha, to those who could understand him at the time, who had become his disciples. The remarkable thing is that this book Jeü - I mean the small fragment that is there - speaks about the Christ and what he is in a completely different way than even the Gospel of John. The remarkable thing is that in this book one word recurs again and again, which clearly indicates to us that it is meant to draw attention to something. And this, to which attention is to be drawn, I would like to explain in the following way. Suppose someone at that time had wanted to make clear why Christ Jesus actually entered into the development of the earth, he would have spoken like this, he would have said to those who could understand: Behold, the time is coming when men will advance in the evolution of the consciousness soul. The time is coming when men will have to comprehend the world through the outer, physical organs, through the organs that are essentially anchored in the physical body. The time is past when men had original revelations through original primitive clairvoyance. The time is past when people knew something not only by applying their physical body with its tools, but by using their etheric body independently of the physical body for knowledge. People will now only have to use their physical body as a tool. But in the future it will also be possible to know something of what has so far only been known through the etheric body. In the outer world there will only be knowledge that is tied to the physical body, which is subject to death. But knowledge about the spiritual world cannot be had through the tools that are tied to the physical body. A helper must come who kindles in people that which only the etheric body can know. Someone must come who does not kindle the dead of the physical body, but who kindles the living in man, the etheric-living, who is with the living, who is with that which is not earthly in man on earth. There must be someone who can tear out of this inert, dead physical body the mind that can understand the spiritual world, the mind that is in man and is connected to heaven – the mind that cannot be crucified by the world because it belongs to heaven, which itself crucifies the world, that is, which overcomes the world.

One must imagine that in the past, before they could see the Christ in his true essence, when they went through the mystery of Golgotha, people felt connected to the spiritual world with their etheric body in primitive clairvoyance. How the physical body has become more and more hardened and hardened and has thus become an instrument; how one had to come, precisely the Christ, to bring out the living from the inert instrument of the physical body. This is what one must imagine.

And now let us consider this book Jeû: How the Christ, after going through the Mystery of Golgotha, speaks to those who have learned to hold to Him, to hold to the wisdom contained in His words: “I have loved you and desired to give you life.” We hear it from the sentence: “and desired to give you life”; he desired to bring this inert physical body out of its inertia and to give what only the etheric body can give.

“Jesus the Living One is the knowledge of the truth.” The Living One - that is, the One who has gone through the Mystery of Golgotha - speaks, presenting Himself as the Representative of the Living One.

The text continues: “This is the book of the knowledge of the invisible God by means of the hidden mysteries,” that is, the mysteries that are hidden in man, “showing the way to the chosen essence of man, leading in silence to the life of the Father of the World, in the coming of the Redeemer, the Savior of souls, who will receive the Word of Life, which is higher than all life , in the knowledge of Jesus, the living one, who came forth from the aeon of light in the allness of the pleroma, that is, of other aeons, of all spiritual beings, in the teaching, except for which there is no other, that Jesus, the living one, taught his apostles, saying, “This is the teaching in which all knowledge rests.”

So then, we have to imagine that the Risen One, who through the mystery of Golgotha has gone, speaks to the disciples who have learned to belong to him.

“Jesus, the living one, spoke to his apostles: ‘Blessed is he who has crucified the world and has not let the world crucify him’”, who can thus grasp in man that which is not overcome by matter, by external physical matter.

“The apostles answered unanimously, saying: ‘Lord, teach us this way of crucifying the world, so that it may not crucify us, and we may perish and lose our lives.’”

Jesus, the living one, answered and said: “He who has crucified the world is he who has found my word and fulfilled it according to the will of him who sent me.”

And the apostles answered, saying: “Speak to us, Lord, that we may hear you. We have followed you with all our hearts, leaving father and mother, leaving vineyards and fields, leaving goods, leaving the glory of the outward king, and have followed you that you may teach us the life of your Father who sent you.”

And now, at this invitation of the apostles, the Christ Jesus, the Living One, responded with what He has to say to them: “Christ, the Living One, answered and said: ‘My Father's life is this, that you receive your soul out of the human being of that understanding, which is not earthly’”.

So the Living One wills that His disciples learn to understand that there is an understanding of spiritual things in man that can be torn away from the physical body, that is not earthly. When they stir this up within themselves, then they understand His word in truth.

«‹This essence of all souls, which becomes understandable through what I tell you in the course of my word. And that you perfect it and before the Archon›», before the being of this eon, this age, «‹and his persecutions›», the ahrimanic-luciferic being, «‹and his persecutions, which have no end, so that you may be saved from them. But you, my disciples, hurry to carefully receive my word within yourselves, so that you may recognize it, and that the archon of this aeon, that is, Ahriman-Lucifer, may not dispute with you because he cannot find any of his commands in me. finds his orders outside of the one who has gone through the mystery of Golgotha, “so that you yourselves, O my apostles, fulfill my word with regard to me and I myself set you free, and you become holy through the freedom that is without blemish. As the Spirit of the Holy Spirit is holy, so you too will become holy through the freedom of the spiritual, the Holy Spirit.”

And all the apostles answered with one accord, Matthew and John, Philip and Bartholomew and James, saying: 'O Jesus, thou living one, whose goodness is spread abroad among those who have found thy wisdom and thy form in illumination , O Light, that in the light which has enlightened our hearts, we receive the light of life, O true Logos, that through Gnosis true knowledge of that which is alive has been taught to us.

Jesus, the living one, answered and said: “Blessed is the man who has recognized this and has been led down to heaven,” that is, who has become aware that there is something in him that is not connected with this earthly body, but is connected with the beings of the heavens, and who introduces what is connected with heaven in him, what is above, into earthly events below.

“Blessed is the man who has recognized this and led heaven down and carried the earth and sent it to heaven.” That which is earthly in him has connected with what is heavenly in him, so that when he goes through the gate of death, with the fruits of the earthly, through the heavenly, he can lead the earth back to heaven.

"The apostles answered, saying: 'Jesus, Thou Living One, explain to us the manner in which one leads heaven down. For we have followed thee that thou mightest teach us the true light.

And Jesus, the living one, answered and said: “The word that exists in heaven,” that is, he means what can be had as wisdom, as knowledge, independently of the physical being of the person. “The word that exists in heaven before the earth came into being, that earth which is called the world. But you, when you recognize my word, will lead heaven down, and the word will dwell in you. Heaven is the invisible word of the Father. But when you recognize this, you will lead heaven down. I will show you what it is like to send the earth to heaven so that you may recognize it; to send the earth to heaven is: the listener of the word of knowledge who has ceased to be the mind of an earth man only, but has become a heaven man, 'who has thus torn away his understanding in himself from the outer physical body, who has ceased to be an earth man and has become a heaven man. His mind has ceased to be earthly; it has become heavenly.

"That is why you will be saved from the archon of this aeon, from the Ahrimanic-Luciferic being.

They see a piece that has remained, has been rediscovered, and that could make people aware of the infinitely deep knowledge that was once associated with the secret of the Mystery of Golgotha in the first Christian centuries. Theologians in the present day usually get quite angry when one wants to draw attention to these or other similar writings. That they exist, they admit, certainly. Outwardly, historically, they treat them and publish editions of them. But they are convinced, these normal 'theologians of the present', that these writings have been forgotten to a certain extent with good reason, because they contain only all kinds of fantastic fantasies that the rational man of the present should no longer deal with; that this is no longer appropriate to an enlightened mind. But in a certain sense, these are indications that what we are now bringing out of the source of the spiritual worlds is in fact taking up something that was already there in the evolution of the earth, something that had only to flow underground for a time, like certain waters in the Alps flow underground after being above ground for a while; then they disappear into the depths and reappear later. So spiritual knowledge has flowed through the centuries as in underground worlds and is now to come out again. In order that those who cannot believe in such origins of the flowing out of spiritual sources into earthly existence may also receive an external indication, history has preserved some pieces, some scraps of a rich ancient literature that was spread out, that was great and powerful, and that is actually only really known in the counter-writings, for example those of Irenaeus and similar people who only wanted to refute it.

So we have to say: under extraordinarily difficult circumstances, the Mystery of Golgotha has been assimilated into Western culture. And the first thing was the result of the tremendous word of Paul, which flowed to him from his appearance of Damascus: the secret of death, of the passage through the Mystery of Golgotha. And then there were those far-reaching discussions about the way in which the Christ was connected to the Jesus, how the divine and human natures were connected to each other, how the three forms of manifestation of the divine, which enter into the development of Western Christian culture as the three persons, relate to each other, and so on. One could say that what was human wisdom receded. The power of knowledge also receded. It was an enormously strong power of wisdom that was present in those people who could come to something like what I have just read to you – a strong power of wisdom. It declined very, very much. And people were much more willing to listen to those who could say: The Jesus, the Christ, was there in person on earth. You know that he was there, because I knew Polycarp, and Polycarp knew the disciples of Jesus! There was an immediate personal tradition. In a certain way, belief in only that which was physically present, in physical development, begins to take hold. As spiritual wisdom gradually seeps away, belief in the merely physical arises. You can say: Irenaeus, for example — what kind of a mind was he? He was a thinker who said: There were Gnostics who claimed to know something through a mind that can work independently of the physical body. All this is wrong, all this is, as they said at the time, heretical, people must not believe in it. And he refuted it. More and more such refuters appeared, further and further afield. And of course there was the power of the Mystery of Golgotha, the power of the fact, the power of tradition. Through what had been handed down, what seemed to be fact, Christianity now propagated itself. What propagated itself as science actually seeped away. And the successor of Irenaeus in our time fights everything that comes from real knowledge of the spiritual world. Who is the forerunner and who is the successor? Irenaeus, the bishop of Lyon, who fought the Gnostics; and the Irenaeus of our time, the bishop of matter in Jena, is Ernst Haeckel — the successor of Irenaeus. That is the line of development, my dear friends! The others are only anachronisms, because the rejection of Ernst Haeckel also stems from the same spirit. In terms of thinking, there is a straight line of reproduction from Irenaeus, the bishop of Lyon, to Ernst Haeckel. These things must be taken objectively and historically, not with any sense of critical sympathy or antipathy, but quite objectively and historically.

When we imagine this entire process of spiritual development, we get a feeling for something that has already been touched on from a different angle: that what people could understand did not actually help this Christian development. Understanding, spiritual comprehension, is yet to come. For people had lost the strength to understand something that can only be understood spiritually, like the Mystery of Golgotha. That through which the Mystery of Golgotha conquered humanity was not through the intellect, but through the fact. And this fact actually worked in a very strange way.

Now, only a very faint echo of this remains. In the early centuries, when the story of the appearance of Christ on earth at Christmas was told, the first chapters of the creation story were read first. The Christmas mystery was directly linked to the creation story, the beginning of the Bible. Now only one thing remains in connection with it: if you look at the calendar, you have Christmas on December 25, Adam and Eve on December 24. That this appears in the calendar in direct connection is the last remnant of what was present in consciousness: that people thought together when Christmas was once established for a certain season of the year, the story of creation with the Christmas mystery. But not only that outwardly the story of Creation was first told and then the Christmas mystery, but also that attention was repeatedly drawn to one of the most profound legends, which sought to express the connection between the world, the beginning of the earth, and the mystery of Golgotha. Attention was called to the fact that when Adam had been driven out of Paradise, the tree through which he had sinned, the tree of knowledge of good and evil, had also been removed from Paradise; how fruits, seeds of this tree, were planted on Adam's grave, and this tree grew out of it. And then the wood of this tree, the tree of Paradise, came down from generation to generation to the time when the Christ appeared on earth. And then the cross was made out of this wood, out of the wood that had just grown again from the grave that was Adam's grave. The Redeemer hung on the cross.

This legend about the connection between the beginning of the world and the Mystery of Golgotha was repeated again and again in earlier centuries to those people who were able to understand such things. They were told: The tree of Paradise, which man had sinned against, was thrown out over Paradise, and seeds came into the soil that was on that grave of Adam. And from these germs arose again the tree, of which man had sinned in Paradise. And this wood of the tree was given from generation to generation and then came in many detours into the time of the Mystery of Golgotha, and the cross on which the Christ hung is made of this wood.

This legend also contains the connections between the beginning of the earth and the Mystery of Golgotha. But things are so interconnected, so intimately connected, that there are certain plays that were performed not only at Christmas as plays about Christ, but as plays about Paradise. These are plays about Paradise in which the mystery of Adam and Eve and the Fall of Man was presented to the people directly, when Christmas, or rather, when the Feast of the Epiphany, the Three Kings, approached on January 6.

Consider, my dear friends, the deeply spiritual facts to which we are led. We think of the Luciferic-Ahrimanic seduction of man, of what has become of man through the Ahrimanic-Luciferic seduction, and we think that this is represented by the figure of Adam, who succumbed to temptation. When we fully understand this Ahrimanic-Luciferic temptation, we must necessarily think that the evolution of the earth would have been quite different if the Luciferic-Ahrimanic temptation had not approached man. But this Luciferic-Ahrimanic temptation has only one meaning for life on earth in the physical body. It can only gain significance from the moment we enter earthly life from the spiritual world through birth, or, let us say, through conception. The Luciferic-Ahrimanic temptation cannot have this significance for the time between death and a new birth, because it has this significance here in earthly life.

Therefore, when we see the child enter into earthly life, we perceive correctly when we say: You appear, you soul, who are here in the flesh, you appear out of a world sphere that is still untouched by the nature of Lucifer and Ahriman. You only enter by growing more and more together with the flesh into the nature of Lucifer and Ahriman.

And when we look at the child, we see a spiritual mystery of the world. The moment a human being enters into earthly development, he is already predetermined by his previous incarnations to grow together with the flesh. But people should once feel what it means to enter into the earth without being predetermined for earthly life. That this thought should awaken in man, the thought of what actually dwells in man as an entity through which he is connected with the heavenly, with the solar, that this should awaken in man, for this the Christ-child conquered the spiritual development of mankind. And this Christ-child conquered the spiritual development of mankind in just the way He could conquer it.

There were basically two currents in the whole Christian development. We can understand these two currents very well. Through two bodies, the Christ entered the world: through the Nathanic Jesus and through the Solomonic Jesus. I would say that He entered through the Nathanic Jesus as through the earthly child. You can see how I have described it in the cycles and also in the book 'The Spiritual Leading of Man and Humanity'. Through the Nathanic Jesus, the Christ entered the earth in such a way that this Nathanic Jesus was a being, as preserved from the previous development on earth, as the substance from the beginning of the earth. But the Solomonic Jesus: an upward development that has gone through many, many earthly incarnations. So two paths that should then meet in the way I have described.

But now imagine that all this is happening at a time when spiritual wisdom is dying out, when there is no possibility of grasping this. Such infinite depth comes into play that two Jesus-children are there through whom the Christ is to come into the world. That infinite depth is entering in, which people who understand nothing of the whole matter, despite being officially appointed to do so, blaspheme and condemn today. That which could only have been understood through that wisdom that has been eradicated is entering in. It is no wonder that this fact has entered in a way that can only be understood little by little through our science. Therefore, the following endeavor was first made. When more of the old wisdom began to seep through, little by little, people wanted to place more emphasis on the appearance of Christ Jesus on Earth, on the onset of the great world events. That is why they established the Feast of the Epiphany, the manifestation of the Lord, on January 6th. This is more closely connected with the Solomon-like Jesus, with the Jesus who appeared as a king, who appeared from a royal line. He was also understood more through what was royal-magical wisdom. In contrast, the other, the Nathanic Jesus, who actually had nothing of what had happened on earth in his substance, was transferred to this deep winter time, which is now Christmas. People have not understood that these two belong together, and have even separated the dates of birth. For in older centuries, the birth of Jesus is still celebrated on January 6. But the fact that two births were celebrated is quite understandable to anyone who can speak of two Jesus boys. Even the way people thought about Jesus is actually available in two versions. One relates more to the Jesus who entered without having previously entered into connection with what human differentiations on earth have brought about through nations and classes and races: the Jesus who can enter, understood by the simplest popular feeling – the Luke Jesus, the Nathanic Jesus. The other Jesus, the Solomon-like Jesus, is more comprehensible through that which is heavenly wisdom, through a wisdom through which that which remains of the old magical wisdom seeps through.

It is not wrong to say: First we saw the first Jesus-Play, this simple Jesus-Play, to which the old remnants of the magical wisdom cannot be applied at all: this is the Nathanian Jesus-Child. In the other, there is the wisdom that still remained: the Jesus who entered the world from royal blood — the second play that had an effect on us. People did not know about it, but the two Jesus boys had an effect in that people made such fundamentally different plays out of them.

So, first of all, I wanted to give a few hints as to how the Paradise Play grew together with the Christmas Play, so that the whole has a meaning. We will talk about it again tomorrow. Today, however, I would just like to once again commend to you the words that I spoke at the end yesterday and also in the course of the reflections, that these Christmas Plays are at the same time - in a certain sense even the simplest - yet a warning. And they were also a warning to all those who listened.

Again, what we have to want should be a kind of world Christmas in a spiritual sense. The Christ should again be born, at least in human understanding, in a spiritual way. All this work within spiritual science is actually a kind of Christmas celebration, a birth of the Christ in human wisdom. The only question is whether people will come in large numbers who are now able to understand. Yes, I would like to say that one could hear many a farmer sitting there when such a Christmas play as yesterday's first play was performed in earlier centuries. The whole community came in and now the farmers were sitting there. Now it was like this: sometimes one of the farmers would say to the other: “Tell me, are you actually a host or are you a shepherd?” Then the other would reflect on whether he was a host or a shepherd. But I think that, in view of what is known about Christ in modern science, one could also ask people: “Are you a host or are you a shepherd?” For one hears the landlords railing quite vividly and saying: What do you want here at my door? Away with you, seek a lodging somewhere else, not with us! The others are the shepherds. There is also a skeptic among them, Mops, who also does not want to understand the appearance, but still lets himself be carried through the coridan by a certain sense of truth. I think it could make us think about the question and the answer in the soul with which some people used to go out after watching the Christmas play, the farmers in the 16th, 17th, 18th centuries: Well, tell me, are you actually a host, or are you a shepherd? – Let us hope, my dear friends, that, little by little, many shepherds will arise in our way, so that the innkeepers, who can be heard from afar, will gradually be silenced.

Yesterday I tried to point out an important fact in the context of the whole Christ problem, a fact that is undoubtedly surprising: the fact that a whole body of wisdom has actually disappeared, and is only known today in a few fragments, in a few remnants, some of which were presented here yesterday from one of the remnants, namely the beginning of the Book of Jeô. Now we must ask ourselves: can a body of wisdom that was available simply disappear without a trace? Can there only be external reasons for such a disappearance? I used a comparison: I said that it would be conceivable for everything that has now been printed and remains to be burned, leaving only the opposing writings, from which one could later reconstruct what we said. Now, certainly, the case could arise. But this hypothesis cannot really be put forward just like that. Because if you think that all the writings would really disappear, then many of us would still be around – at least one can assume that – who know what is in these writings and who, without needing the opposing writings, could pass on the matter further, and so the wisdom could well be passed on. For the matter to disappear completely, it would be necessary that in a certain way, little by little, the abilities to understand the matter and to pass it on from generation to generation would also disappear. But that must have happened in the past. In a certain way, it must have happened in the past that people lost the ability to understand something like the Gnosis of Valentinus, like the content of the Pistis Sophia writing, like the content of the Book of Jeû and so on. And that is really the case. We must absolutely imagine that on the broad basis of that old heritage, which was lived out in older times as the most primitive clairvoyance, then gradually petered out and faded away, but that higher knowledge, spiritual knowledge, was also developed. This was, of course, cultivated only by a few who were trained in the mysteries, but it was present in the wider community. And we must further imagine that through the gradual paralysis of the faculties to comprehend such things, the whole matter was not only forgotten but disappeared. People simply no longer had the ability to understand such things within Western culture. As a result, only what was wisdom could be lost. So we can truly say that by looking at the time immediately preceding and following the Mystery of Golgotha, we are looking at a time when, to a large extent, old abilities were disappearing and work was being done entirely from scratch, from the new. It can be said that as humanity developed towards the Mystery of Golgotha, there was a dimming out, a disappearance of a very special way of looking at things and thinking, which was of a spiritual nature and through which one could have understood the coming of the Christ into the world as a spiritual being.

Thus, precisely at the time when the Christ connects with the evolution on earth, the knowledge through which the nature and essence of this Christ could have been understood in the actual, deeper sense disappears. This is an important fact. I have already pointed out something very significant in various parts of our reflections. I said: the proclamation of Christ as such is not something that is so completely new, for example, with the event of Golgotha. No, the mysteries already spoke of the Christ as the Coming One. There were teachings in the mysteries that the Christ would come. This Christ Being was understood in the sense of the lost spiritual wisdom. But these mysteries had gradually fallen into disrepair, so that just as the Christ came, the time approached when people were least suited to speak about this Christ. This can be seen not only from everything I have already mentioned, but also from what remains with people who now want to form an idea of the Christ secret that is fresh and new.

In the first centuries of Christian development, we have such great minds as, for example, Clement of Alexandria and Origen, two eminent minds. If you want to characterize them from a certain point of view, this Clement of Alexandria, who thus followed the Gnostics, when Gnosticism had already dawned, as did Origen, then you have to say that they strive to recognize: What is the actual truth about this mystery of Golgotha? On the one hand, we are dealing with the Christ – they still knew that. This Christ can only be understood as a spiritual being that has to do with the spiritual, with the supersensible impulses. This Christ descends from cosmic spiritual regions. They no longer knew exactly how the old Gnosticism was able to understand the Christ, but they knew that He must be understood as a spiritual being with spiritual abilities. That they knew about the Christ. On the other hand, Jesus was an historical personality to them. The appearance of Jesus was an historical fact to them. They said to themselves, “So many years ago, in a certain part of the Near East, a personality was born, Jesus, who was the bearer of the Christ, a human being in whom God was present.” This became the riddle for them. They said to themselves, “We are dealing with an historical personality in the historical development, we are dealing with the Christ in the spiritual understanding.” How should one conceptualize the union of the two? And with such eminent, such great spirits as Clement of Alexandria and Origen are, we see a struggle, a fight with it: to be able to grasp how the Christ is in the Jesus, therein is.

If we first look at Clement of Alexandria, who headed the Catechetical School of Alexandria, where those who were to be trained and made into Christian teachers were trained, if we look at this significant personality, we find the following among the teachings of this personality. Clemens of Alexandria said to himself: The Christ belongs to those forces that were already active at the creation of the earth, of course he belongs to the spiritual world. He has entered into the evolution of the earth through the body of Jesus of Nazareth. So Clemens of Alexandria first turned his gaze to the Christ as a spiritual being, seeking to understand him in spiritual regions. Now Clement of Alexandria also knew the following, which we have also emphasized several times before. He knew that the Christ was actually always there for people, but not in the earthly region. Only those who developed powers within themselves through the mysteries were able to reach him, by virtue of which they could leave the body. When they, the people, emerged from the body through the powers of the mysteries and entered into the spiritual regions, they recognized the Christ and felt that He was the One Who was to come. This was known to Clement of Alexandria. He knew that in the old mysteries there was mention of the Christ as the Coming One, Who had not yet been united with the evolution of the earth. He expressed it thus: “Certainly, people were inspired to expect the Christ.” And he went so far as to say: “Specifically at two points in the spiritual development of humanity, was there a cultivation of that which could prepare for the coming of the Christ.” Clement of Alexandria said: “On the one hand, it was cultivated by Moses and the prophets.” What came into the world through Moses and the prophets, he said, was a preparation. People should first experience what came through Moses and the prophets, so that with the help of their own intuition they could then have a feeling for it: We have the Christ. That is what they were supposed to imagine. So he knew nothing of the ancient Gnostic wisdom, or at least he did not apply it. But he said that what came through Moses and the prophets to human abilities was “preparation.” And then – this is very significant – as a second thing that was to prepare for the coming of Christ, besides Moses and the prophets, Clement of Alexandria mentioned Greek philosophy: Plato and Aristotle – Greek philosophy. He said, as it were, that Moses and the prophets and Greek philosophy were there to prepare people for the event, for the fact of the Mystery of Golgotha.

And again Origen said to himself: We are dealing with the Christ: with the Christ who, as a spiritual being, can be understood by spiritual powers, we are dealing with the historical Jesus, with that personality that once existed as a real personality belonging to the world of the senses. How do the two come together – the god with the human being? How is the God-man created? — And Origen came up with a theory. He said to himself: the God cannot simply dwell in the physical man, but there first had to be a special soul in Jesus, so that this soul can mediate between the God and the man, that is, the God as a pure spiritual being with the physical man. So he added the soul. And so he distinguished in Christ Jesus the God, the pure pneumatic being, the pure spiritual being, then the psyche, the soul, and the physical body of Jesus of Nazareth. He therefore tried to form a concept of how the Christ could be in Jesus of Nazareth. He no longer had the old gnosis to imagine the Christ's dwelling on earth and the Christ's connection with the evolution of the earth. One had to work from the fresh, from the new. One had to make an effort to achieve this. So just when the Christ as a real being had united with the evolution of the earth, people had the greatest difficulty in even understanding this fact. The abilities were present to the very least extent.

And why that was, Clement of Alexandria had at least some understanding of it. He said to himself: How then were these old mystery people inspired? It was through the Christ, said Clement of Alexandria to himself, that the Christ also worked through them, but supernaturally, when they came out of themselves. This happened, as Clement of Alexandria very clearly expresses it, because he sent them the angels. So that Clement of Alexandria said it outright: when the Old Testament speaks of the appearance of an angel, it means that the Christ sends that angel. Yes, Clement of Alexandria makes it expressly clear: When Yahweh appears to Moses in the burning bush, it is actually the Christ who appears, who appears through the earthly-soul-spiritual appearance. So that Clement of Alexandria expressly states: In ancient times, before the Mystery of Golgotha, the Christ appeared to people through the angels. If they were able to perceive the message of the angels, then they actually stood face to face with Christ Himself as disembodied, initiated disembodied beings of the higher world.

So far went Clement of Alexandria. And then he said – and this is again contained in his work –: In the progress of time development, Christ has passed from the nature of an angel to the nature of a son. He has become a son. He could manifest Himself earlier, reveal Himself through the angels or as an angel, as a multitude of angels, as many angels. When He wanted to appear to one as an angel, when He wanted to appear to another as another angel, He appeared through many forms. Then He appeared through the one form: the Son.

Here a very important element comes into play. Please pay attention to this, it is extremely important! Clement of Alexandria still takes the view that the Christ was already present in the spiritual regions before the Mystery of Golgotha. He had reached the point where he could make himself known through angels, through messengers. But he progressed further, he came to be able to express himself as the Son. This is extremely important.

What is it that actually enters into human understanding? — If we go through all this old Gnosticism, it has a peculiarity. If, for example, I wanted to draw you a diagram of this Gnosticism, I could say the following: This Gnosticism imagines a person of evolution who emanated from the Father, the Primordial Father, from the so-called Silence or “iyn, from the Primordial Spirit. These ancient Gnostics indicated thirty different levels. They called them eons. So I could mention thirty here. Now, to some extent, a second stream; while the first stream is spiritual, they indicated a second stream that is soul-related. Within this stream, they recognized the two main eons of origin in Christ and Sophia. Then a number of eons came again. And they indicated a third current: the demiurge with matter. And these came together and formed the human being.

You can make such schematics from the way these Gnostics thought. These ideas are not entirely unreal, not entirely imaginary, because the human being is a complex creature. When I once explained how many seven-part aspects there are in the human being – you included it in one of the Norwegian cycles, I believe it is called “Man in the Light of Occultism, Theosophy and Philosophy” – our dear friends were quite amazed at how many, many differences actually have to be looked for in the human being. These differences are reminiscent of what the Gnostics already knew from their point of view. But when one approaches this Gnosis, one thing is always the same: the concept of time plays little role in it. One can express the Gnostic through spatial schematics. The concept of time does not play a special role, at least one does not penetrate it with understanding. And in this respect there is progress from Gnosis to Clement of Alexandria. Even if the entire comprehensive wealth of spiritual wisdom was lost, there was still progress in that Clement of Alexandria brought the concept of time into the development of the Christ and said: The Christ revealed Himself earlier, could make Himself known earlier through angels, then as a son, because He Himself had progressed. Development came into it, that is the significant thing. It cannot be emphasized often enough that the Western cultural development was there to then bring the concept of time into the world view in the right way, to understand the idea of development in the right way. This is so important, this is of far-reaching significance, to look at the development and to see how Christ originally could only make himself known through the angels, and then, after he has gone through the mystery of Golgotha, appears as the Son. Through the angels he is the messenger of something that is outside the world and indeed permeates the world, but which, if it is to be recognized, must be recognized from outside the world: Messenger, later, when he appears as a son, he permeates everything. Just as the son of a blood is one with the father within the physical world, so the spirit-son of a being is to be imagined with the father in the spiritual world. Being a son is different from simply being an angel. So when this entity reveals itself as a son, it is an advance over the earlier revelation, where it could only reveal itself as an angel, as a messenger.

So in Christianity there was a kind of more advanced understanding than there was within the old Gnosticism. But I would say that the after-effects of Gnosticism were still needed in order to say what Clement of Alexandria said. When Gnosticism gradually disappeared altogether, one could no longer even say what Clement and Origen said. People increasingly came to identify with those impulses that were the impulses of later times, the purely materialistic impulses. And so it came about that Origen's teaching was condemned. It was declared heretical. The element that caused it to be declared heretical consists in particular in the fact that one wanted to renounce such an understanding of the matter, coming from man himself and his powers. One felt: that can no longer be there. But how does the matter appear to us now? How must it appear to us? We see, after all, that an old spiritual wisdom had spread on the basis of old clairvoyance. That was there, it is gradually disappearing. Within this spiritual wisdom, even if it related to an extraterrestrial being, there was a wisdom about the Christ. Just when the Christ descended to Earth, this had disappeared. The real Christ was connected with the earth. The knowledge of the Christ had disappeared in time. There you have another case on a large scale, which I ask you to look at properly. We can look beyond the then known earth, beyond the earth before the mystery of Golgotha. The further back we go, the more knowledge of the Christ we find, even if it is the Christ who must be thought of in supersensible regions. But it is a knowledge that can only be imparted by angels. This is evolution. This knowledge, this idea of the Christ is distributed among many people. The Christ lived as the inspirer of many people: evolution.

This knowledge slowly recedes, disappears, fades away, and in the one being, in Jesus of Nazareth, everything that was once distributed is concentrated. Imagine a drop of Christ-inner-self within evolution in one of the mystery priests, a second, third, fourth and so on, in each of the mystery initiates one would find: he has something of the Christ in him when he leaves his body with his spirit. The Christ is multiplied in them. All this disappears. And in a single point, in the body of Jesus of Nazareth, all that was distributed contracts: involution.

Precisely that which had been withdrawn from all others appeared in the one body. And so we see that what was distributed, what lived in evolution, must disappear from the earth by concentrating on the one point, on the body of Jesus of Nazareth. That is this important fact. Within the most significant involution, evolution ceases. So now the time is coming when the Christ lives with the earth, but the Christ-knowledge does not live in the earth, the Christ-knowledge must first develop again.

Now the great difficulties are there, we have already hinted at them: on the one hand you have the Jesus, on the other hand you have the Christ. And do you think that the old wisdom of the connection in man has been lost at all? All this time, nothing has been known about what it is all about with man. Only now are we again dividing the human being into physical body, etheric body, sentient soul and so on. We are only just beginning to do this again. In the individual human being, we now distinguish again the physical-earthly, which continues in the line of inheritance, and the higher spiritual, which descended again from spiritual worlds. Origen did not know this, nor did Clement of Alexandria. They did not know enough about the spiritual and soul life and the physical life of the individual human being walking on earth. That is why they had difficulty understanding the individual aspects of the essence of Christ Jesus. Knowledge about the human being had been lost, hence this difficulty in understanding the God-man. And so the knowledge about Jesus and the knowledge about the Christ became more and more divergent. And it is of infinite importance for our time that we understand how this, as it were, affects the time again, inasmuch as that which our spiritual science contains must appear in it. It is tremendously important to look precisely at this falling apart of the Jesus and the Christ. This is an extremely serious, an extremely important matter. And it confronts us in so many ways.

We have seen these Christmas plays pass before us. In the second play, we felt something of the Christ; in the first, the pure figure of Jesus in the second, the simple and primitive. One can say that gradually the Jesus-child, that is, the starting point of Jesus, has conquered the minds of people. Only in the Middle Ages does one begin to look towards the child. Before that, Christians took part in the sacrifice of the Mass, they heard about the mystery that the Christ had gone through death, the Pauline doctrine and so on. But the Bible was not popular, the Bible was only in the hands of the priests. The faithful had to take part in the sacrifice of the Mass, which was offered to them in Latin. But there was no participation in the proceedings of the sacred action. And that which is contained in the Gospels only gradually conquered minds and souls. And so it was only really from the middle of the Middle Ages that such plays, such representations of the appearance of Jesus and so on, could be offered to people. Today one actually has the idea: The Mystery of Golgotha was, and from then on people would have known something of this Mystery of Golgotha. Yes, what they knew was that the Christ had died on the cross. People were especially aware of the Easter event. But the Christmas event was completely unknown, it crept into people's minds and hearts only very slowly and gradually. That was the external side, how people learned about what had happened in Palestine in pictures. Only gradually, through the dramatic presentation, did people begin to imagine what had happened in Palestine. It was the side of the mystery of Jesus. It was at the same time, just think, it was at the same time when, on the other hand, in mysticism, Tauler, Meister Eckhart and the others were again seeking the Christ through mysticism. So on the one hand we have the first emergence of Christmas plays: Jesus is sought as externally as possible, namely in direct external representation – Jesus is sought – and the mystics seek the Christ, they seek to develop the soul to such an extent that they see the Christ emerging in them, they seek to experience the completely transformed, completely unworldly, purely spiritual Christ in the soul. Mysticism on the one hand, Christmas plays on the other — the Jesus and the Christ are sought at the same time on two different, far-removed paths! What was a theoretical difficulty for Origen, the inability to reconcile the Christ with the Jesus, is encountered in the villages outside. Among the people, Jesus is shown in the form of a child. The deep mystics seek the Christ by wanting to lead their own soul to an inner feeling, almost to an inner sensing of the Christ. But where is the connection? Where is it, this connection? Things go side by side. Think how far apart what the simple person, the simple eye, sees in the Christmas plays is from the deep mysticism of a Meister Eckhart or a Johannes Tauler. But the beginnings of the Christmas plays fall into the time. Mysticism also lives on.

And in our time today - think of what the whole mystery of Golgotha has become for many theologians! Suppose: Those who are the most advanced theologians, what do they actually look at? They see that once at the beginning of our era in Nazareth or Bethlehem or somewhere, a chosen person was born, chosen especially to gradually feel within himself the connection between man and the spiritual world, a noble person - the noblest person, so noble that one can already say that he was almost - and even - not true, because the story is a bit patchy! One does not know how to find one's way around, what more can be said about the fact that in the course of Christianity he was after all conceived entirely as a god. And so one twists and turns, and there come all the Euckenisms and Harnackisms, which are so — yes, one cannot grasp it, but one wants in some way to be clever and yet have a way to understand Jesus as something, Christ as some kind of Christ. Well, and so one takes up the Gospels. Of course, as a modern person, one is embarrassed to admit the miracles. So one deletes what one can delete and constructs something highly natural out of it, something that can have happened for reasonable reasons. And then it goes to the event of Jerusalem, to the crucifixion. Up to the point of dying, that is still possible. But after the resurrection, that is no longer possible, and one then ventures into such things as Harnack, for example, ventures into saying: Yes, this resurrection, this grave from which Christ Jesus is said to have risen – the Easter mystery, yes, yes, the Easter mystery: one must indeed to the realization that from the Garden at the Skull this Easter secret has gone forth; the Easter secret has risen there – the thought of the resurrection has come from there, and to that we must cling and look no further for what has actually happened there; the idea of the resurrection has gone forth from there.

Now, isn't that something! Read “The Essence of Christianity” by Harnack, and you will find this peculiar resurrection idea! I once pointed this out at a meeting of the Giordano Bruno Society in a town and said: It is a strange idea that people want to deal with the resurrection in such a way that they say they do not want to touch what actually happened, but want to point out that the belief in the resurrection, the belief in the Easter mystery, has risen from that grave. — Then someone said to me: That can't stand with Harnack! That's almost Catholic, that's Catholic superstition. It's as if one should still believe that the Holy Shroud of Trier means something! That's superstition, that can't stand with Harnack. Yes, it is in Harnack after all, and I could do nothing else – I did not have the book at hand – than write a card to the gentleman in question the next day, saying that it was on page so and so. These are things that lead into difficulties. You can't get past them if you are to find the way from Jesus to the Christ. Someone once said to me: We modern theologians can no longer do anything with Christology, we can only use a Jesusology. — He said it, not me: It's a shame that the name Jesuit is already taken, because actually the confessors of modern theology should be called “Jesuits”. — Please, I didn't say it, but a confessor of modern theology!

Yes, well, that is one side of the story. The other side is that a number of modern theologians, in turn, adhere more to the Christ. They take the Gospels as their starting point. They do not take certain sayings in the Gospels in the same way as those I have just mentioned take what a reasonable person in the world can believe of a person even if he is a divine person. But when someone is called a “divine man,” it is not clear how far one should go in applying the divine: “Noble man, but more than Socrates” — but, well, it is not right. Now, there are those who are Jesusologists, for theologians, that is a word that is difficult to apply to them. Theology would mean divine wisdom. But the “divine” is to be deleted here. Then there are the others; they take the sayings a little more seriously. With certain sayings, they find: It is not right that the one who said them should be understood only as an ordinary human being. There are sayings in the Gospels that simply cannot be put into the mouth of a human being, a mere human being, in an honest way. And besides, they take the resurrection story seriously and so on. They now turn into Christologists as opposed to Jesus-ologists.

But now they arrive at something else. Read the book “Ecce Deus” and other books, and you will come to the conclusion that if you read the Gospels honestly, you cannot say that the Gospels are about a man. It is about a God, a real, true God. These people, in turn, lose Jesus. And they lose him very strongly, because they now say: the Gospels are all about a God; but the God cannot have existed, he cannot have existed, so we have to keep the Christ. The Christ is something that people talked about, but it did not live on earth. Christology without Jesus-ology, that is the other direction. But the two directions cannot come together. And so it is already really the case today: those who speak of the Christ have lost the Jesus, and those who speak of the Jesus have lost the Christ. The Christ has become an unreal god, and the Jesus has become an unreal man. It is imperative that we continue on this path, if nothing is added.

That which is added must be spiritual science, which in turn can comprehend how the Christ lived in Jesus. And that is basically one of the most important points of spiritual science teaching, that it can lead to an understanding of how the Christ, through the detour of the two Jesuses, could really become the being that placed itself at the center of the evolution of mankind on earth, because this spiritual science in turn has a view of what man is, how the spiritual, the soul and the physical are combined in man. And so, building on this, one can also understand how the Christ comes together with the Jesus. Of course, it is complicated and not easy to understand, but it can be understood. And so you see how, from the original, that which has been lost for humanity must be restored through spiritual science, also in relation to the understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha. When the Christ appeared in the world, it was not possible to understand Him. This understanding must be acquired little by little. What He has worked, He has worked in actuality. But the starting points are there everywhere. And starting points can be found even in the simplest Christmas play.

What is presented? It becomes particularly clear where the Paradiesspiele are still considered, how a person enters the world, from whom it becomes clear only through what happens incidentally that it is Jesus. The human being enters the world as a child. I said: the Paradiesspiel was connected with it - the beginning of the development of the earth - with the Mystery of Golgotha. Why is that? We must take into account the fact that at the beginning of the evolution of the earth, man was exposed to the Luciferic temptation. As a result, he became a different being than he would have become in the regular process of evolution. So when we have Adam, symbolically speaking, outside of paradise, he is a different being than he was destined to be before the Luciferic temptation. How does that come to light? Imagine: Lucifer had not approached the human being, the human being would live without the Luciferic impulse, then he would live quite differently in the etheric body. When the human being passes through the gate of death and still has his etheric body, and then sheds it, that etheric body remains, but in this etheric body is imprinted what the human being does and thinks through the Luciferic seduction. The human being dies, passes through the gate of death. The physical body is given over to the elements. After a few days, the etheric body detaches itself from the human being. The person then goes his or her own way. But in this ethereal body is contained that which this etheric body has become through the fact that the person thinks and feels and acts as he must think and feel and act after the Luciferic temptation. So now imagine the earth. The human physical body goes into the earth, it is handed over to the elements of the earth. But his ether body remains connected to the earth. There we have the ether bodies of human beings, which are now in the earth's atmosphere. They are different from what they would be if the Luciferic temptation had not come. Of course, everything I have said about the ether bodies refers to these ether bodies. But what I am hinting at today also relates to this, so that we can say: A human being is embedded in the earth. That which he leaves behind on earth, what his etheric body has become during his life, is drier, more woody than it would be if the Luciferic temptation had not come. Woody, dry — this difference really exists. Imagine that the temptation of Lucifer had never occurred. In that case, at his death man would leave behind a much more “young” etheric body, as it were a much greener etheric body. He leaves behind a much more withered, dried-up etheric body through the temptation of Lucifer than he would have left behind without the temptation of Lucifer. It is already expressed in the legend that the lignified Paradise Tree grows out of Adam's grave. But that which lives in the earth lived before the Mystery of Golgotha in the Luciferically infected etheric body. That was precisely the element into which the body of Jesus of Nazareth entered in a redeeming way, as a phantom, as I once indicated in the Karlsruhe lectures. Now then, imagine Adam's grave: Adam's physical body consigned to the elements of the earth, emerging from the grave with the sclerotic etheric body, which is the representative of that which is infected with Lucifer in the human being and remains after death. At the same time, this is the wood on which the human being can be crucified. And this crucifixion arises in the lingering of the phantom of Jesus of Nazareth after the Mystery of Golgotha, which connects with the earth precisely with the help of the latter. This is expressed in the legend by saying: This wood passed from generation to generation and formed the wood of the cross of Golgotha. This image is the image that corresponds to a real fact, namely that through the crucifixion the phantom of Jesus of Nazareth united with what lived ethereally in the earth from all the etheric bodies infected by Lucifer, which had naturally scattered and thinned and dissolved, but were still there in their powers. The fact that we have to face here is a very significant and infinitely profound one, shedding light on the secrets of the earth.

But how does man become related to this ethereal body infected by Lucifer? By becoming immersed in the physical world, where he becomes a child. It is not yet natural there, where he becomes a child. Therefore, if you look at the child with the right feeling when it enters the world, you really see the man who is free of Lucifer. And if you are able to look at the child with the right feeling as it enters the world, you will already see the man with his relationship to Christ. This is the feeling that should be achieved in those to whom Jesus was handed over in the Christmas play: to feel what I have indicated on the very first pages of the little writing about the progress of people and humanity, where I spoke of the first three years, of this entering. For if what is permeating the human being could penetrate him in the middle of his life – I have hinted at it in it – then one would have an idea of the way in which the Christ lived in Jesus. This ability to look at what is not yet infected by Lucifer in the child is what can happen in the Christmas play.

And think what all this ultimately is. It is actually something tremendous when you look at the child in this way. In this little writing, I have pointed out how we are wiser in our youth, even if unconsciously wiser, because we have to build up our body little by little, which we cannot do later. One is cleverer, one is much wiser than one is later, in the inner penetration of the human being, of the human entity, but one does not yet have anything Luciferic. By working inwardly in this way when one is a child, up to the point in time to which one later remembers, one works on the fine chiseling of one's body. One works there according to infinitely wise laws, of which one can never get an inkling later on in the luciferic-ahrimanic permeated knowledge. When one works in this essence, one is still free from everything one later enters into by experiencing the world together with the body. One is free from all differences, even from the great difference of male and female. As a child, one is not yet living in the masculine and feminine. One is not yet in a class, racial or national difference in it. One is human, a mere human being. One is really in it, in which even those who now face each other in war through hatred, through what they only experience externally, have once lived. That people face each other in the world hating as belonging to different nations, that is only developed through those forces in which one lives together with the physical body. Before the child has lived together with the physical body, it still lives in the 'in-between', which is beyond national and class differences. It lives in the in-between, in which souls can truly live, wherever they are born on earth. Just think, people can face each other in terrible fighting, angry fighting, shoot each other dead – and those who shoot each other dead can pass through the gate of death in the community of Christ, in that in which they are when they are not yet afflicted with the differences of people. What faces each other hating, that the human being acquires only in the physical body, that has nothing to do with what is outside of the physical body. The present has much to learn, especially the present, by finding its way back to the worship of Jesus in time, when he is presented as a child, since he has not yet entered into that which differentiates people and causes them to quarrel and fight with each other. It is only through what a person experiences when he becomes something other than the child spoken of at Christmas that war and strife arise. What is played at Christmas is the human being, truly in connection with the cosmic powers, but in such a way that what does not enter into conflict, what those in their hearts can carry in the same way, is revealed externally on the physical plane in a unique form, even though they fight each other to the death.

There is an enormous depth to the fact that it is precisely in connection with the Nathanian Jesus-child that this side is presented to humanity, so that the human being touches himself with that side through which he enters the world without the shadow of differentiation, before he has entered into nations, into other differences, into those differences that he enters only through living together with the body. On the one hand, the idea of Jesus touches the idea of Christ, which can only be fully realized in the child Jesus; on the other hand, the idea of Christ comes into being when one can grasp purely, in the Jesus between the ages of thirty and thirty-three, what is now also spiritual, the being of Christ. In a twofold way, through the Nathanic and the Solomonic Jesus, a body has been prepared that can now stand apart from all that differentiates itself through human beings. And only in such a body can the Christ reveal Himself.

Thus, in our spiritual scientific sense, we see, as I have indicated in the booklet on the progress of man and humanity, the Jesus idea and the Christ idea growing together. This is the greatest and most significant need of our time. So far, people have had only one Christmas and only one Easter, but these do not belong together. For Easter is a Christ festival, while Christmas is a Jesus festival. Easter and Christmas will only lead the way together if one can understand how Christ and Jesus belong together. And spiritual science will build the bridge between Christmas and Easter. And from the simple play of the shepherds, a bridge is built to the finest understanding that can be gained when we pursue spiritual science to the point where we find the Christ through it. We must only have the ability to go with the attitude of the shepherds, not with the attitude of the landlords. The contrast between materialism and spiritualism is wonderfully contrasted in the “landlords” and the “shepherds”. And basically, that is the big question of our time: whether people want to be hosts or shepherds. A great deal of the events of our time stem from the fact that people are hosts. Being a host is widespread in the world. To be shepherds, we must again try to become shepherds. There will certainly still be many doubters among the shepherds, and when one says, “I think I see a glow there, that is, I perceive something spiritual,” the other will still say for a long time, “That's just fantasy.” But if the human being can only now develop the sides in himself that are not based on what has been acquired on earth, but can find the connection with what the human being has brought out of the spiritual, heavenly in his inner being, then he will be able to be a shepherd. Today people are too absorbed with the house they live in and the possessions they own, the things they have brought in from the earth. This can only be measured in terms of earthly values. But those who still have a certain connection with the spiritual forces that surge through the world, who still have the nature of a shepherd within them, they should be able to find the way to realize that, basically, external knowledge only reveals appearances. We will gradually begin to understand Christmas when we learn to distinguish between the host nature and the shepherd nature, and when we know how much of the host nature there is in our time. But there is one small problem that needs to be overcome. Of course we have to distinguish between the innkeeper and shepherd natures, since we are surrounded by innkeepers, and wherever we go we are surrounded by innkeepers and feel very much like a shepherd. Of course we always feel like a shepherd! One must get over that, at least to do a little research into the innkeeper element that one carries within oneself, and not to see oneself as a shepherd at all. One will sometimes have to ask oneself: Do I already see the light that is to come and announce what is to come through the new spiritual science? — We will have to cultivate everything that can awaken in us the feelings: to be able to celebrate Christmas in our hearts in this new spiritual direction, to seek the light out of the darkness, but to seek within ourselves and really want to seek, really want to seek, and by really feel that it is not over at once, and that you have to keep coming back, like the shepherds did, who also promise to come back; they don't want to leave it over at once.

Yes, there is still much to be learned from this simple Christmas play, and so I think it is good that we cultivate this simplest way of experiencing the Christmas mystery in these simple forms among ourselves for a while. For many difficult struggles will confront spiritual striving in the coming time, and only those who have truly learned to become shepherds in the spiritual grasp of the Christmas mystery with all the humility of shepherds, but also with all the wise searching of the shepherd who is faithfully united with the world, will find the way. Let us inscribe this in our hearts and souls this Christmas season, so that we may become more and more seeking shepherds and learn in time to seek the sacred in the innermost soul mood of man, as it has been found out of the profane mood, as I have characterized it to you, as more out of a carnival, not a sacred conversation, the most solemn form of the Christmas play also gradually arose.

If we try to seek the spiritual in the context of what the Christmas plays showed us, then we will find it in the right sense as shepherds, not as innkeepers, who have already lost — as the Christmas play symbolically suggests — the connection with the Christmas child. And our time has a great need of it, a very great need of it, our time in which materialism has acquired such wide, wide areas of the outer world, of inner human feeling, and in which it is so difficult for a spiritual world view to even find the right words to express what the right words are, given the misused words with which one expresses oneself.

This lecture is the 4th of 12 lectures from the lecture series entitled, The Human's Connection with the Elemental World, and the 3rd of 4 lectures in the series entitled, Olaf Asteson and the Awakening of the Earth Spirit.

The period from about Christmas to the present date (Jan. 7th) is really an important and significant period of the year, also in an occult connection. It is called “The period of the Thirteen Days.” The remarkable thing is that the importance of these thirteen days is felt by those who through the constitution of their souls have preserved an inkling of the ancient connection of the human soul with the spiritual world, of which we have often spoken. We know that the primitive human being who lives in the country or in a community which is little infected by our town life, preserves more of the connection with the spiritual world which existed in ancient times than one belonging to a town.We find many things in folk-poems regarding experiences of the soul during the period from Christmas Eve to Epiphany, Jan.6th.

This is the time when—after darkness has been greatest over the earth, directly after the winter solstice, when the sun again begins his victorious course,—together with the deepest immersion and subsequent liberation and redemption of nature,—the human soul can also have special experiences if it still has a definite connection with the spiritual world. Those who o longer possess the old clairvoyance, but who in their souls are still connected with the spiritual world, perceive a difference in the abnormal world of dreams at this period of the year. What the soul can then experience is important, because the soul—if it is still susceptible—can then really penetrate best into the spiritual world. To the modern man the course of the year is such that he can no longer distinguish the various seasons of the year; for while the snowstorms rage outside, when the darkness descends about 4 p.m. and it grows light late in the morning, the city man feels the same as in the summer months when the sun develops its greatest power. Man has been torn out of his ancient connection with the Cosmos in which he lived when he was outside in nature. To those however who have kept in touch with nature, what happens at Christmas time is not the same as what takes place at some other time in the year, for example, at midsummer. Whereas at midsummer the soul is most emancipated from what is connected with the spiritual world, at the time when nature has died away the most it is connected with the spiritual world and formerly had special experiences during this time.

Now there is a beautiful folk-poem in the old Norwegian language, a poem which was re-discovered a short time ago and has quickly become popular again owing to the peculiarly sympathetic understanding of the Norwegian people. It treats of a man who was still in connection with the spiritual world,—Olaf Oesteson. What he goes through in the time between Christmas and Epiphany is beautifully described in this poem. At the New Year Festival in Hanover on Jan. 1st, 1912, I tried to put this folk-poem “Olaf Oesteson” into German verse, so that it might come before our souls too. We will begin this evening with the song of Olaf Oesteson, which contains his experiences during the “Thirteen Nights.”

The Dream Song

O listen to my song!
I will sing to thee
Of a certain youth:
This was Olaf Oesteson,
who once slept so long.
Of him I sing to thee.

He went to rest on Christmas Eve.
A deep sleep fell upon him soon,
And he could not awake,
Till on the thirteenth day
The people went to Church.
This was Olaf Oesteson,
Who once slept for so long,
Of him I sing to thee.

He went to rest on Christmas Eve:
Long, long did he sleep!
And he could not awake,
Till the thirteenth day
The birds were spreading their wings.
This was Olaf Oesteson,
Who once slept for so long
Of him will I sing to thee.

Olaf could not awake
Till on the thirteenth day
The sun shone o'er the mountains
Then did he saddle his nimble steed,
And rode to the church in haste.
This was Olaf Oesteson,
Who once slept for so long,
Of him will I sing to thee.

The priest already stood
By the altar saying mass.
When by the church-door Olaf seated himself
To give tidings of many dreams,
Which during this long sleep
Had filled his soul.
This was Olaf Oesteson,
who once slept so long.
Of him I sing to thee.

Young folk and old ones too,
Give heed unto the words
Which Olaf speaks about his dreams.
This was Olaf Oesteson,
who once slept so long.
Of him I sing to thee.

II

I went to rest on Christmas Eve,
A deep sleep soon enveloped me;
And I could not awake,
Till on the thirteenth day
The people went to church.
Brightly shone the moon
And the paths stretched far away.

Up to the clouds was I lifted,
And flung to the depths of the sea.
Mirth cannot fall upon
ONe who follow me.
Brightly shone the moon
And the paths stretched far away.

Up to the clouds was I lifted
And thrust into dismal swamps,
beheld the terrors of hell
And also the light of heaven.
Brightly shone the moon
and the paths stretched far away.

Into earth's depths did I journey,
Where streams of Gods roar frightfully,
To look at them I was not able,
But I could hear their roaring.
Brightly shone the moon
And the paths stretched far away.

My black steed did not neigh,
And my dogs did not bark,
Nor did the bird of morning sing;
There was but one marvel everywhere.
Brightly shone the moon
And the paths stretched far away.

My spirit-land I had to travel o'er
The wide plane of a thorny heath,
And also the nails on my feet.
Brightly shone the moon
And the paths stretched far away.

I came to Gjaller-Bridge
It hangs high up in windy heights;
It is covered with red gold
and has nails with sharp points.
Brightly shone the moon
And the paths stretched far away.

The ghostly snake did strike me,
The ghostly hound did bite me.
The bull, he stood across the way
These are three beasts of the bridge:
Of frightfully evil nature are they.
Brightly shone the moon
And the paths stretched far away.

The dog to bite is ready
The snake desires to sting,
The bull, he threatens violence:
They let none pass across the bridge
Who will not honour truth.
Brightly shone the moon
And the paths stretched far away.

I went across the bridge
Narrow it is, and makes one dismay.
I had to wade through swamps ...
They lie behind me now!
Brightly shone the moon
And the paths stretched far away.

I had to wade in swamps,
Bottomless did they seem.
When I passed o'er the bridge,
I felt earth in my mouth—
Like the dead who lie in the grave.
Brightly shone the moon
And the paths stretched far away.

III

Then I came to waters
In which, like blue flames,
Masses of ice gleaned bright.
And God my purpose guided,
So that I shunned that region.
Brightly shone the moon
And the paths stretched far away.

I turned my steps to the winter-path
On the right could I perceive it.—
I looked as into Paradise,
That threw its light afar.
Brightly shone the moon
And the paths stretched far away.

And the holy Mother of God—
I saw her there in radiance!
She made no travel to Brooksvaline:
Saying that there men's souls are judged!
Brightly shone the moon
And the paths stretched far away.

IV

In other worlds I tarried
Through the length of many nights;
And God alone can know
How much distress of soul I saw
In Brooksvaline, where souls
The Day of Judgment undergo.

A young man there I saw,
Who had recklessly a boy had killed:
Now he must carry him eternally
In his own arms!
He stood deep in mire,
In Brooksvaline, where souls
The Day of Judgment undergo.

Also an old man did I see,
He wore a cloak as though of lead.
Thus was he punished, because he
In avarice had lived on earth.
In Brooksvaline, where souls
The Day of Judgment undergo.

Ad men came into sight
Who carried fiery burdens;
Dishonesty weighs heavily
On their poor souls,
In Brooksvaline, where souls
The Day of Judgment undergo.

Children too could I behold.
With glowing coals beneath their feet.
These worked their parents ill in life,
Which hurt their spirits grievously
In Brooksvaline, where souls
The Day of Judgment undergo.

I was charged to approach that house,
Where witches had to work
In the blood which in life
Had stirred them up to wrath,
In Brooksvaline, where souls
The Day of Judgment undergo.

Down from the North in savage troops,
Come riding wicked spirits,
Led by the Prince of Hell.
In Brooksvaline, where souls
The Day of Judgment undergo.

What came from out of the North
Seemed worst of all;
In front rode he, the Prince of Hell,
On his black charger.
In Brooksvaline, where souls
The Day of Judgment undergo.

But from the South there came
In serene tranquility yet other bands.
Foremost rode St. Michael
At the side of Jesus Christ.
In Brooksvaline, where souls
The Day of Judgment undergo.

The souls laden with sin
Could but in terror tremble!
Their tears ran down in streams—
The result of their bad deeds.
In Brooksvaline, where souls
The Day of Judgment undergo.

In majesty stood Michael there
Weighing the human souls
Upon his scales for sin;
And giving judgment stood
The judge of the world, Jesus Christ.
In Brooksvaline, where souls
The Day of Judgment undergo.

V

Happy is he who in earth-life
Gives shoes to those in need;
He need not walk with naked feet
In the field of thorns.
Thus speaks the tongue of the scales,
And universal truth
Resounds within the spirit-state.

Happy is he who in earth-life
Hath given bread to the poor!
He cannot in that world
Be injured by the dogs.
Thus speaks the tongue of the scales,
And universal truth
Resounds within the spirit-state.

Happy is he, who in earth-life
Hath given corn to the poor!
Threatened he cannot be
By the sharp horns of the bull,
When he must pass the Gjaller-bridge.
Thus speaks the tongue of the scales,
And universal truth
Resounds within the spirit-state.

Happy is he, who in earth-life
Gives clothing to the poor!
The ice-masses in Brooksvaline
Cannot avail to freeze him.
Thus speaks the tongue of the scales,
And universal truth
Resounds within the spirit-state.

VI

Young folk and old ones too,
Give heed unto the words
Which Olaf spake about his dreams.
Long didst thou sleep indeed ...
Wake now, Olaf Oesteson!

The poem itself is old; but as we have already said, it has recently reappeared as if of itself among the Norwegian people and is spreading with great rapidity. The fact of this poem spreading id one among the many things at the present time which shows how people are longing to understand the secrets now being opened up by Theosophy, for the fact that what is here described takes place—or at least could take place a comparatively short time ago—in a soul, is not merely “imagination.” Olaf Oesteson is a type of those people living in the North who, even in the Middle Ages, about the middle of that period, were able to experience literally, one might say, the things mentioned in this poem. When our Norwegian friends gave me this poem on my visit to Christiania the time before last, and wished me to say something about it, it was the fact just mentioned, one of general theosophical interest, which came particularly to notice, but what led up to include this poem in our theosophical understanding we can really penetrate more and more deeply into what comes to light in it. Thus for instance, it was significant to me that Olaf (that is an old Norwegian name) has the surname “Oesteson.” “Oesteson”—the son of what? Of “Oste”; and I tried to find what sort of mother this is the son of. Now of course we might adduce many things—including some that might lead to dispute—about he meaning of the word “Oste” (East): but it would be impossible to-day to explain all that is connected with it. If, however, we take into account all that comes into question, “Olaf Oesteson” means approximately this: One who is still a son of that soul which passes down from generation to generation, and is connected with the blood which is handed on from generation to generation. Thus we have traced this name back to what we have so often spoken of in Theosophy, namely, that in ancient times the old clairvoyance was connected with the relationship of the blood which passes through generations. We might translate “Olaf Oesteson” thus: Olaf, the one born of many generations and who still bears in his soul the characteristics of many generations.

Now when we examine his experiences, it is extremely interesting to notice that what Olaf Oesteson went through while he was asleep for thirteen days, beginning from Christmas Eve, during which time he did not woke was in a sort of psychic state. When we read these verses describing his various experiences with the broad homeliness of the nation, we are reminded of certain descriptions of the first stages of initiation, where we are told that so and so was led to the portal of death. We are shown in many places in the poem that Olaf Oesteson arrives at the portal of death. It is pointed out particularly clearly where he says that he feels like a corpse, even to the earth which feels between his teeth. When we remember that in initiation the etheric body extends beyond the limits of the skin and the neophite becomes larger and larger, so that he lives into the large, into the wide expanse of space, we are told in this poem how Olaf Oesteson descends deeply, feels himself in the depths of the earth and ascends to the clouds. Olaf Oesteson experience what man has to go through after death, for example, in the sphere of the moon. It is poetically described how the moon shines clearly and how the paths stretch far away, then the chasm is described which has to be passed over in the world which lies between the human world and the one leading out into cosmic space. The heavenly bridge connects what is human with what is cosmic. Our attention is then drawn to the beings expressed in the constellations; the bull and the serpent. To one who can look spiritually into the world, the constellations are only the expression of what exists spiritually in space. Then the world of Kamaloca is disclosed in the description of “Brooksvaline.” It describes how there is a sort of recompense, how people have there to experience what they have not acquired here on earth,—but in a compensating way.—We need not, however, go into all the details of the poem. We should not do this at all with poems such as this. We ought to feel they have originated from a frame of mind still closely connected with something which existed in such a people as this, much longer than among nations which lived in the more interior part of the continent or who were connected with the life in cities. In the Norwegian people, which still possesses in its national language many things which border closely upon occult secrets, it is possible to keep souls in touch for a long time with what exists behind outer material phenomena.

Remember who I explained that, parallel with the seasons of the year, there are spiritual facts taking place, how in the spring when the plants spring forth the earth, when everything wakens, as it were, when the days grow longer, we have to recognize what may be called a sort of sleeping of the elementary and higher spirits connected with the earth. In spring, when outwardly the earth awakens, we see that spiritually this is connected with a sort of falling asleep of the earth; and when outer nature dies down again it is connected with an awakening of the spiritual nature of the earth. When about Christmas time outer nature is as though asleep, it is the time when the spiritual part of the earth is most active, and includes elemental, less important beings, as well as great and mighty beings connected with earthly life. It is only when it is observed outwardly that it seems as though we must compare spring with the awakening of the earth and winter to its going to sleep. Seen occultly it is the reverse. The “Spirit of the Earth” which however, consists of many spirits, is awake in winter and asleep in summer. Just as in the human organism the organic and plant activities are most active during sleep, as these forces then work even into the brain, and as the purely organic activity is subdued while the person is awake, so is it also with the earth. When the earth is most active, when everything has sprouted forth, when the sun has reached its zenith about St. John's Day, the Spirit of the earth is asleep. In accord with this occult truth the festival of Christmas, the festival of the awakening of the spirit, was fixed in winter. Things which have been handed down as customs from ancient times often correspond to these occult verities.

Now one who knows how to live with the spirit of the earth celebrates, for example, the festival of St. John in summer, for this festival is a kind of materialistic festival; it celebrates that which is revealed in an outward materialistic form. One who is connected with the Spirit of the Earth, with what lives spiritually in the earth, awakens in his inner being—that is, he sleeps outwardly like Olaf Oesteson—best at Christmas time, during the “Thirteen days.” This is an occult fact, which to occultism signifies exactly the same as, for example, the fact of the outer solstitial point to ordinary materialistic science. Of course materialistic science will consider it to be an obvious thing that in astronomy it should describe the activity of the sun in summer and in winter in a purely external manner, it will consider foolish what to occultists is a fact, namely that the spiritual solstice is at its highest point in winter, that therefore the conditions are then the most favorable for those who wish to come in touch with the Spirit of the Earth and all that is spiritual. Therefore to one who wishes to strengthen his soul's powers it may come about that he can have his best experiences during the thirteen days after Christmas. At that time, without noticing it, experiences come forth from the soul,—although the modern man is emancipated from outer processes, so that occult experiences can come at any time, but in so far as outer conditions can have an influence, the time between Christmas and New Year is most important.

Thus are we reminded by this poem in quite a natural manner, that a great deal of what we are able to relate regarding the period between death and rebirth was known among certain peoples a comparatively short time ago, many knew it from direct experience.

I have sought out of the esoteric aspect of the Easter thought to speak to you about how, when the course of Nature is permeated by spirit, it must come about that an autumn festival is added to the festivals of the year. This should be a kind of Michael festival, placed in relation to the fall equinox approximately in the same way as Christmas is to the winter solstice, Easter to the spring equinox, and St. John's to the summer solstice.

I should like to try to bring closer to you the Easter thought appropriate to the present age, particularly in its feeling content, so that tomorrow I can lay before you the whole significance of such a contemplation.

When we celebrate the Easter festival today, if we look about us into the consciousness of contemporary humanity and are honest with ourselves, we shall have to admit that the Easter thought is actually very little true for the greater part of humanity! On what does the truth of the Easter thought depend? The truth depends on a man's being able to link with this thought a mental image showing the Christ Being as having gone through death, having conquered Death, and then when He had undergone death and the succeeding Resurrection, having thereafter so united Himself with mankind that He could still give revelations to those who had formerly been His disciples, to the Apostles. But the Resurrection thought has more and more faded away, whereas when Christianity was in its inception it had been so living that Paul's words could sound across the ages from this epoch: “And if the Christ be not risen, then is... your faith vain!”

Paul has here linked Christianity directly with the Easter thought, that is with the thought of the Resurrection. People who have received the education of the present day call the Resurrection a miracle, and as miracle it is excluded from the realm of what is or can be reality. So that for all those who can no longer penetrate to the Resurrection thought, the Easter festival merely reflects an ancient custom, as do the rest of the Christian festivals. In the course of the years we have mentioned this from the most varied points of view.

It will first be necessary for mankind to reacquire a knowledge of the spiritual world as such in order to understand events which do not belong to the realm of sense reality; and what is connected with the Resurrection thought must be regarded as such an event. Then it will be possible for the Easter thought to become truly living again, which it cannot be for a humanity that relegates the Resurrection to the realm of unreal miracles.

The Easter thought arose in those epochs of mankind in which there were still remnants of the ancient primitive human knowledge of the spiritual world. We know that at the beginning of human earth-evolution, man had a certain instinctive clairvoyance by means of which he could gain glimpses of the spiritual world which led him to view this world as of equal validity with the physical sense world. This original instinctive clairvoyance is lost for earthly humanity. But in the first three centuries of the Christian era, the last remnants of it at least still existed. Hence in these centuries a certain understanding of the Easter thought based upon ancient human insight could still take root.

Such an understanding became blunted in the fourth century, when preparation began for what has come to full expression since the first third of the fifteenth century; namely, man's life in abstract, dead thoughts, which we have often mentioned. In these abstract, dead thoughts, in which natural science attains greatness, the Easter thought soon died. Today the time has come when it must again awaken as a living thought. But in order to awaken, it must pass over out of the state of death into a state of livingness.

That which is living is characterized by the fact that it puts forth something other than itself out of itself. In the early Christian centuries, when the Easter thought was spreading throughout Christendom, the “Gemuets”¹ of men were still sensitive enough to experience inwardly something very powerful when they pictured the grave of Christ and, rising out of the grave, that Being Who was now united with mankind. The Gemuets could experience with great inner force what appeared before their souls in this powerful image. And this inner experience was a reality in the human soul life.

Only that is a reality in the human soul life which this soul really lays hold of, just as the senses ordinarily lay hold of the outer sense world. The people of the early centuries felt that they were changed by beholding the event of the Death and the Resurrection of Christ. They felt that by this sight their souls were transformed, just as a man feels that he is changed by physical events in the course of his life on earth.

The human being is transformed at about the seventh year by the change of teeth, and again at about the fourteenth or fifteenth year by the onset of puberty. These are bodily transformations. In the contemplation of the Easter thought the early Christians felt themselves transformed in their inner soul life. They felt themselves thereby lifted out of one stage of human existence and transported into another.

In the course of time the Easter thought has lost this force, this power, and it can regain it only when the Resurrection, which cannot be understood according to natural laws, regains reality through spiritual science, a science which comprehends the spiritual. But what is spiritually conceived attains reality, not when this spiritual is conceived merely in abstract thoughts but only when it is also grasped in lively connection with the world appearing before the senses.

Anyone who wants to cling to the spiritual only in its abstraction, who says, for example, that we should not pull down the spiritual into the physical sense world, should at the same time maintain that the Divine Being is degraded when He is represented as having created the world. The Divine is comprehended in its greatness and power, not when we place it outside and beyond the sensible, but when we ascribe to it the power to work in this sensible world, to permeate this sensible world creatively. It is a debasing of the Divine to want to set it up yonder in abstract heights, in a “cloud-cuckoo-land.” And we will never live in spiritual realities if we conceive the spiritual only in its abstractness, if we cannot bring it into connection with the whole course of the world as this comes to meet us.

And this cosmic course, as far as our earthly life is concerned, meets us first of all in the fact that this earthly life comprises a certain number of years, and that these years present the return of certain events in a regular rhythm, as I indicated yesterday. After a year we return to approximately the same conditions of weather, of sun-position, and so forth. The course of the year thus enters into our earthly life in a rhythmical way.

We saw yesterday that this course of the year represents an in-and-out-breathing by the Earth itself of soul-spiritual elements. If we picture to ourselves once more the four high points of this Earth breathing-process, as we allowed them to come before our souls, we must say to ourselves: The time of the Christmas festival represents the time when the Earth holds its breath within it. The soul-spiritual part of the Earth is completely absorbed. Deep in the bosom of the Earth there rests all that the Earth unfolded during summer in order to let it be stimulated by the cosmos. All that opened up to the cosmos and was yielded up to its forces during the summertime has now been completely drawn in by the Earth, to rest in her deeps at Christmas time. Man of course does not dwell in the earthly depths; physically he lives on the surface of the Earth. Soul-spiritually also, he does not dwell in the depths of the Earth, for he lives actually in the Earth's periphery; he lives in the atmosphere that surrounds the Earth.

Therefore esoteric wisdom has always recognized the essential being of the Earth at the time of the winter solstice, at Christmas time, as something concealed at first, as something which cannot be penetrated by the ordinary forces of human knowledge, something which belongs in the sphere of the esoteric mysteries. And in all ancient times when something comparable to our present Christmas festival existed, it was recognized that what goes on in connection with the Earth at Christmas time could be grasped only by initiation into mystery-knowledge, by the initiation still known in Greece as the Chthonian Mysteries. By means of this initiation, man forsook in a certain way the periphery of the Earth in which he lived with his ordinary consciousness, to immerse himself in something into which he could not submerge physically. He immersed himself in the soul-spiritual element, and thus he learned to know what the Earth becomes during midwinter, when she draws her soul-spiritual element into herself.

And then a man came to know through this Mystery initiation, that at the time of the winter solstice the Earth is especially receptive to permeation by the Moon forces. This was regarded as the secret—if I may express myself in the modern sense—as the Christmas secret of the ancient mysteries: that just at Christmas time one comes to know how the Earth, by being permeated and saturated by her spirit-soul-being, becomes especially receptive in her inner being to the activity of the Moon forces.

In certain ancient times, for example, no one was entrusted with a knowledge of healing science unless he was initiated in the Winter Mysteries, and understood how the Earth, through the holding of her breath, becomes especially susceptible inwardly to the activity of the Moon forces, how at this time she permeates especially the plants with healing forces, how at this time she makes the plant world, and to a certain extent also the world of the lower animals into something entirely different.

The Christmas initiation was felt as a descent into the depths of the earthly world. But something else was connected with this Christmas initiation; namely, something that was felt in a certain sense to be a danger for the human being. A man said to himself: “When anyone really observes his consciousness in connection with what lives in the Earth as Moon forces at Christmastime, he comes into a state of consciousness in which he must be inwardly very strong, must have inwardly fortified himself, in order to withstand the attack from all sides of the Ahrimanic powers, who live in the Earth precisely because of its having taken in the Moon activity.” And only in the strength which a man had himself developed in his soul-spiritual being, in the strength to break the opposition of these forces, did he see what makes it possible to endure his earth existence over the long run.

But then some time after the celebration of these Christmas Mysteries, the teachers of the Mysteries gathered their pupils together, and as a sort of revelation, said to them the following: “Certainly, through initiation one can, in full consciousness, behold what is at work within the Earth at the time of the winter solstice. But with the oncoming of spring, when the plant world starts to grow, something rises up out of the depths of the Earth which permeates all that is growing and sprouting, permeates also man himself; namely, what the Ahrimanic powers bring about. At a time when man was still endowed with divine forces, as he was at the Earth's beginning, then through this primordial divine heritage men could still resist the attack of the Ahrimanic powers which broke over mankind in this way during the time of the winter moon. But (so the initiates told their pupils) a time will come when mankind will be rendered insensible to the spiritual through the agency of the Moon forces which the Earth takes up in the wintertime. With the growing and sprouting in the spring, a kind of intoxication with regard to the spiritual will come over mankind, depriving men of any consciousness that anything spiritual exists. Then, should mankind not find it possible to resist these intoxicating forces, the humanity of the Earth will go into decline and not be able to develop further with the Earth to future higher stages of earth evolution.”

The initiates painted in gloomy colors the age which had to break in for humanity in the fifteenth century, when mankind will excel to be sure in abstract, dead thoughts, but when man can again acquire spiritual capacities only by gaining new strength to overcome the intoxicating forces that rise out of the Earth. This he can do by developing the particular spiritual force now accessible to mankind.

When we form such visualizations, we transpose ourselves, so to speak, into the connection that exists between the course of the year in nature and what lives in the spirit. We bring together what is otherwise abstract, merely thought-out, with what is the natural sensible course as it confronts us, for example, in the seasons.

The polar opposite of this Christmas Mystery is the St. John's Mystery, at the time of the summer solstice. Then the Earth has completely exhaled. The spirit-soul element of the Earth is then utterly surrendered to the super-earthly powers, to the cosmic powers. Then the spirit-soul element of the Earth takes in all that is extraterrestrial. Just as the ancient initiates had said of the Christmas Mystery, so they said also of the St. John's Mystery (we use modern forms of expression, but there were appropriate forms in the ancient Mysteries also)—the initiates said that it was necessary to attain initiation in order to penetrate the secrets of the St. John's Mystery, that is, the secrets of the heavens. For man belongs to the periphery of the Earth; he belongs neither within the Earth, nor as earthly man does he belong to the heavens. Hence he must be initiated into the secrets of the sub-earthly in order to come to know the secrets of the super-earthly.

In a certain way, the Easter Mystery and the Michael or Autumn Mystery were seen as holding the balance between the super-earthly and the sub-earthly. And the Michael Mystery, as we have said, will first attain its proper significance in the time that is still future to our own.

The Easter Mystery in its full magnitude entered into the evolution of mankind through the Mystery of Golgotha. And this Easter Mystery was understood, as I have already said, because remnants of the ancient clairvoyance still existed. At that time people could still raise themselves up in their Gemuets or feeling souls to the resurrected Christ. The Easter Mystery was therefore woven into that ritual which was not an initiation ritual, but a ritual for mankind in general; it was woven into the ritual of the celebration of the Mass.

But with the retreat of primitive clairvoyance, the understanding of the Easter Mystery was lost. People begin to discuss a matter only when they no longer understand it. All the discussion that began after the first Christian centuries about how the Easter thought is to be understood derive from the fact that people could no longer comprehend it in a direct elementary way.

Now we have often been able to apply to the Easter thought what anthroposophical spiritual science gives to us. What is essential here is that this anthroposophical spiritual research points again to forms of life which are not exhausted between birth and death in the sense world; that it places what can be spiritually investigated over against what can be sensibly investigated; that it makes comprehensible how the Christ could converse with His disciples, even after the physical body was turned to dust. In the light of spiritual research, the Resurrection thought becomes alive again. But this Resurrection thought will be fully understood only if it is linked to what I might call its counter-pole. What then does the Resurrection thought really portray? The Christ Being descended from spiritual heights, entered into the body of Jesus and lived on Earth in this body, thereby bringing into the earthly sphere forces in themselves super-terrestrial. And these super-earthly forces which the Christ Being brought into the earthly sphere were from the time of the Mystery of Golgotha on, united with the forces of mankind's evolution. Since then that which the men of ancient times could behold only outside in cosmic space is to be feelingly perceived within the evolution of earthly humanity. Following the Resurrection, the Christ united Himself with mankind, and since then He lives, not only in the super-earthly heights, but also within the earth-existence; He lives in evolution, in the stream of mankind's evolution.

Above all, this event must be regarded not from the earthly point of view alone, but also from the super-earthly viewpoint. We can say that we should not view the Christ only in the way He comes to Earth out of heavenly worlds and becomes man, in the way He is given to men, but we should view this Christ Event also from the standpoint that the Christ actually departs from the spiritual world when He descends to the Earth.

Human beings saw the Christ arise in their realm. The Gods saw the Christ forsake the heavenly world and plunge down among mankind. For men the Christ appeared; for certain spiritual beings He vanished. Only when He passed through the Resurrection did He appear again to certain extraterrestrial spiritual beings, now shining out to them from the Earth like a star, a star which radiates out from the Earth into the spiritual world. Spiritual beings mark the Mystery of Golgotha by saying: “A star began to shine out from the Earth into the spiritual realm.” And it was felt to be of immense importance for the spiritual world that the Christ had submerged into a human body, and had gone through death in this body. For by partaking in death in a human body He was enabled immediately after this death to undertake something which His former divine companions could by no means have accomplished.

These former divine companions confronted, as an inimical world, what even in earlier times was called “hell.” But the efficacy of these spiritual beings stopped short at the gates of hell. These spiritual beings worked upon man. The forces of man extend even into hell. This signifies nothing other than man's subconscious projection into the Ahrimanic forces in the wintertime and also into the ascent of these Ahrimanic forces in the spring. The divine spiritual beings felt this as a world opposed to them. They saw it rise up out of the Earth and felt it to be an exceedingly problematic world. But they themselves had only a roundabout connection with it through man. They could only observe it in a certain way. But because the Christ had descended to the Earth, had Himself become man, He could descend into the realm of these Ahrimanic powers and overcome them. This is expressed in the Creed as “the Descent into Hell.”

This Descent into Hell provides the opposite pole to the Resurrection. This is what Christ has done for mankind: By descending from the divine heights and taking on the form of man, He became able actually to descend into the realm to whose dangers man is exposed, into which the other Gods, who had not been exposed to human death could not descend. In His way the Christ gained the victory over death. And therewith entered, I might say, as the opposite pole of the Descent into Hell, the ascent into the spiritual world, in spite of the fact that the Christ remained on Earth. For Christ had so united Himself with mankind that he had descended to that to which mankind is exposed. During the winter and spring seasons, He could win for man that which works out of extraterrestrial regions into the Earth again from St. John's to autumn. Thus in the Easter thought we see united in a certain way the Descent into the region of Hell, and through this descent the winning of the heavenly region for the further evolution of mankind.

All this belongs to a right conception of the Easter thought. But what would this Easter thought be if it could not become living! It was possible in ancient times to connect the right feeling awareness with the thought of the winter solstice only because they had on the other hand the St. John's thought. Schematically drawn: If one had the earthly with its deeply concealed winter nature (orange), then its counterpart was what in summer lay in the super-earthly periphery (orange). Both were to be reached only through initiation, yet they were connected by what was in the atmosphere surrounding the Earth, in the Earth's periphery (green), Christmas calls for St. John's. St. John's calls for Christmas. Man would rigidify under the influence of the Ahrimanic powers if he could not be exposed to the loosening Luciferic powers, who again give wings to thought, so that it need not remain rigid but can thaw again under the influence of the light.

At first humanity in its evolution had only the one pole, the Easter pole, and this Easter pole became paralyzed. The Easter festival lost its inner vitality. It will regain its inner life only when man can think about this festival in such a way that he can say to himself: “Through what is symbolically expressed in the Descent into Hell—which in reality can be understood as the Resurrection—a counterweight was given against something which had to come; namely, the paralyzing of all spiritual vision, its dying away in the earthly life. Prophetically, Christ Jesus wanted to prepare for what had to come; namely, the circumstance that man during his life on Earth between birth and death would have to forget the super-earthly, the spiritual, that he would in a certain way die to the spiritual. Opposed to this dying away of man in earthly life stands the Easter thought of the victory of super-earthly life over the earthly.”

On the one side is this: Man descends from his pre-earthly life; but in the period that dawned in the first half of the fifteenth century, he will in his earthly life more and more forget his super-earthly origin; as to his soul-being he will die away, as it were, in the earthly life. That stands on the one side.

On the other stands this: There was a spiritual, heavenly Being, Who by His deed, working out of the heavens into the Earth, set forth the counter-image. That spiritual Being descended into a human body, and in the Resurrection has, through His own being, placed the super-earthly spiritual among the men of Earth. In remembrance of this we have the Easter festival, which puts before mankind the picture of the burial of Christ Jesus and the Resurrection of Christ Jesus.

He was laid in the grave and thereafter He arose—this is the Easter thought, as it stands in cosmic records... “Look upon thyself, O Man; thou descendest out of the super-earthly worlds; thou art threatened by the danger that thy soul will die away in the earthly life. Therefore the Christ appears, Who sets before thine eyes how that from which thou also didst arise, how that super-earthly spiritual conquers death. There stands before thee in mighty images such as could be placed before mankind: the entombment of Christ Jesus, the Resurrection of Christ Jesus. He was laid in the grave. He rose from the grave and appeared to those who could behold Him.”

But with the paralyzed soul forces of man today, this image can no longer become living. Where could it become alive? In a traditional faith man can still look upon what the Easter festival gives him: Upon the sublime picture of the burial and the Resurrection. But out of the inner force of his soul, he can no longer, of himself, find anything to connect with this Easter thought, with the thought of the entombment and the Resurrection. It is out of spiritual knowledge that he must again unite something with it.

And this something is another thought, to which there can be no alternative. It is, however, possible for a human being to let spiritual knowledge approach him so that he may understand this “other.” Let us place this “other” before ourselves, so as to inscribe it deeply within our souls. Easter thought: He has been laid in the grave; He is risen. Now let us place before ourselves the other thought which must come over mankind: He is risen and can confidently be laid in the grave. Easter thought: He has been laid in the grave; He is risen. Michaelmas thought: He is risen and can confidently be laid in the grave.

The first thought, the Easter thought, pertains to the Christ; the second thought pertains to the human being. It pertains to the man who directly comprehends the power of the Easter thought, comprehends how when spiritual knowledge enters into the earthly life of the present, in which his soul-spiritual is dying away, his soul can resurrect, so that he becomes living between birth and death, so that in the earthly life he becomes inwardly alive.

The human being must through spiritual knowledge comprehend this inner resurrection, this inner awakening; then will he confidently be laid in the grave. Then he may be laid in the grave, through which he otherwise would fall prey to those Ahrimanic powers who work within the earth realm at the time of the winter solstice.

And the festival which contains this thought: “He is risen and can confidently be laid in the grave”—this festival must fall in the time when the leaves are beginning to turn yellow and fall from the trees, when the fruits have ripened, when the Sun has received that power which brings to maturity what in the spring was budding and sprouting, full of the forces of growth, but which also brings withering and the inclination to seek again the inner part of the Earth; when what is developing on the Earth begins to be a symbol of the grave.

If we place the Easter festival at the time when life begins to bud and to sprout, when the forces of growth attain their highest point, then the other festival, which contains: “He is risen and can confidently be laid in the grave,” we must place at the time when Earth nature begins to wither, when the mood of the grave is spreading abroad in Earth nature, when the symbol of the grave can appear before the soul of man. Then the Michael thought begins to stir in man, that thought which is not, like the Easter thought in the earliest centuries of Christianity, directed toward a kind of inner perceiving (Anschauung).²

In the first centuries of Christianity, this feeling perception was directed to the Christ laid in the grave and risen. In this perception the soul was made strong, was filled with its strongest forces. In the festival-thought at the time of the fall equinox, the soul must feel its strength when appeal is made not to its perceiving, but to its will. “Take into thyself the Michael thought which confers the Ahrimanic powers, that thought which makes thee strong to gain here on Earth knowledge of the spirit, so that thou canst overcome the powers of Death.”—As the Easter thought is directed to the perception, this thought is directed to the will-powers: to take up the Michael force, which means to take the force of spiritual knowledge into the will-forces. And so the Easter thought can become living, can be brought directly to the human soul and spirit, when now the Michael thought, the thought of the Michael festival in the autumn, is felt to be the counter-pole of the Easter thought—just as the St. John's thought was perceived to be the counter-pole of the Christmas thought. As the Christmas thought by its inner livingness, has brought forth the St. John's thought after a half-year, so must the Easter thought bring forth the Michael thought. Mankind must attain an esoteric maturity, so as to think, not merely abstractly, but to be able again to think so concretely that men can again become festival-creating. Then it will be possible again to unite something spiritual with the cycle of sense phenomena.

All our thoughts are so abstract! But no matter how remarkable they are, how intelligent, if they remain abstract, life will not be able to penetrate them. When today men reflect that Easter might be set abstractly on any day, no longer according to the constellations of the stars, when today all higher knowledge is darkened, when man no longer sees any relation between insight into the soul-spiritual and the natural-physical forces, the force must once more awaken in man which will be able to unite something spiritual directly with the sense phenomena of the world.

Wherein then did the spiritual strength of man consist, making him able to create festivals in the course of the year, in accordance with the yearly phenomena? It consisted in the primal spiritual force. Today men can continue to celebrate festivals according to the ancient traditional custom, but they must gain once more the esoteric force out of themselves to “speak” something into Nature that accords with natural events. It must become possible to grasp the Michael thought as the blossom of the Easter thought. While the Easter thought stems from physical blossoming, it will become possible to place the blossom of the Easter thought—the Michael thought—into the course of the year as the outcome of physical withering.

People must learn once more to “think” the spiritual “together with” the course of nature. It is not admissible today for a person merely to indulge in esoteric speculations; it is necessary today to be able once again to do the esoteric. But people will be able to do this only when they can conceive their thoughts so concretely, so livingly that they don't withdraw from everything that is going on around them when they think, but rather that they think with the course of events: “think together with” the fading of the leaves, with the ripening of the fruits, in a Michaelic way, just as at Easter one knows how to think with the sprouting, springing, blossoming plants and flowers.

When it is understood how to think with the course of the year, then forces will intermingle with the thoughts that will let men again hold a dialogue with the divine spiritual powers revealing themselves from the stars. Men have drawn down from the stars the power to establish festivals which have an inner human validity. Festivals must be founded out of inner esoteric force. Then from the dialogue with the fading, ripening plants, with the dying Earth, by finding the right inward festival mood, men will also again be able to hold converse with the Gods and link human existence with divine existence.

• 1. The Gemüt, or feeling soul, together with the intellectual soul forms the centermost of the three soul elements in Rudolf Steiner's picture of man. This soul element was predominant in the fourth post-Atlantean epoch, in which the event of Golgotha took place.
• 2. It is assumed that Anschauung here is intended to describe the way man's Gemuet could inwardly experience the Entombment and Resurrection, as was indicated earlier. This would be perceptively, feelingly, rather than through logic.