The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Dear children! Several weeks ago, when we all came to this school for the first time, I visited you more often. Then there were a few weeks when I had to be quite far away from here, but each morning when I got up and went to work, I wondered, “What are my dear Waldorf children and their teachers doing now?” This thought came to me often during the day. And now, in the festive Christmas season, I have had the privilege of being able to visit you again. I went into all your classes and asked many of you, “Do you love your teachers?” [“Yes!” shout the children.] And you see, you answered me warmly, just like that. And then I said to you, “That is an especially nice Christmas gift for me!”

And it is a nice Christmas gift for me. You see, dear children, I have to think about how you have been spending your days since Herr Molt gave us the gift of this Waldorf School. After resting from evening until morning in the divine spirit that watches over your souls from the time you go to sleep until the time you wake up, and after you have washed and dressed and gotten all ready, you come up here to this beautiful schoolhouse. And I believe that many of you, maybe even all of you, look forward to everything that will be here for you in this beautiful schoolhouse. [“Yes!” shout the children.]

Dear children, you have reason to look forward to it. You see, while I was away from you I thought of you often, and in my thoughts I wondered, “What are my dear Waldorf children doing?” And I also said to myself, “They will be doing just fine, because they have nice capable teachers, and these nice capable teachers approach them with real love and are working very hard so that something good will come of the children.” And then I had to think of how you look forward to coming up here and of the love you show for your teachers. These teachers have to work long and hard to be able to teach you all the good and beautiful things that will make good and capable people out of you.

And you know, my dear children, I was especially pleased when I was in the classes and some children would come in playing the part of Ruprecht¹ or of little angels, and they sang and talked about the child Jesus, about the holy Christ Child. It was beautiful and grand that you could speak about the Christ with such love, and that you could listen with such love.

And do you know where your teachers get all the strength and ability they need so that they can teach you to grow up to be good and capable people? They get it from the Christ, whom we think about at Christmas. We think about how He came into the world to bring joy to all people, and you gave some beautiful presentations about Him today.

You see, my dear children, there are beings on earth that are not like human beings—for example, the animals around us—and we might often think that we should envy these animals. You can look up and see the birds flying, and perhaps then you might say, “Oh, if only we could fly, too! Then we would be able to soar into the air.” We human beings cannot fly like the birds because we have no wings. However, dear children, we can fly into the element of the spiritual, and we have two wings to fly there. The wing on the left is called “hard work,” and the other wing on the right is called “paying attention.” We cannot see them, but these two wings—hard work and paying attention—make it possible for us to fly into life and become people who are really ready for life. If we work hard and pay attention as children, and if we have teachers that are as good and capable as yours, then what makes us fit for life will come to us, and on the wings of hard work and paying attention we will be able to fly into life, where the love of our teachers carries us.

You know, you can sometimes think that there are things that are more fun than learning. But that is not really true; there is no greater joy than learning. You see, when you enjoy something that lets you be inattentive and does not make you work hard, then the joy is over immediately. You enjoy it, and then the joy is gone. But when you enjoy what you can learn, when you are flying on the wings of hard work and paying attention, then, my dear children, something stays behind in your souls. (Later on you will know what the soul is.) Something stays in your soul, and you can enjoy that over and over again. When we have learned something good and proper, it comes back again and again; we enjoy it again and again with a joy that never stops. But the other fun things, the ones that come only from inattentiveness and laziness, they come to an end.

You see, because many of you—all of you, I would like to believe—want to work hard and pay attention to what your nice teachers are giving you, I was so glad to see your love for your teachers streaming out of your eyes when I saw you again. And so that you do not forget it, I would like to ask you again, “Don't you all sincerely love your teachers?” [“Yes, we do!” shout the children.] Now, that is what you should always say. That is what you should always feel, and then the spirit whose earthly life and birth we remember at Christmas time, the Christ spirit, will take joy in you.

Now, my dear children, when you have felt your teachers’ love all day long up here, then you can go home again and tell your parents about what you have learned, and your parents will be glad and say to themselves, “Well, our children are going to grow up to be good and capable people.”

Make sure to write that in your souls, for now is a good time to do that. When we think of the great festival that reminds us that the Christ entered our world to bring comfort and joy to all human beings who turn their hearts and souls toward Him, then we can also inscribe in our souls the intention to become good human beings. Because the power of Christ is helping you, you will become what you write in your souls today, what you seriously intend to become. And when I come again and see that you have made even more progress, when I come again and see that you can once again show me that you have taken love for your teachers into your hearts and kept it there, then I will again be very glad. My warmest Christmas wish for you today is that this love will grow ever more perfect in you, and that you may continue to unfold the left wing of the human soul, which is hard work, and the right wing, which is paying attention.

And now that I have spoken to the children, let me still say a few words to those who have accompanied them here. What I just said to the children flows from a deeply satisfied heart, because I really have received the most beautiful Christmas greeting from them. When I came into the school, what wafted toward me was something I would like to call the good spirit of this school. It was the really good spirit, the good and unifying spirit, that brings teachers and children together here.

You see, in these days a Christmas mood was resting on all the serious teaching that was taking place, and it was deeply satisfying to perceive this Christmas mood, into which the revelation of Christ speaks, if I may put it like that, in all the corridors and especially in the classrooms. This was no mere supplement to the regular lessons. You could feel that our faculty managed to warm and enlighten everything that was being presented to the children’s souls and hearts and understanding with the real, true spirit of Christ. Here, in accordance with the wishes of the divine spirit, we do not speak the name of Christ after every sentence—for “Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain!”—but it is nonetheless true that this spirit of Christ is with us in all our individual subjects and in every teaching activity. This is something that can readily be felt, especially at this time of year. Perhaps you too have been able to feel it in what came to meet you out of this Christmas assembly.

And finally, to conclude my Christmas greeting, I would like to appeal to the children whom you have sent here. I hope their progress pleases you.

Children, when you enter these rooms with the other boys and girls, recall that you are meant to love each other warmly, to love each and every other one. If love prevails among you, you will thrive under the care of your teachers, and your parents at home will have no concerns and will have loving thoughts of how you are spending your time here.

There is something we may say today, ladies and gentlemen, which should resound, as the spirit of this school, from every word and glance the children bring home to you who have sent them here, as an echo of what is meant to permeate all of our human journeying on earth since the mystery of Golgotha took place, to permeate all human work and activity, and especially all activity in which the spirit has work to do. May the words that ring in our souls today weave through everything that human beings do out of self-understanding, weave like a warming breath of air or beam of sunlight:

The revelation of the divine from heavenly heights,
And peace to human beings on earth who are of good will!²

Our great ideal is to cultivate this good will in the children of the Waldorf School. Our concern must be to find the governance of the spirit of the world in our work, in everything we do. May the Christmas message, “The revelation of the spirit of God from the heavenly heights, and peace to human beings on earth who are of good will,” trickle down into all the work of the Waldorf School as well. May the school’s working strength be governed by brotherly love and by the peace that inspires and supports all work! That, dear ladies and gentlemen, is my Christmas greeting to you today.

• 1. Ruprecht: in the European tradition, the Moorish helper of St. Nicholas, who carries a black sack and administers symbolic punishments to children who have been bad during the past year.
• 2. A free rendering of the angels’ words to the shepherds (Luke 2:14).

Several weeks ago, when we all came to this school for the first time, I visited you more often. Then there were a few weeks when I had to be quite far away from here, but each morning when I got up and went to work, I wondered, “What are my dear Waldorf children and their teachers doing now?” This thought came to me often during the day. And now, in the festive Christmas season, I have had the privilege of being able to visit you again. I went into all your classes and asked many of you, “Do you love your teachers?” [“Yes!” shout the children.] And you see, you answered me warmly, just like that. And then I said to you, “That is an especially nice Christmas gift for me!”

And it is a nice Christmas gift for me. You see, dear children, I have to think about how you have been spending your days since Herr Molt gave us the gift of this Waldorf School. After resting from evening until morning in the divine spirit that watches over your souls from the time you go to sleep until the time you wake up, and after you have washed and dressed and gotten all ready, you come up here to this beautiful schoolhouse. And I believe that many of you, maybe even all of you, look forward to everything that will be here for you in this beautiful schoolhouse. [“Yes!” shout the children.]

Dear children, you have reason to look forward to it. You see, while I was away from you I thought of you often, and in my thoughts I wondered, “What are my dear Waldorf children doing?” And I also said to myself, “They will be doing just fine, because they have nice capable teachers, and these nice capable teachers approach them with real love and are working very hard so that something good will come of the children.” And then I had to think of how you look forward to coming up here and of the love you show for your teachers. These teachers have to work long and hard to be able to teach you all the good and beautiful things that will make good and capable people out of you.

And you know, my dear children, I was especially pleased when I was in the classes and some children would come in playing the part of Ruprecht¹ or of little angels, and they sang and talked about the child Jesus, about the holy Christ Child. It was beautiful and grand that you could speak about the Christ with such love, and that you could listen with such love.

And do you know where your teachers get all the strength and ability they need so that they can teach you to grow up to be good and capable people? They get it from the Christ, whom we think about at Christmas. We think about how He came into the world to bring joy to all people, and you gave some beautiful presentations about Him today.

You see, my dear children, there are beings on earth that are not like human beings—for example, the animals around us—and we might often think that we should envy these animals. You can look up and see the birds flying, and perhaps then you might say, “Oh, if only we could fly, too! Then we would be able to soar into the air.” We human beings cannot fly like the birds because we have no wings. However, dear children, we can fly into the element of the spiritual, and we have two wings to fly there. The wing on the left is called “hard work,” and the other wing on the right is called “paying attention.” We cannot see them, but these two wings—hard work and paying attention—make it possible for us to fly into life and become people who are really ready for life. If we work hard and pay attention as children, and if we have teachers that are as good and capable as yours, then what makes us fit for life will come to us, and on the wings of hard work and paying attention we will be able to fly into life, where the love of our teachers carries us.

You know, you can sometimes think that there are things that are more fun than learning. But that is not really true; there is no greater joy than learning. You see, when you enjoy something that lets you be inattentive and does not make you work hard, then the joy is over immediately. You enjoy it, and then the joy is gone. But when you enjoy what you can learn, when you are flying on the wings of hard work and paying attention, then my dear children, something stays behind in your souls. (Later on you will know what the soul is.) Something stays in your soul, and you can enjoy that over and over again. When we have learned something good and proper, it comes back again and again; we enjoy it again and again with a joy that never stops. But the other fun things, the ones that come only from inattentiveness and laziness, they come to an end.

You see, because many of you—all of you, I would like to believe—want to work hard and pay attention to what your nice teachers are giving you, I was so glad to see your love for your teachers streaming out of your eyes when I saw you again. And so that you do not forget it, I would like to ask you again, “Don't you all sincerely love your teachers?” [“Yes, we do!” shout the children.] Now, that is what you should always say. That is what you should always feel, and then the spirit whose earthly life and birth we remember at Christmas time, the Christ spirit, will take joy in you.

Now, my dear children, when you have felt your teachers' love all day long up here, then you can go home again and tell your parents about what you have learned, and your parents will be glad and say to themselves, “Well, our children are going to grow up to be good and capable people.”

Make sure to write that in your souls, for now is a good time to do that. When we think of the great festival that reminds us that the Christ entered our world to bring comfort and joy to all human beings who turn their hearts and souls toward Him, then we can also inscribe in our souls the intention to become good human beings. Because the power of Christ is helping you, you will become what you write in your souls today, what you seriously intend to become. And when I come again and see that you have made even more progress, when I come again and see that you can once again show me that you have taken love for your teachers into your hearts and kept it there, then I will again be very glad. My warmest Christmas wish for you today is that this love will grow ever more perfect in you, and that you may continue to unfold the left wing of the human soul, which is hard work, and the right wing, which is paying attention.

And now that I have spoken to the children, let me still say a few words to those who have accompanied them here. What I just said to the children flows from a deeply satisfied heart, because I really have received the most beautiful Christmas greeting from them. When I came into the school, what wafted toward me was something I would like to call the good spirit of this school. It was the really good spirit, the good and unifying spirit, that brings teachers and children together here.

You see, in these days a Christmas mood was resting on all the serious teaching that was taking place, and it was deeply satisfying to perceive this Christmas mood, into which the revelation of Christ speaks, if I may put it like that, in all the corridors and especially in the classrooms. This was no mere supplement to the regular lessons. You could feel that our faculty managed to warm and enlighten everything that was being presented to the children's souls and hearts and understanding with the real, true spirit of Christ. Here, in accordance with the wishes of the divine spirit, we do not speak the name of Christ after every sentence—for “Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain!”—but it is nonetheless true that this spirit of Christ is with us in all our individual subjects and in every teaching activity. This is something that can readily be felt, especially at this time of year. Perhaps you too have been able to feel it in what came to meet you out of this Christmas assembly.

And finally, to conclude my Christmas greeting, I would like to appeal to the children whom you have sent here. I hope their progress pleases you.

Children, when you enter these rooms with the other boys and girls, recall that you are meant to love each other warmly, to love each and every other one. If love prevails among you, you will thrive under the car e of your teachers, and your parents at home will have no concerns and will have loving thoughts of how you are spending your time here.

There is something we may say today, ladies and gentlemen, which should resound, as the spirit of this school, from every word and glance the children bring home to you who have sent them here, as an echo of what is meant to permeate all of our human journeying on earth since the mystery of Golgotha took place, to permeate all human work and activity, and especially all activity in which the spirit has work to do. May the words that ring in our souls today weave through everything that human beings do out of self-understanding, weave like a warming breath of air or beam of sunlight:

The revelation of the divine from heavenly heights,
And peace to human beings on earth who are of good Will!

Luke 2:14

Our great ideal is to cultivate this good will in the children of the Waldorf School. Our concern must be to find the governance of the spirit of the world in our work, in everything we do. May the Christmas message, “The revelation of the spirit of God from the heavenly heights, and peace to human beings on earth who are of good will,” trickle down into all the work of the Waldorf School as well. May the school's working strength be governed by brotherly love and by the peace that inspires and supports all work! That, dear ladies and gentlemen, is my Christmas greeting to you today.

• 1. Ruprecht: in the European tradition, the Moorish helper of St. Nicholas, who carries a black sack and administers symbolic punishments to children who have been bad during the past year.

On this day when we meet to celebrate our Christmas festival, it may be seasonable to depart from what has been our customary routine and, instead of seeking after knowledge and truth, to withdraw inwardly, foregathering for a time with that world of feeling and sensations which we are endeavouring to awaken by the aid of the light we receive through Anthroposophy.

This festival now approaching, and which for countless persons presents a time of joyousness—joyousness in the best sense of that word—is, nevertheless, when accepted in the way in which it must be accepted in accordance with our anthroposophical conception of the universe, by no means a very old one.

What is known as the ‘Christian Christmas’ is not coeval with the dawn of Christianity in the world—the earliest Christians, indeed, had no such festival. They did not celebrate the Birth of Christ Jesus. Nearly three hundred years went by before the feast of His Nativity began to be kept by Christianity.

During the first centuries, when the Christian belief was spreading throughout the world, there was a feeling within such souls as had responded to the Christ Impulse inclining persons to withdraw themselves more and more from contact with the external aspects of life prevalent in their day—from what had grown forth from archaic times, as well as from what was extant at the inception of the Christ-Impulse. For a vague instinctive feeling possessed these early Christians—a feeling which seemed to tell them that this Impulse should indeed be so fostered as to form anew the things of this earth—so forming them that new feelings, new sensations, and, above all things, fresh hopes and a new confidence in the development of humanity should permeate all, in contradistinction to the feelings which had before held sway—and that what was to dawn over the horizon of the vast world-life should take its point of departure from a spiritual germ—a spiritual germ which, literally speaking, might be considered as within this Earth.

Oft-times, as you will be aware, have we in the spirit transported ourselves to those Roman catacombs where, removed from the life of the time, the early Christians were wont to rejoice their hearts and souls. In the spirit have we sought admittance to these places of devotion. The earlier celebrations kept here were not in honour of His Birth. At most was the Sunday of each week set apart in order that once in every seven days the great event of Golgotha might he pondered; and beyond this, there were others the anniversaries of whose death were kept during that first century. These dead were those who had transmitted with special enthusiasm the account of that event—men whose impressive participation in the trend thus given to the development of humanity had led to their persecution by a world grown old. Thus it came to pass that the days upon which these Martyrs had entered into glory were kept as the birthdays of humanity by these early Christians. As yet there was no such thing as a celebration of the Birth of Christ. Indeed we may say that it is the coming—the introduction—of this Christ-Birth Festival, that can show how we in the present day have the full right to say: ‘Christianity is not the outcome of this or that dogma, it is not dependent upon this or that institution—dogmas and institutions which have been perpetuated from one generation to another—but we have the right to take Christ’s own words for our justification, when He says that He is with us always, and that He fills us with His Spirit all our days.’ And when we feel this Spirit within us we may deem ourselves called to an increasing, never-ceasing development of the Christian Spirit. The anthroposophical development of the Spirit bids us not foster a Christianity which is frozen and dead, but a new and living Christianity—one ever quickening with new wisdom and fresh knowledge, an evolution from within, stretching forward into the development of the future.

Never do we speak of a Christ Who was, but rather of an eternal and a living Christ. And more especially are we permitted to speak of this living and ever-active Christ—this Christ Who works within us—when the time is at hand for dwelling on the Birth-festival of Christ Jesus, for the Christians of the first centuries were alive to the fact that it was given to them to imbue what was, as it were, the organism of the Christian development with a ‘new thing’—that it was given to them to add thereunto that which was actually streaming into them from the Spirit of Christ.

We must therefore regard the Christmas Festival as one which was not known prior to the fourth century; indeed, we may place the date of the first ‘Christ-Birth’ Festival in Rome as having taken place in the year 354, and it should, moreover, be particularly borne in mind that at a time less critical than is the present, those who confessed themselves Christians were, imbued with the true feeling—a feeling which impelled them to be ever seeking and garnering new fruits from the great Christian Tree of Life.

This perhaps is the reason why we too feel that at such a season we may do well to rejoice in an outward symbol of the Christ’s Birth—in the symbol of the Christmas-tree now before us and around which through the coming days countless people will gather, a symbol whose true meaning it is the mission of Anthroposophy with ever deepening seriousness to impress upon the hearts and souls of men.

We should indeed almost be coming to loggerheads with the evolution of the times were we to take our stand by this symbol—for it is a mistake to imagine it to be an old one. It would be, however, quite easy to imagine that some such poetic belief giving credence to the Christmas-tree being a venerable institution, might arise in the soul of present-day humanity.

There exists a picture which presents the Christmas-tree in Luther’s family parlour. This picture, which was of course painted during the nineteenth century, perpetuates an error, for not only in Germany during Luther’s days, but also amid the surrounding European countries, there were as yet no such trees at Christmas.

May we perhaps not say, that the Christmas-tree of to-day is something which should be taken rather as the prophetic sign of times to come?—that this Tree may, as the years roll on, be regarded ever more and more as the symbol of something stupendous in its meaning—in its importance? Then, indeed, being trammelled by no illusions as regards its historical age, we may let our eyes rest on this Christmas-tree the while we call before our souls an oft-repeated memory—that of the so-called ‘Sacred Legend.’ It runs as follows: When Adam was driven forth from Paradise (this Legend, I should add, is told after many fashions, and I shall here only put the matter as shortly as possible)—when therefore Adam was driven forth from Paradise, he took with him three seeds belonging to the Tree of Life—the tree of which man had been forbidden to eat after he had once eaten of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. And when Adam died, Seth took the three seeds, and placed them in Adam’s grave, and thus there grew from out the grave a tree. The wood of this tree—so runs the legend—has served many purposes: From it Moses is said to have fashioned his staff; while later on, it is said, this wood was taken to form the Cross which was raised upon Golgotha.

In this way does a legend significantly remind us of that other Tree of Paradise, the one which stood second. Man had tasted of the Tree of Knowledge: enjoyment of the Tree of Life was withheld from him.

Yet within the heart of man has remained for evermore a longing, a desire for that Tree.

Driven forth from the Spiritual Worlds—which are signified by ‘Paradise’—into an external world of appearances, men have felt within their hearts that yearning for the Tree of Life.

But what man was denied unearned and in his undeveloped state, was nevertheless to be his through the struggle of attainment when with the aid of cognition he should in the course of time and through his work upon the physical plane, have made himself ripe to receive and capable of using the fruits of the Tree of Life. In those three seeds we have presented to us man’s longing for the Tree of Life.

The Legend tells us that in the wood of the Cross was contained that which came from the Tree of Life, and through the entire development there has been a feeling, a consciousness that the dry wood of the Cross did nevertheless contain the germ of the new spiritual life—that there had been ordained to grow forth from it that which, provided man enjoyed it in the right way, would enable him to unite his soul with the fruit of the Tree of Life—that fruit which should bestow upon him immortality, in the truer sense of the word, giving light to the soul, illumining it in such manner as to enable it to find the way from the dark depths of this physical world to the translucent heights of spiritual existence, there to feel itself as indeed participator in a deathless life.

Without, therefore, giving way to any illusion, we—as beings filled with emotion (rather than as historians)—may well stand before the tree which represents to us the tree of Christmas-tide, and feel the while we do so, something in it symbolical of that light which should dawn in our innermost souls, in order to gain for us immortality in the spiritual existence; and turning our gaze within we feel how the spiritual tendency of anthroposophical thought permeates us with a force which permits of our raising our eyes to behold the World of the Spirit. Therefore, in looking upon this outward symbol—the tree of Christmas-tide—we may indeed say: ‘May it be a symbol to us for that which is destined to illumine and burn within our souls, in order to raise us thither—even to the realms of the Spirit.’

For this tree, too, has, so to speak, sprouted forth from the depths of darkness, and only such persons might be inclined to cavil at so unhistorical a view, who are unaware that the thing which external physical knowledge does not recognise has nevertheless its deep spiritual foundations. To the physical eye it may not be apparent how gradually this Christmas-tree grows, as it were, to be a part of the outward life of humanity. In a comparatively short time, indeed, it has come to be a custom that brings happiness to man, one which has come to affect the world’s intercourse in general. This, as I have said, may pass unrecognised, yet those who know that external events are but impressions of a spiritual process, are bound to feel that there may possibly have been some very deep meaning at work, responsible for the appearance of the Christmas-tree upon the external physical plane; that its appearance has emanated from out the depths of some great spiritual impulse—an impulse leading men invisibly onward—that indeed this lighted tree may have been the means of sending to some specially sensitive souls that inspiration of the inward light whereof it furnishes so beautiful an external symbol. And when such cognition awakens to wisdom, then indeed does this tree—by reason of our will—also become an external symbol for that which is Divine.

If Anthroposophy is to be knowledge, then it must be knowledge in an active sense and permeated with wisdom—that is to say, it must ‘gild’—external customs and impressions. And so even as Anthroposophy warms and illumines the hearts and souls of men, present and future, so too must the Christmas-tree which has become so ‘material’ a custom recover its ‘golden glint,’ and in the light of this true knowledge rise once more to illustrate its true symbolical meaning in life, after having spent so long a time amid the darkened depths of men’s souls in these latter days.

And if we delve down even a little further and presuppose a deep spiritual guidance to have placed this impulse within the human heart, does this not also prove that thoughts bestowed upon man by the aid of the Spirit can attain to even greater depths of feeling when brought into connection with this luminant tree?

It used to be ancient custom common in many parts of Europe to go t into the woods some time before Christmas and collect sprigs from all kinds of plants, but more especially from foliage trees, and then seek to make these twigs bear leaf in time for Christmas Eve. And to many a soul the dim belief in ‘Life unconquerable’—in that life which shall be the vanquisher of all death—would thrill exultantly at the sight of all this sprouting greenery, branches artificially forced to unfold their tender leaves over-night at a time of year when the sun stands at its lowest. This was a very old custom—our Christmas-tree is of far more recent date. Where, then, have we in the first place to look for this custom?

We know how earnest was the language used by the great German mystics, more especially the impression created by the words of Johannes Tauler, who laboured so assiduously in Alsace; and anyone who allows the sermons of Johannes Tauler to ‘work upon him’ with the sincerity so peculiar to them will understand how at that time—a time when Tauler was more especially concerned in deepening the feeling of men for all that lay hidden within the Christian Belief—a peculiar, unique spirit must have prevailed, a spirit which of a truth was suffused with the Mystery of Golgotha. In those days when Johannes Tauler was preaching his sermons in Strasbourg, the passionate sincerity with which he delivered his ‘words of fire’ may well have sunk into the soul of many a listener, leaving there a lasting impression, and many such impressions may well have been caused by what Tauler was wont to say in his wondrously beautiful Christmas sermons. ‘Three times,’ said Tauler, ‘is God born unto men: Firstly, when He descends from the Father—from the Great All-World; again, when having reached humanity He descends into flesh; and thirdly, when the Christ is born within the human soul, and enables it to attain to the possibility of uniting itself to that which is the Wisdom of God—enabling it thus to give birth to the higher man.’

At all such seasons when the gracious habit of celebrating the Festivals prevailed, Johannes Tauler might be found round about the neighbourhood of Strasbourg dwelling earnestly upon the meaning of these deep verities, and more especially did he do this at the Christmas season. Indeed the words sinking at such times into receptive souls may have echoed on—for feelings, too, have their traditions—and what was felt within some soul’s depths in the hush of such an hour may—who knows?—still stir responsive chords from one century to the other. And so the feeling once possessing souls passed to the eye, and gave to this a capability of perceiving in that external symbol the resurrection—the birth of man’s spiritual light.

Taken from the point of view of material thought the coincidence may be deemed a pretty one: but for those who know the manner in which spiritual guidance permeates all that is physical it becomes far more than a coincidence to learn that the first record of a Christmas-tree having stood in a German room comes from Alsace, and indeed from Strasbourg in Alsace, while the date may be given as 1642.

How ill German Mysticism has fared at the hands of a Christianity wedded to outward forms may be seen in what happened to the memory of Master Eckhard, the great forerunner of Johannes Tauler, since posterity branded him a heretic after death—having omitted to do so while he lived!

Nor did the burning words of Johannes Tauler, words which flamed up from a heart fired with Christian passion, meet with much response; the outward Christianity of the times lacked the spiritual depth of the teachings proclaimed by these men, and this may fully account for the fact that in recording the news of this first Christmas-tree the ‘eye-witness’ alludes to it as ‘child’s play,’ and observes that ‘people would do better by going to places where the right Christian teachings could be proclaimed to them.’

The further progress of the Christmas-tree was a slow one. We see it figuring here and there about Middle Germany during the eighteenth century, but not till the nineteenth century did it become practically a regular ‘spiritual’ decoration intimately associated with the Christmas season—a new symbol of something that had survived throughout the centuries of time.

In such hearts, therefore, where the glory of all things can be truly felt—not in the sense implied by a Christianity ‘made up of words,’ but by the force of a true, a spiritual Christianity—sentiments of the highest human kind were ever prone to kindle in the tree’s illumined presence.

Another reason for placing the advent of the Christmas-tree at so recent a date may be seen in the fact that Germany’s greatest poets had left it unsung: had it been known in earlier times we may be sure that Klopstock, to mention only one, would have chosen this symbol for poetic treatment. And we may, therefore, gather additional certainty from this omission to strengthen our statement as to its being a comparative innovation.

More especially might we then dwell upon this symbol when the feeling of the spiritual truth of the awakening Ego wells up within our souls—that Ego which senses the spiritual bond ’twixt soul and soul, feeling it with intensified strength where noble human beings are striving in a common cause. And I will but mention one instance of how the fight of the Christmas-tree has streamed in to illumine the soul of one of humanity’s great leaders.

It was in the year 1821 that Goethe (whom we so often meet wherever we regard the life of the spirit in the light of Anthroposophy) was bringing his Faust to its close, and in so doing he came to find how essential the Christian symbols were in order to present his poetic intentions—that, in fact, they became the only possible ones. Goethe, indeed, experienced at this time most intensely the way in which Christianity weaves the noblest bond for joining soul to soul; and how this bond has to lay the foundations of a brotherly love not dependent upon the tie of blood, but on that of souls united in the spirit. And when we dwell on the close of the Gospels we are able to feel the impulse yet dormant within Christianity.

Gazing downward from the Cross upon Golgotha, Christ beholds the mother—beholds the son; and in that moment did He found that community which hitherto had only existed through the blood.

Up to that time no mother had had a son, no son a mother, without the tie being that of blood relationship. Nor were blood ties to be eliminated by Christianity; but to these were to be added spiritual ties, diffusing with their spiritual light those ties created by the blood.

It was to these ends, then, that Christ Jesus on the Cross spoke the words: ‘Woman! behold thy son!’, and to the disciple: ‘Behold thy mother!’ What had been instituted as a blood-tie became through the mediation of the Cross a bond of the spirit.

Wherever Goethe perceived a noble effort in furtherance of this spiritual union being made, he was moved to turn towards the true Christian spirit, and what possessed the heart soon yearned for outward expression. The year 1821 gave him a special opportunity for giving utterance to this desire. The residents of the little Duchy of Saxe-Weimar, to the interests of which Goethe dedicated so great a measure of his powers, had united forces in order to found a ‘Bürger-schule’. The undertaking was, in fact, to be a ‘gift,’ as it were, to the Grand Duke of Saxe-Weimar, and Goethe, desirous of celebrating in some suitable manner the spiritual impulse that had led to so progressive a step, called upon various members to give poetic expression to thoughts respecting this undertaking they all had at heart. These verses Goethe then collected in a volume for which he himself wrote an introductory poem which was recited by Prince (later Grand Duke) Karl Alexander, then three years old, who presented the book to his father, Grand Duke Karl August—this little ceremony taking place beneath the Christmas-tree. So we see that the tree was, by the year 1821, already a customary symbol of the season and by this act did Goethe indicate the Christmas-tree as being the symbol of a feeling and sentiment for spiritual progress in things both great and small. His introductory poem written for this little volume is still preserved in the Weimar Library and runs as follows:

‘Bäume leuchtend, Bäume blendend,
Uberall das Süsse spendend,
In dem Glanze sich bewegend,
Alt—und junges Herz erregend—
Solch ein Fest ist uns bescheret,
Mancher Gaben Schmuck verehret;
Staunend schaun wir auf und nieder,
Hin und her und immer wieder.
Aber, Furst, wenn dir’s begegnet,
Und ein Abend so dich segnet,
Dass als Lichter, dass als Flammen
Vor dir glänzten allzusammen
Alles, was du ausgerichtet,
Alle, die sich dir verpflichtet:
Mit erhöhten Geistesblicken
Fühltest herrliches Entzücken.’¹

The above verses of Goethe are the first of what we might call Christmas poems, and when in connection with Anthroposophy we speak of ‘symbols’ we may well say that such symbols, which in the course of time surge up involuntarily within men’s souls, are indeed gilded over with the gold of wisdom.

We have seen that the first Christian Christmas was celebrated during the fourth century in Rome. It would seem, furthermore, a matter of divine dispensation that this Feast of Christ’s Birth has—as far as Middle and Northern Europe are concerned—been introduced at the very time when a most ancient feast—that of the Winter Sun, when the shortest days are chronicled—was also wont to be celebrated.

Now it must not be imagined that this change of the old time-honoured Festival into the new Feast, the Christmas Festival, was brought about in order, as it were, to conciliate the nations. Christmas was born purely and simply out of Christianity, and we may say that the way in which it became accepted by the more Northern lands was a proof of the deeply spiritual relationship connecting these peoples as well as their symbols with Christianity.

In Armenia, for instance, the Christmas Festival has never become customary, and even in Palestine the Christians were for a long time averse to its celebration, and yet it soon found a home in Europe.

And now we will try to understand in the right way the Christmas Feast itself when taken from the anthroposophical view—doing so in order that we may also be enabled to apprehend the Christmas-tree in its symbolic sense.

When, during the course of the year, we meet together, we allow those words—which should not be mere words, but rather forces—to permeate our soul in order that the soul may become a citizen of eternity. Throughout the year do we thus assemble allowing these words—this Logos—to sound upon our ears in the most varied manner, telling us that Christ is with us always, and that when we are thus assembled together the Spirit of Christ works in upon us, so that our words become impregnated with the Spirit of Christ. If only we enunciate these things being conscious that the word becomes a ‘carrier on wings,’ bearing revelations to humanity, then indeed do we let that flow in upon our souls which is the Word of the Spirit. Yet we know that the Word of the Spirit cannot entirely be taken up by us—cannot become all it should be to us if we have only received it as an outward and abstract form of knowledge. We know that it can only become to us that which it should be if it gives rise to that inner warmth through which the soul becomes expanded—through which it senses itself as gushing forth amid all the phenomena of world-existence—in which it feels itself one with the Spirit—that Spirit which itself permeates all that is outwardly apparent.

Let us, therefore, feel the Word of the Spirit must become to us a power—a life-force—so that when the season is at hand at which we place that symbol before us, it may proclaim to our souls: ‘Let a new thing be born within you. Let that which giving warmth can spread the Light—even the Word—rising from those spiritual sources, those spiritual depths—be born within you—born as Spirit-Man!’

Then shall we feel what is the meaning of that which passes over to us as the Word of the Spirit. Let us earnestly feel, at such a moment as the present, what Anthroposophy gives to us as warmth, as light for the soul, and let us try to feel it somewhat in.the following manner:

Look at the material world of to-day with all its perpetual activity, consider the way in which men hurry and worry from morning till evening, and the way in which they judge everything from the materialistic standpoint, according to the measure laid down by this outward physical plane—how utterly oblivious they are that behind all there lives and works the Spirit. At night people sink to sleep oblivious of aught else than that ‘unconsciousness’ enwraps them, and in the morning they similarly return to a sense of the consciousness of this physical plane. Thoughtlessly, ignorantly, man sinks to sleep after all his labours and worries of the day—never even seeking enlightenment as to the meaning of life.

When the anthroposophist has become imbued with the Words of the Spirit he knows that which is no mere theory or dogma: he then knows what can give warmth as well as light to his soul. He knows that were he day by day to take up naught but the presentments of the physical life, he would inevitably wither—his life would be empty and void. All he came by would die away were he to have no other presentments than such as the physical plane is able to place before him. For when of an evening you lie down to sleep you pass over to a world of the Spirit—the forces of your soul rise to a world of higher spiritual entities, to whose level you must gradually raise your own being. And when of a morning you wake again, you do so newly strengthened from out that spiritual world, and thus do you shed spiritual life over all that approaches you upon this physical plane, be it done consciously or unconsciously. From the Eternal do you yourself rejuvenate your temporal existence each morning.

What we should do is to change into feeling this Word of the Spirit, so that we may when evening comes be able to say: ‘I shall not merely pass over to unconsciousness, but I shall dip into a world where dwell the beings of eternity—entities whom my own entity is to resemble. I therefore fall asleep with the feeling, ‘Away to the Spirit!’, and I awaken with the feeling, ‘Back—from the Spirit!’ In doing this we become permeated with that feeling into which the Word of the Spirit is to transform itself, that Word which from day to day, from week to week, has been taken up by us here. Let us feel ourselves connected with the Spirit of the Universe—let us feel that we are missionaries of the World-Spirit which permeates and interweaves all outward existence—for then we also feel when the sun stands high in summer and directs its life-giving rays earthward that then too is the Spirit active, manifesting itself in an outward manner, and how—in that we then perceive His external mien, His outward countenance, mirrored by the external rays of the sun—His inner Being may be said to have retired beyond these outer phenomena.

Where do we behold this Spirit of the Universe—this Spirit whom Zoroaster already proclaimed—when only the outward and physical rays of the sun stream in upon us? We behold this Spirit when we are able to recognise where it is He beholds Himself. Verily does this Spirit of the Universe create during summer-time those organs through which He may behold Himself. He creates external sense organs! Let us learn to understand what it is that from Springtime forward decks the earth with its carpet of verdant plants giving to it a renewed countenance. What is it? ’Tis a mirror for the World-Spirit of the sun! For when the sun pours forth its rays upon us, it is the World-Spirit Who is gazing down on earth. All plant-life—bud, blossom and leaf—are but images which present the pure World-Spirit, reflected in His works as they shoot forth upon this earth:—this carpet of plants contains the sense-organs of the World-Spirit.

When in the autumn the external power of the sun declines, we see how this plant life disappears—how the countenance of the World-Spirit is withdrawn—and if we have been prepared in the right manner we may then feel how the Spirit which pulsates throughout the universe is now within ourselves. So that we can follow the World-Spirit even when He is withdrawn from external sight, for we then feel that though our gaze no longer rests upon that verdant cover, yet has the Spirit been roused in us to so great a measure that He withdraws Himself from the external presentments of the world. And so the awakening Spirit becomes our guide to those depths whither Spirit life retires and to where we deliver over to the keeping of the Spirit germs for the coming Spring. There do we learn to see with our spiritual sight, learning to say to ourselves:

‘When external life begins gradually to become invisible for the external senses, when the melancholy of Autumn creeps in upon our soul, then does the soul follow the Spirit—even amid the lifeless stones, in order that it may draw thence those forces which in the Spring will once more furnish new sense organs for the Spirit of the World.’

It is thus that those who having in their spirit conceived the Spirit come to feel that they too can follow this World-Spirit down to where the grains of seed repose in winter-time.

When the power of the sun is weakest and when its rays are at their faintest—when outer darkness is at its strongest—it is then that the Spirit within us united to the Spirit of the Universe feels and proclaims that union in greatest clearness, by filling the grains of seed with a new life. In this way we may indeed say quite literally that by the power of the seed we also live within and permeate—as it were—the Earth. In Summer-time we turn to the bright atmosphere about us, to the budding fruits of the earth, but now we turn to the lifeless stones, yet knowing that beneath them reposes that which shall in its turn again enjoy external life, and our soul follows in the spirit those budding germinating forces which, withdrawing themselves from outward view, lie dormant amid the stones in Winter-time.

And when Winter-time has reached its central point—when the darkness is deepest—then is the time at hand when we may feel that the exterior world is nevertheless not capable of counteracting our union with the Spirit—when within those depths to which we have withdrawn we feel the flashes of the Spirit-light—that light of the Spirit for which the greatest Impulse received by humanity was given by Christ Jesus. In this way we are enabled to sense what the Ancients felt when they spoke of descending to where the grain of seed lay dormant in Winter-time in order that they might learn to know the hidden powers of the Spirit.

We then come to feel that Christ has to be sought for amid that which is hidden—there where all is dark and obscure, unless we ourselves kindle the light in the Soul—that Soul which becomes clear and illumined when penetrated by the Light of Christ. At Christmas-tide, therefore, we may well feel an ever-increasing sense of strength—strength due to that Impulse which, grace to the Mystery enacted on Golgotha, has permeated the human race. If truly experienced in this way the Christ Impulse becomes for us indeed the most powerful incentive, strengthening year by year this life which is leading us into the Spiritual Worlds where death—as known in the physical world—does not exist.

It is in this way that we are enabled to spiritualise a symbol which to present-day materialistic-thinking persons is no more than a token of material joy and pleasure, and we thus may also feel within our hearts what Johannes Tauler really meant when he spoke of Christ having to be born three times: once as God the Father Who permeates the world—once as Man, at the time when Christianity was founded—and since then again and again, within the souls of those who can awaken the Word of the Spirit within their innermost being. For without this last birth Christianity would not be complete, nor would Anthroposophy be capable of grasping the Christian Spirit did it not understand that the Word brought home to us year after year is not intended to remain theory and dogma, but is to become both Light and Life—a force, indeed, by which we may contribute spirituality to life in this world as well as gather spirituality for ourselves—and so be one with the other—incorporated with the Spirit for all Eternity.

No matter the step of evolution upon which we stand—we can nevertheless feel what was felt at all times by those who had been initiated and who therefore really did in this Holy Night descend at the midnight hour to gaze upon the spiritual Sun in the darkness of the Christmas Night—when that spiritual Sun could call forth from apparently dead surroundings and waken into life all budding nature, bidding it burst forth and proclaim a new Springtide.

This is the Christ Sun we should feel behind the physical sun: to it we ourselves must rise—rise to experience and see that which, by grace of those new forces man may develop, shall unite him with the Spirit—then shall it also be for us to

See the Sun
About the midnight hour,
And build with stones
Amid the lifeless clay,
Finding that as we pass
To the dark night of Death
Creations new come forth—
Young morns arise to power—
The heights above reveal
The Gods’ eternal Word,
And depths below shall guard
The peaceful Place of Rest.

Dwelling in Darkness,
Oh! create a Sun!
And while ye weave the web,
Oh I recognise
The blissfulness of Spirit.

• 1. The first verse is descriptive of the earthly joys—the union, of friends and the gifts interchanged at Christmas; while the second hints at the spiritual significance of the ceremony, the flames of light giving rise to feelings and sentiments which respond to Higher Planes.—Translator's Note.

This lecture is known under the following titles: The Christmas Mystery, Novalis as Seer, The Christ Being, Past, Present, and Future. This lecture first appeared in English in The Anthroposophical Quarterly, Volume 12, 1980, No. 4.

Individuals appear in the world from time to time who are able to see in direct vision what has been realised through Feeling by thousands upon thousands of souls and hearts in the course of the centuries. But in the modern age only those who are familiar with the findings of spiritual ‘clear-seeing’ know that the effects of the event of Mystery of Golgotha on evolution are always perceptible to the true seer.

The entire spiritual sphere of the Earth was changed through what took place at Golgotha. And ever since then, if the eye of the soul has been opened through contemplation of this Event, the seer beholds the presence of the everlasting power of the Christ in the spiritual sphere of the Earth. Other men are impressed by the power of the impulse proceeding from the Mystery of Golgotha and the great truths connected with that Event; they realise, too, that since then the human heart has been able to experience something that could never previously have been experienced or felt on the Earth. But to a seer this is perceptible reality.

The young German poet Novalis became a seer—we might almost say ‘miraculously’—by the grace of divine-spiritual Powers. Through a deeply shattering event which made him aware, as if by a stroke of magic, of the connection between life and death, his eyes of spirit were opened and as well as a great vista of past ages of the Earth and Cosmos, the Christ Being Himself appeared before him. He was able to say of himself that he was one who with the eyes of spirit has actually seen what is revealed when ‘the stone is lifted’ and the Being who has furnished earthly existence with the proof that life in the spirit will forever overcome death, becomes visible.

In the case of Novalis we cannot really speak of a self-contained life in the ordinary sense, for his was like a remembrance of an earlier incarnation. The Initiation conferred upon him as it were through Grace, brought to life within him his achievements and experiences in earlier incarnations; there was a kind of consolidation of intuitions and insights that had been his in a previous life. And because he looked back through the ages with his own awakened eyes of spirit, he was able to affirm that nothing in his life was comparable in importance with the experience of having discovered Christ as a living reality. Such an experience is like a repetition of the happening at Damascus, when Paul, who had hitherto persecuted the followers of Christ Jesus and rejected their proclamation, received in higher vision the direct proof that Christ lives, that He is present, and that the Event of Golgotha is unique in the whole process of the evolution of humanity. Those whose eyes of spirit are open can themselves behold this Event, for in truth Christ was not only present in the Body that was once His dwelling-place. He has remained with the Earth; through Him the Sun-Power has united with the Earth.

Novalis speaks of the revelation that came to him as ‘unique’ and he maintains that only those who with their whole soul are willing to relate themselves with this Event are men in the true sense. He rightly says that the ancient Indian, with his sublime spirituality, would have allied himself with Christ had he but known Him. Not out of any dim inkling or blind faith, but out of actual knowledge, Novalis says that the Christ whom he has seen with eyes of spirit is a Power pervading all beings. This Power can be recognised by the eye in which it is working. The eye that beholds the Christ has itself been formed by the Christ-Power. The Christ-Power within the eye beholds the Christ outside the eye.

These are truly wonderful words! Novalis is also aware of the stupendous truth that since the Event of Golgotha the Being we call Christ has been the planetary Spirit of the Earth, the Spirit by whom the Earth's body will gradually be transformed. A wonderful vista of the future opens out before Novalis. He sees the Earth transfigured; he sees the present Earth in which the residue of ancient times is still contained, transformed into the Body of Christ; he sees the waters of the Earth permeated with Christ's Blood, and he sees the solid rocks as Christ's Flesh. He sees the body of the Earth gradually becoming the Body of Christ; he sees the Earth and Christ miraculously made one; he sees the Earth in future time as a great organism enshrining man, an organism whose soul is Christ.

In this sense, and out of his deep insight into occult truths, Novalis speaks of Christ as the Son of Man. Just as in a certain sense men are the ‘Sons of the Gods’, that is to say of the ancient Gods who through untold millions of years have moulded and shaped our planet, who have built the bodies in which we live and the ground upon which we move, so, by overcoming earthly things, man's task is to build, through his own powers, an Earth that will be the body of the new God, the God of the future. And whereas the men of old looked back to the primeval Gods, yearning to be united with them in death, Novalis recognises the God who in time to come will have as his body all that is best in us and that we can offer to Him. In Christ he sees the Being to whom humanity offers itself in order that this Being may have a body. He recognises Christ as the ‘Son of Man’ in this higher, cosmological sense. He speaks of Christ as the ‘God of the future’.

All these experiences and perceptions are so pregnant with meaning that they are well able to kindle the true mood of Christmas in our souls. And so we will let one who lived a brief life at the end of the eighteenth century, dying at the age of 29, describe the experiences associated with the greatest event in his life—the sublime vision of the Christ Being.

(Marie von Sivers (Marie Steiner) here recited a poem from the Spiritual Songs of Novalis.)

The Christmas Tree has not been the symbol of the Christmas Festival for any length of time. We shall find no poem on the Christmas Tree among, let us say, the works of a poet such as Schiller, although had such a custom existed in his day he would certainly have recognised its poetic possibilities and would not have found it difficult to write a poem on the subject. But in Schiller's time the Christmas Tree in its now familiar form was unknown. It is a young and quite recent institution. In earlier times men celebrated this festival in a different way. However far we look back into past ages, as long as one can speak of human beings in their present form or having the rudiments of that form, we shall everywhere find an institution that is akin to our Christmas Festival; we shall find it in constantly new forms among the widespread masses of the peoples and as an enactment in the highest Mysteries.

The very fact that the festival itself is so ancient and our present symbol of it so recent, is indicative of an element of eternity, of an eternal reality from which new forms ever and again spring forth. This Christ-Festival and all the feelings and experiences it symbolises, are as ancient as humanity on Earth. But man will always be able to find new symbols, symbols that are in keeping with the times, as outward forms of expression for this festival. Just as Nature herself is rejuvenated every year and her eternal forces bud forth in forms that are forever new, so it is with the symbols of Christmas piety; in their constant rejuvenation they betoken the eternal reality of this festival. And so in the solemnity of this Christmas hour we will bring a picture before our souls of what men on Earth have experienced at the time when we now celebrate Christmas.

As pupils of Spiritual Science we can send our thoughts back to ages in the far, far past, to begin with to the times when our souls were incarnated in Atlantean bodies, bodies very unlike those of today. In that epoch there were great Teachers who were also the Leaders of humanity. Men looked out upon a different world, where there was no bright sunlight to reveal to them in clear outlines the forms of objects in the kingdoms of Nature. Everything around them was as though swathed in mist—not only because much of Atlantis was actually covered with mist and fog through which the sunlight could not penetrate to the same extent as later on, but also because man's faculty of perception had not yet developed to the stage where external objects appeared in clear outline. When men woke in the morning they saw everything around them in divine Nature swathed in mist and surrounded by auric colours, and when they went to sleep at night they passed into a spiritual world without falling into the oblivion and unconsciousness of sleep today.

When men went to sleep in the days of Atlantis, they beheld the divine-spiritual Beings who were their companions; they beheld those divine Beings who were once experienced as realities and who in later times were preserved as memories in different regions of the Earth, bearing different names: Wotan, Thor, Baldur, in Middle Europe; the names of Zeus, Pallas Athene, Ares, and so forth, were given to those divine figures who had once been visible to man's eyes of soul in old Atlantis. But in Atlantean times the divine worlds were no longer the highest, creative worlds whence man had come forth in the age of Lemuria. Our souls were once born from the womb of divine Beings of whose sublimity and majesty there can be only a dim inkling today. These same divine Beings sent forth the cosmic orbs and all the forces surrounding us. Man was within the womb of divine Beings whose outward expressions we behold in the celestial bodies; they were the Beings who flash through the air in lightning and thunder, whose expressions are the plants and animals and whose sense-organs are the crystals. All the warmth that streams to us, all the forces in play around us—all this constitutes the body of divine-spiritual Beings from whom man has come forth.

The more deeply man descended to the Earth, the more closely he united with material substances, the more he membered into himself the substances of the Earth, the less capable he became of beholding the great Gods.

In primeval times man had as yet no faculty for cognising the material world; he could neither see with eyes nor hear with ears; pictures that were not pictures of minerals, animals or plants but of divine-spiritual Beings above him, surged through his soul. In later ages he lived more and more on the physical plane, learning through the outer sense-organs to know the physical world. In the days of Atlantis, sight on the physical plane alternated with a form of clairvoyance that had remained as a relic of the ancient state of sublime spirituality in which man once had lived. But the Gods he was still able to behold on the astral plane when by night he enjoyed the bliss of living as a spiritual being among other spiritual beings, were lower in rank than the highest Gods.

As the physical plane grew clearer, man's vision on the spiritual planes grew dim. But in ancient Atlantis there were Initiates who as well as imparting the deeper teachings concerning the Gods of old whence men had come forth, proclaimed a truth which they presented in somewhat the following way.

‘Look at the seed of a plant; see how this seed develops into a plant. It grows, sends forth leaves, sepals, blossom and fruit. One who observes the plant in this way can say to himself: I look back to the seed; the seed is the creator of the leaves and the blossom I see before me, and this blossom holds within it the seed of a new plant; the blossom forms itself into a new seed. And one can also look into the future.’—Thus did the great Atlantean Initiates speak to their pupils and through their pupils to the whole people. They said: ‘You can look back to the seeds of the Gods whence men have come forth. The spiritual and physical realities you see around you are all leaves that have sprung from the seeds of the primeval Gods. See in them the forces of those divine seeds even as the forces of the seed from which the plant has come forth can be seen in its leaves. But we are able to point to something more: in future times there will spread around man something that will be akin to the blossom of a plant, something that has, it is true, issued from the ancient Gods but—as the blossom ripens a seed—contains a seed in which the new God unfolds!’

The world is born of Gods—such was the ancient teaching. That the world will give birth to a God, to the great God of the future—such was the prophecy made by the Initiates of Atlantis to their pupils and through them to the people. For like all Initiates, those of Atlantis saw into the future, foresaw the great events of the future. Their vision reached beyond the time of the great Atlantean flood, beyond that stupendous happening whereby the face of the Earth was changed. They foresaw the civilisations that would arise in the future, in the land of the holy Rishis, in the land of Zarathustra; they foresaw the ancient Egyptian culture founded by Hermes, the conditions heralded and inaugurated by Moses, the happiness prevailing in Greece, the might and strength of Rome. All this the Atlantean Initiates saw in advance, and their vision extended to our own time and even beyond it. And to their intimate pupils they imparted hope, saying to them: ‘True, you must leave the spirit-lands where now you dwell, you must be ensnared in matter, you must clothe yourselves in sheaths woven from physical substances. There will come a time when you must labour on the physical plane, when it will seem as though the ancient Gods have vanished from your ken. But your eyes will be able to turn to where the new star can appear to you, to where the new seed comes to life, where there will spring forth the new God of the future, the God who has waited through the ages in order to appear in humanity at the right and proper time!’

When the Atlantean Initiates wanted to explain to their pupils and to all the people why man was destined to descend into the vale of Earth, they said to them that all souls would at some future time see and experience the One who was to come, who was still hidden from their sight, dwelling in a realm invisible to physical eyes as well as to the eyes of spirit which while man was still resting in the womb of the Gods, had gazed upon Him.

Then came the Atlantean flood. In a comparatively short time the face of the Earth was changed, and after the migrations of the peoples from West to East, the great post-Atlantean civilisations arose, beginning with that of ancient India.

The great Teachers in that epoch, the seven holy Rishis, taught their pupils, and indeed all the Indian people, of the reality of a spiritual world, for their life was now lived on the physical plane and they needed so to be taught. Their eyes could now see only the outer form of the physical world as the expression of the Spiritual, but the Spiritual itself they could not see. Yet there lived in the soul of every Indian something that can be called a dim remembrance of what the soul had once experienced among Gods in the age of old Atlantis. This remembrance aroused a yearning of such intensity for what had been lost, that the soul could establish no close relationship with the physical plane, could only regard it as maya, illusion, unreality. Nor could souls have endured such conditions on the physical plane had not the Rishis, filled with the fire of spiritual inspiration, been able to teach them of the glories of the ancient world that had departed from them. The teachings given by the Rishis concerning the Cosmos are still very little understood today; they were teachings based on a primeval wisdom, because the Rishis were initiated into what man had experienced when he was still within the womb of the Gods.

For man was present when the Gods separated the Sun from the Earth and ordained the paths of the celestial orbs—but during his later earthly pilgrimage he had forgotten it!

This wisdom was taught by the Rishis. And something else too was taught to those who were the most advanced and able to feel its significance. To them it was said: ‘From the world in which man is now placed, the world he now sees as maya, there will spring the Being who cannot yet be visible in this world because the human soul has not reached the stage where it can unfold the power to know this Being. But He who is still beyond your world will appear!’ Vicva karman was the name of the Being proclaimed by the ancient Teachers of India as the great Spirit of the future. To the Indian people it was said: ‘You cannot see Him yet, any more than you can see in the blossom the seed of the new plant. But as truly as the blossom contains the seed, as truly does maya unfold the germinating power that will make life in the physical world a worthy existence. The Being known in later times as the Christ was proclaimed in advance by the Teachers of ancient India; they, in true humility, were his prophets. Their spiritual gaze could turn in two directions—back to that primeval wisdom according to which the world was fashioned, and forward into the future. And to men engaged in the daily tasks of life they proclaimed the coming of One whose power would penetrate into the depths of human hearts and stir human hands to activity.

There was no age when He was not proclaimed, whenever one can speak of human culture and human understanding. If in later times men have forgotten the proclamations, this is not the fault of the great Teachers of an earlier humanity.

Then came the ancient Persian civilisation of which Zarathustra was the Leader. To his intimate pupils, and again to all the people, Zarathustra proclaimed that in everything by which man is surrounded, in the forces streaming from the Sun and from the other celestial bodies to the Earth, in all that fills the airy expanse, lives a Being now revealed to man in veiled form only.—And to his Initiates, Zarathustra was able to speak of the great Sun-Aura, of Ahura Mazdao, of the God of Good. What he said to his pupils may be rendered in somewhat the following way.—‘Look at the plant. It grows from the seed, develops leaves and blossom. But the plant is pervaded by a mysterious force which arises in the heart of the blossom as the new seed. What surrounds the seed will fall away; but the innermost force that can be perceived in the heart of the blossom enables you to feel that a new plant will arise from the old. If you ponder on the power and the force of the Sun's light, Feeling that in it you are beholding merely the physical expression of a spiritual reality and letting yourselves be inspired by the spiritual power of the Sun, then you will begin to understand the prophetic announcement of the Divine Fruit that is to be born from the Earth!’

When these intimate pupils had reached a very advanced stage, they were permitted, at certain times, to listen to teachings even more secret. And in consecrated hours Zarathustra spoke to them of One who would come when men were ready to receive Him into their midst with understanding. Mighty pictures of the One who would come were presented by Zarathustra to his pupils. To one pupil he could reveal the picture itself, to a second a kind of reflection only; to the others it was only possible to give a general picture of what would come to pass in the future.—Thus He who was called Christ was also proclaimed in the civilisation of Zarathustra in ancient Persia.

So also it was in Egyptian civilisation. Hermes too had his Egyptian Initiates and through them had proclaimed the Christ in a certain way to all the people of ancient Egypt. In the legend of Osiris may be seen a reflection of the proclamation of Christ.

What was it that the legend of Osiris conveyed to men? The legend is that in olden times the people were blessed in that Osiris ruled in the Land of Egypt in true union with Isis, his spouse. His evil brother, Set, or Typhon, resolved to destroy Osiris. To this end he built a chest in which Osiris was imprisoned, and cast it into the sea. Isis eventually found the chest but could not bring Osiris to life again on the Earth. He had been transported into higher realms and since then could be seen by men only after they had passed through the gate of death. To every Egyptian it was said: After death you can be united with Osiris as truly as your hand is united with you here on Earth. After death you can be part of Osiris and call him your own higher Self, but only provided you have merited this on the physical plane. After death you can be united with the God known to you as the Most High.

To one who was an Initiate, something more could be revealed. When he had undergone all the ordeals and testings, when he had received all the teachings that must precede vision of the higher worlds, then even during physical life between birth and death the picture of Osiris was revealed to him—the picture that came before other men only after death. The Being with whom the pupil of the Egyptian Initiates must feel himself united came before him when he was outside his body, when his ether-body, astral body and ego had been raised out of the physical body; and then, one who even in his lifetime had gazed upon Osiris could proclaim to the others:- Osiris lives! But never could it have been proclaimed in ancient Egypt: Osiris dwells among us! This was expressed in the legend by saying: Osiris is a king who has never been seen on the Earth! The ‘chest’ is nothing else than the physical body. The moment Osiris is laid in the physical body, the inimical forces of the physical world, forces that are not yet ready to receive the God, assert themselves with such strength that they bring the God to destruction. The physical world is not ready yet to receive the God with whom man must be united. ‘But’—so spake those who could bear personal witness that Osiris lives—‘although we say to you that the God lives in very truth, it is only the Initiate who can behold him, when he (the Initiate) is away from the physical world. The God with whom man must become one in his inmost being, lives, but he lives in the spiritual world. He alone who leaves the physical world can be united with the God!’

At the same time men were beginning more and more to love the physical world; for it was their task and mission to work in the physical world, to establish one culture after another in the physical world. To the same extent to which the eyes looked out with clearer vision, and intelligence was better able to fathom the happenings of the physical world, to the same extent to which man's knowledge increased, enabling him to make discoveries and inventions useful for the purposes of physical life—to that same extent it became constantly more difficult for him during life between birth and death to gaze into the spiritual world. He could hear from the Initiates that the God with whom he must be united, lives in very truth; but from the physical world he could bring little that would make definite communion with Osiris possible for him in yonder world. Greater and greater darkness spread over life in the world surmised by man to be the home of the God with whom he must become one.

Then came the age of Greece when with all their delight in the physical world, men achieved that marriage between spirit and matter which bore such glorious fruit on the physical plane. In the wonderful masterpieces of ancient Greece we have a picture of how, in the epoch when the Event of Golgotha was to take place, men were related to the spiritual world. It is difficult to conceive but it is true nevertheless, that the supreme achievement of architecture—the Greek temple—corresponds with the lowest point in man's relationship with the spiritual world.

Let us picture a Greek temple towering before us. In its forms, in its perfection and wholeness, it is the very purest, noblest expression of the Spiritual—so that it could once be said, and said with truth: the God himself dwells in the Greek temple. The God was present in the temple, for the lines woven by the material were everywhere in harmony with the spiritual order of the Cosmos and with the lines pervading the physical plane as the directions of space. There is no more beautiful, no nobler example of the interpenetration of the spirit of man and physical matter than a Greek temple. It is the unparalleled example of union between the higher worlds and physical matter.

Through their works of art and the principles expressed in their creation, the Greeks were able to make the ancient Gods come down among them. And even if the Greeks did not actually behold Zeus or Pallas Athene when they had so descended, nevertheless the Gods were there, drawn and enchanted into these works of art—the Gods who had once been visible to men and among whom they had lived in the times of Atlantis. Men were able to provide a glorious dwelling-place for the ancient Gods.

And now let us see what the Greek temple represents in another respect. Suppose clairvoyant consciousness has before it a Greek temple. What will now be said holds good even of the sparse remains still surviving of the Greek temple architecture.—Think of what happens when clairvoyant consciousness has before it a relic such as one of the temples at Paestum. The harmony of the lines presented by the columns and roof coverings can literally fill one with rapture. Such perfection is there that one can picture and feel the very presence of divinity in the physical structure itself. The same feeling can arise when Greek architecture is seen through the eyes of the physical body.

And now think of clairvoyant consciousness transported into the spiritual world. There it is as if a black screen were drawn across what is to be seen in the physical world; what is to be seen there is as though obliterated. Nothing of all these splendours of the physical plane can be carried over into the spiritual world. Supreme beauty—when such indeed it is—achieved on the physical plane, is obliterated in the spiritual world. And then we realise that it is no myth when, on meeting an Initiate, one who was a leading figure in Greece uttered the words: Better it is to be a beggar in the upper world than a king in the realm of the Shades! (Homer: Odyssey, Song XI, verse 488-491)—In Greece, where man could find such bliss in the physical world, souls entered a shadowy existence when they passed into the world of the dead. Splendour in the physical world—equivalent barrenness in the spiritual world.

Let us now make two other comparisons with the experience aroused by a Greek temple.—Think of Raphael's Sistine Madonna, or Leonardo da Vinci's Last Supper—works created after the Event of Golgotha and influenced by its mysteries. The sight of these pictures can fill the soul with rapture, and this is also true of clairvoyant consciousness.

When the eyes of clairvoyant consciousness rest upon these pictures on the physical plane and this consciousness then rises into the spiritual world, a man realises, although the physical is no longer seen: What I take into the spiritual world from the experience aroused by these pictures is not simply an echo of the physical; here there is not only the rapture I experienced at the sight of them, but now for the first time I realise all their glory; in the physical world I merely laid the seed of what I now experience in infinitely greater majesty and splendour!—When a man contemplates such pictures in which the mysteries connected with Golgotha are contained, he is laying the seed—but only the seed—for a greater knowledge in the spiritual world. What has made this possible? It has been made possible because the spiritual Power proclaimed so long in advance, actually appeared on the Earth. Mankind had succeeded in unfolding a blossom in which the seed of the God of the future could ripen. Through the Event of Golgotha something was communicated to Earth existence that man can not only take with him into the spiritual world but that in the spiritual worlds appears in higher glory and sublimity.

At the moment when the physical body of Christ Jesus died on Golgotha, Christ appeared among those who were living between death and a new birth. He could proclaim to them what none of the earlier Initiates, when they passed into the spiritual world, could have proclaimed. When the earlier Initiates—let us say of the Eleusinian Mysteries—passed from this physical world into the world of those living between death and a new birth, what would the Eleusinian Initiates have been able to say to those souls? They could have told them of happenings on the physical plane, but this would have caused them nothing but longing and grief. For their life had taken root entirely on the physical plane and in yonder world, where nothing physical could be found and darkness prevailed, souls could not share the Feeling which made a man of importance on the physical plane exclaim: Better it is to be a beggar on the physical plane than a king in the realm of the Shades! The Initiates who could bring such treasures to those living on the physical plane could have brought nothing to the souls then living in yonder world. Then came the Event of Golgotha. Christ appeared among the dead—and for the first time there could be proclaimed in the spiritual world an event of the physical world which forms the beginning of a bridge leading over from the physical into the spiritual world. When Christ appeared in the nether world it was as though light flashed through the spiritual worlds. For in the physical world itself incontrovertible proof had been furnished that the spiritual can forever conquer death! And thus it came to pass that man can also carry over with him into the spiritual world, experiences that come to him in the physical world.

This holds good of St. John's Gospel in an even higher degree and also of the other Gospels which tell of the Event of Golgotha. A man who studies the Gospel of St. John on the physical plane, experiences intellectual joy from the reading of this great record; but when he passes into the spiritual world he knows that what he was able to experience in the physical world was but a foretaste of what he can now perceive and behold. The fact of supreme importance is that man can now take his treasures with him from the physical plane into the spiritual world.

Since the Event of Golgotha the spiritual world has been illumined with an ever brighter, ever clearer light. Everything existing in the physical world has issued from the spiritual world. When he passed from the physical into the spiritual world, pre-Christian man could say: Here is the wellspring and origin of everything the physical world contains. What has come forth from the spiritual world are but the effects. But since the Event of Golgotha, man can say when he passes from the physical into the spiritual world: In the physical world too there is causality and what is experienced on the physical plane works over into the spiritual world.

And so it will continue—in ever-increasing measure. Everything proceeding from the work of the old Gods will die away and what will blossom forth will grow on into the future, as the workings of the God of the future. This is what will pass over into the spiritual world. It is just as when a man, looking at the seed of a new plant, says to himself: True, it has come forth from an old plant, from an earlier seed, but now the old has fallen away, has vanished, and now the new seed is there, the seed that will unfold into the new plant, the new blossom.—We too live in a world where leaves and blossom have issued from the seeds born of the ancient Gods. But more and more the new fruit, the Christ-fruit, is unfolding and everything else will fall away. What is wrought out here in the physical world will be of value for the future in so far as it is carried over into the spiritual world. Before the eyes of Spirit a world arises in the future, a world which has its roots in the physical as our world once had its roots in the spiritual. Just as men are the sons of the Gods, so, out of what men in the physical world experience by rising to an understanding of the Event of Golgotha, the body will be formed for those new Gods of the future, of whom Christ is the Leader. So do the old worlds live on into the new; the old dies utterly away, and the new springs into bud out of the old. But this could come about only because humanity was able to unfold a blossom for that spiritual Being Who was to become the God of the future.

This blossom that could unfold within it the seed of the God of the future could only be a threefold human sheath consisting of physical body, ether body and astral body, a sheath cleansed and purified by all that could be attained by man on Earth. And this sheath of Jesus of Nazareth who sacrificed himself in order that the Christ-Seed might be received, this blossom of manhood, represents the very purest essence that the spiritual endeavours of evolving mankind have been able to produce. Not until the earth was ready to bring forth her fairest blossom could the seed for the new God appear. And the birth of this blossom is commemorated in our Christmas Festival. In our Christmas Festival we celebrate the birth of the blossom which was to receive the Christ-Seed.

Christmas is a festival wherein men can gaze into the past and also into the future. For from the past has issued the blossom out of which unfolds the seed for the future. The threefold sheath of Christ was a product of the old Earth—woven and born out of the highest that it was in men's power to achieve. And no outer presentation of a mystery can make a more powerful impression upon us than the presentation of the mystery of how the fairest flower of humankind could spring from the purest calyx.

That mankind once issued from the womb of the Godhead, that man was once a spiritual being and descended into material existence—how can this be more beautifully presented than by indicating how the Spiritual gradually densifies, how man himself has densified out of the formless haze of the Spiritual? As a prophetic foreshadowing, the ancient Egyptian depicted the lion-headed Goddess, still wholly spiritual, belonging to the age when man was still hardly material, still resting as an etheric-spiritual being in the womb of the Godhead. Then, anticipating the later ‘Sistine Madonna’, we have the Egyptian portrayal of another female form: Isis with the child Horus. There we see how what is born from the clouds, that is to say from the Spirit, has densified into the calyx, into that which represents the human being developing an into the future. This conception, already foreshadowed by men of ancient time, we see in the Christian Madonna with the Child Jesus.

With supreme purity and delicacy, Raphael has breathed this mystery into form in his portrayal of the Madonna. A human being crystallises out of angels' heads and in turn brings forth Jesus of Nazareth, the blossom into which the Christ-Seed is to be received. The whole story of the evolution of humanity is contained in a most wonderful way in this picture of the Madonna. No wonder that as he stood before the Madonna, there arose in the one to whose words we have listened today, the glorious remembrance from the incarnation of which his last incarnation was again a remembrance, and who brought to life within himself all the sublime insight which this pictured mystery of mankind could awaken; no wonder that these feelings streamed to the being from whom Christ was born, to the figure who brought forth the calyx from which sprang the blossom that could allow the seed of the new God to ripen!

And so we see how in the supremely gifted Novalis, feelings free of all denominational bias quicken to life at the portrayal of this holy Mystery which was enacted at the first Christmas and is repeated at every Christmastide. It is the Mystery of the ancient Initiates, represented by the Magi, bringing their offerings to the new Mystery. The Wise Men, who are bearers of the wisdom of times past, make their offerings to that which is to go forward into the future, that which, in a human being, will one day harbour the power by which all worlds connected with the Earth are pervaded.

Novalis experienced the Christ Mystery, the Mary Mystery, in relation to the Cosmic Mystery, the light of which shone before his eyes of soul as it had shone at the first Christmas, when Beings who had not descended to the physical plane proclaimed the union between a cosmic and an earthly Power, which can become a reality in human hearts and in the Cosmos itself when the human heart unites with Christ. The Egyptian proclamation: ‘The God with whom you must be united dwells in the world that can be reached only after death’, holds good no longer. For now the God with whom man must be united lives among us here, between birth and death; and men can find Him when they unite their hearts and souls with Him in this world. Thus in the first Holy Night of Christendom the strain resounded:

Offenbarung durch die Höhen dem Gotte,
Ruhe und Stille durch die Erdenräume,
Seligkeit in den Menschen.

Revelation in the Heights to God,
Quiet and peace through all the Earth,
Blessed joy in Men.¹

Poems by Novalis (‘Marienlieder’) were recited by Marie von Sivers (Marie Steiner) at the end of this lecture.

• 1. This should be regarded as an approximate translation of the rather unusual rendering of the Christmas message.

THE Festival of Christmas which we shall soon be celebrating acquires new life when a deeper, more spiritual conception of the world is brought to bear upon it. In a spiritual sense the Christmas Festival is a Festival of the Sun, and as such we shall think of it to-day. To begin with, let us listen to the beautiful apostrophe to the sun which Goethe puts into the mouth of Faust:—

Life's pulses newly-quickened now awaken,
Softly to greet the ethereal twilight leaping;
Thou Earth through this night too hast stood unshaken,
And at my feet fresh breathest from thy sleeping.
Thou girdest me about with gladness, priming
My soul to stern resolve and strenuous keeping,
Onward to strive, to highest life still climbing.—
Unfolded lies the world in twilight-shimmer;
With thousand throated song the woods are chiming;
The dales, where through the mist-wreaths wind, lie dimmer,
Yet heavenly radiance plumbs the deeps unnumbered,
And bough and twig, new-quickened, bud and glimmer
Forth from the fragrant depths where sunk they slumbered,
Whilst hue on hue against the gloom still heightens,
Where bloom and blade with quivering pearls are cumbered.
A very Paradise about me lightens!

Look up!—The giant peaks that rise supernal
Herald the solemn hour; for them first brightens
The early radiance of the light eternal,
Upon us valley-dwellers later showered.

Now are the green-sunk, Alpine meadows vernal
With radiance new and new distinctness dowered,
And stepwise downward hath the splendour thriven.
He sallies forth, and I mine overpowered
And aching eyes to turn away am driven.

Thus when a yearning hope, from fear and wonder
Up to the highest wish in trust hath striven,
The portals of fulfilment yawn asunder.
Then bursts from yonder depths whose days ne'er dwindle
Excess of flame—we stand as smit with thunder.
The torch of life it was we sought to kindle,
A sea of fire-and what a fire!—hath penned us.
Is't Love? Is't Hate? that yonder glowing spindle
In bliss and bale alternating tremendous
About us twines, till we the dazed beholders
To veil our gaze in Earth's fresh mantle wend us.

Nay then, the sun shall bide behind my shoulders!
The cataract, that through the gorge doth thunder,
I'll watch with growing rapture, 'mid the boulders
From plunge to plunge down-rolling, rent asunder
In thousand thousand streams, aloft that shower
Foam upon hissing foam, the depths from under.
Yet blossoms from this storm a radiant flower;
The painted rainbow bends its changeful being,
Now lost in air, now limned with clearest power,
Shedding this fragrant coolness round us fleeing.
Its rays an image of man's efforts render;
Think, and more clearly wilt thou grasp it, seeing
Life in the many-hued, reflected splendour.

(Translation by Latham)

Goethe lets these words be spoken by Faust, the representative of humanity, as he gazes at the radiant morning sun. But the Festival of which we are now to speak has to do with a Sun belonging to a far deeper realm of being than the sun which rises anew every morning. And it is this deeper Sun that will be the guiding moth in our thoughts to-day.

And now we will listen to words in which the deepest import of the Christmas Mystery is mirrored. In all ages these words resounded in the ears of those who were pupils of the Mysteries—before they were allowed to participate in the Mysteries themselves:—

Die Sonne schaue
Um mitternächtige Stunde.
Mit Steinen baue
Im lebenlose Grunde.
So finde im Niedergang
Und in des Todes Nacht
Der Schöpfung neuen Anfang,
Des Morgens junge Macht.

Die Höhen lass offenbaren
Der Götter ewiges Wort,
Die Tiefen sollen bewahren
Den friedensvollen Hort.
Im Dunkel lebend
Erschaffe eine Sonne.
Im Stoffe webend
Erkenne Geisteswonne.

Behold the Sun
At tire midnight hour;
Build with stones in the lifeless ground,
Thus in decay and in the night of Death
Find the Creation's new beginning,
Young morning's strength;
Glory in the heights the eternal Word of Gods;
Shelter in the depths the Powers of Peace.
In darkness dwelling, create a Sun.
In matter weaving, know the joy of Spirit!

Many to whom the Christmas Tree with its candles is a familiar sight to-day, believe that it is a very ancient institution—but this is not the case. The Christmas Tree is a very recent European custom, dating no further back than about a hundred years or so. Although, however, the Christmas Tree is a recent custom, the Christmas Festival is very ancient. It was celebrated in the earliest Mysteries of all religions, not as a festival of the outer sun but as one which awakens in men an inkling of the very wellsprings of existence. It was celebrated every year by the highest Initiates in the Mysteries, at the time of the year when the sun sends least power to the earth, bestows least warmth. But it was also celebrated by those who might not yet participate in the whole festival, who might witness only the outer, pictorial expression of the highest Mysteries. This imagery has been preserved through the ages, varying in form according to the several creeds.

The Christmas Festival is the Festival of the Holy Night, celebrated in the Mysteries by those who were ready for the awakening of the higher Self within them, or, as we should say in our time, those who have brought the Christ to birth within them.

Only those who have no inkling of the fact that as well as the chemical and physical forces, spiritual forces are also at work and that the workings of both kinds of forces take effect at definite times and seasons in cosmic life, can imagine that the moment of the awakening of the higher Self in man is of no importance. In the Greater Mysteries man beheld the forces working through all existence; he saw the world around him filled with spirit, with spiritual Beings; he beheld the world of spirit around him, radiant with light and colour. There can be no more sublime experience than this and in due time it will come to everyone. Although for some it may be only after many incarnations, nevertheless the moment will come for all men when Christ will be resurrected within them and new vision, new hearing will awaken. In preparation for the awakening, the pupils in the Mysteries were first taught of the cosmic significance of this awakening and only then was the sacred Act itself performed. It took place at the time when darkness on the earth is greatest, when the external sun gives out least light and warmth—at Christmas time—because those who are cognisant of the spiritual facts know that at this time of the year, forces that are favourable for such an awakening stream through cosmic space. During his preparation the pupil was told that one who would be a true knower must have knowledge not only of what has been happening on the earth for thousands and thousands of years but must also be able to survey the whole course of the evolution of humanity, realising that the great festivals have their own, essential place within that evolution and must be dedicated to contemplation of the eternal truths. The pupil's gaze was directed to the time when our earth was not as it is now, when there was no sun, no moon out yonder in the heavens, but both were still united with the earth, when earth, sun and moon formed one body. Even then man was already in existence, but he had no body; he was still a spiritual being. No sunlight fell from outside upon these spiritual beings, for the sunlight was within the earth itself. This was not the sunlight that shines from outside upon objects and beings to-day, but it was inner sunlight that glowed within all beings of the earth. Then came the time when the sun separated from the earth, when its light shone down upon the earth from the universe outside. The sun had withdrawn from the earth and inner darkness came upon man. This was the beginning of his evolution towards that future when the inner light will again be radiant within him. Man must learn to know the things of the earth with his outer senses; he evolves to the stage where the higher Man, Spirit-Man, again glows and shines within him. From light, through darkness, to light—such is the path of the evolution of mankind.

The pupils of the Mysteries were prepared by these constantly inculcated teachings. Then they were led to the actual awakening. This was the moment when, as chosen ones, they experienced the spiritual Light within them; their eyes of spirit were opened. This sacred moment came when the outer light was weakest, when the outer sun was shining with least strength. On that day the pupils were called together and the inner Light revealed itself to them. To those who were not yet ready to participate in this sacred enactment, it was presented as a picture which made them realise: For you too the great moment will come; to-day you see a picture only; later on, what you now see as a picture will be an actual experience. Thus it was in the lesser Mysteries. Pictures were presented of what the candidate for initiation was subsequently to experience as reality. To-day we shall hear of the enactments in the lesser Mysteries. Everywhere it was the same: in the Egyptian Mysteries, in the Eleusinian Mysteries, in the Mysteries of Asia Minor, of Babylon and Chaldea, as well as in the Mithras-cult and in the Indian Mysteries of Brahman. Everywhere the same experiences were undergone by the pupils of these Mysteries at the midnight hour of the Holy Night.

Early on the previous evening the pupils gathered together. In quiet contemplation they were to be made aware of the meaning and import of this momentous happening. Silently and in darkness they sat together. When the midnight hour drew near they had been for long hours in the darkened chamber, steeped in the contemplation of eternal truths. Then, towards midnight, mysterious tones, now louder, now gentler, resounded through the space around them. Hearing these tones, the pupils knew: This is the Music of the Spheres. Then a faint light began to glimmer from an illumined disc. Those who gazed at it knew that this disc represented the earth. The illumined disc became darker and darker—until finally it was quite black. At the same time the surrounding space grew brighter. Again the pupils knew: the black disc represents the earth; the sun, which otherwise radiates light to the earth, is hidden; the earth can see the sun no longer. Then, ring upon ring, rainbow colours appeared around the earth-disc and those who saw it knew: This is the radiant Iris. At midnight, in the place of the black earth-disc, a violet-reddish orb gradually became visible, on which a word was inscribed, varying according to the peoples whose members were permitted to experience this Mystery. With us, the word would be Christos. Those who gazed at it knew: It is the sun which appears at the midnight hour, when the world around lies at rest in deep darkness. The pupils were now told that they had experienced what was known in the Mysteries as "seeing the sun at midnight."

He who is truly initiated experiences the sun at midnight, for in him the material is obliterated: the sun of the Spirit alone lives within him, dispelling with its light the darkness of matter. The most holy of all moments in the evolution of man is that in which he experiences the truth that he lives in eternal light, freed from the darkness. In the Mysteries, this moment was represented pictorially, year by year, at the midnight hour of the Holy Night. The picture imaged forth the truth that as well as the physical sun there is a Spiritual Sun which, like the physical sun, must be born out of the darkness. In order that the pupils might realise this even more intensely, after they had experienced the rising of the spiritual Sun, of the Christos, they were taken into a cave in which there seemed to be nothing but stone, nothing but dead, lifeless matter. But springing out of the stones they saw ears of corn as tokens of life, indicating symbolically that out of apparent death, life arises, that life is born from the dead stone. Then it was said to them: Just as from this day onwards the power of the sun awakens anew after it seemed to have died, so does new life forever spring from the dying.

The same truth is indicated in the Gospel of St. John in the words: "He must increase, but I must decrease!" John, the herald of the coming Christ, of the spiritual Light, he whose festival day in the course of the year falls at midsummer—this John must ‘decrease’ and in this decreasing there grows the power of the coming spiritual Light, increasing in strength in the measure in which John ‘decreases.’ Thus is the new life, prepared in the seed-grain which must wither and decay in order that the new plant may come into being. The pupils of the Mysteries were to realise that within death, life is resting, that out of the decaying and the dying the new flowers and fruits of spring arise in splendour, that the earth teems with the powers of birth. They were to learn that at this point of time something is happening in the innermost being of the earth: the overcoming of death by life, by the life that is present in death. This was portrayed to them in the picture of the Light gradually conquering the darkness; this is what they experienced as they saw the Light beginning to shine in the darkness. In the rocky cave they beheld the Light that rays forth in strength and glory from what is seemingly dead. Thus were the pupils led on to believe in the power of life, in what may be called man's highest Ideal. Thus did they learn to look upwards to this supreme Ideal of humanity, to the time when the earth shall have completed its evolution, when the Light will shine forth in all mankind. The physical earth itself will then fall into dust, but the spiritual essence will remain with all human beings who have been made inwardly radiant by the spiritual Light. And the earth and humanity will then waken into a higher existence, into a new phase of existence.

When Christianity came into being it bore this Ideal within it. Man felt that the Christos would arise in him as the representative of the spiritual re-birth, as the great Ideal of all humanity and moreover that the birth takes place in the Holy Night, at the time when the darkness is greatest, as a sign and token that out of the darkness of matter a higher Man can be born in the human soul.

Before men spoke of the Christos, they spoke in the ancient Mysteries of a ‘Sun Hero’ who embodied the same Ideal which, in Christianity, was embodied in the Christos. Just as the sun completes its orbit in the course of the year, as its warmth seems to withdraw from the earth and then again streams forth, as in its seeming death it holds life and pours it forth anew, so it was with the Sun Hero, who through the power of his spiritual life had gained the victory over death, night and darkness. In the Mysteries there were seven degrees of Initiation. First, the degree of the Ravens who might approach only as far as the portal of the temple of Initiation. They were the channels between the outer world of material life and the inner world of the spiritual life; they did not belong entirely to the material world but neither, as yet, to the spiritual world. We find these ‘Ravens’ again and again; everywhere they are the messengers who pass hither and thither between the two worlds, bringing tidings. We find them too, in our German sagas and myths: the Ravens of Wotan, the Ravens who fly around the Kyffhäuser. At the second degree the disciple was led from the portal into the interior of the temple. There he was made ready for the third degree, the degree of the Warrior who went out to make known before the world the occult truths imparted to him in the temple. The fourth degree, that of the Lion, was reached by one whose consciousness was no longer confined within the bounds of individuality, but extended over a whole tribal stock. For this reason Christ was called "the Lion of the stem of David." To the fifth degree belonged a man whose still wider consciousness embraced a whole people. He was an Initiate of the fifth degree. He no longer bore a name of his own but was called by the name of his people. Thus men spoke of the ‘Persian,’ of the ‘Israelite.’ We understand now why Nathaniel was called a ‘true Israelite’; it was because he had reached the fifth degree of Initiation. The sixth degree was that of the Sun Hero. We must understand the meaning of this appellation. Then we shall realise what awe and reverence surged through the soul of a pupil of the Mysteries who knew of the existence of a Sun Hero. He was able in the Holy Night to participate in the festival of the birth of a Sun Hero.

Everything in the cosmos takes its rhythmic course: the stars, as well as the sun, follow a regular rhythm. Were the sun to abandon this rhythm even for a moment, an upheaval of untold magnitude would take place in the universe. Rhythm holds sway in the whole of nature, up to the level of man. Then, and only then is there a change. The rhythm which through the course of the year holds sway in the forces of growth, of propagation and so forth, ceases when we come to man. For man is to have his roots in freedom; and the more highly civilised he is, the more does this rhythm decline. As the light disappears at Christmas-time, so has rhythm apparently departed from the life of man: chaos prevails. But man must give birth again to rhythm out of his innermost being, his own initiative. By the exercise of his own will he must so order his life that it flows in rhythm, immutable and sure; his life must take its course with the regularity of the sun. Just as a change of the sun's orbit is inconceivable, it is equally inconceivable that the rhythm of such a life can be broken. The Sun Hero was regarded as the embodiment of this inalterable rhythm; through the power of the higher Man within him, he was able to direct the rhythm of the course of his own life. And this Sun Hero, this higher Man, was born in the Holy Night. In this sense, Christ Jesus is a Sun Hero and was conceived as such in the first centuries of Christendom. Hence the festival of His birth was instituted at the time of the year when, since ancient days, the festival of the birth of the Sun Hero had been celebrated. Hence, too, all that was associated with the history of the life of Christ Jesus; the Mass at midnight celebrated by the early Christians in the depths of caves was in remembrance of the festival of the sun. In this Mass an ocean of light streamed forth at midnight out of the darkness as a remembrance of the rising of the spiritual Sun in the Mysteries. Hence the birth of Christ in the cave—again a remembrance of the cave of rock out of which life was born—life symbolised by the ears of corn. As earthly life was born out of the dead stone, so out of the depths was born the Highest—Christ Jesus. Associated with the festival of His nativity was the legend of the three Priest-Sages, the Three Kings. They bring to the Child: gold, the symbol of the outer, wisdom-filled man; myrrh, the symbol of the victory of life over death; and frankincense the symbol of the cosmic ether in which the Spirit lives.

And so in the whole content of the Christmas Festival we feel something echoing from primeval ages. It has come over to us in the imagery belonging to Christianity. The symbols of Christianity are reflections of the most ancient symbols used by man. The lighted Christmas Tree is one of them. For us it is a symbol of the Tree of Paradise, representing all-embracing material nature. Spiritual Nature is represented by the Tree of Knowledge and the Tree of Life.

There is a legend which gives expression to the true meaning of the Tree of Knowledge and the Tree of Life. Seth stands before the Gate of Paradise, craving entry. The Cherubim guarding the entrance with a fiery sword, allow him to pass. This is a sign of Initiation. In Paradise, Seth finds the Tree of Life and the Tree of Knowledge firmly intertwined. The Archangel Michael who stands in the presence of God, allows him to take three grains of seed from this intertwined Tree. The Tree stands there as a prophetic indication of the future of mankind. When the whole of mankind has attained Initiation and found knowledge, then only the Tree of Life will remain, there will be no more death. But in the meantime only he who is an Initiate may take from this Tree the three grains of seed -the three seeds which symbolise the three higher members of man's being. When Adam died, Seth placed these three grains of seed in his mouth and out of them grew a flaming bush. From the wood cut from this bush, new sprouts, new leaves burst ever and again. But within the flaming ring around the bush there was written: "I am He who was, who is, who is to be"—in other words, that which passes through all incarnations, the power of ever-evolving man who descends out of the light into the darkness and out of the darkness ascends into the light.

The staff with which Moses performed his miracles is cut from the wood of the bush; the door of Solomon's Temple is made of it; the wood is carried to the waters of the pool of Bethesda and from it the pool receives the healing properties of which we are told. And from this same wood the Cross of Christ Jesus is made, the wood of the Cross which is a symbol of life that passes into death and yet has within it the power to bring forth new life. The great symbol of worlds stands before us here: Life the conqueror of Death. The wood of this Cross has grown out of the three grains of seed of the Tree of Paradise.

The Rose Cross is also a symbol of the death of the lower nature and the resurrection of the higher. Goethe expressed the same thought in the words:

"As long as thou best it not,
This Dying and Becoming,
Thou'rt but a dreary guest
Upon the dark earth."

The Tree of Paradise and the wood of the Cross are connected in a most wonderful way. Even though the Cross is always an Easter symbol, it deepens our conception of the Christmas Mystery too. We feel how in this night of Christ's Nativity, new, upwelling life streams towards us, This thought is indicated in the fresh roses adorning this Tree; they say to us: the Tree of the Holy Night has not yet become the wood of the Cross but the power to become that wood is beginning to arise in it. The Roses, growing out of the green, are a symbol of the Eternal which springs from the Temporal.

The square is the symbol of the fourfold nature of man; physical body, ether-body, astral body and ego.

The triangle is the symbol for Spirit-Self, Life-Spirit, Spirit-Man.

Above the triangle is the symbol for Tarok. Those who were initiated into the Egyptian Mysteries knew how to interpret this sign. They knew too, how to read the Book of Thoth, consisting of 78 leaves on which were inscribed all happenings in the world from the beginning to the end, from Alpha to Omega and which could be read if the signs were rightly put together. These pictures gave expression to the life that dies and then springs again to new life. Whoever could combine the right numbers with the right pictures, were able to read the Book. This wisdom of numbers and of pictures had been taught from time immemorial. In the Middle Ages it was still in the fore ground although little of it survives to-day.

Above this symbol is the Tao—the sign that is a reminder of the conception of the Divine held by our early forefathers; it comes from the word: TAO. Before Europe, Asia and Africa were scenes of human civilisation, these early forefathers of ours lived on the continent of Atlantis which was finally submerged by mighty floods. In the Germanic sagas of Nifelheim or Nebelheim, the memory of Atlantis still lives. For Atlantis was not surrounded by pure air. Vast cloud-masses moved over the land, like those to be seen to-day clustering around the peaks of high mountains. The sun and moon did not shine clearly in the heavens—they were surrounded by rainbows—by the sacred Iris. At that time man understood the language of nature. To-day he no longer understands what speaks to him in the rippling of waves, in the noise of winds, in the rustling of leaves, in the rolling of thunder—but in old Atlantis he understood it. He felt it all as a reality. And within these voices of clouds and waters and leaves and winds a sound rang forth: TAO—That am I. The man of Atlantis heard and understood it, feeling that Tao pervaded the whole universe.

Finally, the cosmic symbol of Man is the pentagram, hanging at the top of the tree. Of the deepest meaning of the pentagram we may not now speak. But it is the star of humanity, of evolving humanity; it is the star that all wise men follow, as did the Priest-Sages of old. It symbolises the very essence and meaning of earth-existence. It comes to birth in the Holy Night because the greatest Light shines forth from the deepest Darkness. Man is living on towards a state where the Light is to be born in him, where words full of significance will be replaced by others equally significant, where it will no longer be said: ‘The Darkness comprehendeth not the Light,’ but when the truth will ring out from cosmic space: The Darkness gives way before the Light that shines in the Star of Humanity—and now the Darkness comprehendeth the Light!

This should resound and the spiritual Light ray forth from the Christmas Festival. We will celebrate this Christmas Festival as the Festival of the supreme Ideal of mankind, for then it will bring to birth in our souls the joyful confidence: I too shall experience the birth of the higher Man within me! In me too the birth of the Saviour, the birth of the Christos will take place!

Positions of the symbols on the Christmas Tree

The yearly celebration of the physical birth of the Being Who entered earth-evolution in order to give that evolution its meaning, has for many people become a matter of habit. But if, conformably with the task of our spiritual-scientific movement, we are not content with celebrating a festival of mere custom—as is so general nowadays—it will be opportune at this grave time to turn our minds to many things that are connected with the physical birth of Christ Jesus.

We have often pictured how in Christ Jesus, so far as human comprehension goes, two Beings merge as it were into one: the Christ Being and the human Jesus Being. In the evolution of Christianity there has been much conflict, much conflict of dogma, about the meaning of the union of Christ with Jesus, in the Being whose physical birth is celebrated at the Christmas Festival. We ourselves, of course, recognise in the Christ a cosmic, super-earthly Being, a Being Who descended from spiritual worlds in order, through His birth in a physical man, to impart meaning to earth-evolution. And in Jesus we recognise the one who, as man, was predestined after thirty years of preparation, to unite the Christ Being with himself, to receive the Christ Being into himself.

Not only has there been much strife, much conflict of dogma, about the nature of the union of Christ with Jesus, but the relationship of Christ to Jesus contains a hint of significant secrets of the earthly evolution of mankind. If, in the endeavour to understand something of the union of Christ with Jesus, we follow events up to the present day and reflect upon what has still to take place in the evolution of humanity before this relationship can be rightly understood, then we touch upon one of the deepest secrets of human knowledge and human life.

At the time when Christ was about to enter the evolution of humanity, it was possible, through faculties that were a heritage from the days of the old clairvoyant wisdom, to form certain conceptions of the sublimity of the Christ Being. And at that time there existed a wisdom of which people often speak nowadays in a way that is almost blasphemous, but of which they are scarcely able to form any true idea. There existed something which up to this day has been completely exterminated from human evolution, rooted out by certain currents running counter to the deeper Christian revelation: this was the Gnosis, a wisdom into which had flowed much of the ancient knowledge revealed to men in atavistic clairvoyance. Every trace of the Gnosis, whether in script or oral tradition, was exterminated root and branch by the dogmatic Christianity of the West—after this Gnosis had striven to find an answer to the question: Who is the Christ?

There can be no question to-day of reverting to the Gnosis—for the Gnosis belongs to an age that is past and over. True, its extermination was caused by malice, ignorance, enmity towards knowledge and wisdom ... but for all that it happened out of an underlying necessity. When anthroposophical spiritual science is accused of wanting to revive the ancient Gnosis, that is only one of the many expressions of ill-will directed towards it to-day. The accusation is, of course, made by people whose ignorance of the Gnosis is on a par with their ignorance of Anthroposophy. There is no question of reviving the Gnosis, but of recognising it as something great and mighty, something that endeavoured, in the time now lying nineteen hundred years behind us, to give an answer to the question: Who is the Christ?

Before the inner eye of the Gnostic lay a glorious vista of spiritual worlds, with the Hierarchies ranged in their order, one above the other. How the Christ had descended through the worlds of the spiritual Hierarchies to enter into the sheaths of a mortal man—all this stood before the soul of the Gnostic. And he tried to envisage how the Christ had come from heights of spirit, how He had been conceived on earth. The best way to get some idea of the knowledge then existing is to reflect that everything produced by the world after the extermination of the Gnosis was paltry in comparison with the grandeur of the Gnostic idea of the Christ. The Mystery-wisdom behind the Gospels is infinitely great—greater by far than anything which later theology has been able to discover from them. To realise how paltry and insignificant compared with the Gnosis is the current conception of the Christ Being, we have but to steep ourselves in the ancient Gnostic idea of Him. Picturing this, one is filled with humility by the grandeur of the conception of the Christ Being entering into a human body from cosmic heights, from far distant cosmic worlds.

This majestic, sublime concept of Christ has fallen into the background, but all the dogmatic definitions handed down to us as Arian or Athanasian principles of faith are meagre in comparison with the Gnostic conception, in which vision of the Christ Being was combined with wisdom relating to the universe.¹ Only the merest fragments of this great Gnostic conception of Christ have survived.

This, then, is one aspect of the relationship of Christ to Jesus: that Christ came into the world at a time when the wisdom capable of understanding Him, yearning to understand Him, had already been rooted out. People who speak of the ancient Gnosis as oriental phantasy that had to be exterminated for the good of Western humanity, have always believed themselves to be good Christians, but the real cause was that the mind of the age lacked the strength to unite earthly with heavenly concepts. One must have a feeling for the tragic if human evolution is to be understood.

How long after the Mystery of Golgotha was the Temple at Jerusalem, the sanctuary of peace, destroyed? The Temple of Solomon was within the precincts of the city of Jerusalem. What the Gnosis contained in the form of wisdom, Solomon's Temple contained in the form of symbolism. Cosmic secrets were presented in symbols and pictures. And it was intended that those who entered the Temple, where the pictures all around them were reflected in their souls, should receive something through which alone they became truly man. The purpose of the Temple of Solomon was to inculcate the meaning of worlds into the souls of those who were permitted to enter it. What the Temple revealed was something that the earth as such did not reveal, namely, all the cosmic secrets that ray into the earth from the cosmic expanse.

If one of the old Initiates possessing real knowledge of the Temple of Solomon had been asked: Why was the Temple of Solomon built?—the answer would have been somewhat as follows: ‘In order that here on the earth there shall be a beacon light for those Powers who accompany the souls seeking their way into earthly bodies.’ Let us try to grasp what this means, realising that these old Initiates of the Temple of Solomon knew that when men were being accompanied into earthly bodies in conformity with all the signs of the stars, then particular souls must be guided to bodies in which the great symbols of Solomon's Temple could be mirrored.

This, in the nature of things, might give rise to arrogance. If the knowledge was not received with humility, with the humility of the Essenes, it led men into Pharisaism! But at all events, this was the situation: The eye of earth looked up to the heavens, beholding the stars; the spiritual eyes of those who were guiding souls from cosmic worlds to the earth gazed downwards and beheld the Temple of Solomon with its symbols. The Temple was like a star whose light enabled them to guide the souls into bodies which would be capable of understanding its meaning. It was the central star of the earth, shining out with special brightness into the spiritual heights.

When Christ Jesus had come to the earth, when the Mystery of Golgotha had taken place, the great secret that was intended to be mirrored in every single human soul was this: "My kingdom is not of this world!" It was then that the external, physical Temple of Solomon lost its significance and its destiny was tragically fulfilled. Moreover at that time there was no living person who would have been capable of apprehending the full compass of the Christ Being from the reflections of the symbols in Solomon's Temple. But the Christ Himself had now entered earth-evolution, had become part of it. That is the all-important fact. The Gnostics were the last survivors of the bearers of that ancient, atavistic earth-wisdom which was comprehensive and powerful enough to make some understanding of the Christ possible.

That, then, is one aspect of the relation of Christ to Jesus. In those days the Christ Being could have been understood through the Gnosis. But according to the world-plan it was not to be—although the Gnosis teemed with wisdom concerning the Christ. And it may truly be said that the path now taken by Christianity through the countries of the South, through Greece, Italy, Spain and so on, led more and more to the obliteration of insight into the essential nature of Christ. And Rome, sinking into decline, was destined to bring about the final extinction of understanding.

In regard to this relation of the Christ to Jesus it is strange that on the one hand we find lighting up in the Gnosis a sublime conception of the Christ which died away as Christianity passed through the Roman system, while on the other hand, when Christianity encountered the peoples from the North, the concept of Jesus came to the fore. In the South, the concept of Christ flickered out. The form in which the concept of Jesus emerged was by no means very sublime, but it gripped men's hearts and feelings in such a way that something wonderfully absorbing stirred in their souls at the thought of how the Child who receives the Christ is born in the Holy Night. Just as in the South the concept of Christ was inadequate, so in the North was man's feeling for Jesus. But for all that it was a feeling that stirred the very depths of the human heart. Yet in itself it is not quite comprehensible. For if we contrast the immeasurable significance of Christ Jesus for the evolution of humanity with all the sentimental trivialities about the ‘dear little Jesus’ contained in many poems and hymns commonly used to move the human heart—for in their egoism men believe that these trivialities kindle emotions capable of storming the heavens—then we have a direct impression that something is striving to make its home but is not fully able to do so, that one element is mingling with another in such a way that the deeper meaning, the far deeper significance, remains in the subconsciousness.

What actually is it that remains in the subconsciousness while the Jesus-thought, the Jesus-feeling, the Jesus-experience, is coming to the surface? The process takes a strange and remarkable course. The understanding for Christ sank into the subconsciousness and there, in the subconsciousness, the understanding for Jesus began to glow. In the subconsciousness—not in the consciousness, which was dim—the consciousness of Christ that was flickering out and the consciousness of Jesus that was beginning to stir were destined to meet and counter-balance each other. Why was it, then, that the peoples who came down from Scandinavia, from the North of present-day Russia, received Christianity without the Christ-idea which, to begin with, was wholly foreign to them? Why was it that they received Christianity with the Jesus-idea? Why was Christmas the festival which above all others spoke to the human heart, awakened in the human heart feelings of holy bliss? Why was it? What was present in this Europe which in truth received from the South a completely distorted Christianity? What was it that kindled in men's hearts the idea which then, in the Christmas Festival, created such a deep, deep fount of experience?

Men had been prepared—but had largely forgotten by what they had been prepared. They had been prepared by the old Northern Mysteries. But they had forgotten the import and meaning of these ancient Mysteries. And we have to go very far back into the past to discover from the source and content of the Northern Mysteries the deep secret of the penetration of the Jesus-feeling into the soul-life of the European peoples.

The principles underlying the Northern Mysteries were quite different from those underlying the Mysteries of Asia Minor and of the South. The experiences underlying the Northern Mysteries were more intimately and directly connected with the existence of the stars, with nature, with earthly fertility, than with the wisdom represented in symbols within a Temple. The Mystery-truths are not the childish trifles presented by certain mystic sects to-day; the Mystery-truths are great and potent impulses in the evolution of mankind. Present-day Anthroposophy can no more revert to the Gnosis than mankind can revert to what the ancient Mysteries of the North, for example, signified for human evolution. And to believe that such Mystery-truths are now being revealed because of some kind of hankering to go back to what was once alive in them, would be a foolish misunderstanding. It is for the sake of deepening self-recollection, self-knowledge, that mankind to-day must be made aware of the content of such Mysteries. For what linked the Northern Mysteries with the whole evolution of the universe, arose from the earth, just as the Gnostic wisdom, inspired from the cosmos, was connected with happenings in the far distances of the universe. How the secret of man, linked as it is with all the secrets of the cosmos, comes into operation when a human being enters physical existence on the earth—it was this that, with greater depth than anywhere else at a certain period of earth-evolution, lay at the root of these ancient Northern Mysteries.

But we have to go very far back—to about three thousand years before Christ, perhaps even earlier—to understand what was alive in the hearts of those in whom, later on, the feeling for Jesus arose. Somewhere in the region of the peninsula of Jutland, in present-day Denmark, was the centre from which, in those ancient times, important impulses went out from the Mysteries. And—let the modern intellect judge of this as it will—these impulses were connected with the fact that in the third millennium before Christ, in certain Northern tribes, he alone was regarded as a worthy citizen of the earth who was born in certain weeks of the winter season. The reason for this was that from those places of the Mysteries on the peninsula of Jutland, among the tribes which at that time called themselves the Ingaevones, or were so called by the Romans—by Tacitus²—the Temple Priest gave the sign for sexual union to take place at a definite time during the first quarter of the year. Any sexual union outside the period ordained by this Mystery-centre was taboo; and in this tribe of the Ingaevones a man who was not born in the period of the darkest nights, at the time of greatest cold, towards our New Year, was regarded as an inferior being. For the impulse went out from that Mystery-centre at the time of the first full moon after the vernal equinox. Only then, among those who might believe themselves united with the spiritual world as became the dignity of man, was sexual union permissible. The characteristic virility—even in its aftermath—marvelled at by Tacitus, writing a century after the Mystery of Golgotha, was due to the fact that the forces which enter into such sexual union were preserved through the whole of the rest of the year.

And so those who belonged to the tribe of the Ingaevones (and in a lesser degree this was also true of the other Germanic tribes) experienced the process of conception with particular intensity at the time of the first full moon after the vernal equinox. They experienced it, not in wide-awake consciousness, but as it were heralded in dream. Yet they were aware of its significance in regard to the connection between the secret of man and the secrets of the heavens. A spiritual being appeared to the woman who was to conceive and in a kind of vision announced to her the human being who, through her, was to come to the earth. There was no clear consciousness, but only semi-consciousness, in the sphere experienced by souls when the entry of a human being into the physical world is taking place; subconsciously men knew that they were under the direction of the Gods, who then received the name of the Wanen, connected with wähnen, that is to say with what takes its course, not in clear, intellectual, waking consciousness, but in cognitive dream-consciousness.

What was once in existence and fitting for its own epoch, is often preserved in later times in symbols. Thus the fact that in those ancient times the holy mystery of the generation of a human being was wrapped in subconsciousness, and led to all births being concentrated in a particular period of the winter season, so that it was regarded as sinful for a man to be born at another time—this was preserved in fragments which passed over to a later consciousness as the Hertha or Erda or Nertus Saga. No erudition, as scholars themselves openly admit, has hitherto been able to interpret these fragments, for actually all that is known externally of the Nertus Saga, with the exception of a few brief notes, comes from Tacitus, who writes as follows about the Nertus or Hertha cult:

"The Reudigni, Aviones, Anglii, Varini, Eudoses, Saurini and Nuitones—Germanic peoples living amidst rivers and woods" (that is, roughly the several tribes who belong to the Ingaevones) " specially revere Nertus, that is, Mother Earth, and they believe that she intervenes in human affairs, makes journeys to the peoples." (Germania 40).

In the ancient cult of the Wanen it became known in dream-consciousness to every woman who was to give a citizen to the earth that the Goddess worshipped later on as Nertus would appear to her. The Divinity was, however, represented not exactly as female, but as male-female. It was not until later, through a corruption, that Nertus became an entirely feminine principle. Just as the Archangel Gabriel drew near to Mary, Nertus on her chariot drew near to the woman who was about to give a citizen to the earth. The woman concerned saw this in the spirit. Later, when the Mystery-impulse in this form had long since died out, echoes of the happening were celebrated in symbolic rites which Tacitus was still able to witness and of which he says the following:—

"On an island of the ocean is a sacred grove and in it there is a consecrated chariot covered with a veil. Only the priest may approach it."—This priest was taken to represent the ‘Initiate’ of the Hertha-Mystery—"He knows when the Goddess appears in the sacred chariot. He becomes aware of the presence of the Goddess in her holy place, and in deep reverence accompanies her chariot drawn by cows. Then there are days of joy and feasting in all the places which the Goddess honours with a visit. Then there are joyous days and wedding feasts. At those times no war is waged, no weapons are handled, the sword is sheathed. Only peace and quiet are at those times known or desired, until the Goddess, tired of her sojourn among mortals, is led back into her shrine by the same priest." (—This was actually the form taken by the vision—

"Then there are joyous days and wedding feasts." In such ancient records the descriptions are accurate and exact, only men do not understand them. "Then there are joyous days and wedding feasts. At those times no war is waged, no weapons are handled, the sword is sheathed." And so it was in very truth at the time which is now our Easter, when human beings believed in their inmost soul that the time of earthly fruitfulness had come for them too; it was then that the souls who were born at the time that is now our Christmas, were conceived. Easter was the time of conception. The experience was regarded as a holy, cosmic mystery, and it was this that was symbolised later on by the Nertus cult. The whole experience was veiled in the subconscious region of the soul, might not rise up into consciousness. This is hinted at in the description of the cult given by Tacitus: "Only peace and quiet are at those times known or desired—until the Goddess, tired of her sojourn among mortals, is led back into her shrine by the same priest. Then the chariot and the veil and even the Goddess herself are bathed in a hidden lake. Slaves perform the cult, slaves who are at once swallowed up as forfeit by the lake, so that all knowledge of these things sinks into the night of unconsciousness. A secret horror and a sacred darkness hold sway over a being who is able to behold only the sacrifice of death."

Everything that comes into the world calls forth a Luciferic and an Ahrimanic counterpart. The event which—as experienced by the Ingaevones—was part of the regular, ordained evolution of mankind was connected with the time of the first full moon after the vernal equinox. But owing to the precession of the equinox, what had remained from olden days as a dream-experience was transferred to a later date and therefore became Ahrimanic. When the experience that had arisen in ancient times in the true Hertha cult was advanced about four weeks, it became Ahrimanic. This meant that the union of the woman with the spiritual world was sought in an irregular way—at the wrong time. Here lies the explanation of the institution of the Walpurgis Night—between the 30th April and the 1st May. It is nothing but an Ahrimanic transposition of time. Luciferic transposition of time goes backward; Ahrimanic transposition of time runs in the opposite direction, being connected with the precession of the equinox. Thus the Ahrimanic, Mephistophelean form of the Hertha cult, the perversion into the diabolic, later became the Walpurgis Night; it is connected with the most ancient Mysteries of which only faint echoes remained.

Much of the content of the ancient Northern Mysteries lived on—if the matter is rightly understood—in the Scandinavian Mysteries. There, instead of Nertus, we find Friggo, a god who, according to the symbolism associated with him—but this can become intelligible only through spiritual science—turns into the very betrayer of what lies at the root of this Mystery.

One more thing must be mentioned in regard to these Mystery-practices. You can see that if the human seed was ripening from the time of the vernal full moon to winter time, one such human being would be the first to be born in the ‘Holy Night.’ Among the Ingaevones the first to be born in the Holy Night—the Holy Night of every third year in the most ancient times—was chosen as their leader when he reached the age of thirty, and he remained leader for three years, for three years only. What happened to him then I may perhaps be able to tell you on another occasion.

Careful investigation reveals that not only are Frigg, Frei, Freiga, merely additional designations for Nertus, as is the Scandinavian ‘Nört,’ but the name ‘Ing’ itself, whence Ingaevones, is another name for Nertus. Those who were connected with the Mystery called themselves "Men belonging to the God or the Goddess Ing"—Ingaevones. Only fragments of what really lived in this Mystery survived in the external world. One such fragment consists of the words of Tacitus already quoted. Another fragment is the well-known Anglo-Saxon rune of a few lines only. These famous lines are known to every philologist of the Germanic languages, but no one understands their meaning. They are approximately as follows:

"Ing was first seen among the East Danes. Later he went towards the East. He walked over the waves, followed by his chariot."

In this Anglo-Saxon rune there is an echo of what lay behind the old Mystery-customs of the Easter conception with a view to the Christmas birth. What happened then in the spiritual world was known best on the Danish peninsula. Hence the rune correctly says: "Ing was first seen among the East Danes."

Then came the time when this ancient knowledge fell more and more into corruption, when it was to be found only in echoes, in symbolism. This was the time in the evolution of humanity when what originated in the warm countries spread abroad. And what comes from the warm countries is something that is not connected—as is the case in the cold countries—with the intimate relation between the seasons and man's own inner experiences. From the warm countries came the impulse which resulted in the distribution of conceptions and births over the whole year; this of course had already happened in the South even in the days of the old, atavistic clairvoyance, although it was still to some extent pervaded by the old principles, the principles which prevailed in the times when in the cold regions the Women held sway and in the South the Temple Mysteries had long since superseded the old Nature-Mysteries. The Southern practice spread towards the North, although an intermixture of the old still remained at the time when the Wanen gods were superseded by the Asen gods. Just as the Wanen are connected with wähnen, so are the Asen connected with the German sein (being)—that is to say, being or existence in the material world which the mind tries to grasp externally. And when the men of the North had entered into an age when individual intelligence began to assert itself, when the Asen had supplanted the Wanen, the old Mystery-customs fell into decay. They passed over into isolated, scattered Mystery-communities of the East. And one Being only—he in whom the whole meaning of the earth was to be made new, he in whom the Christ was to dwell—he alone was destined to unite within himself what had once been the essence and content of the Northern Mysteries.

Hence the origin of the account in St. Luke's Gospel of the appearance of the Archangel Gabriel to Mary, is to be sought in the visions of spiritual realities once reflected in the Nertus-symbol of the ancient Northern Mysteries. The symbol had moved eastward. Spiritual science discloses this to-day and this alone explains the meaning of the Anglo-Saxon rune. For Nertus and Ing are the same. Of Ing it is said: "Ing was first seen among the East Danes. Later he went towards the East. He walked over the waves, followed by his chariot,"—over the waves of the clouds, that is, just as Nertus moved over the waves of the clouds.

What had once been general in the colder regions, here became singular, individual. It occurred as a single, unique event, and we find it again in the descriptions given in the Gospel of St. Luke.

But whatever has once existed in the world and has taken root, whatever is anchored in the heart's understanding, remains a possession of the soul. And when knowledge of Christianity was received in the North from the Roman South, men felt—not in clear consciousness but in the subconsciousness—it had some connection with an ancient Mystery-custom. Hence in the North, men were able to develop a particularly intense feeling for Jesus. The reality that had lived in the old Nertus Mystery had already sunk into the subconsciousness, yet in the subconsciousness it was present, it was sensed and dimly experienced.

When in those long past times in the far North, when the earth was still covered with forests that were the home of the bison and the elk, families came together in their snowcovered huts and under their lantern-lights gathered around the new-born child, they spoke of how with this new life there had been brought to them the new light announced by the heavens in the previous spring. Such was the ancient Christmas. To these people, who were one day to receive the tidings of Christendom, it was said: In the hour that is especially holy, one destined for greatness is born. It is the child who is the first to be born after midnight in the night designated as holy. And although men no longer possessed the ancient knowledge, when the tidings came that such a one had been born in far-off Asia, one in whom lived the Christ Who had come down from the world of the stars to the earth, something of the old feeling came alive in them.

It is incumbent upon the present age to understand such things more and more deeply and thereby grasp in concrete reality the meaning of the evolution of earthly humanity. Truths of mighty, awe-inspiring significance are contained in the Holy Scriptures, not just the trivialities of which we so often hear in religious teachings to-day, but sacred truths which thrill through the very fibres of our being, stirring our hearts to the depths. These are truths which flow through the whole evolution of humanity and resound in the Gospels. And as spiritual science reveals their deep, deep source, the Gospels will one day become a precious treasure, prized at their true worth. Men will know, then, why it is recounted in the Gospel of St. Luke:

"And it came to pass in those days, that there went out a decree from Caesar Augustus that all the world should be taxed. (And this taxing was first made when Cyrenius was governor of Syria).

And all went to be taxed, every one into his own city.

And Joseph also went up from Galilee, out of the city of Nazareth, into Judaea, unto the city of David, which is called Bethlehem; (because he was of the house and lineage of David).

To be taxed with Mary his espoused wife, being great with child.

And so it was, that, while they were there, the days were accomplished that she should be delivered.

And she brought forth her first-born son, and wrapped him in swaddling clothes, and laid him in a manger; because there was no room for him in the inn."

It was for Him, the first-born among men in whose souls true ego-hood was to awaken, that the holy Mystery-power of ancient days had passed over from the Danish peninsula to the distant East.

"And there were in the same country shepherds abiding in the field, keeping watch over their flock by night.

And lo, the angel of the Lord came upon them, and the glory of the Lord shone round about them: and they were sore afraid."

Nerta too, moving across the land, had announced to the old Wanen-consciousness, that is to say, in the subconsciousness of atavistic clairvoyance, the arrival of human beings on the earth.

"And the angel said unto them, Fear not; for behold I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people.

For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Saviour, which is Christ the Lord.

And this shall be a sign unto you: Ye shall find the babe wrapped in swaddling clothes, lying in a manger.

And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God, and saying ..."

And now the heavenly Powers proclaimed what the Nerta-Priest in the old Northern Mystery-cult had proclaimed to the woman about to conceive.

"The revelation of the Divine from the Heights takes place at the time when there is peace among men who are of good-will."

As Tacitus narrates: "Then there are joyous days and wedding feasts. At those times no war is waged, no weapons are handled, the sword is sheathed."

The great goal for which man must strive is the attainment of the power to gaze into the course of the evolution of humanity. For the Mystery of Golgotha, too, through which earth-evolution received its deeper meaning, will become fully comprehensible when its place in the whole evolution of humanity is understood. In future times, when, with the disappearance of materialism, man will know, not in abstract theory but as a concretely real experience, that he is of divine origin, the ancient, holy Mystery-truths will again be understood; then the intervening time will be over, a time in which the Christ, it is true, lives on earth, but can be understood only by the awakened consciousness. For the Gnostic conception of Christ faded away; understanding for Jesus developed in connection with the old Nertus cult, but in unconsciousness. In the future, however, humanity will have to bring both the unconscious streams to consciousness, and unite them. And then an ever greater understanding of the Christ will take foothold on earth, an understanding that will unite the Mystery-knowledge with a great and renewed Gnosis.

Those who take the anthroposophical view of the world seriously, and the movement associated with it, will see in what it has to say to mankind no child's play but great and earnest, soul-shaking truths. And our souls must submit to this because it is right that we should be shaken by greatness.

Not only is the earth a mighty living being; the earth is an exalted spirit-being. And just as the greatest human genius could not stand at the height he reaches in later life if he had not first developed through childhood and adolescence, so the Mystery of Golgotha could not have taken place, the Divine would not have been able to unite with earth-evolution, if at the beginning of earthly days the Divine—in a different manner but in a manner still divine—had not descended to the earth. The form taken by the revelation of the Divine from the heavenly heights was not the same in the ancient Nertus cult as it was at a later time, but for all that it was a true revelation.

The knowledge contained in this ancient wisdom was, it is true, atavistic in character, but for all that it was infinitely more exalted than the materialistic view of the world which, in the sphere of knowledge, so brutally reduces humanity to the level of the animal.

In Christianity we have to do with a Fact, not with a theory. The theory is a necessary consequence and of importance for the consciousness that has had to develop in the further course of human evolution. But the essence of Christianity as such, the Mystery of Golgotha, is an accomplished Fact. The impulse entered, to begin with, into subconscious currents, as was still possible in Asia Minor at the time when the union of Christ with the earth took place.

Shepherds, men bearing a similarity with those among whom the Nertus cult flourished, are also described in the Gospel of St. Luke. I can give only very brief indications of these things. If we were able to speak of them at greater length you would find that there are deep foundations for what I have told you to-day. The human being has descended from spiritual heights ... hence the revelation of the Divine from the heavenly heights ... The revelation had to be expressed in this form to those who out of the ancient wisdom knew the destiny of man to be united with the secrets of the stars of heaven. But what must live on earth as the result of Christ's union with a man of earth—that can be understood only very gradually. The message is twofold: ‘Revelation of the Divine from the heights’—‘Peace in the souls on earth who are of good-will.’ Without this second part, Christmas, the Festival of the birth of Christ, has no meaning!

Not only was Christ born for men; men have also crucified Him. Even behind this lies necessity. But it is none the less true that men have crucified the Christ! And it may dawn upon us that the crucifixion on the wooden Cross on Golgotha was not the only crucifixion. A time must come when the second part of the Christmas proclamation becomes reality: ‘Peace to the men on earth who are of good-will.’ For the negative side too is discernible. Men are very far indeed from a true understanding of Christ and of the Mystery of Golgotha.

Does it not cut to the very heart that we ourselves should be living at a time when men's longing for peace is shouted down?³ It seems almost a mockery to celebrate Christmas in days when voices are raised in outcry against the desire for peace. To-day, when the worst has not actually befallen, we can but fervently hope that a change will take place in the souls of men, and a Christian feeling, a will for peace supersede these demonstrations against the desire for it. Otherwise it may not be those who are struggling in Europe to-day, but those coming over from Asia, who will one day wreak vengeance on this rejection of the desire for peace; it may be they who will have to preach Christianity and the Mystery of Golgotha to humanity on the ruins of European spiritual life. And then the indelible record will remain: that at Christmas time, nineteen hundred and sixteen years after the tidings of peace on earth to men of good-will, humanity came to shout down the desire for peace.

May it not succeed! May the good Spirits who are at work in the Christmas impulses protect luckless European humanity from such a fate!

• 1. Arius: "The Son was once created out of nothing by the Divine Will, was the first creature and the creator of the Universe, hence to be called God, though subject to the Father," This was declared heretical by the Council of Nicea in A.D. 325, and replaced by the Athanasian principle of faith. "The Son of God is from eternity, not created, but begotten out of the Being of the Father, and is of like nature to the Father.
  
  Streams of blood were shed in consequence of these doctrines, impenetrable as they are by the human mind (Weber: Lehrbuch der Weltgeschichte, 1875).
• 2. Mannus had three sons, after whom the people nearest the North Sea are called Ingaevones, those of the centre, Hermiones, the remainder Istae. (Germania 2).
• 3. A reference to the agitation against the German proposal in December, 1916 for peace negotiations.

Anyone walking down the street today among the Christmas trees that have been put up might easily be led to believe that the Christmas tree itself is something very old. But it is precisely the Christmas tree that allows you to see the change in people's customs and traditions, because the Christmas tree, which is now found in almost every home, is not even a hundred years old. A century ago, you would not have been able to walk down streets occupied by Christmas trees. You would also look in vain in the poetry of a hundred or a hundred and twenty years ago for a song, for a poem that sings of the Christmas tree. But that should be a striking phenomenon for you, because the Christmas tree is something that has been sung about by poets in the time when it was once there. It is a very new phenomenon, something that only became common in Europe in the second half of the nineteenth century. The Christmas tree as a symbol of Christmas only appeared around 1800, but Christmas itself is ancient, not just Christian. It was celebrated in the same way in all times of which we can have historical knowledge.

In Christianity itself, Christmas has only been taken as a symbol of the birth of the Christian Redeemer since the fourth century AD. In no way was December 25 celebrated as the birthday of the founder of Christianity in the first centuries of Christianity; it was only in the fourth century that it was understood as such. But a festival was celebrated in the Roman Empire during this time, a festival was also celebrated at the same time by the ancient Celtic and Germanic peoples and with a similar idea already in ancient Egypt and in many other areas. What was celebrated there was something else; it was only in the fourth century of our era that it was linked to the birthday of the founder of Christianity.

Now one could conclude from this that the Christian church would have done something that would historically go against all tradition, and would have wanted to correct something with it, so to speak. But that is not the case. Anyone who truly understands the meaning of Christmas recognizes the ancient wisdom that lies hidden in such a festival. Festivals such as Christmas, Easter and Pentecost are nothing more than dates, dates inscribed in time by our ancestors, with whom they showed us, their descendants, how they understood the relationship between the world and man and the great mysteries of existence. Whoever knows how to decipher the writing that has been laid down for us in the great festivals, whoever knows how to decipher the hieroglyphs that time itself presents to us, will glimpse into the deep and meaningful mysteries of all human becoming. I said – and we will see in a moment in which sense this applies – that Christmas has been celebrated since the time when we have history. The times about which we know historical documents go back to the third sub-race of the fifth root race. The times of our own sub-race, in which physical science and physical culture have developed, go back to the fifteenth or sixteenth century. This was preceded by another race, and this goes back to the ninth or eighth century BC, to the times when Homer was singing his poems to the Greeks. This period tells us about the feelings and deeds of the fourth sub-race that preceded us.

Then we come back to the even older times, but these already lead us back to the gray antiquity, to the time of ancient Babylon and Assyria, to the ancient times of the Jewish people, to the times when the Egyptian priests preserved their wisdom and only brought it to the people in an exoteric way. Then the historical tradition ceases. What has been handed down to us from Persian history was only recorded much later. What is communicated to us as the sublime religion of ancient India, what is recorded in the Vedas and in the Vedanta philosophy, these are late records compared to the times in which the great thoughts of the ancient Indian Rishis, which they received directly from the divine spirits themselves, flowed through them to humanity. Thus we look back from the time in which we ourselves live, and which will last for a long time yet, to the Greco-Roman epoch, which is transformed into Christianity, and then to the epoch in which the Egyptian priests were active. But then the paths become lost. Only those who can follow history in other ways can know anything about ancient Persia. We are led even further back into the times that only the occultist can see.

Now, if you want to understand the Christian festival, you have to look back in time to the point where a new wisdom was taught to newly emerging humanity for the first time. We have come back to the time when the ancient Atlantean civilization disappeared due to the tremendous flooding of a large continent and a new human civilization - to which the epochs I have already enumerated belong - was established. A completely new way of thinking and feeling has emerged with this new humanity. Nothing of the actual culture of the Atlanteans, let alone of the even older culture of the Lemurian peoples, who once lived in ancient times and perished in a fire, has been preserved directly. However, what humanity has once gone through must be gone through again briefly when a new turning point in development has been reached. Thus the first sub-races of the fifth root race were destined to briefly repeat three important epochs in the development of humanity.

In ancient India, the wise Rishis looked back to those times when humanity was still at a very different stage, to those times when there was not yet a male and a female

sex, when man was still a unity. Then they looked back to that great unity in the human race, to that primeval man Adam, who is also called Adam Kadmon in various secret teachings, who was man and woman at the same time. They expressed that primal unity of humanity in a spiritual way by hinting at the supreme world being with the indefinite sacred name Brahman. Brahman is originally that out of which, as out of the All, out of the divine ground of unity, all manifoldness has emerged. On the earth itself, this unity was only present for man in a certain way in the times when there was not yet male and female, in the times when the diversity that we have now did not yet exist. What we are confronted with here is a reflection from the spirit of the great Indian Rishis: the divine Primordial Unity of man, the pre-human Adam Kadmon, in whom there was still peace, spirit, clarity and harmony; he speaks from the Vedic word as it flowed from the lips of the Indian Rishis. This was the first epoch of our human race after the great flood. It was not yet the case that there was talk on our earth of a trinity, of a threefold divine person. People only spoke of a primal unity, of Brahman, in which everything is contained, from which everything originates.

Then there came a time when the Persian Zarathustra priests, the wise men of the Parsees, looked back to that epoch when man, of both sexes, was born out of fire, when that man was born who represents a dual, a twofold. And with the birth of man out of the fire, something came into our earthly world that had not been there before; only then did evil come into the world. Evil did not exist in the human sense before the origin of the sexes. These originated in the middle of the Lemurian period. And good and evil have only existed since that time. Good and evil filled the last Lemurian period and the first Atlantean period.

It is interesting to research, according to the spiritual documents called the ‹Akashic Records›, how these two forms of humanity express themselves. In the next issue of the magazine “Lucifer - Gnosis” you will find an explanation of how the duality in man unfolds, how, when man really appeared in two sexes, man's soul and man's physical willpower were initially distributed among the sexes. Even those who today, as occultists, decipher the wonderful records that have been preserved for us in the Akasha Chronicle may be amazed at how fundamentally different the masculine and feminine appeared on our Earth in those early times, because it is so different from our present-day conception. Woman initially developed the soul, under the guidance of the wise leaders of humanity; man developed the will element. This is how a duality of will and soul arises. They face each other in the Atlantic epoch in the two sexes of humanity. Because soul came into the physical body and thereby into humanity, evil came into humanity. And because our humanity had to repeat that epoch, which is characterized by the difference between good and evil, the fire religion, the Parsee religion, the doctrine of Ormuzd and Ahriman emerged. This precedes our history as a Persian cultural period.

The concept of “good and evil” lived on in the religion of Zarathustra. At that time, there was no talk of a trinity. This came only later, at about the time when our historical documents begin. The Akasha Chronicle does not report a trinity in prehistoric times. It was only when people knew how to distinguish between good and evil that they were forced to look to a third party. And so we see the mediator, in the form of the mediator, in the form that most clearly presents itself to us in the so-called Mithras mysteries, which spread from Persia across the whole world. We see the mediator, the reconciler, the redeemer of humanity from evil, the guide from evil to good.

In these ancient times, one must always see in the earthly an image of the divine, an image of what has taken place in the great vault of heaven. If you look at the zodiac, you will see that in this zodiac the signs of Cancer, Gemini, Taurus and Aries or Lamb follow one another. According to certain laws, the sun, or rather the sun's vernal point, advances, so that in ancient times the sun rose in spring in the sign of Cancer, later in the sign of Gemini, still later in the sign of Taurus, and still later in the sign of Aries or the Lamb. Around the time of the eighth century before the birth of Christ, the sun had reached the constellation of Aries or the Lamb in the celestial vault. Now, in our cultural era, it enters the constellation of Pisces.

Depending on what happens in the spiritual realm, what happens on earth takes shape. You are familiar with the sign of Cancer, but its true significance is not always known. This sign of Cancer must be understood; then one will also understand how it points to the dawning of a completely new era. They are two intertwined spirals or two intertwined vortices. When something important happens in the world, when one stage of development is replaced by another, when something completely new enters the world, then two such vortex movements intertwine. In this one vortex you have the end of the Atlantean culture, and in the other you have the beginning of the Aryan culture. Our ancestors saw the outer sign for the rise of the new Aryan culture in the sky above. Then, in later times, the sun entered the sign of Gemini. Gemini is a sign for good and evil; Gemini is the sign of the zodiac that dominated Persian thinking. Then the sun enters the sign of Taurus. This brings us to the third sub-race; it has the worship of the bull, the Egyptian Apis, in Babylonia the service of the bull, and finally in what was later to become Persia the bull sacrifice, the service of Mithras. Man brought the bull sacrifice down from heaven because it was marked there.

The fourth sub-race, which saw the rise of Christianity, begins with the sun entering Aries. An important saga – the bringing of the ram skin by the Greek hero Jason – indicates this important turning point in history. And a further important turning-point is indicated by the sacrifice of the mystic Lamb on the cross. This is the historical expression of the mystery that is indicated by the fact that the Sun, the ruler of the world, has reached the point in the vault of heaven that is signified by the Lamb or the Ram.

But now we have to understand this whole development in the right way. After the duality of good and evil, the trinity appears in human consciousness. This occurs in various religions. We only need to get to know it in what we know in the different countries around the Mediterranean as the Mithras mysteries. Let us look at one of these mystery temples. For those who only participate in the lesser mysteries, a symbolic act takes place. For those who are allowed to participate in the greater mysteries, the same thing takes place as a fact in the astral realm. I can only speak about the lesser mysteries of the Mithras service. The symbolic bull becomes visible. The mediator, the god, rides on it. He then holds the bull's nostrils shut and plunges his sword into its side. A snake comes, a scorpion; above the head of Mithras one sees a bird, and above the whole group, on one side, one sees the genius with a lowered torch and, on the other side, with a raised torch, which symbolizes the sun on its course through the vault of heaven.

Human life, as it was experienced in the consciousness of that time, is thus presented to us. Man had come to seek redemption within himself, the third divine principle, which leads him away from evil and can reconcile evil with good. Evil is the passions, that which pulls man down to earth, all the way to what is symbolized by the bull. But what can lead man up to the higher self, what appears as the immortal, is the mediator who has killed the lower being when he symbolically thrusts the sword into the bull's loins. Thus, as mediator between good and evil, that is, in the third sub-race, a trinity in the divine appears, and with that, humanity has grasped what is called Atman-Budhi-Manas in theosophy. The moment the mediator appears, the mystical secret is fulfilled: the trinity in the consciousness of man awakens.

Thus man was led through the human realization of unity, duality and trinity to Atman, Budhi, Manas. Atman or the spirit is the unity that man is able to perceive within himself when he has developed to it. Budhi or the spirit of life will express itself in man in that evil will be overcome by good, that duality will on the one hand purify the lower instincts or desire and on the other hand reconcile the higher so-called fire instincts or love, in that all evil will be consumed in the fire of love. Manas or the spirit self is the spiritual principle that already governs human development. Just as the Messiah, the redeemer, creates unity in the world, leading from disharmony to harmony, so duality dissolves through the trinity, in which evil is overcome by good.

Thus the human race had come so far that it saw its entire destiny in the trinity. But it sees fate in this trinity as imposed on people as an eternal world order. Man looks up to the threefold aspect of the Godhead, beholds a divine trinity in the world and sees himself as dependent on this divine trinity. He truly experienced that this divine Trinity descended directly to him in a human brother. This was the great event at the beginning of our era. For human consciousness, the Trinity has become something completely new as a result.

But we can only understand the deeper meaning of Christmas if we understand the mediator in the right way. From unity, duality has developed, from duality, chaos, from which harmony is to develop again. This harmony can only develop if the mediator creates this harmony. This harmony can only find expression in an eternal lawfulness, and this eternal lawfulness found its symbolic expression - in the time when the Mithras service originated - in the fact that an image was seen in man himself, this creating the eternal world harmonies of the world law.

In the same mysteries that I have already mentioned here, in the secrets of the Persian religion, you will find a sevenfold initiation for those who were admitted to the sacred secrets. The first degree included those who learned about the very first secrets: this was the degree of the “ravens”, as the symbolic name indicates. The second degree was that of the Occultists. The third degree was that of the fighters or for sacred truth. The fourth degree was that of the so-called Lions, and the fifth degree was that of the Persians. Only the latter was regarded as a full Persian, in whom the consciousness of the highest spiritual in man had awakened, which we call Manas. He in whom this had awakened could be called a fifth-degree initiate, and he was called a Persian. He was a member of a nation in the truest sense of the word. He represented the destiny of his people. And if he was initiated one degree higher, he no longer represented the personality of his people, but that of all mankind. He then represented not the karma of a people, but of all mankind, insofar as it had developed from the middle of the Lemurian race and further into the fifth root race. Then such an initiate was called a sun runner or a “sun hero.” All those whom you find in the books as solar heroes are none other than such initiates of the sixth degree. Then came the “Father”; he was connected with the evolution of the future of humanity.

What does the name Sunrunner mean? If you could look back into the primeval times of our solar system, you would see that this solar system emerged from the struggle of thermal chaos, and that harmony itself has established itself in our world of disharmony, that peace and the laws have developed out of discord and disharmony. But how did they come about? They came about like this: The sun has such a regulated course that we cannot even imagine that the sun could deviate from its path for a moment; our world is so firmly grounded in harmony that the sun is firmly determined in its direction by its path through the world, that nothing can bring it out of this direction. In this course of the sun across the vault of heaven, the ancient Persian initiate saw his own inner destiny in the sixth degree. The sun of his own inner being, the sun of his spirit, had to shine so firmly for him that he could not deviate from the path of good and wisdom any more than the sun could deviate from its path. A person who had reached the sixth degree of initiation had to be so imbued with this lawfulness that he could not possibly deviate from his path; then he was a solar hero, a sun-runner.

All the earlier degrees of initiation had no other purpose than to give the human being this inner security, this inner sun-likeness. Thus, the person who knew something of these mysteries saw a deep harmony between human destiny and the path of the sun across the vault of heaven. The sun – so he said – causes the days to grow shorter and shorter, nature to die towards autumn, everything to withdraw into the interior. And when we approach the time that is celebrated today as Christmas, a new turn occurs: the light emerges, the days become longer in nature, nature can awaken again. The birth of the light – that was the moment celebrated since the times when it was said that the light is the symbol of revelation in the world and in man. So that in the East all peoples of our root race regarded the light as the garment for the wise ordering of the world. In the light they saw the garment for world wisdom. When we direct our eyes into the universe, light appears, harmoniously and firmly imprinted, in the stars outside. In reality, the spirits of wisdom reveal themselves through the light that the ancient religions saw as the garment of wisdom in the world.

Thus the trinity appeared to the ancient religions, that they first celebrated unity, primordial wisdom, then duality, light and darkness, and finally, as a trinity, also the enlightened man, the teacher and mediator, Mithras.

But mankind could not attain salvation in the sense of this consciousness until the consciousness of this universal harmony was born out of human hearts themselves. That which lives outside in the world as light, as the birth of light, must at the point in time we are now approaching arise in the human heart itself. The external mystical fact that has taken place is the founding of Christianity. In Christ, that which has been present on our earth from the very beginning, but which has remained hidden from humanity throughout the ages we have just spoken of, has appeared. During this time, humanity has gradually repeated those three stages. But now a new point of view, a new high point can be reached: the light can be reborn. Just as after the light grows weaker and weaker as we approach autumn, and then, when we come to the winter solstice, the light is reborn, so too was the savior, the Christ, born to humanity in the fourth sub-race. He is the new solar hero who was not only initiated in the depths of the mystery temples but appeared before the world, so that even those who do not see can be blessed by believing! It was therefore a natural consequence that when it was realized that the Divine can descend to the level of personality, one could at that moment replace the birth festival of the Light with the birth festival of the solar hero of the fourth post-Atlantean race.

This happened in the fourth century of our fourth sub-race. What had never been there before was now there, namely, the possibility that man could give birth to the light within himself. He could do so because the light principle had been incarnated in a human being for the first time. With this happening, the winter solstice festival was necessarily associated with Christmas. The entire significance of the preceding sub-races is determined and established with the transfer of the celebration of the birth of Christ to the winter solstice festival. At first, wisdom and light appeared to people from outside, but now the light was to be brought forth from within the human heart. Christ was to be born within man himself. Therefore, the event also had to take place in Palestine, a mystical event and an historical fact.

We are therefore dealing with a historical event, and that is precisely the great mystery that is so little understood: that what happened in Palestine happened literally as it is described in the Gospel of John, and that at the same time it is a mystical fact. Those who do not understand the event in this way do not yet understand it at all. But if you understand it that way, then you will also understand why from this moment on God is to be imagined as a personality, and that the Trinity, which had been imagined differently before, is to be imagined in the form of three divine persons. Christ had now become a person, and with that the proof was delivered that the divine can be realized in man. With that a firstling had appeared on earth, in whom the divine once dwelt. And this could henceforth become a lasting, an undestroyable ideal for mankind.

All the earlier great teachers of wisdom - the Egyptian Hermes, the ancient Indian Rishis, the Chinese Confucius, the Persian Zarathustra - they spoke the word of the divine, they were the great teachers. With Jesus, who was the Christ, the divine itself walked on earth in a living form for the first time. Before that, we only had the way and the truth on earth. Now we have the Way, the Truth, and the Life. That is the great difference between the earlier religions and Christianity, that the latter is the fulfillment of the former, that in the case of Christ we are not dealing with a teacher of wisdom – for teachers of wisdom are also present in all other religions – but with a human personality who must at the same time be venerated as a divine personality. This is why the disciples' message is so important: “We have laid our hands in his wounds, we have heard his message.” This is also why they relied on appearances, on direct sensory impressions; that one should not just listen to the word, but also look at the personality. And this is also the reason for the conviction that he was the world solar hero in a completely unique way. If we grasp this, we also understand that the old festival of the winter solstice used to mean something different from today's Christmas. In Egypt we find Horus, Isis and Osiris, the archetype of what also lives in Christianity. In ancient India we have the birth of Krishna from the Holy Virgin. Everywhere we find echoes of this myth. But what is important about Christianity is what I have just mentioned: the fact that not only the trinity, but the tetrad has become sacred, that the sacred has descended to the personality. Before that, the sacred was divine and enthroned at an inaccessible height above human beings. The old teachers of wisdom, the holy Rishis, revered it as the indefinite, unutterable Brahman; the old Zarathustra disciples saw it in the duality of good and evil; in Egypt, as already mentioned, it is the triad of Isis, Osiris and Horus. But that the Divine dwelt among men, that it became personality, that was the secret of the fourth sub-race. This is the most important event of our human epoch, that Christmas, which has always represented the birth of an initiate, now represents the birth of the greatest solar hero, the Christ Himself. Thus we see the necessity of these two things resonating in the course of the world. If we look at the fourth sub-race and compare it with the point in time at which we ourselves stand, then we see the divine having moved down even further. And it has taken on a peculiar form in our present time, a form that one must understand if one wants to fully decipher the Christmas festival. Go back to the fourth sub-era, to the twelfth or thirteenth century: everywhere you will find full understanding of the real personality of Christ among those who know it; this personality of Christ is so comprehensively described that, for example, in the poetry of 'Heliand', German conditions are transferred to the Christ. The Christ stands so firmly within humanity that the conditions of other countries can be related to his redemptive deed. He is so firmly rooted in humanity as a whole as a personality. But then a different mood sets in. There is a certain shaking of faith in this archetype of humanity. Something occurs that is a step forward on the one hand, but on the other hand a much larger circle of humanity enters into the further evolution of Christianity. But in return, people cease to understand that the center of his thinking, feeling and willing can lie in the individual personality of Christ. There are fewer and fewer people who dare to say that it is not the doctrine but the personality of Christ that is at issue. Finally, it dissolves altogether into the worship of the abstract ideal, which one thinks only spiritually and towards which man strives. In the time of the first sub-race it was Brahman, in the time of the second it was light and darkness, in the time of the third it was the Trinity. Then, in the time of the fourth sub-race, this Trinity had descended and become a person. The personal aspect descended even further, to the level of mere intellect, which has dissolved the human personality and is only worshipped as an abstract ideal.

In our fifth sub-race, however, the moment that must still come is already approaching, and it must bring us faith in the new initiates, in the 'Fathers'. Those initiated in the seventh degree are called the Fathers, and in the spiritual scientific world view we speak of the realization of the Masters, because it is not just one, but because it will be the Masters to whom man will look in gratitude and adoration as the great leaders of humanity. Thus the fifth sub-race connects us with our future. And so this fourth sub-race appears to be placed right in the middle of the great process we are going through, the process of Advent, that is, of the three preceding races, of which the three-week Advent is a reflection, because in a short time people will once again go through the process of how, in earlier times, the light dawned at Christmas time. Then comes the life in the light. That is why Christmas is not something temporary for Christians either, not a commemoration of what has passed; because the Christmas antiphon is not: Christ was born, or Christ was born, but it says: Today Christ was born. Today is always spoken of. That is important and significant. Today is spoken of in the sense that Christ Himself spoke: 'I am with you until the end of days'. This is something that stands before us anew every year and reveals to us the connection between man and heaven. It shows us that what has taken place in heaven must also take place in man. And just as the sun could not deviate from its orbit by a single inch without causing confusion, so too must man keep to his path. He must achieve that inner harmony, that inner rhythm, which is given to him by Christ, who was incarnated in Jesus and who will work in the Fathers, whose guidance man must follow in the times of the future.

This is the connection between man and heaven: the sun should not only move unerringly in the sky and gain new strength at the winter solstice, it should also bring about a birth of light from deep within in man, a resurrection, a solar heroism of the fifth root race. Hence the Christmas saying: “Gloria in excelsis deo et in terra pax”, “Peace on earth to those of good will”. Inner peace will also bring humanity's evolution into a rhythmic process, just as the sun has brought its own process into a regular rhythm. In the sun we have an image of the eternal cycle of the cosmos. It has overcome chaos within itself and brought it to peace. In this sense, Christmas is a festival of peace, from which the mood of peace and harmony should also radiate. Then it is celebrated in the right way, when the power of peace and harmony radiates from this festival. With the Christmas bells, not only the sounds of the Church resound, but the sounds of all striving humanity, which is working and has worked on present-day culture and its further development, ever since the Earth with its spirituality rose again from the great frost.

What the preceding races longed for as their future was born into the fourth post-Atlantean sub-race. And what the three following races must strive for, that resounds from the Christmas sounds. The harmonies of the heavens truly speak to us when we understand what Christmas expresses. Every festival of the year is so firmly grounded in ancient wisdom.

It is no coincidence that these festivals have been set, they have not sprung from arbitrariness, but are drawn from the deepest wisdom of the world, and those who can truly understand and celebrate them with full understanding will find in them the scriptural characters of ancient wisdom for what has happened from the beginning and will happen in the future. In this way the festivals take on a new meaning; they cease to have the conventional significance that they have for many people. To read the great truths of the world is to celebrate the great world festivals in the right spirit. With the heart, with the mind, with the soul you read the primal truths of heaven when you celebrate the great world festivals. Then they are truly celebrated out of the spirit, then they are something for humanity again.

Spiritual science is not mere abstract thought, not a tangle of dogmas. It has a great task and a world mission to revive what humanity has forgotten, to strike the fire out of what has been given to us by our ancestors. Then human selfishness will also cease. They will learn to live in the unified spirit of the world. This is the wisdom that, among many other things, emanates from spiritual science, and it is practical in a good sense; it gives us inner support and secure hope. And that is why the spirit of peace and spiritual confidence that emanates from the Christmas festival can inspire those who strive for spiritual knowledge in their innermost being.

The exalted spiritual leaders of humanity once prescribed this festival for us in primeval times. Let us visualize this as genuine Christmas wisdom at the end of this hour: Advanced human brothers are the leaders of the spiritual movement, advanced human brothers who were already present at the beginning of the fifth root race when the great world festivals were established, and who, as the great teachers of humanity, are still revealing such truths to us today. They do not give us the wisdom teachings out of speculation, out of their own opinion, but because they were there when the things were revealed. They have prepared the peace that shall one day flow over humanity, and they have composed the holy scriptures in the festivals, from which we shall read the message of peace, the message of inner soul bliss, which we shall regain through spiritual science. If we live in the spirit of the masters of harmony, then we live more and more towards the great ideal that they themselves exemplify to us. Spiritual science reminds us of those exalted leaders of humanity when we are seized by the Christmas spirit, which speaks to us of peace and of the sacrifices of the great masters. This peace flows into the future of humanity. We see it completely surrounded by the splendor of this spiritual light and the harmony of feelings. In this glory in which they appear to us, we recognize them as the fathers who lead us towards the future. We follow in their footsteps, and out of our own soul is born a life that is immersed in peace, in harmony and unity - in that harmony that is an image of the sun's path around the world.

The birth of peace at Christmas time is a reflection of the sun's passage around the celestial vault. This is taught by the wise magicians, the great masters, and spoken by those who not only have blind faith in these masters, but who also know and say out of their full knowledge: the masters they are, and the spiritual world movement under the guidance of the masters is the great and lofty peace movement that leads people to that world harmony in which human souls will live with the same harmonious regularity and imperturbability with which the sun moves through the worlds, showing us the way to the radiant beauty of the spiritual sun.

The Christmas festival which we are about to celebrate is given deep significance again and a new life in the spirit with the anthroposophical view of the world. Spiritually, the Christmas festival is a sun festival, and it is as a sun festival that we shall meet it today. To begin with, let us hear the most wonderful apostrophe⁸¹ addressed to the sun, words Goethe wrote for his Faust:

The throb of life returns, with pulses beating Soft to ethereal dawn. O steadfast earth,
True through the night, you waited for my greeting,
Breathing beneath my feet in glad new birth,
And, clothing me afresh in joy of living,
In high resolve that banishes misgiving,
You stir my soul to prove life’s utmost worth.—

In gold of dawn the quickened world lies gleaming,
The forest is alive with myriad voices,
Through dell and vale the misty shapes are teeming,
But nature’s deepest heart in light rejoices;
Now burgeon, freshly quivering, frond and bough,
Sprung from the fragrant depth where they lay dreaming;
On flower and blade hang trembling pearls, and now Each colour stands out clear, in glad device,
And all the region is my Paradise.

Look up on high!—The giant peaks that stand In joy of light above the mountain-brow,
Are heralds of the solemn hour at hand,
That brings the blessing down upon our land.
Already, down the soft eternal stair,
The shine has reached the lower Alpine sward,
Where clarity and brilliance are restored,
As downward, step by step, the light is poured—
The dazzling sun strides forth, and fills the air.
I turn, from greater power than eyes can bear.

And thus it is, when hope with earnest striving Has toiled in aims as high as man may dare,
Fulfilment’s open gates give promise fair,
But from those everlasting depths comes driving,
A fiery blast that takes us unaware:
We thought to light life’s torch, but now, depriving Our highest hope, a sea of fire surrounds us.
Such fire! Of love? Or the fierce glow of hate?
The blend of joy and sorrow that confounds us Sends us to earth: to veil our troubled state,
For benefice of Spring we supplicate.

And so I turn, the sun upon my shoulders,
To watch the waterfall, with heart elate,
The cataract pouring, crashing from the boulders,
Split and rejoined a thousand times in spate;
The thunderous water seethes in fleecy spume,
Lifted on high in many a flying plume,
Above the spray-drenched air. And then how splendid To see the rainbow rising from this rage,
Now clear, now dimmed, in cool sweet vapour blended.
So strive the figures on our mortal stage.
This ponder well, the mystery closer seeing;
In mirrored hues we have our life and being.⁸²

These are the tremendous words Goethe lets his representative of humanity utter as the sun rises in the morning. It is not this sun, however, awakening anew every morning, which we are considering in connection with the festival of which we want to speak today. We want to let the true nature of the sun influence us in a much deeper sense. And the reality of that sun shall be our lodestar today.

We shall now hear the words that reflect the most profound meaning of the Christmas mystery. These words sounded as the pupils listened in deep devotion in the mysteries of all ages, hearing them before they were permitted to enter into the mysteries themselves.

Behold the sun
At the midnight hour!
In the lifeless ground
Build thy rocky tower!

So, when in depths thou mourn,
Find thou in death’s dark night
Creation’s pulse new-born With living morning light.

The powers on high make known
The eternal word divine;
The deeps must guard their own—
Peace, in their sacred shrine.

In gloom thou livest—
Create anew a sun!
In matter weaves—
Know spirit-bliss begun!⁸³

Many people who today know only the Christmas tree with its candles believe it to be an institution that has a long tradition. This is not the case, however. The Christmas tree is in fact a fairly recent European institution. Even the earliest Christmas tree was only just over a hundred years ago. But young as the tree may be, the Christmas festival is old indeed.

The Christmas festival was known and celebrated in all the mysteries of earliest times everywhere. It is not a mere sun feast but one that takes humanity to true perception or at least an idea of the wellsprings of existence. It was celebrated annually by the highest initiates in the mysteries at the time when the sun sent the least energy to the earth, gave the least warmth. It was also celebrated by those who could not yet take part in the whole of it, but knew only an outer reflection of the most sublime mysteries, a reflection in the form of images. And these secrets from the mysteries have survived through the ages and assumed a different garb among different peoples, depending on their beliefs. Christmas is the name given to the solemn night, this holy night celebrated in the great mysteries. These were occasions when the initiator would let the higher human being be resurrected in those who had been adequately prepared, or, to put it in present-day terms, when the living Christ was born in the inner human being.

People who do not know that spiritual principles are at work as well as chemical and physical principles, and that like chemical and physical principles these have their particular seasons in the cosmos, people like this are the only ones able to believe that it does not matter when the higher self is awakened. The essence of the great mysteries was that human beings lived through an event in which they were allowed to see the creative powers in the glory of colour, in bright light; were permitted to see the world around them filled with spiritual qualities, with many spirits; were permitted to see the world of spirits around them, and had the greatest experience a human being can have. One day this moment will come for all and everyone. All will know it, though perhaps only after many incarnations—but the time will come for all and everyone when the Christ will rise within them and new seeing, new hearing will awaken in them.

Mystery pupils who were being prepared for the awakening would first be taught what this awakening meant in the great universe. After this the final acts would come to bring awakening, and these acts were performed at the time when the darkness was greatest, when the sun was at its lowest in the outside world—at Christmas, for those who knew the true facts in the spirit knew that powers moved through cosmic space at this time that were helpful for such an awakening. During the preparation the pupils would be told that those who truly wished to know must know not only what had been happening on this globe through millennia but must also learn to have an overview of the whole of human evolution. They also had to know that the great festivals had been made part of the year and its seasons by leading spirits and that they must devote themselves to looking up to the great eternal truths.

The eye was guided to roam over millions of years. Look to the time, the pupils would be told, when our earth was not yet the way it is now, when there was no sun as yet, no moon, but the two were still one with the earth; when the earth was still one body with the sun and the moon. Human beings were there at that time, but they did not yet have a body. They were spiritual entities, and no light of the sun fell on those human souls and spirits from outside. The light of the sun was in the earth itself. It was not like the sunlight of today, which falls on creatures and objects from the outside. It was a light that had power of spirit in it, and shone forth at the same time in the inner life of every human being. Then came the time when the sun moved away from the earth. It separated from the earth and its light then fell on the earth from outside. The sun had withdrawn from the earth. Darkness had come to the inner human being.

This was where the human race began to evolve towards the future point in time when they would find the inner light shining again within them. Humanity had to gain knowledge of the things of this earth, using the outer senses. Human evolution tended towards the time when the higher human being, the spirit human being, would once again be aglow and alight within. From the light through the darkness to the light—that is the course of human evolution.

When the pupils had been prepared they would be guided towards awakening at the moment in time when as a chosen group they were to have an inner experience of something which the rest of humanity is only to experience in the distant future. Then they would see the light of the spirit with eyes that had been opened in the spirit. This solemn moment was to come when outer light was weakest, on the day when the sun shone least in the outside world. Then, on that day, the pupils of the mysteries would be brought together, and the inner light would open up for them.

Others who were not yet able to take part in this celebration were to have at least an outer image that would tell them: ‘You, too, shall one day know this great moment. Today you see an image. Later you shall experience the event you now see in the image.’

Those were the lesser mysteries. They would show a reflection of what the initiate would experience at a later time. Today we’ll share in the experience of what happened in the lesser mysteries around the midnight hour. It was the same everywhere—in the Egyptian mysteries, the Eleusinian mysteries, the mysteries of Asia Minor, in the Babylonian and Chaldean mysteries and also in those of Persian Mithra worship and the Indian Brahma mysteries. Everywhere the pupils of those mystery centres would have the same experience around the midnight hour of that solemn night.

They would gather in good time on the eve of the event. In quiet thought they had to gain insight into the significance of this, the most important event. They would sit in absolute silence, having gathered in the dark. When midnight approached they would have been sitting in the dark room for hours. Thoughts of eternity went through their inmost minds. Then, towards midnight, mysterious sounds would arise, flooding the room, growing louder and then softer again. Hearing these sounds the pupils would know it to be the music of the spheres. Profound, solemn devotion filled their hearts. Then a faint light would come from a dimly lit disk. Those who saw it would know that this disk represented the earth. The luminous disk would then grow darker and darker until finally it would be quite black. At the same time the room around them would grow progressively lighter. Those who saw it knew that the black disk was the earth. The sun, which otherwise shone through the earth had been obscured. The earth could no longer see the sun. Then halo upon halo would develop around the earth’s disk, in rainbow colours, going outwards. Those who saw this would know that it was the iris.⁸⁴ And around midnight, a luminous reddish violet halo would arise in place of the black earth disk; a word was written on this. The word would be a different one, depending on the nations whose members were allowed to experience the mystery. In our present-day language it would be Christos.⁸⁵ Those who saw it would know it to be the sun. It appeared to them in that midnight hour when the world all around was lying in profound darkness. The pupils would be told that they had now experienced something in images which in the mysteries was called ‘to see the sun around midnight’.

A true initiate truly learned to see the sun around the midnight hour, for the material principle in him had been extinguished. The sun of the spirit alone lived in him, its light shining out over all the darkness of matter.

This was the most blessed moment in human evolution when the human being found himself released from darkness and living in the light of eternity. It was shown as an image in the mysteries, year after year, around the midnight hour of that solemn night. The image showed that there is a sun of the spirit as well as the physical sun, and like the physical sun this must be born from deep darkness. To make it even clearer to them, the pupils were taken to a cave after their experience of the rising sun, the Christos. The cave appeared to contain nothing but rock—dead, lifeless matter. They would then see ears of corn arise from the stones, a sign of life, a symbolic picture of life arising from apparent death, life being born in dead mineral. They would then be told that just as the power of the sun will wax again from this day onward, the day when it appeared to have died, so new life was forever rising from life that was dying.

The same event is referred to in the words ‘He must wax but I must wane’ in the New Testament.⁸⁶ John, herald of the coming Christ, of the light of the spirit when it is at its greatest height in the course of the year at midsummer, this John must wane, and as he wanes the power of the light that is coming waxes, growing more and more powerful as John wanes. Thus the new, the coming life is preparing in the seed which must perish and die so that the new plant may arise.

The inner feeling pupils were meant to develop was that life lies dormant in death, that new, magnificent flowers and fruit arose from death and putrefaction, that the earth was filled with the power to give birth. They had to come to believe that something happens in the inner earth at this time—the overcoming of death through life. When they were shown the conquering light they were shown the life that was present in death. They experienced this inwardly, they lived through this when they saw light arise and shine out in the darkness. They now saw sprouting life in the rock cave, life arising in glorious abundance from something that was seemingly dead.

That is how the pupils were trained to develop this belief in life, and belief in what may be called the greatest human ideal was made to grow in their hearts and minds. They learned to look up to this, the greatest human ideal, to the time when earth will have completed its evolution, when light will be radiant in the whole of humanity. The earth itself will then fall to dust, but its spiritual essence will remain, with all the human beings who have grown inwardly luminous through the light of the spirit. And earth and humanity shall awaken to a higher form of existence, a new stage of existence.

When Christianity arose in the course of evolution, this was its ideal in the highest possible sense. It was inwardly felt that the Christos, being the immortal spirit of the earth, was to appear as the foundation not only of all material, sprouting life, but also of spiritual rebirth, the great ideal of all humanity; that he was born around Christmas time, the time of greatest darkness, as a sign that a higher human being can be born out of the darkness of matter in the human soul. Before people came to speak of a Christos, they would speak of a sun hero in the earlier mysteries; he was seen to be connected with the same ideal as the Christos of Christianity. The individual connected with the ideal was called the sun hero. Just as the sun completes its cycle in the course of the year, as its light increases and decreases, just as its heat seems to be withdrawn from the earth and then radiates again, just as its death holds life, letting it stream forth once again, so the sun hero has become lord over death and night and darkness because of the power of his life in the spirit.

Seven degrees of initiation were known in the Persian Mithras mysteries. The first was the ‘raven’, someone able only to go as far as the portal of the temple of initiation. The ravens became mediators between the material life of the outside world and the spiritual life of the inner world; no longer belonging to the material world they were not yet part of the spiritual world. We find these ravens come up again and again, always playing the same role as messengers going to and fro between the two worlds and conveying knowledge between them. We also have them in our Norse and German myths and legends—Odin’s ravens and the ravens flying around the Kyffhäuser mountain. The second degree, that of the ‘occult person’, took the disciple from the portal into the inner initiation temple. There he matured until he reached the third degree, the ‘protagonist’ who would go out and make known to the world the occult truths he had experienced in the temple. The fourth degree, that of the ‘lion’, was gained when his consciousness was no longer limited to the individual but to a whole tribe. Hence the Christ was known as the ‘lion of Judah’. Someone whose consciousness extended even further, embracing a whole nation, would have reached the fifth degree. He would no longer have a name of his own but would bear the name of the nation. Thus people spoke of a ‘Persian’, or an ‘Israelite’. We can see why Nathanael⁸⁷ was called a ‘true Israelite’; it was because he had reached the fifth degree of initiation. The sixth degree was the ‘sun hero’, and we need to understand what this means. We shall then come to see that pupils in the mysteries would feel a shudder of veneration if they knew something about a sun hero and were able to share in the festival to celebrate the birth of a sun hero at Christmas.

Everything in the cosmos takes its rhythmic course. All the stars follow a great rhythm, as does the sun. If the sun were to abandon this rhythm for even a movement, if it were to leave its orbit for just a moment, this would cause a revolution of unheard-of importance in the whole of the universe. Rhythm governs the whole of nature, from lifeless nature all the way to the human being. We see it in the plant world—a violet, a lily flowering at the same season. Animals are on heat at given times in the year. This changes only in humans. Rhythm, active in powers of growth, reproduction and so on all the way up to the animal world, comes to a halt in human beings.

Humanity is meant to be embedded in freedom, and the more civilized people are the more is this rhythm on the decrease. Just as the light vanishes at Christmas time, so has rhythm apparently completely disappeared from human lives, and chaos prevails. But human beings are meant to bring this rhythm to birth from within and do so on their own initiative. They are meant to shape their lives of their own free will so that they run within rhythmic boundaries. Life’s events are meant to follow one another as firmly and securely as the sun’s orbit. And just as it is unthinkable that the sun’s orbit should ever change, so it should be unthinkable that the rhythm of such a life could be broken.

The sun hero was the embodiment of such a life rhythm. With the strength of the higher human being who had been born in him he gained the strength to govern the rhythm of his own biography. This sun hero was also the Christ Jesus for the first two centuries, and this is why the celebration of his birth was moved to the time when the birthday feast of the sun hero had been celebrated from time immemorial. Hence also everything connected with the life story of Christ Jesus, hence also the midnight mass, celebrated in caves by the early Christians in memory of the sun festival. At this mass, a sea of light shone out in the darkness of midnight in memory of the spirit sun that rose in the mysteries. Hence the story goes that Jesus was born in a stable, in memory of the rock cave out of which life was born in those ears of corn that were the symbol for life.

Just as life on earth was born out of dead rock, so was the highest—Christ Jesus—born out of the lowest. The legend of three priestly sages, the three kings from the east, was connected with his birth. They brought gold, the symbol of external power full of wisdom, myrrh, the symbol of life vanquishing death, and incense, symbol of the cosmic ether in which the spirit lives.

In the deeper meaning of the Christmas festival we can therefore sense echoes from man’s earliest times. And this has come down to us in the particular quality which Christianity has. Its symbols reflect the earliest symbols known to humanity. The tree with its candles is such a symbol. It is an image of the tree of paradise for us.⁸⁸ That tree represents the life-giving principle and the gaining of knowledge in paradise. Paradise itself is the whole, complete sphere of material nature. Spiritual nature is represented by the tree in the midst of it, the tree that encompasses knowledge and the tree of life. Knowledge can only be gained at the cost of life.

A story tells us the significance of the tree of knowledge and the tree of life. Seth stood before the gates of paradise and asked to come in. The cherub guarding the entrance let him enter. This is to indicate that Seth became an initiate. When Seth was in paradise he found that the tree of life and the tree of knowledge were firmly intertwined. The archangel Michael, he who stands before god, allowed him to take three seeds from the intertwined tree.

This tree prophesies the future of humanity. When the whole of humanity has gained insight and has been initiated, it will bear within it not only the tree of knowledge but also the other tree, that of life. Death will then be no more. For the time being, however, the initiate was only allowed to take three seeds, the three seeds that signify the higher principles of the human being.

When Adam died, Seth placed the three seeds in his mouth and a flaming tree grew on Adam’s grave. This had the property that new shoots and leaves would grow from any wood cut from it. In the bush’s circle of flame were written the words ehjeh asher ehjeh, meaning ‘I am the one who was, who is and who shall be’. This signifies the principle that goes through all incarnations, the power of man to renew himself, come into existence again and again, descending from the light into the darkness and ascending from the darkness into the light.

The rod Moses used to perform his miracles was cut from the wood of this bush. The gate of Solomon’s temple was made of it. Wood was taken from the bush and put into the pond at Bethesda and gave it the power of which the story tells. And the cross of Christ Jesus was made of this wood, the cross which shows life dying away, life perishing in death which nevertheless has the power in it to bring forth new life. Here we have before us the great symbol for the world—life that overcomes death. The wood of the cross had grown from the three seeds that came from paradise.

The same symbol—of the lower principle dying and the resurrection of the higher principle sprouting forth from it—is also shown in the Rose Cross, and the red roses. Goethe put it in these words:

For as long as you do not have
this word ‘die and become’,
you are but a troubled guest
in the darkness of this earth. ⁸⁹

This is a wonderful connection between the tree of paradise and the wood of the cross! The cross may be a symbol for Easter, but it also deepens the Christmas mood for us. We can feel the new life welling forth in the Christ idea as we contemplate it in the night when Christ Jesus was born. We see the idea reflected in the living roses decorating our tree here. They tell us that the tree of holy night has not yet become the wood of the cross but the power to be this wood is beginning to arise within it. The roses growing among the green are a symbol of the eternal conquering the temporal.

The square of Pythagoras (Fig. 12) is a symbol for the fourfold nature of man—physical body, ether body, astral body and I.

Above it is the tao (Fig. 16), the sign reminding us of the image our earliest ancestors had of God. Before Europe, Asia and Africa were cultivated land, those ancestors lived on Atlantis, which has gone down beneath the waves. Norse mythology still holds memories of Atlantis in the legends of Niflheim, home of mists. For Atlantis did not have clear air. Vast, mighty masses of mist rolled and boiled above the soil, similar to the experience we may have today walking in the clouds and mists at high altitudes. Sun and moon were not clearly visible in the sky. On Atlantis they appeared surrounded by rainbow haloes the sacred iris. People were then still much more able to understand the language of nature. The lapping waves, the sound of the wind in the trees, the whispering leaves, the rumble of thunder still speak to us today, but we no longer understand them. The ancient Atlanteans did. They felt that a divine element was speaking to them in all these things. In the midst of all those speaking clouds and water and leaves and winds a sound reached the ears of the Atlanteans: tao—it is I. The essence of the whole natural world lived in that sound. Atlantis heard it. The tao later became the letter T. The circle at the top is the sign for the all-encompassing nature of God the Father.

Finally the principle which is present in the whole of the universe and exists as the human being is shown in the symbol of the pentagram (Fig. 17) which we see at the top of the tree. It is not permissible to speak of the deepest sense of the pentagram here and now. It does show us the star of evolving humanity. It is the star, the symbol of the human being which is followed by all who have wisdom, as the priestly wise men did in the distant past. It is the meaning of the earth, the great sun hero who is born in holy night because the most sublime light shines out in the deepest darkness.

Humanity will live on into a future when the light will be born in them; when words pregnant with meaning will give way to others and it will no longer be said that the darkness cannot comprehend the light. Truth will sound out in cosmic space, and the darkness will comprehend the light that shines out for us in the star of humanity. Darkness shall yield and comprehend the light, that is, will be taken hold of by it. And this is meant to sound out for us from our inmost being in the Christmas festival. Only then will we be celebrating Christmas in the right way, for it will then tell us that one day the light of the spirit will shine out from the inmost human being into the whole world. And we’ll then be able to celebrate Christmas as the feast of the most sublime ideal for humanity. It will then have real meaning again, be alive again in our souls, and the Christmas tree, too, will once more have its true meaning as a symbol of the paradise tree, truer than the meanings it is given today, however thoughtful. In our hearts, celebration of holy night will lead to joyful hope and to understanding that yes, I too shall experience within me what we must call the birth of the higher human being; in me, too, the birth of the saviour, of the Christos, will come.

• 81. In rhetoric, a passage where the speaker specifically turns away from the main discourse and addresses a present or absent person or thing.
• 82. Goethe, J. W. Faust 2, Pleasing landscape. Faust speaking. Translated by Philip Wayne. London: Penguin Classics, Penguin Books Ltd 1959.
• 83. Version as found in a notebook entry Rudolf Steiner made in 1906. Different versions appeared in later years. English version given here taken from Steiner R. Verses and Meditations. Translated by F. Melland. London; Rudolf Steiner Press 1979.
• 84. In Greek mythology, Iris was the messenger of the gods. In another set of notes it says: 'an image of St Iris'.
• 85. The Greek ὁ Χριστός means ‘the anointed’, corresponding to the Hebrew ‘the Messias’. The ‘χρηστος’, Chrestos, used by Gnostics and Manicheans means 'the good one'; according to Marcion (early Christian Gnostic, c. 100–165 AD), the most sublime good god as distinct from the demiurgos, the creator god who was merely just. 'Chrestos' was introduced in the 3rd edition of the special German booklet Zeichen und Symbole des Weihnachtsfestes, for Rudolf Steiner used it in the lecture he gave on 14 December 1905 (in GA 54; English in Christmas). The context was a different one, however, and a further review of the original records shows that 'Chrestos' does not appear in any of the sets of notes available to us (Literary Estate Administration in Dornach).
• 86. John 3: 30.
• 87. John 1:47.
• 88. See 'Der Baum des Lebens und der Erkenntnis des Guten und des Bosen. Die Geheimnisse der Kunst' in GA 162.
• 89. In ‘Selige Sehnsucht’, Westöstlicher Diwan.
• 90. Lully (or Lull), Raymond (c. 1232–1315). See Steiner R. World History in the Light of Anthroposophy (GA 233), lectured dated 5 January 1924. Tr. G. & M. Adams. London: Rudolf Steiner Press 1977.

Allow me to announce the commencement of our Christmas Conference for the Founding of the General Anthroposophical Society. We shall in future always be of the heartfelt opinion—you will come to feel the definite rightness of this—that it will be significant for the development of the Anthroposophical Society to find its centre and its home here on Swiss soil in the manner expressed in the Statutes which I shall be suggesting to you.

The Society will in no way manifest any kind of a national character, but we shall always remain aware that we have been accepted here by our dear Swiss friends as a kind of guest in the realm of ideals, and we shall forever know how to respect this in a suitable way. Both privately and also in various public statements to our friends, I have often sought to show the importance of the fact that we have taken our place here on Swiss soil with our Goetheanum and with everything that seeks to be an Anthroposophical Society. This alone, my friends, is sufficient justification for the appearance of our dear friend Albert Steffen as the first speaker during our Christmas Foundation Conference. Of course he will speak here as a member and fellow founder of this Anthroposophical Society. But everything we feel especially in connection with the fact that the Goetheanum, as the central point of the Anthroposophical Society, stands here on Swiss soil, will be expressed symbolically when you now permit me to request Herr Albert Steffen—our dear and much respected friend, the distinguished poet whose presence among us may be counted as such great good fortune—to speak the first words of this our gathering.

Albert Steffen's lecture on the history and destiny of the Anthroposophical Society is published in the Supplement to Das Goetheanum 1924, Nos. 2, 3 and 6.

DR STEINER:

My dear Herr Steffen!

With your words that are so warm and so filled with beautiful love you have given us a wonderful prelude to our gathering here. We could not have had a more beautiful prelude than the words you have spoken to us out of an anthroposophical heart of such warmth. I am quite sure that your kind words will shine over all our gatherings and meetings like a radiant star, and that we shall owe you most cordial gratitude for the feeling in our hearts which will endure throughout the period of our gathering, engendered by the words you have spoken to us on this first morning. We may be certain of ever feeling warmly enveloped within the marvellous land of Switzerland if an attitude of mind so truly Swiss continues to surround us with an atmosphere as beautiful as that now moving among us. Your words are founded indeed on a truly Swiss attitude of mind. I know that I speak from the bottom of every heart, now that our discussions are about to begin, when I offer you, dear friend Steffen, the most cordial thanks for the wonderful way in which you have provided the prelude for what is to take place over the next few days. To you come the warmest thanks from the heart of every one here present.

The Christmas festival, which we are about to celebrate, gains new life through a deepened spiritual world view. In a spiritual sense the Christmas festival is a sun festival, and as such we shall become acquainted with it today. To begin, we shall hear that most beautiful apostrophe to the sun that Goethe puts in the mouth of Faust.

Refreshed anew life's pulses beat and waken
To greet the mild ethereal dawn of morning;
Earth, through this night thou too hast stood unshaken
And breath'st before me in thy new adorning,
Beginst to wrap me round with gladness thrilling,
A vigorous resolve in me forewarning,
Unceasing strife for life supreme instilling.—
Now lies the world revealed in twilight glimmer,
The wood resounds, a thousand voices trilling;
The vales where mist flows in and out lie dimmer,
But in the gorges sinks a light from heaven,
And boughs and twigs, refreshed, lift up their shimmer
From fragrant chasms where they slept at even;
Tint upon tint again emerges, clearing
Where trembling pearls from flower and leaf drip riven:
All round me is a Paradise appearing.

Look up!—The peaks, gigantic and supernal,
Proclaim the hour most solemn now is nearing.
They early may enjoy the light eternal
That later to us here below is wended.
Now on the alpine meadows, sloping, vernal,
A clear and lavish glory has descended
And step by step fulfils its journey's ending.
The sun steps forth!—Alas, already blinded,
I turn away, the pain my vision rending.

Thus is it ever when a hope long yearning
Has made a wish its own, supreme, transcending,
And finds Fulfilment's portals outward turning;
From those eternal deeps bursts ever higher
Too great a flame, we stand, with wonder burning.
To kindle life's fair torch we did aspire
And seas of flame—and what a flame!—embrace us!
Is it Love? Is it Hate? that twine us with their fire,
In alternating joy and pain enlace us,
So that again toward earth we turn our gazing,
Baffled, to hide in youth's fond veils our faces.

Behind me therefore let the sun be blazing!
The cataract in gorges deeply riven
I view with rapture growing and amazing.
To plunge on plunge in a thousand streams it's given,
And yet a thousand, downward to the valleys,
While foam and mist high in the air are driven.
Yet how superb above this tumult sallies
The many-colored rainbow's changeful being;
Now lost in air, now clearly drawn, it dailies,
Shedding sweet coolness round us even when fleeing!
The rainbow mirrors human aims and action.
Think, and more clearly wilt thou grasp it, seeing
Life is but light in many-hued reflection.¹

Goethe lets his representative of mankind speak these mighty words in the presence of the radiant, rising morning sun. But it is not this sun, awakening anew every morning, with which we have to deal in the festival we will speak about today. This sun is a being of much profounder depths, and the nature of it shall be the leitmotif of our present considerations.

We shall now hear the words that reflect the deepest meaning of the Christmas Mystery. These words have been heard by the pupils of the Mysteries of all ages before they entered the Mysteries themselves:

Behold the Sun
At midnight hour,
And build with stones
In lifeless clay.
So find in world decline
And in the night of death
Creation's new beginning
And morning's youthful strength.
Let heights above reveal
The Gods' eternal word,
May depths preserve and seal
The peaceful treasure-hoard.
In darkness living
O now create a Sun!
In substance weaving
O know the Bliss of Spirit.²

Die Sonne schaue
um mitternächtige Stunde.
Mit Steinen baue
im leblosen Grunde.
So finde im Niedergang
und in des Todes Nacht
der Schöpfung neuen Anfang,
des Morgens junge Macht.
Die Höhen lass offenbaren
der Götter ewiges Wort;
die Tiefen sollen bewahren
den friedensvollen Hort.
Im Dunkel lebend
erschaffe eine Sonne.
Im Stoffe webend
erkenne Geistes Wonne.³

Many people who today merely know the Christmas tree with its candles believe that to have a tree symbolizing Christmas is a traditional custom dating from ancient times. This, however, is not the case. On the contrary, the custom of decorating a tree at Christmas is most recent and does not date back more than a few centuries. The custom of decorating a Christmas tree is a recent phenomenon, but the celebration of Christmas is old. The festival at Christmas time was known in the most ancient Mysteries of all religions everywhere, and has always been celebrated. It is not merely an outer sun festival, but one that leads man to a divination of the sources of existence. It was celebrated annually by the highest initiates in the Mysteries at the time of year when the sun's force was weakest and bestowed least warmth upon the earth. It was also celebrated by those who were unable to participate in the entire celebration, but were permitted to experience only the outer pictorial expression of the highest Mysteries. This imagery has been preserved throughout the ages and has assumed forms in accordance with the various religious confessions. The celebration of Christmas is the festival of the Sacred Night, which, in the great Mysteries, was celebrated by those personalities who were ready to bring about the resurrection of the higher self within their inmost being. Today we would say, "Within their inmost being they gave birth to the Christ."

Only those who know nothing of the fact that, besides the chemical and physical forces, spiritual forces are active, and that, just as the chemical and physical forces have definite times in the cosmos for their action, so likewise have the spiritual forces—only such people can remain indifferent when the awakening of the Higher Self occurs. In the great Mysteries man was permitted to behold the active forces in colored radiance, in brilliant light. He was permitted to perceive the world around him filled with spiritual qualities, with spiritual beings, to behold the world of the spirit around him in which he underwent the greatest experience possible.

This moment will arrive at some time for everyone. All men will ultimately experience it, even though perhaps only after many incarnations. The moment will arrive for everyone when the Christ will rise within them and new seeing, new hearing will awaken within them.

Those who were prepared for the awakening, as were pupils of the Mysteries, were first taught what the awakening signifies in the great universe; only then was the rite of awakening performed. It took place at the time when darkness on earth is greatest, when the outer sun has reached its lowest point at Christmas time, because those who are acquainted with spiritual facts know that at that time of year, forces stream through cosmic space that are favorable to such an awakening. In his preparation, the pupil was told that the one who really wished to know should not merely know what has taken place during thousands and thousands of years on earth, but he must learn to survey the entire course of human evolution, realizing that the great festivals have their place within this, and that they must be dedicated to the contemplation of the great eternal truths. The pupils directed their thoughts toward the time when the earth had not yet become what it is today. Sun and moon did not yet exist but were both united with the earth, and the earth, sun and moon still formed one body. Man already existed at that time but he had no body; he was a spiritual being upon whom no external sunlight shone. The sunlight was within the earth itself. Its nature differed from the present sunlight, which shines upon beings and things from without. It had the quality of being able to radiate within itself and, at the same time, to radiate within the inner nature of every earthly being. Then the moment arrived when the sun separated from the earth and its light fell upon the earth from without. The sun had withdrawn from the earth and the inner being of man had become dark. This was the beginning of his evolution toward that future time when he is to find the inner light again radiating in his inner nature. Man must learn to know the things of earth by means of his outer nature. He will evolve to the time when in his inner nature the higher man, the spirit man, will glow and radiate again. From light, through darkness, to light—such is the course of the evolution of mankind.

The pupils were prepared by these teachings, which were constantly impressed upon them. Then they were led to their awakening. The moment arrived when, as chosen ones, they experienced by means of their awakened spirit organs, the spiritual light within them. This holy moment came when the outer light was weakest, on the day when the outer sun shines least. On that day the pupils were gathered together, and the inner light revealed itself to them.

Those who were still unable to participate in this celebration were able to experience at least an outer likeness of it from which they learned that for them, too, the great moment would come. "Today," they were told, "you behold only an image; later you will experience what you now see as a likeness." These were the lesser Mysteries. They showed in pictures what the neophyte was to experience later. We shall hear today of what took place in the lesser Mysteries on Christmas eve. It was the same everywhere -in the Egyptian Mysteries, the Eleusinian Mysteries, the Mysteries of the Near East, the Babylonian-Chaldaic Mysteries, as well as in the Mysteries of the Persian Mithras cult and the Indian Mysteries of Brahman. Everywhere the pupils of these Mystery Schools had the same experience at the midnight hour on the Night of Consecration.

The pupils gathered in the early evening. In quiet contemplation they had to make clear to themselves what this most important event signified. In deep silence they sat together in the darkness. By the time midnight drew near, they had been sitting in the dark room for hours. Thoughts of eternity pervaded their souls. Then, toward midnight, mysterious tones arose, resounding through the room, up welling and diminishing. The pupils who heard these tones knew that this was the music of the spheres. Then the room became dimly lit, the only light emanating from a dimly lighted disc. Those who saw this knew that this disc represented the earth. The illumined disc became darker and darker, until finally it was quite black. Simultaneously the surrounding space grew brighter. Those who saw this knew that the black sphere represented the earth. The sun, however, which ordinarily irradiates the earth was concealed; the earth could no longer see the sun. Then around the earth-disc, at the outer edge, rainbow colors formed, ring upon ring. Those who saw it knew that this was the radiant Iris. At midnight a violet-reddish circle gradually arose in place of the black earth sphere. On it a Word was written. This Word varied according to the peoples whose members were permitted to experience this Mystery. In our language the Word would be Christos. Those who saw it knew that this was the sun, which appeared to them at the midnight hour, when the world around rests in deepest darkness. The pupils were now told that what they had experienced was called, "Seeing the sun at the midnight hour."

Whoever is really initiated learns to experience the sun at the midnight hour, for in him all matter is obliterated. The sun of the spirit alone lives in his inner self and radiates over all the darkness of matter. This is the moment of highest bliss in the evolution of man, when he has the experience that he lives in the eternal light freed from darkness. Year after year, at midnight on the Night of Consecration, this moment was thus represented in the Mysteries. This image represented the fact that alongside the physical sun there is a Spiritual Sun, which, like the physical sun, is born out of darkness. In order to make this clearer to the pupils, after they had experienced the rising of the Sun, of the Christos, they were led into a cave in which there was seemingly nothing but stone—dead, lifeless matter. There they beheld stalks of grain arise from the stones as a sign of life, as a symbolical indication of the fact that from apparent death life springs forth, that from dead stone, life is born. They were told that just as the sun force, after it had seemingly died, waxes anew from this day on, so does new life forever arise out of dying life.

The same event is indicated in the Gospel of St. John in the words, "He must increase, but I must decrease." John, the herald of the coming Christ, of the Spiritual Light, whose festival day falls in the course of the year in mid-summer—John must decrease, and simultaneously with his decrease the force of the coming light waxes, increasing in strength as John decreases. In like manner the new, the coming life prepares itself in the seed that must wither and decay in order that the new plant may spring forth from it. The pupils of the Mysteries were to experience that in death life resides, that out of decaying matter the new, glorious blossoms and fruits of spring arise, that the earth teems with the forces of birth. They were to learn that at this time something happens in the inner being of the earth—the overcoming of death by life that is present in death. This was shown them in the conquering light. This they felt and experienced when they saw the light arise and shine in the darkness. They beheld in the stone cave the sprouting life arising in splendor and abundance out of the seemingly dead.

Thus, faith in life was fostered in the pupils. Thus were they led to arouse in themselves what may be called faith in man's greatest ideal. Thus they learned to look up to the highest ideal of mankind, to the time when the earth will have completed its evolution and the Light will shine forth in all mankind. The earth will then crumble to dust but the spiritual essence will remain with all men who have become radiant in their innermost nature through the spiritual Light. Earth and humanity will then awaken to a higher existence, to a new phase of existence.

When Christianity arose in the course of evolution, it bore this ideal within it in the highest sense. Man felt that within Christianity the Christos was to appear as the great Ideal of all men, that He had been born on the Night of Consecration about the time of deepest darkness as a sign that out of the darkness of matter a higher man can be born in the human soul.

In the ancient Mysteries, before men spoke of a Christos, they spoke of a Sun Hero who embodied the same ideal as is connected with the Christos in Christianity. The bearer of this ideal was called the Sun Hero. Just as the sun completes its orbit in the course of the year bringing about an increase and decrease in light, and its warmth apparently withdraws from the earth and then again radiates anew, just as it contains life in its death and lets it stream forth anew, so like wise does the Sun Hero, through the power of his spiritual life, become master over death and night and darkness.

In the Mysteries there were seven degrees of initiation. First the degree of the "Ravens," who were able to approach only as far as the portal of the temple of initiation. They became the intermediaries between the external world of material life and the inner world of spiritual life, and no longer belonged to the material nor yet to the spiritual world. These Ravens are to be found everywhere. They are always the messengers who pass to and fro between the two worlds and transmit messages. They are to be found in the Germanic sagas and myths also. The Ravens of Wotan, the Ravens who fly around the mountain of Kyffhäuser.

In the second degree the disciple was led away from the portal into the interior of the temple of initiation. There he matured until he reached the third degree, the degree of the "Warrior," who stepped before the world to proclaim the occult truths that he was permitted to experience in the interior of the temple.

The fourth degree, that of the "Lion," was attained by one whose consciousness was not merely that of an individual human being, but encompassed an entire tribe. Thus the Christ was called "the Lion of the Tribe of David." A man whose consciousness encompassed a whole nation had attained the fifth degree. He no longer had a name of his own but was designated by the name of his nation. Thus, people spoke of the "Persian," or the "Israelite." Now we can understand how it was that Nathanael, for instance, was called a "true Israelite." It was because he had reached the fifth degree of initiation.

The sixth degree was that of the "Sun Hero," and we must understand what this name signifies. We shall then realize what awe and reverence passed through the soul of the pupil of the Mysteries who knew something of a Sun Hero, and who experienced at Christmas the Birth Festival of a Sun Hero.

Everything in the cosmos takes its rhythmic course. The stars as well as the sun follow a great rhythm. Were the sun to change this rhythm but for a moment, were it to leave its orbit only for a moment, a revolution would result in the entire universe of quite unheard-of significance. Rhythm rules all nature, right up to man. Only with man does the situation change. The rhythm that rules until death throughout the course of the seasons in the forces of growth, propagation, etc., ceases with man. He is to stand in freedom, and the more highly civilized he is, the more does this rhythm decrease. Just as the light disappears at Christmas, so apparently has rhythm disappeared from the life of man and chaos prevails. Man, however, gives birth to this rhythm out of his own initiative out of his own inner nature. He must so fashion his life out of his will that it takes its course within rhythmical boundaries, steadfast and sure, like the course of the sun. Just as a change in the course of the sun is unthinkable, even so is it unthinkable that the rhythm of such a life be interrupted. The embodiment of such a life rhythm was to be found in the Sun Hero. Through the strength of the higher man born in him, he gained the power to rule the rhythm of the course of his life. This Sun Hero, this higher man, was born in the Night of Consecration.

Christ Jesus was also a Sun Hero and was conceived as such in the first centuries of Christianity. His birth festival was, therefore, placed at the time of year when, since primeval days, the birthday of the Sun Hero has been celebrated. This is also the reason for all that was linked with the life story of Christ Jesus. The Midnight Mass, which the first Christians celebrated in caves, was in memory of the Sun Festival. In this Mass an ocean of light streamed forth at midnight out of the darkness as a memory of the rising sun in the Mysteries. Christ was thus born in a cave in remembrance of the cave of rock out of which, symbolized in the growing stalks of grain, life was born. Earthly life was born out of the dead stone. So, too, out of the lowly, the Highest, Christ Jesus, was born!

The legend of the three priest-sages, the three kings, was linked with the Christ Birth Festival. They brought to the Child gold, the symbol of the wisdom-filled outer man; myrrh, the symbol of life's victory over death, and finally, frankincense, the symbol of the cosmic ether in which the spirit lives.

Thus, in the meaning of the Christmas Festival, we feel something echoing to us from the most ancient ages of mankind, and it has come down to us in the special coloring of Christianity. In its symbols we find images for the most ancient symbols of mankind. The Christmas tree with its candles is one of them. For us, it is a symbol of the Tree of Paradise, which represents all of material nature. Spiritual nature is represented by the tree in Paradise that encompassed all Knowledge, and by the Tree of Life. There is a narrative that imparts clearly the significance of the Tree of Knowledge and the Tree of Life. Seth stood at the Gates of Paradise and begged to be allowed to enter. The Archangel guarding the portal let him pass. This is a sign for initiation.

Seth, now in Paradise, found the Tree of Life and the Tree of Knowledge closely intertwined. The Archangel Michael, who stands in the presence of God, let him take three seeds from these intertwining trees, which, standing there as a single tree, pointed prophetically to the future of mankind. Then the whole of humanity shall have been initiated and shall have found knowledge. Only the Tree of Life will still exist and death will be no more. For the time being, however, only the initiate may take the three seeds from this Tree, the three seeds that signify the three higher members of man.

When Adam died, Seth placed these three seeds in Adam's mouth, and from them grew a flaming bush. From the wood cut from this bush, new shoots and green leaves continually burst forth. Within the flaming circle of the bush, however, was written, "I am He Who was, Who is, Who is to be." This points to the entity that passes through all incarnations, the force of evolving man repeatedly renewing himself, who descends from light into darkness and ascends from darkness into light.

The rod with which Moses performed his miracles was carved from the wood of the flaming bush. The portal of Solomon's Temple was fashioned from it. This wood was carried to the waters of the pool of Bethesda, and from it the pool derived its power.

From the same wood the Cross of Christ Jesus was fashioned, the wood of the Cross that shows us life passing into death, but which at the same time bears the power in itself to bring forth new life. The great world symbol stands before us here—life, which overcomes death. The wood of this Cross grew out of the three seeds from the Tree of Paradise.

The Rose Cross also expresses this symbol of the death of the lower nature and, springing from it, the resurrection of the higher. Goethe expressed the same thought in the words:

As long as you have not
Died and been reborn,
You are but a gloomy guest
Upon the darkened earth.

What a wondrous connection there is between the Tree of Paradise and the wood of the Cross! Even though the Cross is a symbol of Easter, it also deepens our Christmas mood. We feel in it how the Christ Idea streams toward us in new welling life on this night of Christ's Nativity. This idea is indicated in the living roses that adorn this tree.⁴ They tell us that the tree of the Sacred Night has not yet become the wood of the Cross, but the power to become this wood begins to arise in it. The roses that grow from the green symbolize the Eternal that grows from the Temporal.

The square is the symbol of the fourfold nature of man: physical body, ether body, astral body and ego.

The triangle is the symbol of the higher man: Spirit Self, Life Spirit and Spirit Man.

Above the triangle is the symbol of the Tarok. Initiates of the Egyptian Mysteries knew how to read this sign. They also knew how to read the Book of Thoth, which consisted of seventy-eight cards on which were recorded all world events from beginning to end, from Alpha to Omega, and which could be read if they were joined and assembled in the right way. The Book of Thoth, or Hermes, contained in pictures the life that fades in death and again sprouts forth anew into life.

Whoever could combine the right numbers with the right pictures was able to read it. This wisdom of numbers and pictures has been taught since primeval ages. In the Middle Ages it still played an important role, but today there is little left of it.

Above the Alpha and Omega is the sign of Tao. It reminds us of the worship of God by our primeval ancestors because this worship took its origin from the work Tao. Before Europe, Asia and Africa were lands of human culture, our ancestors lived on Atlantis, which was submerged by a flood. In the Germanic sagas of Niflheim, the land of the mists, the memory of Atlantis still lives. For Atlantis was not surrounded by pure air. Its atmosphere was filled with enormous masses of mist similar to the clouds and mists in high mountains. The sun and moon were not seen clearly in the sky, but were surrounded by a rainbow, and sacred Iris. At that time man still understood the language of nature. What speaks to him today in the lapping and surging of the waves, in the whistling and rushing of the wind, in the rustling of the leaves, in the rumbling of thunder, is no longer understood by him, but at that time he could understand it. He felt something that spoke to him from everything about him. From the clouds and waters and leaves and winds the sound rang forth: Tao (the I am). Atlanteans heard it and understood it, and knew that Tao streamed through the whole world.

Finally, all that permeates the cosmos is present in man and is symbolized in the pentagram at the top of the tree. The deepest meaning of the pentagram may not now be mentioned, but it is the star of mankind, of mankind developing itself. It is the star that all wise men follow as did the priest-sages in ancient ages.

It symbolizes the earth that is born on the Night of Consecration, because the most sublime light radiates from the deepest darkness. Man lives on toward a state when the light shall be born in him, when one significant saying shall be replaced by another, when it will no longer be said, “The Darkness does not comprehend the Light” but when the truth will resound into cosmic space with the words, “Darkness gives way to the Light that radiates toward us in the Star of Mankind, Darkness yields and comprehends the Light.”

This shall resound from the Christmas celebration, and the spiritual light shall radiate from it. Let us celebrate Christmas as the festival of the most lofty ideal of the Idea of Mankind, so that in our souls may rise the joyful confidence: Indeed, I, too, shall experience the birth of the higher man within myself. The birth of the Savior, the Christos, will take place in me also.

• 1. From Goethe's Faust, translated by George Madison Priest; copyright by, and reprinted here with permission of Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.
• 2. Translated by Henry B. Monges.
• 3. By Rudolf Steiner.
• 4. This lecture was delivered beside a lighted Christmas tree adorned with the signs depicted here, as well as with thirty-three wax candles and fresh red roses.