from the General Secretary
In the Southern Hemisphere, the time of Advent and Christmas is summer. This differs to the Northern Hemisphere: in the south, the human soul experiences something different to the soul wakefulness of winter’s inwardness. In summer, the soul flows outwards, breathing out. The festivals are not seasonal and we are stimulated to ask what the earth really needs at this time. We are asked to see the earth and humanity as a whole, as a single entity; not as polarities but as mirroring each other.
At Advent, a feeling of preparation, of anticipation, is apparent. There may arise in us a state of ‘coming-to-terms’ with the past to prepare the future.
The Christmas Conference 1923/24
101 years ago, Rudolf Steiner founded the General Anthroposophical Society at Christmastime and joined his destiny to it. It was no mistake that he chose Christmas in 1923 to will this deed.
Steiner addressed hundreds of members over 10 days in the wooden carpentry shop on Dornach hill, overlooking the charred ruins of the first Goetheanum. He spoke of the anthroposophical movement, not as an earthly service, but in its entirety, in all its details, as a service of the gods, as a divine service.
Every Christmas, an essential, unifying theme is that every one of us has been born from the same source of love. Those connected to Anthroposophy acknowledge a previous time together, before this earthly life, where previous karmic connections formed our intentions towards community in this life. True humanity is the basis of Christmas: thresholds can be crossed between people, bridges can be built out of love and good will.
Christmas readings
Rudolf Steiner (1861–1925) gave many lectures on the theme of Christmas, which can easily be found online at Rudolf Steiner Archive,. One particularly popular lecture is The Festivals and Their Meaning I:
Christmas, eight lectures that address special Christmas motifs.
These selected lectures bring spiritual insights to all the time-honoured festivals. These lectures awake thoughts in us that lift us above materialism, beyond the supermarket shelves and the business of preparation, to bring a wellspring of meaningful social feeling and goodwill towards others.
Here is an excerpt from one of the lectures in this series: The Christmas Festival: A Token of the Victory of the Sun
The Festivals have become abstractions, matters of indifference to modern people. The word as a medium of strife and blasphemy often means more than the Word conceived as the power by which the world itself was created. Yet the alphabetical word ought to be the representative, the symbol of the Word Creative in Nature around us, in the great universe and within us too when self-knowledge awakens, and of which all mankind can be made conscious by those who truly understand the course of Nature. It was for this that the Festivals were instituted and with the knowledge we have gleaned from Spiritual Science we will try to understand what it was that the wise men of old set out to express in the Christmas Festival.
Christmas is not a Festival of Christendom only. In ancient Egypt, in the regions we ourselves inhabit, and in Asia thousands and thousands of years before the Christian era we find that a Festival was celebrated on the days now dedicated to the celebration of the birth of Christ.
Now what was the character of this Festival which since time immemorial has been celebrated all over the world on the same days of the year? Wonderful Fire Festivals in the northern and central regions of Europe in ancient times were celebrated among the Celts in Scandinavia, Scotland and England by their priests, the Druids. What were they celebrating? They were celebrating the time when winter draws to its close and spring begins. It is quite true that Christmas falls while it is still winter, but Nature is already heralding a victory which can be a token of hope in anticipation of the victory that will come in spring—a token of confidence, of hope, of faith—to use words which are connected in nearly every language with the Festival of Christmas. There is confidence that the Sun, again in the ascendant, will be victorious over the opposing powers of Nature. The days draw in and draw in, and this shortening of the days seems to us to be an expression of the dying, or rather of the falling asleep of the Nature-forces. The days grow shorter and shorter up to the time when we celebrate the Christmas Festival and when our forefathers also celebrated it, in another form. Then the days begin to draw out again and the light of the Sun celebrates its victory over the darkness. In our age of materialistic thinking this is an event to which we no longer give much consideration.
In olden times it seemed to men in whom living feeling was united with wisdom, to be an expression of an experience of the Godhead Himself, the Godhead by Whom their lives were guided. The solstice was a personal experience of a higher being—as personal an experience as when some momentous event forces a man to come to a vital decision. And it was even more than this. The waxing and waning of the days was not only an expression of an event in the life of a higher Being, but a token of something greater still, of something momentous and unique.
This brings us to the true meaning of Christmas as a Festival of the very highest order in cosmic and human life. In the days when genuine occult teaching was not disowned as it is today by materialistic thought but was the very wellspring of the life of the peoples, the Christmas Festival was a kind of memorial, a token of remembrance of a great happening on the Earth. At the hour of midnight the priests gathered around them their truest disciples, those who were the teachers of the people, and spoke to them of a great Mystery. (I am not telling you anything that has been cleverly thought out or discovered by a process of abstract deduction but was actually experienced in the Mysteries, in the secret Sanctuaries of those remote times). This Mystery was connected with the victory of the Sun over the darkness. There was a time on the Earth when the light triumphed over the darkness. And it happened thus: in that epoch, all physical, all bodily life on Earth had reached the stage of animality only. The highest kingdom upon the Earth had only reached a stage at which it was preparing to receive something higher. And then there came that great moment in evolution when the immortal, imperishable soul of man descended. Life had so far developed that the human body was able to receive into itself the imperishable soul. These ancestors of the human race stood higher in the scale of evolution than modern scientists believe, but the higher part of their being, the divine ‘spark’ was not yet within them. The divine spark descended from a higher planetary sphere to our Earth which was now to become the scene of its activity, the dwelling-place of the soul which henceforward can never be lost to us.
24 December 1905, Berlin
Other lectures from this series include:
The Christmas Festival: A Token of the Victory of the Sun
Signs and Symbols of the Christmas Festival
The Proclamations to the Magi and the Shepherds
Christmas greetings to all,
Jane Bradshaw
General Secretary of the Anthroposophical Society in Australia
Feature image: courtesy of Unsplash