The Seasonal Festivals as Soul Experience

Eleven Lectures held in Bern, Dornach, Prague, Stuttgart, and Berlin from April 6 to July 11, 1923 (CW 224)

"The true value of the Anthroposophical Society can only be assessed by verifying whether it understands not only dead anthroposophy, which concerns itself with what is past, but whether it also understands living anthroposophy. Living anthroposophy can also be a sum of flaming sparks! But these sparks of fire will be inside a temple that is not made of external material. Physical flames consume temples that consist of outer materials. The flames of genuine spiritual enthusiasm, of true spiritual life--which must permeate the temple because they must illuminate it with what lights up in the spirit--these flames cannot destroy the temple; they can only give an ever more glorious form to this temple. Let us think of what living anthroposophy is; let us think of it as the fiery flame that will lead us ever further, like the living spirit of anthroposophy itself--which shall lead us to the further evolution of humanity and to the rebuilding of what is now in such an evident decline." --Rudolf Steiner, Berlin, May 23, 1923

This volume, published here for the first time in English, contains lectures given in the first half of 1923, a year of trials for Rudolf Steiner and the anthroposophical movement. Having suffered the loss of the Goetheanum, that house of the Word into which he had poured his forces for ten years, Steiner was faced with the possible, and even likely, splintering of the anthroposophical movement and its Society. Representing an upbuilding impulse after the tragedy of the Goetheanum fire, these lectures have as a common thematic thread the connection of the human being with the work of the hierarchies through the rhythms of human life and the cycles of time.

The title of the volume is drawn especially from the later lectures, which are centered around a renewal of the seasonal festivals. Rudolf Steiner speaks about Easter, Ascension and Pentecost, St. John's, and Michaelmas, illuminating new paths toward the celebration of true festivals in our time.

The Berlin lecture on the founding of a new Michael Festival is of particular significance. It was the last that Rudolf Steiner ever gave in Berlin, the city where he had lived and worked on behalf of anthroposophy for many years. In the lecture, Rudolf Steiner draws a parallel between the autumn and spring seasons. Just as we experience the death and resurrection through the spring festival of Easter, so, in the autumn, when outer nature dies away and the human being hears the inner call to awaken, he can, out of his inner forces of consciousness during earthly life, experience a resurrection in spirit before death, so that when he passes through the gate of death, he will have first accomplished this resurrection and will thereby find his rightful path in the spiritual worlds. Thus the death and resurrection at Easter is mirrored in the resurrection and death at Michaelmas. This inner path of Michaelic self-transformation leads to the possibility of moving beyond mere talk about social change to an actual capacity to become socially creative, not merely to understand through the head the meaning of the old festivals, but rather to create festivals out of an inner sense for the course of the year, out of a will to awaken.

The sparks of fire that set the Goetheanum, that temple of the Word, ablaze flashed forth from the jealousy of man. The human world, in that moment, denied the spirit. But the spirit could not and cannot be irradicated. It lights up anew wherever human beings give it a dwelling place. This is the real story of the year 1923 in the life of Rudolf Steiner and his work on behalf of the spirit, of anthroposophy: the continuation of the spiritual fire in the hearts of those willing to freely work in service of the true spirit of humanity.