The History of the Esoteric School 1904–1914, Volume Two

GA 265

On the Spiritual Meaning of the Cultus

by Hella Wiesberger

In order to properly determine the relationship between Rudolf Steiner's epistemological approach to work, as discussed in the documents presented in this volume, and his overall impact, it is necessary to consider not only the external history of this branch of his work, but also, first of all, his conception of the meaning and significance of the cultic as such.

According to the insights of anthroposophy, in ancient times humanity lived in the instinctive, clairvoyant awareness that all life in the world and in humanity is brought about, shaped and sustained by the creative forces of a divine spiritual world. This awareness grew weaker and weaker over time until it was completely lost in modern times as a result of intellectual thinking that was focused solely on the physical laws of the world. This was necessary because only in this way could the human being become independent of the creative spirituality of the universe in terms of consciousness and thus acquire a sense of freedom. The task of human development now consists in using the free intellect, which is not determined by world spirituality, to gain a new awareness of the connection with world spirituality.

This realization was what led to one of Rudolf Steiner's fundamental concerns: to pave a path for modern intellectual thinking to spiritual knowledge that was appropriate for it. This is how the first anthroposophical guiding principle begins: “Anthroposophy is a path of knowledge that seeks to lead the spiritual in man to the spiritual in the universe.”¹ The concrete means for walking this path are to be found in the complete works, paradigmatically in the fundamental works «The Philosophy of Freedom» and «How to Know Higher Worlds >».

While it was natural for ancient cultures to cultivate in their external life, through symbols and cultic acts, that which could be inwardly experienced from cosmic spirituality, and thereby to shape their social life, the fading of the consciousness of being existentially connected to the divine-spiritual world also meant that the sense of the cultic had to be lost. And so, for modern abstract thinking, which has become the dominant intellectual force in the course of the 20th century, the traditional cultic forms can only be regarded as incomprehensible relics of past times. Existing cultic needs do not come from the intellect, but from other layers of the human soul.

This raises the question of what reasons could have moved Rudolf Steiner, as a thoroughly modern thinker, to cultivate cultic forms in his Esoteric School and later to convey them to other contexts as well. To answer this question fully, the whole wide and deep range of his spiritual scientific representations of the nature and task of the cultic for the development of the human being, humanity and the earth would have to be shown. Since this is not possible here, only a few aspects essential to the present publication can be pointed out.

Understanding cults arises from spiritual vision.

We need harmony between knowledge, art, religion and morality for our complicated social life, which threatens to spread chaos across the earth.²

Rudolf Steiner's fundamental concept of the cultic is rooted in his spiritual vision, trained with modern means of knowledge, to which the spiritual world content reveals itself as “the source and principle of all being”³ and whose nature evokes an equally cognitive, artistic-feeling and religious-worshipping experience. As long as humanity lived in an instinctive clairvoyance, cultures were sustained by such a unified scientific, artistic and religiously attuned spiritual vision: “What man recognized, he formed into matter; he made his wisdom into creative art. And in that the mystery student, in his liveliness, perceived what he learned as the Divine-Spiritual that permeates the world, he offered his act of worship to it, so to speak, the sacred art re-created for cult.“⁴

Human progress demanded that this unified experience be broken down into the three independent currents of religion, art and science. In the further course of development, the three have become more and more distant from each other and lost all connection to their common origin. This has led to cultural and social life becoming increasingly chaotic. In order for orienting, rising forces to become effective again, the three “age-old sacred ideals” – the religious, the artistic and the cognitive ideal – must be reshaped from a modern spiritual-cognitive perspective. Rudolf Steiner regarded this as the most important concern of anthroposophy, and he emphasized it in particular on important occasions in the anthroposophical movement, for example at the opening of the first event at the Goetheanum building.⁵

In the spirit of the words spoken on this occasion: “When nature begins to reveal her manifest secrets to him through spiritual vision, so that he must express them in ideas and shape them artistically, the innermost part of his soul is moved to worship what he has seen and captured in form with a religious sense. For him, religion becomes the consequence of science and art,”⁶From the very beginning, he had been driven to shape the results of his spiritual vision not only according to science but also according to art: towards a pictorial quality that contains spiritual realities. For “images underlie everything around us; those who have spoken of spiritual sources have meant these images” (Berlin, July 6, 1915). Because it seemed necessary to him, especially with regard to social life, to shape the essence of the spiritual not only scientifically but also visually, everything that characterizes anthroposophy as a worldview should also be present in the image through its representative, the Goetheanum building (Dornach, January 23, 1920). After the fire on New Year's Eve 1922 destroyed this pictorial expression of the view, he expressed what he had wanted to present to the world with the Goetheanum in a somewhat succinct formula:

“The Goetheanum was felt to be a physical sign of the formation that the three main interests of humanity are striving for in the depths of the human soul. These main interests are the religious-moral, the artistic and the cognitive interest.”⁷

The formulation of the cognitive and artistic interest is clear. But what about its religious interest? If this is not as clearly perceptible, this is partly due to the characterization of religion as the “mood” of the human soul for the spiritual that lies beyond the sensual (Mannheim, January 5, 1911), and partly due to the often-stated belief that the religious and moral essence of anthroposophy cannot could not be confessional in the sense of forming a religion, that spiritual scientific endeavors should not be a “substitute” for religious practice and religious life, that one should not make spiritual science “into a religion”, although it could be “to the highest degree” a “support” and “underpinning” of religious life (Berlin, February 20, 1917). Anthroposophy as a science of the supersensible and the Anthroposophical Society as its community carrier should not be tied to a particular religious confession, since Anthroposophy is by nature interreligious. Even its most central insight, the realization of the importance of the Christ-spirit for the development of humanity and the Earth, is not based on that of the Christian denominations, but on the science of initiation from which all religions once emerged. In this sense, he once characterized it as a “fundamental nerve” of spiritual scientific research tasks to work out the supersensible truth content common to all religions and thereby “bring mutual understanding to the individual religious currents emerging from the initiations religious movements over the earth“ (Berlin, April 23, 1912).⁸ From this it follows logically that, from the point of view of anthroposophy, practical religious observance within a confession must be a private matter for the individual. This has been expressed in the statutes of the Society from the very beginning.⁹

The ideal of the sacralization of one's whole life

Sacramentality is an expression of the fact that human action is aglow with holiness.¹⁰

What was done only on the church altar must take hold of the whole world.¹¹

The ability to experience how spiritual beings are manifested in a cultic, sensory way had to fade away because it is a law of development that forces must be lost in order to be conquered anew at a different level. To this end, every development must proceed in a seven-fold rhythm: from the first to the fourth stage it is evolutionary, but from the fifth to the seventh stage it is involutionary, that is, retrogressive. This means that the third, second and first stages must be relived as the fifth, sixth and seventh, but now with what has been gained as new up to the fourth stage. For humanity on earth, the new thing to be attained consists in the special or 'I-ness', which in the phase of evolution develops physically out of birth and death and in the phase of involution is to spiritualize into freedom and love. The latter, however, requires sacrificing the egoism that was necessary for the development of specialness and the sense of freedom.

This fundamental law of micro-macrocosmic development is referred to many times in the complete works. It is expressed particularly vividly, because it is presented in diagrams and meditation, in the following notes:

Handwritten entry in a notebook from 1903 (archive number 427)

Stepping, you move through the power of thought on the floods of specialness and follow seven guiding forces under the truth: desire pulls you down, the guiding forces placing you in the power of disbelief; spirit pulls you up, raising the seven to the sounding sun.

1. In the special being, discover the law: for the law wove the first of the seven into the material.
2. In movement, discover life: for the second of the seven poured life into matter.
3. In desire, discover the person: for the person was imprinted by the third of the seven in the material.
4. In the thought, recognize yourself: for the I gave the fourth of the seven its self.
5. In your desire, discover renunciation: for through renunciation, the fifth of the seven sacrificed itself so that you may be yourself.
6. In your movement, discover blessed calm: for the sixth of the seven sacrificed blessed calm so that you may live moving as yourself.
7. In thy particularity discover thy eternal law: for as eternal law the seventh of the Seven has created thy self in particularity, and as eternal law will lead it out of particularity.

The power of regression was born in humanity when the Christ, the world spirit effecting the cosmic-human evolutionary-involutional process, historically appeared and through the great sacrifice at Golgotha became the leading spirit of the earth:

“... That man can develop back again to an awareness of his spiritual relationship [to the cosmos] is due to the Mystery of Golgotha. But that which one owes to the Mystery of Golgotha must be sought out of one's own free inner motivation. Christianity presupposes freedom.” (Dornach, February 11, 1920)

Now that this retrogression of consciousness has set in from our age, it is necessary that the Christian element of freedom should also be incorporated into the nature of the cult, into sacramentalism. This means that, increasingly, it is no longer the case that one person must make the sacrifice for all others, but that each person must experience, together with all others, becoming equal to the Christ, who descended to earth as a being of the sun (Dornach, December 23, 1922). For spiritual science, freedom and individualism in religion and in sacramentalism do not mean that every person should have their own religion. This would only lead to the complete fragmentation of humanity into separate individuals but that through the assimilation of spiritual-scientific knowledge, a time will come, “however far off it may be,” in which humanity will be increasingly seized by the realization of the inner world of truth. And through this, “in spite of all individuality, in spite of everyone finding the truth individually within themselves, there will be agreement”; while maintaining complete freedom and individuality, people will then join together in free connections (Berlin, June 1, 1908).

In this sense, it was repeatedly pointed out that what had previously been performed only on the church altar must take hold of the whole world, that all human activities should become an expression of the supersensible. Especially since the First World War, it has been emphasized more and more strongly how important it is for the whole of social life to find its way back into harmonious coexistence with the universe, since otherwise humanity is doomed to “develop more and more disharmony in social coexistence and to sow more and more war material across the world”. One will not come back to ascending cultural forces as long as one serves only human egoism, especially in science and technology, alongside a separate religion, as long as one does research and experiments at the laboratory and experimental table without the reverent awareness of the “great law of the world”. “The laboratory table must become an altar“ is a formula that one encounters again and again.¹²

The fact that there is still a long way to go and that tolerance should therefore be exercised, both by those who have to continue to maintain the old forms and by those who should strive for the future, is clear from the following statements:

"Of course, just as it is true that a completely new era is dawning in relation to the spiritual life, it is also true that the path to the Christ, which was the right one for many centuries, will remain so for many centuries to come. Things are gradually merging. But what was right before will gradually change into something else as people mature for it.” (Karlsruhe, October 13, 1911) "Just as the one who, because he believes that he has so deeply grasped the spirit of the Mystery of Golgotha, the Christ, within himself that he can immediately, one might say, ‘dialogue’ with this Christ, must look with understanding at those who need the positive statutes of a confession, who need the Christ-servant who again and again gives them consolation with the words: Your sins are forgiven. On the other hand, those who can see that there are people who are already dealing with themselves should be tolerant. This may all be an ideal in earthly existence, but at least the anthroposophist may look up to such an ideal.” (Norrköping, July 16, 1914)

But the importance of cults was not only emphasized for the individual, but also for the development of the whole of humanity and the Earth. In lectures given at the time when the religious renewal movement “The Christian Community” was founded and in which it was said that the mysteries are contained in the cults and that they will only reveal themselves in their full significance in the future , “the mysteries of the coming age,” it was explained that a time would come when the earth would no longer be; everything that today fills the material of the natural kingdoms and human bodies will have been atomized in the universe. All processes brought about by mechanical technology will also be a thing of the past. But through the fact that, through “right” acts of worship that arise out of a “right grasp of the spiritual world,” elemental spiritual beings that have to do with the further development of the earth can be called into these declining natural and cultural processes, the earth will arise anew out of its destruction (Dornach, September 29, 1922).

Another reason for the saying that the mysteries of the future lie in the cultic, which shines deeply into the overall development of humanity and the cosmos, arises from the spiritual-scientific research result that the divine-spiritual of the cosmos will reveal a different nature in the future than it has done so far through free humanity, which has become self-responsible out of I-consciousness: “Not the same entity that was once there as Cosmos will shine through humanity. In passing through humanity, the spiritual-divine will experience a being that it did not reveal before.“¹³ For this new mode of revelation of the cosmic spiritual being will only be able to emerge in the future, since the essence of a genuine cult is that “it is the image of what is taking place in the spiritual world” (Dornach, June 27, 1924).

The prerequisite for all this is the spiritualization of thinking. Only on this basis will it be possible to gradually sacralize all life activities. Then, out of the knowledge of spiritual realities, the old ceremonies will also change, because where there are realities, symbols are no longer needed (Karlsruhe, October 13, 1911, and Workers' Lecture Dornach, September 11, 1923).

The change of ceremonies here refers to the Christian sacraments, which, in the traditional Christian view, contain the meaning of Christianity, but whose origin is to be found in the ancient mysteries. It was only in the 16th century, with the translation of the Bible as declared to be the only authentic one by the Council of Trent in 1546, the Vulgate, that the Latin “sacramentum” replaced the Greek “mysterion”. However, the term “sacrament” has been used in ecclesiastical language since the time of the church father Tertullian in the 2nd century. With regard to the number, meaning and effect, the view was, however, fluctuating until the Roman Catholic Church at the Council of Ferrara-Florence in 1439 set the number at seven (baptism, communion, penance, confirmation, marriage , ordination, extreme unction) and proclaimed as dogma that the sacraments are acts instituted by Christ, consisting of a visible element (materia) and ritual words (forma), through which the sanctifying grace is conferred.

If, on the other hand, the Protestant Church recognizes only two sacraments, baptism and the Lord's Supper, this, according to Rudolf Steiner's presentation in the lecture Stuttgart, October 2, 1921, is due to the fact that at the time of the Reformation there was already no sense of the inner numerical constitution of the world. For the concept of the seven sacraments originally arose from the ancient insight that the overall development of the human being is brought about by processes of evolution and involution. The seven sacraments were therefore intended to add the corresponding counter-values to the seven stages through which the human being passes in life, including the social, and in which he or she develops values that are partly evolutionary and partly involutionary. The seven stages in human life are: birth, strength (maturity), nourishment, procreation, recovery, speech, transformation. They are characterized as follows. The involution inherent in the birth forces is the dying process that begins with the birth process; it should be sanctified by the sacrament of baptism. The entire maturation process, including sexual maturation, should be sanctified by the sacrament of confirmation. The process referred to as “nourishment” refers to the embodiment of the spiritual-soul in the physical-bodily, that is to say, the right rhythm must be established between the spiritual-soul and the physical-bodily so that the soul-spiritual does not sink down into the animalistic, but also does not lose itself in a spirituality foreign to the world. The involution inherent in this process of evolution should be hallowed by the sacrament of Holy Communion. Linked with this rhythmic process of vibration between the soul-spiritual and the physical-corporal is the possibility, through the faculty of memory, of being able to swing back again and again in time. For complete development, it is necessary to remember previous experiences on earth. The involution inherent in the memory capacity evolving from the human being should be sanctified by the sacrament of penance, which includes examination of conscience, repentance and the resolution to correct the mistakes made and to accept appropriate retribution imposed by oneself or by the priest, so that the process of remembrance is Christianized and at the same time elevated to the moral level. These four processes exhaust the evolutionary processes that have taken place since the birth of man. The act of remembering already represents a strong internalization; evolution is already approaching involution. A natural involutionary process is death. The corresponding sacrament is extreme unction. Just as the physical body was stimulated by the corresponding natural processes of life, so now the soul-spiritual life is to be stimulated by the sacrament of extreme unction, which in the old knowledge of nature was seen as a process of ensoulment. “Expressed in rhythm, at death the physical body is to disappear again, while the soul-spiritual life is to take form.” This is what is called “transubstantiation”.

Since the individual life of a human being comes to an end with death, the two remaining stages and sacraments relate to something that is no longer individual in nature. On the one hand, there is the interrelationship between the human being and the heavenly-spiritual, which unconsciously exists in every human being. If this were not the case, one could never find one's way back. But there is an involutionary process hidden deep within the human being, “even more hidden than that which takes place within the human being when he passes through death with his organism,” a process that does not come to consciousness at all in the course of the individual's life. The evolutionary process corresponding to this involutionary process would have been seen in the sacrament of priestly ordination, which corresponds to what is called “speech”. Spiritual thinking as spiritual communion, as the beginning of a cosmic cult appropriate for humanity in the present day. The Forms of Worship Created for Various Communities “After the founding and establishment of the 'Free Society', which came about at the suggestion of Rudolf Steiner after the delegates' meeting in Stuttgart at the end of February 1923 and of which I was a member, here, as elsewhere in the movement, the relationship between our work and that of the Christian Community was discussed frequently, especially after Rudolf Steiner's lecture on December 30, 1922. In our circle of co-workers, a conversation about our tasks and our way of working arose. Some of us noted that The Christian Community had an easier time with its work because it has a supporting spiritual substance through its cult and could thus meet the need for direct contact with the spiritual, more so than through lecturing, which our work was mainly limited to. So the question arose among some friends as to whether it would be conceivable for a cult to be held for the Society. Opinions were divided. I then turned to Dr. Steiner himself, whom I was privileged to accompany on several journeys, with this question. To my surprise, he responded very positively to the idea of cultic work for the Society. He explained that there had been a cultic work for society before the war. In the future, however, it would have to take on a different form. It would not be in the form of the Christian Community. He then characterized the different foundations of anthroposophy and the Christian Community. Both movements represent a different path and have different masters in some cases. A cultic work in the Anthroposophical Movement must arise out of the same spiritual stream as the school activities, and must become, as it were, a continuation of what has been given in the form and content of the School Sacrifice Ceremony. And he indicated that he would come back to this after he had been asked about it."

The seventh, he said, was the image of the spiritual and mental in the physical and bodily, as expressed in man and woman: “One should say that a certain boundary marks the descent into earthly life. Woman does not reach this boundary completely, but man crosses it. This is actually the physical-bodily contrast.” Because both carry a certain imperfection within them, there is a natural state of tension between them. ‘If the sacramental evolutionary value is sought, we have it in the sacrament of marriage.’

This fundamental idea of Christian esotericism in relation to sacramentalism – that man enters life as an imperfect being, develops partly evolutive and partly involutive values, and that in order to make him a fully developing being, the countervalues are to be added to them in a sacramental way – has no longer been understood since one began – “of course, again rightly” – to discuss the sacramental. Today, however, we urgently need to arrive at involutional values.

That all that is our relationship to the world first recognizes itself as cosmic cultus in the human being is the first beginning of what must happen if anthroposophy is to fulfill its mission in the world.¹⁴

When Rudolf Steiner speaks of the spiritualization of the forms of the sacraments, this is in turn conditioned by the law of development in that the sacrament of communion contains the involutionary counterpart to the incorporation of the soul and spirit into the physical body. Since the last stage of the process of incarnation was the binding of thinking to the physical brain, the reverse development, the re-spiritualization, must also begin with this physical thinking, this intellectuality.

Already in his first book publication, in the writing “Grundlinien einer Erkenntnistheorie der Goetheschen Weltanschauung” (1886), he started at this point by explained how pure, that is, unadulterated thinking unites with world spirituality. This is also referred to a year later with the sacramental term “communion”, when it is stated:

"He who grants thought its ability to perceive beyond the sense perception must also, of necessity, grant it objects that lie beyond mere sensory reality. But the objects of thought are those. By seizing the idea, thought fuses with the source of the world's existence; that which operates externally enters into the mind of man; he becomes one with objective reality at its highest potency. The realization of the idea in reality is man's true communion. Thinking has the same significance for ideas as the eye has for light and the ear for sound. It is an organ of perception.“¹⁵

Since the content of anthroposophy is nothing other than what can be researched in this way from the world of ideal, spiritual reality and what is, by its very nature, of a moral and religious character, it goes without saying that even in its early days was proclaimed that through their teachings it should be effected to sanctify and sacralize all of life, even into its most mundane activities, and that therein even lies one of the deeper reasons for their appearance (Berlin, July 8, 1904). It also becomes clear why it is said in the lectures on 'The Spiritual Communion of Humanity', which are so important for the context under consideration here, that the spiritual communion to be experienced in spiritual thinking is the 'first beginning' of what must happen if anthroposophy is to fulfil 'its mission in the world' (Dornach, December 31, 1922).

How this can become a reality through the spiritual communion performed in the symbol of the Lord's Supper is characterized in the lecture Kassel, 7 July 1909: Humanity is only at the beginning of Christian development. Its future lies in the fact that the earth is recognized as the body of Christ. For through the Mystery of Golgotha, a new center of light was created in the Earth; it was filled with new life down to its atoms. That is why Christ, at the Last Supper, when He broke the bread that comes from the grain of the Earth, could say, “This is my body,” and by giving the juice of the vine, which comes from the sap of plants, He could say, “This is my blood!” The literal translation continues: “Because he has become the soul of the earth, he was able to say to that which is solid: This is my flesh - and to the sap: This is my blood! Just as you say of your flesh: This is my flesh - and of your blood: This is my blood! And those people who are able to grasp the true meaning of these words of Christ, they visualize and attract the body and blood of Christ in the bread and wine, and the Christ-Spirit within them. And they unite with the Christ-Spirit. Thus the symbol of the Lord's Supper becomes a reality.

However, it continues: “Without the thought of the Christ in the human heart, no power of attraction can be developed to the Christ-Spirit at the Lord's Supper. But through this form of thought such attraction is developed. And so for all those who need the outer symbol to perform a spiritual act, namely the union with Christ, Holy Communion will be the way, the way to the point where their inner strength is so strong, where they are so filled with Christ that they can unite with Christ without the outer physical mediation. The preliminary school for mystical union with Christ is the sacrament – the preliminary school. We must understand these things in this way. And just as everything develops from the physical to the spiritual under the Christian influence, so under the influence of Christ, those things that were there first as a bridge must first develop: the sacrament must develop from the physical to the spiritual in order to lead to real union with Christ. One can only speak of these things in the most general terms, for only when they are taken up in their full sacred dignity will they be understood in the right sense."

In the same sense, it is said in the lecture Karlsruhe, October 13, 1911, that when man, through becoming acquainted with the knowledge of the higher worlds, through concentration and meditation exercises in scinem, is able to penetrate completely with the element of spirit, the meditative thoughts living in him 'will be exactly the same, only from within, as the sign of the Lord's Supper - the consecrated bread - was from without'. In his memoir, 'My Life-long Encounter with Rudolf Steiner', Friedrich Rittelmeyer reports that when he asked, 'Is it not also possible to receive the body and blood of Christ without bread and wine, just in meditation?' he received the answer, 'That is possible. From the back of the tongue, it is the same.

In the lecture Dornach, December 31, 1922, it is indicated that spiritual knowledge can be further deepened by uniting with the world spirit, with the words that spiritual knowledge is “the beginning of a cosmic cultus appropriate for humanity today,” which “can then grow.” In other contexts, it is pointed out that this requires a certain sacrifice, through which one can go beyond the general experience of spiritual communion to truly concrete cosmic knowledge. What has to be sacrificed in this process is referred to by the technical term “sacrifice of the intellect”. This is not to be understood as renouncing thinking as such, but rather as renouncing egoism, the will of one's own mind in thinking, which consists in arbitrarily connecting thoughts. Two lectures from 1904 and two lectures from 1923 and 1924 contain explanations of this.

The two lectures from 1904 have only survived in an inadequate transcript and therefore remain unpublished to this day. Therefore, the relevant text is quoted here verbatim. The lecture of June 1, 1904 states that certain prerequisites are needed to be able to read the Akasha Chronicle, to explore cosmic evolution, one of which consists in

“that one makes one's own thoughts available to that principle, that power and those entities which, in the theosophical language, we call the Masters.”¹⁶ Ultimately, the Master must give us the necessary instructions to be able to read the Akashic Records. It is written in symbols and signs, not in words of any language that exists or has existed. As long as one only uses the power that man habitually uses when thinking – and every man, who has not expressly learned to do so, uses this power – one cannot read in the Akasha Chronicle. If you ask yourself, “Who is thinking?” you will have to say to yourself, “I am thinking.” You connect object and predicate when you form a sentence. As long as it is you yourself who connects the individual concepts, you are not able to read in the Akasha Chronicle. You are unable to read because you connect your thoughts with your own ego. But you have to eliminate your ego. You must renounce all your own sense. You must merely present the ideas in order to have the connection of the individual ideas established by forces outside of you, by the spirit. So to read in the Akasha Chronicle, it is necessary to renounce not thinking, but to renounce connecting the individual thoughts on your own initiative. Then the Master can come and teach you to let the spirit from outside join your thoughts into what the universal world spirit is able to show you about what has taken place in history. Then you no longer judge the facts, but the universal world spirit itself speaks to you. And you provide it with your thought material. Now I must say something that may perhaps give rise to some prejudice. I must say what is necessary today in preparation for eliminating the ego in order to be able to read in the Akasha Chronicle. You know how it is today a thing held in contempt, what the monks in the Middle Ages cultivated. They cultivated the “sacrifice of the intellect.” The monk did not think as today's researcher thinks. The monk had a certain sacred science, sacred theology. One did not have to decide on the content. Therefore, it was said that in the Middle Ages the theologian had to use his reason to explain and defend the given revelations.¹⁷ That was, however one may judge it today, a strict schooling in the sacrifice of the intellect to a given content. Whether this is something admirable or reprehensible in modern terms is not our concern. This sacrifice of the intellect, which the medieval monk made, led to the elimination of judgment based on the personal ego; it led him to learn how to place the intellect at the service of something higher. In the process of reincarnation, the fruits of that sacrifice come to fruition and make him a genius of insight. When higher insight comes, he can apply his abilities to the facts that can be read in the Akashic Records.” (Berlin, June 1, 1904) In the lecture held a few weeks later, it says: ”... The further one advances on the path of knowledge, the more one must cultivate devotion; one becomes ever more and more devoted. From this devotion flows the strength for the highest realizations. He who can refrain from connecting his thoughts attains to the reading of the writing in the Akasha-Chronicle. But one thing is necessary: the personal ego must be eliminated to such an extent that it makes no claim to connecting the thoughts itself. It is not at all easy to understand this, because man claims the right to connect the predicate with the subject. But as long as he does this, it is impossible for him to really study occult history. When he allows thoughts to arise in selflessness, but also in awareness and clarity, an event occurs which, from a certain point of view, every occultist knows, namely the event that the ideas, the thoughts, which he previously formed into sentences and insights from his personal point of view, are now formed by the spiritual world itself, so that it is not he who judges, but is judged in him. It is then the case that he has sacrificed himself so that a higher self speaks spiritually through his ideas. This is - understood occultly - what was called in the Middle Ages the “sacrifice of the intellect”. It means giving up my own opinion, my own conviction. As long as I myself associate my thoughts, and do not make my thoughts available to higher powers, which then, as it were, write on the tablet of the intellect, I cannot study occult history.” (Berlin, July 25, 1904)

In the two lectures Penmaenmawr, August 31, 1923, and Prague, April 5, 1924, the term “victim of the intellect” occurs again, in connection with the research result of a lost epic-dramatic poetry from the first four Christian centuries. This poetry was created by the mystery teachers of that time because they foresaw that in the future people would develop their intellect more and more, which would indeed bring them freedom but also take away their clairvoyance, a grave crisis must overtake them because they will no longer be able to comprehend the regions from which the actual deeper foundations of the development of the earth and of humanity and the cosmic significance of Christianity can be understood. This foresight had caused the mystery teachers great concern as to whether humanity would really be able to mature for that which came into the world through the Mystery of Golgotha. And so they clothed the teaching that the sacrifice of the intellect is needed to understand the Christ in his cosmic significance cosmic significance in a “mystery drama”.¹⁸ In this lost epic drama, In a moving way, it is said to have depicted how a young hero acquired the clairvoyance for the cosmic significance of Christianity through his willingness to make the sacrifice of the intellect. And with this poetry - it is said to have been the greatest that the New Testament produced - those mystery teachers wanted to put before humanity, like a kind of testament, the challenge to make the “Sacrificium intellectus”. For if the connection with that which has entered into humanity through the mystery of Golgotha is to be found, then this Sacrificium should basically be practiced by all who strive for spiritual life, for erudition: “Every man who is taught and wants to become wise should have a cultic attitude, an attitude of sacrifice.” (Penmaenmawr, August 31, 1923, and Prague, April 5, 1924). For “sacrifice is the law of the spiritual world” (Berlin, February 16, 1905); “Sacrifice must be, without sacrifice there is no becoming, no progress,” it says in notes from an instruction session in Basel on June 1, 1914.

Artistically formulated, the “sacrifice of the intellect” is found in the third mystery drama, “The Guardian of the Threshold”. In a moment of spiritual drama, the spiritual student Maria, supported by her spiritual teacher Benediktus, who characteristically appears in this picture, set in the spiritual realm, makes a vow before Lucifer, the representative of the egoistic forces, to always keep her love for self away from all knowledge in the future:

Never again will I
let myself be found by that bliss
Which people feel when thoughts mature.
I will prepare my heart for the service of sacrifice,
That my spirit may always think, and, thinking,
to offer the fruits of knowledge to the gods.
Then knowledge becomes my sacred duty.

From the lectures from 1904, it is clear that the sacrifice that the spiritual disciple Maria vows to make is equivalent to what is characterized there as the “sacrifice of the intellect”.

In addition to the references to the spiritualization of the sacrament of communion in spiritualized thinking, there are also references to the spiritualization of the sacrament of baptism. In contrast to spiritual communion as an individual event within the human being, this points to the spiritualization of external work. The beginnings of this could already be made today in education and teaching, if each human child is seen from the point of view that it brings the power of the Christ-spirit into the world in its own personal way.¹⁹ In another context, we find the remark: “That which was formerly performed in the mysteries as the symbolum of the sacrament of baptism should today be introduced into external events, into external deeds. Spiritualization of human work, sacralization in external action, that is the true baptism.20In notes from an esoteric lecture, Hamburg, November 28, 1910.

Cult unites the people who come together in it.²⁰

The question of how ritual can build community was discussed in detail in 1923, when a fundamental reorganization of the Anthroposophical Society had become necessary due to various subsidiary movements that had emerged since the end of the First World War and the fire at the Goetheanum. The problem of “community building” had become particularly pressing at that time, on the one hand due to the youth streaming into the Society, most of whom came from the youth movement (the “Wandervogel” movement) that was struggling with the ideal of community at the time, and on the other hand due to the religious renewal movement “The Community of Christ”, which was founded in the fall of 1922, shortly before the building burnt down. This movement had formed after young theologians, mostly still students, approached Rudolf Steiner around 1920/21 with the question of whether he could advise and help them in their need for a spiritual renewal of the religious profession. His answer was that he himself had spiritual science to offer and could not in any way found a religion; however, if they, together with a group of 30 to 40 like-minded people, carried out their plans, it would mean something very great for humanity.²¹ For he was convinced that for those people who want to seek the path to the spiritual through religious practice, the renewal of Christian religious life is a deep necessity. And so he provided the most energetic support for this young movement, admittedly not as its founder, but, as he said, as a “private individual”. He gave lectures on the foundations of “what a future theology needs” and, above all, he gave “a valid and spiritually powerful, spiritually fulfilling cultus”, because a recovery of religious life must come about through healthy community building, which in turn is only possible through a cultus (Dornach, December 31, 1922, and March 3, 1923).

After the establishment of the “Christian Community” in the Anthroposophical Society had created a certain uncertainty regarding the relationship between the two movements, he felt compelled to address the issue of community building and worship. Starting from the question of whether the community formed by the “Christian Community” is the only one possible in the present, or whether another possibility could be found within the Anthroposophical Society, he presented the two poles of community formation made possible by worship. While the well-known pole in religious worship lies in the fact that through word and action, entities of the supersensible worlds are brought down to the physical plane, the other pole is a “reverse” cultus, which can arise when one rises up to the supersensible worlds in anthroposophical working groups through a common effort of knowledge. When a group of people come together to experience what can be revealed from the supersensible world through anthroposophy, “then this experience in a group of people is something different from the lonely experience”. If this is experienced in the right spirit, it means a process of awakening in the other person's soul and a rising to spiritual community: “If this consciousness is present and such groups arise in the Anthroposophical Society, then in this, if I may may say, at the other pole of the cultus, there is something community-building in the most eminent sense present” and from this, this ‘specifically anthroposophical community-building’ could arise (Dornach, March 3, 1923).

This form of cultic experience, which is possible without external ceremony, obviously lies in the line of the cosmic cult that can be experienced through spiritual knowledge. Nevertheless, if he had been able to work for a longer period of time, Rudolf Steiner would also have created a cult that could be performed externally, so to speak, as an effective aid on the difficult path to the cosmic cult to be sought in the purely spiritual. For the experience of cosmic cult as a spiritual-mystical union of the human spirit with world spirituality should always be striven for, but, at least today, it can certainly only rarely be truly experienced. Rudolf Steiner once hinted at this when he said: “I recall that a great mystic of the Alexandrian school confessed in his old age that he had only experienced that great moment a few times in his life, when the soul feels ripe to immerse itself so that the spirit of the infinite awakens and that mystical moment occurs when the God in the breast is experienced by the human being himself. These are moments at midday, when the sun of life is at its highest, when something like this can be experienced, and for those who always want to be ready with their abstract ideas, who say: once you have the right thoughts, they must lead you to the highest - for them such midday hours of life, which must be seen as a grace of earthly life, are not time when they would willingly travel.²² For such abstract minds, the moment must always be there to solve the riddles of the world. (Heidelberg, January 21, 1909).

That Rudolf Steiner considered the possibility of creating a new form of anthroposophical worship in 1923, the year of the reorganization of the Anthroposophical Society, is clear from two of his statements in the spring of 1923. One of these was made in the context of describing the “reverse” cult as a specifically anthroposophical form of community building. In this context, he added the following remark to the statement that many people come to the Anthroposophical Society and not only seek anthroposophical knowledge in abstracto, but also, out of the urge of our consciousness soul age, corresponding community formations: “One could now say: the Anthroposophical Society could also cultivate a cult. Of course it could; but that belongs to a different sphere now” (Dornach, March 3, 1923). The other statement was the answer to a question posed in a personal conversation about a cult for the anthroposophical movement. The questioner, Rene Maikowski, recorded this conversation as follows and made it available for reproduction:

However, this new form of the anthroposophical cult of knowledge was never realized. After Steiner's death, Marie Steiner tried to create a kind of substitute by giving the celebrations held at the Goetheanum, especially the annual festivals, an artistic-cultic character.

In retrospect, it is clear that the needs of various walks of life, as expressed to Rudolf Steiner, have given rise to a wealth of ritual texts.

The first to be written were the texts for the rituals of the interreligious cult of knowledge, as it had been practised within the Esoteric School from 1906 until the outbreak of the First World War in the summer of 1914.

Shortly before or immediately after the end of the war (end of 1918), he had been asked to redesign church rituals. This request came from a Swiss anthroposophical friend, Hugo Schuster, who had been so deeply moved by Rudolf Steiner's descriptions of Christ that it had led him to become a priest. And after he had been ordained within the Old Catholic Church in the summer of 1918 – in which the rituals were already being read in German – he received a ritual for burials and, in the spring of 1919, a new translation of the “Mass”.²³

Other friends of anthroposophy who were or had been priests also received ritual texts upon request. Pastor Wilhelm Ruhtenberg, who had become a teacher at the Free Waldorf School in Stuttgart, founded in 1919, received a baptismal and a marriage ritual in 1921. The following account of how this came about was handed down:

"As early as 1921, Pastor Ruhtenberg was often asked by anthroposophical friends to marry them and baptize their children. He then asked Rudolf Steiner for a baptismal ritual. After he had received it, he no longer felt that the black robe with the white bib was appropriate and asked for a new robe. Rudolf Steiner drew what he wanted and indicated the colors. According to Ruhtenberg's report, the marriage ritual was as follows: “Once a bridegroom came to me and said that Dr. Steiner, whom he had asked to perform the wedding, had sent him to me. I didn't want to let the man go away empty-handed, so I married him. But after that I went to Dr. Steiner and said to him: “Doctor, if you send me someone to marry, then please give me a ritual for it.” A few weeks later, as I was sitting with my class in the eurythmy lesson, the door opened; Dr. Steiner came up to me, handed me some sheets of paper and said: “Here is the marriage ritual for you.” I sat down immediately to immerse myself in the ritual with burning curiosity. After the lesson, in the office, I asked about the garment for this act. I still had the sketch of the baptismal garment with me, and Dr. Steiner wrote the colors for the marriage ceremony next to it; the shape of the garment remained the same.”²⁴

Before that, another teacher, Johannes Geyer, who had also been a pastor, had received a baptismal ritual for the baptism of a child for whom he had been asked by an anthroposophical friend.

Rituals were also designed for the free Christian religious education at the Waldorf School after Rudolf Steiner was asked whether a religious celebration could be arranged for the students of the free religious education on Sundays. The answer was that this would have to be a cult. So the first ritual, the “Sunday Act,” was created before New Year's Day 1920. In response to further questions, he developed the three other rituals: the “Christmas Ritual” during the Christmas season of 1920; the “Youth Ritual” in 1921, standing for church confirmation; and the “Sacrifice Ritual” in spring 1923 for the two upper classes, standing for the sacrifice of the Mass.

The “sacrifice ceremony” came about after Rudolf Steiner was told in a meeting with the religion teachers on December 9, 1922 that a student in the upper classes had asked if they could receive a Sunday act that would take them further than the youth celebration. He had taken this suggestion particularly thoughtfully and described it as having far-reaching significance; he wanted to consider it further. He did not want to include a mass in the activities associated with free religious education, but “something similar to a mass” could be done. A few months later, in March 1923, the text of the ceremony was handed over and on Palm Sunday, March 25, 1923, the “sacrificial ceremony” could be held for the first time for the teachers and the students of the eleventh grade.²⁵

However, he never returned to the request expressed at the teachers' conference on November 16, 1921 for a special Sunday event just for the teachers.

When the work of the “Christian Community”, founded in the fall of 1922, raised the question of whether free religious education and the “acts” were still justified, Rudolf Steiner spoke unequivocally to the effect that both types of religious education, the free Christian and the “Christian Community”, had their own character, their own goals and full justification for the future. If some parents wished their children to participate in both types of instruction, he also allowed this, provided it did not become a health burden. (At that time, religious education for the Christian Community was not taught in schools, but in their own rooms). The unchanging basic attitude of the greatest possible tolerance in religious matters is also evident from the way he characterized the difference in the objectives of the two types of religious education: “The inner meaning of our youth celebration is that the human being is placed in humanity in a very general way, not in a particular religious community; but the ‘Christengemeinschaft’ places him in a particular religious community.” But - and he emphasized this several times - “there can't really be a discrepancy between the two in terms of content”.²⁶ And when the “Christian Community”, to which the “Youth Celebration” ritual had also been made available for their area of responsibility (confirmation), asked him whether this ritual might not require some changes for their sacramental context he developed in a “spirited” way that it was precisely “instructive” to know that the same ritual was used “as the expression of different life contexts”.²⁷

He expressed similar views regarding the “sacrifice ceremony”. Maria Lehrs-Röschl reports, as quoted above, how, after the first performance of this act, teacher colleagues requested that the ceremony be repeated for the teachers alone. Since the people performing the act were inclined to the opinion that the act should only take place for students with the participation of teachers and parents, she was asked to ask Rudolf Steiner about it: “I asked him in a way that already showed that I thought it was unacceptable to consider the sacrifice ceremony differently than for students. But Rudolf Steiner looked at me with wide-open eyes (I knew this gesture as his expression of surprised, slightly disapproving astonishment) and said: “Why not? This act can be performed anywhere there are people who desire it!”

For the purposes of the “Christian Community”, the missing rituals were gradually created, in addition to the completely redesigned “Human Consecration” Mass and the rituals handed over to it that had been created earlier. The last ritual to be created was that for the appointment of the Chief Executive. It was created shortly before Rudolf Steiner's death.

The abundance of rituals that came into being in this way is all the more astonishing given that Rudolf Steiner himself once said that it is difficult to design a ritual: “You can see from the fact that for a long time everything ritual-like has been limited to taking over the traditional that it is difficult to design a ritual. ... All cultic forms that exist today are actually very old, only slightly transformed in one way or another.” (Stuttgart, June 14, 1921).

It follows that anyone who undertakes to shape cults, if they are to become a true reflection of processes in the spiritual world, must have a sovereign relationship with the spiritual world. However, they must also have artistic creativity at their disposal. For cult forms as reflections of spiritual processes are by no means to be equated with photographs, but are independent creations based on physical means. A supplementary explanation for this seems to be given in the following statement: “As man rises to the next level of existence, images arise for him, but we no longer apply them in the same way as our thoughts, so that we ask: how do these images correspond to reality? but things show themselves in images consisting of colors and shapes; and through imagination, man himself must unravel the entities that show themselves to him in such symbolic form.” (Berlin, October 26, 1908). This is illustrated in concrete terms by the example of the cult of the dead, and the comment concludes: “It could be even more complicated, but in its simplicity, as it is now, what is to be conquered through it can already be conquered for humanity.” (Dornach, June 27, 1924). The term “conquer” again suggests how difficult it must be to shape ritual.

He once justified simplicity – a striking feature of all his rituals – by saying that a complicated cult would not satisfy people today and that it would therefore have to be made “extremely simple” (Stuttgart, June 14, 1921). But it is precisely this simplicity that in turn testifies to a strong artistic ability to create. Now art and cultus are also closely related in their origin, since they both originated in the same spiritual region: “With the evolution of humanity, the rite, a living image of the spiritual world, develops into the spheres of artistic production. For art likewise emerges from the astral world - and the rite becomes beauty.” (Paris, June 6, 1906). An incident related by Emil Bock is of interest in this context: “When I received the Children's Burial Ritual from him in the spring of 1923, he himself beamed with delight at this special kind of creativity, which was at the same time the highest art of receiving. On that day, during a conference, he approached me twice with the words, “Isn't the text beautiful!”²⁸

Another characteristic arises from the esoteric principle of continuity, one of his most important leitmotifs:

“The future rests on the past / the past endures the future / to the vigorous presence”.²⁹

Wherever possible, he linked the newly explored to the traditional old for the sake of the continuous progress of development. This was also the case with his ritual designs. The necessity of taking into account the stream of the past is formulated as follows: “In order to maintain the continuity of human development, it is still necessary today to take up ritual and symbolism, as it were” (Dornach, December 20, 1918). In this, something is something is preserved that can and will be resurrected once we have found the way to bring the power that emanates from the Mystery of Golgotha into all human activity (Dornach, September 29, 1922). And the words point to the future trend that is only now beginning to reveal itself in the present: “In our time it is only possible to arrive at symbols if one delves lovingly into the secrets of the world; and only out of anthroposophy can a cult or a symbolism arise today.” (Stuttgart, June 14, 1921). In the same sense, it is said in a lecture on various cults that today, in a cult, what can be perceived through modern spiritual scientific schooling in the laws of world spirituality must be brought in, and that one can “at most stand at the beginning again” with the construction of such a cult (Dornach, September 11, 1923, lecture for the workers on the Goetheanumbau).

The connection between elements of the past and the future in the formation of the “Human Consecration Ritual” for the “Christian Community” was once pointed out as follows: “This cult takes full account of the historical development of humanity, and therefore carries in many its details and also in much of what occurs in its totality, a continuation of the historical; but it also bears everywhere the impact of that which can only now reveal itself to the supersensible consciousness from the spiritual world. (Dornach, March 3, 1923).³⁰ He expressed himself similarly regarding the translation of the mass text for Pastor Schuster, who had had asked him to “bring some of the viable Catholic rituals not in the strange translation in which one often enjoys it today, but to bring it into a form that was actually originally in it”; and then, although it was only a translation, it actually became “something new” from it. In the same context, he also said of the funeral ritual: “Of course one had to tie in with the usual funeral rituals. But by not translating the usual ritual lexicographically, but rather correctly, something different emerged.” (Stuttgart, June 14, 1921)

The following saying also points to a characteristic of rituals: “Only one cult at a time can be legitimately brought down from the spiritual world.”³¹ The question of how the various cult forms correspond to this one possible cult can be answered to the effect that the cults given for different walks of life – the cult of knowledge of the esoteric school, acts for the free religious education of the Waldorf school, ecclesiastical cult for the “Christian Community” – must be essentially the same in the depths with this “one” cult for the various walks of life. This seems to be confirmed by another statement handed down by Emil Bock, according to which the “sacrifice ceremony” was an attempt to give the “Act of Consecration of Man” of the “Christian Community” something corresponding to it, insofar as it could be performed by lay people, that is, by those not ordained as priests. Maria Lehrs-Röschl comments on this: “What arose again and again in the development of Christianity as a longing and striving for lay priesthood - albeit also repeatedly persecuted and ultimately made to disappear - has here [with the sacrifice celebration] experienced a new germination through Rudolf Steiner.” From all this it can be seen that for Rudolf Steiner there was no contradiction between esoteric cult of knowledge, free religious cult and church cult. On the one hand, because, as everywhere, the freedom of the individual was his highest commandment in religious matters and only that which makes “absolute religious freedom” possible (Zurich, October 9, 1918) is considered true Christianity. On the other hand, because only by extending the cultic into all branches of life can the path to the high ideal of sacralizing the whole of life be followed. The necessary prerequisite for this, however, is that spiritual thoughts and feelings “equally permeate and spiritualize the inner being with just as much consecration as in the best sense of inner Christian development, the sacrament spiritualizes and Christifies the human soul.” If this becomes possible, and according to Rudolf Steiner it will become possible, then we will have advanced another step in our development and “real proof will be provided” that Christianity is greater than its outer form (Karlsruhe, October 13, 1911).

---