Lectures to Priests The Apocalypse

GA 346 — 5 September 1924, Dornach

First Lecture

My dear friends! If I may say something in response to your kind words, it would be this: It was fully justified of you to have spoken these words on behalf of the priesthood, and one cannot always say that what is spoken by people with the best of intentions is fully justified. In this case it can be said. It is said because, in addition to everything that arises from the inner spiritual impulse that is to emanate from the Goetheanum through the Anthroposophical Movement, there is always something that goes far beyond not only all theoretical understanding, but all understanding, period. It is something that approaches what one can express as follows: Today, the tasks for humanity are becoming great again. They are becoming great because the forces from those times are exhausted, when it was possible for humanity to turn away, more or less, from the impulses of the old mysteries.

The impulses of the old mysteries have unfolded divine substances and divine forces into full reality on earth. Humanity had to develop in such a way that the time came when it was more or less left to its own devices, and that during this time the divine substances and forces could not work directly through people on earth. The forces that have gone through humanity on earth in this interim period of human development have been exhausted. And this is perhaps the most significant, if not the highest, or at least an important and deeply incisive occult truth: that the forces that were allowed to take effect within human evolution without the mysteries have been exhausted, and that human evolution will not continue unless mystery forces enter into it again.

In the light of this truth, it must be felt that today something other than mere understanding is necessary for those who, out of true spirituality, want to work in any branch of the Anthroposophical Movement. Something must come again that is similar to the work in the old mysteries that has been described as the sacrificial devotion of the whole human being, with the whole human being absorbed in his task.

If it were not clearly evident — and it is clearly evident — that within your priesthood this impulse is present, working in pure inwardness, sacrificing the whole person for the cause you have recognized as sacred, then your words would not have this deep truth. But I may say before all the divine powers that brilliantly preside over our cause: Your words, which you have spoken of your enthusiasm and devotion to the cause, are full, pure, sincere truth. It was clear to see how this priesthood as a whole is inspired by the noblest, most inward striving to bring the sacrifices that must be made today to full fruition with the inner spirituality of man. And it may be said that what you have done is the beginning of what the divine essence can do to satisfy the world. I am saying something very important to you.

Of course, your work has remained within Germany . But that has happened for reasons that will probably be overcome in the not too distant future. For the interest in that religious renewal that flamed in your hearts when you came here to me to found your priestly work also takes hold of souls across wide areas outside of Germany. And it will depend only on the inner strength that is in you, how far the possibility exists to go beyond Germany.

Naturally, one can only think with a deeply moved heart of how the inauguration and initiation of your movement with the sacred human consecration service took place here two years ago, at the place where we first had to watch the flames that destroyed our beloved Goetheanum. You can see that today, this place is the most utterly decimated. But it has actually been started through your beautiful devotion to transform what happened in that room that was first consumed by the flames into a truly sacred deed in the earth. And if you continue with the holy zeal that first seized you, the impulses within your priesthood will develop in the right way.

This time, when you gather again in this place, bathed in the light and warmth that came to us from the spiritual world through the Christmas Conference, we will have important questions to address as a kind of spiritual counterweight to the earthly losses that were caused by the flames. We will address what can truly be suitable to carry forward the impulses of your souls.

This time we will try to let the deep content of the Apocalypse approach us, but starting from this contemplation of the Apocalypse, we will let everything pass before our soul that is of particular importance for your priesthood at this moment. And it is precisely by contemplating the Apocalypse that we will be able to place at the center of all our work here that which gives meaning to priestly work: the Act of Consecration of Man. And so, on the one hand, we will have the Act of Consecration of Man and, on the other, the Apocalypse.

Today, a few words will be said about how we want to inaugurate this here and how we want to inaugurate your priestly movement through this work. And so we want to save for later what will be said over the course of time about the immediate needs of your priestly work, what will be brought about in this practical priestly work, what will be achieved in terms of looking back at the past and looking forward to the future. And today I will begin by telling you how this work of ours is to be organized here over the next few days.

So, first of all, I greet you all from the bottom of my heart on behalf of all the powers that have united here and of which you are aware, that they are the hosts of the powers that follow Christ. They may provide the right religious impulsivity, the right theological insight and the right impulses for the work of worship in the present, which you would like to take over in the deepest Christian sense, religiously, theologically, ceremonially. It is in this spirit that we want to be together and it is from this spirit that the work we are now undertaking together should be shaped.

We assume that we are pointing to that which is great in our time, to that which must endure in a completely new disposition of the human soul, to that which passes through priestly activity. That which is present in priestly activity when the Act of Consecration of Man is performed is something that people have always sought as long as there has been a human race on earth. But if we want to see in what light the Act of Consecration of Man must appear to the priest who celebrates it and to the lay person who receives it today, we must first take a look at what the Act of Consecration of Man has been over the course of time in the development of humanity on earth, what it is and what it must become.

But to understand what the Act of Consecration of Man is when it is celebrated today, we must approach it from another angle, permeated with the true content of what John, initiated by Christ himself, wanted to give to future Christianity with his Apocalypse. Basically, the two belong together: the right sense in celebrating the Act of Consecration of Man and the right sense in inwardly permeating oneself with the substance of the Apocalypse.

Let us disregard for the moment the special meaning that the Apocalypse of John has for the contemporary Christian. Let us instead call everything “apocalyptic” that is revealed as occult truth for the proper priestly impulse concerning humanity and its further development. Much falls under this concept of the apocalypse, which is precisely summarized in the Apocalypse of John and which is directed towards the Christ. In striving for an apocalypse, there was always an understanding that the full and deep sense for the reception of the apocalyptic must be given in the Act of Consecration of Man.

Much will become clear to us if we first say to ourselves: There were once mysteries that I will call the old mysteries. We do not want to dwell on dates in this introduction, but only characterize the four successive stages of the mysteries. There were ancient mysteries, there were semi-ancient mysteries, there was a semi-modern mystery tradition, and we are now at the starting point of a modern mystery tradition. We thus have four stages before us, four stages in the development of the human conception of apocalypse and the human consecration ritual.

If we look at the ancient mysteries that existed among people at the first dawn of human development on earth, which had to bring everything that was sacred, true and beautiful to people, then we can say: the essential feature of the ancient mysteries was this: that in them the gods descended from their seats of power to mankind, and that within the mysteries, in priestly dignity, men communed with the gods directly, from being to being. Just as man and man, being with being, communicate with each other today, so in those ancient times the gods communicated with men and men with the gods in the mysteries.

But just as there are natural laws that apply to time, there are also eternal laws, which, however, do not in any way impair human freedom; and among these eternal laws are also those that relate to the interaction of the gods with humans. These primeval laws were especially taken into account at the time when the gods themselves associated with men in the sacred mysteries of primitive times, and when all human teaching took place between the divine teachers and the men themselves. When what took place in the cultus was such that the transcendental powers of the gods were also present among the celebrants, then in those old mysteries was accomplished that which has always given meaning to the Act of Consecration of Man: the Transubstantiation. But what was Transubstantiation in the old mysteries?

In the ancient mysteries, Transubstantiation was that which the gods regarded as the ultimate thing through which they entered into a relationship with human beings. The ceremonies were determined by the eternal laws of which I spoke. From certain constellations of the stars, which one learned in the true old astrology and the coincidence of these constellations with circumstances that men could discern, the path was paved from the gods to the people and from the people to the gods.

You can see this if you look at the calendars of ancient times: there were different calendars, for example, some that assumed 354 days and others that assumed 365 days. These calendars had leap days or leap weeks inserted into them to compensate for the discrepancy between human calculations and the true course of the cosmos. What people were able to calculate never coincided with the true course of the cosmos. There was always a small remainder somewhere. Now, the priests of the ancient mysteries paid particular attention to this small remainder where human time calculation did not correspond to the cosmic course of the world. They determined these specific times when this mismatch was particularly noticeable by dividing the year into months and weeks, leaving them with a certain number of days between lunar months until the beginning of the next year.

Looking closely at these times, when people, by inserting such days or weeks, expressed, as it were, the non-coincidence of human calculation with the course of the cosmos, and when the priests regarded these times as sacred weeks, provides all the more reason for anyone who wants to find their way into the course of human development. For in such holy weeks, which made it so very noticeable that the thinking of the gods is different from that of men, in such times when this difference becomes clear, the way can be found from the gods to men and from men to the gods, if the hearts of the gods and the hearts of men are in harmony.

This was something that people observed within the old astrology and that allowed them to see through it in the right way when the gods came into the mysteries. There were always sacred times at the end of each year, or at the end of an 18-year lunar cycle, or at the end of other periods, which marked the boundary between human and divine intelligence, and in which the priests of the mysteries could recognize that the gods could find their way to them and that humans could find their way to the gods.

It was also in such times that those ancient priests sought to capture the workings of the sun and moon in the substances with which they celebrated the Act of Consecration of Man, in order to extend what they had received in the sacred times over all the remainder of the year. In this way they also preserved what the gods had made out of these substances and forces of the earth in the sacred times. They kept the water of those times, the Mercury element, in order to celebrate the Act of Consecration of Man with it during the rest of the year in such a way that it contained transubstantiation in the same way as it had been done by the gods themselves during those acts of consecration of man that had taken place in the “dead times”, as they were called, but which were precisely the holy times.

Thus, in those ancient mysteries, at the times when the cosmic language was spoken among people, not human language, people wanted to connect with the gods, who then descended into the mysteries and which each time newly hallowed what the Act of Consecration of Man was, but which also each time left behind an understanding of the apocalyptic for the those who performed this Act of Consecration of Man and participated in it. Thus the great truths were taught in those ancient times when to stand in the Act of Consecration of Man meant to be imbued with the substance of the Apocalyptic. The Act of Consecration of Man is the path of knowledge; the Apocalypse is the object of sacred knowledge.

We then come to the semi-ancient mysteries, to the mysteries of which at least a small reflection still remains in history, whereas of the mysteries that I have characterized as ancient, nothing emerges into history anymore, but can only be explored through occult science. It was already the time when the gods withdrew from men and no longer descended in their own being into the mysteries, but they still sent down their powers. It was the time when the Act of Consecration of Man was to receive through transubstantiation that splendor of the divine which must ever shine forth in the Act of Consecration of Man.

Transubstantiation was no longer carried out through taking from the astrological observation of cosmic processes which substances and forces should flow into the celebration of transubstantiation, but the secret was sought in a different way. They sought the inner essence of what was called in ancient alchemy: the Ferments. That which has reached a certain age and has passed unchanged through the various stages in which it has effected the transformation of other substances is a Ferment. If we want to choose a trivial comparison, we only need to remember how to bake bread; it happens according to the same principle. You keep a small part of the old dough and add it to the new dough as a leavening agent. We can imagine how, in the times of the semi-ancient mysteries, ancient substances, which have retained their own inner substance through the transformation of other substances over time, were stored in sacred vessels that were themselves something ancient, something holy in the mysteries.

The substances were taken from the sacred vessels as leaveners, with which transubstantiation was carried out in the old, still sacred alchemy. In those times, it was known that the initiated priest understood transubstantiation through the powers preserved in the substances; he knew that they radiated with the splendor of the sun in the sacred crystal vessels. What was sought in them and what they were used for was that they became the celebrant's organ of perception for receiving that which is Apocalyptic.

During the time of these semi-ancient mysteries, there was this phenomenon: the priest was tested at the moment when he entered the holy place and the ancient ferments began to transform the substances in the sacred crystal vessels in such a way that he could see in the crystal vessel how the substances spread the sun-radiance. The vessel containing this small sun was called a monstrance. It was a Holy of Holies, which today can only be imitated. The moment he saw the radiance of the Holy of Holies, he became a priest inwardly.

Today, in the Catholic Church, anyone who enters the church can see the Holy Sacrament, because remains only a symbol of what it once was. But once upon a time, only the one who could see in the Holy of Holies the radiance of the sun in the substances kept there was truly a priest. At that moment, his insight was opened to the apocalyptic.

Then came those mysteries of which the Mass of more recent times is a reflection. For in a very complicated way, the Catholic Mass, the Armenian Mass and other masses have come into being from the semi-new mysteries. Despite having become externalized, these masses still carry the full initiation principle within them. In these semi-new mysteries, what can be perceived by man when the Word awakens inwardly in him takes the place of the presence of the gods in the old mysteries and the forces sent by the gods in the semi-ancient mysteries: the Word, the magic Word, the Word in which inwardness resounds, the Word that goes to the deepest knowledge of the inner essence of speech. For in the time of the semi-new mysteries, there was the cultic language, that cultic language of which the last remnants still exist in the individual religious denominations, in which everything is based on rhythm, on the inner understanding of the speech and on the understanding of the inner penetration of the sounds of speech from the priest's mouth into the human heart. The magic Word, the cultic Word, spoken in a holy place, was the first step up to the gods, and then to the divine powers.

Thus:

First period of humanity – ancient mysteries – the gods descend.

Second period of humanity – semi-ancient mysteries – the gods send down their powers.

Third period of humanity – semi-new mysteries – man learns the magical speech and begins to ascend to the powers of the world of the gods by intoning this magical speech.

That was the meaning of everything that was intoned within the human consecration ritual in the third age of the mysteries. And that was in those days when the Cabeiri element lived on within the mysteries as a contemporary religious cult. For the services of the Cabeiri, the Cabeiri sacrifices celebrated in Samothrace, are part of all that is ceremonial in the semi-new mysteries and of all that belongs to priestly ceremonial. Blackboard Drawing

We visualize the Cabeiri altar of Samothrace. The Cabeiri that stood on it as external monuments were sacrificial jugs, which now contained not fermental substances but substances that human knowledge could find if it could penetrate into the inner spiritual of the substance. The substances in the sacrificial jugs, sacrificial substances, were ignited, the smoke rose, and the magical language worked in such a way that in the rising smoke appeared the imagination of what the word intoned. Thus, in the sacrificial smoke, the path up to the divine powers became visible on the outside. In the sacrificial smoke, the priests knew themselves in the atmosphere through which transubstantiation was performed. That was the third stage in the development of the mysteries and of what is contained in the Act of Consecration of Man.

These first stages have indeed entered into decadence, but some of their external forms are still preserved today. A new age of mysteries has now begun, a new era for the Act of Consecration of Man and for an understanding of the apocalyptic, at the moment when you inaugurated the new priesthood, of the movement for a Christian renewal in the burnt-down Goetheanum. What must now flow through your heart in order to properly perform the fourth stage of the Mystery of the Consecration of Man, we will begin to explore tomorrow.