Der «umgekehrte Kultus» - Artikel von Ilona Metz/en
!Automatische Übersetzung aus dem Deutschen!
!Automatic translation from German!
Anthroposophy and Current Affairs No. 107 / Vol. 10 / 1 July 2026
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The ‘Reversed Cult’ Ilona Metz Individual Achievement, Spiritual Reality, a new level of community-building and seeds of the future
*
To summer heights
The radiant being of the sun rises, It carries my human feeling
Into the vastness of its space; A sense stirs within me, foreshadowing, dimly announcing to me, ‘One day you shall realise:
A divine being has now felt you.
(Rudolf Steiner, Weekly Saying for the first week of June, GA 40, page 27)
Significance
We are at a turning point in world history.
When early humanity still possessed a natural clairvoyance, it lived, as it were, quite naturally amongst the gods and in the perception of their workings. Then this gradually faded, and ways—paths of mystery—were found to maintain contact with the spiritual worlds; a kind of return to the previous state also played a significant role in the emergence of yoga.
Western humanity, in particular, has in recent centuries increasingly passed through a state of complete mental isolation from the world of the supersensible hierarchies. Through this, it attained its own sense of self. Had people remained in the ancient state in which they perceived how the angel within them thinks, and how other hierarchical beings govern the processes in their organism, they would not have become free.
Now, however, humanity is in danger of losing touch with reality through abstract intellectualism and sinking into subhuman conditions. Remarkably soon after the end of the ‘Dark Age’ in 1899, the new revelation took place, and with it a new opening towards the spirit. With the faculties of the self-awareness that has been attained—the awareness of individual selfhood—a new connection to the spirit, in freedom and consciousness, is now intended to give the human soul the opportunity to gradually grasp its true nature and to shape its earthly path accordingly.
Whereas up to this point the old cult—which was already in partial decline and still rooted in the mysteries of the past—had continued, a cult in which the priest, on behalf of the congregation, invokes the angels, the beings of heaven, to descend upon the altar and performs the transubstantiationwith bread and wine, the new path of spiritual science now enables the development of the powers of consciousness for the individual realisation of a corresponding spiritual event. When our now-defunct image-thinking, which in contemporary science merely traces nature as it has come to be, in Thought is transformed and comes to life in the higher spiritual levels of knowledge—imagination, inspiration and intuition— and thus, with his newly attained waking self-awareness, man embarks on the ascent from the external world—which has come into being and is now fading away—back to the weaving, creative forces and beings of the spiritual world; in this way he connects with and is filled by the true world-forming forces, and thereby the substance that is a process which has come to rest and died away is once more transformed into activity, spiritual activity; then he accomplishes the real connection with the world of the gods within himself, within the workings of his consciousness.
One can well imagine that certain circles, which have hitherto used the relationship between humankind and the world of the gods as a factor of power—in a certain sense to ‘mediate’ it, to regulate it and thereby direct it according to their own purposes and goals—will do everything in their power to prevent such a development. The lecture on the reversed, or cosmic, cult certainly did not coincide by chance with the night of the fire at the first Goetheanum. The transformation of humanity’s descent into an ascent—which the individual human soul can and must embrace—began with the Christ event on Golgotha and is now being continued—on the basis of what the Central European spiritual strivers have prepared—through spiritual science, Anthroposophy, which was introduced into our earthly world bestowed by Rudolf Steiner at the turning point from the Dark Age, which had lasted five thousand years, to the Age of Light. We perceive the resistance of the old earthly forces, a powerful resistance. But here and now lies the preparation, the sowing of the seed for a new future for humanity, for its reconnection with its spiritual reality. We stand at a new beginning and must witness how fiercely contested the human soul is, as opposing forces seek to take hold of it and hold it back. We have been given the path of re-ascent, and if we do not take it, then, without our realising it, the forces thus freed up will go to the opposing forces of human development.
Let us become aware of the magnitude of what has been given to us as a possibility: An ancient cult, which has endured for millennia but has fallen into decadence, yet still retains an element of group-soul character within it, is being transformed and presented as a possibility—as a gift of divine grace—to the freedom and consciousness of the individual human being, so that human beings may gradually allow their true nature to resound within themselves. This is how it is to be achieved.
New communities in this sense – characterised by this selfless engagement with the spirituality of other human beings as well – are seeking to form.
Let us now examine both of these in more detail.
The Cosmic Cult
The only passage that is so clear on the subject of the cosmic cult is to be found in the lecture of 31 December 1922 in GA 219
‘The Relationship between the World of the Stars and Humanity, and between Humanity and the World of the Stars. The Spiritual Communion of Humanity’.
The beginning of the lecture serves as an introduction, which I shall only touch upon briefly: what is separated in outer nature—winter and summer—we possess simultaneously within the human being. In the state of sleep, the physical and etheric bodies are under the influence of summer; the expenditure and wear and tear of the day are balanced out, whilst the astral body and the ‘I’ are separated from this and are under the influence of winter—that is, spiritual influences. In the waking state, the situation is reversed. Yet we always possess both, like the beams of a balance that are in equilibrium, with the point of rest situated at their centre. And this is the point of equilibrium between the forces of nature and, consequently, of human freedom from them—of human autonomy. The forces of nature cancel each other out. Thus the spiritual and soul aspects of the human being can intervene, uninfluenced by these natural forces.
What nourishes our physical and etheric, or vegetative, body during the night are echoes and effects from the pre-birth period, from the past. We exist in the present only in our spiritual and soul aspects. The physical and etheric organism perish; our future life is secured solely by our supersensible spiritual and soul organisation, which, after a sojourn in the spirit world, prepares itself for rebirth. Only the astral body and the ‘I’ ensure the possibility of seeds for the future. And here we come to the essential point:
Our mineral-vegetable Earth is indeed surrounded by a soul-spiritual envelope, but this does not penetrate it. Thus it would be doomed to perish were it not for human beings giving it what it lacks itself.
‘If, therefore, external nature is not to perish, it must be given what humankind possesses through its astral and ‘I’ bodies. That is to say, since he possesses self-aware concepts through his astral and ‘I’-body, if humankind wishes to secure the future of the Earth—which would otherwise perish—it must instil into it that which is supersensible and invisible within itself… That which is not present on Earth of its own accord is the active thoughts of the human being, which live and weave within his organism—an organism independent of external nature through its state of equilibrium. If he realises these independent thoughts, then he gives the Earth a future. But to do so, he must first possess these thoughts himself, for all the thoughts we form about that which is in a state of decline in ordinary scientific understanding of nature are mirror-images; they are not realities. The thoughts arising from spiritual research are brought to life through imagination, inspiration and intuition. If we take them in, they become entities that exist independently within earthly life.”
What does that mean – ‘entities that exist independently’? Here we are entering a world of thought entirely different from the one we are accustomed to, a world in which thoughts are realities, creative realities, seeds of the future.
The ideas arising from spiritual science do not merely encompass what has come into being and passed away, but, through imagination, inspiration and intuition, connect with that which weaves in the invisible world—whether pictorially or formatively, whether through resonant creation, or through essential action—which once wove our world as well, and in which lies the seed for the future, if we recognise it.
‘This thinking represents the spiritual form of human communion. – For when a person abandons themselves to their reflective thoughts about external nature, they merely repeat the past; they live in the lifeless remains of the Divine. By enlivening their own thoughts, they connect—through their own being, communicating and receiving communion—with the Divine-Spiritual that permeates the world and secures its future.
Thus, spiritual knowledge is a true communion, the beginning of a cosmic cult befitting present-day humanity, which can then grow as human beings become aware of how they now permeate their physical-mineral and vegetativeorganism, and how, by bringing the Spirit to life within himself, he now also imbues with the Spirit that which otherwise surrounds him as dead or dying.’
Communion – does this not mean receiving the divine-spiritual, taking the divine-spiritual into oneself? Coming together? Be it in the symbol of bread and wine, or purely spiritually through spiritual thoughts that rise up to the divine and unite with it.
And when a person takes in the thoughts of spiritual science, they can come to experience ‘that when they look upon their organism, which functions in a solid state, they feel connected within it to the world of the stars, insofar as it is a resting entity.’ And the flow of vital fluids, the flow of blood, which is set in motion by the etheric organism, is connected with the workings of the stars, with the movement of the planets.
‘But as it appears in immediate perception, this is a dead world. Human beings transform it from their own spiritual nature when they communicate with the world through their spirituality, by enlivening thoughts into imagination, inspiration and intuition, and by bringing about the spiritual communion of humanity.’
The cosmic beings are indeed the creators, but they cannot recognise themselves; for that, human beings are needed. But when a human being grasps the workings of these beings in their thoughts, they add the spirit to what has come into being. This expanded view of the world then enables them to think and act quite differently, transforms their will, transforms their feelings, and can lead them into harmony with the cosmic beings.
To arrive at this point, human beings must first develop an awareness of it—an awareness that must take on an ever-greater vitality and permeate their lives—‘then human beings will increasingly find the path to this spiritual communion.’
Rudolf Steiner now offers a saying that can help to revive what has died in the past, to breathe new life into it, so that its ‘death may become the life of the future.’ For this, it is necessary to become properly aware of humanity’s relationship to the cosmos.
When we take in the substances of the earth through our earthly nourishment, we take in within them that which has been wrought by the heavens, by the stars, by the cosmic beings; we take in cosmic activity through our nourishment. ‘We take in the star-being, the heavenly being, together with the substance of the earth contained within earthly activity.
‘It draws near to me in the workings of the earth,
Given to me in the image of matter,
The celestial beings of the stars:
I see them transforming lovingly in their will.”
Now, however, it is the case that within the human being, the earthly substance must first be destroyed, so that it may then be shaped for the organism in accordance with the ‘I’-human being, the ‘I’-organisation. Our physical-etheric organism, however, provides the foundation for the activity of the astral and ‘I’ beings who are incarnated within it. And on this foundation, earthly consciousness can unfold in the waking state with its dissolving activity, its spirit-liberating activity.
‘But we must be aware that, as human beings, in our willing—in our willing imbued with love—we transform that which has become matter back into spirit, effecting a true transubstantiation, when we become conscious of our innermost presence in the world, so that the intellectual-spiritual life within us comes alive.’
Another aspect concerns what we take into our fluid organism, so that it permeates the circulation of blood and bodily fluids. This is not a reflection of the stellar beings, but rather an effect, a consequence of the actions of the stars, that is to say, the movements of the planets. This, too, can be spiritualised.
Just as, in the case of solid forms, we have the image of the fixed stars, particularly the zodiac, and this can, as it were, be spiritualised in will and love as a creation of the first hierarchy, so, in the case of planetary movements, we have the effects, the actions of the following hierarchy, in which the Spirits of Wisdom occupy the highest position. Is not our etheric body woven from wisdom? The astral realm intervenes in it with the powers of sensation and feeling. Through objectified feeling, we create for ourselves an important organ of perception and judgement for the processes of the world.
‘In my watery life, the celestial deeds of the stars penetrate me, shaping me through the powerful forces of matter.
I see them transforming wisely within my feeling.”
‘Whilst I can see, through my will, the nature and weaving of the stars as they lovingly transform into the spiritual substance of the future, so too do I see, through my feeling, that which is given to me here on earth transforming wisely, as I take in, through what permeates my vital organism, the image of the celestial deeds. Placed in this way, the human being can experience themselves through willing and feeling.’ –
But what sort of volition is meant here? ‘Surrendered to the universal rule of the worldly existence surrounding him, of cosmic existence, he can experience that which is carried out through him in the great temple of the cosmos as transubstantiation, by standing within it in a purely spiritual manner, in a spirit of sacrifice.’
What is this sacrifice? Is it the setting aside of selfish individuality in favour of devotion to the divine-spiritual stream of becoming?
‘What would otherwise be merely abstract knowledge becomes a relationship with the world characterised by feeling and will.’ Feeling and will must work in concert with transformed thinking.
Thus we arrive at a new starting point for a corresponding way of acting. ‘The world becomes a temple; the world becomes a house of God. The discerning human being, rousing themselves through feeling and willing’—so that it does not remain mere intellectual knowledge, but can become knowledge of the heart and of action—becomes a sacrificial being. Humanity’s fundamental relationship to the world rises from cognition to a worship of the world, to a cosmic cult. That everything which constitutes our relationship to the world is first recognised within the human being as a cosmic cult—this is the very beginning of what must happen if anthroposophy is to fulfil its mission in the world.’
The very beginning! Where do we stand? – the forerunners of forerunners, as Rudolf Steiner calls them at one point.
And he instructs us ‘…how we are to seek the future from the past, how we are to know how to shape the future in order to create the spiritual’ and emphasises ‘that we must seek life from our own power of action.’ For the burgeoning life of the external world contains death within itself. Only from that which is created by the human being—by sacrificing their own will and placing themselves within the cosmic context of becoming—can the seed of the future be formed in what might be called a ritual act.
Here we have the stages of the ritual: the absorption of spiritual content and the enlivening of thought through imagination, inspiration and intuition. This is only possible by leaving behind, by sacrificing, the lower self; this must fall silent. In this way, a transformation can take place towards spiritual thoughts and, with it, the transubstantiation of rigid materiality into spiritual activity. The thoughts transformed through imagination, inspiration and intuitive insight lead to a true spiritual communion and enable a renewed grasp and revitalisation, resulting in a renewed activity of the world-forming forces—which had died away—for the future.
The individual human being himself becomes the executor of the cosmic cult, out of free devotion to the cosmic-earthly reality of human existence, which at the same time represents an overcoming of the Fall, the separation from the world spirit. This opens up the path for the human being to their true self and to attaining a hierarchical level within the cosmos – the return journey, so to speak, from the earthly realm to the spiritual world, equipped with newly acquired powers and abilities, and with a newly attained sense of self and ego-consciousness.
Christ is not mentioned even once in the lecture of 31 December 1922. What role does Christ play on this path?
Rudolf Steiner once said, in essence, that in anthroposophy we are actually doing nothing other than giving expression to the language of Christ and bringing it into the world. Without Christ, this re-ascent would not have been possible; human beings would have lost the connection between their (lower) ‘I’ and the spirit, and would have become immersed in the material world. But Christ has united himself with earthly existence. Does he not weave his way through everything that happens, particularly in spiritual striving? Is not anthroposophy, in fact, his path for us? Is not the cosmic cult, as it were, the transition from a more group-soul-like nature in ecclesiastical worship to the individual soul, into which Christ is now gradually able to enter? And only that which we realise within our own souls is what will carry us forward into the future.
Man as a World Being
One might ask: What do these words mean: ‘I see them transforming themselves lovingly in their willing.’ And: ‘I see them transforming themselves wisely in their feeling.’ – Who is transforming themselves? What can the little earthly human being contribute to such a transformation brought about by cosmic forces?
In a lecture delivered on 6 July 1915 in Berlin (GA 157), the answer to this enigmatic formulation becomes clear, following on from the question of what a human being really is – for with their consciousness they encompass only a fragment, a rather small part of the reality of their life. What would we be if we had to consciously carry out all the functions of our organs day in, day out?
‘Our conscious existence as human beings begins, in a certain sense, through our sensory perceptions, through what we perceive of the external world with our senses.’ Yet much of what our senses perceive does not even enter our consciousness. For example, our ears are not switched off at night, but we are asleep and have no awareness of this. Does this perceptive capacity of our senses have significance only ‘for us as earthly human beings, or does it have some other, wider significance’? This question, says the spiritual teacher, can only be answered if we first ask: What is the light through which the sun shines and the stars shine? It then becomes clear to the clairvoyant consciousness that the light of the celestial bodies ‘actually consists of the perceptive capacity… of beings’. And if a being from Venus or Mars were to see the Earth shining, it would be able to know that there are perceiving beings on Earth, from whose perceptive capacity the light emanates.
‘Thus, in fact, each of our sense organs has the task not only of being what it is for us, but also has a cosmic task. Through their sensory perception, human beings are cosmic beings.’
Let us now turn to the next faculty of the soul: thinking. Although human beings are aware of some of what they think in terms of content, they know very little of the complex processes that take place during thinking; nor are they conscious of the fact that thinking does not cease during sleep. ‘Thinking is actually a process of our etheric body.’ And when, in the morning, a human being, with their astral body and their ‘I’, re-enters first the etheric body and immediately afterwards the physical body, they initially plunge as if into a surging mass, into a weaving life, into ‘a sea consisting solely of weaving thoughts’. But the physical body veils this from them.
‘Our act of seeing brings about the radiance; in this respect we are cosmic beings of space. Through what takes place in thinking, we are cosmic beings of time; here everything that happened before our birth, everything that happens after our death, and so on, plays a part.’ That is why the intermediate state of dreaming, in which something of this undulation can rise to the surface, has a prophetic character.
We have even less of feeling than of thinking and sensory perception in our consciousness. ‘It is a profound, profound process.’ If one wishes to understand the true nature of thought, one must strip it of its earthly abstractness and rise to imaginative contemplation, to the world of images that lie behind everything, which are the cause of everything. ‘And we immerse ourselves in these images when we plunge into the sea of thought… this imaginative thinking is a reality, and we immerse ourselves in it when we plunge into the surging thought that flows along with the current of time.
We only immerse ourselves in feeling when we arrive at what is called inspiration, which is the higher form of knowledge compared to imagination. Everything that underlies our feeling is, in fact, a surging tide of inspirations.’ But we do not perceive these directly; rather, as in a mirror, they are reflected back by our organism and appear – stripped, as it were, of life – as feeling. Thus our feelings are a mirror image of the inspirations through which the higher hierarchies make themselves known. ‘For in each of these images are reflected the qualities of the higher hierarchies, which express themselves in the world through inspiration. And just as we do not remain at the level of feelings, but progress towards clairaudient perception, we perceive the world as it interacts through a great diversity of beings from the higher hierarchies. The world is this essence, this interplay of the beings of the hierarchies. The deeds of the higher hierarchies take place in the world. And we are drawn into it, we are within the mirror, and the deeds of the higher hierarchies are reflected back through our mirror. We then perceive what is reflected back through our consciousness. Thus we live within the bosom of the qualities of the hierarchies as sentient human beings… because we are sentient human beings, we are also beings of the hierarchies, and we too are active within the realm where the hierarchies are at work. We act within this fabric, performing deeds that are not merely for ourselves, but through which we contribute to the entire structure of the world. Through our feelings, we are servants of the higher beings who are building the world.’ If our feelings were not there, then ‘those beings who are destined to contribute to the building of the celestial body Venus would not possess the forces they need for this. Our feelings are necessary for the house that the gods are building as the world, just as the bricks are used to build the house.’ When we stand before the Sistine Madonna and develop feelings towards it, this is not merely a process within ourselves; rather, ‘what happens there is part of the whole of the world, quite regardless of how we accompany it with our consciousness.
And when we look at our will, this too is merely a mirror, but now of the essence of the individual members of the hierarchies. We are likewise a being of the hierarchies, only on a different level. Our reality consists in our will. We give substance to the world by allowing our will to play out in reality in some way. Once again, the fact that we accompany our will with our consciousness is significant only for us as human beings; alongside this, our will stands as reality—that is the material from which the gods build the world.
You can see how our sensory perceptions, our thinking, feeling and willing have cosmic significance, how they fit into the whole of cosmic life… it is truly essential that a greater number of people realise that the days are over when one could manage without this insight.’
The old form of clairvoyance had to fade away for the development of our sense of self, for the thinking we would otherwise develop if we were to see ‘the whole tumult beneath consciousness’ ‘would be a heavenly form of thinking, but not independent thinking.’ We could not have the awareness ‘It is I who think’, but would instead experience that it is the angel who protects me who thinks. This awareness
‘I think’ is only possible through the assumption of the earthly body. That is why it is necessary for human beings to become capable of using their earthly body during their earthly life.’ Human beings will have to do this more and more in the near future, and a certain justified egoism will thereby become increasingly pronounced. ‘A counterbalance to this must be created by gaining, on the other hand, the insights provided by spiritual science.’
If this does not happen, if these forces within the human being are not used for what is the task of the age, then development will proceed in such a way that the human being will offer to Ahriman and Lucifer ‘what he would otherwise offer to the regular gods. For everything you suppress in your consciousness, you offer to Ahriman and Lucifer.’
Thus, ‘there is a “small human being”, the conscious one, and a “great human being”, the cosmic reality.’
And if we now return to our original question and bring to mind the words:
‘In my earthly work, the heavenly beings of the stars draw near to me, given to me in the image of matter:
I see them moving lovingly in their willing.’
then it has become clear how our will, as a reflection of ‘the essence of the members of the hierarchies’, has cosmic significance. We are integrated into the hierarchical cosmos, and through our will we create the substance, ‘the matter from which to build the world’.
And let us consider the second part of the verse:
‘In the water-life, the celestial deeds of the stars Penetrate me, shaping me through the mighty power of matter. I see them transforming wisely in my feeling.”
Here we can realise how our feeling is the reflection of ‘the inspirations through which the higher hierarchies make themselves known’—the hierarchies that act in the world, the world which is, as it were, a collaboration of the hierarchies. And we, within whose bosom they dwell, reflect this activity in our feelings. And without our feelings, they do not receive the power they need to build new worlds.
The interweaving between the earthly and the cosmic becomes clear – the small, conscious human being and the great cosmic reality, right through to the re-spiritualisation of earthly matter, transubstantiation, and the new, conscious connection of humankind with the divine beings of the cosmos: communion.
Strangely enough, I always have the feeling that a third part of the saying is still missing, and so I have attempted, clumsily and stammeringly, to add one:
The thoughts of the world live within me and, in truth,
the archetype of the world.
I see with gratitude how they guide me,
how they transform me.
Building a New Community
Let us now turn to the question of ‘reversed worship’ in our shared anthroposophical work. Rudolf Steiner speaks of this in particular in the lectures of 27 February 1923 in Stuttgart (1) and 3 March 1923 in Dornach (2), both contained in the volume ‘Anthroposophical Community Building’ GA 257. In what follows, I shall quote alternately from the two lectures, using (1) or (2) to indicate the source.
Since human beings cannot live on earth without their fellow human beings, the question of community-building always arises. There are both older and more recent forms. An initial form, following our entry into earthly life, is the linguistic community with the people around us; later, we form communities of memory with those with whom we have shared experiences during childhood, school days or at other times. Community-building in religious worship is likewise based on a kind of memory, namely the (mostly unconscious) recollection of what one experienced with others during the second half of one’s post-death or pre-birth existence. Religious worship is, as it were, a reflection of actual pre-birth experiences.
‘Before we descended to Earth, we lived through a world together which stands here before our souls on Earth in the religious service. This is a powerful bond; it is a genuine bringing in, not only of the images but of the forces of the supersensible world into the sensible world…
The Anthroposophical Society also needs such a force so that a sense of community may blossom…’ (1), but it needs a different form.
In the age of the culture of the consciousness-soul, yet another form of community-building is required. ‘With the awakening of the consciousness-soul, a new element has entered human life on earth in this respect.’ (2)
When a person is not in the waking state but in the state of dreaming, they are alone. ‘They isolate themselves in their dream world, and even more so in their sleeping world. When we wake up, we immerse ourselves in a certain communal life.’ The space and our conceptions of it correspond to what our fellow human beings also experience. Our relationship with the external world connects us, in a certain sense, with other people. ‘We awaken to the external world, to light, to sound’, to the other sensory phenomena, and also to the outward appearance of another person, the natural aspect of the human being.
‘We do not awaken – and this is the mystery of everyday life – as human beings to other human beings, to the deepest innermost being of the human being, … to what is taking place in the depths of the other person’s soul.’ (1) This is a higher level of awakening: when we awaken to the spiritual and soul aspects of another human being, when we feel their spiritual and soul aspects within ourselves, learn to recognise them, and awaken through their experiences.
If we merely take in the ideas of anthroposophy, however abstractly we may do so, we do not thereby yet understand the spiritual world. ‘We only begin to develop our first understanding of the spiritual world when we awaken to the soul-spiritual nature of another human being. Only then does a true understanding of anthroposophy begin.’ (1)
Thoughts alone do not enable us to understand anthroposophy; it is only when we can, so to speak, experience the concrete spiritual, the soul-spiritual, which has its home in human beings on earth, that we no longer remain merely in a world of thought, but enter, through this experience, into the active, the real world. There, so to speak, we have the opportunity to experience the soul-spiritual here.
‘Dream life awakens to waking daily life through the natural environment. Waking daily life awakens to a higher consciousness through other human beings, through the soul and spirit of other human beings. Human beings must become more than they have ever been to one another. They must become beings who awaken one another. Human beings must draw closer to one another than they have ever been before… To this end, modern people, who have now entered life, have accumulated far too much karma for them not to feel their destinies are linked, each one with the person who meets them in life as another human being… Now the necessity arises that one should be awakened not only by nature, but by the people with whom one is karmically connected and whom one seeks out.” (2) This requires a whole new kind of attentiveness; in a certain sense, it also requires restraint in matters of sympathy and antipathy; it requires a new way of accepting the other person as a bearer of soul-spiritual forces, of a soul-spiritual being.
‘The power for this awakening can only be generated by planting spiritual idealism within a human community.’ But true idealism exists only ‘when a person can become aware that, just as they bring a spiritual world down into the earthly realm by establishing a form of worship, they also lift something they have beheld in the earthly realm—something they have learnt to recognise and understand in the earthly realm—up into the supersensible-spiritual realm by elevating it to the ideal.’ (1)
In worship, we bring the supersensible into an image imbued with power. What we perceive here in the world of the senses, we can lift up; it comes to life when we penetrate it in the right way with feeling and an impulse of will. ‘If you let your will radiate through your whole inner being, directing enthusiasm towards it, then, by idealising your sensory experience, you take the opposite path to the one you take when you enshrine the supersensible in the form of the ritual.’ (1)
This is a different choice of words and a slightly different perspective, but we nevertheless sense that what is said here echoes what was presented in the New Year’s Eve lecture of 31 December 1922 – here too, it must be permeated by the will; thoughts must rise to the world of the ideal, to the world of the creative spiritual beings.
On an emotional level, wherever we engage in anthroposophical work, we should infuse this work with ‘spiritually imbued feeling’ (1): indeed, we should even regard the door to the room in which we carry out anthroposophical work as something we cross with reverence, for the room is sanctified by the fact that anthroposophical activities are carried out within it. This must become an inner experience, so that through the very act of working together anthroposophically
‘a truly real spiritual being becomes present’ in the room.
‘Just as the divine forces are present in a sensory way in the forms of worship that take place in the sensory world, so must we learn, through our inner spiritual disposition, to allow a true spiritual being to be present supersensually with our souls and our hearts in the room where the anthroposophical word is spoken, and we must be able to attune our speech, our feelings, our thinking and our impulses of will in a spiritual sense — that is to say, not in some abstract sense, but so that we feel as though a being were looking down upon us and listening to us, a being that hovers above us and is truly present in a spiritual sense. We must sense a spiritual presence, a supersensible presence, which is there precisely because we practise anthroposophy. Then the individual anthroposophicalactivity begins to become a realisation of the supersensible itself’.
Just as a group spirit was once active through blood ties, so today, through the shared experience of anthroposophical content, ‘a real spirit of community can be fostered’. (1)
‘It is precisely through the shared experience of the supersensible that one human soul is awakened by another; the soul awakens to a higher understanding, and when this attitude is present, something emerges that causes a shared, real essence to descend upon people who are united in mutual communication and in the shared experience of anthroposophical ideas…’ (2)
Through their shared anthroposophical work, people’s thoughts and feelings are lifted up into the supersensible world. ‘And when the anthroposophical content is experienced by a group of people in the right spirit, whereby one human soul awakens another, this human soul is indeed raised to a spiritual community. The crucial point is simply that this consciousness is truly present… then, in this … ‘reversed’ form of worship… there is something that fosters community in the most eminent sense…
The work of an anthroposophical group does not consist merely of a number of people talking about anthroposophical ideas, but of their feeling so united as human beings that one human soul awakens another, and people are lifted up into the spiritual world, so that they are truly amongst spiritual beings, even if perhaps without seeing them. Even if this is not present in visual perception, it can be present in experience. And that is then the source of strength and vigour that can emanate from the groups which have come into being through genuine community-building within the Anthroposophical Society.” (2)
I have deliberately reproduced the words of the Spiritual Teacher directly as quotations. With such profound topics, much of the nuance and power contained in the original words can otherwise be lost when rephrased in one’s own words.
What is required is not only an awareness of the content being worked through, but also an awareness of the people with whom this content is being worked through, and an awareness that the spiritual world is participating in this, that, in the right frame of mind, we are truly lifted up into the company of spiritual beings. And if we can then also incorporate into our consciousness the esoteric content of the inverted or cosmic cult and experience it meditatively, we are on the path to realising anthroposophy and fulfilling its purpose in the world.
The Task of Central Europe
We have now brought to life before us the inner substance of the reversed, or cosmic, cult and the task of building a new community. If we consider these within an earthly context, we can grasp even more deeply the significance of such an event for the development of humanity:
In the lecture cycle ‘The Spiritual Background to the First World War’, GA 174b, and particularly in a lecture delivered on 13 February 1915, crucial points are articulated that are just as relevant to us today. Are we not in the midst of the Third World War, a terrible struggle for the human soul on every level?
Rudolf Steiner warns how essential it is, within the pursuit of spiritual science, that mere knowledge and life itself belong solely to external conceptions of the past, and that we must seek a form of insight imbued with feelings and impulses of will that actively engage with real life; otherwise, we are heading towards a time of spiritual desolation. Major world events, too, must be viewed more deeply. One must be aware that, when dealing not with what is generally human but with events involving nations, different laws apply; these are linked to spiritual events and demonic struggles that cannot be grasped by earthly intellectual logic and judgement.
In the subsequent lectures, it will be explained how Central Europe, our sphere of life, is wedged between East and West. When we look to the West, we find a distinctly different spiritual attitude there than in the centre – bearing in mind the national character, not the individual. In the West, ‘the belief in spiritual life is coupled to external culture as an external element. People [there] do not even feel the need to interweave the two.’ Spiritual insights are used instrumentally to gain power and dominion over the rest of the world.
If we look to the East, we observe cultures with residual atavisms that cling to old, ossified religious forms, over which spirituality hovers like a cloud in which they live, yet which show no personal striving for spirituality.
If we consider the development of Central Europe from the Germanic element, we can see how, over the centuries, there was a struggle for a spirituality, a knowledge of humanity and of God, which seizes the soul’s powers at their very depths and unites itself with the whole human being. – In the early phase, we might think of Meister Eckhart, Tauler, the Rosicrucians, Angelus Silesius, Jakob Böhme, and then that distinctive constellation in the eighteenth century, comprising the figures of Wieland, Lessing, Herder, and in particular Goethe, Schiller, Novalis and the philosopher of the ‘I’: Fichte, as well as Schelling, Hegel, the Humboldts and a whole host of other intellectual wrestlers grappling with the nature of humankind and the world, with the true relationship to Godrelationship with the divine, and the personal core of the soul and the ‘I’ within the human being.
Just as it was the fourth epoch of the Atlantean era that sowed the seeds for the post-Atlantean cultures, so it is the fifth epoch within the post-Atlantean cultures that is entrusted with this task—that is, our present cultural epoch of the development of the consciousness soul. This fifth epoch will be followed by a sixth. ‘We should, however, be clear that there are times of ascent and times of decline; we should be absolutely clear that the sixth epoch… must necessarily belong to the period of decline, and that what develops during the fifth post-Atlantean cultural epoch must be the seed for the earthly age that will follow the seventh cultural epoch. We must view these things in such a living way, not in an abstract, theoretical manner.
And what is the defining characteristic that must develop particularly within this fifth cultural epoch? It is the defining characteristic that has been kindled above all by the Mystery of Golgotha: that the spiritual impulses are brought down into the immediate physical human realm, that, as it were, the flesh must be taken hold of by the spirit.’ This is why the Christ appeared on earth. And this must take place right down to every movement of the hand, right into everyday life. This bringing down, this permeating with impulse, is, as it were, the mission of the peoples of Central Europe who are currently the bearers of culture in this fifth post-Atlantean epoch.
‘In the sixth cultural epoch… the task will be, above all, to recognise the spirit as something that hovers more in the surroundings than within oneself, to acknowledge the spirit more in the elemental world, because the sixth cultural epoch has the task of preparing for the recognition of the spirit in the physical surroundings. This cannot be achieved so easily unless ancient atavistic forces are preserved’ – as is happening today in the East, ‘which recognise the spirit in its purely elemental life. But these things do not come about without the fiercest struggles.’ For how could genuine understanding be possible given such differing developments and tasks?
‘What, then, is the history of Central Europe if not a ceaseless struggle for the emergence of the divine spark in the individual soul, for the emergence of the spiritual within the physical?... In the fifth cultural epoch, the spiritual must be attained through one’s own efforts.’ In the sixth and seventh epochs, nothing new will be added; rather, the bearers of the sixth cultural epoch—the epoch of the spiritual self, who are constituted in a more receptive manner—will take in, as if from without, what was achieved and fought for in the fifth cultural epoch.
‘That which will live on in the souls of the sixth cultural epoch will be the very same thing that was achieved by the souls of the fifth cultural epoch…
This cannot happen unless that which truly professes the interpenetration of the physical and the spiritual gives rise to cultural impulses that are enduring for the Earth, that cannot disappear from the Earth again. For whatever follows as the sixth or seventh cultural epoch must live spiritually from the creations of the fifth; it must take the creations of the fifth cultural epoch into itself…’
The peoples of the East still resist this today, because they must first develop to that stage; at their present level, they have no means of assessing these facts, yet it must happen nonetheless, otherwise no culture of the spiritual self can arise.
What a task is becoming clear for our time and our cultural movement! Must we not exert all our strength to do justice to this mission? And is there not a need for such a central event—an event of insight and worship—as the ‘reversed cult’, so that we do not remain on the periphery of the New? We, too, will surely live again in bodies of the coming cultural epochs. What we sow now will be what then comes to meet us! The seed for long periods of human development is being sown now!
In order to bring together all that has been addressed here, it has been presented in a relatively condensed form; otherwise, the content would have filled an entire book. It was intended as preparation for a conference that had only one and a half days available. Perhaps, however, something of the grandeur and sublimity of the subject matter may still shine through – just as the substance condensed into crystal speaks to us through its own form and colour, through its radiance – and of the profound significance
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