The Rudolf Steiner Archive

8. Novalis the Seer: The Mystery of Christmas

[ 1 ] From time to time, people arise who can actually see what thousands upon thousands have felt in their hearts and sensed in their souls for many centuries. Only those who live with what we have gained in recent times through the insights of esoteric science know that what has been felt by thousands upon thousands can be perceived by seers at any time—that it is possible to perceive what has come about as a consequence of the event at Golgotha, which illuminates our entire evolution.

[ 2 ] What took place on Golgotha has transformed the entire spiritual sphere of our Earth. And ever since then, the seer—provided his inner eye is even slightly opened by those feelings that can connect us to the event at Golgotha—sees the consequence of this event: the everlasting presence of the Christ power, which has been incorporated into the spiritual sphere of our Earth ever since that time. Others sense and feel the power of this event when they force themselves to grapple with the great truths and the mighty impulses of the proclamation of the event at Golgotha. They sense that, since that time, the human heart has been able to experience something on Earth that was not possible before; they know that there is something present that could not be felt in the same way before. And the seer sees this.

[ 3 ] Such a seer—called to be a seer, as it were, by the grace of the spiritual-divine powers, or one might almost say, by a miracle—was the young German poet Novalis. Through an event that deeply shook him—one that, as if by a stroke of magic, taught him the relationship between life and death—his spiritual eye was opened, and alongside a vast retrospective view of the past of earthly and cosmic ages, the Christ-Being was also revealed to this spiritual eye. In the presence of this Christ-Essence, he was able to say of himself that he belonged to those who, with their spiritual eye, had themselves seen what is revealed when the “stone is lifted,” and the Essence becomes visible that has provided proof for our earthly existence that life in the spiritual realm always conquers death.

[ 4 ] We must not—as has already been done—actually call Novalis a human being who lived a life, but rather something like a memory of a past life. With his initiation, bestowed upon him as if by grace, everything he had attained in earlier incarnations dawned upon him at once; it was, in fact, merely a great gift of the synthesis of insights he had possessed in a previous life. And because he could look back upon those times and see with the spiritual eye, he was able to say that the greatest event in his life was the moment when he discovered within himself what Christ is. It is an experience akin to a repetition of the event at Damascus, where Paul—who until then had persecuted the followers of Christ Jesus and had not heeded their proclamation—received, through higher vision, direct proof that He is here and alive, that something had taken place through the event at Golgotha that stands alone in the entire development of humanity. Thus, those whose eyes have been opened can witness this event repeatedly. Christ was not merely present in the body in which He dwelt. He has remained connected to the Earth; the power of the sun has united with the Earth through Him.

[ 5 ] Novalis therefore calls the revelation he received “unique,” and he considers only those people to be truly human who wish to participate in this event with their whole soul. He rightly says that even the spiritually magnificent ancient India would profess faith in Christ if only it could first recognize this Christ. And he says—based on his knowledge, not on a hunch, not on blind faith, but on his knowledge—that the Christ whom he has beheld spiritually is the very same force that permeates all beings. And the eye comes to recognize this force when this force is at work within it. The eye that beholds Christ is formed by the Christ-force. The Christ-force within the eye beholds Christ outside the eye.

[ 6 ] What a wonderfully grand and powerful word! And Novalis also recognizes that profound connection: that what we call Christ has been, since the event at Golgotha, the planetary spirit of the Earth—the Earth spirit—which will increasingly transform the Earth’s body. And a wondrous vision of the future opens up before Novalis: He sees the Earth transformed; he sees today’s Earth—which still contains the remnants of ancient times—transformed into the body of Christ; he sees all the fluids flowing within the Earth permeated by the blood of Christ, and he sees all the rocks within the Earth as the flesh of Christ. He sees the body of the Earth gradually transforming into the body of Christ. And in a wondrous interplay, the oneness of all that is Earth and Christ presents itself to him: the Earth in the future as a great organism in which humanity will be embedded and whose soul is Christ.

[ 7 ] From this perspective, Novalis—drawing deeply from his sense of esoteric knowledge—refers to Christ as the Son of Man. Just as human beings are, in a certain sense, the sons of the gods—that is, the sons of the ancient gods who have shaped our planet for millions and millions of years, who have built the houses in which we live, and the ground upon which we walk, so humanity, drawing from within itself and overcoming the earthly, will have to build a new Earth that will be the body of the new God, the God of the future. And just as in ancient times people looked back to the primeval, holy gods and sought to be united with them in death, so Novalis recognizes the God who will one day bear within His body all that is best in us and all that we can sacrifice to the body of Christ. He recognizes in Christ that which humanity sacrifices itself to, so that it may have a body. In this, he recognizes the “Son of Man” in the higher cosmological sense. He calls Christ the “God of the Future.”

[ 8 ] These are all feelings of such significance that they are well suited to putting our souls in the right Christmas spirit. And so let us allow him—who lived a short life at the end of the 18th century, having died at the age of twenty-nine—to describe his feelings as they were linked in his life to the greatest event of his life: the unique, profound insight into the essence of Christ.

[ 9 ] Here, Marie von Sivers (Marie Steiner) recited the poem “Wenn alle untreu werden …” from the Geistliche Lieder.

[ 10 ] It has not been long since the Christmas tree became the symbol of the Christmas celebration. One will not yet find a poem about the Christmas tree by a poet such as Schiller, for example, who would undoubtedly have sensed the poetry of the Christmas tree had it existed in his day, and for whom it would not have been difficult to compose a poem about it. The Christmas tree, as we know it today, did not yet exist back then. It is a recent creation. People used to celebrate this festival in different ways, and as far back as we can look in the course of history—as long as humans in their present form, or in the rudiments of their present form, are taken into account—we will find something like the Christmas festival everywhere. We will find it among the broad masses of people everywhere; we will find it all the way up to the heights of the mysteries in ever-new forms.

[ 11 ] It is precisely the fact that the Christmas celebration is ancient and our current symbol for it is so new that shows us there is something eternal connected to this celebration—but an eternity such that it continually brings forth new and ever-changing forms from its very heart. Truly, the Christian festival is as old as humanity itself on Earth, and the feelings symbolized by this festival are just as ancient. But humanity will always have the power to find an outward expression for this festival in new, rejuvenated symbols appropriate to the times. Just as nature rejuvenates itself every year, with its eternal forces sprouting from it in ever-new forms, so too do the symbols of Christmas devotion continually rejuvenate themselves, thereby revealing precisely the eternal and enduring nature of this festival. And so, today, in this solemn Christmas hour of ours, let us hold before our souls what may emerge as we journey along the path that can show us, at least to some extent, how people actually felt during the time we now celebrate as our Christmas season.

[ 12 ] As befits us as students of spiritual science, we can go back far, far into the distant past. We go back, first of all, to those times when our souls were incarnated in ancient Atlantean bodies—bodies that bore little resemblance to our present ones. There were great teachers of humanity in those days, who were at the same time the leaders of that humanity. People viewed the world differently back then. It was not the bright sun of the day that already revealed to them, in sharp contours and distinct lines, the forms of external objects and the natural realms. Everything around human beings was as if shrouded in mist, not only because a large part of the Atlantean world was physically covered by masses of mist and the sunlight could not yet penetrate the mist as it would later, but also because human perception had not yet developed to the point of seeing external objects in clear outlines. When a person awoke in the morning and sought to perceive the outer world—God’s nature—around them, they saw things only blurrily, surrounded by colored edges, and everything as if shrouded in mist. And when they fell asleep in the evening, they drifted into a spiritual world. It was not the case that self-forgetfulness and unconsciousness enveloped people, as is the case today when a person falls asleep

[ 13 ] During the Atlantean era, when a person slept, they saw the spiritual-divine beings who were their companions. All around them, they saw all those figures that had once been real to them, that had been lived experiences for them. They also saw all those figures who have since been preserved in memory across the most diverse regions of the Earth under the most varied names: Wotan, Thor, Baldur, and so on—that is how our ancestors in Central Europe referred to them; Zeus, Pallas, Athena, Ares, and so on—that is how the people of ancient Greece referred to those divine-spiritual figures whom their souls had once beheld in ancient Atlantis. But in the Atlantean era, the divine worlds were no longer the very high, creative divine worlds from whose bosom humankind had once emerged in the Lemurian era. Our souls once arose from divine beings whose glory and grandeur humanity can only glimpse today. These very divine beings revealed humanity from their bosom; they brought forth the celestial spheres and all the forces that surround us. Humanity was in the bosom of divine beings, whose outward expression shines down upon us from the celestial spheres, among those beings we see in the flash of lightning and the roll of thunder, whose expression is manifested in plants and animals, and for whom crystals serve as sensory organs. Everything that approaches us as warmth, every force that surrounds us, is the body of divine-spiritual beings, and humankind sprang from the bosom of these divine-spiritual beings. The more he descended to our Earth, the more he united with material substances, the more he became integrated into the matter of our Earth, the less he was able to perceive the great gods.

[ 14 ] While in primeval times, when human beings did not yet possess sensory faculties of perception—when they could not yet see with their eyes or hear with their ears, and when images that were not of minerals, animals, and plants, but of divine-spiritual beings who stood above him, in later times human beings stepped out more and more onto the physical plane and came to know the physical plane through the external sense organs. During the Atlantean era, there was a sort of alternation between seeing on the physical plane and an ancient form of clairvoyance that had remained as a remnant of the ancient spiritual glory in which humankind had once lived. Compared to the very high gods, these were lower gods whom human beings could still perceive on the astral plane when, at night, they enjoyed the bliss of being a spiritual being among spiritual beings.

[ 15 ] The brighter the physical plane became, the less able human beings were to see into the spiritual planes. But in the ancient Atlantean era, humanity had initiates. These initiates of ancient Atlantis were able to foretell certain things in addition to the deeper teachings about the ancient gods from whose bosom humanity sprang. They were able to foretell to humanity that there is something in the world that can be viewed in such a way that it can be made clear, for example, through the following comparison: Look at a plant seed; observe how this plant seed develops into a plant. It grows; it produces leaves, sepals, a flower, and fruit. Anyone standing before the plant in this way can say to themselves: I look back at the plant seed; it is the creator of the leaves and the flower standing before me, and this flower holds something within it; this flower holds within it the seed of a new plant; the flower itself takes shape as a new seed.

[ 16 ] And just as one can look into the future of a plant and look back into its past, so the great Atlantean initiates were able to say to their disciples—and, through the voice of the disciples, speak to the entire people: You can look back to the divine seeds in the world, from whose womb human beings sprang forth. What you see around you—both spiritual and physical—are all leaves that have sprouted from the ancient divine seeds. Behold in them the powers of these ancient divine seeds, just as one can see in the leaves of a plant the power of the seed from which the plant sprang. But we can point to something else as well: In the future, something will spread around humanity that will be like the flower of a plant—something that is indeed a result of the ancient gods, but which contains within itself a seed, just as the flower contains and brings to maturity a seed—a seed that unfolds within itself the new deity. That the world was born of gods—that was the ancient teaching; that the world will give birth to a god, the great God of the future—that was the great prophecy of the Atlantean initiates to their disciples, and thus also to the peoples. For this was the distinctive trait of the Atlantean initiates: like all initiates, they beheld the great events of the future. They looked beyond the great Atlantean flood, beyond the great event that reshaped the lands of the earth. They saw, beyond the Atlantean era, all the cultures that would spring forth in later times; they looked toward the land of the holy Rishis, toward the land of Zarathustra, toward the culture of ancient Egypt founded by Hermes, toward the forerunner of Moses; they looked toward blissful Greece, toward mighty Rome, all the way to our own time; and further into the future. And it was hope that they instilled in their innermost disciples.

[ 17 ] They could say this to them: You must indeed leave all the realms of the spiritual realm in which you now find yourselves. You must indeed become entangled in matter; you must indeed clothe yourselves entirely in garments made of physical matter. A time will come when you must work on the physical plane, when the sacred ancient gods will seem to have vanished. But may you look toward where the new star may rise, where the new seed may sprout—the future god who has preserved himself throughout the ages to appear among humanity at the right time!

[ 18 ] And when the Atlantean initiates wished to explain to their disciples—and thus to the entire people—why one descends into the earthly valley, they drew their attention to the fact that one day all souls would experience and behold Him who is to come, whom they could not yet see because He was in a realm where the eye—the physical eye—could not perceive Him, nor even the spiritual eye that had once seen Him, when man still rested in the bosom of the gods.

[ 19 ] And the Atlantic flood came. The face of the Earth was transformed. After some time, it looked completely different. Following the great migration of peoples from the West to the East, the great post-Atlantean cultures arose, the first of which was the culture of ancient sacred India. The teachers of ancient India, the seven sacred Rishis, taught their disciples—and thus the entire Indian people—that a spiritual world existed; for the Indian people needed the teaching about the spiritual world. They had been cast entirely onto the physical plane, and during life on the physical plane, the eyes could see only the outer form of the physical world—as the expression of the spiritual—but not the spiritual itself. Yet within the soul of every such Indian there was something that might be called a dim memory of what the soul had once experienced among the gods in ancient Atlantis. This memory awakened a longing, and this longing was so strong that the Indian souls could not form an intimate relationship with the physical plane; thus, the physical plane appeared to them as Maya, as an illusion, as something unreal, and their longing continued to be directed toward what had been lost. The souls would not have been able to endure on the physical plane had it not been for the spirit-imbued Rishis, who were able to proclaim the teaching of the glory of the ancient world that humanity had lost. Thus the holy Rishis were able to proclaim the teachings about the cosmos—teachings that are scarcely understood today—the teachings of an ancient wisdom, because they were initiated into what humankind had experienced when it was still in the bosom of the gods. After all, humankind was present when the gods separated the sun from the earth, when they set the course for the celestial spheres; it had simply forgotten this during its later journey on earth.

[ 20 ] This wisdom was taught by the Rishis, but so was something else. It was taught to those who had already been able to develop a sense of it—and these were precisely the most advanced—that from this world, into which human beings have now been cast and which now appears to them as illusion and Maya, will spring forth the One who cannot yet be perceived in this world, because the human soul is not yet ready to develop the power to recognize this Being—yet He will appear, He of whom the Rishis said He was “beyond them,” “Vilva karman.” Thus was named the Being whom the ancient teachers of India proclaimed as the great Spirit of the future. You cannot yet see Him—so it was proclaimed to the Indian people—just as you cannot yet see the seed of the fruit within the blossom. But just as surely as the blossom contains the seed of the fruit, so surely does Maya develop the seed of that which will make life in the physical world worth living. —And what was later called the Christ, the Indian teachers proclaimed in advance; they were his humble prophets. They looked in two directions: back to the world of ancient wisdom, according to whose plan the world was formed, and forward; and to ordinary people they proclaimed that One would come who would enter human hearts and inspire all human hands.

[ 21 ] There has never been a time when He has not been proclaimed, as long as human culture and human reason have existed. If later generations have forgotten this proclamation, it is not the fault of humanity’s great teachers.

[ 22 ] Then came the ancient Persian culture, led by Zarathustra. Zoroaster was already able to tell his inner circle of disciples—and thus his people—that in everything that surrounds human beings, in the forces that reach us from the sun, in what comes from the other stars belonging to our solar system, and in everything that fills the air—there lives a being who, however, now reveals himself to human beings only in a veiled form. To his initiates, Zarathustra could speak of the great solar aura, Ahura Mazdao, the good God. And he said something to his disciples that might be clarified, for example, by the following comparison: Take a look at the plant. It springs from the seed, develops leaves in all directions, and brings forth the flower; yet it is as if something mysterious permeates the entire plant and appears at the center of the flower as the new seed. What surrounds it will wither away; but the innermost force that you can see within the flower—that is what allows you to sense that a new plant could arise from the old one. When you contemplate the power of sunlight, and when you perceive this sunlight in such a way that you see in it only the physical expression of something spiritual and allow yourselves to be inspired by the spiritual power of the sun, then the foretelling of the divine fruit that is to be born from the earth will dawn upon you!

[ 23 ] And when these intimate disciples had advanced further and further, they were then able, at certain times, to participate in more secret teachings, and Zarathustra could, in a solemn hour, paint for them the image of One who will come when humanity is ready enough to receive this One with understanding in their midst. Zarathustra presented his disciples with powerful images of this One to come. To one he could show the image itself, and to another he could show a kind of reflection of it; the others could only receive, in a comprehensive image, what is to happen in the future.

[ 24 ] So it was also in ancient Persian culture—the culture of Zoroaster—that the one who would later be called the Christ was foretold. And it was the same in Egyptian culture. Hermes, too, in a certain sense, foretold the coming of Christ to his Egyptian initiates and, through them, to the entire Egyptian people. A reflection of this foretelling of Christ can be seen in the Osiris legend. What, then, did the Osiris legend make clear to people? The Osiris legend tells the following story: Once, in ancient times, Osiris reigned over the land of Egypt for the good of his people, faithfully united with his wife Isis. Then his evil brother Set—or Typhon—set out to destroy Osiris. To this end, he fashioned a chest and cast it, with Osiris inside, out into the sea. Isis did indeed find the chest again, but she could not bring about Osiris’s return to life on earth. He was carried away to higher realms, and since then, people can see him only after they have passed through the gate of death. Every Egyptian was taught: After death, you can be united with Osiris just as your hand is united with your soul. You can one day become a part of Osiris, call him your higher self—but only if you have earned it on the physical plane. After death, you can be united with the God whom you call your highest being.

[ 25 ] There was something else that could be shown to the initiate: Once he had undergone all the trials and tests, all the teachings one must undergo in order to glimpse into the higher worlds, the initiate was shown the image of Osiris even during his physical life, even in the life between birth and death itself. What met the ordinary person when he had passed through the gate of death—and with which he was to feel united—was what met the secret disciple of the Egyptian initiates when he was out of his body, after his etheric body, his astral body, and his “I” had been drawn out of the physical body. Then the one who had beheld this—who had already beheld Osiris during his lifetime—could proclaim to others that Osiris lives.

[ 26 ] But in ancient Egypt, no one could ever proclaim: “Osiris lives among us!”—This was expressed in the legend precisely by saying: “Osiris is a king who has never been seen on Earth.” —For the “sarcophagus” is nothing other than the physical body. The moment Osiris is placed within the physical body, the hostile forces of the physical world—which is not yet ripe to receive the God within itself—assert themselves so strongly that they corrupt the God. The physical world is not yet ripe to receive the God with whom human beings are to become one. But when we tell you—so spoke those who could personally bear witness that Osiris lives, with whom man is to become one in his inner being—when we tell you that God lives: only the initiate can see Him when he leaves the physical world. The God with whom man is one day to become one lives, but only in the spiritual world. Only those who leave the physical world can be united with God!

[ 27 ] The fact was that people grew to love the physical world more and more; for it was their task to work within the physical world and to bring about one civilization after another within it. To the same extent that their eyes saw more clearly, that their minds could better understand what was happening in the physical world, and to the same extent that human beings were able to to know more and more and to make discoveries and inventions in the physical world that made his physical life easier, to that same extent it became increasingly difficult for him to see into the spiritual world between birth and death. Thus, although he could hear from the initiates that the God with whom he would unite is alive, he could take little with him from this world that might have made the coexistence of Osiris in the other world clear and distinct to him. Life in the higher world grew darker and darker, so that man could only surmise that the God with whom he was to become one is alive.

[ 28 ] And then came the Greek world—Greece, a land blessed for the physical plane, where human beings forged that marvelous union between spirit and matter for the physical plane. We look at the marvelous works of ancient Greece, and when we allow these works to emerge before us, we will have a picture of how people in that era—when the event of Golgotha was to take place—related to the spiritual world. It is hard to imagine, but it is nevertheless true that the pinnacle of architecture—the Greek temple—corresponds to the lowest point in humanity’s relationship to the spiritual world.

[ 29 ] We imagine a Greek temple standing before us. In its forms and in its unity, it is the purest and noblest expression of the spiritual, so that one could say that God Himself dwells within the Greek temple. He was present within it. For the lines that were inscribed into the matter were entirely in keeping with the spiritual world-plan and with those lines that run through the physical plane as spatial directions. And there is no purer, more beautiful, or nobler interpenetration of the human spirit with physical matter than that found in a Greek temple. And therefore, on the physical plane, there is no other way to interpenetrate the higher world of the gods with physical matter than as is the case with the Greek temple or with Greek art in general. Through the way they created their works of art, the Greeks succeeded in causing the gods of ancient times to descend to them. And even if the Greeks did not actually see Zeus or Pallas Athena descend—the gods were nonetheless enshrined within these works of art, the very gods among whom people once lived during the Atlantean era and whom they had seen. In ancient times, people were able to provide the old gods with a magnificent dwelling place. And now let us consider what the Greek temple represents from a certain other perspective. Imagine that clairvoyant consciousness is standing before a Greek temple. What is now being said also applies to the sparse remains that still exist from the world of Greek temples. Imagine that the clairvoyant consciousness stands before a remnant such as the one found in the temple at Paestum: one can feel joy and bliss for life in the physical body through the harmony of the lines formed by the columns and the roof structures. Everything is of such perfection that the divine can be envisioned and felt within the physical realm. One can live in such a feeling when, through the eyes of the physical body, one beholds this harmony of Greek architecture. And now imagine the clairvoyant consciousness transported into the spiritual world. There, it is as if something like a black wall were drawn in front of what you can see in the physical world, and how utterly obliterated is what can be seen on the physical plane. Nothing of these wondrous glories of the physical plane can be carried over into the spiritual world. The most magnificent aspects of the physical plane, if they are truly such, fade away in the spiritual world. And then we realize that it is no legend when one of those who had been among the leaders in Greece, upon being encountered by an initiate in the other world, said: “Better to be a beggar in the Upper World than a king in the realm of shadows!”—Precisely in Greece, where such delights could be experienced in the physical world, souls, upon entering the world of the dead, entered a gloomy, dark realm of shadows. The physical plane had become magnificent, but to the same extent, the spiritual world had become desolate.

[ 30 ] And now let us compare two other things with what one might feel when viewing the Greek temple: Let us imagine Raphael’s painting Madonna di San Sisto or Leonardo da Vinci’s The Last Supper! Let us imagine those works of art that were created after the events at Golgotha, and into which the mysteries of Golgotha have flowed. A person can experience a sense of bliss when looking at these images; they can pour delight into their soul through them. And this is also the case with clairvoyant consciousness when it views these images through its eyes on the physical plane. When it now transports itself into the spiritual world—even though it no longer sees the physical—it says to itself: What I carry over from what I experience with these images is not merely an echo of the physical; it is not merely the joys and bliss I experienced when I saw all of this—but now, for the first time, all the splendor dawns upon me; I have only planted the seed there for what I am now experiencing in greater splendor and greater glory! — In the physical world, when one contemplates such images into which the mysteries of Golgotha have flowed, one is merely planting the seed for a greater understanding in the spiritual world. And how can all this come to pass? It can come to pass because that spiritual power, which had long been foretold, has truly appeared on Earth, and because humanity has advanced to the point where it could unfold a blossom within which the seed of the future God could mature. Through the event of Golgotha, something has been imparted to earthly existence that can not only be carried into the spiritual world, but that rises in the spiritual worlds to a higher glory and higher bliss; and the most significant expression of this is precisely the one that has already been described here: At the very moment when the physical body of Christ Jesus died on Golgotha, Christ appeared to those who were then between death and a new birth. He was able to proclaim to them, for the first time, what none of the earlier initiates could proclaim when they passed into the spiritual world.

[ 31 ] If the initiates of old—let us assume the Eleusinian Mysteries—had passed from this world to join those who were over there, between death and a new birth, what could the Eleusinian initiates have said to them? They could have told them about the events of the physical plane; but this would have evoked only longing and melancholy in them. For people had become completely absorbed in the physical plane. Yet they could not find the physical there, where everything had become dark and gloomy, and where the one who had been a great person on the physical plane felt compelled to say: “Better to be a beggar in the higher world than a king in the realm of shadows!”—The initiates, who had been able to bring so much to those on the physical plane, had nothing to offer those who were on the other plane at that time. Then the event at Golgotha took place—and Christ appeared among the dead. And for the first time, an event from the physical world could be proclaimed in the spiritual world—an event that marked the beginning of a reaching across from the physical world into the spiritual world. It flashed like a ray of light in the spiritual worlds when Christ appeared in the underworld. For now it was clear that proof had been provided in the physical world that the spiritual can always conquer death.

[ 32 ] It followed from this event that one can now experience something in the physical world that can be carried over into the spiritual world. What can be said about other things that have been influenced by the event at Golgotha can be found in the Gospel of John and other teachings that build upon it. Those who savor the Gospel of John on the physical plane experience the bliss of understanding this great document on the physical plane. But whoever then enters the spiritual world with clairvoyant consciousness knows that what they were able to feel while reading the Gospel of John was only a foretaste of what they can now absorb. This is the significance of the fact that one can now carry treasures from the physical plane into the spiritual world.

[ 33 ] Since then, it has grown brighter and brighter on the spiritual plane. Everything that existed in the physical world had sprung forth from the spiritual world. If one were to pass from the physical world into the spiritual world, one could say: Here lie the causes of everything; and over there in the physical world is only what has sprung forth from the spiritual world. There are only the effects; there is only the reflection from the spiritual world. Since the event at Golgotha, when one passes from the physical world into the spiritual world, one says to oneself: Causes also lie in the physical world, and what is experienced through the event at Golgotha on the physical plane has an effect over here in the spiritual world.

[ 34 ] This is how it will increasingly be: everything old—which is the work of the old gods—will die away, and what will flourish, what will take root in the future, are the works of the God of the future. That will live on into the spiritual world. It is as if one were looking at a new plant sprout and saying to oneself: Of course, it has sprung from an old plant. The old leaves and blossoms have fallen off and disappeared, and now the new plant sprout is there, which will unfold into a new plant and a new blossom. So, too, do we live in a world where leaves and blossoms fall away and the seeds of the gods are present. - And more and more the new fruit—the fruit of Christ—unfolds, and everything else will fall away. What is conquered and achieved here in the physical world will be of value for the future, to the extent that it is carried over into the spiritual world; and before our spiritual eye, a world is dawning in the future that has its roots in the physical, just as our world once had its roots in the spiritual world. Just as human beings are the sons of the gods, so too will that which human beings experience in the physical world through the exaltation brought about by the events of Golgotha form the body of the new gods of the future, whose leader is Christ. Thus the old worlds live on into the new worlds through the complete passing away of the old and the sprouting and flourishing of the new from the old. But this could only come about for human beings because humanity had matured to the point where it brought forth a blossom of that spiritual being who was to become the God of the future.

[ 35 ] This flower, which was able to unfold and which was able to take within itself the seed of the future God, could only be a threefold human shell consisting of the physical body, the etheric body, and the astral body—a shell that had previously been purified and cleansed on Earth through all that could be attained there. This human form of Jesus of Nazareth, who sacrificed himself to receive the Christ seed like a flower, and this flower of humanity represents the purest essence—the very essence—of what humanity has been able to bring forth in its spiritual evolution. And people can say to themselves: Only when the Earth was ripe to bring forth the most beautiful flower could the seed of the new God appear. — And the birth of this flower took place in Bethlehem; this is what our Christmas celebration embodies. In our Christmas celebration, we celebrate the birth of the flower that was then to receive the seed of Christ.

[ 36 ] Thus, Christmas is indeed a festival through which human beings can look in two directions: into the past and into the future. For out of the past has sprung the blossom from which the seed for the future develops. Out of the old earth has arisen the threefold sheath of Christ. This threefold body of Christ has coalesced and been born from the very best that human beings have been able to achieve. And there is no external representation of a mystery that could, in fact, make a more powerful impression on us at first than the representation of this very mystery: how the most beautiful flower of humanity could spring from the purest calyx.

[ 37 ] That humanity once emerged spiritually from the bosom of the Deity, was divine and spiritual, and condensed into matter—how can this be portrayed more beautifully than by showing how the spiritual gradually condenses, how humanity has condensed itself out of the indeterminate darkness of the spiritual! With intuition and prophetic insight, the ancient Egyptians depicted this as the once lion-headed goddess, who was still entirely spiritual—dating back to a time when humanity was still barely condensed, resting in an ethereal-spiritual state almost within the bosom of the Divine. As the next figure—foreshadowing the later “Madonna di San Sisto”—another female figure appears to us in the Egyptian depiction: Isis with the child Horus. There we see how that which was born of clouds—that is, of the spiritual—has condensed into a chalice, into that which is meant to represent humanity as it develops into the future. But moving into the purely spiritual realm, we see this concept—already known to the ancients—in the Christ Madonna with the infant Jesus.

[ 38 ] Raphael has breathed this mystery into the work with wonderful tenderness and purity, showing how the Madonna takes shape from the ethereal heads of angels—and in turn brings forth the blossom, Jesus of Nazareth, who is to receive the seed of Christ. The entire evolution of humanity is contained in a wondrous way precisely in this image of the Madonna. It is therefore no surprise that the one who spoke first among us today had, precisely in relation to the Madonna, the most beautiful, the most glorious memory from that life of which his present life was a recollection—from which he allowed all the beautiful feelings and glorious sensations to spring forth within himself, sensations that can be linked to this mystery of humanity depicted in the painting, and that from there these feelings passed on to the Mother of Christ herself, to the very figure who brought forth the seed, the chalice, from which the blossom sprang—a blossom capable of allowing the seed of the new God to mature within itself.

[ 39 ] And so we see how, in this wonderfully gifted Novalis, feelings resonate that can be understood freely, free from any Schillerian bias toward this or that political orientation—precisely in relation to this sacred mystery that unfolded during the first Christian Christmas and that is repeated time and again in every Christian Christmas: that Mystery before which the ancient initiates, in the form of the ancient magi, offer their sacrifices and go where the new Mystery took root. And they offer their sacrifices—the sages of ancient times, adorned with the wisdom that comes from ancient times—before that which is to enter the future, that which is to one day hold within itself the power in a human being that flows through all the worlds connected to our Earth.

[ 40 ] Novalis perceived the Mystery of Christ and the Mystery of Mary in connection with the cosmic mystery. It shone in his soul, just as it once shone on the first Christian Christmas, when those beings who had not descended to the physical plane proclaimed the connection between a cosmic power and an earthly power, and between what can take place in the human heart and in the cosmos when the human heart unites with the Christ-being. For today it no longer needs to be proclaimed what the Egyptians said: The God with whom you are to unite lives in that world, which can only be reached by passing through death. - Now the God with whom human beings are to unite lives among us between birth and death, and people can find him when they unite their souls and hearts with him here. That is why the Christmas message resounds in the first Christian Christmas:

Revelation from on high to God,
Peace and stillness
through peace on earth,
Bliss
among mankind!

[ 41 ] Marie von Sivers then recited Novalis’s “Marienlieder.”