The Rudolf Steiner Archive

First Lecture

[ 1 ] Let us reflect today on a topic that ties in with the festive season—that time of year which, year after year, renews our remembrance and commemoration of the Mystery of Golgotha, as well as our direct experience of the Mystery of Golgotha.

[ 2 ] There are actually three such festive seasons within Christian development: Christmas, Easter, and Pentecost. And it can be said that these three festivals, in different ways, bring people into a relationship with that which Christian development sees as the meaning of all earthly events. These three festivals also differ in relation to the powers of the human soul.

[ 3 ] Christmas is more closely tied to emotion. It is also, in a certain sense, the most popular holiday, because understanding it requires a deepening of emotion and feeling, and because it is the one that is accessible to the widest range of people.

[ 4 ] Easter, which requires human beings to rise to an understanding of the true mystery of Golgotha—the entry of a supersensible being into human evolution—places the greatest demands on human understanding. It is a festival that, in a sense, elevates human understanding to the highest level; it is, of course, celebrated universally, but cannot be as popular as Christmas.

[ 5 ] The third festival, Pentecost, establishes a special relationship between the human will and the supersensible world—namely, the world to which the Christ Being as such belongs. The transmission of impulses of the will, which are then in turn conveyed to the world, is brought to human consciousness through the true meaning of the Feast of Pentecost.

[ 6 ] Thus, what might be called the Christian mystery is brought to life in three ways through these annual festive seasons. There are many different ways to conceptualize how the mystery of Christmas approaches humanity, and over the years we have indeed examined the idea of Christmas from a wide variety of perspectives, particularly during the Christmas season.

[ 7 ] This time, we want to recall something that can become clear to anyone who considers the mystery of Christmas from the perspective of the Gospels. The Gospels present us with a twofold proclamation of the birth of Christ Jesus. One proclamation is that which is made to the poor shepherds out in the fields, to whom—whether in a dream or in some other way—an angel announces the birth of Christ Jesus. Here we are dealing with the perception of this event through the inner soul forces, which are in a special state among these shepherds from the vicinity of Christ Jesus’ birthplace. And a second Annunciation is depicted for us in the Gospels: the one addressed to the three kings or the three Magi from the East. They follow—so we are told—the message of a star, which announces to them that Christ Jesus has come into the world.

[ 8 ] We are referred here to two ways in which an earlier humanity arrived at its higher insights. This, too, is something that is actually never viewed in the proper way anymore in the present day. Today, it is often assumed that human beings simply possess a certain kind of perception and thinking, and that this perception, this thinking—in short, the unfolding of the inner soul forces—has, in essence, remained the same throughout the centuries and millennia; even if these faculties were more primitive in earlier times, they were essentially the same as they are today. We know from our anthroposophical spiritual science how the state of the human soul has changed over the course of time, how in ancient times—for example, in the 7th or 8th millennium of the post-Atlantean era or earlier—humanity viewed both its own life and the nature of the environment in a completely different way, and how this state of the soul has then undergone repeated transformations, eventually becoming what we now recognize as the intellectual analysis of the world and the purely sensory perception we still have of external things today. This development proceeds from a certain older, instinctive clairvoyance through our present state of mind, only to turn back again in the future to a kind of clairvoyance—a way of seeing the world—which will then, however, be permeated by the full consciousness of humanity.

[ 9 ] At the time when the Mystery of Golgotha took place on Earth, the ancient form of clairvoyance—which was instinctive—had, for the most part, if I may say so, already been dulled. Although people had a different state of mind than they do today, they no longer possessed the ancient clairvoyance; nor did they possess the ancient methods of analyzing the world more precisely through various forms of wisdom. Both the ancient wisdom teachings and the ancient instinctive clairvoyance had faded by the time the Mystery of Golgotha came to humanity. But remnants of these still existed, and the Gospels themselves clearly point this out to us—if we understand them correctly—that such remnants were present. Such remnants were present in certain select individuals. These select individuals may well have been the poor shepherds in the fields, who, out of their devout hearts, possessed a certain clairvoyant power that came upon them as if in a dream; or they may also have been individuals presented to us at the very top of the social ladder, such as the three Magi from the East, who had preserved from ancient times the ability, through a certain teaching of wisdom, to look into the course of world events. And so the poor shepherds, in a kind of dreamlike experience, in a kind of inner perception, were able to see approaching what was taking place in the event of the birth of Christ Jesus. On the other hand, the three Magi from the East were able to develop such knowledge that, by observing world phenomena and celestial phenomena, they were able to grasp what was happening on Earth that was significant and lay beyond the ordinary course of life.

[ 10 ] We are thus directed toward two very specific, yet distinct, kinds of knowledge. Let us first turn to what was present in the three Magi from the East as the last remnant of an ancient wisdom teaching. After all, it is clearly shown to us how these Magi were able to unravel the course of the stars. This account thus points us to an ancient astronomy, to an ancient view of the mysteries of the starry world, in which the mysteries of human history were also revealed. This ancient astronomy was different from our own. Our astronomy is, after all, prophetic in a certain sense; it can predict the course of solar and lunar eclipses and the like. But our astronomy is merely mathematical and mechanical. Our astronomy speaks only of the relationships of space and time, insofar as they can be expressed mathematically. But what takes place in relation to inner human life—beyond space and time, yet still within space and time, though with a higher significance—was perceived by an ancient astronomy, an ancient wisdom of the stars, through the course of the stars. When we bring the science of an earlier humanity into our consciousness, we find that this stellar wisdom is essentially what gave that ancient science its very substance. From the stars, people explored what was happening on Earth. But to them, the world of the stars was not that abstract, machine-like entity that it has become for humanity today. To them, the world of the stars was something full of life. They sensed an essential being in the world of each individual planet. In a sense, they spoke to each individual planet through an inner language of the soul, just as we today speak only from person to person through outer language. People were clearly aware that they were experiencing something inwardly, in their souls, that in a certain way reflected and mirrored what was taking place out there in the vast expanse of space through the movement of the stars. It was a living, spiritually imbued view of the universe. And human beings themselves felt placed within this universe in a spiritual, soulful way. The wisdom of this universe was also cultivated in schools—which might be called mystery schools—where the students were prepared in a careful, intimate, and inner way to understand the course of the stars in such a way that it made human life on Earth comprehensible.

[ 11 ] What kind of preparations were these? These preparations—specifically for understanding the starry sky and its effects—were such that even back then, in the age of instinctive clairvoyance, human beings were trained to lead a more alert life than their normal, outward existence. The people of the broad masses possessed a kind of instinctive clairvoyance. This corresponded to a state of mind that was less alert than our normal state of mind. In the early stages of human development, people could not think with the same level of alertness as we can today. They could not approach mathematics and geometry in the same way we do today. Throughout their entire existence between birth and death, people’s lives were more of a dreamlike state; yet precisely because they were dreamlike, they perceived the world around them in a more vivid way than our fully alert lives do. And what is remarkable is that the individual initiates of the Mysteries—in whose final remnants people such as the three Magi stood back in ancient times, one might say roughly up to the 2nd millennium, and even at the beginning of the 1st millennium before the Mystery of Golgotha—were initiated into a body of knowledge that is very similar to our geometric or mathematical knowledge.

[ 12 ] Euclid first presented geometry to the outer world. But that was merely a transmission of geometry to the outer, broader humanity. What Euclid presented as geometry had already been alive in the Mysteries for millennia; however, it was communicated only to the select students of the Mysteries. It had a different effect on them than it did later on. It seems strange and paradoxical, but it is nevertheless true: what even our children learn today—our geometry, our arithmetic—was learned in the mystery schools by individuals who were specially chosen for this purpose, who were considered particularly gifted among the masses, and who were admitted into the mysteries.

[ 13 ] Today, one often hears that mysterious things were taught in the Mysteries. In terms of their purely abstract content, these mysterious things are the same as those taught to children today. They are not different at all, and what makes them mysterious is not that these things are somehow unknown to people today, but rather the different way in which the subject was presented to them. It is, of course, quite different when the content of our geometry is simply presented to children in a way that appeals to their intellect in an age when people live in our waking consciousness from the moment they wake up until they fall asleep, or whether, in the age of ancient, instinctive clairvoyance, these things were presented to particularly select individuals with a more mature consciousness through a dreamlike state of consciousness. Today, the ideas people have about these things are by no means always accurate.

[ 14 ] You see, there is a poem dedicated to Varuna in Eastern literature. It speaks of how Varuna appears in the air that blows through the forests as wind, how Varuna appears in the thunder that bursts forth from the water in the clouds, how Varuna appears in the human heart when it summons the will, how Varuna appears in the sky when the sun traverses the heavens, and how Varuna is contained in the mountains within the soma juice. Today, you will mostly find in books that no one actually knows what the Soma juice is. In their scholarship, people today state that no one knows what the Soma juice is, even though there are people who drink it by the liter and, from a certain point of view, know it very well. But it is one thing to know these things from the perspective of the mysteries, and quite another to know them from the perspective of waking consciousness in a profane sense. And today you can read about the Philosopher’s Stone, which was cultivated during a certain era when the nature of substance was viewed quite differently than it is today. And yet the historians of alchemy will tell you that the Philosopher’s Stone is unknown. I have always hinted here and there in my lectures that this Philosopher’s Stone is very well known to most people. They simply do not know its nature and do not know why it is called that. It is very well known to most people, since they actually use it by the kilogram.

[ 15 ] The reality of things is sometimes something entirely different from what our current abstract, theoretical, and unrealistic—and, indeed, detached from reality—worldview is capable of conceiving. Nor is there today any true understanding of what it means to grasp our geometric and arithmetic sciences in a state of maturity, with a state of mind entirely different from that of humanity today. I have, in fact, pointed out this particular aspect of the nature of the mysteries in my work *Christianity as a Mystical Fact*. Yet such important matters are usually not understood correctly; they are usually not taken deeply enough. What one should understand is that the very way in which these things were presented to people constituted the mysterious nature of the mysteries in ancient times. And this was indeed the case with purely mathematical considerations, whose emotional and fully human content Novalis was still able to sense when he perceived mathematics as a great poem—something most people today certainly do not find in it. It was this emotional grasp of the world—though expressed in mathematical forms—into which the initiate of the ancient mysteries was introduced. And when the mathematical understanding of the universe was thus presented to the initiate of the ancient mysteries, he became a person with a worldview such as that described to us as belonging to the magicians of the Orient. Then the mathematics of the universe—which has become something entirely abstract for us—revealed something essential, because what it revealed was complemented by something else that met it halfway. And so what corresponded to the external knowledge of an ancient culture—what had been preserved in its last remnants for the magicians, what had come to the magicians from the East—was the impetus for a single proclamation: the proclamation through the wisdom teachings, through external science.

[ 16 ] On the other hand, the inner experience of the mysteries of humanity was able to develop in people with a special predisposition, such as those who were to be represented to us as the shepherds in the field. For this to happen, the inner forces within the human being had to reach a particular level. Then direct perception—imaginative and instinctive-imaginative perception of images—became what took place in the human world. Thus, through inner vision, what was to come was revealed to the poor shepherds in the fields—a revelation summed up for them in the proclamation: “Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace to those on whom his favor rests.”

[ 17 ] Thus the mysteries of the universe spoke both to the innermost depths of the poor shepherds in the fields and to the very limits of what human wisdom could attain at that time; the mysteries of the universe spoke both to the shepherds and to the Magi from the East. And the great mystery of earthly life was proclaimed from two sides.

[ 18 ] What did the magicians from the Orient experience? What was particularly developed in such students by introducing mathematics into their state of mind, when that state of mind was already particularly mature? You see, Kant says that mathematical insights are a priori. By “a priori,” he means that they are attained prior to external, empirical knowledge, prior to experience. That is mere verbal wisdom. This term “a priori” says absolutely nothing. The word only takes on meaning when, from the perspective of spiritual science, one can point out that mathematics arises from within us, that it is something that comes from the innermost being of the human being into human consciousness. And where does it come from? Well, it comes from the experiences we went through in the spiritual world before conception or before birth. There we lived in the great, vast universe. There we experienced what we could experience before we had our physical eyes and ears. There we experienced things a priori in relation to life on Earth. What is experienced a priori there rises unconsciously from within into our consciousness today. Unless one experiences it, as Novalis did, through such an intuition—that the experiences from before birth or conception are rising up—one does not realize this when engaging in mathematics. For those who are able to view these things in the right way, mathematical insight alone is proof that they existed in a spiritual world before conception. For those for whom this is not proof of a pre-birth life, the other fact is that they simply do not reflect deeply enough on the phenomena of life, that they have no inkling of what the origin of mathematics actually is.

[ 19 ] The students of the ancient mysteries, who were in that state of wisdom as it had been preserved in its final remnants among the magicians of the Orient, gained a clear impression of this: When we gaze at the stars in such a way that we penetrate them with mathematical lines, with our calculations, we spread out across the vast expanses of outer space that which we lived in before our birth. And so such a student of the sacred mysteries felt as though he were saying to himself: Now I live here on Earth, looking out through my eyes into the cosmos, perceiving what is spatially around me. I also lived within these manifestations of the cosmos before my birth or conception. Back then I myself counted from star to star what I now only visualize here symbolically through mathematics; back then I myself rushed with my inner forces from star to star; back then I lived within what I now only construct. Through this, everything they had experienced before birth or conception became present to them. That is why they also received it in a sacred sense. That is why they also knew: it is the spiritual world into which they are now entering; it is the world in which they had lived before they set foot on Earth. This knowledge of the world that a human being experiences before setting foot on Earth was still present, in its last vestiges, among the Magi of the East; through it, they recognized the approach of the Christ Being.

[ 20 ] Where, then, did the Christ-being come from? It came from that world we experience between death and a new birth, and united itself with the life we experience between birth and death. The science that deals with the world we experience between death and a new birth can therefore reveal something like the Mystery of Golgotha. It was through this science, then, that the Mystery of Golgotha—the Christmas Mystery—was revealed to the Magi.

[ 21 ] As a person lives here on Earth and develops what his insights into the environment bring him—the impulses that guide his actions and his social life—he unconsciously experiences something else within himself. They are not aware of it, but just as they experience the aftereffects of their prenatal life, they also experience that which then passes through the gate of death and becomes the content of life after death. These are the forces that already exist in embryonic form between birth and death and that only unfold to their full bloom in the afterlife. These forces were at work with great intensity in ancient instinctive clairvoyance; and they were still at work, to the very last, in the poor shepherds in the fields through their special piety. We live in these forces especially between falling asleep and waking up, when our soul is outside the physical body and lives in outer space. Then it lives in the same way that it will live consciously again only after it has shed the outer physical body following death. These forces, which can penetrate into waking life from the world of dreams and sleep under certain conditions, were very active in ancient instinctive clairvoyance. The poor shepherds experienced these forces, and through them was revealed that which, from a different perspective than that of the three Magi, could herald the Mystery of Golgotha to them.

[ 22 ] What does one experience through those powers that are particularly inherent in human beings between death and a new birth, when they are kindled in the life between birth and death, as was the case with the magicians of the Orient? One experiences that which takes place beyond the earthly realm. One is carried away from the earth into the world of the stars, where one exists between ‘death and a new birth.’ This was the world into which the Magi from the East were led—away from the earth and into the heavens.

[ 23 ] What do we experience through those forces that rise up from within, especially in the world of dreams—forces that originate entirely from within the human being? Through them, we experience what is happening inside the Earth. It is primarily the telluric forces that are at work there—those forces we possess through our physical body, through our dwelling within it. These forces are particularly active in what we experience between falling asleep and waking up. We are also present in the outer world at that time, but primarily in that part of the outer world that belongs to the Earth.

[ 24 ] You will say: It is a contradiction to the truth that we are outside our bodies. — That is no contradiction. One always perceives only what lies outside oneself; one does not perceive that in which one lives. Only those people who are particularly ignorant in certain areas and wish to develop a purely superficial knowledge of phrases manage to gloss over such things with platitudes and say, for example: It would not matter to found a spiritual science on knowledge gained outside of the human being, for what is important is precisely that the human being should acquire knowledge through the inner self in addition to external knowledge of nature. — Yes, with such a torrent of empty phrases one can found “Darmstadt schools of wisdom” today, but one remains nothing more than a mere phrase-monger, even when founding such schools. For if one understands the matter correctly, one can even say: Yes, one must describe the world from within in order to reach the supersensible; but then one must first enter into the inner world, and what is then external must be observed from outside the body, and one must look back at the body. Keyserling’s talk of “contemplation from a spiritual perspective,” however, does not actually seek to penetrate the human inner being; rather, it makes use of mere phrases. That is why it is also true that when we are in the state between falling asleep and waking up, we look back and, in a sense, feel our way back into our body. We thus perceive that which connects our body to the earthly realm; after all, it is of the earth. The poor shepherds in the field actually perceived the revelation of the earth from within their bodies, perceiving what was happening—the voice of the angel—in a dreamlike state.

[ 25 ] And it is entirely in keeping with the Mystery of Golgotha that the revelation came from two sides: that of the Magi from the knowledge of the heavens, and that of the shepherds from the revelation of the earth. For a heavenly being—a being that until then had not belonged to the earth—arrives. One must therefore recognize this arrival through heavenly wisdom. Then one learns to recognize that something is descending from heaven. — If one possesses the wisdom of the shepherds, one comes to know the earth; one feels oneself drawn into the weaving and life of the earth, which perceives the arrival of the heavenly being. It is the same announcement from the other side. In a wondrous way, what is communicated to humanity as a unified event from two sides has come together.

[ 26 ] And when one considers the way in which humanity received the event of Golgotha, one must say: In this and other respects, only remnants of the ancient wisdom remained. I have already pointed out how, in the first centuries of our era, the Mystery of Golgotha was understood through the remnants of the ancient wisdom and a certain form of gnosis. Then, people increasingly attempted to penetrate the event of Golgotha through mere intellectual analysis. And in the 19th century, naturalism gradually gained ground in this realm of faith. Nothing was understood anymore of the supersensible content of the event of Golgotha. Christ became merely a wise man from Nazareth, understood in naturalistic terms. A new, spiritual grasp of the Mystery of Golgotha had become necessary. One must not confuse the fact of the Mystery of Golgotha with the way in which people, in their understanding, relate to this fact.

[ 27 ] Well, that state of mind—such as the shepherds in the fields had, such as the Magi from the East had—was still present in its final remnants at the time the Mystery of Golgotha took place. All of that has changed in the course of human evolution. Things change and undergo metamorphoses.

[ 28 ] What has become of the wisdom of the Magi from the Orient? It has become our mathematics with its astronomy. The Magi possessed a supernatural knowledge that was, in essence, a magnificent recollection of prenatal life. This has shrunk and become stunted in our culture into our mathematical-mechanical understanding of the heavens, where we apply nothing more to external phenomena than the laws of mathematics and mechanics. What rises up from within us—especially when we look at what remains to us as mathematical astronomy—is the present-day metamorphosis of what the Magi possessed.

[ 29 ] And when we look at what constitutes our external sensory knowledge—mere visual and auditory perception—it is the externalized inner knowledge of the shepherds in the field. What once revealed to the shepherds in the fields the inner mysteries of earthly existence is now what allows us to view the external world dispassionately through our scientific observation. Our scientific observation is the daughter of shepherds’ wisdom. But the daughter bears little resemblance to her mother. And our mathematics, which becomes astronomy, is the daughter of the wisdom of the magicians. Humanity had to go through this. When our natural scientists sit in their laboratories and clinics with their dry research, they no longer have much in common with the shepherds, yet this is the linear metamorphosis of shepherding wisdom. And our mathematicians are the successors of the magicians from the East, who have come in a linear stream. The external has become internal, and the internal has become external. And with that, we have, in essence, strayed very far from an understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha; and we should become aware of this. Yes, we have strayed very far from this understanding. Perhaps, however, those who have strayed the farthest from this understanding are many of those who, in the official sense, call themselves the preachers and proclaimers of Christianity today.

[ 30 ] With the powers of cognition, sensation, and faith that are at work in human beings today, it is no longer possible to grasp the true essence of the event at Golgotha. It must be rediscovered anew. Magical wisdom has become like dry mathematics, through whose images only the heavens are still beheld; it has become an inner reality. The inner realm must be revitalized. It must, so to speak, rebuild what is external from within.

[ 31 ] Now try, from this perspective, to understand the content of a book such as my *Outline of Esoteric Science*. The magicians surveyed the stellar realms; they saw the spiritual in the stellar realms because they were able to look into human experience before birth. This has become abstract in our mathematics. But the very forces that develop our mathematics can in turn be brought to life and intensified through imaginative contemplation. Then a world is born from within us, which we now, although we create it from within, regard as the outer world—a world that is to us, in turn, like Saturn, the Sun, the Moon, the Earth, Jupiter, Venus, and Vulcan. We see the heavens through inner contemplation, just as the Magi from the East perceived the secrets of the Mystery of Golgotha through outer contemplation. The external has become internal, has reached the abstract realm of mathematics; thus, the inner world must in turn be expanded into the external universe, as inner contemplation leads us once more to a new astronomy—an astronomy experienced from within.

[ 32 ] Only by turning toward a new understanding of Christ can we today truly give meaning to what Christmas is all about. Does Christmas still hold a special meaning for most people today? It has become a very beautiful custom—one that is not very old, barely 150 years old—to make the Christmas tree a symbol of Christmas. The Christmas tree, after all, did not emerge until the 19th century. What is it? One can try hard to find the meaning of the Christmas tree. Precisely when one makes this effort—and when one knows how the Christmas tree gradually came into being, how it grew from the small twig that St. Nicholas first carried in his arms on December 6 into the Christmas tree—precisely when one traces the history of the Christmas tree, one realizes how the Christmas tree is, after all, directly connected to the Tree of Paradise. Human consciousness turns toward the Tree of Paradise, toward Adam and Eve. What does this mean? It is one aspect of how the Mystery of Golgotha is proclaimed anew in our time.

[ 33 ] One turns away from the mystery of Golgotha and back to the creation of the world, to the world’s origins. People do not understand the meaning of the world’s redemption and turn once again to the God who created the world. This is expressed in the fact that the true symbol of Christmas—the nativity scene, which was so magnificently present in the Christmas plays of earlier centuries—gradually disappears, and in its place emerges the Christmas tree, which is actually the tree of Paradise. The ancient religion of Yahweh has once again taken the place of the religion of Christ, and the Christmas tree is the symbol of this resurgence of the religion of Yahweh. However, this religion of Yahweh manifests itself in many different forms among people. For Yahweh was rightly worshiped as the One and Only at a time when his people saw themselves precisely as the unified people, who did not look beyond their own borders and expected that one day they would fill the entire earth.

[ 34 ] In our time, people speak of Christ Jesus but worship only Yahweh. For among the various nationalities—as was particularly evident during the war—people did indeed speak of Christ; yet it was only the original God, the God Yahweh who lives in heredity and in nature. The Christmas tree on the one hand, and the national gods—who did not rise to the level of Christianity—on the other, were the factors that caused people to turn away from grasping the mystery of Golgotha and return to a much earlier time. In the assertion of the principle of nationality—in the proclamation that individual peoples follow their own gods—there is a regression to the old religion of Yahweh. Those who wish to worship Christ in some national form are the ones who deny him the most.

[ 35 ] You see, what must be taken into account is that in every kind of proclamation—whether the proclamation to the shepherds or the proclamation to the Magi—there is something that is universally human; for the earth belongs to all people in common. And in that the shepherds received the earthly proclamation, they received a proclamation that cannot differ from one people to another, that cannot be differentiated by people. And in that the Magi received the great solar, the heavenly proclamation, they, too, received something universally human. For if the sun first shone upon the territory of one people, it also shines upon the territory of another. The heavens belong to all, the earth belongs to all. What is universally human comes to life within humanity through Christianity. This is also indicated by that Christmas narrative, which is expressed in the twofold proclamation. Such things, which were fully comprehensible to a very different state of soul, are only becoming comprehensible again today through spiritual science.

[ 36 ] And how is this spiritual science treated? — Yes, it is treated in a very peculiar way, especially by those who call themselves official representatives of Christianity. There are certainly also a number among you who have seen that group in Dornach, with the Christ figure in the center, which is to stand at the eastern end of the Dornach Goetheanum. You know that when I explain this Christ figure, I explain how it represents an ideal human face, as it appears to me to be the true face of Christ. Those who have seen the figure will recall that it is a purely human, idealized face. The figure has progressed somewhat further in recent times, but as long as it was on display, it was, down to the middle of the lower part, a block of wood just as the workers had made it. For it is particularly the will that must express itself in the lower part as the figure strides forward. This figure is flanked at the top by two Luciferic figures, which are separate from the Christ figure, and at the bottom by two Ahrimanic figures. — Now there is a certain missionary preacher named Frohnmeyer. He has published a little book on theosophy. It also deals with anthroposophy in a very superficial way. It says there—and not as if someone had told the man this, but as if he himself had been there and had seen it—it says in this writing: In Dornach, a Christ is to be depicted who bears Luciferic traits at the top and animalistic characteristics at the bottom.

[ 37 ] I have often heard the story that one can sometimes examine one’s state of mind in a very special way in the evening by lying down in bed upon returning home and placing one’s top hat on the bedspread. If the top hat is simply there, one is sober; if there are two of them, one is definitely drunk. — Now, anyone in Dornach who sees the figure of Christ with Luciferic features at the top and animalistic characteristics at the bottom was certainly in the same situation as a man who sees two top hats when he has placed one on the bedspread.

[ 38 ] There is a very serious underlying issue here, because this is written by a Christian missionary preacher. It appears in a text that contains other statements of equal truthfulness. Some time ago, this man was awarded the degree of Dr. theol. by a theological faculty. He teaches at a theological faculty, where he is registered as a lecturer. You can imagine the degree of truth that might permeate the teachings of someone who has such a relationship with the truth and who claims to have witnessed what he describes here.

[ 39 ] Such is the state of affairs today regarding the truthfulness of those who claim to officially represent Christianity. I ask you: Do not these very Christian—that is, anti-Christian—representatives—anti-Christian because of their insincere, deceitful nature—prove the necessity of a renewal of Christianity? Are these people not living proof that Christianity needs renewal? Perhaps this is also the most understandable reason why these people are our fiercest enemies: because the truth about what kind of Christians they really are is meant to come to light! Of course, they do not want that. They want to continue fishing in troubled waters, want to spread their slanders and falsehoods everywhere, and then present themselves as beacons of Christianity.

[ 40 ] We should take this to heart today: When we reflect on the mystery of Christmas, we need to truly focus on a birth. We must not merely talk about Christmas, nor merely talk about it in our feelings, but we must look toward something that must be reborn in our time. True Christianity—truly—must be reborn. We need a universal Christmas celebration. Spiritual science aims to be that which properly prepares a universal Christmas celebration among humanity.