The Rudolf Steiner Archive

My dear friends! I have the following to say to you, in continuation of our conversation yesterday morning. The point is that you feel in the right way the sending out by the spiritual powers present in the spiritual world and connected with Christ's life on earth, and that you feel your own connection with these spiritual powers as your mission. And in this sense I have read to you the words from the Epistle to the Hebrews, chapter 5, verses 9 and 10, in the way they present themselves when we try to penetrate their real meaning in our language:

After Christ brought his bodily life to an end, he is the healer of sins through all earthly times for all who are filled with him, and is referred to with the word of the spirit as the highest savior of souls according to the rite of Melchi-Sadek.

Only when you feel your own calling in the spirit of these words, with which at the beginning of the Christian era those who were to fulfill the mission of Christ to the full were sent out, will you be able to see in them a renewal of Christian work. Now, however, it is important that we are able to let this word - which is an old word, but has been renewed in the fifth chapter of the Epistle to the Hebrews - have the right effect on our souls. This word, which designates the actual mission of the Christian priesthood, points out to us that only those in the early days of Christian development, that is, in the first centuries of Christianity, sensed their priestly mission in the right way, who said: We do not want to understand alone, in the sense of the Levitical rite, that which we have to bring into the world as a cult, but we want to see through the look through the Levitical rite to that rite which stands nearer to the divine world order and according to which the priest-king Sadek, Adonai Melchi-Sadek, performed the sacrificial service before the priest-king of the ancient Jews, and that is a sacrificial service which Abraham, the old priest-king of the Jews, to whom the Levitical priestly service is to be traced back, also recognized as the higher one for that time. This indicates to us that the sacrificial service of the Jews, insofar as it is traced back to the sacrifice of Abraham, must be understood as a lower one in the early days of Christianity compared to that which was then accomplished in its archetypal old way by Melchi-Sadek, and which in a higher sense, closer to the spiritual world, was again accomplished, is being accomplished and is to be further accomplished by the Christ Jesus Himself. It is pointed out that what Christ's sacrifice is - which is to be renewed on the altar in the way it can happen -, is a higher act than the act that was offered in the days before Abraham - not to the God Jehovah - by Melchi-Sadek, and we must now understand what is actually in these words.

It is said that Melchi-Sadek offered his sacrifice through bread and wine, which were considered inferior to the offerings made by Abraham – the underlying concept here is quite clear. However, we must also bear in mind that the expression “bread and wine” is one that came from later, exoteric Judaism and no longer shows the original full understanding. Because this original and complete understanding was no longer present in those who had a hand in formulating the text of the Old Testament, but only in those initiates who still had an understanding of the ancient initiation in the early centuries of Christianity, it can no longer be fully determined from the text of the Old Testament what is actually meant by the sacrifice of Melchizedek. And yet, those who are sent out into the world as priests today must also have a correct understanding of these offerings of Melchi-Sadek.

If one goes back to what is really meant, in the sense of the initiatory knowledge, when it is said that the sacrifice of Melchi-Sadek was offered in the form of bread and wine, one comes to see that in the bread, in the right initiatory knowledge, has always been seen as a carrier of salt. The Jews actually no longer acted in the right sense and with the right understanding when they forgot the salt and even emphasized that it was necessary to use unleavened bread for the sacred sacrificial act. In the bread that was originally meant, salt was seen, just as in the wine it was not the wine as such that was seen, as it presents itself in its wine substance, but it was sought in the wine the extraordinarily volatile, fluctuating content of sulfur or phosphorus, which in the old term is one and the same. If we speak in the right sense, we must actually say that the sacrifice of Melchi-Sadek - that is, the sacrifice that was performed according to his rite - was offered through salt and sulfur - or through salt and phosphorus - as found in the foodstuffs bread and wine. That is the original conception, and initiation is called “initiation” because it always goes back to the original conception. In the ancient Hebrew priesthood, the real bread, which contains salt, was replaced by unleavened bread for a certain reason that was not human, because certain secrets were no longer known.

What is it, then, that is contained in salt and phosphorus when a person absorbs them through bread and wine? In salt and phosphorus, through salt, lies the connection between man and the earth. The more salt a person absorbs, the more he connects with the earth, and the more phosphorus he absorbs, the more he breaks away from it and frees himself from it. What takes place in the human body – not outside of the human body – through the combination of salt and phosphorus is a process that properly connects the person to earthly existence, because the salt connects him to the earth in the right way, while the phosphorus snatches him away from earthly existence in the right way, making him free from it again. It is so that the man who has salt and phosphorus in the right way in him stands on the earth in the right way, is properly connected to the earth, but also receives the necessary ethereal and astral lightness to be free again from the earth forces in his being. The fact that the Jews of later times laid the main emphasis on the unleavened in bread showed that they no longer wanted to be connected with the earth, but wanted to have in the bread itself that which would carry them above the earth. Thus they wanted a supermundane and not an earthly priesthood; they wanted a priesthood that would rule the earth from the outside. This was the case with Judaism in particular at the time of Christ. Because Judaism, through long periods of time, had established a priesthood in its mysteries that was not properly connected with the earth, it could not understand that the Being of whom its initiates spoke as the coming Messiah could come to perfection in an earthly body; and it never dawned on the initiated Jews either that the Christ could have walked on earth in an earthly body, in the body of Jesus. Only Paul realized this when he received the help that the Christ revealed Himself not in the earthly body but in the etheric body.

Thus are all things connected, and this you must feel, for the words from the fifth chapter of the Epistle to the Hebrews, which were given to those who were sent out as priests in the first Christian centuries, these words can only be understood in the right way from these foundations. But what is gained by going back to the actual original form of the offering of “salt and brimstone”? We can imagine what is gained by doing so if we imagine the contrast that existed between the high priest, between Melchi-Sadek, who was also a priest-king, an Adonai, and Abraham. In the current of intellectual life in which Melchi-Sadek also stood, the idea of repeated earthly lives was alive. It lived precisely in the mystery community to which Melchi-Sadek belonged in such a way that it was kept hidden from the uninitiated as a mystery, but it was handed over to all those who had been initiated into these mysteries. The Abrahamitic Hebraism was characterized by the fact that it restricted human perception to what arises as something spiritual for man when one disregards repeated earth lives, when one does not go into them, when one still takes scantily into account the pre-earthly life that preceded one's earth life and then considers the post-earthly life.

At least that was the teaching of the Pharisees. Abraham was the forefather of Judaism, who had the mission, within the education of mankind on earth, not to allow the teaching of repeated earthly lives to be active at first, in contrast to the higher priest, whom he recognized and who applied this teaching to those who were consecrated by him when they offered a sacrifice. He was opposed to the view of Melchi-Sadek, as described in the Old Testament. We must visualize this view of Melchi-Sadek in the following way.

It was the case that those who became disciples of Melchi-Sadek, which Abraham did not fully become, came to recognize that a person who, here on earth, in addition to doing good and right, also does wrong, needs a power that passes from his present body to the body of the next earthly life. Man cannot by himself carry over into the body, that is to say into the physical and etheric organization of the next earth-life, that which he accomplishes as activity in one earth-life; he can carry it over - and that now in sense of the time of human evolution before the Mystery of Golgotha, in that what is accomplished through the cult with salt and phosphorus is done for him, in the sense that Melchi-Sadek accomplished the sacrifice through bread and wine. This enabled people in the time before the Mystery of Golgotha to take with them into the bodies they took on in the next life on earth the consequences of the good and evil they had committed in the previous life on earth. In other words, it was only through this that people were able to develop karma. None of the moral actions of one earthly life would have been passed on to a future life if it had not been for this kind of passing from body to body of what must be borne, so that there is karma, the cosmic destiny of man.

And what would have happened if there had been no such sacrifices of salt and phosphorus, if there had been no priest-kings to perform these sacrifices and thus become human beings who, so to speak, carried the other bodies along with them through their own momentum and enthusiasm, thus carrying the power of karma from one earthly life to another? Then the good and evil that people have done in one earthly life would have fallen away from them in that particular earthly life and become an inheritance of that power which, in the sense of the Gospel, is referred to as the “prince of this world”, not as the prince to whom man, with his innermost being, belongs. Before the Mystery of Golgotha, the constant struggle of the time was that the so-called prince of this world - a spirit that had become Luciferic-Ahrimanic, namely a spirit that had become strongly Ahrimanic - took possession of that which tends towards evil in man, so that he could use the power of this evil for himself in the cosmic order. Human beings would then have become increasingly free from this evil. They were not allowed to do so; they were not allowed to do so because otherwise a new existence of their own would have begun in each new life on earth, and they would never have been able to atone for what is called 'sin' themselves. The sacrifice of Melchi-Sadek therefore consists in the fact that the healing of sins was preserved for men by continually snatching them from the prince of this world, and thus giving men the possibility of effecting a sin-atoning through their own nature in a subsequent life on earth. The Catholic Church was careful later on not seriously to consider this secret, which it has known for many centuries, even as late as the Middle Ages, and which is still known today by individual initiates of the Catholic Church, as religious content, for the reason that it is easier to tell people that their sins are forgiven, that is, that they are wiped out of the earth, even with the help of indulgences, to blot them out, instead of telling them that one is working to ensure that they are not blotted out on earth and do not become prey to the prince of this world and thereby corrupt the world for eternity instead of telling them that the healing of sins consists precisely in the fact that man is given the opportunity to make up for sins in the following earthly life.

In the sacrifice of Melchi-Sadek, therefore, in the right sense for that time, the remedy for sins is given, and the healing consisted in giving men the strength to keep their sins and not to deliver them up to the prince of this world. All that lies in the meaning of these words, you, my dear friends, will find renewed and exalted in what the Christ accomplished on earth. And only this illumination, which is now being given, will lead you on the path to recognize in the right sense what the word means: Christ took upon Himself the sins of men, united with them. Christ did not come to unite human piety with Himself, but He was the One who united Himself with the sins of men in order to take upon Himself the burden of sin. And when Paul says, “Not I, but Christ in me,” he means: You humans should accept the Christ in you, and thus accept the current in you that goes into the future of the earth, which contains your stream of sins, but the stream of sins that does not lead to death, but to the atonement of sins. And as priests you will become real healers of sins, not repulsors of sins, whereby men would perish in the light of their existence on earth. Again, this mystery is not explained in the church because it does not want to say what speaks to the courage, but what speaks to the cowardice of men. And it speaks to the cowardice of men when one says: Your sins will be taken from you. But one must speak to the courage and strength of men when one tells them: Your sins will be kept from you, you can carry them into the following earthly lives and can create the compensation for them so that you do not spoil earthly development, and in this way you can carry what you have worked for into future earthly cycles. But this is what you must feel with dignity again if you want to understand your priestly office in the right way. For then you will unite in your mission the three things that the Christ wants to see united in the mission of those who follow him and acknowledge him as the true Master, who in a higher sense has renewed the sacrifice of Melchi-Sadek, who acknowledge him in such a way that they continue his work among men in the threefold sense:

Firstly: in the name of the Father, by feeling truly imbued with God and the spirit, by feeling themselves to be priests not merely by profession, by virtue of their office, but by feeling themselves to be priests through the spirit. Those who do not perform their priestly duties with enthusiasm but merely as a job – which is always the heritage of the prince of this world – do not perform them in the sense of Christ.

"The second is that the word of the gospel is not externalized in the sense of the prince of this world, but proclaimed in the sense of the living Christ, so that the proclamation of the gospel is based on spiritual understanding in the heart of the priest. The continuing churches have sinned very grievously against the second, that which Christ demanded of his servants; they have sinned very grievously by bringing about conditions that are still visible today in their extremes. Especially those who want to be priests or teachers of the gospel very often most often criticize when anyone wants to base the gospel on the living spirit again. And then, in a seductive way that actually contains a Luciferic impulse, it is said that the Gospel should not be interpreted in a “complicated” way – but it is not a matter of a complicated interpretation, but of an interpretation in keeping with the spirit – it should be interpreted in simple words, as they stand. But that means nothing other than that it should not be interpreted at all. Because the way it is proclaimed today is not the gospel; that is, the way it is proclaimed today is actually denied by many theologians. The second thing you should feel as priests of a renewed priesthood is that you should carry out your ministry with enthusiasm, that you have the will to fulfill Scripture in a spiritual sense.

The third thing is that you want to be and should be in the right sense soul doctors of people, soul healers, by your word actually being fulfilled by that power that is given with the commission you have received, by that power through which you, when you perform the cult in the right sense and teach from inner enthusiasm, from inner knowledge, interpreting the scriptures , then in your work you have the power to heal souls, that is, to truly continue the work that the Christ accomplished with the Mystery of Golgotha and that is indicated by the words that he who struggles for the inheritance of evil in human nature, so that this human nature may not bring sin from one from one life to another, has been bound by the Mystery of Golgotha in the earthly life for a thousand years, that is, for a period at the end of which people should have become so strong that they can no longer fall prey to him; then he will be released again, and then people will have to have greater strength to resist him.

We live in the time, my dear friends, in which, on the one hand, Christ wants to show Himself to people again to strengthen their power; in this time we must prepare ourselves for this in the appropriate way. But we also live in the time when the thousand years are fulfilled, when the adversary wants to break his fetters and will do his utmost to achieve his intentions. And that is the time when the real secret of human evolution will be revealed to people, that those who truly feel the “Christ in me” take their sins with them by having the intention not to repel sins and thereby deliver them to the adversary, but to take them within themselves and, through what happened at Golgotha, to have a healing effect on humanity.

My dear friends, I believe you expected to learn not an unctuous reworking of what has already been taught, but something that really contains the secrets of initiation; and you will see that much of what has been taught so far is the very opposite of what is real. And if you cannot feel very keenly that you have to bring something new into the world, which in many respects is the very opposite of what is not a teaching from God but a teaching from the prince of this world, then you will not be able to enter into what you want in the right way. It is therefore an important matter. And the words that I have to add, so to speak, as the “first sermon” at the first mass that has been held here, must not only be words spoken in theory, but they must contain something that can shake your souls in a certain way and bring them to a new state of mind. Because the time has come when people must again be told: Change your minds! And those who want to lead people in a new priestly sense must also speak in such a way that it is said: Change the mind by which, in misunderstanding the facts, the Christian mind has been veiled to man so far!

In this way, after the preceding ceremonies, it falls to me to address the word of sending to you, the word of sending that was spoken in the sense of the first Christian sending of those who had been called to the apostolate, this word of sending forth, which is recorded in the second letter of St. Paul to Timothy, chapter 1, verse 6. And this word I have to speak to you at this moment in the manner in which we can express it in our present language:

I exhort you always to stir up the gift of the Holy Spirit that is in you, which was given to you by the touch of the power of the Spirit world.

And I have to add the word from the first epistle of Timothy, chapter 4, verse 14, which in turn is translated into the language that is expressed by our present words with liveliness, so it means:

Do not lose the excited spiritual power from the eyes of your soul, which is given to you through the spirit word that touches the power of the spiritual world and works in the future.

Those who were sent out in the first Christian centuries to become the apostles were sent out in the spirit of the words of truth contained in these letters to Timothy, and became true followers of the apostles. And if you want to carry out what you have set out to do in the right way, you must become successors of the apostles. You can only do that if you say to yourselves: The apostles will speak to us in the mind of Christ; but we must bring the right understanding to the language of the apostles! And in order for you to have the right understanding of the language of the Apostles, I followed the solemn ceremony of the ordination of the shepherds of souls by connecting, so to speak, the first sermon for the Apostle ministry, which can lead you in the right sense to an understanding of your Apostle ministry. But only if you know that it is precisely in the alchemy of salt and phosphorus – or sulphur – that is, in the bread and wine, that you renew what happened on the cross and as a result of the death on the cross, then you will know that you have to consider the third as part of your mission. The three components of your mission are as follows:

First, that you should discharge your office in the enthusiasm with which the divine spiritual world permeates us;

secondly, that you should bring strength to the communities in the living word, not in the dead word, which actually denies the real spirit and which today, out of a Luciferian inclination, is called the “simple” word; and

thirdly, that you feel like real healers, like real doctors for the sins of humanity, that is, that you can accomplish, in addition to your own state of soul, in addition to the interpretation of the word the miracle of the remission of sins, that is, the transformation of the inheritance of the prince of this world into a good that the Christ carries into the souls of men through all subsequent eras and circles of the earth for the atonement of sins. As one imbued with God, as a teacher of God and as a healer of sins – in this sense you must give to your communities and tell them what you yourselves experience in your enthusiasm, what you can learn as a teacher of God within you, and that it may become manifest to them what you have attained as the living power of the healing of sins. That is what I had to place upon your souls today.

A participant: What about the breaking off of a piece of the host? Does that have something to do with the human constitutional elements?

Rudolf Steiner: If we see in the whole host what lives as solar power in man, we first take in nine-tenths, which we initially let work through their salt content. In this way, we connect nine-tenths of what is in us with our earthly existence, in the way I have just described. The question is: what happens to the remaining tenth? We immerse it in the wine, and before it enters our organism, we mix it with the phosphorus of the wine. It is in this mixing of the phosphorus with the salt that the part of the action taken out of the human being lies. The other part of the action takes place when we allow the salt to combine with the phosphorus merely through inner alchemy. The fact that we also take a small part out of this inner alchemy and leave it to the power that lives on the altar, that is what lies in the breaking away of the tenth from the host.

If we consider the whole human being, in the sense in which I have presented it in my “Theosophy”, according to its nine parts, we find, if we go down from above: spirit man, spirit of life, spirit self, consciousness soul, mind soul, sentient soul, sentient body, etheric body, physical body. These are the nine members. They would not connect with earthly life in the right way if there were not a synthesis: this is the tenth (see the larger circle drawn around the nine smaller circles in the diagram on Plate 3). This gives us ten members, which also appear in the ten Sephirot of the pre-Christian era, albeit in the way that corresponds to that time, when full self-awareness did not yet exist. If you now think of the host in connection with the ten members of the human being, you have in it a member that is the physical body, the ninth (in the drawing, the small red circle), which is actually the tenth. This physical body is in a special position, it is in a different position from the other links in human nature. You have to bear in mind that if you look out into the vastness of space from the earth, in the parts bordering on the earth, in a very, very fine resolution, you have everything that is on the earth, except for the salt-like. The salt-like is a property of the earth itself. There was once a period in the evolution of the Earth when salt formations also occurred in the Earth's immediate surroundings, but they no longer developed into solids, remaining instead in a liquid or gaseous state. Then a time came in the evolution of the earth when salt formation only occurred on the earth itself and in its immediate vicinity, so that the ether, which permeates the earth but extends beyond it, has no part in the formation of salt. Salt is something that has only a meaning for earthly existence itself, and this is shown by the fact that for no other celestial body but the Earth has salt formation become the peculiar characteristic of planetary formation. If you take the physical body, then, simply through its organization, it has a share in salt. And at the moment when you break out of the whole human being, which the host represents, the 'physical body', you can say: I cannot have this body connected in any other way with the one in which the other parts are already inside, than by me letting what can no longer take place on earth in the right way, what only takes place in a decadent way – by forming phosphoric acid salts, , but which make up precisely the heaviest part of the human being, his bony part, which belongs solely and exclusively to earthly existence. By allowing this to combine in an extra-terrestrial way – that is, allowing the salt to combine with the phosphorus that is in the wine – I allow, through what I do in the rite, through Christ, that which would not be effected in my own body. So I must consume a part of the host in such a way that it does not work like the other part of the host; so that [by breaking off a part of the host] it should be shown that man himself is not the alchemist who effects the transmutation, but it should be shown how that which man cannot do is done by the power of Christ at the altar.

This is how the matter presents itself when we consider it in terms of the new spiritual alchemy.

A participant: What about the seven candles on the altar?

Rudolf Steiner: It is good to put into words everything that is present in the cultus in a physical form, because the physical form of the cultus should speak to us. If we wanted to express in a single sentence what is contained in the seven candles, we would have to say: Just as there are seven human constitutional elements within you, a sevenfold power radiates out of the ritual for you, each part of which belongs to a part of your own being.

A participant: What can be said about the figures on the chasuble?

Rudolf Steiner: If we consider the processes that take place in the cosmos and which either close in on human beings, so that they participate in cosmic processes, or which are expressed in a different way so that they develop images or replicas of them, then, if we want to express this in words, we can only do so in the following way: Panel 3

We can say that ascending and descending forces are at work everywhere in the cosmos. These ascending and descending forces can best be visualized by a line like this:

We would then have the ascending forces on one side and the descending forces on the other.

On the one side we would have the ascending forces and on the other the descending forces. You can imagine it something like this: if you were to stand on one pan of a set of scales, you would be heavy, i.e. you would take part in the general ponderability of the earth, in gravity. You would join the forces that work downwards. There are, of course, other forces at work than those that we initially think of as represented by gravity. You could live in connection with everything that manifests itself as gravity, but you could never develop a soul life permeated by thoughts. For if you were only exposed to these forces of gravity, your brain would weigh 1500 grams; but a brain weighing 1500 grams would immediately crush all the fine veins beneath it. If the brain were to press down on the lower surface of the head with this weight, a person would not be able to think, and would therefore not be able to develop a soul life. How do we develop a soul life? You develop a soul life, to put it bluntly, through Archimedes' principle. Archimedes said that when he was once in the bath, he observed that he felt lighter than outside the water. And in physics we learn the law that every body, when immersed in water, loses as much weight as the weight of the amount of water displaced by it, so that when you are in the water, you lose as much weight as a human formed from water would weigh. Now our brain is floating in the brain fluid and as a result it loses so much of its weight that instead of pressing down with 1500 grams, it only weighs 20 grams. In physics, what counteracts the force of gravity in the fluid, which now works upwards and not downwards, is called buoyancy. Thus man lives with his soul not in the forces of gravity, the ponderable forces, but in those forces that draw upward; he himself is a physical cosmos, which, as regards his soul life, does not live in what is heavy in him, but in what continually strives to escape from gravity in him.

Thus we can say: We need only look at the human being very roughly in physical terms, and we cannot think materially at all. The human being has the characteristic of being heavy. But if we were to think with the material, we would have to think with the heaviness. We cannot think with heaviness, but only with uplift. It is therefore nonsense to believe that we think with heaviness. We think with that which strives upward to heaven; thus we join the forces that work upward. We human beings live in the forces that draw downward and those that work upward; our inner being is in the upward-working forces, our outer being in the downward-drawing ones. The physical body is heavy, the etheric body is neutral in relation to gravity, the astral body pulls up and the I is carried up through the astral body, not down. Thus the outer man is integrated into the cosmos. But what does he do as an organism that also has an inner organic life? The following happens:

Everything that takes place in the head is a true reflection of what is happening in the metabolic-limb organization. When, for example, a person digests and his kidney and liver systems work together to regulate digestion in the right way, a process takes place in the kidney and liver systems that is also reflected in the left part of the brain. There is never just something going on below or just above, but there are always corresponding processes taking place below and above. Thus, just as the human being is outwardly embedded in the cosmos of ascending and descending forces, so too is he inwardly endowed with these forces; those forces that are in the left part of the brain act down in the liver and kidneys; those forces that are in the upper right part of the brain act down in the stomach (see diagram, plate 3).

And if we follow the effects of these forces, the ascending and descending ones, we get this second line:

Plate 3

There is a neutral point in the human being where these two forces intersect. If you show yourself as a spiritual person to the believing community, and you show yourself from the front, you show yourself in this form (see drawing). If you turn around, then that part of you which is more an image of your own inner being shows itself in the other line. With regard to the upper, dotted part, it is then a matter of taking it up through yourself, that is, letting it go within you and leaving it to the gods to properly effect the transformation of the ascending into the descending forces. So that you simply show what is right when you are vested. You pronounce the secrets of the world through the vestment.

So you can't say: why is that so? In the material world, man is simply Maya. During the sacred act, he can show himself as he is in relation to the cosmos and to himself. You make sure that the person shows himself not in an illusory form, but in his truth. The image is intended to suggest what is a reality in the human being in the spiritual sense, but what is also reproduced in the physical human being. You just need to form a picture of how the blood circulation in the human being proceeds in the left and right halves of the heart, how the blood flows from the right atrium to the right ventricle, through the lungs, back to the left atrium , from there to the left ventricle, and again supplies the upper part of the human being, this is visible in an approximate way, corresponding to earthly conditions. Only when one follows this line, the point of intersection is somewhat shifted in the physical and is more towards the bottom.

A participant: Does a donation formula have to be given for the community communion?

Rudolf Steiner: The situation is as follows: the Act of Consecration of Man, the Mass, can be read and the faithful merely listen. The Communion of the faithful can also be incorporated into the Act of Consecration of Man; in that case it takes place after the Priestly Communion. And so it should actually be that all the breads are in the paten, to be used for the Communion of the faithful, and that all the wine is in the chalice, to be used for the Communion of the faithful. So the Priestly Communion is coming to an end.

May Your Body, O Christ, which I have received, and Your Blood, which gives me life, penetrate me, so that the disease of sin may be cured by the healing medicine, the sacrament.

It is done through You, who bear and order the life of the world, as You receive it from the Father and, through the Holy Spirit, make it whole in all the ages to come.

Altar server: Yes, let it be so.

Now the priests' communion is over; now the faithful's communion begins:

The body of Christ which you receive and the blood of Christ which gives you life may permeate you so that the disease of sin may be healed by the healing medicine, the sacrament.

It is done through You, who bear and order the life of the world, as You receive it from the Father and, through the Holy Spirit, make it whole in all the ages to come.

Altar server: Yes, Lord, let it be so.

The host is given, placed on the tongue. The believer is touched lightly with the fingers of the right hand on the left cheek, and it is said again:

Peace be with you.

Then the chalice is passed. The left cheek is again touched with the fingers of the right hand, and again it is said:

Peace be with you.

This is the transition from the priest's communion to the faithful's communion.

Of course, Holy Communion is not to be distributed at every Mass, but in any case it should not happen that the faithful proceed to Communion without an opening of the Mass. Now it may be that in some places the Mass cannot be read. Then it would of course still be good, even without celebrating the Mass, at least to develop the whole spirit of the Mass, so that - since the community will certainly demand the explanation of the Mass right from the start - the Communion of the faithful can at least be incorporated into the Mass action in spirit.

A participant asks whether the Communion of the faithful should also take place without the Priestly Communion.

Rudolf Steiner: The action can certainly be performed in an appropriate manner. It is not good if the communion of the faithful is brought about without the communion of the priests. The communion of the priests should come first.

A participant: What about the mixing of water and wine?

Rudolf Steiner: This is a given in actual alchemy, in that the human being - I only hinted at this yesterday by way of example - continually develops alcohol within himself as he needs it. Now, the human being is also 90% water column, the other is only incorporated in it. Therefore, in the chalice, we also have an image of the human being made of water and wine, in that you do not just take the wine, but the wine, which is a product of the human being, mix it with the water.

You can only unite with Christ by entering into the phantom of the physical human body. This is contained in the words: “entering into the physical earth”; and this is what man finds when he

physical, even when it is already corrupted in the physical, is linked precisely to Christ. Thus renewal takes place in union with Christ, which is there as a consequence of the Mystery of Golgotha.

Friedrich Rittelmeyer asks whether words could also be given for the laying out of the robes in the sacristy.

Rudolf Steiner: Of course one could think of something like that, but I would actually like to warn against the danger of over-Catholicizing. The situation is this: if you take a missal in your hands today – the good missals include instructions for this – you will find an extraordinarily strong externalization. Every second, when the priest dresses or walks to the altar, he is doing something prescribed for him; he cannot escape the words contained in the missal. A Missa solemnis is, after all, something extraordinarily complicated, and only by first tormenting candidates for the priesthood to learn how to put together a mass, for example at Christmas, at Easter and so on, does one make it possible for the matter to proceed without difficulty. Otherwise, the composition of a mass, for example a Christmas mass, where many individual priests work together, would take an extremely long time to prepare, because everything is externalized and has to be coordinated. Now this is simply postponed to the time of the candidates, and later the priests can spare themselves the trouble, because it actually happens automatically. So it is precisely in the Catholic Church that it is the “catholic” that it has externalized everything, and one must go back to feeling one's way through the action of the Mass with such moods, as I have just indicated through the two fundamental sermons, so that one does not have to specify. And you have indeed given the priest the means to keep this alive in his mind, in the breviary, if it is used in the right way and is brought into the right connection with the preparation for and the celebration of the Mass. I would therefore like to warn against the fact that the matter is too formulaic. I must strive to bring back what is Catholic in the Ahrimanic externalized, to the original real spiritual. So I would like to warn against feeling too strong a tendency towards Catholicism. They would quickly end up on the same path that Catholicism actually took in the 5th century, but especially between the 10th and 12th centuries, where everything was really externalized. I believe that we would have to avoid that if we act correctly. So: do not go too far when formulating. Formulate what needs to be formulated, but do not go too far.

What I said yesterday and today, and what I may still have to say, offers the opportunity to experience the original spiritual dimension in a very concrete way, not just in a general, abstract way, but in a very concrete way, during the preparation, the celebration and the aftermath of the Mass. There it comes to life every day. We do not run the risk that the Roman Catholic priest does, namely – and of course one must express things as they are – when you celebrate the great lines of the rite, it is also a real process. What you perform as a rite is imprinted in the ether of the universe; and when you read the tenth mass, it is not the same as the first time. The first time you excite the vibrations in the cosmic ether, the tenth time you already place yourself in the vibrations; thus, more and more an objective arises. If you now permeate everything with formulas too strongly, you get the same result as when a Catholic priest performs the service. The actual rite breaks away from the person, but the rite that clings too strongly to the person causes a terrible hardening in the person: he repeatedly enjoys the same thing that he enjoyed the day before, he enjoys, so to speak, his own sputum over and over again. And that must be avoided. A participant: How should we understand 'to the right and left of the altar' at Mass?

[Rudolf Steiner's answer is only poorly recorded by the stenographer. See note.)

A participant asks about sobriety when celebrating the Act of Consecration of Man.

Rudolf Steiner: You can imagine how much more undisturbed the whole process of celebrating the Mass is when there is no nourishment at work within you. The Catholic Church has the idea that the consumption of the sacrament at Mass is made the first consumption of the day, with the exception of those who have dispensation because otherwise their health would be harmed. Now, the idea is that the mass is basically performed for others, so it is detached from the priest, so that the question of whether the priest should perform the mass on an empty or a full stomach is actually a personal matter for the priest. Of course, it has an effect on him, because he also has to read it for himself. Now he can arrange it in such a way as he needs for his own strengthening. He has to read the Mass every day. But if one priest says, “I feel the power of the Mass for eight days,” another says, “I feel it for a month.” This is true for the priest himself.

The act should be celebrated at sunrise, not at sunset. A mass at sunset cannot be considered a real mass for the cosmos. During the Christmas season, a mass should be read around midnight, at the transition from the descent to the ascent of the sun, between December 24th and 25th. This is how it is now; originally it was between December 22 and 23. This is now also correct in the Catholic Church. A mass is to be read at midnight between December 24 and 25, immediately where the sun begins to rise. A participant: How often should incense be burned during the ceremony?

Rudolf Steiner: Only one incense is necessary. But of course, if you want to celebrate the service solemnly, you can even do it up to three times. You don't have to limit it to a clever system. It is a process that develops. You must not ask: What difference does it make if I do it three times? - The first time invokes the process.

[No stenographer was present at this discussion. The individual points of the discussion were presented by Gottfried Husemann and are reproduced here in slightly abbreviated form. No notes are available from the beginning of this discussion hour.]

Regarding the question of enlarging the circle:

Rudolf Steiner: The circle now exists as a closed circle, but it must now expand through itself. I cannot be involved in the admission or non-admission of an additional member.

Friedrich Rittelmeyer: The steering committee and the leaders would have to decide what conditions they actually have to set in relation to the previous education of the person to be accepted.

Rudolf Steiner: Of course it must be decided from case to case, from personality to personality. Internally, of course, the matter is clear from what I said yesterday and today. But of course you need an administration.

Since these questions have come to me, I would just like to ask you to state what points of view are being put forward. I do not claim to have an opinion and I do not want one. Of course, it may be the case that people who have the rituals now found churches for their part. We have to bear that in mind, and it would require us to take a position on it at some point.

Emil Bock: The fact is that some have not found their way back to the original community; they have not come to Breitbrunn. Now they would have to approach the community like anyone else. And with others it was their own will not to join, or they resigned at our advice before the original community was constituted. In one case we were in a very difficult situation; we felt that we really could not use someone. For the future, some people are already thinking about how to arrive at clear thoughts regarding admission. Perhaps this will be possible with reference to the text proposed yesterday.

Rudolf Steiner: As far as the admissions are concerned, I do not want to have an opinion, because I believe that the decision about admissions and also about being together should be made by you, quite apart from me. It is my task to give everything that is spiritual in the matter, including the spiritual aspects that extend into the organization; it is my task to relate how it can extend into it. It is my task to say how it could be. As for the fixing of the fees, I do not want any opinion at all in this direction, because I do not want to bear any responsibility for it.

Friedrich Rittelmeyer: The decisions have been made by the six trustees.

Rudolf Steiner: And there are no others who signed up in Dornach at the time?

Emil Bock: Yes, there are others, for example, those who think they should complete their exams first, for example, Dr. Schwedes and others. They have gone about their signature somewhat.

Rudolf Steiner: Are there not others who have signed without returning?

Emil Bock: Yes, what Klein and Heisler had done, the memorandum business, will be added, whereby new facts have arisen.

Rudolf Steiner: But that is a mistaken view. Something new is only within the wall, not outside of it. The purpose of the memorandum was not to expand or reduce the circle, but only for those within the circle to say what they want. Johannes Werner Klein: We had set ourselves the task of gathering those people who had signed who were now quite firm in their decision. But that was not meant to exclude the others. There are some who have forgotten they signed.

Rudolf Steiner: It can only be this. The memorandum cannot be considered. The only thing that should be considered is that the people of that time did not take their signature seriously.

Friedrich Rittelmeyer: Yes, but a selection had also been made.

Emil Bock: But they are just not included now.

Rudolf Steiner: But what does the writing of the memorandum have to do with the signature that was given at the time? It would be understandable if those who signed [in the fall of 1921] but then did not receive a request to write the memorandum had now said: We hear that there is a request to write a memorandum; what is that? We protest against it! — That would have been possible. But not coming because they were not asked to write the memorandum is not something that could have followed from it. So it could well have happened that Klein would have said: I will arbitrarily choose fifteen men to have the memorandum written by. - That would have been an act that simply stands on its own, because it was only done on his own mandate.

Emil Bock: In fact everyone was informed about it afterwards.

Rudolf Steiner: Of course, this is not a matter for which we have to spend time now. But I think we have to remember that there are a number of personalities who at that time actually stood up for themselves with their signature, but who are simply not there at present.

Emil Bock: They also received the rituals and everything that was given at the time, so that there is at least the real possibility that someone might do something with it on their own initiative. After all, the text of the consecration ceremony could be stolen in shorthand. But I don't know if we can arm ourselves against that other than by making sure that our effectiveness is quite strong.

Rudolf Steiner: You mean the text of the act of consecration? Emil Bock: Yes, it could be misused.

Rudolf Steiner: It is a remarkable fact that I ask you to consider: that the text of the Catholic Mass could be stolen in so many places and has not actually been stolen, with the exception of those who have read black masses. There are actually no incorrect masses read.

A participant asks about black masses.

Rudolf Steiner: Black masses are a kind of black magic that belong to the many phenomena that also exist in the world. The reading of black masses is even a thing that was quite common in Europe before the war.

A participant: To gain supernatural powers through it?

Rudolf Steiner: Yes, and also to serve the devil through this, just as one can serve God through the right mass.

Emil Bock reminds the group of the text of the “Confession” that was discussed yesterday.

Friedrich Rittelmeyer: We have talked about it quite a bit, but have not yet come to a conclusion about one sentence. It is the sentence: “Should a separation be brought about by me, ... I want to acknowledge.” Now I am not thinking of myself, but I want to think of those who are to sign it, and I cannot quite get away from the thought that was hinted at yesterday: that they are promising something for a [later] point in time when it could really happen that the separation occurs. Instead of the words “I will recognize it”, I would rather suggest “I recognize it”. We have now decided to hear how you assess the whole matter. Rudolf Steiner: I would like to hear as many votes as possible on such an important matter, because it is something that should be wanted by this closed circle with one voice, without coercion. I have already spoken to you three about the difficulty of this matter. The difficulty lies precisely in the fact that in our time a person's momentary, passing convictions play such a powerful role that one is inclined to join something too hastily or to set ideals for oneself that one then abandons. For the individual person, of course, this is something that he must work out with his karma. But the matter is immediately different when a community is to exist that also has a common cult as a community. There is already the necessity that the community itself has something to say about a separation, both about the separation that is brought about by the individual and about the separation that is brought about by the community. But we can limit ourselves to the first point, because the community should hardly have the option of excluding someone for any other reason than this. I can't think of any other good reason; there shouldn't be any good reasons other than this.

A participant: In the case of mental illness?

Rudolf Steiner: Then the only reasons for not celebrating it and not teaching it are mental illness, but there is no reason to exclude it. That would be a different matter, [which would have to be discussed]. For how a certain discipline should be handled would have to be decided only on the basis of what should be decided about the expulsion. So let us assume that a person who has already been admitted later acts against you, that should not be the slightest reason to expel him. Therefore, I say that if that is not a reason to expel him, then it would not be a reason to refuse him admission. Mental illness, like other illnesses, cannot be a reason for expulsion, but only a reason to withdraw the functions from the person concerned. But of course he can always find reasons for himself to separate from the community.

Now, I said at the time in the studio, which I now had to suggest again, that there must be something that deprives the person who leaves of the right to make any judgment, and that the community has the right to morally evaluate the leaving. But there is something that hangs in the air if the person in question does not recognize this judgment. I said at the time, in response to your objections: Of course, this still does not prevent the individual from resigning and saying: I recognize that the community judges my resignation morally, but I will now start the fight against it and see if I can bring about a different moral judgment that will prevail over the community's moral judgment. – One would just have to find an equivalent for it. When someone resigns, they will usually always find it justified that they are resigning. The judgment cannot depend on that at all, but the judgment, the moral evaluation of their resignation, must depend on something other than them.

[The discussion about the wording of the loyalty oath continues.]

One participant suggests adding the wording “in the spirit of community” to the pledge of allegiance.

Rudolf Steiner: This raises the difficulty of identifying the instance that decides.

The same participant: There is no such thing as a bad external instance, only a spiritual instance.

Rudolf Steiner: There is the difficulty of deciding whether the leadership is bad or not. That is the difficulty, for example, for someone who wants to challenge a papal decision. In the spiritual worlds, of course, the decision is clear, but who should bring it to a decision on earth? There is no guarantee that our perception will not degenerate, just like anything else. Then on the side of those who are in opposition, there could be spirituality. That could happen. With regard to the future, something would have to be included in the wording to the effect that someone would say: If I were to oppose, it would be for reasons that the leadership is no longer on the right path.

A participant: Most of us were Protestants. If we now found the new community, would we not be breaking away from the Protestant Church, even though we previously agreed with the Protestant Church in our hearts? We are breaking away because we are convinced that something higher, something more valuable, has now been given.

Rudolf Steiner: You can break away from the Protestant Church because there are no spiritual foundations there. So it is only a matter of bringing the spiritual into the text. We have already discussed how to handle this so that people do not just leave in a careless way. We will consider the further formulation. It is not necessary for us to come to further decisions now. Perhaps there are other things on the table.

Emil Bock: I would like to go back to the example that one can forbid someone to exercise his priestly functions, that one reckons with keeping someone away from teaching or celebrating. What is the form of the exclusion? Should it not be expressed somehow? What can still be included in the formulation with regard to the possibility of exclusion, insofar as it exists? And with regard to the personality, the question arises: Is it not the case that one must at least risk a judgment about the suitability of a personality? If someone wants to work with us, is there not a necessity that one considers certain people, as far as one can judge them honestly, unsuitable and then also holds them back? Are there guidelines for this in order to be more specific? Rudolf Steiner: As I said before, this seems to be a spiritual question, not a matter that can be formulated. In each individual case, one must simply be able to form an opinion about the person in question as to whether one can ordain him or not.

Emil Bock: I don't quite understand how what you said can be reconciled with the idea that if something is not a sufficient reason to exclude a person, then it could also not be a reason not to accept someone. — He could be with us, he could also celebrate and fall prey to moral temptations – then we cannot excommunicate him, as far as I can see. But if that were no reason to exclude him, neither would it be a reason not to accept him.

Rudolf Steiner: There would be no reason not to accept him either.

Emil Bock: What then is the criterion for recognizing a person as worthy of admission?

Rudolf Steiner: The question is whether or not you believe that he can properly perform his priestly functions. That is the only question. You will have no reason not to accept someone who can be expected to perform his priestly functions in the right way, so that the conditions I mentioned this morning as the “three points” are also fulfilled. This basic formula should form the actual spirit for the admission. You will have no interest in not accepting someone who can meet these three points. The thing is that there could, of course, be a difference. You could say: of someone who has qualities like those that are present in this case, we do not believe that he can perform the priestly functions in the individual cases. I would negate it, I would not believe that he cannot do it.

Emil Bock: It is precisely in this matter that we would like to ask for your judgment, because we cannot judge it. Rudolf Steiner: Yes, if the person in question is otherwise capable of performing the priestly functions, I do not consider the mentioned qualities to be an obstacle. And if it is not an obstacle, then it could not be a reason not to accept him. He would have to be incapable of performing the priestly functions.

Emil Bock: Should there not be something about how the leadership can impose a period of abstention from the practice of priestly functions on someone?

Rudolf Steiner: This would have to be carried out as a kind of “disciplinary order”; and that will probably be something that develops continuously, because one will have to think of all the things that can occur. But that someone can be suspended because of this or that thing, before the community [to read the sacrifice of the mass], that must of course be carried out. But you can't, for example, stop him from reading the sacrifice of the mass for himself.

Emil Bock: There are a whole series of points that we still have to discuss together.

Rudolf Steiner: I will tell you quite openly what is to be said about this from the spiritual world. But precisely those administrative matters that you should stipulate in the spirit that is indicated here, so that it is really part of this joint initiative before you leave here.

Friedrich Rittelmeyer: It is just a bit much for anyone to have to sign a disciplinary code as well.

Rudolf Steiner: You need only add: “I also recognize the disciplinary regulations of which I have been made aware.” Friedrich Rittelmeyer: There is still the question for us: Who has the right to accept and ordain priests?

Rudolf Steiner: That is a question that has already been considered. And perhaps it should be stipulated that no priests can be admitted without the decision of the governing body.

Friedrich Rittelmeyer: So the leadership could then give up the right to ordain someone?

Rudolf Steiner: This is something that you, as an original community, should discuss. You are an original community and should discuss it, and then of course it should remain as it has now been stipulated. But now it is still possible for you, as an original community, to discuss how succession should possibly come about, whether by mere co-election or whether you would accept a certain degree of co-determination from a larger community in some form. Of course, it must not come down to an ordinary democratic vote. But there are still various other conceivable cases, for example, if an Oberlenker is to be appointed, groups could be formed that, if they are large enough, could make proposals, so that these proposals would simply be put forward. And even if the Oberlenker were not obliged to consider one of these names under any circumstances, it could still be very instructive to find out who is to be recognized. It would not be a democratic vote, but it is still conceivable that some way or other could be found to ascertain the mood of either just the priesthood or the whole community on a larger scale.

Friedrich Rittelmeyer: We would also very much like to talk about the distribution of cities, as well as when, in your opinion, the cultus can begin and what preconditions still need to be met. Rudolf Steiner: So we will deal with that tomorrow, again at half past ten. Then we will have to talk about the sacrament of penance and extreme unction.

In addition, the Hebrew verse and the two Timothy verses must be spoken at the priestly ordination, not at the ceremony itself but in a subsequent address when the ceremony is over.

Let us now consider once more from a different point of view what this healing of sins consists of. We look first into human nature and compare it with

what it is in its earthly environment. Let us imagine for a moment this duality before the soul: earthly human nature, that is, the inner nature of earthly human nature, and now the whole earthly environment. We cannot do otherwise if we proceed calmly than to imagine, in the sense of a truly spirit-imbued cosmology - which is also a Christian cosmology - that this environment of ours, if we want to use religious terms, is a revelation of the divine that permeates this earthly environment. But it will not be difficult for you to imagine that within human nature, something else is at work than in the earthly environment of man. In his inner nature, man is actually only completely similar to the outer world in what are intermediate earthly processes, which take place between water and air on the one hand and between water and solid earth on the other. Processes are constantly taking place in the outer world between the airy and the liquid, which play into the animal, plant and mineral kingdoms. Processes take place between water and the earth, external processes that natural science observes as geology, geognosy, mineralogy, paleontology, but also as biology, and which, insofar as they take place between the solid and the aqueous, play into human nature almost unchanged. All that takes place in this interplay between the airy and the watery and between the watery and the solid, and what also takes place in this relationship in the environment of man, was described by an earlier clairvoyant art, which, however, was able to see through these things to a higher degree than the mercurial.

Now, however, we also have those processes that take place between air and warmth, air and light, which, to a certain extent, lie above the mercurial. These are processes that take place primarily in the human head and are quite different from those processes that take place between air, warmth and light outside of the human being. Only the middle earthly processes, the mercurial ones, are almost the same outside and inside the human being. What takes place, on the other hand, in the sulphuric processes, as they were called in earlier times – for solid sulphur is indeed a Maja image of the actual effects of sulphur – which essentially take place between air, warmth and light and also in the life ether, these are processes that take place within human nature in a very different way. And the processes that take place in the middle human being, which are quite similar to external natural processes, undergo a strong metamorphosis in the human mind, so that something completely different takes place in the mind than outside of it.

Likewise, the metabolic processes that extend into the movement processes of the limbs involve completely different processes than those outside in nature. The external natural processes that, for example, lead to the formation of phosphoric acid lime in nature are quite different from those processes that take place within the human body to form phosphoric acid lime in the bones or teeth. Such processes, which, for example, cause a human thigh bone to develop in such a way that it appears as a wonderful framework, these processes, which form the phosphoric acid lime and the carbonic acid lime as mineral processes in the human being, are not found in the external natural world. But such processes, which are not found in nature, which are found in the head processes and in the organization of movement in the human being, are, because they are also connected with the soul and spirit of the human being, now also dangerous for this soul and spirit again, and indeed the head processes become dangerous in the luciferic sense, the metabolic-limb processes in the ahrimanic , and external healing can only be brought about – as I described yesterday – by supplying the head processes with the salt that remains almost unchanged in the human nutritional process and the limb processes with the volatile, fluctuating phosphorus present in grape juice, which then continues to work in the metabolic organization and permeates the limb system. Thus we have [in humans] a chemo-biology that brings about something quite wonderful, namely that something happens to the salt that in the external world has actually only been done by the gods. For we have to imagine that in the human environment the Luciferic and Ahrimanic are not present in the same way as in the human being; after all, it works from the human being into nature and is present in the salt effects [of nature]. By consuming salt, we therefore send a decisive fight against the luciferic processes into our head, while by absorbing the phosphorus and causing it to overflow into our limbs, we send a fight against the ahrimanic into them. This is the outer process, which the believing person must also follow in his inner soul processes. If it is the outer process that you bring about in the souls of the faithful through Communion, then Communion can naturally only work in the right way if the inner inspiration is also renewed again and again from time to time. This must be done by taking the healing of sins in the broadest sense, so that everything that can be a temptation to sin through the Ahrimanic and the Luciferic in human nature is now truly healed through the priestly work.

And so the priestly work must add to the communion, if not to everyone, then at least now and then, that which is no longer preserved in its purity in the Catholic Church, but only in a terrible distortion . It is necessary to add the counseling of the person that precedes Communion, that which in the Catholic Church has become confession, especially auricular confession, which is an entirely Ahrimanic distortion of what needs to be willed. That is what makes up the difficulty with respect to Catholicism. If, for example, a Catholic anthroposophist asks whether he can participate in the overall practice of the Catholic Church, one is always confronted with the Ahrimanic aspect of auricular confession, which one cannot advise the [anthroposophical] Catholic to take; but by doing so, one deprives him of Holy Communion, because the Catholic Church has the coercive law that Communion can only be given if auricular confession has been made beforehand. This is, of course, the most difficult of spiritual requirements. But if you handle the counseling, which must be linked to Communion at certain intervals, correctly, you will not only be able to appear as enthusiastic priests proclaiming the word, but also as priests who forgive sins, and you must be clear about what you can also be as a counselor to your parishes. You will need to take a stand on the matters with which your parishioners come to you as their inner soul concerns. You will not, of course, introduce compulsory confession, but you will notice when the community is properly established how much the community members will come to you with trust and will entrust you with the most diverse inner matters, and how most of them will even feel a certain relief in being able to entrust these matters to you.

This is all you have to do in your movement, going beyond what anthroposophy will essentially remain as teaching and knowledge and what should not, to some extent, be adapted to the individuality of each person: counseling individuals with regard to what can inwardly trouble them in their soul condition as a result of sinful human nature. Of course, you will achieve the least if you indulge in general, theoretical and didactic phrases when counseling your parishioners before Communion. At this moment, anything doctrinal is actually the least appropriate. Only a priest who, when he is such a “confessor”, can put himself in the position of how the difficulties in the soul of the penitent actually arose, what role they play, and how far back they go in time, will give this advice correctly. In short, I would say that you will have to implement in a pure form what has already emerged as nonsense in the development of culture because the churches have withdrawn from it. The Catholic Church has so thoroughly Ahrimanized confession that the confession of children and young people is often a source of moral aberration in the Catholic Church. There are areas where what Catholic children are supposed to do in the so-called examination of conscience is preprinted - I cannot say in small “booklets” because it is usually four pages long - where the possible sins that someone might have are printed in advance, so that some boys, who see through these things, simply cross out what they do not want to have sinned and then just read their confession according to the form. But this also leads to great harm in many other respects. These forms often state, for example, that the child should ask itself whether it has the habit of keeping its hands under the blanket. You can imagine that, from a very early age, the child is made aware of sexual mischief precisely through the obligation required of him by confession. In short, what has become of auricular confession is already a great, great difficulty. That is one side of it; the other is the following.

People live strangely blindly in the world. You know that in Spengler's “Decline of the West” it is said that the priest actually has no influence on world events, that he is a kind of theorizing, contemplative person, and that the world is basically run by people of the nobility, princes and so on. Spengler really talks as if he did not know that there are confessors, that princes, before they come to their decisions, first sit with their confessors, and that from the way the auricular confession is handled there emanates the greatest possible influence on the great affairs of the world. You must realize that in the world, the origins of the most important events must be sought with the confessors. But people are blind; they describe what happens on the outside and have no sense of where things come from. No, you must not forget that this is something that tends to be extremely secretive and that it is something through which one can rule the world in a very wonderful secretive way. The Pope sits in Rome, the Archbishop N.N. in some very distant place and has his archdeacons, canons, provosts and the lower clergy; all of whom, through the confessional, have access to the most intimate affairs of those people who are subject to them. Of course, the Pope in Rome does not need to know what the individual penitent says to the confessor, but he knows that he has someone sitting in these places who carries out the Roman orders with an enormous amount of in-depth knowledge. In this way, the Catholic Church has made confession extraordinarily difficult, both for the individual and for the whole world context. And the Protestant Church? It is not just one Protestant preacher, but a whole series who, in the course of my life, have been with me and said: We long to have something that is like the Catholic confession; we need a method to gently enter into the matters of the heart with which people come to us; we need a kind of active catechesis. Some Protestant pastors have clearly presented this to me. I then advised them to develop the idea from “How to Know Higher Worlds,” whereby, if adopted from the priestly side, one could actually arrive at a tactful confession. That was too difficult for them. So some of them came to me and said: Yes, insofar as these instructions morally coerce, I can agree with them, but where it becomes a matter of inner technique for a person, we certainly do not need such a thing in religion. — In short, the difficulty is this: First one is asked: what should we do? —, one says so, and then the person concerned replies: We have no need of it.

This shows that precisely these innermost things point to something that must come. And because it is not offered to people by either the Catholic or the Protestant side, psychoanalysts do it. Familiarize yourself with the methods of psychoanalysts, to whom people flock in droves today, and see how psychoanalysis is praised by outstanding writers. You will see: What psychoanalysis wants to give to people in a crude way is what the churches of all denominations actually withhold from them. Today we have a psychoanalysis that is spreading more and more every day, from a neglect that can be attributed to the churches. Take any English weekly or monthly magazine. I have convinced myself: you will find an essay on psychoanalysis in it almost every time. This is the materialistic degeneration of what should have been the duty of the pastor, and the matter takes on its serious character when one then comes to what takes the place of communion at the psychoanalyst. One cannot think of the development of Christianity without thinking of all that has been left out of the development of denominations out of human complacency.

You must be aware of these things. You must educate yourself to be able to live with the inner difficulties that people approach you with. You can only do this if you approach everything humanly, without emotion, if both joy and indignation essentially remain silent, and if you can immediately raise the judgment of what you have to approach to a higher sphere, to the sphere of spiritual life. Then you will find that even in the most specific details you have the opportunity not to teach theories or doctrines to the penitent, but to formulate little by little what is indeed doctrine, always in the specific case, and thus to bring it into your teachings. You must, of course, make it clear to the penitent how he has an inner tendency to sin in the Ahrimanic and Luciferic sense, but do not speak of Luciferic and Ahrimanic every time; rather, the treatment of each individual case must always be an essentially individual matter, formulated in concrete terms. You must make it clear to the penitent how the person belongs to another earth, from which he has brought in the Ahrimanic and Luciferic as an inclination, and how he helps himself by really experiencing the means of his religious community to overcome what gives him difficulties within.

In this direction you must become an adviser. You must be able to advise the penitent on some point of difficulty, so that he may rise above it. This will come to you if you apply yourself to a constant and careful study of human nature, in the sense in which it is possible today. The various representations that have been given on an anthroposophical basis contain so many indications of how one or the other aspect of human nature is connected with karma, with the individual destiny, and even with the physical human organization, that they will shed light on many things for you if you study the subjects not just by take a book or a cycle, read it and then be able to say what you have read, but when you study it in such a way that, immediately after you have read it, you bring it to life in your own thoughts, bring it to life as it lives in one or other case during earthly existence, when you study it in a lively way. This is how anthroposophy should be studied. I often have to say to people: you should not read an anthroposophical book like any other book, but in such a way that you feel you want to 'eat it up', so that it then works in you as a force. The comparison can really be taken to the extreme: what you have eaten up has disappeared for the others. That is how one would like an anthroposophical book to disappear, to no longer be there, but to go through a process in the person. If it is read in this way, one learns to understand human nature in a concrete way.

In this way, an enormous amount can be done in the preparation for the act of communion. And every such consultation should actually, I would say, end with a half or three-quarters ritual, in that the penitent is released in a living way with a thought that I would like to put before your souls in the following six lines. It is not necessary for you to express this thought in a formulaic way to each person after every confession, as the Catholic Church does, but the direction that the end of every communion counseling should take is indicated in these six lines.

Learn to sacrifice your thoughts to the Divine
And receive thy will by God's grace.
Then your soul will feel peace;
you will lovingly admire God's revelation and lovingly serve people.
Love for God will enter into your entire being,
love for people will enter into your heart.

If the penitent experiences what lives in these words through you, then you have certainly achieved something with the confession. In this way, you have developed the whole meaning of Johannine Christianity at the end of each confession and can then lead your penitent to Communion with what really inspires them in that Communion. That is what essentially needs to be said about what confession should become through you, what makes confession a real sacrament in connection with Communion.

It will then be my task tomorrow to familiarize you with the last rites and perhaps with some of the things you have notified yourself. But then I will have given you everything I think you need to start your work. After tomorrow's session, we will only need to complete the fundamental issues we have discussed in our joint deliberations, and it will be necessary to say a mass before you leave, with communion for the others.

A participant asks a question about the confession formula. (The stenographer did not note down the wording of the question.

Rudolf Steiner: The difficult sentence of the creed was already felt by me in its difficulty, but it already had a little history from us. The point is that we formulate it - in the real it is not about craziness, but about activity - so that this is expressed in a sentence in the creed: He who joins this community recognizes that what he has become through this community, can only initially become through this community; that is to say that he receives the rituals and what radiates from the rituals from this community and also receives from it the right, in the sense of these rituals, to found communities. So that the person in question has received the evaluation from the supreme leaders and leaders of this community for everything he does on behalf of this community, and that he acknowledges that he has no right to carry out these rituals other than as a member of this community. But you must not make that dependent on whether his will is to recognize this today and may be different in three years, but you must decide today that his will must not be different in three years. So it would not be for him to decide, but for the community. He would have to acknowledge that, with regard to everything he has received on behalf of the community, the community can decide in its superiors, and also that he renounces deciding on it himself in the future. That is the meaning of the matter. We cannot get around this meaning, otherwise you make the rituals a free gift, otherwise you do not establish something, but teach something, and it is gradually carried into the world in dilution, in change, without connection to what it started from. So what I am saying now should be taken into account in some way. But I only want to be available to advise on these matters.

Then someone asked me what the relationship between the community and the Waldorf school teachers will be, since they not only teach the children but are also active in the religious services in the Sunday and other celebrations; and since at the beginning of this course there was the view that Mr. Uehli should not participate in this course, there was something dubious about this relationship. A real basis for such things must be found within the constitution. I do not know whether there is still a rule for this within the community, but there must be. For it is undoubtedly the case that the Waldorf School - and it would be very similar in other schools set up in this way - already has religious education in the sense sought here, and also religious practice. You should be aware that the whole of the teaching in a Waldorf school is imbued with this, so that at least something should be struck in this respect.

A participant: How should we imagine the early development of the work in the community? How should the community be led, and who should take part in the first service? How should we counter the accusation of stealing the mass from the Catholic Church? Rudolf Steiner: With such things, we have to be clear about how the natural process will be. So let's start with this case of the mass. Here we must place ourselves on very firm ground. The Catholic Church regards the reading of the Mass as something that is an outgrowth of apostolic succession. It therefore recognizes as having the right to read a valid Mass only that person who can prove his apostolic succession in the way that the Catholic Church understands this apostolic succession. The Catholic Church interprets succession in such a way that it only recognizes it if it itself effects it, so that in the sense of the Roman Catholic Church only those can read masses who can trace their authority back to a priest ordained by the church itself. Among the Old Catholics, the Old Catholic priests themselves claim that they also fulfill the apostolic succession, also in the sense of the Roman Catholic Church, that they can trace it back to those who were ordained by the Roman Catholic Church in the sense of the apostolic succession. That is what will lead to the Catholic Church not recognizing your masses as valid. But you cannot expect that either. Since there is no Catholic among you or, insofar as there is one here, he is not a priest – a Catholic priest is not with you, otherwise the whole thing would have had to take a different course, we would have had to count on the Catholic priest, but we did not need to – so it is therefore a matter of the Catholic Church not being able to apply the disciplinary measures it has against a renegade Catholic priest who has been deprived of the right to say mass and who then does say it anyway. So there remain the Catholics who are within your community; you must have some. These Catholics naturally expose themselves to excommunication. One must realize quite clearly that the Catholic Church will also apply the disciplinary measures it has, and there is no objection at all within the Catholic Church to excommunication for reading Mass and hearing confessions. If the Catholic Church now decides that it would be wise not to make a fuss about it, then that would be wise of her. That may well be the case as long as you have not exceeded the third thousand, because the Catholic Church does not concern itself with trivialities. If you do not sit together too much or too intensely on one point, you are a bagatelle for the Catholic Church. It already said in 1909: As long as the anthroposophical movement is small, we will only observe it, but not deal with it. But in 1919, she found that she had to deal with it very strongly. And it will also come about that all Catholics who read mass or hear confessions [at your place] will be excommunicated. Of course, she will also take issue with priestly ordinations in the first place, while she will take less offense at all other ceremonies.

That is the one thing that can happen, and a theoretical justification that the Catholic Church itself got the mass from somewhere else is of no significance at all; it does not recognize that and it decides it as a mere question of power. So any theoretical objections would naturally be ignored by the Catholic Church with a wave of the hand. The important thing is that you simply have to accept the excommunication and count on those who are your followers remaining so despite being excommunicated Catholics. That is the real process. The more you enter into the real practice of religion, the more you have to get rid of Protestant theorizing, which aims to prove something to someone. This has even less significance for the Church than it has for the sciences. In the real world, 'proving' something has basically no real meaning. So you can't make anything dependent on the fact that you want to prove to the Catholic Church that you are reading the mass “by right”. You are reading it in the sense of the Catholic Church absolutely wrongly, and you can put forward the most cunning or spiritual proofs, so that would not be able to help you the slightest bit on this point. You cannot take any other direction than the one in which you succeed in getting more and more people to recognize that you are right to read the mass. You cannot do this in any other way than by winning your followers through the three means I have mentioned. In general, this will not be particularly difficult for you at the present time. If you look at the matter superficially, you will find that there is a very strong yearning for worship in humanity today throughout the civilized world, except that this yearning for worship and also for confession is not being met in the right way by the religions.

Of course, you can deal with the faithful by making an impression of truth through your whole behavior, through the way you work and through the inspiration of your work, when you tell them in the appropriate way: The property of the Catholic Church is the Latin Mass; this has taken on a dead character because the Latin language itself is dead. We do not in the least deny that the Latin Mass was once the right Mass; but we must point out that only the German Mass - or the French Mass or the English Mass and so on - which we read, is the present form of the Mass, and that we hold this in the sense of the living Christ, just as the Roman Catholic Church reads the Latin Mass in the sense of mere remembrance of Christ. And you must make this concept understood. It is important that you do everything so that this concept simply prevails. That is not so difficult. Because there is a deep need in humanity for a renewal of the forms of worship. The Latin Mass is also felt by Catholics today as something insufficient. The only thing you have to do is to show by your whole behavior that you have a spiritual impact, that your holding of Mass is not from men, but from God.

With regard to the Mass, you have only one task with regard to those who join you as parishioners. Even in Luther's time, it was possible to discuss with the Roman Catholic Church, as Luther did. Of course, you can't do that anymore, but you can only gather followers who assert what you yourself assert. The Catholic Church today no longer enters into a discussion in the same way as it did in Luther's time. So I think that everything depends on your strength, whether you can get the reading of the mass recognized or not.

I have already told you this in connection with other things a long time ago. You must be clear about one thing: a movement like the one you have in mind has the peculiarity that it should only be started when you are sure that it will succeed! And as far as this certainty is based on your own inner strength, it depends on you simply not letting up. You must have this certainty. And for that you will need a certain broad-mindedness today, both in the way you deal with religious matters and in the way you deal with the faithful, and especially in administrative matters. I can only express such things radically, they are perhaps a little gentler in reality. You feel today that Breitbrunn has bound you together. It has done that, and you must hold on to it. But if you do not continue what you began in Breitbrunn, then the picture of a large part of you hitting your heads in no time at all is not so far-fetched. You must therefore realize that you need to keep that which you believe to be firmly established in constant exercise and liveliness. For think for yourselves how it is with those who join you – after all, you will not always remain just these forty. You must bear this in mind when you begin to found your communities. You have already begun. A large number of you will return to these communities, but for another part the communities will have to be sought. And above all, you will first have the task of dealing with the proclamation of the word in a somewhat freer way, in connection with advising the people who come to you. And if you succeed in speaking about Christ as you speak, if you take into account everything that we have been going through for a long time, especially in these days, then you will see that you will win your followers through your speaking, much more easily than followers can be won on the basis of anthroposophy, where you have to speak in different terms. And you will find that precisely because you are also taking on the task of healing sins, you will be able to retain these followers as very loyal ones.

You must be satisfied with every small flock, for only by being satisfied with a small flock will that small flock gradually become larger. This is not possible in any other way. Those who want a large flock right away will not get one. So you have to be satisfied with everything that arises out of the world as a possibility, and you will see what can be meant by this loyalty in the first instance. And if you are careful enough with the teaching and with the confession-like treatment of the faithful, you will be able to move on to the cultic acts very soon. It is much easier to move on to the cultic acts than the Protestant preacher or the one who wants to become one imagines. The more naturally you let the community arise, the better it will be.

That is it, [what is to be said about it,] how just such a thing would be treated, which lies in such questions as they have been asked here. I will begin to answer the other questions this evening.

A participant: What about the criteria for worship and what would be advisable for the beginning of worship? In Bremen, for example,

people are already prepared for it, and there is even a church available. Would it be advisable to exclude the public?

Rudolf Steiner: The early Christians also had guidelines, but they did not formulate them, because it was often necessary for the early Christians to hold services underground in order to create the possibility of holding them at all. It has happened that such a longing was present in the first priests to hold services that they held the service even when they were tied hand and foot, but were surrounded by a wall of believers who prevented anyone from watching. And only gradually did it actually emerge in the post-Constantinian period that services could be held in public.

I find it hard to believe that you will have any particular luck if you say a German mass in a public church in front of unprepared people. On the other hand, I think it's a very good thing that you say this mass as soon as possible in front of people who will all say yes. So you have to prepare your people, and for a long time you will simply be forced to say your mass in such a way that you only say it in front of prepared people and only allow prepared people. Because of course, if a dyed-in-the-wool atheistic social democrat goes into your mass today and afterwards starts his things, which he will most certainly start, then you will see that you will most certainly have difficulties that you should actually avoid. You have to take such things into account and you have to look out into the world in what you do every day. The smaller the movement still is, the more you will be able to do that. The more it grows quickly, the more others will do what you shouldn't do.

Rudolf Steiner: It seems to me that these questions you have written down are largely rooted in matters that have already been discussed.

Regarding the change of cult colors [1st question]: The point, as I told you, is that the cycle is that the time before Christmas is essentially blue, that at Christmas you have the light color; then the light color remains until Lent, when it turns black. Then we have mainly red during the Easter season, and then we move on to light colors for the Pentecost season. That is how it was presented the last time. So for what I call the festive season, we have the light color during the summer; if there are no special occasions, the color remains white. At Pentecost it is white with yellow edges. That remains essentially so until we have to move on to the blue color.

Emil Bock: The color we are using now is already a light one.

Rudolf Steiner: What I have suggested to you now is what I would advise you to use at all times for the regular trade fair because this violet that you have now is the color that you can actually use all year round on every occasion, whereas you could not do that with any other color.

Emil Bock asks about the spiritual essence of colors. Why these colors cannot be used.

Rudolf Steiner: If we take the color red, which would occur at the resurrection on Easter Sunday, we have in the red color that which characterizes the activity from the spiritual world, and in contrast to the red color, in the blue color we see the gradual decline of the physical into the spiritual world. These are the two color contrasts; therefore, the Advent is blue, the time immediately after Easter until Ascension Day is red, as the contrast. Then we have the other colors in such a way that they always have some other aspect. We have the universal color white, or light, at Christmas, which the Catholic Church has taken as the color of innocent children, but this is wrong, since white represents light as such, that is, the reappearance of the sun, the solstice. Then we have the black color, the color that moves toward the time of the Passion, which represents the darkening that culminates in death. Then in summer we don't actually have white, but light colors. If you don't go back to the old mystery tradition, then of course we don't actually have green. If we went back to what you call “cultic optics” – one would have to call it the cultic Gloria – then you would have a light green for summer, around Midsummer. But that is no longer used. But it could be reintroduced, a light yellow-green. But then you actually have all the colors. The thing is that everything else depends on the color of the chasuble, everything else.

Now you are also asking about the other vestments here [2nd section of questions]. You have other vestments for the priest: the vestment for the afternoon service on Sundays. Have I not yet explained this? It is like this: a cope of this cut (see drawing on page 202) has the color of the chasuble that is worn down here. For you, since you will still be wearing the original garment for some time, which can always be worn on any occasion, it should be the color of the braids.

The stole is worn under the mantle. It is better if you do not wear the alb at baptisms and when hearing confessions, but instead wear a shortened alb, so that you have an alb up to the knee. This is the priestly garment for these acts such as baptism, hearing confessions, anointing. Funerals should actually be performed in this mantle. The alb and stole are worn under this mantle. Now, what else I noticed: the alb has the belt around here and this belt is also the color of the chasuble, and this then makes it possible for you to cross the stole where it should be worn at the front. But that would be all the garments you need.

Table 4

The sleeves are not important, but it is difficult to get a robe for every single thing now. Therefore, I am putting together here the things that I consider practically possible and that can serve quite well. The sleeves are really not important. Of course, you could also baptize in a kind of surplice that is sleeveless. All of this can be arranged at some point. But for now, having Alba and a surplice, which of course can have sleeves, the chasuble and a mantle like that for the Sunday afternoon service, which essentially consists of the reading of a short passage from the Gospel and a short sermon, during which the mantle is taken off. Then it is put on again and a psalm is read. This will be the Sunday afternoon or evening service. Everything else depends on the color of the chasuble, that is, the covering of the chalice and the cloth covering the altar; the altar server also wears a chasuble. Now you have a chasuble that I imagined you could use to celebrate every Mass in at first. You cannot think about going through the whole process for quite a long time. A chasuble already costs a small capital in Germany today. So I think you would do best if you used this color, which could be a little lighter – it turned out a little dark – and read every mass in it.

Emil Bock: It is a safe guide for us to hear that violet should take the place of blue at Christmas and reddish yellow at Easter.

Rudolf Steiner: I said that at Christmas a bright white is decisive; perhaps a very light violet. I said that at Christmas the point of view has always changed. Essentially, one has to hold that white should characterize the rising of the sun; that is a different point of view. The point of allowing light violet to enter is this: at Christmas you read the prime mass; you read it in light violet. I only said reddish yellow because I wanted to distinguish it from violet red. There are these two reds: vermilion, which I use for the very bright, shining red, in contrast to the more blue-based carmine red.

The color of the trim? It is best to choose the trim that represents the complementary color, as you have it now. And the length of the robe: to just above the knee. The surplice goes to the knees. Under this robe you wear the alb. You only wear the surplice when you are officiating. Tunic, surplice, stole. Then you wear the beret. The beret is actually the outward sign of priestly dignity. You do not wear the beret as a vestment, but as an external badge. The beret is actually an official badge, not a priestly one. You do not need to wear it during the service. In the Old Testament you had to wear it because you had to be covered. But you wear it when you walk around the church to the altar and take it off when you come to the altar. It is actually what, like Athena's helmet, outwardly demonstrates your dignity. — During the sermon? Yes, you wear it during the sermon. You also preach with it. You preach with the beret. If we had come to the point where some of you were preaching, then you would have needed it. You wear the beret at funerals and at baptisms, but you take it off during the ceremony. You go to the ceremony with your beret on and you leave the ceremony with your beret on.

[Regarding the third section of questions:] I will talk about oil tomorrow; I have talked about wine and bread, and about salt. I have also already spoken about Mercury and so on. – Ashes? Well, the thing is that the actual ashes are on their way to being crushed into an atomistic form. If you produce ashes when burning any substance (the drawing has not survived), then these ashes are on the path of matter to prepare itself to become receptive to spirit again. That is, the ashes, driven far enough in their incineration process, become capable of receiving an image of the universe and forming a kind of cell. [Gap in the stenographer's notes.] It is the case that the ashes are what serves the purpose of the regeneration of the cosmos.

[Regarding the question: What substances and objects are consecrated before cultic use, on what occasion and by what words?] – I have already said that. Actually everything should be consecrated. But we need nothing more than to allow the consecration to be a completely free act, as I have done, in a similar way to the chasubles. So in this way everything should be consecrated.

Interjection: water and wine?

Rudolf Steiner: No, not that, but everything that is used as an auxiliary object in cults. Emil Bock: What about water, salt and ashes in the baptismal ritual?

Rudolf Steiner: That is for baptism. It is necessary that you include in baptism the whole transformation that has taken place in the evolution of the earth through the Mystery of Golgotha; that is what matters in this matter.

Emil Bock: That first the Christ is indicated by the water, and only then the cosmic foundation by the salt?

Rudolf Steiner: Through water, we are led to the Father-God. It is the same process that has taken place through a truly profound fact, in that the female moon and the male sun have passed in the newer times into the female sun and the male moon. Thus you have a transition, a metamorphosis, that is in it.

Emil Bock: While one must think of the Father God in the case of salt, here it is the water. Water – generative power; salt – sustaining power; ash – renewing power. You related the water to the Father, the salt to the Christ, the ash to the Spirit.

Rudolf Steiner: There is a slight difficulty here because we cannot properly express what is there in time. If I describe: physical body, etheric body, astral body, sentient soul, intellectual soul, consciousness soul, spirit self, life spirit, spiritual human being, I also put them in that order; it looks as if I am putting them in succession.

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But that is not true. I would have to combine two currents here (it is drawn on the board) if I want to draw it correctly. I would have to do it like this: physical body, etheric body, astral body; sentient soul, intellectual soul, consciousness soul; and now I would no longer have to draw the spirit self in one plane, but in a different direction, turning it around here and drawing it three times in a different direction. I would have to do it like this:

Plate 4

This is also the case in the formula [of the baptismal ritual]. If you take the same sequence: water – Father, salt – Christ, ashes – Spirit; you will not get the real fact that you want. You have to [think] you live in the community of Christ through the birthing power of water, through the sustaining power of salt, through the renewing power of ashes. Now you turn the whole idea around, you come from a completely different side: in the Father's World Substance, in the Christ's stream of words, in the Spirit's radiance of light. - It is not possible for you to relate these things directly to one another, they are out of alignment with one another.

[Regarding the last question of the third section:] Holy water and incense at the grave? – incense is only there to take over the connection to the spiritual world. Incense is burnt. You follow the path of the soul from the physical body until the soul reaches the spiritual world. You follow it by means of incense. You go from what is still below to what is above. And in holy water we have regeneration again.

[Regarding the fourth question:] Use of a monstrance. Do you really need these devices? These were originally devices that remained fixed, that simply belonged to the architecture of the altar and represented the sun with the moon, and which were then transformed into a container that was used at solemn masses to initiate and conclude the mass and that was carried by Catholics in processions.

Emil Bock: I believe that we do not have that need, but we recalled that you said that we should strive for this symbolum first.

Rudolf Steiner: I said for the sermon that you should have this symbol as a guiding symbol: sun and moon, because by this you have the will to connect the physical cosmos with the spiritual cosmos at one point. It can also be used as a fixed symbol in your worship, when you perform the worship, either architecturally or painted: the monstrance as the connection of the sun with the moon. You have the same symbol, for example, among the “seals and pillars”, and you will also find it again in the Apocalypse: the woman who is on the moon, the sun in front of the constellation of the Virgin, which points to midsummer, when it approaches the Christmas season. Here you also have the sun, with the moon below it. This is the same as the monstrance. This is what I meant, you have to work towards this symbol. You will find opportunities to use this symbol everywhere, in speech and in representation. But I think that this is one of the points where, in the use of this symbol... [Gap in the stenographer's notes]. The Catholic Church today does not admit this whole context and uses the monstrance like an idol that is worshipped, which has its center where the consecrated host is carried. I don't think you have a need for it. Otherwise, what I said about not making it too Catholic will come about. But the symbolum is something to which you should pay special attention. [The next question in the fourth section:] Is it possible to use wooden chalices? — Of course you can use wooden chalices.

Emil Bock: Where should the confession take place?

Rudolf Steiner: It can take place anywhere. It is very difficult to perform this half cultic act without a stole, and you cannot wear the stole without at least a surplice as something else. You can speak to the people at first, that is a counsel, but then, in order to maintain the priestly dignity, put on the surplice and stole before you summarize the matter in the sentences in which it should culminate. That is how it should be, but for the time being you can simplify it. You can do it by giving the advice without the stole and then putting on the stole by letting it culminate in a cultic act. This makes a very solemn impression.

[The next questions:] Why the touching of the left cheek at the parish communion? — This is a special form of laying on of hands. And: Why the signs on the forehead, chin and chest of the infant? — This is the acceptance into the three powers of the Trinity. Perhaps it should be mentioned that you have to get the congregation used to making the three crosses on the forehead, chin and chest at the same time as you make the sign [sign of the cross]. You make the sign on the person to be baptized first at the baptism.

Emil Bock: Why these three parts of the body?

Rudolf Steiner: These three parts of the body express – of course, here too we are dealing with a shift – that when we make the triangle on the forehead, we are dealing with the human head system, with the past, if we make the square on the chin, it has to do with the future, because this actually represents the metabolic system, and under this we have to do with the chest system, with the present. However, in reality these things shift, they are not arranged in this way. But there is a trinity everywhere. You can even find this in pictures in the Catholic Church. You often find the Father depicted at the top, with the dove below and the crucifix above, which does not mean that this is a systematic order. As soon as you approach the spiritual, you are not always able to maintain a systematic order in terms of space or time. I think I have already made it clear to you that in the spiritual realm, numbers do not correspond to our numbers at all. You have strange experiences, for example, that two times two is not four in the spiritual world.

Next question: Is it possible to burn incense using bowls instead of the usual censer? — You can, of course, burn incense with whatever you can handle. This form of censer is the most convenient to use. Once you have mastered the technique, it is extremely easy; you can direct it so easily. You can use it to burn incense with anything that you can use to burn incense with, without burning yourself; because you don't get burned with the incense burner, it is very comfortable. Once you have some practice, it is excellent. I have never found a prescription for the shape of the incense burner anywhere. The prescription consists of burning incense, not of the incense burner. The only prescription is that you burn incense.

A participant: Can you put the incense bowl on the altar?

Rudolf Steiner: You must burn incense yourself, it must be your deed. But the shape of the censer, there is no rule about that.

[Regarding the question:] The right and left sides of the altar in their alternation during the act of consecration. — This is how it is: if you start from the right side of the altar based on the Gospel reading [i.e. from the left as seen by the faithful], then you proclaim – in the understanding that the proclamation is about the cross – to where the eye looks; active on the right, passive on the left. The remaining things depend on whether one speaks more to the heart, then one speaks to the left, or to the mind, then one speaks to the right. The change is on the right side of the altar, that is, to the left of the faithful [as seen from their perspective].

Emil Bock: Is the consecration addressed to the mind?

Rudolf Steiner: The consecration is directed to the mind. The missal lies on the right side. The consecration itself takes place in the middle. The book lies where the gospel book lies. But to understand it, the highest clarity is needed. The action is already directed to the mind. You also have to look at it in such a way that you have to distinguish whether a believer comes into consideration more in an action than in the reading of the Gospel, or the priest, who always looks to the other side. What is right and left for the believer is not for the priest. The light comes from the east. So it is a matter of either the original concept, that the altar itself is placed to the east, or the newer concept, that the church choir is in the east. The correct thing is to orient the altar to the east, that the altar is the east of the church and that the believer looks to the east. From the very earliest days of Christianity, the altar was always erected over the grave of some founder of a community or some martyr, so that in fact there never was an altar in the Christian church that was not intended as a gravestone. One celebrates mass over the grave of a revered person. The altar also has the form of a gravestone, and is thus intended as a memorial.

Emil Bock: For us, there is no objection to having a movable table?

Rudolf Steiner: You will have a movable altar as long as you do not have the main mass in a specially built building for it. You have many altars in large churches, and they are directed in all possible directions. Whether you place one altar in the room or many, it makes no difference.

[Regarding the fifth question:] What is the more precise distribution of the pericopes for the gospel reading over the course of the year? — It is good to read the Gospels in such a way that you distribute them throughout the [church] year. Leave the letters, the Acts of the Apostles and the Apocalypse for those parts of the year that are not exhausted by the Gospels. You cannot transfer anything from the Gospel to the time of July or August. Nothing from the Gospels fits there.

A participant: So the Epistle is read instead of the Gospel?

[Another question is asked, but the stenographer only noted:] because of the name?

Rudolf Steiner: The gospel is the whole of the New Testament. I have also used [the expression] in this way. Until the end of the Apocalypse, I call it the “gospel”. The gospels go until Pentecost. It is not true that if they continue, they do not mean anything that falls on the day. I would consider a uniform order of pericopes to be incorrect. The Catholic Church has done this because it wanted to have hierarchical authority. They will not need that at all. The letters of Paul and the Apocalypse are used outside of the church year. Then you will find some clues in the festivals that I have recorded in my calendar. I have included festivals that are to be regarded as Christian festivals, not as Roman Catholic ones. There you will notice some clues. Otherwise one would first have to study the matter carefully. The Catholic Church has simply distributed everything. You should not stick to it, but you should start there with the freedom of teaching.

[Regarding your questions:] Is it the duty of parishioners to communicate? — I would not consider it right to introduce a duty, but I would consider it right for you to work in such a way that no one fails to communicate. - Is it possible to exclude parishioners from communion? What would be the point of that?

Emil Bock: We just wanted to think these things through. Some of us have considered that someone has been accepted into the community who would not have been accepted as a member at another point in time. If this person now wants to come to communion, can they always be admitted?

Rudolf Steiner: It is to be assumed that in those cases that are not, I would say, self-evident cases, you always have the opportunity to have some kind of consultation with these people. That will happen automatically, and then you will have to prepare him in the right way. If you have a murderer who is to be executed the next day, you will not refuse him Communion for that reason. That is about the most radical case. It cannot be right for you to refuse Communion. It will be very difficult for you to have any jurisdiction over the community at all – the church never had that, the political community always lent itself to it – you will never have it. The church has never burned a heretic; it has only said that he is a heretic and worthy of death. The church itself never burned heretics.

A participant asks about church discipline. If a parishioner continues to live an immoral life but wishes to take part in Holy Communion, do one have the right to exclude them?

Rudolf Steiner: In my opinion, the only way to do that would be to oblige him, if he wants to take communion, to accept counseling from you, not in community with the other believers. In this way, you would exercise disciplinary power that is more aimed at ensuring that he does not lose contact with the community, that he is only allowed to sit in a certain place, for example, away from the others when the mass is read. If he puts up with it, it will have the desired effect. The others who don't put up with it leave the church. That is a different kind of punishment. For those who don't put up with it, refusing to take communion is also effective.

[Next question:] Is it advisable to make the ritual texts available to the parishioners? The Credo? - The Credo must of course be made available to all parishioners, they should only hear the rest.

A participant: Can the text be read in community meetings?

Rudolf Steiner: There is no need to exclude that, but it should be made clear that the text is for listening and not for reading. I gave the friends who wanted it prayers for young children. With these prayers, I gave the instruction that the children should not learn or read them by heart; they are spoken in front of the children. They should take them in by listening, not by learning, because: however much is learned in this way, it is ineffective. It must be a process that only works through listening. The cult text should also be heard and seen in this way. You can, of course, explain it, but you have to understand that the cult text should be heard, so that the cult text has no meaning if it is not heard. If someone reads it, it is not a cult text at all; he must hear it from someone else. If he reads it, it would only be a cult text if he heard it at the same time from the transcendental world; then it would become a cult text for him. But if someone living on the physical plane reads the text, it is not a cult text.

A participant: What if a member of the community asks for the text?

Rudolf Steiner: This can only have a meaning if you consider it good for the development of his soul. Then it is not used as a cultic text, but as a meditation.

Now, my dear friends, it is still my duty to speak to you about the so-called last rites. The last rites are to be carried out in such a way that they follow a confession and communion. In such a case, where Communion is given outside of Mass, it is natural that the Priest connects this Communion with the thought of his own Communion and that it is celebrated in the same way as it is celebrated during Mass, but only in the thought of the Mass. After this Communion, therefore, the Anointing would have to take place, in the vestments that we already spoke about yesterday. It is of course the case that this sacrament of unction must be administered with the greatest delicacy, so that it does not upset the person to whom it is administered, does him no harm, and also so that he is not placed in a context that would inevitably evoke the realization on all sides: this is a dying person. For he may indeed recover.

So one connects with the distribution of Communion. The priest appears with his altar boy for the anointing and connects with Communion a number of sentences from the 17th chapter of the Gospel of John, which in the version you are to receive should read as follows from the original text. I note in parenthesis that a real translation of the gospel is only possible if this translation happens out of the world consciousness from which these sentences were once written or spoken, and that later translations suffered from the outset from the fact that the one who translated did not have this world consciousness within him, from which these sentences were written. It is a very superficial way of speaking when we say that the Gospel was translated in later times in a “plain” way, for this simplicity is an untruth, and we must do our utmost today to counteract it; so that this seventeenth chapter of the Gospel of John reads thus:

Jesus placed himself in the spiritual vision
and spoke: Fatherly ground of the world:
Let the works of Your Son be revealed,
so that through the works of thy Son, thou also mayst be made manifest.

You have made him a creator
in all human bodies of flesh,
that he may lead all who who came to him through you.

They will live in the future because
that their soul's eye is prepared
to behold You as the truly united foundation of the world
and the creative Christ Jesus, whom You have sent to them.

Through me You were again revealed in earthly existence,
when the earth clouded over Thy Revelation.
This was thy will, which worked through me.

So too, Fatherly Ground of the World,
now let the revelation shine,
which was already made through me
before You were revealed in the earthly world.

Through me, the word
that reveals you, was revealed in human souls,
who came to me through you.
You were in them, through You they came to me,
and they have taken in the knowledge of You.

They recognized that that what I spoke to them was spoken by You through me

was spoken to them by you.

Fatherly world-ground, I implore,
that they who have come to You through me may always live with You as I live with You, and that they may behold there Your revelation,
which you lovingly let shine before me,
before the earth was.

Through me was revealed the word
that reveals You,
and I will bear this word into human souls, so that the love with which You love me be preserved in them,
and so my eternal life
preserve their life eternally.

The altar server says, “Yes, Father, may it be according to your word.”

Then the oil is taken from a small capsule in which the oil was brought, with the thumb and index finger of the right hand, and the words are spoken:

In the healing oil
that is outside your body

— by this is meant the sick person — the spirit soars to the heights
Feel yourself living and vibrant

— make a sign of the cross over the right eye with the oil, the altar boy says:

Yes, so be it.

The ceremony continues:

Christ's blessing receive
as life-bearing power
In it lives, lives, which conquers all that is dead.

— make the sign of the cross over the left eye on the forehead, the altar server says:

Yes, so be it.

The words continue:

Christ's strong soul
Leads in the weak body ¹
From existence to existence

Through all the worlds.

The altar boy:

Yes, so be it.

A cross is made with the oil at the top of the forehead, between the eyes, but at the top. Each time after saying the four lines, the altar server says:

Yes, so be it.

That is the ceremony, and when it is properly performed in this manner, the ceremony has the delicacy that it must have if confusion is not to be caused, or at least some kind of agitation in the soul of the sick person. That such a ceremony can be performed without causing such agitation in the soul of the sick person, that would be the task of the ministry of souls for life, so that the sick person is sufficiently prepared to also receive such a ceremony in the right way in his thoughts. Now, in this context, my dear friends, there are still a few words to be said about the one question you asked me regarding the three ages of Peter, Paul and John. Yes, and then you also asked about the periods of church history after the twelve apostles. Now these things are such that they have always only formed the core of teachings that have been handed down and that can, of course, be expressed in the most diverse ways. The fact that they appear in Schelling's work is due to the fact that Schelling once read a writing from around the 13th century in which such things were still spoken of as something self-evident. In terms of content, this can be understood by saying the following: First of all, we are dealing with the appearance of Christ Jesus on earth, with his Passion story, with the Mystery of Golgotha, with the Resurrection and with the appearance of the Christ in the etheric body before those who could recognize him in such an etheric body. In this way the Mystery of Golgotha first affected the disciples who were close to Christ Jesus, so that it appeared to them as the conclusion of the old time. Above all, they saw in the first man, Adam, that which had become so within the physical organization of this Adam through the cosmic events - whereby the spiritual cosmos is meant here - with all its adversaries - that in the course of the evolution of the earth up to the Mystery of Golgotha, it had to become more and more fragile and diseased. And they saw in the Mystery of Golgotha, also according to the teaching that was given to them after the Resurrection, that which in turn heals man, so that his fragile body does not allow sins to fall into the earth, which would be corrupted by them, but that sins are kept for redemption. Thus they saw in the most eminent sense in Christ Jesus the man as he now appeared on earth, in order to raise up mankind again that part which man was bound to lose through the special manner of entering into earthly existence through Adam.

This was the most essential idea, and the teaching that can be attributed to Peter was nourished by it. Peter spoke in this sense, he understood this teaching in such a way that, in the esoteric sense, the Petrine Age can be said to have begun at the creation of the earth, when people were led, through the Mysteries, to see the Christ as a supermundane being, and which found its conclusion in the appearance of the Christ on earth. Thus Peter taught in a manner that was almost taken for granted, how the Christ descended to earth.

This was opposed by the teaching of Saul. The teaching of Saul begins with the fact that the Christ is indeed on his way down to earth from the supermundane worlds, but that this event could not be realized at all in the same way as it was realized as the Mystery of Golgotha in Palestine. For from the places of initiation that Saul had gone through came the view that the Christ would appear in the world in glory and not go through what appeared to the Jews to be a shameful death: the death on the cross. Saul balked at the crucifixion, and only came to profess the Christ after the event of Damascus, through which it became clear to him, in a way that was not earthly - and therefore also not from the mysteries - but from the etheric, that the mystery of Golgotha is really the appearance of the Christ on earth. From that time on, there arose the necessity to understand the event of Golgotha more and more with the human mind. However, during the time when Paul lived on earth, the human mind was still so developed that it could easily understand such things as we then find as the interpretation of the Mystery of Golgotha in all of Paul's letters, where the idea of the re-establishment of human nature, which had fallen as the Adamic nature, through Christ Jesus, also shines through.

The direct continuation of what is in the Pauline letters forms everything that then emerged as Western theology, through Augustine and the other church teachers, and continues up to our time; so that one can say that Protestant theology is also a continuation of Paulinism, even if Paulinism is already very much veiled there. Yes, well into the 19th century and into our time, of course, this Pauline interpretation prevailed; in our time, however, there was quite strong opposition to this Pauline view among Catholic priests, in that many Catholic priests, whose teaching is considered orthodox, contrast the original Petrine Christianity with the Pauline one. One can say: Petrinism ends with Peter himself, and then Paulinism begins to take effect. And Western Christianity now awaits Johannine Christianity, which will be a Christianity based on the spirit. This is how Schelling understood it in his mature years, at forty or fifty.

The other question was about the periods of Church history after the twelve apostles. Such a division is not only peculiar to Christianity, but is basically characteristic of all mystery religions. It is that the evolution of the world, in which the evolution of the earth is also included, proceeds in periods of twelve epochs each, that after a cycle of twelve epochs the first epoch is repeated and again twelve epochs are traversed on a higher, on a modified level. It can be said that at the time when the Mystery of Golgotha was to shine most intensely into physical earthly vision through its direct earthly presence in a certain way, there was a time of darkness for the outer world. And one can say: precisely in contrast to what was to shine as a light into the souls of the apostles, there was the darkness of Judas Iscariot. The cosmic aspect is the one that sees the most apostate spirit of this time as the ruler of the world, the apostate spirit that always follows a time of Michael. This cycle, which always takes up about three centuries, has arrived at the point in our time where the transition has taken place from a Gabrielic cosmic age, from the age of Gabriel, to the age of Michael, which in turn will last about three centuries. The development intertwines in many ways, so that if you express it in a calculation, nothing completely adequate comes out. (It is written on the board: 330 times 12 = 3,960.)

These are things that are also known within the Catholic Church as esoteric wisdom. But I do not think that at the present moment it would have any particular significance for you if anything were added to what I have said about some of the esotericism of the Catholic Church in the course of my lectures. Of course, there would be a lot to say about the esotericism of the Catholic Church, especially that the Catholic Church is well aware that when a new form of clairvoyance emerges today, it reveals something that it wants to conceal from its faithful, and that it has set itself the task, above all, of fighting this newly emerging clairvoyance. This is one of the teachings that the initiates among the Catholic priesthood are already receiving today.

Now, regarding the question you raised: music and chorales in worship, it would have been very nice if something like this could have been tackled already now. When the Mass is celebrated on solemn occasions, it is possible to introduce the Mass before the relay prayer is said, with appropriate choral music, with instrumental table music that may also include singing, which refers to the motif of the relay prayer, and that each individual part of the Mass can then be commented on in the appropriate way. Likewise, the mass can end with a composition of the “The Act of Human Consecration, that was it”. So it is that before Communion everything in the music should be preparatory, and after Communion there should be a dying away of the music, so that Communion would be introduced by a musical motif, which would then fade away, ending with the words “The Act of Consecration of Man, that was its purpose”.

This is something you can study. And those who are seeking to compose from the spirit of the Mass and are looking for a musical stimulus will find the most intense stimulus in Bruckner, who was stimulated by the motif of the Mass. His compositions of the Mass offer more than those of Beethoven and Brahms. You will also gain a great deal here if you follow older [composers], but you must be aware that in this direction, some things have to be done anew. In particular, it should be noted that Bruckner's compositions of the Mass were actually consciously composed for non-ecclesiastical purposes, so that one cannot see completely adequate models in them.

Then there is the question – the other questions, which are more practical in nature, will be best answered this evening – about the Bible: What can be said about textual corruption in the New Testament? How did it come about and with what intention, and how can the sources of error be eliminated?

You see best of all, whenever translations are given, including today's translation, how the consciousness of the connection between the human soul and the cosmic worlds has faded in humanity. Just as a blind person, if he does not hear about it from the outside, could not describe trees, rivers, clouds, so today's person, when he has a text in front of him, cannot interpret it with what he sees; he will interpret what he does not see. Thus, the powerlessness in the face of what lies in the Gospels has gradually led to the lack of translations. And since, in the intellectual age of the mid-15th century, an enormous arrogance and pride has asserted itself in the face of this lack, the view has arisen that it is a purely arrogant conceit to exclude what is cosmic in the gospel texts, that one should speak to the simplest of people.

Yes, my dear friends, in the time when one officially translated as you have it today in the Lutheran translation, in that time it was not this translation of the Gospels that spoke to the simplest people, but rather what Jakob Böhme or Paracelsus spoke. They translated the Gospels differently and understood them correctly, and they translated them for simple minds in the right way, quite unlike those who boast that they speak to simple minds. In Paracelsus, you have a personality for whom religion was something that had a much broader meaning than the religion that must be gained in the age of intellectualism by those who want to replace this intellectualism of the head with a very strong intellectualism of the mind by freeing the concept of God from everything, in contrast to which everything must also be freed... [here the stenographer marked a gap]. That is what has become most un-Christian in modern Christianity. Just consider that in Paracelsus there lived a personality for whom religion applied to such an extent that it included medicine. In Paracelsus there lived a conception of religion that enabled him to hold on to the spiritual so firmly that it could permeate him to the point of illness, so that the physician is the one who carries out the will of God on earth in relation to the sick person. For him, medical service was religious service. And that is what is absolutely necessary today: not just to talk endlessly about the eternal, but to bring this eternal into all of life and to make it active and effective in all that is alive.

Now here the synoptic question is also touched upon in relation to the well-known agreement of the first three Gospels down to the details and the contradictions to the fourth, the Gospel of John (second section of the sixth point of the question).

Now, you will understand that these circumstances must be so if you consider the following: Especially about the Mystery of Golgotha and everything connected with it, was spoken of as something secret in the first centuries of Christianity. You know how they dealt with mystery wisdom in ancient times. This mystery wisdom was not something that was taken directly onto the streets, but was considered something that was only given to someone who had been properly prepared with the whole person in the right way. Thus, even in the remnants of mystery wisdom, in which Christianity first appeared before the most intimate of its adherents in the first Christian centuries, the mystery of Golgotha itself was also taught. However, they did not proceed with all the facts in the way that today in external science, where one proceeds according to the so-called historical sources, but rather, great value was placed on determining the day of Jesus' death not from a historical source but from stellar wisdom, thus saying: at this and that stellar constellation, the death of Jesus occurs. Such was the form.

But this knowledge of the stars was no longer very much alive at the time when the Gospels were written down in the form in which they now exist, and so you can very easily find that one person saw it one way and another person saw it another way. As for the similarities, they mostly relate to the teaching content. The fact of the matter is that at that time, when this teaching content was passed down from personality to personality, people had a very different memory than they do today, and what they were told over and over again and continued to say was naturally continued into future times. This must be explained, otherwise we fall back into the old days, which must not be. We must seek to overcome what was customary in the old days on a higher level. In this day and age, it is necessary to write down everything that is said; even the listeners here sit and write, horribile dictu. One should not imagine that the sayings reported in the Gospels were recorded by a proud stenographer. That was not necessary even in those days, the development of memory was quite different, and people memorized everything much more faithfully than they can today. The human brain, the physical brain, is much more fragile today than it was in those times. In those times, the brain cells lived almost to a real life in certain hours of the day, to the life that only clouded consciousness – those cells that cloud consciousness, that underlie the will, those are the white blood cells – not only at night, but also during the day, and even weaker at night. The brain cells did not have such an intense life as the white blood cells, but they did have a certain life, and that caused a very different memory to be present than it is today, so that what had been learned and what should be learned was faithfully preserved. Those who know this fact also know that the synoptic question of the Gospels is answered by the faithful memory of ancient times.

These were the questions that required me to answer them in a way that was conducive to the lecture, insofar as the answer had not already been given in what had been said so far. The further questions should actually be developed in the discussion, so the discussion should really be started in such a way that it can still be continued during your stay here. It is better to develop the things that are still questions here in speech and counter-speech. I know very well, my dear friends, that a great deal more could be said about such questions as historical questions, questions about the Bible and so on, but here we must come to an end. Certainly, there are still many questions to be answered, which in the course of time can be answered on other occasions, but to those who are beginning to question, I would also like to advise them to engage in self-knowledge, which can be done in the right can be done in the right direction by the following little story, which I give without any allusion, but which, if used in the right way in self-knowledge, can lead one to expect the future with regard to certain questions.

Once upon a time there was a little boy who asked questions about everything, and his father was quite disconsolate about it and said one day: “I longingly await the day when my son stops asking questions, because otherwise I'll go crazy over all this questioning.” — Then another person came along, a family friend, who decided to answer the questions the little boy asked until the little boy himself would be in a position where he could no longer ask questions, that is, until no more questions occurred to him. That took a very long time, and the danger was already approaching that the little son would run out of questions, but he kept asking: Why is Friday noon before Friday evening? Why do the stars shine in the evening? And so on. Now, nevertheless, the danger was approaching that the little son would run out of questions, but he wanted to overcome this danger, and so he finally asked the terrible question: Why is the What? Well, we should incorporate such a narrative a little into our soul when we should be sad that in these days the time is approaching when questioning will no longer be possible for some time. But we still want to deal with the questions that are to be discussed in speech and counter-speech now. So from now on I will again be more of a listener and only occasionally interrupt you.

A participant: I would like to ask why Luke has the Risen One eat.

Rudolf Steiner: The matter is such that it can only be properly understood if one is clear about the fact that in order to interpret such things from the consciousness of the time in the right way, it is really necessary to reawaken the idea that was associated with the concept of eating at that time. Today, we simply imagine that we consume physical matter and that this physical matter passes into the human body. Now, as today's physiology tells us, the concept of eating was not always, but in the time when the Gospel of Luke was written down, the old wisdom was still valid in many ways, that man takes what he builds his body with from the etheric world, and that what he takes from the etheric world also appears in the image of eating when one sees the etheric body. So you also see in the image of the physical eating that which is the correlate for eating in the etheric world. If you base your interpretation on this, you will see that the passage could, of course, be expressed in a completely different way than it is expressed, but that it does not need to be eliminated. This is the case with many passages.

A participant asks a question about the marriage ritual [the wording of the question was not written down in shorthand].

Rudolf Steiner: Of course, this is about what marriage is as a sacrament. You have to bear in mind what the content of the church ritual of the sacrament of marriage means. The content of the church marriage sacrament is no more the consummation of the marriage than, for example, the blessing of the ripening of the fruit in the course of the year corresponds to the reality of the ripening of the fruit. The performance of the marriage sacrament in the Christian view is that which is performed by marriage in the civil sense, is elevated to the ecclesiastical, to the ceremonial. So that with regard to the dissolution or the indissolubility of marriage, nothing is given within the content of the sacrament, because what is elevated into the sacrament is what is considered to be the essence of marriage. The Catholic Church has also retained this; of course, originally it fully recognized the marriage performed by civil law and then blessed it in church. In more recent times, when the emancipation of [church from civil] marriage occurred... [larger gap marked by the stenographer in the transcript]. The Catholic Church regards what has been agreed between the spouses as the ecclesiastical and blesses that. With regard to this matter, the Church takes the most liberal position, only that it has been confused by the fact that it speaks out on marriage in all sorts of ways because, in recent times, it has presumed not to bless marriage but to perform it, that is, to assume the function of the secular power of the prince of this world... [further gap]. There the fact is that the church, by entering into the secular, has also secularized the sacraments, and then these secularized sacraments have been taken over by the state. With these explanations, you will also see the relevant passages of the testament in harmony.

A participant asks a question about emergency baptism (the wording was not noted).

Rudolf Steiner: As it stands, emergency baptism can be administered in any situation. It is different from baptism in the course of worship. It is performed when there is danger to the life of the person to be baptized, but a priest cannot be called in time. In this case, baptism can also be performed by a lay person. It does not matter how it is performed. It just has to be rectified by the priest and recognized by the community. What can happen in addition is that the priest includes baptism in the next communion, so to speak making it an ideal baptism if death has occurred; otherwise it is ritually reenacted.

Friedrich Rittelmeyer: We have a colleague who is Jewish. How should adult baptism be performed?

Rudolf Steiner: Actually no different from the baptism of a child. The ritual does not contradict this at all. He must first be baptized before he is ordained a priest.

A participant: Why is child baptism necessary for the time being and not adult baptism? In the past, it was the custom to baptize adults first.

Rudolf Steiner: I have said that this cannot be avoided in today's world. We cannot introduce the baptism of adults in today's world. You have to take that into account, otherwise you will either bang your head against a wall or smash your head. I believe that we must retain infant baptism, and once it has been performed, we cannot repeat it. We have to let baptism take effect before confirmation.

Friedrich Rittelmeyer: How does what is necessary today to bring healing facts to people differ from the proclamation that was possible a few centuries ago?

Rudolf Steiner: Bringing all the facts of salvation to people will have to take the course that you will first do what is possible in order to increasingly move on to what is necessary. The necessary has already been outlined, but it will really differ even in one and the same place, depending on whether you have one community or another there or there. Let us assume that one finds a community of nothing but socialists. He will have to proceed somewhat differently than the one who finds a community of old dethroned German princes. [The following remarks have only been recorded in fragments by the stenographer.] In scholasticism, this type of discussion occurs very frequently. That is something that clarifies the matter, if one says it radically. You must experience that. With what can result from it, one comes to differentiating.

[Questions are asked about the loyalty formula. Friedrich Rittelmeyer proposes an amendment. The stenographer did not write down the wording of the question and Rittelmeyer's vote. ]

Rudolf Steiner: What I consider necessary is this: At first, in a purely intellectual sense, some might believe that someone can separate [from the community] by simply continuing to do the same things within the community after the separation. Now this is against the tradition of the cult. The granting of the right to practise this cult and likewise the speaking out of the mediated Christ-power, which belongs to this cult, must be regarded as belonging to this community. Therefore, the community has the right to deny anyone the right to practise the cult or to teach in connection with this cult. He can, of course, teach, but not in connection with this cult. So he simply loses the right to continue to practise what he has taken on within the cult. The moral evaluation lies in the fact that the conference, the meeting, the community of leaders and senior leaders, has to pronounce on how his relationship to this community can now be understood in relation to real things, that is, that he loses the right to do this and that and so on. The natural connection with this community is such, and that is expressed [in the formula]. You can formulate it differently, you can grasp it more clearly if you are aware that it is so. The interpretation must also be passed on. So in this respect I could not object to this formulation, but it must be recognized not by me but by the community.

[The question was asked about the possibility of distributing it to individual cities. The questions were not noted by the stenographer.

Rudolf Steiner: There is no reason to exclude Vienna. Because it is geographically remote? Well, after all, Vienna is no further from Stuttgart geographically than Königsberg is. That is a question that is only related to whether you find the opportunity to occupy Vienna from the outset. That it is good to occupy it is something that I fully accept. Firstly, there is no reason not to occupy Vienna. Secondly, the situation in Austria is such that the configuration of religious life that you now find in Austria is actually only about fifty years old, and in the years before that, this religious life had a completely different configuration. Austria would have been an extraordinarily favorable ground for such a renewal of Christianity if it had been carefully implemented, because the orthodoxy of Catholic priests has become very alien to many people, not only to the laity but also to priests. Now, the completely untrue Christian-social element has taken over everything that existed in Austria until the 1980s – it is an embodied lie. It has also seized the religious element, and today the situation is such that one would think there was no receptivity at all for the renewal of Christianity in Austria. In Austria one could speak fairly freely about anthroposophy if one did not touch on anything that reminded one of Catholicism... [space in the text marked by the stenographer]. Then it was claimed that anthroposophy was just a form of Jesuitism in disguise. But in fact this earlier current is still there in latent form and, if approached in the right way, is good soil. [Another question is asked that was not noted by the stenographer.]

Rudolf Steiner: In such areas, the need for ritual often arises as a reaction. In the east and in the north, a great deal is suppressed that lives in people's minds. You are not justified in assuming that you would not find a yearning for ritual in the north and in the east.

A participant: I think Silesia is a very good field. I have heard from the people of the social work group that they are much more popular in Breslau, in Silesia, than in Berlin.

Rudolf Steiner: I am very surprised that you think that the Protestant spirit has had such a deep influence in northern and northeastern Germany. That is actually impossible. The influence only goes so far in the north and east because it has been and is being artificially generated. It is the Prussian state power that has worked so extraordinarily, that has brought about what is there and suppressed the religious inclination of the people. What basically holds it back is Prussian militarism and the assessoral spirit, and not the spirit of the people. It cannot be dismissed out of hand that precisely on the way to the East something of what made it possible to Christianize East Prussia in earlier centuries is reviving.

Marie Steiner: I think you should go to places like Essen and Bochum. I don't know of any places that need more spiritual life than these. I felt so sorry for these people from the factories.

Rudolf Steiner: This question is one whose answer depends on whether it is possible to fill these positions.

I must say that I sometimes heard the question: “Why don't you have a Swiss person in your class?” when I came up to you. The last time we were here, there were still Swiss people among you. So with the general process of elimination, all the Swiss left. What you have now is enclosed within the borders of the German Reich, and of course it cannot remain that way, otherwise you would found a German church. Christianity cannot be enclosed within national borders, nor within political national borders. We must think not narrower, but much further. It is something that weighs heavily on me that you have been left so alone by the members living outside the borders of the German Reich. Those of you who were already pastors are few in number. The Swiss pastors had to withdraw. This is very understandable given the special nature of these personalities. But there is a tendency that even the younger Swiss people do not approach this work, who, as Swiss, could found communities in Switzerland just as you can found communities in Germany. This is because there are not as many idealists among young Swiss people as there are among young Germans. They know that they will not receive their salaries in the same way on the new path they are about to take as they would on the old path. The mistake of Old Catholicism is that it has not accepted a new element in an entirely unbiased way, but essentially wants to go back to what was corrupted by ultramontanism. Old Catholicism suffers from its own negation; it is actually only anti-ultramontane.

Gertrud Spörri is Swiss, but initially prefers to work in Germany rather than Switzerland.

Rudolf Steiner: But the Swiss are not coming either. And you must not present it as an ideal that they should also have a war so that they can catch up on what the others went through [during the war]. It would be necessary to do something for the Swiss in particular. I just want to have said that. I realize that it cannot be done the way you are now. But national borders must not be the limits of our work.

Friedrich Rittelmeyer suggests going to the universities and trying to get students to participate.

Rudolf Steiner: Actually, the whole world comes into consideration, where today there is only that name Christianity. Where is true Christianity today? The whole world comes into consideration. When in earlier times such a movement as the present one is to be, was kindled, it necessarily had to have a completely different character: it is the Hussite movement; only it was cut off at that time. But the Hussite movement had, besides the negative elements mentioned in history, also its positive elements. The conditions already exist everywhere beneath an upper stratum that has become purely Ahrimanic.

The question concerns Thuringia and Erfurt. Is it important to start immediately or to think about Thuringia later?

Rudolf Steiner: Thuringia naturally has the one characteristic that the population is the most unintelligent in all of Germany. There is a lot of native wit in Thuringia with regard to everyday life, but in terms of understanding all higher questions, Thuringia is quite backward. That is why it is difficult to work there. But why not overcome these difficulties in this way? Thuringia does not need to be an exception. I could well imagine that a center can be created in Erfurt, for example. I cannot believe it in Weimar, because even today people there are blasé about religious matters. Weimar has the harmful after-effects of the fact that Goethe and Schiller lived there. The fact is that Goethe and Schiller, who are well known by name, are basically two plaster figures in Weimar. The people are satisfied with that. A participant: Is it time to start in Munich?

Rudolf Steiner: No, in Munich it is still the case, even today -— although today much is immersed in untruth -, that everything is still possible, as it was before the war, when Munich was the German city where everything was possible. In Munich you could really do anything. But in most cases, either a very open or at least a hidden path leads from everything to the Hofbräuhaus; of course to the republican Hofbräuhaus, just as in Vienna people were surprised to get the republican roll instead of the Kaiser roll. In Munich, everything leads to the Hofbräuhaus. That is the difficulty. And so in Munich the Catholic movement is also flooded by that standard life, that standard living, the mighty Hofbräuhaus. But I believe, on the other hand, that your movement is precisely about the necessary strength and energy. Other movements will have a much harder time of it than this one of yours. So it's not a matter of saying we can't occupy Munich, but rather of asking how to properly occupy Munich, or rather, who should be admitted as Mr. Klein's helper, because he will cause offense in Munich due to his excessive youthfulness. That will cause some difficulties. But he will be supported.

Emil Bock: This is our concern, especially with regard to the large cities. We are convinced that we do not have enough older personalities who could tackle a larger city in such a way that it would attract public attention. That is why we have the question of how we want to deal with Klein and Munich: Who would be best suited for the job? We are such a small group and, after all, we don't have so many different people among us that it seems possible for us to adequately serve these cities. Therefore, we have hesitated as to whether we want to leave out the big cities because we cannot properly staff them.

Rudolf Steiner: What were the difficulties? Objective difficulties? There were none. It is precisely in Catholic cities – both Munich and Cologne are Catholic cities, although Catholicism manifests itself quite differently in the two – that you meet people who initially have a high degree of neutral feeling. At first everything is more or less the same to them because they have become indifferent; then gradually they are seized. One can achieve a great deal there. I am counting on a great deal in Munich and Cologne, that people will gradually be seized. It could also happen in Vienna, for example, that a larger number of people will simply go there out of curiosity at first, which should not be the worst thing, but the best. It could be the same in Cologne. Catholicism prepares the ground for people to become dulled to the Church out of habit, but actually have a deep urge to experience something true. Among the old Catholic population, there are many who are striving for religious renewal. The only question is: do we have the necessary personalities, and if not, how do we get them?

[Another question is asked about the dangers of sectarianism.]

Rudolf Steiner: It depends on the spirit, on the seriousness, not on the appearance. Sectarianism will arise immediately if you see something in the seclusion that is a danger for the cause. Why should it be sectarian to spread higher insights among the people.

• 1. See note

[At the beginning of the meeting, the “Community Order for the Soul Shepherds of the Christian Community” drafted by the founding circle was discussed. First, the draft for point 1 was read out:]

"Affiliation. The Christian Community was founded in Dornach between September 6 and 22, 1922 as an original community, consisting of 45 priests authorized to perform the rituals entrusted to the Christian Community.

The Church of Christ recognizes as authorized helpers for the practice of the three rituals and for giving religious instruction the personalities who, on behalf of Dr. Steiner, give the free religious instruction and celebrate the cultural rites at the independent Waldorf School in Stuttgart and at sister schools.

Ernst Uehli [a teacher of religion at the Waldorf School] points out that the individuals currently teaching religion at the Waldorf School have been appointed by Dr. Steiner. Since Dr. Steiner is in overall charge of the Waldorf School, he will also have to decide who will continue to perform the cultic service there.

Rudolf Steiner: I think that the Waldorf School will always be seen as a kind of model school for this pedagogical approach, which is cultivated within the anthroposophical movement. And for the part that figures as religious education, of course, the complete idea of Waldorf school education must be considered, so that the previous practice must certainly be continued there. For those whom one is still obliged to appoint as religion teachers, exactly the same must apply as for the present religion teachers. That should be the case. There is hardly anything in contradiction to what you have here. I just don't want to be restricted in the event that I consider someone to be a proper religion teacher and then the same does not apply to the person concerned as to the current Waldorf teachers. That is something I cannot even consider. In making the appointment I can only consider personal suitability. So the question here is whether you mean by the sentence that the subsequent religion teachers should be members of the Christian Community. Has anything been done about that yet?

Emil Bock: Perhaps this formulation is not clear enough after all. This sentence could perhaps be worded as follows: Those who are appointed by Dr. Steiner to these functions will be recognized without these conditions being met. The sentence that religious education and rituals should not be carried out by all those who are not appointed by Dr. Steiner is intended only for those schools that may receive a different leadership.

Rudolf Steiner: No, the only schools that will come into question for this paragraph of yours are those that are recognized as Waldorf schools. And I will appoint the people for these until I die [to teach religion and celebrate the rites]. So until then, it will be a matter of recognizing those I appoint. And afterwards, recognition will perhaps also be sought in accordance with what is decreed for the constitution after my death, insofar as I have not settled it.

[Further points of the draft of the community order are read out. This was only partially recorded by the stenographer. Regarding point 2c:]

"The appointment of successors and the expansion of the leadership and guidance is carried out by election from among the consecrated workers, namely by the senior leaders for the office of senior leader, and by senior leaders and leaders in community for the office of leader. If a territorial structure of the work develops, the proposals of the consecrated workers working in a particular area should be sought by those to be elected before each election of a leader or leader for that area.

Rudolf Steiner: That can certainly be done. The only difficulty arises in the one point, the very last paragraph that you read. It is not entirely clear whether the appointment or co-option of the senior leaders and leaders can be changed in the paragraphs. If it can be changed at any time, then that is something that thwarts the purpose of this paragraph, which you draw up so that something other than what you want does not take place. If you formulate the last paragraph in such general terms, this paragraph in particular calls into question something that is otherwise quite clear. It could then be changed every year. Since you consider this mode of election to be something very salutary, you would be contradicting yourself if you did not add something to the paragraph to the effect that this mode of election cannot be changed or only at very long intervals, in other words, something to protect it; otherwise you would very easily end up with a democratic election after a short time.

[The stenographer's transcript shows a gap here.

Rudolf Steiner: I might have a few words to say before you leave. This can be done tomorrow.

A request has been made for clarification of the Credo.

Rudolf Steiner: What I wanted to say about the creed has already been said to some extent in other things. The creed I gave you was taken from genuine spiritual knowledge. There is something different about this creed compared to rituals. Rituals are given as something that now arises as a form of ceremony. This creed gives something that the religious person of the present day presents as their confession. You can agree or disagree with it. Or perhaps you can say to yourself today, “You have faith that I have given this creed.” You want to declare your agreement with this creed today and regard this agreement initially as an agreement with the teaching. It will hardly be possible to object to the creed in any way. However, I believe that you have described a table 5

sentence that comes from the Credo as unclear, the sentence “to spiritually heal the disease of sin from the body of humanity”. You asked whether it should not read “to spiritually heal the body of humanity from the disease of sin”.

What is meant is this: To spiritually heal the sin-sickness of the body of humanity – to spiritually heal the sin-sickness present in the body. That is the meaning. “To spiritually heal the sin-sickness of the body of humanity” – well, that wouldn't make sense. You could also say “to spiritually heal the sin-sickness of the body of humanity”. I would prefer: “on the physical.” — “To spiritually heal the sin-sickness of the physical of humanity,” that is a genitive objective. I have paraphrased it because these two genitives are in succession, but they are simply given by the text. Otherwise, I have nothing to say in relation to the Credo.

[You still have the question:] Why are there monthly sayings that apply to the whole week? – The reason for this must be understood from a higher point of view. Suppose I were to explain the human soul, I would say: will, feeling and thinking are the three members of the soul, or at least the outer manifestation of it. (I write on the board – middle –: will, feeling, thinking.) Now I must not present it by writing: here thinking, feeling, willing.

No.

So it would be wrong. I have to draw it so that there is thinking, feeling and willing in the head, only the willing is weakest. In the metabolic-limb organism of man, the will is predominant. There is always one that takes over the others. And so, in spiritual activities, you have to have something that takes over the lower levels from a higher level.

A participant: When is the beret handed over to the priest when he is installed in office?

Rudolf Steiner: I would like to carry out this ceremony of handing over the beret after the ceremony. The handover would take place when the person concerned reads the first mass, then when you carry out the ceremony. Then he will simply receive the beret with the words I will speak tomorrow. That is the handing over of the office. Otherwise one would hand over a diploma, here one hands over the beret. This will be handed over when you read the first mass, with a few words spoken after communion.

I have tried to find a name to replace the word “priest”, but apart from the names “shepherd of souls” or “caretaker of souls”, I have not yet come up with any other. It is

new German language, it is hardly possible to form a word for the word “priest”. “Seelenhirte” (shepherd of souls) seems too sentimental, but you won't easily find a non-sentimental word.

[A participant] suggests retaining the word “priest”.

Rudolf Steiner: That is the simplest. But it is something that has been perceived as offensive in Protestant circles. Basically, “priest” also originally goes back to “shepherd of souls”. There are, of course, no objective reasons [not to use the name “priest”]. It is only the reason that all these things should be avoided that are common in Roman Catholicism. The “Act of Consecration of Man” is a very adequate term for “mass,” but for “priest” one would have to use the word “soul carer,” which also sounds sentimental. And a word that would not so much denote the priesthood as the dignity of a priest would be the word “consecrated person”, which denotes one who has been consecrated. “Consecrated person” is something that would be quite adequate, not so much for the word “priest” as for the word used in the ancient mysteries.

A participant: Are there any rules about the type of incense?

Rudolf Steiner: We use ordinary incense. The essential thing is that the incense spreads this kind of ethereal odor. That is essential to the matter. It is not correct that incense is only used in Catholic communities; it is used wherever ceremonies are performed that have a real spiritual basis. You mean, whether one can take an incense that does not have this ethereal smell, because the incense could be slandered to the effect that it puts people to sleep? There is no other option, as long as this prejudice has to be combated, than not to burn incense. You can omit the incense.

Werner Klein: Would that not substantially alter the spiritual facts?

Rudolf Steiner: By merely imagining the incense, it will be one degree less real. But you will have to make such allowances in relation to various things. I cannot see how you can fulfill the ideal if you want to see it fulfilled. You have incense everywhere. I have already mentioned the Freemasons; the Indians also have it. It is everywhere where serious occult practices are performed. Only in Protestant circles, when smoking is used, it smells Catholic. - One could also say, it smells Masonic or Indian.

A participant: We can get a small chapel for our worship in Frankfurt. Are there certain things to consider when furnishing the church? What color for the walls or the details?

Rudolf Steiner: I would not go to extremes here. I would keep it to a dull purple, not too loud, but a dull purple. That is the best way to get the mood right. The things that differ are done in a darker purple.

A participant: Could other rooms also be considered, for example, Masonic ritual rooms or similar?

Rudolf Steiner: Of the Freemasons you could only get those rooms that do not have their symbols, so the ballroom. The ballroom you could take under certain circumstances readily. This is a matter of opportunity. I could imagine that is no obstacle to use the ballroom of the Freemasons for your purposes.

Friedrich Ritielmeyer: Auditoriums and schools would also work, of course. For smaller communities, I would even consider private rooms to be the most suitable. But people don't have many rooms anymore. Only a few people in Germany still have large private rooms. The rooms of the Anthroposophical Societies are also increasingly at risk. In Munich, there are no longer any such rooms. Where they still exist, they would of course be usable in agreement with the boards of directors. Public education rooms would also be considered.

Rudolf Steiner: In these matters, I must say that I am only familiar with one adult education centre that I have come into contact with. Adult education rooms are those that also have a public character. The adult education association led by Raphael Löwenfeld had its lecture room in the Berlin City Hall. Of course, one can use these rooms. One could also use the hall of the Bernoullianum in Basel if one gets it. I would only say in such cases, if I were to take over the hall as the person in charge: Please don't be alarmed; we have ceremonies in which we use incense. —You would always have to tell the hall providers this.

A participant: There is no longer any smell of incense the next morning.

Rudolf Steiner: It depends entirely on the sense of smell of those who enter the room. Of course, you will find people who can still detect the smell days later.

A participant: How should our group relate to Freemasonry? Several of us have become more familiar with Freemasonry.

Rudolf Steiner: The Circle as such does not relate to Freemasonry. I regard it as a purely individual matter. It cannot be that anything is brought in from Freemasonry as such, because in reality Freemasonry no longer has anything Christian. That is not something we need to discuss here. Freemasonry as such has nothing Christian. A participant: Could we exert influence on Freemasonry?

Rudolf Steiner: I think that is hardly possible. It is different if someone works in Freemasonry with the impulses that he has and receives through this community. In that way he can influence them. But that is not very easy either. Now, I do not think that is particularly desirable either. What is desirable is that this community spreads as widely as possible and that everything is done to promote this spread. With Freemasonry, you will find least of all that it has a progressive effect. I also do not believe that you can come into a conflict of duty there. I do not know where that could lie. But I will not ask you if you do not want to hint at the conflict.

A participant: I think that our movement here, our circle, is much more valuable than what Freemasonry can offer. I was already a Freemason before I joined our circle. Now I am striving to devote all my energy to our movement. I don't think I will have the time and energy to be able to give to Freemasonry what it demands.

Rudolf Steiner: There is no real conflict of duty. At most, it would make it possible for you to be less active in the lodge. But it does not give rise to a real inner conflict of duty. If you were to become a Roman Catholic priest, however, there would be a conflict of duty. But as it is, there is no conflict of duty for you at all, except that you cannot be in the lodge as much. That could also be caused by something else.

Emil Bock: We would be very grateful if you could at least give us some pointers on pastoral psychology and pathology. We then asked about the sexual question in a pastoral relationship, for guidelines for pastoral care in this area.

Rudolf Steiner: This can hardly be achieved in any other way than perhaps by you first trying, together with our doctors, to gain some insights into psychiatry in general and how it is practised in our country. This must then be incorporated into the confession. Because you can only go as far as it is an object of confession. Otherwise you will hardly be able to do anything. All physical treatment you must leave to the doctor for the time being. But the confession must be aimed at being a real sedative for those who have some kind of defect. This will be an item that must be worked out step by step in Stuttgart. It cannot be done in a few minutes. But you should also talk about pastoral therapy. It is quite possible that you will need knowledge in this area when you are ready to found village communities. Since the pastors in the villages often give physical medicine at the same time, they acquire knowledge that they can then use in their pastoral care.

[A question was asked that was not recorded by the stenographer.]

Rudolf Steiner: The wives of the married may be present at tomorrow's celebration, but may not receive communion.

A participant: How can we officially identify ourselves to the authorities? Rudolf Steiner: Is the name of pastor monopolized?

Emil Bock: I believe it is legally reserved. Only those with the title of pastor in the recognized denominations may use it.

Rudolf Steiner: As soon as I find a name for “priest”, you can also use that as an official title. But I have to find it first; perhaps it will come while you are still here. For the time being it has not been possible to find anything except these three names: “Seelenpfleger”, “Seelenhirte”, “Weiheträger”. These are adequate names, but they sound a little sentimental in modern language. Friedrich Rittelmeyer: Is there a German name for “Hostie”?

Rudolf Steiner: Why do you need a German name for it? We should only strive for a word if it can truly be a word. For something as solemn as the Mass, it is acceptable to use a word like “Human Consecration Ritual”; for the host, however, it is of course difficult to use a different word. “Altar bread” and ‘altar wine’ is a very adequate name that works quite well, but it is a long name. I cannot find a word for ‘priest’ and ‘pastor’ alone. I would even find ‘pastor’ very painful if it were not used. Perhaps it would even be better to let you use the official title of “pastor”. I think “priest” is different from “pastor”. “Priest” refers to the consecration, but “pastor” refers directly to the person who is an official as a shepherd of souls.

A participant asks whether the word “clergyman” could be used.

Rudolf Steiner: Of course there is nothing wrong with the word “clergyman”. But Dr. Rittelmeyer shook his head?

Friedrich Rittelmeyer: All these words are too heavily burdened for me.

Rudolf Steiner: “Spiritual” too? “Ordained minister” is the term to be used for the priest. Outwardly, it is a demotion if you cannot bear the name “pastor”. Why is that not possible? Do you yourself have something against the title “pastor”? “Pastor” is, for the time being, a title that encompasses both Catholic and Protestant clergy.

Emil Bock: The title “clergyman” would not be confirmed as an official title for us.

Rudolf Steiner: The German language does not have a clear word, so the word “pastor” is to be aimed for. A question is asked about the doctrine of predestination. [The stenographer did not record the wording of the question, and only parts of the following remarks by Rudolf Steiner were recorded.]

Rudolf Steiner: This is a question that cannot easily be answered in a pastoral setting because it is fundamentally a profound question of world view. In ancient times, predestination meant the names of those who were entered in the Book of Creation. But now you must realize that actually until the 5th or 6th century, at least until the time of Augustine, all thinking that referred to the spiritual world itself was thought from the spiritual world to the physical world and not the other way around. It is only in the last few centuries that thinking has been from the bottom up and no longer from the top down. So if you take the way of thinking that was natural for Augustine from the moment he was able to think philosophically at all, predestination meant the names of those who were chosen by God to be written in the book of life; they meant a configuration of the world in which the names were there. So you would get the scheme: The heavenly; now comes the first name: those who gave alms, so we have the almsgivers. As a second, those who cared for the sick; and as a third name: those who taught. And now, in what is conceived from above downwards, you do not yet have people in it at all; they must first acquire the right to these names themselves, must first integrate themselves. All these designations are type designations that descend from above, so that people must first acquire the right to these type designations. It is not people who are nurses, it is not people who are alms-givers, soul-shepherds and so on; these are the names – but they are not names that the individual bears – they must first be acquired.

It is the completely different way of thinking from which one must try to understand such a word as “predestination”. Otherwise, how do you get along with the teachings of Augustine and with the whole dispute of the minds at that time about predestination? You cannot get along. You cannot possibly ascribe to Augustine that he divided humanity on earth into two groups, one predetermined for good, the other for evil. What he meant is that he placed the types on the one hand and the other types on the other. But people themselves do not belong to one type or the other from the outset; they must first acquire their claim to a name.

Gnostic? There it is in the most eminent sense that only the one who acquires the possibility to do so in the course of earthly life belongs to those who can be so designated. Blessed is everyone who acquires the name in earthly life; anyone who does not do so will not be blessed. One must come to blessedness through the name. That is a Gnostic principle. If you hear the word “name” in the language of the older times, you will find that outwardly.... [gap].

Take these two things for the time being in my “Theosophy”. There is the human being who goes up to the consciousness soul; he wants to come to the spiritual man, there the impact from the spiritual world is “poured over”, and the germ of the “I” lies in this, which is poured over there. This also corresponds to Indian terminology. The Indian uses the word 'Nama', the Indian word for 'name'. Nama points upwards to 'Manas', not to what is below. It is the same in Egyptian. So what corresponds to the name is predetermined. If I may express myself very roughly, one could say that there is a map of heaven, where all those who will be blessed and all those who can be damned are written down; but one must acquire that which corresponds to what is written there as one's name. There is a typology that is nothing other than the expression of predestination. Augustine cannot be understood any differently; he is truly a follower of absolute predestination. With Calvin's doctrine of predestination, one really doesn't know what he wants; he ends it rather confusingly. I imagine – I haven't studied it, it's never interested me much, I haven't studied Calvin – but I imagine that with him it is so that he started from a moment when he sensed something, and then he couldn't face saying it clearly. His followers felt the need to bring it to an understanding. Today, people treat such things as if they were none of their business. I don't think that [the teaching] of Augustine can be treated in the same way as that of the Gnostics. Augustine is to be seen as an excellent human being.

Friedrich Rittelmeyer: What is the significance of Christ's resurrection after three days?

Rudolf Steiner: For three days it was undecided whether he would die or not. It was a three-day struggle with death. So it is to be understood that the things that are there [in the Gospels] are realities. It is not the case that the Christ did not really go through the pain that had to be suffered during the scourging and the crucifixion. It is to be understood that for three days there was the possibility that he would not overcome death. The struggle lasted so long. You can say that from a higher point of view that is out of the question. But he had to fight with death for three days and had this tableau of the past life and led the fight against dissolution [of the body], which he went through with his divine nature like the human being in his human nature. The human body disintegrates at death. The body of Christ Jesus has dissolved into the substance of the earth. You can just as well call that “disappearance” as “dissolving” and “remaining”.

Something redemptive is taking place; an effect on elemental spirits is being exerted by drawing them into their realm.

[At the beginning of the meeting, the wording of the loyalty oath was discussed again. The conversation was not

- Before handing over the beret to Friedrich Rittelmeyer, Rudolf Steiner speaks:]

This is therefore the last action to be undertaken out of the spirit, out of which I have undertaken the attempt to realize this movement as a ritual-bearing one in the world, directly out of the spiritual world. In the future, this ceremony is to be performed each time before the first mass is celebrated by the ordained priest. It should be a different kind of action from all the others, and therefore less bound to fixed forms. But in spirit it should briefly contain what I now want to express with the following words. It will therefore not be clothed in the ceremonial words of making the cross or of “Christ in you”, but will be performed directly without an introduction and without the usual concluding sentence. It will be carried out in the way that I describe with the words:

All the symbols of Your actions in the sense of this spiritual movement that have come to You so far express Your communion with the divine worlds that reign over the earth. The symbol that You now receive expresses Your different relationship from You to the people for whom You administer Your office. That is, through the preceding rituals You have received Your communion with the divine essence. Through this sign you receive your power over those who place their trust in you as members of the community. You lead them by virtue of the office, which is symbolized in this protection of your own head. The baretti is placed on the head of the newly ordained.

You always wear this to express your relationship to the lay community; you wear it on the way to the altar, you wear it on the way from the altar; you wear it wherever you go to a solemn ceremony or a sacrament. Accept this symbol of your authority, an authority within which you perform priestly acts.

When the priest reaches the altar, the beret is given to the altar server; he places it on the side table until the end of the service. If the service is interrupted for any reason, in other words wherever the priest moves away from or towards the altar, the beret is put on, never at the altar itself. At the end of the service, after the words “That was the Act of Consecration of Man,” the priest takes the chalice in his left hand, puts on the beret with his right hand, and then walks away, with his right hand now resting on the chalice again.

[Friedrich Rittelmeyer now celebrates the Act of Consecration of Man. After its conclusion, Rudolf Steiner speaks:)

My dear friends! The last ceremonial act that was to be performed here in this place for the inauguration of your mission to the world has been performed, and you will now take what has been done here into your thoughts, into your feelings, into your will, and you will, according to your own judgment and insight, henceforth carry out everything that has been conceived by you in the spirit, everything that has been initiated here.

These are the last few words I shall speak to you. You will find that you have a difficult path to tread. Your attention has already been drawn to the individual difficulties that have been mentioned. But it is certainly good if you now, before you go out into the world to do your own work, face your soul impartially and frankly, that what you are thinking of undertaking is not fenced off in the world today, but is fought over, and you will have to all that you undertake out of the spirit, which is to begin here through you, what you undertake for those who will entrust themselves to you, you will have to have an alert eye for the fact that what you want to make the soul of your work will be fought over. We could also cite many things today, on this occasion, when it is a matter of adding the watchful eye for the world to the heart inspired by God, but I will bring only one of the testimonies before your soul, which will make you realize how strong you yourselves will have to be if you want to penetrate all the judgment that the world presents today against what you, as the soul, have taken up in your teaching work, what penetrates against what is called the anthroposophical worldview.

We see, don't we, how people sometimes fight with almost devilish activity against the anthroposophical worldview. We do not want to focus on that today, but we do want to draw attention to how difficult it is in our time, even for those who want to retain at least a small degree of impartiality, but absolutely cannot, for the reason that what has been accumulating over centuries now envelops human souls and really obscures their clear view of the spiritual forces. Therefore you will have to penetrate through this darkness, for believe me, in many an hour this darkness will also envelop your soul. This darkness will approach you and will ask you many a question along the lines of: Is it really the case that the spiritual world has begun to speak to people in a new way in the last three to four centuries? It is so! And you will have to struggle to the realization that it is so. But you will have to be strong to struggle through.

And so I would like to bring an example to your mind that is currently occurring, which will show you how these darkening clouds come upon people's souls and obscure their further view into the spirituality that is flowing into the earth today.

Not so long ago, a Benedictine priest from the Catholic Church, that is, one of those who express their thoughts most freely in the Catholic Church, wrote a nice little book about the journey of the human soul in the divine face. This little book, which appeared in German in an inexpensive book collection, could actually be of great use to many. Not for those who seek to walk in the light of the spiritual in the sense of our time, but for those who want to get a real idea of how, in that time, in which what was still present in the first Christian centuries of older mysteries was already darkening, the better souls sought to deepen their minds by always keeping in mind the perpetual wandering of the human soul in the face of God. In this respect, the account of the Benedictine monk is precisely a confession that even an excellent person today can no longer escape the bleakness of the darkened worlds. The same person who wrote this booklet, which is good in some respects, about the path of the human soul in the presence of God, recently wrote a condemnation of anthroposophy in the sense that he denies that today's humanity, without exception, has any possibility at all of coming to the spiritual through the paths that the human soul can take. He imagines that the divine-spiritual lies in a cosmic distance from the human soul, that in the human soul there is always a yearning to live together with this divine-spiritual, but he asserts that only in two cases was it possible for a human being to connect with the divine-spiritual world from the human soul, and that only for a very short time and in an insufficient way, but still in a distinct way. He assumes these two cases with Plotinus and with Buddha. The Benedictine monk therefore asserts today that only these two human personalities, through a special dispensation in the development of the earth, were able to bring their soul close to the divine spiritual world and thereby, in a certain sense, achieve a divine spiritual enlightenment for the other human personalities. But with that, he claims, humanity's power to do anything from the human soul to come close to the divine spiritual world is exhausted. Therefore, apart from these two personalities, everything that comes with the claim that the divine spiritual world, the spiritual existence, can really be connected to the earth through human powers is a misconception. He says that weak humanity has no other choice than to accept the historical appearance of Jesus of Nazareth and, in unillumined faith, to attain through the power of Christ that which cannot be attained in the light. Mager explains this in a rather strong way. He sees the situation of humanity in relation to the divine-spiritual world as that of an army that wants to storm the seat of the divine-spiritual. It is as if an army had set itself the task of storming a fortress; only a few of the boldest storm the wall, and the attack collapses. And so man has no choice but to renounce a connection of his consciousness with the divine spiritual world.

From such a point of view, Mager, the Benedictine monk, cannot, of course, see anything in anthroposophy but what he sees in it. These are indeed characteristic words that he speaks, but they are words of complete darkness of the human soul. He says the following words: “My innermost scientific conviction is that Steiner's Anthroposophy cannot be characterized otherwise than as the skillful systematization of hallucinations into a world view.” — And what emerges from Anthroposophy in this way, he must reject as coming from hallucinations. He cannot find any real “religious renewal of the people” in anthroposophical efforts and must therefore raise a warning voice against it. This is the judgment of a Catholic educator. Numerous other judgments are exactly the same, including the judgment of numerous Protestant recognized pastors, who cannot raise the warning voice often enough.

Now, my dear friends, these warning voices will also be raised against you. You must realize that even those who see things as they are, due to the darkness in people's souls today, do not find it easy to understand that in the evolution of the world, at the time when humanity is to receive the first impulse towards freedom in the course of modern evolution, there have always been souls that have found the way to the divine spiritual world. The voices that come from there are simply not heard because they are not illuminated by any light. For in order to make them resound, they must be illuminated by the right light. Darkness also takes away from people that which would resonate with them as the voice of the spiritual. Therefore, you may take into yourself the vigilance for all that you carry out into the world in the way of enthusiasm through being filled with the living word, in the way of the power of healing sin, and that you have to include, so to speak, in what humanity calls prayer and meditation, so that your truth can be effective.

You will have to be vigilant, first of all, to the extent to which the spirit of darkness obscures the soul itself, and you will have to be vigilant that at no hour, at no minute, at no second of your effective existence, the spirit of darkness itself takes hold of you. That is why I say to you, my dear friends, since you must decide to go out to your mission, as I speak again the words that have often been spoken, out of this spirit that is now to inaugurate your movement:

Watch and lift up your souls to the Spirit that reigns throughout all cosmic spaces, throughout all circles of time. If you develop the strength to do so, you will be able to do it, then you will not be alone. These spiritual powers themselves will help you. They will enlighten your thoughts, they will permeate your mind, they will strengthen your will. And with thoughts enlightened from the spiritual world, with feelings strengthened from the spiritual world, with a will strengthened from the spiritual world, you will be able to work. Take with you the assurance that my thoughts will always accompany you and that wherever you need help in the right sense, you will always find me ready to give you that help.

These are the words I give you now at the end, when you set out on the path to the mission you have chosen for yourselves, willed out of the power of Christ.

Friedrich Rittelmeyer: We feel the need to say a few words about something that cannot really be expressed in words: the deep and immense gratitude that we all feel in our hearts towards you. You have become for us a strong, extraordinary mediator to Christ, and I believe I can make the promise on behalf of all of us that we will fight like lions for what you have given us and for what will come to us from you in the future. First of all, we are all deeply impressed by the great kindness we have experienced from you. When we think back to the hours we have experienced in Dornach, from the first serious hour in the Glass House, where we discussed the farewell of our friend Geyer, through the ceremony you celebrated with us, through the lectures in which you so kindly wanted to convey to us, to this last day that we are able to experience with you, we are filled with the memory of a truly unique wisdom and kindness and an extraordinary earnestness with which you have led us from day to day. May they become our example for our own pastoral work. We have often sought comparisons in our circle of friends for what we have experienced, so as not to oversleep its full significance while we are in it. We have thought of this and that, which is known to us from history. We have found nothing that can be compared since the time when the Christ came to earth. We feel very deeply that we, who have now been called by Providence to fight through this, we feel in the deepest reverence that we have to stand up for what has become ours with the sacrifice of our entire independent being, and that we have to see our freedom in realizing the greatness of what has come over us.

It is in this spirit that we want to continue our work. We are aware that we cannot do it alone. Apart from the help of the spiritual world and of Christ Himself, which we want to seek daily ourselves, we ask that you too, as you have so promisingly promised, may stand by us with your advice and your deeds at all times. We feel far too weak and small to stand up for what we want to stand up for.

In this spirit, we want to conclude our conference by expressing our heartfelt thanks, albeit weakly, and asking you from the bottom of our hearts for your continued support.

[For the following meeting, Rudolf Steiner was handed a series of written questions. This “questionnaire” is available in Emil Bock's handwriting and has the following wording:]

1. The change of cult colors (especially in the non-festive half of the year) and their meaning in relation to the course of the year in its psychological relationship (cultic optics)? The colors of the altar servers' vestments, the altar cloths, the chasuble, the figures and borders of the chasuble in relation to the primary colors of the chasuble itself? Colors used in the baptismal ceremony (red and blue)?

2. The spiritual meaning of the vestments, insofar as this has not yet been hinted at. Is it possible to derive an understanding of the cult vestments from the history of human clothing in general within the history of customs (the cultic origin of all clothing in general, the difference between men's and women's clothing)? What is the meaning of the vestments worn by altar servers? In what vestment does the priest serve? When is the beret worn and why only in these cases? Form of the stole, its spiritual justification? Vestments for casualities (baptism, burial, etc.)?

3. What else can be said about the substances used in worship? Incense, oil, wine, bread, salt, ash, water, mercury, sulfur, salt (cultic alchemy)? Which substances and objects are consecrated before cultic use, on what occasion and by what words? Water, salt, ashes in the baptismal ritual in relation to the Trinity. Water is associated with the Father God, salt with the Son God, whereas we expect the opposite. Connection between the four parts of the mass and the four elements? Holy water and incense at the grave?

4. Details about cultic forms, devices and gestures. Use of a monstrance and what use? Use of wooden goblets possible (social reasons)? Why turn the left cheek in the case of a community communion? Why signs on the forehead, chin, chest of the infant? Is it possible to use incense in bowls instead of the usual censer, or can a simplified form of this be considered at least? The right and left sides of the altar in their alternation during the consecration. Which direction should the altar

face and why? 5. What is the more precise distribution of the pericopes for the gospel reading over the course of the year? Use of the Pauline letters, the Apocalypse, etc.? Can we hope for translations of individual pericopes by Dr. Steiner?

6. Parish regulations and pastoral care: What conditions must be met for the first performance of the rites in the individual cities? In front of which audience should the cult be introduced?, in public or in invited circles? Who can communicate? Only community members? Is it the duty of community members to communicate? Is it possible to exclude members of the community from communion? Is it advisable to make the ritual texts accessible to the community members? (The Credo?)

Questions about the Bible:

What can be said about textual corruption in the New Testament? How did it come about and with what intention? How can it be eliminated as a source of error? The synoptic question: literal agreement of the first three Gospels down to the smallest details and contradictions in statements about facts (the date of Jesus' death, etc.)?

Historical questions:

We would like to hear as much as possible about church history, because current research leaves us in the lurch there. In particular: How and where can the origin of the Mass from the mysteries be studied and shown exoterically in order to refute the accusation of theft? The ages of Peter, Paul and John in Schelling, etc., and Dr. Steiner's suggestion of the periods of church history after the twelve apostles (the time of Judas, etc.)? Esotericism in the Catholic Church?

Individual aspects:

Music and chorales in worship. Training of priests and important books (study plan).

Practical aspects:

Our proposal for admission requirements and disciplinary regulations. Financing. Guidelines for differentiating pastoral care according to profession, temperament and age, especially in religious education, about which we would still like to hear a lot, apart from what we can learn from Waldorf teachers. Preparation for the youth celebration for those children who have already reached the appropriate age and have so far only received confessional religious education? How long will a child participate in the youth celebration? Guidelines for pastoral psychology and pathology?

What illnesses are particularly to be expected? How can meditation be used as a remedy? The sexual question in a pastoral relationship: What is the karmic and physiological basis of homosexuality, and how can we help to overcome it?

Can special prayers be given for our pastoral care work (morning, evening, table, children's prayers)?

7. Questions about the sacraments:

Why no adult baptism (conversions of Jews)? The sacrament of marriage. Solubility of marriage, divorce? Sense of the Bible passages dealing with this topic: Genesis II, 1 Cor. 6 and 7, Romans 7, Matthew 19, 1-12?

8. Questions about the texts:

In the Credo: “To spiritually heal the sin-sickness of the body of humanity” or “to spiritually heal the body of humanity from the sin-sickness”? Breviary: Why monthly sayings as weekly sayings?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thus:

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

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

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

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

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

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

[ 1 ] We will now take a closer look at the connection between the act of consecration of man and apocalyptic things, so that we will then be able to approach the Apocalypse and to see its significance for the present and future activities of priests.

[ 2 ] Yesterday we had to point to three past epochs of the mysteries, in so far as these mysteries tried to give each priest experiences which put him into an apocalyptic mood. We pointed out that there was a very ancient mystery period during which the gods descended into the mystery centers in order to work with human beings, and a semi-ancient mystery period when the gods sent down their forces, so that the men who lived in this sphere of forces were able to work with the gods in the cosmos.

[ 3 ] One could say that the path was completely reversed during the third epoch when the mysteries were partly renovated. At that time man shaped and developed forces so that they could lead him up to the gods. We saw that man looked for a way up to the world's divine, spiritual forces through the intonation of magical words in cultic ceremonies. These words either worked directly upon the auditor's whole soul mood, so that he became aware of the spiritual activities of the gods in the words, or else magical words were spoken into the smoke in the way which was indicated yesterday, and the smoke drew Imaginations out of the words.

[ 4 ] This development of a certain religious feeling, which one can really only describe separately, always went parallel with a certain condition or a certain kind of transubstantiation which was the center of the holy act of consecration of man. Priests are now being called upon to experience this transubstantiation and everything else that is connected with their activities in a new way. They will not be able to do this very well without an understanding of what transubstantiations and apocalypses were really like in each of these four successive periods of human evolution.

[ 5 ] One thing we have already seen is that the act of consecration of man and its transubstantiation process involves a working together of human beings and the gods in the spiritual world. Priests cannot really work properly unless they're aware that men and the gods can work together.

[ 6 ] If we take another look at the oldest form of transubstantiations and acts of consecration of man we find that the gods found the way to men at certain times that are really differences between what one can calculate in the course of time and what the cosmos does. The gods descended during such blank or holy times when men must add something to the times they calculated because their calculations are incorrect. In these times men had to expose themselves to cosmic influences directly in order to carry our transubstantiations, and they saved what had occurred in the substances during such times in order to carry out transubstantiations with the preserved things that had been transformed by forces from the cosmos.

[ 7 ] The right place for priests and lay brothers to be in for these transubstantiations at that time was a cave or a grotto. And in fact, wherever people were fully aware of the presence of the gods and of the significance of transubstantiations in the ancient mysteries, we see that they tried to carry out the sacred rites in subterranean rock temples or caves.

[ 8 ] The fact that they tried to do this is connected with the experiences which priests had during the transubstantiations. A transubstantiation consists of a transformation of the given earthly materials. If one wants to understand the process completely one should add the communion or the ingestion of the transformed substances by the human being to it, so that actually the two last parts of the act of consecration of man, transubstantiation and communion, constitute a unity, whereas the gospel reading and the offering are a preparation for them. Taking transubstantiation and communion as a unified priestly or cultic act, let's look at a view which the initiates we call fathers had in the oldest mysteries.

The “fathers” refers to the father grade of initiation, and this name is still given to priests in many confessions today,—pater. [ 9 ] Now when a priest carried out a transubstantiation in his earth or rock temple, he experienced the union of his physical organism with the whole earth. This is why they had the temple underground or in a rock. Today we can also feel united with the surrounding cosmos in our ordinary earthly consciousness as we live between birth and death, and this has been the case during the whole time that mankind has been evolving on earth.

[ 10 ] The air which is in your body now was outside it a moment ago, and it will soon be outside again. The air which is outside your body and the air inside your body constitute a whole. The real state of affairs is that there is an aery ocean, and when man inhales, one part of this aery ocean becomes transformed in the human being. The air is absorbed, and it penetrates and fills man and thereby assumes a human form. Then this form immediately dissolves again in the ocean of air. An aeriform man is continually being created and destroyed, although one is usually unaware of it.

[ 11 ] However, Indian yogis knew about it whenever they did their conscious breathing exercises. They didn't feel separate from the earth's ocean of air; they felt that they were united with it, and they felt this creation and destruction at each systole and diastole. One can easily experience this by doing these breathing exercises, although they are no longer appropriate for men today.

[ 12 ] However, man is not just a man in connection with physical, earthly things. Although he is an earthly man where the so-called physical, body is mainly active, he is also a fluidic man. The whole human being is filled with circulating fluids which work upon each other. This fluidic man is mainly dependent upon the ethers. For the forces in the etheric body work more upon fluids and not so much upon solids.

[ 13 ] We also bear an aery man and a warmth man in us. This aery man, which takes care of respiration, is controlled by the forces of the astral body. And the warmth man: you need only recall that if you measure some place on the surface of your body or inside it with a thermometer, you get different temperatures. This crude procedure already shows one that man is a differentiated warmth organism. The latter is mainly under the influence of the ego—organization or ego.

[ 14 ] Thus, we find four elements in man. Earth is under the influence of the physical body, water is influenced by the etheric body, air is under the influence of the astral body, and warmth or fire is under the influence of the ego.

[ 15 ] The transubstantiations and communions which the ancient fathers carried out made them feel that their physical body was connected with the earth, when they had gone into their rock temple or earth temple, in order to unite themselves with these earthly developments. What actually happened here? [ 16 ] A man's supposedly scientific view of himself today is really wrong; it is really complete nonsense. We must rethink all of our ideas about human beings. The ancient fathers received the right ideas about man through direct perception when they carried out transubstantiations during sacrificial rites which consecrate human beings.

They knew that we don't just breathe air in through our respiratory organs, but that we are continually taking in all kinds of substances from the cosmos through our sense organs. All kinds of substances are continuously being taken in through our hair and skin. Just as someone who is watching his breathing feels that air is entering his respiratory organs, so the ancient priest felt that substances passed over from the siliceous environment of the consecrated subterranean temple and penetrated his nerve-senses system just as aery man feels the air which is going through him, for when he breathes in a conscious way he can feel that these substances permeate his entire organism. The priests knew that none of the substances in the metabolic-limb man come from what we eat. Nothing of what one eats becomes part of the metabolic-limb man. [ 17 ] One takes in substances from the cosmos. The whole modern nutritional theory is really wrong. The celebrating father felt that what is eaten and then transformed by the digestive system passes over from the metabolic man to the nerve-senses man and especially to the head. He knew that what you eat is transformed into the substances of your head and what is connected with it. But the substances which become the organs that take care of your metabolic functions are taken in from the cosmos by a finer breathing. Thus he felt that his metabolic-limb man consisted of cosmic substances which are taken in from all sides through the senses and nerves. And he felt that the food that one eats and transforms goes the opposite way and becomes the upper man.

[ 18 ] When a father carried out a transubstantiation he had a current in him which flowed upwards and another one which flowed downwards. Then when he took communion he knew that he was connected with the cosmos, because he had become aware of his physical body by means of these streams. He had become united with the earth and he united what he had prepared at the altar with his body, with currents that belong to both the earth and his body, and with divine things on the earth which are a reflection of the universe.

He knew that he was united with the outside universe. He knew that the meal which he had taken in in this way was a meal which his cosmic man had completed. He felt that his divine man arose through what streamed into the current which went upwards and the one which went downwards, and that it could be a companion of the gods who had descended. He felt that the gods had transformed him into a divine human being in his physical body, that is, he felt that he had been transubstantiated. And at this moment he could say from the depths of his heart: Now I am not the one who walks around in the physical world; I am he in whom the descended god lives; I am he whose name includes all sounds and who was at the beginning, is in the middle and will be at the end. I am alpha and omega.

[ 19 ] The extent to which he could really participate in the secrets of the cosmos, in the divine working and creating in the cosmos, and in the manifestation of forces, substances and beings there while divine, spiritual work was being done, depended on the way his inner life was shaped by this feeling. This is the way priests worked in the ancient mysteries.

[ 20 ] If we go on to the semi-ancient mysteries we find that holy water and washing and sacrificial actions which are connected with water had become very important, and also that the temples had been moved aboveground. They were no longer put into subterranean caves out of the same longings as before, or if they were placed there it occurred through tradition and it was no longer understood in a living way, and it was precisely for this reason that the tradition lived on, even though it had lost its living content.

[ 21 ] Such traditions also remained with regard to the dipping of people into the dew, as it were. What the priest did at baptisms was less dependent upon the actual watery element than upon the Inner force which he applied during the sacrificial action in order to unite the fluidic man in whom the forces of the etheric body were active with the universe.

When a transubstantiation was being carried out and one observed things which involved the fluidic element before or after it in the act of consecration, one felt that the etheric organization was working in a temporal way. While the transubstantiation was being carried out one felt that one's growth since childhood had occurred under the influence of the fluidic element in one, and that the etheric body was active in this streaming from the past through the present and into the future.

[ 22 ] In ancient times priests felt that their physical body was connected with the earthly element, and during the less ancient mysteries the one who performed transubstantiations felt united with the watery element which exists in the whole universe. He felt the growth forces of all creatures sprouting, germinating, growing and unfolding in him into fully developed organisms and then contracting into seeds again. He felt this sprouting, shooting living and dying activity whenever he carried out a transubstantiation.

At every moment he could say to himself: Now I know how creatures come into being in the world and how they die. For both ascending and descending etheric forces were active in him. He could, as it were, feel eternity in the sacred transubstantiation.

[ 23 ] The priest who was performing a communion in conjunction with a sacred act of transubstantiation knew that the substances which were transformed in the way we described yesterday were absorbed by his etheric, fluidic man. He felt that he was united with everything which preserves immortality in the universe and with everything which is created and born or is killed and destroyed. Birth and death wafted over the altar and from there into the faithful who were assembled. The priest became permeated with feelings of eternity. This permeation with feelings of eternity had replaced the previous feeling of being united with the whole cosmos through the earth.

[ 24 ] Then when the third epoch of holy acts of consecration arose, man was to experience his union with the aery element and thereby with the cosmos. [ 25 ] Oriental yogis could become aware of the streaming of divine, supersensible world forces in inhalation and exhalation in a different way and for their own personal development. They took hold of breathing in a direct way.

People intoned magical words into their breath in Europe, and to a lesser extent in Asia Minor, but they didn't take hold of the undifferentiated breath directly. Thereby the breath or the air streaming in and out of them was taken hold of by magical, cultic words. The striving up of magical forces towards divine ones became manifest indirectly in what was spoken into the sacrificial smoke, or directly in what was experienced in the intonation of the magical, cultic words. Whenever someone prays, he is basically trying to ascend to divine, spiritual regions with his forces, and these people felt that when they intoned magical, cultic or prayerful words they were ascending to a region where they met the gods. When someone intones things, the godhead becomes manifest and speaks in the cultic words, so that it's not he who is speaking anymore. The godhead was now revealing itself in the aery element. Man felt that he was in something which controls the forces in the air from his own astral body.

[ 26 ] The transition from the second, semi-ancient mystery epoch to the third, partly new mystery epoch was a large one. In ancient times fathers experienced things in their physical body. This involved an intensification of its activities. The sun priests of the second epoch experienced an enhancement of their etheric or fluidic body. When a priest intoned cultic words in the third epoch he experienced the streaming of divine spiritual forces in his astral body. The astral body of the average person was only a mediator of consciousness to a very slight extent. At the beginning of the third epoch a priest could still say: when I speak magical cultic words, a god is speaking in me. However later on this awareness diminished. The new consciousness which arose was unaware of the astral body's activities. Today, ordinary consciousness is completely oblivious to the latter. The verbal content of the ritual gradually became something which made qualified people aware of the gods' presence, whereas unqualified people were unaware of what was connected with the intoned words. The latter was increasingly the case for a large number of priests who were active in Catholicism.

[ 27 ] Hence it gradually came about that the act of consecration of man or mass became something that the priest celebrated, although he himself was not present in it. However, one cannot celebrate with words or intone words which have aery beings incorporated in them in such a way that there is no spirituality there. Spiritual things immediately appear whenever something material is being shaped. And so if an act of consecration is celebrated with real cultic words by even the most unworthy priest, his soul, may be absent but something spiritual is present. So the fact is that if the liturgy is correct, the believers who are listening to it are participating in a spiritual event under all circumstances.

[ 28 ] While things were developing like this at the end of the third epoch, some of the Protestant confessions which were working in a more rationalistic way thought that they could throw the mass out altogether. They were no longer aware of the significance of cultic rites or of a real collaboration between gods and men.

This inner circumstance then led to the time in which we are living. There was less and less understanding for the act of consecration of man which brings the divine, spiritual life right down to earth. People no longer understood the apocalyptic things which the rites were supposed to take one experience. [ 29 ] This is basically the experience you had when you came one day and said: A Christian renewal must occur. You felt that the religious life of all the confessions and other things that exist in our civilization had become separated from real spiritual things in the real spiritual world. You were looking for the path to the real spiritual world again. [ 30 ] This impulse can show us the way and can lead us into the depths of the mysteries, which are connected with apocalyptic things.

So we saw that in the first epoch transubstantiation was connected with experiences with the physical body, in the second epoch the connection was through experiences with the etheric body and in the third epoch through experiences with the astral body. The grasping of apocalyptic things and of the act of consecration by the ego of mankind depends upon you and your inner experience of the working and weaving of spirituality in the world. [ 31 ] Therewith we only have a right view of what should be done by this movement for religious renewal if we look upon what is to be done as the carrying out of a task which has been given us by the supersensible world and as a task which places what one does at the service of supersensible powers. For if you don't take your task seriously enough, what you do will come to nothing in the present evolution of the world, and it will only have been a kind of disturbance. Or else you will see how deep and profound your task is and you will Immediately feel that this task is connected with the activity of the gods throughout earth evolution, and not just with human activities. In that case you can say: we are called upon to help with the shaping of the fourth mystery epoch in human earth evolution. This task will only be placed in the service of the powers in the spiritual world from whom the content of the ritual flowed two years ago when we were assembled here, if you have the courage, strength, seriousness and perseverance to find your way into your task in this way. Only then will what you took upon yourselves through the content of this ritual, which is a revelation from the spiritual world and which radiated down upon you as such, become real.

[ 32 ] Then you will increasingly sense and feel: it's really the case that Christ came into earth life in a real cosmic and tellurian ritual. The Mystery of Golgotha is present as a real ritual. In our time man must first unite this ritual with his ego; for the first commemorations of the Lord's Supper were still immersed in the third mystery epoch, when the astral body took in and controlled the cultic activities which occurred in the aery element. But now it's a question of connecting one's innermost core with the Christ so that each human being can begin to understand apocalyptic things in a new way.

[ 33 ] How did one look upon apocalyptic things in the first mystery epoch? One experienced them as the presence of the gods, which are the beginning, the middle and the end, alpha and omega.

[ 34 ] How did one look upon the presence of divine forces in the second mystery epoch? One experienced them as something which resounds through the world as the music of the spheres, and which lives in the cosmic word that created everything and that creates in everything, and which streams from the heavens to the earth. One experienced what is at the beginning, in the middle and at the end of time simultaneously, as it were. One experienced the alpha and the omega in the cosmic, world word. Whenever the subject of the Greek alpha and omega, the first and the last, came up in this or that epoch, people always tried to find out what the first and last letters of various alphabets really contain.

[ 35 ] And how did one understand apocalyptic things during the third mystery epoch? One understood apocalyptic things in such a way that people were developing cultic words which were still half conscious. Apocalyptic things were perceived during the third epoch when these half-conscious cultic words transubstantiated themselves as they were being intoned and when things were as follows. Most of you have probably heard some music on a day when your soul and senses could be entirely receptive to the impressions of the outer world, and then you fell asleep and woke up in the middle of your sleep. It was as if you lived in a surging back and forth, but in a transformed surging of the symphony you heard during the day. This is the way it was for priests in the third mystery epoch.

What happened to them is comparable to the trivial thing I just mentioned. They celebrated the act of consecration with cultic words, and they experienced that the godhead appeared in them. They had sent the cultic words up and the godhead had streamed into them. Then they left the sacred ritual in an appropriate mood. They not only experienced the presence of divine spirituality in human, cultic words during the act of consecration of man, but afterwards, they experienced a supersensible echo of what they had spoken in the liturgy of the mass. These transubstantiated, transformed words streamed towards them and revealed apocalyptic things.

The god revealed apocalyptic things as a counter present for an appropriately celebrated sacrificial rite. This is how one experienced apocalyptic things during the third mystery epoch.

[ 36 ] The one who felt that he had been made into a priest, by Christ Jesus himself, namely, the author of the book which we want to study, the Apocalypse, was more or less the first to feel that an apocalyptic content merged with his ego,—and only very few people have experienced this since. For it was the astral body which received the echo that. I mentioned, where the god gave apocalyptic things as a counter present for words. However, the one who wrote John's Apocalypse felt that his fully conscious ego was united with the content which he had given the Apocalypse.

[ 37 ] The priest who wrote the Apocalypse and who felt that he had been anointed by Christ Jesus himself, was inspired by the afterglow of ancient Ephesian rituals, and he felt as if he were continuing frequent celebrations of this ancient act of consecration up to an advanced age. One day he felt that the ego which had been completely filled with the significance of the sacred ritual was now also completely filled with an apocalyptic content.

[ 38 ] Hence John expressed his Apocalypse in the same way that one says the single word “I” in one's ordinary consciousness. When a human being says “I” he is expressing his inner nature with a single sound. The only thing which can be meant by this is what the individual human being is. But this one thing has a large content. This large content is the content of apocalyptic things.

[ 39 ] If everything which religious feeling can give a meditating soul and if all the enlightenment which is gained by energetic effort and by a striving towards an understanding of the supersensible can work in men's spirits,—if all of this is oriented in the way it can be oriented and if we let ourselves be stimulated by everything that can stimulate us through a contemplation of the three past mystery epochs which can become the inspirer of the fourth one, and if we let ourselves be stimulated by what was outlined in an introductory way yesterday and today, that is, by what lived in the first, second and third mystery epoch which was the living inspirer of the fourth, and if we let the power of the Spirit God—which is possible again today work in our souls—we will be able to experience that there is not just one Apocalypse but that there are numerically just as many apocalypses as there are human, God-fearing, priest's egos in the priest-renewal who speak to the Christ who is to be found again through this Christian renewal.

[ 40 ] There is only one apocalypse from a qualitative point of view, but from a numerical viewpoint it can become the content of the soul of each individual priest. Conversely, every single soul that undergoes the act of consecration of man, so that it prepares the ego to become identified with the content of the apocalypse, can become a proper priestly soul. We are egos as human beings. We become priests in the modern sense of the word if the ego becomes aware that it is creating a copy of the Apocalypse at every moment in life, so that it isn't just something which is finished and printed in the bible, and it isn't just memorized by heart. [ 41 ] Take the following analogy. Someone gives the content of a book. It is sent to the printers. This might seem like a pedantic, philistine analogy, but it's useful nevertheless. The book is printed and a large number of copies go through the world which are different, although they all have the same content. What you are referred to right at the beginning of the Apocalypse is a single thing and what Christ revealed to John is a single thing. For this is “The revelation of Jesus Christ” which was received by “his servant John.” There is only one content, but it is multiplied by those who recreate this content in themselves after they have been prepared through the wisdom of supersensible worlds.

[ 42 ] This is an understanding of John's apocalyptic things. In the deeper sense of the word, this also amounts to an understanding of the words: Christ has ordained us to be priests. You have felt how the Apocalypticer says that Christ Jesus anointed him to be a priest; one becomes anointed as soon as one feels how the content of the Apocalypse arose in John and as soon as one feels that people want to become priests today by creating the Apocalypse in themselves so that they experience that their ego is in the Apocalypse. If the ego becomes apocalyptic, the ego is priestly. We will take this up again tomorrow.