Anthroposophical Guidelines

Christmas Contemplation: The Logos Mystery

The Mystery of Golgotha streams into the contemplation of the Michael-Mystery because of the fact that Michael is the force which leads man to Christ in a wholesome way.

But the Michael mission is one which repeats itself rhythmically in cosmic human evolution. It was repeatedly present in its beneficent effect on humanity before the Mystery of Golgotha. It was related to all the revelations that the still supra-earthly Christ forces were doing for man’s evolution. After the Mystery of Golgotha it became subservient to the development of earthly humanity through Christ. It entered into a variegated and progressive form in its repetitions - but just that: repetitions.

In contrast, the Mystery of Golgotha is an all-embracing cosmic event which occurred only once during the course of cosmic human evolution.

As humanity advanced as far as the development of its Comprehension or Sensitivity Soul, the ever-present, potentially primeval danger of the separation of humanity from divine spirituality fully exerted itself. And in the same degree in which the human soul lost its experiencing of the divine-spiritual beings, it became immersed in what is today called “nature”.

Man no longer saw the essence of humanity in the divine-spiritual cosmos; he saw the works of divine spirituality in the earthly domain. At first he did not see it in the abstract form in which it is seen today - as physical-sense being and events, which are condensed into the abstract ideas called “natural law”. He saw it as a divine-spiritual nature. This divine-spiritual nature billowed in everything he saw in the emerging and dying out of animals, in the growth and sprouting of the plant world, in the flow of springs and rivers and in the formation of wind and clouds. He considered all this to be the gestures, deeds and speech of the godly being which is the foundation of “nature”.

Just as the positions and movements of the stars were once seen by man to be the deeds and gestures of the universal divinity whose words could be read in them, now the “facts of nature” were seen to be an expression of the earth goddess - for the active goddess in nature was considered to be feminine. Vestiges of this way of thinking as imaginative content of the Comprehension or Sensitivity Soul were active in the human soul well into the middle ages.

Knowledgeable people spoke of the deeds of the “goddess” when they wanted to conceptualize “natural events”. Only with the gradual emergence of the Consciousness Soul did this living, soul-filled consideration of nature become incomprehensible.

And the way in which this was seen in the Comprehension or Sensitivity Soul epoch is reminiscent of the Persephone myth with the mystery that is at its foundation. Demeter’s daughter, Persephone, is forced by the god of the underworld to follow him into his kingdom. It turns out that she must spend only half of the time in the underworld, and the other half in the over-world. This myth expresses with great force how once in the remote past the evolution of the world was revealed through dreamlike clairvoyance.

In primeval times creative activity originated in the earth’s surroundings. The earth itself was still in the process of becoming. It formed its being in cosmic evolution from the activities of its surroundings. The divine-spiritual beings of the cosmos crafted its being. When the earth was sufficiently developed to be an independent cosmic body, divine-spirituality came down to it from the cosmos and became earthly divinity. The dreamlike clairvoyance of humanity of that time knew and saw this fact; the Persephone myth is what remains of that knowledge. But what also remained was how humanity sought knowledge of “nature” until well into the middle ages. For one did not yet seek it by means of sense impressions, as was later the case - that is, according to what appears on the earth’s surface, but according to the forces that work up from the depths of the earth. And these “forces of the depths”, the “forces of the underworld”, were observed in conjunction with the effects of the stars and elements of the earth’s surroundings.

The plants grew there in a diversity of forms, and revealed themselves in their many-colored variety. The sun, moon and star forces worked in them together with the forces of the earth’s depths. Minerals, which were penetrated by what had become earthly from cosmic being, provided the basis for this. Rocks sprang up from the “underworld” only through the heavenly forces which had become earthly. The animal world had not absorbed the underworld forces. It arose only through the active cosmic forces in the earth’s surroundings. It thanks the sun forces steaming down to the earth for its becoming, capacity for nourishment and movement. It reproduces under the influence of the moon forces streaming to the earth. It appears in many forms and species because the constellations act in the most varied way from the universe in shaping animal life. But the animals are only put down on the earth from the universe. With their dim consciousness they only participate in earthly matters; with their genesis, their growth, in fact with everything they are which allows them to perceive and move - they are not earthly beings.

This sublime concept of the earth’s evolution once lived in humanity. What intruded in the Middle Ages left only a vestige of this concept as recognizable. It order to achieve knowledge of all this, one must be able to view the remote past with visionary knowledge. Because even using the existent physical documentation, only he can perceive what existed in human souls who can do so with spiritual vision.

Humanity is not able to hold the earth at arm’s length to the extent the animals do. In saying this, one approaches the mystery of humanity as well as that of the animal world. These mysteries were reflected in the animal cults of ancient peoples, especially those of the Egyptians. They saw in the animals beings which are guests on the earth, in which one could visualize the beings and activities of the spiritual world that surrounds the earth. And in the connection of the human form with the animal form, which was portrayed in pictures, they visualized the form of those elementary intermediate beings who, although in the evolutionary process of becoming human, did not enter the earth’s domain in order not to become human. Such elementary intermediate beings do exist. The Egyptians were only showing what they saw when they created images of them. But such beings do not have the full self-consciousness of humanity. In order to achieve that, the human being had to stride the earth so completely that he absorbed something of the earth-essence into his own essence.

He had to be exposed to the fact that in this earthly world the divine spirituality to which he was bound was present - but only in its effects. And just because only these effects, torn loose from their source, were present, the Luciferic and Ahrimanic beings gained access. Therefore it was necessary for man to make way for Lucifer’s and Ahriman’s forcibly interjected activities in a part of his evolution - the earthly part. This was possible without man being separated from what remained of his connection to divine spirituality as long as he had not yet advanced to the development of his Comprehension or Sensitivity Soul. What occurred then was a corruption of his physical, etheric and astral bodies. An older science knew this as something vital for the human being. It knew that it was necessary in order that consciousness advance to self-consciousness in man. In the teaching carried out in the places founded by Alexander the Great an Aristotelianism existed which, rightly understood, contained an essential element of this corruption in its psychology. It was only later that such ideas no longer contained this element.

In the time before the development of the Comprehension or Sensitivity Soul, the force of his divine-spiritual origin was still so interwoven in man that these forces streaming to the earth from their cosmic home could hold the intervening Luciferic and Ahrimanic powers in check - in equilibrium. From the human side, it was sufficient help to maintain this equilibrium when in the cultic and mystery rituals the image was created of the divine-spiritual being descending into Lucifer’s and Ahriman’s realm and then emerging victorious. One sees in the pictorial representations of the various people’s rituals in the times previous to the Mystery of Golgotha what later became reality in the Mystery of Golgotha.

Once the Comprehension or Sensitivity Soul had developed, man could only be kept from being cut off from his divine-spiritual essence through reality. The divinity had to enter as an earthly Being into the earthly organization of the Comprehension or Sensitivity Soul. This was accomplished when the divine-spiritual Logos, Christ, bound his cosmic destiny with the earth for the benefit of humanity.

Persephone immersed herself into the earth in order to free the plant-world from having to form itself from what is merely earthly. This was the descent of a divine-spiritual being into nature. Persephone also experiences a kind of “resurrection” - but annually, in rhythmic sequence. This cosmos-to-earth event is in contrast to the descent of the Logos for the benefit of humanity. Persephone descended to order nature in its original orientation. Rhythm must underlie this; for the process of nature occurs rhythmically. The Logos descended into humanity. It happened once during human evolution. For this evolution is only one link in a gigantic cosmic rhythm in which humanity before becoming humanity was something quite different and after which will again be something quite different, whereas plant life, as such, repeats itself in short rhythms.

Man needs to view the Mystery of Golgotha in this light during the Consciousness Soul age. For during the Comprehension or Sensitivity Soul age the severance of humanity [from divine-spirituality] would have been a danger had the Mystery of Golgotha not occurred. In the Consciousness Soul age a complete darkening of the spiritual world in man’s consciousness would have had to occur if the Consciousness Soul did not sufficiently strengthen itself for man to be able to look back with insight at his divine-spiritual origin. If he can though, he finds the cosmic Logos as the being which can lead him back. He pervades himself with the powerful image which reveals what happened on Golgotha.

And the beginning of this understanding is the love-filled grasping of the Cosmic- Consecration-Night [Christmas Eve], which is festively commemorated every year. For the strengthening of the Consciousness Soul - which initially receives intellectuality - takes place when it allows warm love to enter into that coldest soul-element. This warm love is most enhanced when it is applied to the child Jesus, who appears on earth on the Cosmic-Consecration-Night. Therewith man lets the highest earthly spiritual event, which was at the same time a physical one, work on his soul; he has started on the path of taking Christ into himself.

Nature must be recognized as the foundation of man’s being which revealed itself as Persephone - or the being who was perceived when “nature” was spoken of during the Middle Ages - as the divine-spiritual origin and eternal force from which it, nature, was born and is continuously reborn.

The human world must be recognized in a way that it reveals in Christ the eternal Logos, which works with man’s originally bonded divine-spiritual essence for the unfolding of his Spirit-Being.

To guide the human heart in love to this grand cosmic contiguity is the true meaning of this festive commemoration every year at the Cosmic Christmas Eve. If such love lives in human hearts, then it permeates the cold light element of the Consciousness Soul with fiery warmth. If this were to happen without the permeation of fiery warmth, then man would never achieve thorough spiritual fulfillment. He would perish in the coldness of intellectual consciousness, or he would have to exist in a spiritual life which doesn’t advance to the Consciousness Soul. He would then stay behind in the unfolding of the Comprehension or Sensitivity Soul.

But the essence of the Consciousness Soul is not cold. It only seems to be so at the beginning of its unfolding, for it can only reveal its light-filled content at first, and not yet the cosmic warmth from which it precedes.

To feel and experience Christmas in this way can make the following real in the soul: how the glory of the divine-spiritual beings' revelations are announced to man in the vastness of the stars through their images, and how the liberation of humanity on earth from the powers that want to distance it from its origins is achieved.

Goetheanum, on Christmas 1924

Additional Guidelines relating to the foregoing Christmas Contemplation

137. The activity in human and world evolution, which occurs due to Michael forces, repeats itself rhythmically, although in varying and progressing forms, before and after the Mystery of Golgotha.
138. The Mystery of Golgotha is the greatest single event in human evolution. It has nothing to do with rhythmic repetition. For although human evolution is part of a vast cosmic rhythm, it is nevertheless only one element - albeit the most extensive element in this rhythm. Before humanity became an element of this rhythm it was something substantially different; afterwards it will again be something different. Therefore during human evolution there are many Michael-events, but only one Golgotha event.
139. In the rapid rhythmic repetitions of a year, the divine-spiritual Being who descended to the depths of the earth accomplishes the task of spiritually permeating the processes of nature. She personifies the ensouling of nature with the original and eternal forces which must remain active, just as the descended Christ represents the ensoulng of humanity with the original and eternal Logos who shall never cease his activities for the healing of humanity.