Michaelmas and the Soul-Forces of Man
Reflections on the Michael Thought in its True Aspect the
Regeneration of the Michael Festival.
At Michaelmas, 1923, for the last time in his earthly life Rudolf
Steiner was able to celebrate fully a Michaelmas festival, and this he
did in Vienna, the capital city of his own homeland, where he had
spent so many fruitful years in his youth. Much of Germany, including
Berlin, was cut off from him in that year of uncontrolled inflation
but here in Vienna he could feel himself truly at home, as he
refounded the Anthroposophical Society in Austria and gave these
wonderful lectures on the human Gemüt.
In his Christmas letter to the members that forms part of the Michael
Mystery Rudolf Steiner in 1924 emphasized in a single marvelously
compressed paragraph the task of man especially in the middle period
of the age of the consciousness soul in which we are now living.
In its essential nature the Spiritual Soul (Consciousness Soul)
is not cold. It seems to be so only at the commencement of its
unfolding, because at that stage it can only reveal the light-element
in its nature, and not as yet the cosmic warmth in which it has indeed
its origin.
This cosmic warmth must now be breathed out by men into their
observing of the external world. Not only must we understand
the world objectively after the manner of the scientist, but we must
enter into this understanding with our life of feeling, and
thus wrest the world from Ahriman's clutches, filling it with the
Christ forces working from within ourselves. In this short cycle, as
also in the two public lectures
(Supersensible Knowledge as a Demand of the Age,
and
Anthroposophy and the Ethical-Religious Conduct of Life)
Steiner describes just how it is possible to enter into
the external world with love, endowing it with soul-warmth, in the
process learning also to celebrate a new kind of autumn festival in
which Michael can truly participate. As soon as he returned to Dornach
from Vienna, Steiner gave the five Archangel lectures (The Four
Seasons and the Archangels), to which these four are a soul-warming
introduction that he could perhaps never have given elsewhere than in
the gemütlich city of Vienna.
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