The Easter Festival in relation to the Mysteries

The following lectures on the “connection of Easter with the evolution of the Mysteries in the history of mankind” were given by Rudolf Steiner to an audience familiar with the contents of many earlier lecture-courses dealing with the Festivals, Seasons of the Year and the Mysteries of the past as well as those belonging to the future.

A brief list of publications containing English translations of these other lectures will be found at the end of the present volume, together with a summarised plan of the Complete Edition of the works of Rudolf Steiner in the original German.

In his autobiography, The Course of My Life, Rudolf Steiner emphasises the distinction between his written works on the one hand and, on the other, reports (not personally revised by him) of lectures which were given as oral communications and were not originally intended for print. For an intelligent appreciation of the lectures it should be borne in mind that certain premises were taken for granted when the words were spoken. “These premises,” Rudolf Steiner writes, “include at the very least, the anthroposophical knowledge of Man and of the Cosmos in its spiritual essence, also what may be called ‘anthroposophical history’, told as an outcome of research into the spiritual world.”