Esoteric Easter. Lecture 3 of 4.
Rudolf Steiner, Dornach, Switzerland, April 21, 1924:
In expanding today what we have been discussing in the previous lectures I
should like to take up the astronomical aspect of the Easter festival; and in
order to do this it will be necessary to touch upon some of the facts referring
to the so-called secret of the Moon.
During all epochs in which people
knew of the Mystery wisdom, the secret of the Moon was a familiar concept and
was invariably associated with the being of man, in so far as the latter is
related to the whole cosmos. We must keep clearly in mind that in his entirety
man is related to the whole cosmos, just as he is connected with the Earth as
regards his physical body. Now, it is a concomitant of the materialistic age
that of the vast cosmos, which expresses its spirituality in the form of the
fixed star constellations and the movements of the planets, nothing has remained
in human consciousness but the outer appearance of the stars and the computation
of their movements (if they are planets) and so forth.
The manner in which astronomy is
studied today is the same as it would be if one studied the relative
measurements and the outer conditions of movement in the human organism,
remaining unaware that a psycho-spiritual element pervades the physical organism
and comes to expression in these measurements and conditions of movement.
In the human being a unified
psycho-spiritual element manifests itself, held together by the ego. But
spiritual observation discloses that the cosmic organism expresses itself not
in a unified psycho-spiritual entity but in a multiplicity, an immeasurable,
limitless multitude of spiritual beings that reveal themselves through the forms
of the fixed star constellations, through the movements of the planets, through
the light raying forth from the stars, and so on.
Inner man is related to this
spiritual multiplicity in the stars as is physical man to Earth substances that
can serve as nourishment. And man's closest connection with the universe has to
do with what we can call the secret of the Moon.
External observation of the Moon
shows it to be in a state of metamorphosis as seen from the Earth. We see the
full luminous face, we see it half-illuminated, then one-quarter — and there is
also that stage in which it entirely withdraws from outer view, called the stage
of new Moon. And then we have again the return to full Moon.
All this is nowadays explained as
though the Moon were merely some kind of a body moving about in cosmic space,
illuminated by the Sun from different directions and hence presenting various
aspects. But that does not exhaust what the Moon means to the Earth, and
especially to Earth men. In the case of the Moon in particular we must
understand that if we look out at something as readily perceptible in its
physical surfaces as, say, the full Moon — that is, something that presents a
physical aspect — this aspect embodies something totally different from what is
inherent in a new Moon. True, the new Moon cannot achieve direct physical
expression on account of correlated cosmic conditions; but we must not conclude
that because it does not express itself as a physical phenomenon, it has no
effect. When our knowledge of the firmament tells us that it is new Moon, this
means that the Moon is present in an invisible but all the more spiritual way
than when appearing as full Moon in physical light. So the Moon is present — now
wholly physical, now wholly spiritual, and we have the rhythmic alternation of
its physical and spiritual expression.
And now, in order to understand the
crux of the matter, we must recall a fact with which you are familiar from my Occult Science, an Outline, namely, that at one time
the Moon was within the Earth: it was part of the Earth body. It passed out of
the Earth and became a satellite, as the term goes. In other words, it split off
from the Earth and now circles it. When it was one with the Earth its influences
upon human beings were exerted from the Earth.
Naturally, in the time when man
existed and developed upon an Earth that still contained the Moon, he was a very
different being. When this Moon withdrew, the Earth became poorer by exactly
what the Moon represented; and henceforth the lower
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We can put it this way: formerly
the Moon forces came in contact first with the lower limbs — the feet and legs —
and then streamed upward from below; but since the Moon withdrew from the Earth
they act in the opposite direction, from the head downward. But this implies
that the task of these forces has become a very different one, and the nature of
this task comes into evidence in the experiences man has when he descends from
the pre-earthly to the earthly life. When he has completed the period between
death and a new birth and has absolved all the requirements of soul and spirit
demanded during that period, he prepares to descend to Earth, to unite with the
bodily-physical principle transmitted to him by his father and mother. But
before it is possible for his ego and astral body to unite with the physical
body he must provide himself with an etheric body, which he attracts from the
surrounding cosmos.
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This process has radically changed
since the Moon withdrew from the Earth. Before that time man needed forces, when
approaching the Earth again, that would enable him to shape the all-pervading
ether into the form of an etheric body around his ego and astral body. These
forces he drew, as he approached the Earth, from the Moon which was then within
it. He still does; but the point is that since the splitting off of the Moon
they come to him from outside the Earth. This means that immediately before
entering the Earth life he must appeal to the power of the Moon forces — that
is, to something cosmic — if he would build his etheric body.
This etheric body must be formed in
such a way that it has, as it were, an outer side and an inner side. Let us
think of it quite graphically, formed with an outer side and an inner side. When
the outer side is being formed the forces of light are needed, for, like other
things of substance, the etheric body is fashioned principally out of the
flooding light of the cosmos. But sunlight cannot be employed for this purpose:
it does not provide the forces that would enable man to build his etheric body.
This calls for sunlight that is reflected by the Moon and thereby radically
altered; and all the light coming to us from the Moon — in fact, all the light
shining from the Moon into the cosmos — contains the forces that enable man to
form the outer side of his etheric body when he descends to Earth.
And on the other hand, the forces
man needs to form the inner side of his etheric body are the spiritual
emanations of the new Moon; so that his ability to form the outer and the inner
side is related to this rhythm of the outer light and dark of the Moon.
But all this that the Moon forces
achieve for man, as it were, goes back to the fact that the Moon is truly not
the mere physical body about which modern science tells us fairy tales, but a
body wholly permeated by spirituality, comprising a multiplicity of spiritual
beings. I have repeatedly explained that when the Moon withdrew from the Earth,
it was not merely physical matter that streamed out into cosmic space: those
ancient beings, man's primordial teachers, who lived on the Earth not in
physical bodies but in a spiritual form, these passed with the Moon out into the
universe and there founded a sort of Moon colony. We have therefore to
distinguish between the physico-etheric and the psycho-spiritual constituents of
the Moon, remembering that again the latter is not a unity but a
multiplicity.
Now, the entire life of this
spirituality in the Moon depends upon the manner in which those beings observe
cosmic conditions from their point of view, from the point of view of the Moon.
Figuratively expressed: the spiritual beings of the Moon direct their gaze
primarily to what is of greatest importance for them, to the planets of our
orbit; and upon the inferences of these observations depends all that takes
place on the Moon, as well as all that contributes to providing man in the right
way with the forces needed for forming his etheric body.
Certain of the Mysteries knew this.
It was ancient Mystery knowledge in some of the sanctuaries that the
constellations and the movements in the planetary system were observed from the
Moon, and the actions of the Moon beings determined accordingly. This was
expressed by relating, in human consciousness, the Moon with the forces of other
planets, the Moon being the point from which are determined those cosmic
contexts that are linked with the forming of the human etheric body. This is
reflected in the names of the days of the week:
| Moon | Monday | |
| Mars | Tuesday | |
| Mercury | Wednesday (mercredi) | |
| Jupiter | Thursday (Donnerstag — Jupiter is the German Donar) | |
| Venus | Friday (Venus is the German Freia) | |
| Saturn | Saturday | |
| Sun | Sunday (the Sun forces cannot act directly in the formation of the etheric body, but they act in their reflection from the Moon.) |
Thus we see how everything
pertaining to the point of view of the Moon was brought into relation with all
that tended to quicken man's awareness of the planets in connection with
reckoning time. And the burden of the admonition given in the old Mysteries was
something as follows: Remember, O man, that before descending to Earth you
needed forces engendered in the Moon by the act of the Moon-beings in observing
the other planets. For the configuration of your etheric body, when you
descended to earthly life, you are indebted to the Moon's share in what is
expressed by Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and so forth.
So on the one hand we have the
rhythmical passage of the Moon through light and darkness in its course around
the Earth, and on the other we find the whole sequence of the planets inscribed
in human consciousness. The Mysteries even added the following: Due to the
ability of the Moon-beings to behold Mars, the capacity for speech is
organized into man's etheric body, and through their observation of Mercury, the
capacity for movement is concentrated there.
If we wish to employ these secrets
of the Moon as a medium of expression, this can be done in an entirely different
form: speech becomes eurythmy. It comes about as follows: if we study the
secrets of speech by finding out what the Moon-beings observed when questioning
Mars, and then discover what changes these observations undergo when the
Moon-beings turn to Mercury, then speech becomes eurythmy. In other words, if we
transform the Moon-beings' Mars experiences into their Mercury experiences, the
human capacity for speech becomes the capacity for eurythmy. That expresses the
matter cosmically.
The current engendering in man the
capacity for wisdom derives from the Moon-beings' experiences with
Jupiter; what streams through the soul as love and beauty, from
Venus; and that which permeates the etheric body with inner soul warmth
is gained from the experience acquired by the Moon-beings' observation of
Saturn.
There remains that which must be
kept away — pushed back, as it were — to prevent its interfering with the
formation of the etheric body immediately before the descent to Earth: that
which comes from the Sun. From the Sun — or from the observation of the Sun —
derive the forces from which man must be protected if he is to become complete
in himself through the integration of the etheric body — that is, through
protective forces.
It can be said that in this way we
learn what occurs on the Moon, and at the same time we learn how the human
etheric body is formed and constituted when man descends from the pre-earthly to
the earthly existence. Those are the facts connected with the secret of the
Moon. Nowadays we can recount such matters, but in certain of the older
Mysteries they were not merely narrated but actually experienced. What I shall
now write on the blackboard was not only known; it was an inner experience.
| Moon Day: | ||
| Tuesday: | Speech | |
| Wednesday: | Movement | |
| Thursday: | Wisdom | |
| Friday: | Love, Beauty | |
| Saturday: | Inner Soul Warmth | |
| Sunday: | Protective Forces |
By means of initiation into the
Mysteries, of which I spoke yesterday, it was possible to get beyond looking
outward and listening outward with eyes and ears in the physical vicinity of the
Earth. It was possible to become free of the physical body, to keep aloof from
it, and to live only in the etheric body; and then the initiate lived with all
that has been described. He did not live with the speech formed in the larynx,
but with the speech resounding in Mars as cosmic language. He moved in
conformity with the way in which Mercury guided the movements in the cosmos: not
merely with feet and legs did he move, but in accord with the manner in which
Mercury directs the movements of the human being. Nor did he possess that wisdom
so laboriously acquired during childhood and early youth — really an unwisdom in
the materialistic age — but he lived actually in the wisdom of Jupiter, because
he could unite with the Moon-beings who observed Jupiter.
This sort of initiation really
meant that the mystic was wholly in the light shining from the Moon. He had left
the Earth, no longer a creature of flesh and blood, and lived in moonlight
modified by forces from the other planets. During these periods of spiritual
observation he simply became a light-being of the Moon — not in a symbolical
sense or in any way to be thought of as abstract, but rather, as a man might
today go to Basel and back, fully conscious of a reality, knowing he had
experienced something real. The mystic was equally conscious of reality when he
was led through the initiation ritual to the Moon-beings.
The initiate knew that for the time
being he had taken leave of his physical body, that his soul and spirit had
passed into the light-sphere of the Moon, and that he had borne a light-body;
and because he had been united with the Moon-beings he had looked out into
planetary space, truly able to behold what could be revealed in this vast
realm.
And what was that? Well, among
other things, he observed principally that from the Sun there emanated the
forces of beings that must not be allowed to intervene in the building of the
human etheric body. The Sun appeared as something that tended to dissolve,
destroy, the etheric body; hence he knew that forces to be received by the
Sun-beings must not proceed from his etheric body, but from his higher
principles, from his ego and astral body. Only upon these must the Sun forces be
allowed to act. So he knew that for the forming of his etheric body he must not
look to the Sun but to the planets, and that he must turn to the Sun for his
astral body and especially for his ego and its whole inner strength. The second
point, then, that became manifest through this recurring initiation into the
secret of the Moon was this, that in what pertained to his etheric body man
belonged to the planets; but for the strengthening of his astral body and most
of all his ego he must look to the Sun.
This initiation was really of such
a nature as to make the mystic one with the moonlight; but it was by means of
his own moonlight existence that he looked into the Sun.
And now he reflected as follows:
the Sun sends its light to the Moon because this must not be imparted to man
directly. The result is moonlight in conjunction with the planetary forces, and
out of this the etheric body is formed. — That was the secret known to him who
was initiated in this way. He also knew to what extent he bore within him the
power of the spiritual Sun: he had seen it, become conscious of it; and this was
the stage of initiation at which the initiate became a Christ bearer — that is,
a Sun-being bearer, not a Sun-being recipient. Just as the Moon itself, when at
full, is a sunlight bearer, so man became a Christ bearer, a
christophoros. This initiation leading to the stage of
christophoros was thus an absolutely real experience.
Now imagine this actual experience
through which the mystic sped away from the Earth, as it were, and ascended as
an initiated Earth-man to the light-being; and imagine this inner, human Easter
experience of former times transformed into a cosmic festival. In later ages men
no longer knew that such things could happen: that man is really able to
withdraw from Earth conditions, unite with those of the Moon, and from the Moon
behold the Sun. But the memory of it was to be preserved, and this we have in
the Easter festival.
The ability to experience all this
did not pass over into the later consciousness that was becoming materialistic;
instead it turned into an abstract conception. Men no longer looked inward and
said: I can unite with the moonlight. They looked at the Moon, the full Moon,
and said: It is not a question of my aspiring upward: it is the Earth that
strives to ascend. And when is this effort at its height? When spring begins,
when there burst forth from the surface of the Earth all the forces that had
lain dormant in seeds and plants under the ground. On the Earth they become
plants, but they go further: they stream out into cosmic space.
The old Mysteries employed this
image: man can most easily attain to the Moon-Sun initiation and become a
christophoros in the season when the inner Earth forces, by means of the
stems and leaves of plants, carry out of the ground what then streams forth from
the Earth into the cosmos; for then he floats, as it were, on the forces that in
spring ray out from the Earth and up to the Moon. But it must be the light of
the full Moon.
All this, then, became a memory,
but it also became abstract ... It must be the light of the full Moon.
... Subconsciously, no longer with the clear knowledge that this could be a
human experience, people imagined that something or other — not man himself —
streamed toward the full Moon, the first one after the beginning of spring. And
what can this full Moon do now? It beholds the Sun; that is, the first day
dedicated to the Sun: the first succeeding Sunday. Just as once a
christophoros, from the viewpoint of the Moon, beheld the Sun-being, so
now the Moon beholds the Sun — that is, its symbolization in Sunday.
We have the beginning of spring,
March 21st, and the forces of the Earth are burgeoning forth into the universe.
We must await the proper observer, the full Moon.
March 21st — full Moon — Sunday.
What does the Moon observe? The Sun;
and the following Sunday is fixed as Easter Sunday. This is an abstract way of
determining the date, surviving from a very real Mystery event that in former
times frequently occurred for many men.
That is actually what our present
spring Easter festival has come to be. It represents a Mystery act that has
often been performed in spring; but it is not the one I described day before
yesterday. The latter led man to a comprehension of the death event. I explained
that the idea of resurrection, clarified by something like the Adonis
celebration in the fall, really led men to the experience of death, to the
spiritual resurrection after about three days; and this process of resurrection
really belongs in the autumn, for the reasons I gave.
The process I described today is a
different one, performed in other Mysteries for certain initiations — those of
the Sun and Moon; and this process confronted the neophyte with life's
beginning. So you see, we can look back at a period in which certain Mysteries
saw the descent of man from the pre-earthly to the earthly life, while others
dwelt on the ascent in the spirit. But in later epochs, when the living
substance of man's relation to the cosmic spirit could no longer be discerned,
men went so far as simply to combine the autumn Mystery of the ascent with the
spring Mystery of the descent into one festival.
Thus the confusion manifesting
itself in the course of human evolution is evidence of the gradual effect of
materialism: not only has the latter engendered false beliefs, but it has
completely confused men's minds concerning an issue that at one period of human
events existed, I might say, in a sacred order that caused mankind at the
approach of autumn to celebrate a cosmic festival. But this in turn pointed to a
Mystery act that evoked the thought: Nature falls into barrenness, it wilts and
dies away, and this is like the physical dying of man; but while in Nature only
the perishable is seen to be active, there lives in man the eternal, which must
now be observed spiritually, disregarding the course of Nature, as the element
of resurrection in the spiritual world after death. The spring Mysteries made it
clear that Nature is conquered by the spirit, that, in turn, the spirit acts out
of the cosmos, and that matter germinates and sprouts from the ground because it
is driven by the spirit.
But this was intended to remind men
not of their passing into the spirit through death, but of their origin in the
spirit, their descent from the spiritual world. Precisely where Nature begins to
ascend, man was to remember his descent into the physical; and where Nature
disintegrates, man was to contemplate his ascent, his spiritual resurrection.
There is no doubt that such an understanding of man's relation to the cosmos
intensified his soul life enormously.
But this varied according to the
locality. In olden times some were definitely inclined to be autumn peoples and
others rather spring peoples. Among the former were to be found the Adonis
Mysteries; among the latter, other Mysteries concerned with what I have set
forth today. And only those seekers after wisdom of whom it is correctly
reported that, like Pythagoras, they moved about from place to place, from one
Mystery to another, only those enjoyed the fullness of human experience. They
would pass from a sanctuary where they could participate in the autumn secret,
which is really the Sun secret, to one where the spring secret was revealed, the
Moon secret. For this reason it was reported again and again of the consummate
old initiates that they traveled from one sanctuary to another. It can truly be
said of these that they had a certain inner experience of the year and its
festivals. An old initiate of that sort could say to himself: I come to a place
where the Adonis festivals are celebrated, and I can witness the cosmic autumn
and the rays of the spiritual Sun at the beginning of winter's night; I wander
to another, where the Mysteries of spring are observed, and I can behold the
secret of the Moon. — Thus he acquired an inner knowledge of all that relates to
the whole meaning of the year.
You see, our Easter Festival has
really had something saddled on it that is not right. It should really be a
spring commemoration of burial; and this commemoration of burial in the spring
should at the same time be an incentive to work, such as the more primitive man
needed during the summer time: that is what such burial festivals were in their
appeal to the human spirit. Easter was a festival of admonition regarding the
work of summer, just as the autumn festival of the resurrection of the spiritual
world was a festival celebrated in the season when the labor was completed. But
it was of the utmost importance for man's soul and spirit that, when his work
was finished, he should become aware of and inwardly experience the eternal in
himself by contemplating the resurrection in the spiritual world, the days that
follow upon death.
In passing, then, from Earth
secrets to cosmic secrets, from Earth wisdom to cosmic wisdom, we can come to
know what I should like to call the inner structure of the order of the year, as
indicated by the festivals. But much of what had been hidden in them has
disappeared.
Today I wanted to present this
subject to you by considering the conditions of the firmament itself. Tomorrow I
shall endeavor, as far as time permits, to penetrate still deeper into it in the
light of certain Mystery sanctuaries.
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