The Calendar of the Soul
GA 40
Foreword
Rudolf Steiner's Calendar of the Soul offers powerful verses to awaken the soul to an experience of spiritual forces that resound within us throughout the year. By contemplating these truths during the changing seasons, one begins to notice how life itself wants to be awakened in us so we may more consciously participate in the world's course as it unfolds in time. The first verse starts with Easter during the blossoming of Spring in the Northern Hemisphere.1Since it is autumn in the Southern Hemisphere, Week 27 may be a more appropriate the starting point on Easter Sunday.
This novel translation offers pairs of mirrored "corresponding verses" of seven lines each to reflect the changes of the soul's striving each week throughout the year. Also consider the cosmic influences each day of the week in each set of corresponding verses.
| Day | Cosmic Influence |
|---|---|
| Sunday | Sun - freedom, generosity, wisdom, enlightenment |
| Monday | Moon – density, lunacy, confusion, materialism |
| Tuesday | Mars – knightly discipline, courage & orderliness or cruelty and lawlessness; war-like |
| Wednesday | Mercury – active power, temperamental, ability to divide and recombine like quicksilver |
| Thursday | Jupiter – tragic splendor, kingliness, magnanimity, festal joy |
| Friday | Venus – love, union, beauty, creativity |
| Saturday | Saturn – death, treachery, sorrow, pestilence |
Careful attention to the original German text reveals actual formulae for human evolution. The text brings the practitioner through a contemplation of polar spiritual and physical forces working in the human soul throughout the year.
Published in the same year as the founding of the Anthroposophical Society in 1912, Steiner held the Calendar's intrinsic connection to all of anthroposophy required its sharing, stating: "It is not to be regarded as a sudden inspiration but as something organically connected with our whole Movement."
These formulae for meditation do in all reality lead the soul out of its narrow confines to experience of the heavens. I can assure you that the results of long, long occult investigations are contained in these 52 verses which will enable the soul to find access to happenings in the great universe and thereby to experience the Spirits working in the onward flow of Time. But if you ponder on the texts of the verses in the Calendar you will discern an element of Timelessness, in rhythmic alternation, an element that is experienced inwardly by the human being, the laws of which run parallel to those of Time in the outer world. Mere analogies do not suffice here.
See Rudolf Steiner, GA 143, May 7, 1912, Cologne.
It is a moving calendar that flows with changing dates from one Easter to the next because "in what is uniform and fixed there is the impress of death; but in what is unequal there is life." The Event of Golgotha is "the most momentous of all" since time is to be computed as beginning "on a Friday in April in the year 33 A.D. when the Mystery of Golgotha took place" and "Ego-consciousness in the present sense was actually born." Out of the ultimate death of Christ-Jesus, arose the possibility of new life in the Spirit for all of humanity. By contemplating The Calendar of the Soul verses from on Easter to the next, we bring cosmic wisdom into our souls so we may rise ourselves from this deadened world to join our true place as Human Beings as the fourth Hierarchy of Heaven.
For more information about these transformative verses, see these additional resources:
Preface to the First Edition, 1912/13 by Rudolf Steiner
Preface to the second edition, 1918 by Rudolf Steiner
Calendar of the Soul Tool - Multiple translations updated weekly for Northern and Southern Hemispheres
— Foreword and translation by Steiner Online Library
The Calendar of the Soul Verses
Week 1 (Spring - Easter)
When out of widest worlds
The Sun speaks to human senses
And joy from depths of Soul unites with light beholding,
Then draw from selfhood's sheath
Thoughts into space's wide expanse
And gropingly bind
Human essence with Spirit Being.
Week 52
When from the depths of soul
Spirit turns to world existence
And beauty flows from space's wide expanse,
Then draw from distant Heavens
Force of Life in human bodies
And mightily unite
Spirit essence with Human Being.
Week 2
Into the outer world of the senses
The power of thought loses its own being;
Spirit worlds are found
In the human sprouting again,
The seed of existence in them,
But the fruit of the soul
Must be found within oneself.
Week 51
Into the interior of the human being
The richness of the senses pours out;
The world Spirit is found
In the mirror image
Of human eyes,
But the power must come from within
To create oneself anew.
Week 3
There speaks to the World-All,
Forgetting itself
And mindful of its primordial state,
The human growing I:
Into You, freeing myself
From the shackles of my idiosyncrasies,
I explore my genuine nature.
Week 50
There speaks to the human-I,
Revealing itself powerfully
And unleashing the forces of Its essence,
The World-Being's joy of becoming:
In you, My life carried
Out of its spell-bound state,
I reach my true goal.
Week 4
I feel the essence of my being:
Thus speaks perceptive feeling,
Which in the sunlit world
Unites itself with floods of light;
Offering warmth for clarity of thought
And firmly connect man and world
United in solidarity.
Week 49
I feel the force of the world's existence:
Thus speaks clarity of thought,
In dark nights of the world
Remembering its own spirit-growth,
And turning toward the approaching world-day
Out of its interior
Rays of inner hope.