SOL COTS —Rudolf Steiner Archive

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.}

Corresponding Verses of Seven Lines Each

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

The Light Verses

Only four of the fifty-two verses start the first line with "the Light." Two of them land five weeks before and after Easter (verses 5 and 48) begin with "In the Light." The verses five weeks before and five weeks after Michaelmas (verses 22 and 31) begin with "The Light." While the difference is subtle, it reveals our shifting relationship to the light of the Sun as we move into the light of summer during weeks 5 and 48 and withdraw from it during weeks 22 and 31 as we move into winter. One can visualize this journey through the seasons in the image above in which the Light Verses are starred.

Our oscillating relationship to the Sun can be likened to the rhythmic system of our heart (blood, lungs, and feeling) connecting our lower body (the metabolic system and our willing) with that of our head (our senses, nervous system and thinking). The lower body can be likened to the hardened winter and Ahrimanic influences while our upper body is akin to the airy Luciferic impulses of warm summer. We balance these polar forces with the Christ in the heart.

The Dark Corner Verses

Four of the fifty-two verses offer dark warnings. Two caution against the dangers of losing oneself and spiritual suicide from Luciferic temptations in the summer and two warn of Ahrimanic temptations from which the soul risks spiritual benumbing and even soul death in the winter. They appear in the middle of each quarter of the year in verses 7, 20, 33, and 46. In verse 7, the Soul must be careful not to fly away with Luciferic temptation as it moves into summer. One must restore the power of thinking developed during the winter. In verse 20, Luciferic impulses must once again be overcome as the Soul approaches autumn. One must become grounded in the world or be extinguished as if by spiritual suicide. In verse 33, a material, Ahrimanic risk arises, warning that the world without soul-life can find only death. One must participate in the world to enliven the frozen, empty space. Then, in verse 46, another Ahrimanic risk presents itself as the Soul must use its memory from spirit depths to guide it into the future. The soul must take stock of the past and present to properly arise once again in the coming Easter.

Formulae Essential for Anthroposophy

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)

Sun: When out of widest Worlds
Moon: The Sun speaks to human senses
Mars: And joy from depths of Soul unites with light beholding,
Mercury: Then draw from selfhood's sheath
Jupiter: Thoughts into space's wide expanse
Venus: And gropingly bind
Saturn: Human essence with Spirit Being.

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